Employer Branding is always a topic that provokes a lot of debate. So much debate in fact that sometimes it is difficult to get a clear view of what strategies are working. It’s fair to say that many employers are now putting their employees at the centre of their employer brand strategy but have do you have a people centric approach in a large complex organisation?
My guest this week is Julie Griggs, Head of Talent and Resourcing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie leads a team that has been doing some interesting, innovative and effective work in employer branding.
In the interview we discuss:
• The challenges of recruiting for a large university with diverse needs.
• Technology as the foundation of a smooth candidate journey
• Putting people at the heart of employer branding
• Innovative approaches to photography and video
• Their unique approach to attracting senior hires
• The importance of candidate and hiring manager feedback
Julie also talks about the results her team has seen from using this approach and shares some valuable advice for employers who are just getting starting with employer branding.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company. Smart Recruiters is a full talent acquisition suite with candidate relationship management and an applicant tracking system all in one modern platform. With an extensive marketplace of more than 300 vendors and a user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters alike love. Companies from Ikea to Bosch to blah blah Car leverage Smart Recruiters to attract, select and hire the talent they need to grow and expand their business. Visit smart recruiters@www.smartrecruiters.com to find out why companies across the globe consider them to be the number one ATS replacement.
Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 112 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Employer branding is always a topic that provokes lots of debate. So much debate, in fact, it can sometimes be difficult to get a clear view of what’s actually working. Putting employees at the centre of employer branding is certainly a strategy that lots of organisations are currently undertaking, but how do you have a people centric approach to employer branding in a large, complex organisation? My guest this week is Julie Griggs, Head of Talent and Resourcing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie leads a team that’s been doing some interesting, innovative and most of all effective work in employer branding. And I know you’ll find this interview fascinating.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Hi, Julie and welcome to the podcast.
Julie Griggs [00:02:01]:
Hi, Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Julie Griggs [00:02:07]:
I’m Head of Talent and Resourcing at Manchester Metropolitan University, so I’m responsible for all our hiring across the organisation, but been at Manchester met since April 2016 and before that spent about 15 years in various resourcing and HR roles. Yeah. So really excited about the role that I’m in at the moment. We’ve got a lot to do, lots of challenges, but really exciting journey.
Matt Alder [00:02:34]:
And can you sort of tell everyone a little bit about Manchester Metropolitan University? Because I saw you do a presentation a couple of weeks ago and until then I don’t think I really had a sort of perception of the, you know, of the size of it and what it actually does as an institution.
Julie Griggs [00:02:50]:
We’re a large university, We’ve got approximately 35,000 students. Our marketing team will probably correct me on that and tell me that it’s nearer to 38,000, but we’ve got a lot of students spread across different faculties. We’re a research focused university, but we’re also a teaching intensive university, so we do a lot of things, such as continuing professional development for people. I did my own CIPD at Manchester Met, got a varied range of students, quite a lot of students that are first gen, so they’re the first people in their family that have been to university. So working with our communities and in partnership with local people, local students is very important to us and we’re on quite an exciting journey. Actually. Our Vice Chancellor has been with us for about two, two and a half years and he’s very excited about the future vision of the organisation. So there’s a lot of ambition and a lot of change. So it’s a very exciting time to be at the university, I think. Fantast. Fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:03:53]:
So talk us through the kind of recruitment challenges that you have at an institution like that.
Julie Griggs [00:04:00]:
I always liken our institution to talent village. That’s how I describe it. And a couple of members of my team always laugh at me for that. But it’s the best way I can describe it, because we’ve got such a range of roles. I think when you look at the university, and I know this is the case with me, you think about lecturers, you think about your own experience, professors, heads of department. But actually to a university, ticking over requires an awful lot of different skill sets, because you’ve got people that look after your students, all those people that do the residential care, catering, the domestic assistance, you’ve got people that support learning and teaching, so you’ve got technicians. And the technician population is very interesting in itself because that’s everything from people that demonstrate in labs to people that help our fashion students with sewing and how to cut cloth, and people that do gospel to support our art students. So you’ve got an incredible range of people that support learning and teaching and student life, but then you’ve also got all those backup functions. So hr, finance and it. And our IT estate is really impressive as well, because, you know, universities are becoming more digital, so we’ve got a whole range of people, so it’s lots of challenges, lots of different audiences to spread speak to. Manchester is obviously quite an exciting city, so if we’re looking for digital skills, everybody else in Manchester is looking for digital skills. So it’s. Yeah, it’s very, very challenging in the sense that it keeps us on our toes with looking for talent, really.
