Regular listeners to the show will know how much I love strategic recruitment marketing that is based around effective storytelling. To me, it’s the future of talent acquisition and something every employer needs to be doing.
One company who I think does this brilliantly is Indeed, and I’m delighted to have Bryan Chaney their Director of Global Employer Branding as my guest this week. Bryan shares some brilliant insights into Indeed’s strategy and it really is a must listen for anyone working in talent acquisition.
In the interview we discuss:
- The unique recruiting challenges at Indeed
- Employer Branding versus Talent Branding
- Employer Brand strategy.
- Finding, curating and elevating stories that already exist and telling them in different ways.
- Creating an employee-generated content engine and influencer programme
- The relationship between talent acquisition and marketing
- Rebranding from talent acquisition to talent attraction
- Measuring success
- Cultural Add versus cultural fit
Bryan also shares his favourite employee story and talks about what’s next for talent acquisition and employer branding.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment. Advertising in real time spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 185 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Regular listeners to the show will know how much I love strategic recruitment marketing that’s based around effective storytelling. To me, it’s the future of talent acquisition and something every employer needs to be doing. One company who I think does this absolutely brilliantly is Indeed. And I’m delighted to have Bryan Chaney, their Director of Global Employer branding, as my guest this week. In our interview, Bryan shares some brilliant insights into indeed strategy and it really is a must listen for anyone working in talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:01:46]:
Hi Bryan, and welcome to the podcast.
Bryan Chaney [00:01:46]:
Hi, thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:48]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bryan Chaney [00:01:53]:
Sure. My name is Bryan Chaney and I lead employer Brand at Indeed for internal recruitment. And I’ve been in the recruitment marketing and employer brand space for, gosh, for. I don’t know. I don’t. I really want to say how old I am, but I’ve been in the space for almost 15 years.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
Fantastic. So I follow a lot of the work you do around employer branding and it’s interesting because there are a number of different labels attached to this space. Employer branding, talent branding. What’s your definition of employer brand?
Bryan Chaney [00:02:26]:
Sure, there’s so many different definitions and if you’ve ever looked into finding people who do what we do in recruitment, marketing, employer branding, recruitment communications. In the talent branding space, there’s about 18 different job titles and that’s probably only in one region like the Americas. So there’s so many different ways that people refer to what we do. For for me, I look at employer branding as the way that a company wants to be seen and referred to as an employer and I look at talent brand as the overlap there or in parallel with what employees are actually seeing and saying and their experience because the employers actually have that message. You know what the goal there is? The goal is to attract and hire the right people. And the employees, their goal is just to share information. Good, bad, indifferent. It’s just share information in their perspective. And just like everybody else, there’s all kinds of different ways to look at that perspective. So it’s taking and elevating the voice of the employee and then doing that in tandem with the things that the company wants to highlight. So it’s. It’s not making things up, but it’s elevating and turning the volume up on the things that make the most sense.
Matt Alder [00:03:46]:
So working for indeed, what are the main recruiting challenges that you face?
Bryan Chaney [00:03:51]:
Well, for us, our challenge is very unique, and I can’t believe I just said very unique because it’s something that’s either unique or it’s not. But you get the idea. It’s a challenge in brand recognition. So we’re a great place for people to go to search for jobs. But what happens is we have to re educate people on the fact that we are a company that’s just past 9,000 employees and we’re in 30 different locations in different countries around the world. And so it’s changing that expectation of we’re not just a job job search site. We are much, much more than that. And that people can think of us as a place not just to find work, but a place to work and help others get jobs. So I think there’s a re education there around what we do, and there’s a lot of meta thinking about what we do and how we search for jobs online. So an example is if you type in indeed and the word jobs, you, you get the world’s jobs. Where for us is that? That’s a challenge in reeducating and creating a destination for people to find out about the actual experience that they have working at Indeed.
Matt Alder [00:05:02]:
I can see that’s definitely a unique challenge. And what’s your strategy for solving it? What sits behind your employer branding activity?
