The critical role employer branding plays in attracting top tech talent to companies is something we have covered a few times on the podcast. However, what happens when you need to create an employer brand for an entire country? The Irish government recently initiated a project to do just that in order to service the growing need to import top tech talent into the Irish digital economy.
My guest this week is Niall Dowling who is Strategic Director at Atomic, the marketing agency who are delivering the project and its resulting website www.techlifeireland.com
In the interview we discuss:
• The strategic thinking behind the employer brand
• Some surprising insights from the research that reveal the motivations that drive people to relocate
• Audience segmentation and personas
• The importance of quality of career and meaningful work
• How the brand has been activated and optimised for the target audience.
Niall also shares the results of the project so far and offers his advice to companies looking to attract senior talent from abroad.
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 67 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The critical role employer branding plays in attracting top tech talent is something we’ve covered a few times on the podcast. But what happens when you need to create an employer brand for an entire country? The Irish government recently initiated a project to do just that in order to service the growing need to import top tech talent into the Irish digital economy. My guest this week is Niall Dowling, strategic director at marketing agency Atomic, who are delivering the project and its resulting website, techlifeisland.com in our interview, Niall shares some brilliant insights into the initiative and its results so far. Hi Niall and welcome. Welcome to the podcast.
Niall Dowling [00:02:02]:
Morning Matt. Good to be on the show.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
So could you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about you?
Niall Dowling [00:02:09]:
Sure. My name is Niall Dowling, I’m head of strategy at Atomic. We are an Irish ad agency based here in Dublin, offices in the UK as well. We operate in a range of different sectors. There’s kind of three key business areas where we work. The first and the oldest part of the business will be very consumer focused, consumer brand focused. So we work with everything from car brands to ice cream to fashion retailers. More recently then about three or four years ago, we established Atomic Sport. So that’s a purely sport based, sport focused, part of the business and sport specialist team that works in that business. Today that’s the largest creative agency working in the sports space in Ireland. And then last year we established Atomic DNA. And what Atomic DNA is is a fully employer, branding and recruitment, marketing focused agency, again with a specialist team working in it, but very focused really on, I suppose, bringing creativity, bringing strong strategy, bringing good understanding of employer brands and candidates to HR professionals and talent protection professionals here in Ireland and set up really to service a huge need and a huge demand in this market. Dublin and Ireland are Very competitive labor markets, a huge amount of major tech firms here, a lot of hiring, a lot of growth going on. So, you know, very quickly we have begun working with a range of great clients and brands in the employer branding space. That’s everybody from tech firms, some big global ones like Salesforce, some local Irish players. We’re working with the largest Irish bank and we’re also doing a range of government work in the talent attraction space.
Matt Alder [00:04:14]:
And that’s really the main thing that I wanted to talk about on the podcast today. I know you’ve been involved in a really interesting initiative to attract more skilled tech talent to Ireland. Could you tell us a bit about that initiative and how it came about?
Niall Dowling [00:04:37]:
Sure, I’d love to. So that’s TechLife Ireland. So what? Tech Life Ireland is Ireland’s national tech talent attraction brand. So that’s a bit of a mouthful. That’s its official governmental title, but the brand itself is TechLife Ireland with a website of TechLife Ireland. So really the background to the project is that it was commissioned and established by government, it’s a national project with governmental funding for a three year period. And you know, the rationale behind us is to service the demand, the growing demand in Ireland for really high quality, top tech talent from around the world. So, you know, Ireland itself is a very vibrant, growing tech tech hub. It’s really a who’s who of tech companies, many of the big, most of the big international tech brands, whatever, an EMEA HQ here in Ireland and then there’s a really, really vibrant and dynamic sector of indigenous Irish tech happening here. So as a result, we do have a large and growing demand for high quality tech skills. The country itself operates a very fluid open visa system for critical skills. And also as a member of the EU, we’ve access to tech talent from 28 member states. That’s very important. It’s a very important feature of our economy. Unlike, I suppose maybe in the US where they have their H1B visa system which is capped as a quote in place, Ireland doesn’t have a capped quota for critical skills. So Tech Life Ireland is, it’s one initiative designed to, you know, help build that pipeline of tech talent coming into the country and also to support the employer branding efforts of the tech employers themselves here.
Matt Alder [00:06:39]:
It’s a fascinating, a fascinating initiative and I, you know, I think it’s, you know, it’s a fantastic thing, thing to be doing, I think particularly with, you know, the amount of competition that there is in various tech hubs in Europe for, for, for, for Global talent. So how, how do you go about sort of working on a project, project like that? What, what, what research did you do? What did you, what did you find out? What was the, what’s the sort of key strategy behind it?
