Many organizations are currently finding talent acquisition very challenging and need to increase the sophistication of their recruitment marketing to connect with and influence their target audiences of talent.
My guest this week is Celinda Appleby, Global Talent Attraction Director at Visa. Visa is using a strategy of data-driven recruitment marketing supported by sophisticated storytelling and technology to meet their recruiting challenges and Celinda has some great practical insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Visa’s recruiting challenges
- How recruitment marketing is changing
- Dealing with multiple personas and target audiences
- Using data for audience insight
- The importance of market analysis
- Working in close partnership with vendors
- Building business cases and consensus internally
- The role of technology
- Redefining what storytelling means
Celinda also shares her thoughts on where the industry is going over the next two to three years.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Zor. ZOR is a global recruiting platform that drives smarter and more efficient hiring. Direct employers and staffing agencies use Zor’s AI powered software to automate recruiting’s most repetitive tasks like candidate pre screening, interview scheduling, ongoing engagement and cold outreach at scale. By freeing recruiters to focus on what matters, Zor increases productivity while delivering a personalized, attentive candidate experience that’s responsive 24. 7 and delivers a 99.3% candidate satisfaction rate. Hundreds of companies across the globe, including IKEA, ExxonMobil, MOL Group, X5 Retail and Manpower Group, rely on ZOR to hire better people faster. To find out more, go to www.ZOR.AI. that’s www.ZOR.AI AI and XOR is spelled.
Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
X O R.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder.
Matt Alder [00:01:24]:
Welcome to episode 234 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Many organizations are currently finding talent acquisition to be very challenging and need to increase the sophistication of their recruitment marketing in order to connect with and influence their target audiences of talent. My guest this week is Celinda Appleby, Global Talent Attraction Director at visa. VISA uses a strategy of data driven recruitment marketing supported by sophisticated storytelling and technology to meet their recruiting challenges and Celinda has some fantastic practical insights to share.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
Hi Celinda and welcome to the podcast.
Celinda Appleby [00:02:10]:
Hi Matt, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Celinda Appleby [00:02:19]:
Absolutely. So my name is Celinda Appleby and I am in Portland, Oregon. So I’m excited to be talking to you all the way in Scotland. Power of social media and technology. But in my day job I work for Visa. I am a director of Talent attraction and what that means at Visa is I’m responsible for all of the activities and the candidate journey before they hit apply.
Matt Alder [00:02:42]:
Fantastic. So before we sort of get into talking a little bit about some of the recruitment challenges you might face and recruitment marketing in general, tell us a bit about your story. How did you get to be working where you are now and what were you. What were you doing before?
Celinda Appleby [00:02:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. My very first job was at a staffing company recruiting finance professionals. Honestly, I started as a receptionist or a switchboard operator. I’m dating myself so it’s kind of embarrassing, but I fell in love with the connection and the matchmaking of recruiting and more so the people. I remember when I was a headhunter back then, I would remember that my candidates wanted this and my client could offer that, and I would always want to make those matches. And so in the core of my spirit, I’ve been a recruiter my whole care. And then I was working at Hewlett Packard or HP Inc. As they’re called now. And I had the. It was a wonderful company, probably one of the best places I’ve ever worked. And there was an opportunity. We were rebuilding our employer brand. We were launching a career site, we were starting to work with tmp. And it was all things I didn’t know about. And I literally just raised my hand and offered to be on a project team. And the rest is history. I have never left employer brand or recruitment marketing or talent traction, as we call it today. Since then, it’s been about nine years now that I’ve been in this space.
Matt Alder [00:04:06]:
Fantastic. So tell us a little bit more about Visa. What kind of recruiting challenges do you face?
Celinda Appleby [00:04:14]:
So Visa, like every other company in Silicon Valley, has the challenge of recruiting technologists, and primarily also technologists that look like me. So people of color. And it’s a fantastic organization. I don’t think people associate us as a technology company. I think everyone knows who Visa is because you have one. One in your wallet. At least one in your wallet. And so when we go to events or career fairs, people think we’re selling them a credit card. And often or not, people say, no, we already have one. And so it’s about showing up as a technology company, as an employer of choice. And I will say I have an excellent employer brand team who does a fantastic job with our brand. But I don’t think candidates or people that want to work here know how much Visa powers. I mean, we’re a sponsor of FIFA, we’re a sponsor of the super bowl, and all of that hasn’t shown up organically in our storytelling. And so that’s something that we’re working on now.
Matt Alder [00:05:12]:
Amazing. So obviously, recruitment marketing is a big, big part of what you do. What’s your. I mean, recruitment marketing gets talked about a lot. It’s a phrase that kind of gets, you know, thrown. Thrown around. What’s your definition of recruitment marketing? And how do you think it’s. It’s changed over the last few years.
