Employer Brand storytelling is a crucial topic for me, and it has been great to see an increase in the number of employers using the power of stories over the last 18 months.
However realising the true potential of storytelling is only possible by understanding the science behind it and having proper strategies in place for audience segmentation, messaging, medium, format and distribution.
My guest this week is someone who will genuinely accelerate your understanding of how to get results using stories. Miki Johnson is the co-founder of Job Portraits, a San Francisco based employer branding studio focused on helping high growth startups hire more effectively through storytelling.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The evolution of employer branding
- Deep dive storytelling
- A strategic approach to content using UX research tools
- Evidencing EVP through stories
- Tailoring the message to different audience segments
- Medium, Format and Distribution
- When to use video and when not to
Miki also discusses the role of employees as creators and distributors and highlights some great examples of companies producing great content.
If you are interested in getting started with or improving your storytelling Job Portraits have an Employer Value Proposition Worksheet that can help. Please email miki@jobportraits.com to get your copy.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Workable, the hiring platform used by more than 20,000 companies to make the right hire faster. With automated and AI powered tools and workflows, Workable helps teams find and attract more candidates and work together to identify and hire the best, advertise jobs to 200 job boards and source candidates with just one click, evaluate applicants fairly and consistently, schedule interviews and make offers and more. To learn more About Workable, visit workable.com getademo that’s workable.com getademo.
Matt Alder [00:01:03]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 216 of the recruiting Future podcast. Employer brand storytelling is a really important topic for me and it’s been great to see more employers using the power of stories over the last year or so. However, the true power of storytelling is only possible when employers understand the science behind it and have proper strategies in place for aud, audience segmentation, messaging, medium format and distribution. My guest this week is someone who will truly accelerate your understanding of getting results through stories. Miki Johnson is the co founder of Job Portraits, a San Francisco based employer brand studio focusing on helping high growth startups hire more effectively through storytelling. Enjoy the interview. Hi Miki and welcome to the podcast.
Miki Johnson [00:02:01]:
Hey there Matt, Glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Miki Johnson [00:02:08]:
Yeah, of course. So I’m Miki Johnson. I’m one of the co founders of Job Portraits and we are a content studio focused exclusively on employer branding and recruitment marketing content. We’re based in the San Francisco Bay Area so we work primarily with very high growth startups here, although we do have some clients that are either high growth startups other places or we’ve worked with a few, you know, large corporations working with their sort of internal innovation labs, things like that. But we tend to really work with companies that are really all about moving fast, hiring really really competitive candidates in really difficult markets and sort of are interested in iterating and sort of learning from things as we go and being really collaborative and just really, really high quality content that’s kind of our specialty.
Matt Alder [00:03:03]:
So obviously employer branding is the hot topic of the moment and obviously it’s something that’s going to be very important to the types of employers that you’ve described there. How is employer branding developing and evolving? What are you seeing out there?
Miki Johnson [00:03:18]:
I think one of the big things that we See in employer branding is just that it’s clear that you need it. Even like five years ago, at least in the Bay Area. I know the US is a little bit behind Europe on this front, I think, but it wasn’t really a word that was sort of on people’s radar. And we would talk a lot more about just like we make stories that help you recruit and there wasn’t sort of this whole community around it. And now I think it’s much clearer. People know what it is, they know that it’s something that they need. And so I think we’re in an exciting place where we’re starting to see people really deepen into what. And for us especially, the storytelling piece of it is. And so it’s been interesting to see sort of what par for the course is and how that’s changed over the years. And so I think, I think it used to be a really basic careers page was sort of like just your jobs and maybe a few photos, and then people were stepping it up with testimonials and talking more about maybe cool things going on in the office and stuff like that. And now I really think two of the things that I’m seeing that I think are really taking people to the next level that not everyone’s doing yet is really deep dive storytelling, where you’re having longer form blog posts on a regular basis that are really introducing people to your team members and really sharing their stories in an authentic way, or talking about teams and cool things they’re doing. And the other interesting thing is I think we’re starting to see people also just really treat candidates the same way that they would treat customers and really think about that whole experience and that whole life cycle and doing things like nurture email campaigns where you’re getting people to opt into sort of a, a regular flow of content about your company so that they’re kind of ready and primed when you maybe have a new job or something like that. And, and we have built content for kind of both of those case use cases.