Niall Dowling [00:07:12]:
Yeah, well, I suppose the first thing is that the structure of the initiative itself is really important and this is a question that I often get from other people in either government or the talent attraction area on a national or in a city or regional level. So it operates as a classic multi stakeholder model. So it’s government funded, as I said, but it’s rolled out and supported primarily by two state agencies, which are Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, which are the two primary industrial promotions and attraction agencies in Ireland. But the advantage of being a multi stakeholder model is that we also work very, very closely with industry. So we have a huge amount of collaboration and consultation with industry. So we are very in tune with what their needs are, what their emerging skills needs are, the kind of candidates that they need to approach and indeed the motivations of those candidates. So, you know, there’s been a huge amount of very good stakeholder research, very good consultation that kicked off the project to ensure that we were very in touch with what the needs of industry were. The next piece really was to establish a very clear and deep and comprehensive understanding of the motivations of the talent that we were trying to attract. And you know, as you said, this is top tech talent we’re talking about in a global sense. It’s everybody from, you know, CTOs to developers to solutions and systems architects, cybersecurity people, etc. So, you know, a very in demand and a very mobile group of people. I suppose what we did as an employer branding focused agency was we brought our own research process to the project, but instead of looking at an employer, we looked at a country. So, you know, we’ve a pretty comprehensive process that we use ourselves. We look at employer brands along A4C’s model. So we look at the company itself, the company value proposition. We look at the candidate, most importantly, what motivates, what drives the particular candidate. We look at the competitors in the company’s own sector and in adjacent sectors and then we look at the culture or the context that the talent attraction is trying to take place. So really we apply the same model to Ireland. And then in terms of the candidate, we began a very systematic and fairly deep process of research. I think we ended up doing close to 50 in depth interviews with relocated tech talent in Ireland. We began by conducting a lot of secondary Research looking at a lot of online, publicly available data from sources like LinkedIn, from, indeed from some of the big consulting groups that were available. And we established, we established about six initial strategic principles or pillars, and then we set about actually trying to either validate or challenge or add a bit of depth and a bit of texture to those principles. So we did that using qualitative research. As I said, these in depth, one hour interviews with relocated tech talent, and that was a really, really interesting journey and experience. I think what we found was that most of our initial principles stood up to further investigation, but some were disproven. And what we found was really, that the really, really key driver for tech talent to relocate to a country is actually not so much about work life balance and quality of life and social and cultural factors. It’s really much more about the job, much more about the quality of the opportunity, the challenge, the impact that they can have in their careers here. So, you know, I think maybe in the initial stages across the group, we were thinking about maybe a 50, 50 ratio of job to quality of life. But since doing the research, we really refined that. I think we probably focused maybe to 80, 90% on the actual quality of the job here. And then of course, we introduce the quality of life and the more sort of soft values, but to a lesser degree, very interesting.
Matt Alder [00:11:33]:
And that actually chimes very well with other interviews that I’ve done with people sort of leading searches for tech talent. In terms of motivations, was kind of ongoing career a factor? Was it just the, was it just the job or was it the scope of further opportunity when someone wanted to move on, particularly if they’re relocating from, from another part of the world?
Niall Dowling [00:11:59]:
Yeah, I think it really is about careers and that’s a big advantage that Ireland would have insofar as we have a lot of career paths both, you know, within Ireland and then using Ireland as a starting point or maybe a springboard for the rest of your. Rest of your career? We looked at, we, we undertook a segmentation of the, of the audience and we ended up with three key segments which are fairly broad, but they looked at people’s life status and primary motivations. And they were what we called footloose millennials, first of all, which was probably the youngest group. And this is the group for whom, I suppose, cultural and social factors were as big a draw actually, as the job themselves. So Ireland has a fantastic quality of life, both in terms of the social scene and cultural scene and the outdoors that we have here. So that group was very interested in those factors. Second group then we called responsible pragmatists, which is a bit of a mouthful, but, you know, that was a group who were a little bit older, may have kids already, maybe planning kids, maybe ready to settle down. And there was different drivers for that group. They tended to think a little bit more long term. They thought about their career, they thought about more practical factors, of course, like education, healthcare, taxation, system, more practical pragmatic factors. And then there was the final group, which we labeled single minded careerists. And this group, you know, this group was all about the career. It trumped everything else for them. It trumped, you know, where they would live, what kind of people they would be living alongside. They were really just interested in the quality of the career. And for a lot of these people, you know, PhD level candidates with perhaps upwards of, you know, 10 years experience in tech, they could really live anywhere in the world. They’re utterly mobile. So it was critical for those people to really illustrate and demonstrate very clearly the quality of the careers and the quality of the career paths that we have in Ireland.