Matt Alder [00:05:41]:
I can imagine. And what have you sort of done to address those challenges? Because I know that you’ve been doing some really interesting work recently. Could you sort of talk us through some of the approaches that you’re taking?
Julie Griggs [00:05:53]:
Yeah, I mean, we started from a position of being a very traditional resourcing function. So when I joined in April, it was very much, I think, a HR function. And I’m not saying that in a derogatory way. It was seen as very much a standard part of HR. So recruitment was a process. CVs came in, something happened to candidates in the middle and people were hired at the other end of the process. But as the strategies changed and as the ambition of the organisation changed, we had to look at the entirety of that resourcing ecosystem, because you need to kind of operate in a much more commercial way, if that makes sense. We need to start thinking about ourselves as a business rather than as just an educational establishment. So we’ve looked at everything and I think one of the key areas for us was about raising our profile and raising our brand as an employer, because universities are very much seen as places of education. Our own employers association talks about that and talks about the need for universities to start embracing employee value proposition and employer brand. So one of the key things was how do we market ourselves as a great place to come and work, as a great place to forge a career? And how do we actually talk to all those different audiences that we’ve got? So what we’re saying to professors is obviously very different from what we’re saying to IT people, to what we’re saying to domestic assistants. So an awful lot initially, around going out, talking to the business, talking to the partners that we work with, talking to candidates, talking to the agencies that we work with, and finding out a lot about what does Manchester Met mean to you, and then how can we talk to you and raise the profile of the organisation? So we’ve spent a lot of time there. We’ve also spent time recently on our technology because we were using a legacy applicant tracking system. I think it’s fair to say that as a sector, universities haven’t really been very hot on the software side of things, in terms of how they interact with candidates and how they manage candidates and talent pools. So one of my key drivers was to absolutely make sure we got a strong technology underpinning, so that everything else we were doing was facilitated. Because I think if you haven’t got that very smooth journey to help people apply and manage your candidates, everything else becomes window dressing. So a very firm technology base was something else that we looked at.
Matt Alder [00:08:30]:
That’s very interesting. And I can see that they’re sort of really strong foundations to build on. How have you moved forward from there, because I’ve seen some of the really sort of great work you’ve been doing in employer branding and I’m sort of interested to find out a bit more about it.
Julie Griggs [00:08:46]:
It’s been very much focused around our people. So we didn’t want an employer brand that was a million miles away from consumer brand, for want of a better word. So whilst a lot of our outward facing marketing is focused on students, our employer brand had to be very aligned to that in terms of our people are what make us as an organisation. So we didn’t want to create some concept that was kind of out there. It had to speak to the people that we work with. And an awful lot of what we found coming back from our focus groups, coming back from our discussions, was people, colleagues, a sense of collegiality, a sense of community and partnership. So we’ve built a lot around people. So what we’ve done is we’ve looked at our collateral. We actually went out and used a wedding photographer to do our photography of our people because what we wanted was something very natural. We didn’t want that Shutterstock photography, as it were, with, you know, people sat around a whiteboard or kind of pontificating on someone doing something with Sharpies. We wanted it to be these are our people in their natural surroundings. So we had a wedding photographer come in and take lots of great shots of our people. So what we’ve been doing is created some collateral around that in terms of to use across social media, to use across the job boards and the various channels. And what we also did was we looked at our senior hires in particular, because we weren’t getting a lot of applications for professorial roles and very senior roles. So we looked at something very different there. And we looked at electronic magazines which were about how to create a candidate journey that was very simple in terms of application. So a few clicks and you could apply, but equally giving a lot of information about the university, because a lot of our academic positions, people are looking at us from overseas. So what did you need to know about the university? And also some really cool drone footage across Manchester as well. Because one of the things that we also found when we were looking at this was people are very proud of being Mancunian, they’re very proud of working, looking at MMU and what it means in the city, because we’re an old institution, even though We’re a post 1992 university, we’re an old institution, so people are really proud of that Manchester heritage. So we’ve got this really Great drone footage, some of our campus buildings, you know, iconic things such as the town hall and sweeping across trams and stuff across the city. So we created something very, very unique and special for our senior hires to, to entice people to have a look at us. So a lot of work and a lot of effort from particularly Ben in my team has been focused on getting the message about Manchester out there and getting the message about our people and our people’s real stories. Because we’ve got, you know, got fascinating stories, we’ve got people that are training IVF scientists, we’ve got people that are working with colleagues in Manchester on graphene, we’ve got a world renowned architecture school. There’s really great people doing really great stuff. So when you’ve got all those stories, it’s kind of there for you. It’s just a question of how do you segment those messages and get the content right for different audiences. So that’s been a lot of effort, really.