Bryan Chaney [00:05:11]:
So for us, the biggest part of our strategy is to find, curate and elevate stories that already exist and tell them in a lot of different ways through copy, through visual visuals, video and podcasts, really looking at any way that a story can be packaged and seeking that out and then elevating it and amplifying it. We started out where we had very, very little content at the beginning. So I’ve been in indeed for approaching, gosh, almost four years now. And I think at the beginning we suffered from very little, almost no content out there. And so what we had to do was kind of scrape and pull together all these different things that lived in different silos, internal social networks. There were some content out there that wasn’t hashtagged for anything. And so we had to go out and seek out this. And a lot of the stuff that we’ve done, especially at the beginning, was Austin, Texas based, because that’s where our largest office was. That’s where myself and my team originally started. So originally it was just me, and then we added one person and then everybody kind of started around Austin. And what we realized is that while we can capture a lot around Austin, that’s definitely not everybody’s experience globally. And so we had to branch out, hire additional people on the team to help tell the story, to capture those stories within different regions as people were having those experiences. So understanding that a localized story is the one that’s going to resonate the most with each of our audiences. So we actually started a hashtag in 2016 called Inside Indeed. We launched some social channels and we started with the content that we were able to pull together and then slowly built an employee generated content engine. We’ve socialized it, we’ve now educated people. There are laptop stickers, there are slides on our TVs around the world in the offices, and then there are other pieces of content. We started with our influencers because if you have people who are telling good stories, you want to encourage them to tell more of those good stories. So we built an influencer program where we would seek out people, recognize them by highlighting them on those TV screens in the offices, and then we would also send them care packages around the fact that they got a unique piece of swag. It was a branded shirt that was with a kind of cheeky message on the, on the back and so that with some stickers and some socks, and then a personal note from the employer brand team. So those little things helped us progress along to where we are today, which is where we have a lot of content, we have a lot of choices to help tell that story. And we’re also lucky in that we work at a company that treats people really well. So there tends to be a lot more of those stories than in other companies.
Matt Alder [00:08:16]:
Interesting stuff. And what’s really interesting to me is that with all the other companies out there, I see more employer brands, content and talent brand stories from indeed in my social streams than almost anyone else. And I think that obviously reflects my job and what I do. But also some of the people that I’m connected to, but Also, I’m guessing you’re using some pretty sophisticated marketing techniques and methodologies to amplify that content. What’s the relationship between talent acquisition and marketing in terms of skill set and the approach that you take?
Bryan Chaney [00:08:51]:
So for me, I’ve been at previous organizations where I didn’t have the best relationship with marketing and it showed. And so to be in a role at a company where you don’t have to sell the value of elevating and focusing on your employer brand is really, really great. I try not to take it for granted, but I hear a lot of my colleagues in the space just say, hey, I’ve got to. I feel like I have to defend my life all the time. We’re having to, to prove this roi, and we still are too, right? We still have to tell a story. But to have that buy in from not just HR and TA leadership, but also marketing, because we’re so very aligned with the things that we’re actually trying as a company to help our clients accomplish. And so for us to have that freedom to be able to work on that is really important. And the success, I can tell you, the success that I’ve either had or not had has been largely in relation to the actual connection and collaboration that I’ve had with marketing. And I really actually look at it as talent attraction. I don’t. We’ve actually went through a renaming or rebrand internally on, from, from talent attraction, excuse me, talent acquisition, to talent attraction. Because it’s really this constant process of attraction. You’re, if you ask, if you ask anyone, hey, did you, did you go acquire some people today? And the answer is no. No, we persuaded them, we marketed to them, we, we sold them and then we had to work to keep them attracted and engaged and retained at our company. So we look at it a little bit differently.
Matt Alder [00:10:33]:
You mentioned your successes there. How do you measure success?
