One thing that I’ve noticed recently is the increasing traction behind the concept of talent experience. The reality is that employer brand, candidate experience, and employee experience don’t exist in silos when you are the employee experiencing them.
So what can employers do to ensure the kind of joined-up thinking that creates a seamless talent experience and, at the same time, develops workplaces that prioritise belonging and inclusion?
My guest this week is Charu Malhotra, a highly experienced global employer branding leader.
In the interview, we discuss:
- How employer branding is changing
- Why EVPs tend to get overshadowed by other employer branding outputs
- Joining up candidate experience, employee experience, employer brand, and EVP
- Moving culture and values from talk into action
- Inclusion, belonging and psychological safety.
- The importance of listening and two-way communication
- The role of technology
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 206 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One thing that I’ve noticed recently is the increasing traction behind the concept of talent experience. The reality is that employer brand candidate experience and employee experience don’t exist in silos when you’re experiencing as an employee. So what can employers do to ensure more joined up thinking to create a seamless talent experience and at the same time create workplaces that prioritize belonging and inclusion? My guest this week is Charu Malhotra. Charu is a leader within the global employer branding space and has some brilliant insights to share on this topic. Enjoy the interview. Hi Charu and welcome to the podcast.
Charu Malhotra [00:02:01]:
Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:03]:
I’m great, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:02:05]:
An absolute pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Charu Malhotra [00:02:12]:
Sure. So my name’s Charu Malhotra. I’ve been lucky enough to work in employer branding and recruitment marketing for about 12 years now. I’ve worked at organizations like Unilever, BP Ferrero and have a global role, but I’m based in rainy London.
Matt Alder [00:02:30]:
So you, as you say, you’ve worked in the employer brand space for quite some time and you’ve worked with some sort of really interesting and innovative organizations. How, how do you see sort of employer brand and employer value proposition changing what’s, what’s kind of going on in the market at the moment?
Charu Malhotra [00:02:52]:
Yeah, so I mean I’ve worked on 45 employee value proposition projects in the last 10 years, all with big global brands and with various different talent segments and lots of different geographies. And I think one of the observations certainly that I’ve experienced in the last two, three years is when starting these type of projects, although they were often labeled employee value proposition, with certainly focus on research and focus groups, the output would be very much around Employer branding and recruitment marketing. So focus very much on what’s the problem statement, how do we get great people in at the right time, the right place and give them a right experience? And the kind of the value proposition piece almost got lost in the equation. So, you know, almost that research would be done. But the focus and the heavy lifting and the output we very much generated towards the website, the social channels, content, and thinking about measurement. How are we getting the right people in? How long are they staying? Is our recruitment marketing working? I have seen and I think it’s a really positive step and I hope it matures. More is as more and more value propositions are on their third or fourth iterations. And also we’re seeing, and quite rightly so, a sort of a real strong lens towards not just having a global value proposition, but a talent proposition. Recognizing that the type of talent we’re looking for, whether it’s digital talent or talent in a different segment, requires different messaging under a big umbrella. There’s a lot more focus and as I said rightly so, and I’m really pleased to see this on, you know, what’s the actual employee experience? So it’s not just the external, it’s not just the, you know, how do we bring the person into our organization, how do we distinguish ourselves, how are we distinctive? But actually, once they’re in the organization, how do we retain them? How do we engage them so they become really strong advocates, but also happy, productive, engaged employees. So I see that value proposition, employee value proposition maturing to think about things in a much more 360 holistic way.
Matt Alder [00:05:10]:
I think that’s really interesting because we’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen a, you know, dramatic rise in the amount of people talking about employee experience. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the people talking about candidate experience. And, you know, we still see a dramatic rise in people talking about employer branding. I get the sense though, you know, as you say, for many companies, those things aren’t, aren’t joined up when they kind of absolutely should be. Are you sort of genuinely, genuinely seeing that happen? Do you think that companies are realizing that these are all pieces of the same puzzle? What’s your kind of view on where the market actually is at the moment?