Celinda Appleby [00:05:32]:
So when people ask me this all the time at work, because I think a lot of my role today and actually at all my jobs previously has been education. Right. So explaining what we do and how we can do it better. We’ve been doing recruitment marketing forever. I remember when I first started, we used to fax resumes and the most placeable candidates, the MPC’s. And so recruitment marketing has been around forever. And we’ve always been an intent wowing either the hiring manager or wowing the candidate to take this role, to take a job with the power of social media and connectivity and additional technologies and also the market. Right. There’s way more jobs than people. That is where the challenge is. And it doesn’t matter who where I’m working at, whether it’s Nike or Visa or hp, the challenges always remain the same is it’s how do we get the best. And it’s not even that we want the creme de la creme, which of course we all do. It’s how do we get people to understand how they fit into our organization. And that is primarily the challenge that I’m facing here. And we know the answers. It’s how do you do it at scale? That is probably what keeps me up at night.
Matt Alder [00:06:46]:
Tell us a little bit more about the process you’ve got and some of the work that you’re doing in recruitment marketing to solve some of these challenges.
Celinda Appleby [00:06:54]:
Yeah. So even though Visa is a mammoth of an organization, and as you know, we’re a multibillion dollar company, we hire about 6,000 people a year. And that number seems, I’m sure, large for a lot of your listeners. But when you think of Oracle, where I came from, where they’re hiring 30,000 people a year, the 6,000 number to me does not seem intimidating at all. And so what I’ve been doing is rolling up my sleeves and very grad working with our leaders and our recruiters and our sourcers to create tailored experiences. And it seems to be, I mean, I know it’s a challenge because it’s still not scalable. We don’t have technology at the root to help me make it easier. But what I do is I figure out who we need to hire and I create tailored recruitment marketing plans for the role for the individual Persona based understanding that, well, I’ll just use the role of a developer, a software developer, for example, that there’s multiple Personas that can match on our team and we can’t just have one plan because that one size fits all is not working anymore.
Matt Alder [00:08:06]:
Talk us through some of the channels that you might use for that particular set of Personas.
Celinda Appleby [00:08:12]:
Yeah, of course, I will be very honest. We are a little bit, what’s the word I’m looking for limited on the toolkit here. And I say that because sometimes people think, oh, you know, you work at this amazing huge company that’s so well known, you must have an unlimited budget, unlimited access to tools. And that’s not the case. And so a lot of the work I do, actually all of the work I do is grounded on using Glassdoor, LinkedIn in the U.S. you know, Asia Pacific. We’ve just started using WeChat. We, you know, and we are a little bit recessed in comparison to our competitors in the market. But what we do is we ground ourselves on data, really understand what the market is, who we’re going after, does it make sense for us to go after here? And I spend all my time doing that. And then once we define where we’re going, where we need to post, and like I said, we don’t have many tools, we really maximize our relationship with the vendors that we have so very close partnership with LinkedIn and Glassdoor. And they’ve been unbelievable in providing a service because, you know, we can’t go anywhere else. Right. And so they’ve been extremely helpful in helping us define our user groups and branded marketing. We do a lot of ads that are, you know, you like, unless you have that profile, you wouldn’t see it, you know, dark ads, if you will, using those vendors. And those have been really great for Visa. And in terms of getting our name out and getting in front of people, I’ll tell you a funny story, and I know I’m talking a lot, so apologies there, but when we started advertising on Glassdoor, for example, we started out with data scientists. And that is for about a quarter and a half. That was our most looked at job. And the conversions weren’t as high as the clicks that people were reviewing and looking at that ad. But the reason I, what I tell people and how we have defined that is no one imagined that Visa was hiring data scientists. And so for a while it would show up on a data scientist feed for about, like I said, about a quarter and a half. And people weren’t clicking through, they were just reading it. And I think it took a while for people to just realize, wow, you are hiring for people like me. And obviously now it’s been a year since we ran that campaign. And I will say data scientists has been one of our highest hires coming from that source.
Matt Alder [00:10:42]:
You mentioned a little bit earlier about employer, brand and storytelling and that kind of thing. How do you use content and storytelling to sort of engage with candidates as part of this Recruitment marketing process.
Celinda Appleby [00:10:58]:
Yeah, so we use landing pages or job family related pages. We also are very big on events. The team at Visa, we have an excellent team that runs that for us. But we are basically at every event you could imagine and not so much just career focused events, but also events that are aligned to the business need. And so what we do is we work with our employer brand team. They have created amazing employee story videos and we create very targeted landing pages, for lack of better word, that we then use to market. We use that page as our entryway to speak to candidates in that skill family or job family. And then we solidify that by inviting them to an event either on site site or an event that’s hosted at the same time as a big, you know, industry event in their field that we know a lot of people will be at. And that has been an. We’ve seen incredible ROI working in that regard with our diversity and inclusion team.
Matt Alder [00:12:00]:
And tell us a bit more about the kind of the upfront data that you use because you’re, you’re talking about so how you target and really kind of zeroing in within your target audience. What kind of data sources or data do you use to get yourself there to target in that kind of way?