Matt Alder [00:05:17]:
Storytelling is something that comes up time and time again when we sort of talk about recruitment, marketing and employer branding these days. And sometimes I’m not sure that people actually kind of break down what that really means and, and how you do it in practice and also how you do it in a way that stands out from everyone. What’s your take on storytelling and what sort of strategies should employers be using to make sure that they stand out from everyone else?
Miki Johnson [00:05:48]:
I think maybe one of the first things to know about Storytelling for a candidate audience is just that it’s different from the way that you’re going to talk to your customers. And depending on who your customers are and how you talk to them, it might be more or less different. But what we do that I think is kind of special is that we really approach our audience, which ultimately is the candidates from kind of a product standpoint, and really think about if our content is the product. We need to really understand what do they want to get out of it, what decisions are they trying to make, what points in the process do they need to get that content. We’ve actually done a good amount of UX research where we source candidates from using a user research tool. And then we put either our clients or just general employer branding content in front of them. So careers page and job descriptions. And we actually just ask them to do their own research too and kind of see where they go and how they look for things. And a couple of things that just come up over and over and over again from that is first, they’re just really skeptical. And I think we’re all pretty skeptical as buyers generally these days because we’re all getting hit with just so much content and advertising all the time. But when you’re thinking about a job, it’s like times 100, right? They’re just so sick of being sold to. Everybody’s had a job. Everybody knows it’s not peaches and cream all the time, but that seems to be how people want to talk about it. They seem to want to make it like this is the best place ever and everyone should come here. And it’s so awesome. And I think if there’s one thing maybe that you would take away from this podcast, it’s that that’s actually not the right approach. In most cases. Yes, you want to put your best foot forward, but the more that you can be really honest about the challenges that someone would face at your company and really who might not be a right fit or just what is going to make someone not sort of enjoy the work. It saves everyone time, and it also just buys you a lot of credibility with candidates. It just look so different from what everyone else is doing. So that’s one thing that we do that I think is really different. And actually, most of us come from a journalism background rather than marketing or advertising or something like that. And so I think most of us also have pretty high BS meters and we’re used to building content that’s really about educating people so they can make informed decisions that help them be Good citizens. And so I think we really apply that mentality to our content too. So. Yeah, so one thing, I think the way that we think about storytelling is just like, you need to be really honest. And the other thing is just specifics. Right. I just see a lot of people spend a lot of time really nailing down this beautifully crafted, perfect EVP tagline and then they put it at the top of their careers page and they’re like, okay, we’re done. And that’s, that’s part of storytelling. You need that to lay the foundation to know where you’re going to go next. But every candidate we have ever done a UX research with looks at that and they scroll right past it and they just go, yeah, that’s nice. Everyone says that, show me the money. Basically show me that that thing is true. Because everybody can write a nice tagline. And so I think we really work with our clients a lot to be like, okay, how do we take that and turn it into a real story or ideally a series stories that show rather than tell that that thing is true over and over. And I’m happy to talk more about how we do that too.
Matt Alder [00:09:52]:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t agree with you more about the EVP thing. I think that too often an EVP just ends up as a tagline and becomes meaningless as you get into the specifics of it all. And also they all tend to sound the same as well. So, you know, there’s not much kind of differentiation there. So. So traditionally employer branding has always kind of worked on this sort of unified EVP that defines the message. How should employers be thinking about that now? What’s the way to kind of get specific and really speak to individual audiences in a relevant way?