Bryan Chaney [00:10:36]:
Well, it depends on what part of talent branding you’re referring to. For us, what’s been around forever is recruitment, marketing and advertising. And what hasn’t been around forever is the employer branding aspect of that. And so as you think about what you want to achieve in the short term, right, Are you driving top of funnel? Are you driving applications? Are you driving awareness? All those things, that’s great. But you also need the long term approach. You need to be there, you need to be consistent, you need to have that association with all of your different audiences that you need to recruit. And so that’s the difference that I see between recruitment, marketing and advertising. And in employer Branding and to me, talent branding compasses all of that. So it’s just the method and the philosophy behind how that message is delivered. So for us, ROI on or measurement on recruitment, advertising is relatively easy. It’s in the visibility, it’s in awareness, it’s in clicks. And obviously the recruiters love the applications. So it’s a matter of that part is relatively easy to track. The branding piece is a little bit tougher to track because it is more of a long term approach. And it’s harder to measure that against something that can change from year to year. Right. Depending upon how fast the company is growing, depending upon those initiatives and where the company is growing. So all those things are a little bit harder to measure from a talent, brand and employment brand standpoint. But we do that through a few different things. So obviously awareness, we have social profiles, we’re broadcasting information, culture, information and jobs, more culture, information and events and like stories about what we’re doing as a company. But in addition to that, we’re also engaging people. So our engagement, our awareness and engagement is kind of the top level. The next level is going to be our affinity or the ability for people to opt into a conversation with us long term. And so when we think about those conversations, they take permission, they take barriers or overcoming barriers. And so for us, it’s a matter of joining our talent networks and actually having a conversation and having content prepared so that when people raise their hand and they say, you know what, now I know who you are and I actually want to learn more about what it’s like to work on your user experience team. And so we have that content and so what we do is we put them on. From a marketing perspective, you’d look at it as a drip campaign, right? And so you think about, okay, how are we communicating with people over time? What information are we sharing and what are the triggers that we put in front of this audience that allow them to interact and change their course, change what information they’re going to get. So I think that’s one of the biggest things that we’re broadening, kind of the middle of that process. And then the last thing that we measure is applications, as I mentioned before, applications and then ultimately hires that come from that. So visits to application, those conversion ratios and then obviously hires and then being able to do that in a way that shows not just why somebody clicked on the last thing they got them to apply, but also do we have them in our system? Have we communicated with them before? Is this more of a longer term deal? Whereas if you see, if you see a job ad or if you see a post on Twitter and you’ve already had 8 to 10 touches with that person, they’re more likely to take that action.
Matt Alder [00:14:26]:
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. So you’re curating a lot of stories from employers as part of the content you’re using. What’s the absolute favorite story that you’ve come across in the time that you’ve been doing this?
Bryan Chaney [00:14:42]:
Wow, there are a lot of stories. One of the ones in, selfishly, one of the first stories that pops into my head is someone who joined our prime team. And prime is one of our products that actually helps the candidates, the technical candidates, manage communication within the hiring process. Puts a lot more control back in the candidates hands. And so that’s just really high level. But that particular team, someone reached out to me and they said, hey, I’ve been following you. I’ve been listening to the stories that you’re sharing. I’ve been paying attention. And it’s been about a year and a half that I’ve been doing that. And because of that content, I decided to go ahead and apply to one of the jobs working on the prime team. Well, I got it and I start in two weeks. Can we have lunch? And it was really like, that’s one of the things that, that’s just one example where all those different stories come together and sharing things, that’s kind of what I, what I share with our recruiters, right? Our recruiters, our sourcers, our ambassadors, that every story is a touch point there to get someone engaged to think about working at, indeed, to think about having them as a co worker. So yeah, there’s a lot of different stories like that that are out there. There’s so many. So I’m probably not doing, not doing it justice. That was just the first one that popped in my brain.
Matt Alder [00:16:15]:
No, fantastic. That’s a great story. Moving on to the type of people that you’re hiring into the organization. I’ve seen you writing before about the difference between cultural addition and cultural fit when it comes to recruiting people. And it’s generally something that a number of other people have discussed on, on the podcast before. What’s your take on that? What’s going on? What are you actually doing?
