I’ve been advocating for broader adoption of established digital marketing practices in recruitment marketing for a long time now. With many talent acquisition teams now having to deliver results with reduced resources, understanding targeting and measurement in marketing has arguably never been more important.
My guest this week is David Larsen, Global Talent & Employer Brand Lead at Knauf. David has a really interesting background, having worked at Google and also spent time as an entrepreneur starting up and successfully exiting from a tech company. David has some great thoughts and insights to share on the role digital marketing should be playing in talent acquisition moving, forward particular in terms of how employers define and understand their target audiences.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The lessons David has learned about talent acquisition during his career to date.
• The talent acquisition challenges at Knauf
• Applying digital marketing practices to recruitment marketing
• Defining and understanding target audiences
• Truly understanding an EVP
• Gaining competitive advantage
• Adapting processes and communication for different audiences
• Technology as a lever of cost and efficiency
• Quantitive analysis of candidate journeys
• The future of recruitment marketing
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Paradox, the conversational AI company helping global talent acquisition teams at Unilever, McDonald’s and CVS Health get recruiting work done faster. Let’s face it, talent acquisition is full of boring administrative tasks that drag the hiring process down and create frustrating experiences for everyone. Paradox’s AI assistant Olivia, is shaking up that paradigm, automating things like applicant screening, interview scheduling and candidate Q and A so recruiters can spend more time with people, not software. Curious how Olivia can work for your team? Then visit Paradox AI to learn more.
Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 302 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’ve been advocating for broader adoption of established digital marketing practices in recruitment marketing for a really long time now. With many talent acquisition teams now having to deliver results with reduced resources, understanding targeting measurement in marketing has arguably never been more important. My guest this week is David Larsen, global talent and employer brand lead at Knauf. David has a really interesting background, having worked at Google and also spent time as an entrepreneur starting up and successfully exiting from a tech company. David has some great thoughts and insights to share on the role digital marketing should be playing in talent acquisition moving forward, particularly in terms of how employers define and understand their target audiences. Hi David and welcome to the podcast.
David Larsen [00:02:08]:
Hi Matt, thanks for the invitation.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
David Larsen [00:02:17]:
Yeah, same here. I’ve been looking forward to it. Well, my name is David and I’m working as the global talent attraction and employee brand lead in Knauf, an international company producing components for building buildings. And previous to that I’ve been working within HR and the HR tech for I think it’s six, seven, eight years now. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
Fantastic stuff. Now you’ve had quite an interesting background in the talent acquisition space. Can you sort of just talk us through where you’ve worked and what you’ve done?
David Larsen [00:02:53]:
Sure, absolutely. So I started my career with Google in their headquarters in Dublin actually and started as a strategist in an entry level role where I primarily work with digital marketing, consulting and looking into business models and advising clients on how they could optimize their business online. But after a year or so I was so motivated to go into the people operations organization with Google and obviously recruit for one of the most, if not the most Attractive employer in the world. So I looked after the talent attraction and acquisition in the Nordic region at a university level so for entry level roles and had a great, great journey there. Fantastic organization with a lot of bright minds in there. I then moved back to Denmark where I joined Verisure, which is an alarm company I think must be the second largest in the world now. It was a VC who had acquired a Danish alarm company and took it into their portfolio. And in Verisure I basically worked in the HR and was building a recruitment team to do scale recruitment. It was primarily a sales organization and I think the target at the time were to grow the organization eight to 10 times. So a very high level of recruitment activities and I had a great team there and we set up the whole structure to be able to recruit a lot of new salespeople every month. But that kind of forced me to look into all of the great technology options that are out there in the HR market. So I actually quit very sure to become an entrepreneur and worked in the HR tech industry for a couple of years. I’ve been co founding a job board called simplyjob. It’s like a Tinder based job board for blue collar workers in Denmark. I’ve also been involved with Graduate Land, Europe’s largest job board for young professionals and been holding board member roles and advisory board roles within the startup world in the Nordics. And yeah, today I’m with Knopp, which I’m really happy about. We have a lot of interesting opportunities ahead. So really trying to support the organization in reaching the objectives and reach the full potential of the company.
Matt Alder [00:05:34]:
I think that’s really interesting because it is quite unusual for someone to have a background where they’ve worked in talent acquisition. They’ve been an entrepreneur, they’ve worked in recruiting tech and now they’re kind of working back in talent acquisition. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned about talent acquisition Acquisition from. From the kind of the background that you had?
David Larsen [00:05:53]:
Well, I think my first realization of where and what I wanted to work with within talent Acquisition came when I was looking for job opportunities in Denmark, wanted to move back from, from Dublin and I interviewed with a couple of, should we say more old fashioned companies in terms of HR and I actually came in doubt whether that was the way to go for me. But then I found out that there are a lot of companies transformation within their HR functions or people functions in general. So if you can combine the knowledge from digital marketing and from looking into a lot of different business models, if you can apply that into HR and talent acquisition. You will have an advantage because the technology that is in the market right now is quite new, and the digital transformation in hr, as I am seeing it, is at an early stage. So if you’re willing to use and adopt new technology and to use some of the great experience that you would have from a digital marketing function, you can really come into the war for talent with some competitive advantages. So I think that’s why I ended up in that kind of career path.