Miki Johnson [00:10:30]:
Yeah, for sure. And just to say, like, I always get a little nervous when we’re using like the should word. You know, I think there’s a lot of different methodologies out there and different ones fit for different companies and people. This is just kind of our way of working and it works for some people. And so hopefully it’s helpful in that way. But yeah, as far as how do we take a really big, high level idea like an EVP kind of tagline and bring it down to something that I think really means something to individual candidates? I think the idea of either segmented EVPs or Personas are really helpful here. And I think anybody who is in the true UX design world will probably get upset with me when I say Personas, because I’m talking about Something that’s very, very lightweight. I don’t think some people dig really far in and really make Personas and there’s a person and you have all their motivations and all that stuff. I think you can do something a little lighter weight with EVPs. And basically what we look at is segmenting just by things like team. Obviously there is a huge difference in the experience of someone on a sales team versus an engineering team and what they’re looking for as a candidate and how they want to be spoken to and where they live online and all those things. So that’s sort of the first level that we look at. When we do stories, we tend to focus on a team level story because that’s sort of the most cohesive experience of someone within the larger culture. Seniority obviously really matters. So if I’m straight out of school, I’m looking for something really different as a candidate than if I’m someone who’s pretty senior and want to contribute in different ways. Location obviously matters, especially for global companies. So just the way that you position things in the US versus EMEA versus Asia and then Asia APAC is like this whole thing that’s really. Each of those is 100 of their own little cultures also, obviously. So just understanding are there ways that you need to dial up some parts of your message and dial down other parts of your message? For instance, I know we were working with a company and we were doing EVP work for them. And in the US they talk a lot about even though they’re a public company, they’re still really scrappy and they move really fast and they’re still like a startup. And in Japan, for instance, that does not play well. Japan wants stability and they’re like, what do you mean your company is only 8 years old instead of 30 years old. And that sounds really risky to people. They really kind of dial down that scrappy startup image there and they push on other things. They talk about other things. Then obviously I think diversity and inclusion is a really huge topic for pretty much every company right now. So really understanding how different marginalized groups might differently perceive the stories that you’re doing and just being aware about how you’re discussing certain things and that you’re including a fair representation of your actual diversity at your company. And I think addressing those things we look at, like I said, how do you dial up or down different parts of your EVP to talk to what those different groups need? And you might actually need to add extra things in. If I’m speaking to an engineering Audience I’m going to want to get really specific about technology, technologies we’re using and the processes we have and specific problems that we’re solving and stuff like that. And that kind of stuff would be really unnecessary and probably distracting if I was speaking to a sales representative or a customer success person or something like that. So really just trying to understand what does each of those groups need that’s a little different and kind of prioritizing your message that way. Then we basically we go into content brainstorm mode. So when we do content brainstorms, we look at kind of three main things. So the medium, the format and the distribution. So medium can be text, videos, photos, could be social media posts, or what we call kind of micro content. Right. Small ideas that come up a lot. And for that, when you’re deciding what medium is, right. We kind of look at a mix of what’s the message that we’re trying to tell, what’s the Persona we’re telling it to, and what stage in the decision making process are they at? Just as an example, video is really great for things that you want to really connect on an emotional level, or especially something that’s really visually compelling. I see a lot of people that try to tell not very visual stories in video and it’s usually a miss, right? It’s usually something you could better tell in text at that point. Video is great for something that’s really visual and emotional. It does better with a younger audience or a more junior audience. And it also does better with sales and customer success or things like that as opposed to engineering. Not that no engineer is going to watch any video, but they tend to be less interested in them. And then stage in the process. I think video is best for an awareness stage where you’re just kind of giving people a little taste of what it’s like and getting them interested, excited. I don’t think it’s great for a research and decision making process. So I think once you start trying to explain too many things and get really kind of didactic almost, that means you’re probably ready to move into more like a blog post where you could say here’s all our processes, or here’s our interview process, or here’s a specific thing that our team is working on or something like that. Just kind of understanding which medium is going to be best for a story and then format within that. Let’s take a blog post, for instance. Do you want it to be narrative or do you want it to be Q and A? There are pros and Cons to both Q and A tends to be a little lengthier, but it’s more trusted by candidates because it’s not sort of polished up right. But narrative can be more compelling and kind of punchier. And you can have more people in the story where they just have a couple of quotes and then distribution and just thinking about how are we going to then get this out to the right people? And the thing that we’ve learned about candidates is just like there are no two candidates who are going to do their research the same way or who are going to find your company the same way. So the more places you can get that content out to and the more you can kind of operationalize how you’re getting that content out through all of your channels on a regular basis. So obviously thinking about social media, but also using it really tactically in your recruiting strategy, where you’re putting it in sourcing emails, getting your employees to share it within their networks. Again, if you have nurture campaigns or something like that, internal newsletters, putting it in your email signature, we have a whole checklist of places that we recommend people put it. But yeah, just thinking about distribution too, sometimes we create a little matrix that’s like, for this Persona, this format, and it’s going to go over here and stuff like that. But it’s not a science. It’s really just, I think people get caught up in, oh, what’s the right thing. We have to do the exact thing in this place more about just like, use your best judgment and then start small and start testing things and see how they work. And then you’ll learn what’s kind of working and what’s worth your investment in doing more of that kind of thing.