Charu Malhotra [00:05:50]:
Sure. So I think like a lot of things, there’s a lot of noise out there and hubris does exist. So in the same way that we both know that there’s a lot of talk and has been for the last nearly decade on candidate experience, actually shifting of candidate experience piece has only happened in the four, five years and we still have horror stories going on and still having a lot of organisations not treating candidates in the right way. But I would say that the noise and the dialogue and the chat and the conference sessions on candidate experience, you know, was sort of much louder than the actual action and the activity behind it. I would say we’re probably in the same space now where you have a lot of dialogue, a lot of books, a lot of conferences talking about D and I inclusion and then you have a lot of people talking about employee experience. Is the impetus behind that happening in some organizations that are thinking about this carefully and recognizing that retention is a massive issue and productivity is a huge issue. We see the data, we see the stats monthly on this, if you’re interested in this type of thing. There’s a lot of data out there around how productive people are engaged workforces are globally. Some organizations are looking at this not enough in my opinion. But I do think as we, as we’ve seen with candidate experience, there will be a lot more momentum behind it. We have to. If we’re looking in an environment where people are talking about we can’t fill jobs, we can’t find talent, that’s rubbish. We’re not thinking cleverly enough. We’re not thinking about retraining, retooling up existing employees. We’re not thinking about why are people so disengaged, why aren’t we looking at how we’re leading and creating culture? And for me it’s very much around removing the piece around culture and values from the walls and from flyers and the occasional town hall to actually what are we really doing with people internally. So I think we’ll in a good place from moving D and I employee experience, employee value proposition, operating in silos by often different teams and seen as programs versus, you know, actually this is, you know, thinking about the talent experience and the employee experience should be something that we’re all thinking about properly and carefully. And I think the move from having chief HR officers to thinking about chief people officers is a nice signal. I’m a cynic, I don’t think a job title change anything, but I think you can take that as a positive signal, can’t you?
Matt Alder [00:08:27]:
Absolutely. And I think what I’m kind of seeing in the market is there’s certainly an intent to change and an understanding that this is the direction to go in. I think when you ask people at a practical level, many of them still have a bit of a journey to go on and pick that up. Again, a little bit later perhaps to get your view on what companies can be doing. Before that, though, I just want to just pick up on the, the DNI aspect of this because diversity and inclusion, again, it’s a massive conference talking point, huge amounts of content, huge amounts of discussion going on. What’s, what’s your take on, what’s your take on that?
Charu Malhotra [00:09:11]:
Well, the first piece I would say is I personally, I have a real issue with the word and perhaps the way it’s used diversity. So, and I made no secret of this. So I may have worked in organizations where we have D and I teams and you know, full credit and kudos to the hard work that they do and have a lot of respect for some of those individuals in those teams. I personally feel as a, as an individual that works in recruitment, hr, branding, marketing, communications, all those spaces and, you know, a female leader, that when you start thinking about diversity and using it as an umbrella term, using it as a catch all, you know, seeing, you know, words like, you know, we’re looking for diverse talent, I feel uncomfortable and I do well, vocalize that as I’m doing now, that actually it puts people into a space of other, whereas I much prefer things that works words like inclusion and belonging. I think organizations like LinkedIn started talking about this four or five years ago, way before anyone else. Very much nurtured by that. They had a very, they had an amazing leader who’s now left called Pat Wade, I think her name is, and she talked a lot about belonging and inclusion. And I think that’s the direction we need to head in. I think words are very powerful and if we start with diversity, that can lend itself into the position of otherness, a position of kind of really earmarking differences versus, you know, actually trying to strive for a culture of belonging and inclusion. So, yeah, and I’ve completely forgotten what the question was, but I have to say I really don’t like the word diversity.
Matt Alder [00:10:54]:
No, I mean, that’s absolutely, that’s absolutely fine. The question was I wanted your view on it, which, you know, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve given and you know, I think it makes perfect sense and I think it’s really interesting you mentioned LinkedIn actually, because I saw them do a presentation about belonging a few months ago at a conference I was at in the Netherlands and it really sort of moved my understanding forward about what that means and the kind of issues, issues around it. Could you, could you sort of, for people who are sort of perhaps struggling to understand this concept. Could you. Could you sort of give us a bit more detail about, you know, about what that actually means in practice?