Celinda Appleby [00:12:18]:
So I will say that I’ve developed great relationships with our vendor partners. So the minute that I know we have, and I like to call them recruitment challenges and I get probably three to four a month of hey, we’re going into a new market or this is a new skill set or, you know, this isn’t a whole new team that we’re building. And so what I do is I will immediately contact the vendor partners and say, oh, interesting, fun opportunity for us to partner. What do you think my demographics? Here’s what we know. And then I do a lot of intake meetings with the hiring team, the leaders, the recruiters, and as many people as want to talk to me so I can really assess what they’re saying. Oftentimes they’re saying blue, but what they really want is light blue for lack of better words. And so I try to really understand that. And then I go into we use hire tool here. They have an excellent insights tool, as does LinkedIn. And I just start learning what the market analysis is. I actually recently learned that cbre, which is a us focused, like real estate entity, I’ve been using that. It’s free. You go in to just really understand, you know, what the market is like. And you know, sometimes I’ll come back and say, you know, I know you want to do this in this city, but maybe if you looked at these other cities, we would have a higher yield, you know, maybe we can reload, you know, we’ll have a higher yield on the investment. And so I put all this together in PowerPoint. I know people make fun of me here at work because I love PowerPoint, but I think I’m just visual and it’s so much easier for me to showcase all of the data. I will be very honest. Data scares me most of the time. For me, if I make it pretty and less about Excel and numbers, I seem to bond with it better and I can present on it better. Then when I do that I also go out to vendors, whether It’s Indeed or LinkedIn and Glassdoor or if I always offer up new. We just met with the Muse yesterday, so I’m always looking for new resources as well. And I present this back to the recruiting leaders and the business and say, here’s what I’ve compiled. We’re looking for purple dinosaurs. I’ve learned that they’re in high demand in these areas, but also they live in these areas and can we bring them over? Are you open to that? You know, and here’s, you know the top five companies they work at, here’s the top five universities they’ve studied at or are studying. And it honestly when I do that, it does take a lot of work and I am a one person show. But I will say that it’s not hard to get money for them to fund these activities because they have the data they need to walk away with a deck and come back and say, you know what, this was thoughtful, we really appreciate it. We don’t have the half million dollars that you want, but here is this number of very small dollars to go after it and try it out. So we do a lot of pilots.
Matt Alder [00:15:20]:
Now you mentioned that the tools that.
Matt Alder [00:15:23]:
You have at your disposal might be.
Matt Alder [00:15:24]:
Quite limited, but what role does technology.
Matt Alder [00:15:27]:
Play in all of this?
Celinda Appleby [00:15:29]:
Oh, it’s all grounded on technology. So what I will say is that we use smart recruiters as our ETS and CRM vendor. And that is why I use landing pages so much. Because in the absence of not having a pipeline builder or having a lot of people will use like Eventbrite or whatever little medium it is to collect data. The landing pages have been genius. I can provide content, I can provide a story. It showcases my jobs and it’s a very easy. It doesn’t take very long with the technology that we have to send it out. We Create a short link that’s trackable and then we can send that to people, whether it’s email, whether it’s through LinkedIn or hire tool. And they. And then people have the information at their fingertips and they don’t have to go and research for it. We provide them everything they need that’s tailored to them.
Matt Alder [00:16:21]:
So, final question. What are your thoughts on where recruitment marketing might be heading over the next two to three years?
Celinda Appleby [00:16:29]:
So, you know, when you asked me this question, my brain says, oh, we’re going into more automation and AI and all of the buzzwords of all of the amazing people that we follow in our industry and read their blogs. Right, The Matt Charneys of the world. But having worked at companies like Nike and Oracle and now Visa, we’re a little bit slower to the AI as a practitioner. Right. Everyone talks about it every meeting I attend at all of the companies. But we’re a little bit more slower to adapt, perhaps than the startups that are doing them. And so I will say that I know that that’s the answer. I should be in the trenches, I’ll tell you. We’ll continue to redefine what storytelling means. I know we’ve been talking about storytelling for as long as I’ve been in this industry, but I think that we’re going to redefine what that means. I think we’re going to really nurture our target pools. I think people are going to get a lot better of understanding workforce plans. And I thought that sounds really bizarre to say from a recruitment marketing perspective, but what I’ve noticed in, in my peer set and just looking at what people do, a great example is even not in recruitment marketing, sometimes ads or campaigns are created without the right people in the room. And so I think that what’s going to happen is we’re going to get, we’re really going to define who we’re going after. What are those pools of people A and how are we going to address them? And I know that there’s some companies that have been doing this really well. I always say Dell is a high bar for me. But if you look past the top 10 companies, whether it’s Amazon, Facebook and Google, nobody else is really doing it well. Right. There’s one message for all. And that’s where I think recruitment marketing fails. That’s why everybody has a hard time adapting or understanding what I do for a living, is because we’ve been working with this one message for all and that’s not working. And so I see, at least in my role for the next two years, focusing really on working with the business and stepping outside of HR and understanding what the business wants to do and creating messages aligned to what the business needs. With my recruiter hat on with my diversity and inclusion hat on and helping them consult them to say the right stories to attract the right people.
Matt Alder [00:18:58]:
Celinda, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Alder [00:19:01]:
My thanks to Celinda Appleby. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find it by searching for Recruiting Future. 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.
Matt Alder [00:19:30]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:19:32]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