Matt Alder [00:14:06]:
What were the biggest surprises for you? I mean, other than the sort of career versus lifestyle balance, were there anything else that came out, that came out of the research that you, that you or the stakeholders in the initiative were sort of genuinely surprised about?
Niall Dowling [00:14:21]:
Yeah, there were quite a few along the way. One, I suppose, early hypothesis that we had, we probably felt quite sure would be, you know, proven to be true was that the presence of local countrymen or country women in Ireland for a particular nationality will be a big magnet for them to come over and to relocate to Ireland. So, you know, we ask people, for example, from Argentina, there’s a quite large Argentinian community in one Dublin suburb. Would that be a factor for you? Would it be something that would attract. And more often than not, what we found from this group was that no, it wasn’t a big driver for them. You know, this audience, particularly at the more experienced and the more senior levels. It’s very self directed. It’s very, I suppose the audience, the people are very confident and self assured about their own decisions and their own career journey. So the presence of, you know, somebody’s compatriots in this country is not a big driver. So, you know, that was something that came through again and again, that intrinsic factors and intrinsic motivations are the most important thing for this group. So, you know, whether that’s undertaking a very complex challenge in their job. It’s the pride of working for a great employer. It could be the sense of competition they have with their, with their colleagues and with their peers. Or it could be the autonomy and the impact that they have working in a smaller company. They were time and again demonstrated to be the most important motivations and most important drivers.
Matt Alder [00:15:53]:
So with the, with the research done and the kind of the strategy formulated, what’s happened in terms of activation? You obviously have the website, but what initiatives are sort of being undertaken to communicate this sort of country brand of Ireland as a tech employer?
Niall Dowling [00:16:14]:
Yeah, so we have the country brand first of all and the brand obviously is there to encapsulate and to communicate the overall Ireland proposition as a place to have a tech career. There’s a very significant website which has been built specifically for this. That’s techlifeireland.com and that’s kind of part, I suppose, marketing tool, but part resource. So it does, it serves two purposes really. It allows the candidate considering Ireland to really find out all the information that they need in one place about making the move, what life would be like when they get here, and then also to search for available jobs in their particular area of expertise. We also have a fairly major international marketing campaign which launched in July of this year and that’s made up of paid media activity in a range of different territories around the world, comprising search advertising, we launched with some display advertising on major tech publishers, but then a very, very heavy content publishing and content distribution element to that as well. So, you know, really it’s a largely content based campaign. We’re producing content at volume. We, I think since beginning we’ve produced maybe 30 or 40 videos of different formats of candidates and companies working in Ireland. And then on an ongoing basis we’re producing probably upwards of 10 pieces of content every month and again distributing them to an international audience.
Matt Alder [00:17:55]:
So what results have you got from the initiative?
Niall Dowling [00:17:58]:
Well, Matt, we’re only in operation two months, but so far results are really, really, really positive. You know, since going live in July, we’ve had upwards of 45,000 tech people from all over the world visiting the site. We’ve recorded about 130 different nationalities coming to the site, roughly half of those. So nearly 25,000 people have used our job search tool. So it’s, you know, it’s the traffic will be comprised of both passive but also quite actively minded people. But then I think one of the most encouraging things is very, very positive sentiment across the social channels that we’re measuring. So the content that we’re producing is very well received. The focus on the techies themselves is obviously working with people we use a sort of a mantra here by techies for techies. So the more sort of tech centric and the more specific to a particular job or area of expertise we make the content, the better it works.
Matt Alder [00:19:01]:
So final question. What would your advice be to an organization who’s looking to bring tech talent into their company from outside of their country?
Niall Dowling [00:19:12]:
Well, I think from our experience, the most important thing is being absolutely focused on the tech mindset when you go about producing messages, producing content, video, a UX, etc. So as I said, we use this by techies for techies mindset on this initiative and that informs everything that we do. We test everything from a piece of content through to the front end of a website with the actual tech audience themselves. So our tone, our language, the ux, the subject matter is all completely tailored to this particular group. And another thing that we find and have found is that, you know, a lot of tech people obviously have an engineering type mindset and orientation. So they’re very, very interested in how navigable, how clear, how accurate and efficient information is. So we’ve really stripped out a lot of the extraneous jargon and salesy kind of material from our language. We’ve kept it very, very direct and that that scores really, really well with this group.
Matt Alder [00:20:20]:
Niall, thank you very much for talking to me.
Niall Dowling [00:20:23]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:24]:
My thanks to Niall Dowling. 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. If you enjoyed the podcast, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with your colleagues. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