Matt Alder [00:07:10]:
We’ll come back and talk a bit more about digital marketing and technology a bit later in the conversation. Before we do, though, give everyone just a little bit of context and tell us about the talent acquisition challenges that you’re sort of facing up to in your current role.
David Larsen [00:07:26]:
Well, so I think one of the things that really was attractive to me when I was in the recruitment process with Knauf is that Knauf is a company with a very strong culture and with a fantastic history. And then I don’t think it takes a lot of minutes to look on, let’s say, for instance, LinkedIn, and see how much we’re doing there. We’re not doing that much. So there’s a huge opportunity to improve the setup that we’re having. And I think one of the key challenges that we’re working on is really to tell what a great place Knauf is to work for and how many opportunities that are in an organization with presence in more than 100 countries. So I think that’s the key challenge for us. And then in relation to that, obviously, also to find out how do we want to work with the best technology to attract the right candidates in the future. I think that Knop, as any other business, is facing a lot of change in the landscape for talent. We’re digitalizing all over the business and all over the world. So it obviously also raised the demand for new skills and for new colleagues around the world.
Matt Alder [00:08:49]:
You mentioned the digital transformation in HR and the speed of change. Obviously, 2020 has been a somewhat unprecedented year in terms of everything that’s happened. What changes are you seeing in talent acquisition that are being driven by the pandemic and the crisis that we’re currently going through?
David Larsen [00:09:11]:
Well, to be honest, Matt, I actually think it’s still quite difficult to tell because I think on the one side, we have the more practical challenges of, you know, either you would have. Typically before the pandemic, you would have a physical interview, but now most interviews are being held online. Right. So that’s one of the practical challenges that we’ve seen now, where we’ve seen many HR organizations try to accommodate the need for being able to assess candidates online. One of the things that, when I’m looking back into my old industry, the tech industry, one of the things that I can see, which is quite interesting, is that it’s a new competitive landscape because more companies, especially in the tech industry, are offering more or less remote roles. So you came from a situation where one of the key assets for the big tech companies around the different hubs around the world was that they had amazing offices with amazing facilities. But with this pandemic and with the development we’ve seen, we’ve seen some of the big tech companies offering more or less remote roles. I think it’s just one example that the competitive landscape and the, should we say the unique selling points of the companies in the tech industry are changing because you will compete against a different, should we say package that your competitors are offering the same candidates that you want to approach. For me personally, I think it’s still difficult to say what will happen, but I think the practical is a very present challenge in terms of how to assess candidates in the same way that you did before. And then also that the landscape, the compensation and benefit, the perks that are for the candidates, especially within some industries, is changing and you would need to react to that to keep your competitive place in a specific industry or market.
Matt Alder [00:11:06]:
I think that’s really interesting, and that’s a really interesting point about the tech companies that sort of use their office as their selling point. I suppose as a follow up from that, talk us through your perspective on how you understand your target audience in talent acquisition.
David Larsen [00:11:23]:
Yeah, I mean, when already when, when you’re saying target audience, my first thought is that when I see some of the, I don’t know if I want to call them mistakes, but maybe where companies are not, you know, fulfilling their potential is that it starts with not knowing what the true employer value proposition is. What is the ebp? I’m very inspired by the definition of an evp, that it should lie within what your company offers, what the preferences of the target group is, and then more importantly, where the competitors in the market are not having their strengths. So I think both from working as a supplier to corporates and also working internally with recruitment, sometimes there’s a misalignment between what you think you’re offering and what your competitors are offering and what the target group are preferring. So I think that’s one key element to get right. It’s Usually a difficult process because you would need to kind of look at yourself from the outside. You probably also need to involve candidates or external audience to have it verified that this could be your, your evp. So I think that’s usually where it starts. And I think the result of getting your target audience wrong is that usually it gets either inefficient recruitment activities or it gets very costful because you’re targeting job posts and employee branding to a target group that should maybe be adjusted. So that’s one thing that I’ve definitely seen and always try to avoid when looking into it myself. The other thing that I think is key is to use your internal people analytics resources and knowledge about your well performing and high engaged employees to kind of create a target group where you think you would be able to attract them. So it’s one of the things that I’ve worked a lot with previously in my career to identify who are the high performers that are high engaged and how can we replicate their, should we say skills and behavior to attract the right talent. An example of how that can be done is by asking them, you know, why are you engaged in this workplace, why are you happy to work here? And also to look into why are they performing well? And then you can kind of modelize around who are they and how can we target them on job boards or with digital marketing on social media or whatever. Because I think it’s very important for us in talent acquisition functions to change the perspective from saying that we want talent to work for us and they have to go through this process to change the perspective and say we would love to engage you with our brand and with our workplace and we are willing to adapt the process and the communication so that you find it attractive.