Matt Alder [00:18:39]:
I think that’s really interesting because to me, I think that employers are getting better at understanding storytelling. I’m seeing an increasing amount think in terms of Personas and segmentation and targeting. But I think the area where, where lots of companies really fall down is, is that format and medium selection, if you like. I think that people make videos or audio or use text and blog posts. Not really based on much strategic thought, maybe just based on the circumstances at the time or the budgets they have or what’s available. So, you know, really, really interesting to hear how you can put sort of more strategic thinking behind that, basically.
Miki Johnson [00:19:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the most common, the most common sort of pushback that I give clients is that almost everybody comes in wanting a video and they want it as the first thing that they do in an engagement with us. And the thing about video is when they’re done well, they can be incredibly powerful and they can really build that emotional bond really quickly. But when they’re done sort of mediocre, it can be a huge investment of time and money with very little results. And again, it’s not the right thing for every Persona or every stage in the process. We actually really push people to think more about their outbound strategy. And again, this is because we’re working with companies that are. And I think this is most companies these days, but especially in recruiting technical talent, these are not people who are looking for jobs. You were having to go out and do sourcing of passive candidates. And so really thinking about how do you get higher leverage on your outbound, we like to start there and then sort of expand out into more awareness. And how do we build inbound for you? And so we really look at like, how can we create some usually text stories that are like the best single link to send to a candidate in an outreach email. And then that, that helps us kind of lay the foundation and do the discovery and figure out who are the interesting characters and what’s really the story. And then we can kind of find a really great nugget in there that’ll work really well for a video and then sort of build the video and then use that in a larger campaign to drive awareness and stuff like that. But yeah, I don’t think that video is right for every use case. And I think it’s rarely the right sort of like first thing to do if you don’t already have a pretty well established brand and process and employer brand, all that.
Matt Alder [00:21:30]:
And what role do employees play in this in terms of contributing content or being a resource for the content marketing process?
Miki Johnson [00:21:38]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is another really important trend that we’re seeing. And again, I think companies that are getting ahead of everyone else are often doing it by really engaging their employees in this recruiting process and really creating an environment where everyone at the company understands that it’s their responsibility to contribute to helping tell people about their experience working there and to help bring people in. And that should go way beyond just referral programs. We really think about your employees are your influence marketers and in order to have them provide as much help as they possibly can for your recruiting and retention efforts, I think the big thing is just make it as easy as possible for them and really make them feel valued and like they’re really part of the process. I’ve seen especially bigger companies that are doing real ambassador programs where they’re enrolling employees who are interested and then maybe having a monthly brainstorm or something with those employees where they all get together and talk about cool things that are happening, or individual people who want to take on maybe writing a blog post or being featured in a short video or something like that. Then the companies also just have content that they’re pushing out to those people on a regular basis and they know what kind of content those people like to share. And they’re sort of. Some of them have incentive programs where they’re really rewarding people for how much they share, or they have special events and those people get to go early. I think you can do a much lighter weight version of that though, which can be as simple as going to the all hands, making a solid presentation where you really speak to people’s motivations and you help them understand that they’re going to have a better result, they’re going to get to work with better people, they’re going to get to work less because they have the people on their team that they need to do what they need to do if they help in these recruiting efforts. And it’s not something that just the talent team does, it’s really something that everyone needs to do. We run these employer branding workshops and we just had one where this sort of little framework for helping your employees create content came up. So I thought I would share that with you guys. But basically it starts with motivation. How do you go in and make it really clear that this is something that everyone needs to be involved in and they’re going to benefit from it too. So a presentation in all hands, or especially having the CEO talk about it or, or having people who have been at other companies where they’ve had strong blogs or they’ve written blog posts and talk about their experience and then existing opportunities. How do you find things that are already happening on a regular basis? Maybe you give giant checks for referrals that you’re all hands every week and you can assign someone who’s passionate about helping to build the company to take pictures and turn those into social media posts or lever the ATS. They create these GIFs, these welcome GIFs for all of their new employees. And