The balance between global consistency and local nuance in recruitment marketing is a difficult issue that provokes a lot of debate. It has become clear to me from working with a number of employers in this area that there are no right answers and every company needs a bespoke approach to be successful.
My guest this week is John McCall who oversees Talent Branding for Groupon in the EMEA region. Groupon has grown via acquisition in EMEA, creating a number of challenges for brand and marketing consistency.
In the interview we discuss:
• Groupon’s definition of Talent Branding and how they are positioning themselves as an employer of choice.
• Creating a core central truth with local variations
• Marketing effectively in multiple languages
• The role of mobile video and social engagement
• The importance of messaging consistency throughout the business
John also talks about what is next for Groupon and gives us his thoughts on the future of Talent Branding
This episode of the podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit. And Lever is spelt L E V E R Lever. Where ATS meets CRM.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 66 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The balance between global consistency and local nuance in recruitment marketing is a difficult one and there’s much debate about the best way to do it. My guest this week is John McCall, who oversees talent branding for Groupon in the EMEA region. Groupon has grown via acquisition in emea, creating a number of challenges with branding and marketing consistency. Enjoy the interview. Hi, Jon, and welcome to the podcast.
John McCall [00:01:41]:
Hi, Matt, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:43]:
I’m very good. It’s Friday, so that must be a good thing. Yes, indeed.
John McCall [00:01:47]:
Yeah, that Friday feeling is just around the corner.
Matt Alder [00:01:50]:
Totally. So could you introduce yourself and tell everyone who you work for and what you do?
John McCall [00:01:56]:
Sure. My name is John McCall and I work with Groupon. I’m based in the Dublin office and I take care of our employer, talent branding across the EMEA region.
Matt Alder [00:02:06]:
Could you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by talent branding?
John McCall [00:02:11]:
Yeah, I suppose in many respects talent branding is an extension of marketing and it is an area that has really come to the fore for a lot of medium and larger sized corporations in more recent years. I suppose at its core, I would see talent branding as being the marketing function of talent acquisition. So wherever a candidate wants to reach out and find out some information about what kind of a company we are to work for, investigate new roles, interact with us online, that really boils down to talent branding and how we position ourselves online and through all of the channels that are available to us, how we position ourselves as an employer of choice.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
So I know that Groupon are in a lot of different countries. Could you sort of give us a bit of, you know, background to what that looks like and the challenges it causes for you?
John McCall [00:03:03]:
Yeah, I suppose. Emea. So Europe, Middle East, Africa is a particularly diverse market and that’s reflect. That’s not just true of Groupon, but I’d say for many companies internationally who operate on a global level, I mean, within the EMEA region alone, we operate in, well, in all of the main languages. So French, English, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, all of the main European languages we have operations in and operations in those countries. So what that does is that presents challenges in terms of developing content and developing a message that has, I suppose, the core and the central truth of what we’re trying to say to candidates, but will also allow for some nice local variations and allow for that local feeling.
Matt Alder [00:03:52]:
I think that’s always interesting because I know that’s a challenge that lots of different companies have and people tend to sort of have different approaches to dealing with it. I mean, how do you guys deal with it? Is it, is it something that’s coming centrally? Is it something that comes locally? It’s a mixture. Is it a mixture of the two? If it is, how does that mixture work?
John McCall [00:04:13]:
Well, that’s, that’s a, it’s a good question actually. And it’s an area that has been sort of front of mind for us in Groupon now, particularly over the past, say 14 to 16 months, I suppose for context to explain a little bit. Groupon in North America grew organically and grew, you know, very quickly. At one point Groupon was quoted by Forbes as being the quickest growing company in history. And so brand awareness within North America is exceptionally high. And pretty much everybody you speak to knows who Groupon is and what they offer. The story in EMEA is slightly different insofar as Groupon grew mostly through on acquisition within the EMEA region and there were various different companies offering a similar type product offering which Groupon then went on and purchased. There was a rebranding and so that’s how Groupon grew a lot within the EMEA region. But what that translated into is that each of those individual companies that were bought up had their own web presence, they had their own recruitment channels, they had their own LinkedIn page, their own careers site and there was, there was a very, very wide network of social channels, too wide as it was. And so a big project that we launched maybe about 14 months ago was a consolidation project where we were going to bring all of our channels slowly together and have one single central source of truth that candidates, irrespective of where they were coming from, could reach out and engage with us and know that whatever they were interacting with and whatever story they were hearing was the actual truth. I mean, I suppose having you know, I think at one point we had 16 or company pages on LinkedIn and each of those was a very difficult piece to maintain on their own. So the problem was that they weren’t being maintained quickly enough and regularly enough. So we were able to pull it all together into one centralized piece. And it means that we can do it on a much more regular basis and make sure that the information to hand is always accurate and up to the minute.
Matt Alder [00:06:16]:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting because I think a problem that I think for lots of companies is having too many social profiles and not be able to, you know, to manage them and keep that consistency. How, how do you deal with, you know, the fact that you’re covering different countries and different languages and presumably different recruitment needs?