Matt Alder [00:14:42]:
You’ve mentioned digital marketing sort of a number of times as we’ve been talking. In your view, how should practices from digital marketing be influencing recruitment marketing? I know you’ve kind of mentioned, mentioned, mentioned a few things, but could you, could you kind of give us a bit more of a perspective on that?
David Larsen [00:14:57]:
Sure. And I think, sorry if I’m over mentioning it, but I think one of the key learnings that I had, especially from joining the people operations organization in Google was that when I looked around the table and the team that I joined, we had people with different backgrounds. So I came from the business. A few other colleagues there came from the business as well. Then we had some traditional HR specialists and we also had some data scientists or engineers working in the people operations organization. And one of the first things That I learned there was that it’s data, data, data. You need to understand people why you’re doing the stuff that you’re doing. So the first thing really for me is that any recruitment process should be analyzed in the exact same way that you would analyze a customer journey. So a candidate journey, in my opinion is not any different from a customer journey. If you were to have an E commerce web shop or whatever, you’re looking to attract a candidate or a customer and you want to follow them through the whole funnel and journey until that you have either hired them or have told them that it might not be the right match. So that’s one thing. Another thing that I’ve had great success with both from a marketplace view when running a job board, you want to acquire users that you can then help to apply for jobs with companies. So both in that aspect but also as recruiting internally. If you’re doing scale recruitment, a very low hanging fruit here is to use the technology that is present to help you replicate the applicants that are engaging well with your content. So something like lookalike audiences that I think most digital marketing practices would know and probably a lot better than me from, from Facebook or any other social media is something you can also use for recruitment if you are having a high volume of advertisement or candidate intake. So you know, looking into the candidate journey from a quantitative perspective, analyzing the data points and then to use the existing technology to help you, such as using the lookalike audiences with a platform.
Matt Alder [00:17:20]:
Like Facebook and picking up on technology there. What do you see as the sort of the broader role of technology and talent acquisition?
David Larsen [00:17:28]:
I think it’s the engine of the car. I think that’s how I see it because most of us working professionally with talent acquisition today, most of our work is creating a best in market career page, making sure that it’s fun and engaging content that is there for the candidates. And again, the application form is, I hope, in 99.9% of the instances online today. So it is the engine of the car in my opinion. And it is also with technology, when you’re talking talent attraction, talent acquisition, it’s where you can affect the cost and the efficiency. One of the big recruitment marketing tracking companies, appcast, they published a report where they mentioned that the difference between bad performing career page and job post and a good performing career page and job post, the difference between them in terms of cost is 300%. So if you built your engine well, you can perform 300% better than others in the market. I think that’s One really important point. And then there’s the other, more, should we say qualitative point that the first touch point for all employees. So I think if you as a person are going on a date, you want to make a good first impression, you want to do that as well to the candidates and to the people you want to attract into your business. And it is the technology that is going to power the way that you look to candidates. So I think it’s a very important role, especially in the attraction phase of a candidate or employee journey.
Matt Alder [00:19:21]:
Final question. It’s obviously impossible to predict the future at the moment. It’s impossible to work out what’s going to happen next week at the moment. But what do you think we’ll be talking about in 18 months time? What would we be talking about if we were having this conversation again?
David Larsen [00:19:37]:
Well, I think in Knopf I have the pleasure of working globally, so my experience is talking to different suppliers and different colleagues in, in the HR industry it’s very regional. So please bear in mind that my scope will be, I would say a European view because it’s where I primarily are looking at suppliers and technology. One of the things that I’ve experienced within the last three to six months, which has been quite surprising for me, is how well some of the chatbots, recruitment chatbots based on AI technology are working. I remember attending an HR tech conference, I think two years ago, where a supplier presented their chatbot and it looked to me basically like a chat function where there was an Excel sheet in the background replying specific things when a candidate wrote specific things. But the solutions that I’ve seen the last three to six months are very sophisticated, very intelligent and really provides a good candidate experience and also providing a lot of efficiency for the recruitment function. One of the examples that I’ve seen is how a chatbot can assist a candidate through the whole recruitment process by providing options to choose when you want to go to your interview. If you want to reschedule, you can do that with the chatbot. You are also being sent relevant content and material to prepare before the interview. And it was just a very sophisticated way of working with a candidate and keeping them close and active in the recruitment process. So I really think that and I can see the chatbots are now adopted by the industries where it is very scaled recruitment. So it’s the same kind of recruitments, they’re using this technology now. But what I’ve seen, I definitely see that solutions like this can be implemented in organizations where recruitment is not the key HR activity as well because not only does it provide a good candidate experience, it’s also making the work processes internally more efficient. So I have high expectations for that.
Matt Alder [00:21:56]:
David, thank you very much for talking to me.
David Larsen [00:21:58]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:22:00]:
My thanks to David Larsen. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all of the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