so they’ve just shared those out as a cool thing to show, to give a look inside their culture. Or do you do a 60 or 90 day review where you can have someone answer a few extra questions and turn those into a blog post for every new employee. Really just trying to leverage things that are already happening, happening and then kind of assigning them to people and then structure. So how can you give people, for instance, a photo treasure hunt instead of just saying, go write a blog post. And it’s a blank page saying, oh, go take these five pictures around the office. Or we have a recurring Q and A with the same five questions. And then people just raise their hand to kind of be profiled and. And that goes up on the blog or something like that. But it’s always easier to have a starting point for content and that helps people sort of get their brains into that place faster and then just support. Not everyone is a writer, but everyone has really great ideas. And so if you can say, if you raise your hand to do a blog post, we’ll give you a couple hours of support from our copywriter or from someone on our comms team or something like that. Or even just like, we’ll help you kind of project manage it, right? Like we’ll give you some deadlines and help you think through the process and stuff like that. And that’s what we do sometimes is we come in and provide that kind of support for our clients. But yeah, I mean, I think it’s just really about making it simple and easy for them so that they can tell your company’s story. Because that’s ultimately going to be the most meaningful for, for candidates. Because again, candidates are skeptical and they know that something that’s coming from the company is not. It’s just never going to have as much weight as something that’s coming from an employee directly.
Matt Alder [00:27:12]:
So final question. What are some of your favorite sort of pieces of content that are out there? Where could people go and see some great examples of employers doing this really well?
Miki Johnson [00:27:25]:
Let’s see. Well, I’m biased, obviously. I think that some of our companies are doing, doing this very well. Although I’ll point you to a couple of companies where we helped them kickstart things, but they’ve really taken it to a much higher level and have really continued to do it internally in an awesome way. We worked a little bit with Instacart back in the day and they have really built out their blog in a really awesome way. I’ve chatted a little bit in Slack with their talent brand lead and they’ve done a lot, especially on the engineering blog side, to really not only build high quality content there, but also to really think about how they’re going to get it distributed and really having their team sort of step up and place it into communities that they already have traction within. So subreddits that are really popular or hacker news or places where other entities, engineers hang out, Slack channels, stuff like that. And so they’ve been able to get a lot of really great organic inbound from interested candidates. I’ll just plug another great company that is in the employer branding space in the Bay Area. Key Values. If people don’t know about them. Lynn, who runs Key Values, we know pretty well and she’s wonderful and we think she’s just brilliant. And so what she’s done is she’s created a whole website. It’s specifically for engineering candidates, but it basically, basically lists a whole bunch. There’s probably 40 or so different values. And then companies that are featured on there, they choose their top eight values and then basically a candidate can go through and click on any value that matters to them and they’ll see all the companies that have chosen that as one of their top eight and then they’ll be able to read sort of a profile of that company and why those values are important them. And it’s been a great way for companies to I think get connected to people that are in alignment with their values, right. That are not just excited about some big round of funding they got or whatever. But I think it’s really connecting people around the right thing, which is really great. Another one that I think is just a proof of how this can happen really organically, when employees just really love their experience at work is Mozilla, who we’ve done a little bit of work with. That’s a place where people that work there, so many of them are like, I have dreamed of getting to work for Mozilla my whole life because they just have such a strong mission and value statement and they’re so involved in the open source world. And so especially on the technical side, people just really love what they do there. And so I think Mozilla makes it possible for them to go out and especially at events and stuff like that, talk about what they’re doing. But people just because it’s an open source world, people just write blog posts and they make their own blog posts that they’re kind of just like out there all over the place. And that’s an interesting situation where they have so much content that I think their goal is actually more like how do we kind of make sure it’s all visible to our recruiting team so they can use it right and really take advantage of all of this great stuff that employees and sort of fans are writing about the company.
Matt Alder [00:30:47]:
Miki, thank you very much for talking to me.
Miki Johnson [00:30:49]:
Thank you so much. Matt this is a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:30:52]:
My thanks to Miki Johnson and if you want to get started or improve your storytelling jobportraits have an EVP worksheet that can help you. You can get a copy by emailing mickeyobportraits.com that’s mickeyobportraits.com and Miki is spelt M I K I. 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 Maiming list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week week and I hope you’ll join me.