Charu Malhotra [00:11:32]:
Yeah, I think one of the ways that I bridge it is there’s quite interesting quote around industrial leaders. Leaders, up until a moment ago, if you think about work history, were trained and are trained to look at people as resources to get the work done. Whereas if you think about even the points we’ve just touched upon in this call, around employee experience, around culture, around engagement and having productivity and happiness as an index about keeping people engaged, that’s a very different leadership model. That means that we have to look at work as a resource to build people. So I’m paraphrasing a quote I’d heard around that, but I think it frames it well. You know, industrial leaders and most organizations and a lot of organisations, you know, are trained and their organizational models are, you know, let me look at these people, these workforces, these employees as resources to get my work done, to get the work done. Whereas now we have to change the way that we look. And leaders now need to look at work as a resource to build people, to retain people, to engage people. If you flip that in terms of how do you retain somebody intrinsically, whatever you’re doing, whether you’re working on the shop floor, whether you’re working in a call centre, whether you’re in the C suite, you want to feel valued, you want to be motivated, you want to be engaged, you want to be rewarded, whether that’s intrinsic or extrinsic, we’re all the same in the terms of we want recognition. How we want recognition differs from person to person and that lends itself to. If we have to bring a mask into work, if we have to operate in a way that hides our true selves, how can we then create an environment where we feel like we can openly share our feedback and our thoughts? So I think that creating a culture of belonging, a feeling that I can be you can be our true selves when we come in, is a very powerful statement. And then that then impacts culture, that impacts that belonging piece. If I feel like I belong, therefore I will have the freedom to be myself, whatever that is, and therefore that lends itself to providing honest, constructive feedback and ideas. If you’re giving your ideas because you feel like you’re in a safe space because you belong, and it’s an inclusive environment, everyone benefits and an organization becomes more productive and more engaged or feeling slightly happier at work and therefore engage workforces are more productive. I said slightly happier because again, this is quite an interesting one in terms of inclusion and belonging doesn’t mean that you need to have this sort of workforce where everyone is happy and delighted all the time. I think there’s something around if we’re demanding people are happy every day at work. That’s a false promise. That’s not fair. I don’t necessarily want to be happy at work. I want to feel respected. And it goes back to that. Your value system, what makes you an employee that’s enjoying what they’re doing. Matt and me, we both have very different value systems. So I think this whole belonging piece and feeling happy piece are slightly different directions. I think if we strive to create an environment where people feel safe and there’s a lot around psychological safety and feel like they belong, whoever they are, wherever they’ve come from, you know, however they experience their life and what are their backgrounds, that allows for a culture of safety. And if I’m feeling safe and I feel like I belong, I will bring my ideas to work and my ideas bring innovation and innovation brings hopefully success. So that’s kind of my, my sort of two minute elevator pitch. I’m sure it can be honed a bit, well, better. But those, those are what I think.
Matt Alder [00:15:25]:
All of these things sort of tied together. You know, it’s a big strategic led journey for an organization to, you know, to kind of go on to get this right. And with that in mind, it’s probably, you know, quite difficult to boil it down into a few sort of practical steps of advice. But that said, I mean, what advice would you give to organizations who are looking at this sort of whole, let’s call it sort of talent experience, talent experience piece. What should they be thinking about and what should they be?
Charu Malhotra [00:15:58]:
Yeah, I think it actually mirrors, Matt, a lot of the work around. How do you create a great employee value proposition sort of framework? And the first step is your research and your listening. So I think actually listening and being prepared to be uncomfortable is step one. So you can’t create a culture from the C suite. It’s not top down nor is it bottom up. It’s. A culture is how people experience every day. A culture is how meetings are run, how promotions are given, how things happen, what’s the construct? And I think you need to understand what’s your baseline, what is it like now today for an employee in a shop, an employee in your frontline customer service, a mid manager. Be prepared to listen, have honest and transparent conversations, whether you do art of hired focus groups or digitally, but have those conversations, have an opportunity for people to share what the true construct is. So again, back to whether you do this via way of making people understand that it’s okay to be honest. I think that’s a really important piece that you’re really signaling that you’re prepared to be uncomfortable with what you hear and be very respectful and recognizing that people always want to be the person that says, actually it’s awful here because we’re constantly being told this has happened, that’s happened, but never given an explanation behind the why or it’s not very good here because very often I’m expected to do over time with very little notice. It’s not an easy ask to ask your employees to be honest. So when you’re saying, we want to listen, listen with respect. Listen with an open mind. Listen consistently. You know, be really kind of uniform in your thinking. So if you’re doing workshops, make sure that you’re listening to everybody. You’re not just targeting a particular segment because, oh, it’s really hard to recruit digital people. Or today or this year, we’re thinking about automation. So let’s really listen to