Matt Alder [00:12:09]:
I mean, I think it’s, you know, I think some of the stuff you’ve done is brilliant and, you know, really kind of some really sort of fascinating content. I want to come back and talk a little bit more about video, but before I do, I’m really interested. Digital magazine for senior hires. Now that’s obviously, you know, a kind of a new innovation. Sure. Something I’m sure the university hadn’t done before. How did you persuade your sort of key stakeholders that this was something that they should, you know, invest sort of time and money in?
Julie Griggs [00:12:39]:
It was one of our pro vice chancellors, which are in effect the MDs, if you like, for the faculties. He was trying to recruit for a new research centre and he wanted to meet with me because previously they, I think they do search and selection. They’d used a standard advert on something like Jobs ac, something like that, which, you know, is one of our major channels. But this time it just hadn’t done it for him. And he said to me, I think the actual words he used were, I want you to wow me. So the challenge was from him really in terms of what could we do that was different. So I thought there must be something around creating some very targeted content and creating something interesting. And then I spoke to Kat Fox at Peter’s Fox and said, I’ve got this real challenge from one of our pro vice chancellors. I think we need to do something that’s really very specific in terms of content and grabs people. And she said, well, you know, have you seen these electronic magazines that they use, like in the car industry, like if you’re buying a BMW and you can configure your BMW. And I was like, yeah, yeah. She went, well, let’s use one of those. And so we think, yeah, okay, let’s give that a go. And when she came back to us, it was just brilliant because we got this fantastic drone footage, got this really easy candidate journey and all this information. And I presented it to our pro Vice chancellor and I said, look, you know, this is probably a little bit sort of wacky in terms of what you were thinking of. You probably were thinking of a nice advert. And he just looked at it and he was blown away by it. And then I said to him, you know, this is what we can create if we, you know, if we’ve got a bit of space to do it. And I think the thing that convinced him in the end to go with it wasn’t just the kind of novelty of it, but it was also the fact that it was so cost effective in comparison to, you know, giving a vacancy straight out to search and selection. We were talking a huge difference, difference in terms of cost and also because it was reusable. So use it for this campaign, for this head of research, tweak the content and use it again. So we’ve created something that’s not only engaging, but it’s got some longevity as well. And I think the drive has never been solely cost savings, but cost savings have resulted out of doing something quite creative. So it’s worked really well. So I think that the proof of the concept was the fact that we managed to recruit someone. And it’s one of those moments where me and my team were like. And we got them from a Russell Group university. We were really pleased with ourselves because we managed to tempt someone away from a traditional university. So, yeah, it worked really well. But it was good to have that case study and that champion in terms of one of our Pro VCs. And now it’s seen as the standard now. So for senior hires, the E magazines are seen as the standard. So it’s worked really well.
Matt Alder [00:15:34]:
So one of the things I know you guys are doing a lot of is video and you know, video can be seen as something that’s sort of time consuming and expensive to expensive to produce. What’s your kind of. You mentioned that you’d sort of used a wedding photographer to do your people photography, which I think is a brilliant idea. What’s been your strategy with sort of delivering video projects?