Bryan Chaney [00:16:39]:
So every hiring manager is different and one of the things that we try to do is we try to talk about the overuse or the misuse of the word culture. And so if you ask 10 different people what the word culture means to them, you’re going to get probably 12 different answers. And so that’s one of those things that we try to talk about. What does that mean? So for me, culture is how people are found, engaged, enticed, and attracted to work at a company, how they’re set up for success while they’re at a company, how they’re related to how they’re grown and developed, and then ultimately how they’re treated when they leave. So to me, like, all of those touch points encompass culture. But. But when you ask someone in the product organization or in engineering or on the legal team, culture is going to be something that’s very different to them. So I try to talk differently about culture, not that there’s either you’re fitting or you’re not, because I feel like cultural fit. If someone is. If a team is perfect, if they’ve got every single thing figured out, they know exactly what they’re doing in their zero room for improvement, then saying you’re either a culture fitter or not is perfectly fine. That just means you need more cogs in the machine. But let’s be honest, very few, if any of us, have the perfect team, the perfect organization. So we’re always improving, always changing. And addition, to me, is about filling in those gaps that you have, adding in different perspectives and strengths. And one of the things that we look at is actually called insights, and that gives us, no pun intended, insights into how people operate, how they think, and how they like to relate to other people. So for my team, we look at all of our different backgrounds and we don’t look necessarily for fit because naturally we’re a creative bunch. We’re creating a lot of content, we’re engaging people, we’re communicative, we’re people focused. And so we tend to be what’s referred to as like, yellow and green, which is focused on showing people that we care, including people. These people are very inclusive, they’re patient, engaging. But to balance that, we have to have people who are driven by data, driven by analysis, and people who have a lot of forward momentum and can execute quickly on projects. And so you’ve got to have both of those components, both of those sides for people who can stretch into places where they don’t currently fit, whether that’s about skills, their personality, or just room for growth. And that’s the definition of a culture ad. So for my team, I’m always looking, looking for a culture ad, a place that can fit into the things that we need to do as a team that we might not be excelling at. It gives us the Ability to mold ourselves into a more highly functioning unit.
Matt Alder [00:19:43]:
So what’s next? What do you think we can look forward to over the next couple of years in terms of talent acquisition and employer branding?
Bryan Chaney [00:19:51]:
So that’s the big hairy question, right? There’s always about what’s happening in the future, what’s happening around employees branding. I think we’re going to set up a lot of standards around employer branding and talent branding. And I think one of the things that we do that by is by creating community. And one of the things that I’ve done is I’ve co founded a community called the Talent Brand alliance and that is around knowledge sharing, building connections, asking questions, working towards a lot of things like setting standards and understanding where the benchmarks really are. Because we’re in a relatively new function. And by new I mean the term employer brand was coined in 1996. So we’re still relatively late to the, to the recruiting game. But we have to think about, we have to think about how we are defining those expectations. And I tell my team that all the time is we’re in charge of our own destiny, meaning we’re setting the expectations for what good looks like. And so getting through that, I think there’s going to be a lot more rigor around setting those expectations, defining them. And then I think the biggest thing is that content and story creation is really the future of how we attract talent. Now we’re doing a lot of that stuff today, but I think that we’re going to take it to another level. I feel like that it’s being democratized. So storytelling is being put into employees hands. There are apps now to help create employee generated video content and to index that content, make it embeddable so that people can find it online. Then there’s all the different review sites. So I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to have another level of, there’s going to be some, I’ll say, some collection of that data. And so being able to create that, being able to have that transparency and have the story, I think will ultimately change hopefully our job descriptions. But, but we’ll make them more human, more relatable, and then take on a completely different form. So the storytelling piece is something that’s affected us and compelled us as humans for thousands and thousands of years. And I think taking that to another level and making that more important than maybe even the legal document of your job description, I think is what’s next within the next couple of years for, for, for talent attraction, for talent branding and I hope for recruiting.
Matt Alder [00:22:21]:
Fantastic. I couldn’t agree with you more. So where can people find you? Where can they find out more about the Talent Brand Alliance?
Bryan Chaney [00:22:28]:
Sure. So if they are interested to learn more about the Talent Brand alliance, it is a vetted community, meaning you have to be actually be doing the work to get into the community at the moment. But you can find out@talentbrand.org and then for me, I’m all over the place just Bryan Chaney. Find me on Twitter is probably one of the, one of the, one of the easiest ways to get ahold also Instagram. So really just looking for my name. I’ve kind of been very mindful about how I put my stuff out there so that people can find me. And I’m a lot more, I’ll say a lot more publicly available than most. But I welcome those conversations and I think having those conversations and educating people are really going to be how we push everything forward.
Matt Alder [00:23:12]:
Bryan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bryan Chaney [00:23:14]:
Wonderful. Loved it. Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:23:16]:
My thanks to Bryan Chaney. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts 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 find the show there. You can 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.