John McCall [00:06:38]:
Well, I, I think in a company like Groupon, you have to be, because we have such a wide and varied base of people. I suppose Groupon at its core is a local company. We’re a local company operating on a global scale. So what that means in reality is that the bulk of the people who work with us are engaged in the local market, so they speak the local language, they’re engaged in going out, finding local vendors and local merchant opportunities and working there. So we need to look at content and product delivery that we can deliver in such a way that’s scalable, but scalable in different languages. And I suppose a prime example of that would be our recruitment video. And we’ve all seen very different types of recruitment videos that are exceptionally highly produced, look very expensive, very corporate in their, in their appearance, and generally all through English. And that wasn’t really going to suit our model. We’re a much more dynamic, less formal kind of a company. And that corporate, that very strict corporate way of doing things wasn’t really going to suit us. Also bear in mind we needed to be able to run a video in seven or eight different languages. So we decided to opt for a motion graphics version where we actually had our company mascot is the Space Cat, which is a cat that sits in a flying saucer in HQ in Chicago. So we took that as our mascot and built out a 90 second, maybe two minute short video and then did voiceover in various different languages to it. And we were able to tell our message to an awful lot of different markets by tweaking and changing slight changes within the actual text itself and then doing it in various different languages. So that’s an example of how we were able to take a product and internationalize it for our needs, but still allow for a Local variation.
Matt Alder [00:08:33]:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what are your sort of main channels? What channels are you marketing in and pushing your message out and what’s working for you across the region?
John McCall [00:08:46]:
Well, I suppose we have a couple of really main primary channels that we use. So first and foremost would be our jobs, Groupon.com, which is our brand new website. Previously we had each region geographically and in some instances even within those regions there would be further careers websites. And what we did over the course of the past 18 months, we brought our brand new global website online, which is jobstart groupon.com and candidates, irrespective of where they are on a global level, can navigate to this site and content will be served to them based on their geographical location. Say, for example, somebody is in Paris and wants to see if there are sales roles available to them. They will have local content served them, local videos, local blogs. The actual back end systems pick up the fact that this person is viewing from a European region and then we’ll serve them jobs that are closest to them by geography as well. So it’s quite a dynamic and quite a responsive platform and that has been online now for the past couple of months and is already proving a very valuable asset to the company. Also we use LinkedIn is a very important piece of the pie for us. So on a global level we have a couple of substantial company pages. We have within EMEA, we have the Groupon EMEA page on LinkedIn which is where candidates can go and see a variety of various different roles that are available at any given stage. Again, spread across geographies, spread across functions. The benefits of the LinkedIn platform as well is that if somebody is in the engineering space and they view our careers page, their profile pre selects them to be served engineering content. So the actual platform itself is also quite dynamic that we can specialize content on the back end that will be served directly to people based on what their profile looks like. And then within that, again, whatever language their profile happens to be written in, that content can appear in that language as well.
Matt Alder [00:10:53]:
So it’s about centralization, but it’s about targeting and personalization within that. Okay, that’s, that’s, that’s really very, that’s really very interesting actually. So how else do you use the social channels? Did you use social advertising? Is there some sort of specific, country specific market marketing that you do within that?
John McCall [00:11:12]:
Yeah, I suppose that we, not that long ago we embarked on our first foray into advertising on Facebook for recruitment purposes. I mean, Groupon has long been a big fan of the Facebook platform in terms of advertising to our consumers, but in terms of reaching out to candidates, we had never really tested the waters there. So as part of the hiring initiative that we were running earlier this year, we, we took a split testing in a B format for our video, our Space Cap recruitment video, which I spoke about a little bit earlier and also one of the screenshots from it. So we ran a sample with an image and a sample with the video content and worked on a targeting basis for. We were looking for graduates in the London area with third level qualification and background in sales or retail and we were able to really get quite granular on the targeting level. And again, not that we had some very, very good results for us. We got some very good quality candidates into the pipeline, brought them in for our graduate assessment days and yeah, I think overall we had a very positive experience. Our click through rates were very good. Our cost per media was good as well. So in terms of those key metrics that many people will be familiar with and the ones that will actually set the scene for whether an online campaign can be described as successful or not, we were very happy with you.
Matt Alder [00:12:37]:
You mentioned that, you know, a kind of an overly corporate marketing approach isn’t, isn’t, isn’t kind of really the essence of your, of your business. Do you sort of use employees stories to give an authentic view about what it’s like to work at Groupon? What, how do you, how do you kind of differentiate, different. Differentiate and brand yourself?