Julie Griggs [00:15:57]:
We’ve got a combination really, so we have Done some what I call inverted commerce professional videos with our university guy. But an awful lot of what we’ve done has been very on the hoof content and it’s been an iPhone and the legendary 7 pound Amazon tripod, which I think we should probably get insured because it’s probably our best piece of kit. So a lot of that has been has been Ben from our team going out with an iPhone, going out with a tripod, meeting with someone and asking them what’s their day to day experience of Manchester Met. Why should someone come and work in their area? And describing a little bit about the roles and the level of engagement we’ve had both internally and from candidates has been amazing because at first I thought we’re going to have to twist everybody’s arm to be on a video, but as soon as someone did it, someone else is going, oh, yeah, I’ve seen that such and such body’s done one of those videos. Can I be on a video? I’d like my video job description and in terms of the outcomes of it, we had a role for Head of Health and Safety and I always joke that, you know, no one grows up wanting to be a Head of Health and Safety, but it’s one of those roles that you have to have in a big organisation. We put the video out of our outgoing Head of Health and Safety, talking about what he’d done in the role, talking about what you get involved in in that role in a university and how exciting that can be because one minute you’re crawling under the floor making sure that cables are fine, the next minute you’re talking to the Vice Chancellor and the Chancellor about strategy for a new building or something. So that was really good. And when we actually put that video out there embedded in an advert, the level of engagement was huge. I think we got something like 500 views on that advert in one day. So we were like, yeah, this stuff really works. People like seeing people and like seeing the reality. So, yeah, it’s been really effective for us.
Matt Alder [00:17:58]:
So you’ve obviously mentioned kind of, you know, some of the individual successes that you’ve had with this strategy, but how’s it been working generally? Kind of how far along the journey, you know, do you think, do you think you are? What, what sort of, you know, results is it delivered kind of across the board?
Julie Griggs [00:18:15]:
We’ve had some very good, what I call quick wins. So the video, in terms of managing to recruit senior people through videos or senior people, the EE magazines, has been very good quick wins. I Think in terms of where we are, we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of our journey because we picked up from a very, very traditional resourcing function. So branding is going apace and we’ve got a new careers website that we’ve launched the first phase of. Due to launch the second phase, technology has run at a pace and we’ve got brilliant ats in now. That’s creating a lot of value for us. But I think we’ve still got a lot to do in rest of the journey. So assessment and selection is an area that I want to focus on next. I think there’s also a piece about empowering our hiring managers more, giving them more in their toolkit to enable them to go off and do a lot more and build a lot more. I think we’ve raised the profile of resourcing. I think it’s fair to say when I joined resourcing didn’t have a high profile, or if it did have a high profile, it was a negative one. And I think part of that was driven by the technology, but I think also part of it was because the business didn’t really understand the value of what good resourcing could bring to an organization. So I think we’ve raised our profile, we’re getting good feedback. We’ve deliberately gone out there and asked for feedback, which is something that the resourcing function hadn’t done previously. So every candidate gets an email at the end of the process saying would you like to feed back to us on your experience? And every hiring manager gets an email saying, would you like to feedback to us on your experience? And we’ve asked for feedback all along. The rollout of our ats as well, our managers saying, what do you think? Has the process improved? And we’re starting to get a lot of good anecdotal feedback about improvements in the process. But that still feels like only scratching the surface for me because I think, you know, the front facing things are much better and when we’re in a much better position, but we still need to do a lot more around it, I think.
Matt Alder [00:20:19]:
So final question, what advice would you give to someone who was perhaps in a similar position to where you were a few months back? So, you know, starting from scratch, either when university or within another large organization, what advice would you give to help someone sort of begin this kind of journey?
Julie Griggs [00:20:38]:
I think the first thing that I did was I actually got out into the business and I actually started talking to people and saying, what are your issues? What are your Pain points. What’s resourcing as a function not delivering to you? And we actually asked our candidates as well, what’s resourcing as a function not delivering to you? So actually going from a bench basis of having data, so actually having something that backed up your arguments. I think what was also helpful for me as well is going out and talking to other institutions, finding out where they were and how we were positioned and how we against them, but also going out and talking to other organisations that were out of the sector, that were doing stuff that I considered to be good practice. I don’t really like best practice, but good practice and benchmarking ourselves against that as well. So having a good basis, a good solid foundation of data was good in terms of building the business case for big change. But I think what also helps as well was going out and looking for quick wins. That could be case studies that we could say, look, if you give us the tools and you put a bit of faith in us, we can deliver X, then going out, delivering X and then using that as a case study across the organisation to say, this is what good resourcing can look like. So I guess the approach I took was two pronged. Some quick wins to give resourcing some good press because we were doing good stuff, but also a good solid pot of data that I could use to build a business case for global change. So I think that was my take on it and that would be my advice, getting some good data, I think.
Matt Alder [00:22:16]:
Julie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Julie Griggs [00:22:18]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:22:20]:
My thanks to Julie Griggs. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes, in Stitcher or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also now find the show on Spotify. Just search for Recruiting Future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also 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.