those. Employees are going to be impacted by that. Listen with a whole heart. Listen respectfully and listen with consideration. Don’t just do superficial listening. People are cynical. People are tired of just giving their opinions and not being heard and nothing changing. So genuinely listen. And I said, you know, really dump the superficial listening, then signal what you’re going to do with that listening signal timeline. So again, very much to how I’ve worked on my EVP projects, you know, nothing is going to change tomorrow. Be very honest. And people respect that, colleagues and employees respect that. But explain that there will be action. But action will come. Post the listening and the reflection. And then I think there’s something around a natural step. It’s prioritisation. So you can’t change everything overnight. We’d all love that. And I think that’s where organizations can go wrong. We want to become an organization that creates a belonging culture. And if you’ve come from the starting point that you listen and hear is an aggressive culture or a culture where employees feel slightly wary and worried about providing feedback. You can’t change that to an inclusive belonging culture overnight. So prioritise what’s important. What have you heard, what’s going to have the biggest impact, Have a prioritisation plan and consistently signal that you valued all the input. Just because you’re prioritising 1 to 7 doesn’t mean that 8 to 10 weren’t important. But again, value the input and share why you prioritised those one to seven. So if we’re going to create a sense of inclusion and belonging, start with how you actually manage the insight that you’ve got from your listening and then sort of lastly also one of the points I think is really key and you know, we both experience this in corporates and we’ve both experienced this I’m sure in sort of other environments. It’s not just a, okay, we’ve listened today, that’s it and then we’ll tell you what we’re going to do. I think employee expect and I expect two way communication. So I don’t just want to hear at the end of the year this is what you’re going to do. But I want to be kept involved on that roadmap or dare I say it, on that journey. So build in two way, build in opportunity to be agile. So you might have heard something a year ago and as you’re kind of going down that roadmap and journey of changing slightly slight things, keep testing what we heard, is it still true or has actually something changed? So don’t just leave it to chance, keep communicating and keep testing. Some of these things are very simplistic but you’ll be surprised. I don’t think you would be but it’s very, very apparent to have a very bad communications culture. Not out of any kind of maliciousness or done in a purposeful way but it’s amazing how people forget about communications, forget about telling people because I think we’re all in a state of busyness and actually building in to your intention of building inclusive culture that two way communication is really key. Don’t just leave it to chance is something that I feel very strongly about.
Matt Alder [00:21:24]:
So final question. One of the, I suppose one of the unfortunate things about the, the current market that we’re living in is whenever there are talent issues to be solved the what seems to happen is people just sort of throw technology at the problem. So you know, huge amounts of investment, lots of recruiting and, and HR technology being developed. Now obviously this is a, this is a big strategic issue. It’s not something that’s going to be solved by technology despite, you know, whatever anyone might say. However, what I’m interested to know is your view on can technology help here. You know, is there a way that technology can help facilitate and make this process more effective?
Charu Malhotra [00:22:08]:
Yes, I mean I love technology, I work in technology. I think it would be odd if we didn’t embrace tools and techniques to help us in this space. I Think it’s around prioritization and really thinking about not technology first, but what are we trying to achieve here? So for example, we both know, and I’ve experienced it in terms of recognition often can be a once a year piece. You know, it can be, you know, the end of the year appraisal or mid year appraisal. You did a good job, xyz. But often it can feel like it’s a process point. Oh, I’m in a management meeting and I know that I need to recognize my team, so I’m going to just say you did a good job in this job done box. I think there’s some really nice tools out there and techniques out there that organizations are implementing. I’m aware of around how do you recognize people via technology? How do you make sure that the person doing the great job has not just got recognition in that conversation or via email, but the rest of the organization they work in is aware. I think this technology has a benefit to it, but I think the intent has to be still empathetic and has to still be human. So you don’t want this classic, oh, we’ve implemented a tech piece to help us give recognition, but it’s never used because you haven’t built into your leadership model or your management model this feeling that and this sort of freedom for managers to give recognition. So, you know, almost teaching people that, you know, coaching people, coaching leaders to recognize their employees is step one and explaining the why of it’s important and it probably sounds really simple, but actually it’s needed before you put in the technology. Otherwise you’ve got this technology that’s just sitting there like tumbleweed because no one’s using it. So technology is fabulous, but why do you want it? What are you trying to achieve with it before you actually go and buy that shiny new toy? That is a wonderful investment but actually doesn’t help you because you haven’t changed people’s way of working or thinking.
Matt Alder [00:24:20]:
Charu, thank you very much for talking to me.
Charu Malhotra [00:24:22]:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:24:24]:
My thanks to Charu. 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 or Pandora 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.
Matt Alder [00:24:57]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