John McCall [00:13:00]:
Sure. Well, I suppose in terms of one of our core values within Groupon is the fact that great people make great companies and we really try to bring that to life through any of the interactions that we have with our candidates and to be able to put flesh on the bones of that statement. What we ask some of our employees to do, various different employees from various parts of the business and various levels of seniority, is to tell us their story in their own words. I mean we will serve guiding questions and those kind of things, but it’s very much somebody’s own experience of how they came to Groupon and what their thoughts are. So we run a regular blog series and it’s on our jobstock groupon.com and people can log on there and read blogs from people who have recently started as graphics design interns or recent sales graduates within the London market. We have operations in Casablanca where we have editorial and customer service, where we also had people writing blogs there. And they’re available also in English and in the local languages as well. So what that does is it gives a little bit of authenticity. I think there’s nothing more believable, I suppose, than hearing it directly from the horse’s mouth. If people themselves are happy to stand up and have their story told, I think that’s, that’s a great endorsement of the work life balance here at Woopa. And then added to that, what we also try and do is do short video interviews with our key business leaders talking about the wider, more strategic end of things. So recently, Julie Sudarek, who is the president of our operations in Emea, she was talking about who she really believes is the kind of person who succeeds at Groupon. And that can be distilled down into one phrase. It you said you need to be somebody who can embrace change and get right into the details because this company does move quickly. And if you’re the kind of person who’s good with change and can adapt to quickly, then you will, you will forge yourself a very substantial career here.
Matt Alder [00:15:02]:
Now, I know a number of companies who are facing the sort of the same global local issues that you guys have been dealing with. What advice would you give to someone who’s in the same position but say, you know, 12, 12 to 18 months behind you? How should they get started? What would really make it work for them?
John McCall [00:15:26]:
Well, I think the absolute priority, first off, is to do a bit of an audit of where you are. I think it’s very difficult to know where your talent brand should go until you know where it is. And the idea of talent brand is in and of itself quite nebulous. It’s hard to kind of quantify what it is. But I think first and foremost, as I said, in order to find out exactly how many Twitter accounts do we have going, how many Facebook pages, what is on an anecdotal level, Take a temperature check of how your brand is perceived in the various different markets you operate in. And that’s done very simply by chatting to the recruiters, chatting to people who have recently started within the organization. And once you have a reasonably clear Picture and Marketing 101, the SWOT analysis, that you can identify where your strengths lie and where your opportunities are as well. And then after that, I think you need to start identifying what main channels you want to use on a social perspective and how you want to try and engage your candidates. And I think after that, it’s a case of having your story and being quite consistent and quite clear. I think what is a big failure and it’s seen time and Time again, again is that companies often don’t connect between what the message is coming out of talent acquisition in terms of trying to reach out to candidates and what other parts of the business are saying. So it becomes a lot of noise and it’s mixed messaging for candidates. So I think within the company there needs to be a strong sense of collaboration and that there’s a universal sense of buy in. The talent brand is very important in Groupon. That really is top down. That is hugely important. Your talent brand won’t really go very far at all unless you’ve got it ingrained within the business that this is very important to us in terms of the overall strategic direction. And once that’s explained to a business that this improves the overall quality of candidates coming through and the longevity of their tenure, then that’s a very easy sell to make to any part of the business.
Matt Alder [00:17:40]:
So what’s next? What are you sort of working towards? How is the strategy going to pan out over the next sort of 12 to 18 months?
John McCall [00:17:49]:
Well, yeah, great question. I suppose long term for Groupon, we’re at a very exciting stage within the company. We’ve had a couple of years of exceptional growth and now we’re at the stage where we’re really trying to shape that. So we are continuing to try and drive that message that we’re a very dynamic place to work, that we are looking for people who will come in and maybe try and shake things up a bit and that they’ve got to be gregarious and able to deal with change on a rapid basis. But also in terms of a nuts and bolts end of things, in terms of how we present ourselves, we will move further and further towards that idea of having a more globalized presence in, in how we present ourselves. And that has largely already been accomplished, or a major part of that has been accomplished with our jobstop groupon.com which took all of the old websites down and we have a nice single centralized presence and that will slowly continue across all of our various social channels over the next 12 to 18 months.
Matt Alder [00:18:50]:
And final question, there’s obviously lots of innovation going on in recruiting and recruitment marketing. Marketing in particular at the moment with, you know, technology and various platforms and things that are coming onto the market. What have you got your eye on? What’s most interesting to you? Where. Where do you think the, the future is for recruitment marketing?
John McCall [00:19:12]:
Well, I think. Great question actually, because there are so many different parts to that. Very definitely there’s, there’s two things that are jumping at the moment. For us anyway, we’re starting to see real benefits from the likes of really engaging on social media. Not that long ago we ran a Q and A on Twitter with a company in the UK called Milkground and that’s where candidates could come online, ask questions to either hiring managers or recruiters or recent starts in those roles and really get a real flavor for what the job is like. So that sort of immediate ability to chat openly and honestly online is a big area that will be a key focus for us as we move forward. But also video. I mean time and time again, any metrics that you look at video, and particularly video off mobile platform like blogs, once they’re a certain way down the line that they are interested in the company. But in terms of generating an initial grab, video is a very important place for us as we move forward. And when I say video, I don’t mean very fancy produced video. I think something that looks very authentic and was filmed by somebody themselves, which is how we like to do it. I think that’s going to be very important for us. So definitely video conference as we move forward.
Matt Alder [00:20:42]:
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John McCall [00:20:44]:
Thank you very much Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:46]:
My thanks to John McCool. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for Recruiting Future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
