Employer branding is often misunderstood or undervalued, especially in a landscape of shrinking budgets and rising expectations. Yet, in today’s competitive environment, the ability to measure and communicate its value is more critical than ever.
So, how can employer brand professionals quantify their impact in ways that resonate with the C-Suite? What strategies can they adopt to ensure their work aligns with business goals, drives meaningful results, and operates with the right level of sophistication?
My guest this week is Ben Phillips, Global Employer Brand Lead at Booksy. Ben explains why ROI conversations must be grounded in financial outcomes, not vanity metrics, and highlights the importance of aligning employer branding with the strategic priorities of the business. Drawing from his experience across consumer marketing, recruiting, and culture transformation, Ben shares practical approaches for demonstrating the tangible business value of employer branding.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Communicating the ROI of Employer Branding
• The five things the C-Suite cares about
• Forecasting ROI
• Degrees of separation from the P&L
• A financial conversation versus a cost-benefit one
• How is employer branding changing?
• Culture, EVP, experience, authenticity and trust
• The difference between consumer marketing and recruiting marketing
• What does the future hold, and what part will AI play?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 666 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Employer branding is often misunderstood or undervalued, especially in the current landscape of shrinking budgets and rising expectations. However, in today’s competitive environment, the ability to measure and communicate the value of employer brand is is more critical than ever. So how can employer brand professionals quantify their impact in ways that resonate with the C suite? What strategies can they adopt to ensure their work aligns with business goals, drives meaningful results, and operates at the right level of sophistication? My guest this week is Ben Phillips, global employer brand lead at Booksy. Ben explains why ROI conversations must be grounded in financial outcomes rather than vanity metrics and highlights the importance of aligning employer branding with the strategic priorities of the business. Drawing from his experience across consumer marketing, recruiting and culture transformation, Ben shares practical approaches for demonstrating the tangible business value of employer branding.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
Hi Ben and welcome to the podcast.
Ben Phillips [00:02:17]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me. How are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
I’m very good, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:02:21]:
It’s very cold here, but other than that I’m very good and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Ben Phillips [00:02:30]:
Yes, certainly. It’s a pleasure to be here Matt. Thank you. I feel like I’ve always wanted to say lifetime listener, first time caller. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that. So who am I? What do I do? Hello everyone, my name is Ben Phillips. I am currently the global employer brand lead for a company called Booksy who are a marketplace for the health, beauty, wellness industry where businesses can set up kind of shop fronts within the app and people could book appointments and there’s lots of other things that go on in there. And a bit about my background so in a, in the smallest nutshell possible, possible, I, I fell out of university with a marketing degree, had debt, didn’t know what I wanted to do. A career in marketing may have been a good idea, but I like blame my parents for a lack of direction in my life and I fell into recruitment and I did that for several years. It was meant to be a couple of years to pay off debts, but I was okay at it and eight years later I was still in there. And then I went in house doing recruitment which evolved into learning and development. And then throughout my career I’ve also been very fortunate to kind of swim in the waters of L and D leadership development, culture transformation, which will be a thread throughout this conversation, I think, Matt. But I’ve also had several years in consumer marketing when I was at Tesco, in a couple of opportunities there in global roles, UK roles, and I left there when I was the manager of their social media team for fnf, their clothing range, or Florence and Fred for your more mature UK based listeners who may remember when they were Florence and Fred. And then I’ve worked in digital companies, SAS hootsuite, I spent some time at so internal, external client side, agency side, SaaS, vendor side. And I’m fortunate now to be in a role where I hopefully have the opportunity to tie all those threads together and help them engage employees and attract future talent into the organization.
Matt Alder [00:04:40]:
It’s always really interesting talking to you because you’ve got such a varied background across lots of different bits of communication and marketing for, you know, some pretty big companies and some, you know, some kind of, you know, growing, growing, growing brands as well. So it’s been a pretty tough time in employer branding in the last, in the last couple of years, as I’m sure everyone will, everyone will agree. And I think one of the things that we sort of always seem to talk about when we talk about employee brands this podcast, is the issues with measuring and communicating, you know, ROI around it. What is it that people get wrong about this and how can you communicate, you know, the ROI of employer branding, what it is, what its value is in a way that kind of really resonates at the top of the organization?
Ben Phillips [00:05:34]:
Yeah, thanks, Matt. That’s a really big question.
Matt Alder [00:05:37]:
Yeah.
Ben Phillips [00:05:38]:
How long do we have? Yeah. So ROI, yes, I do tend to bang on about this topic quite a bit actually, as you may have seen from my LinkedIn activity. Let’s take it back. Right. So the context, as always, is incredibly important. There’s many ways to answer this question depending on what context you’re in. And I’m very conscious that what I’ll go through today may resonate with some because they will be able to relate to the context, but may not relate to others. So apologies if you’re in the latter camp. I think let’s take a step back. What do the C Suite typically care about? And it’s five things which, if you’ve heard me talk before, you may have heard me say. It’s basically you boil it down to, are we making money, Are we driving revenue top line, number one, Number two, are we driving down costs to maximize profit margins? This is obviously for commercial organizations. Are we acquiring new customers, are we retaining existing customers and getting them to spend more? And are we doing all that whilst mitigating risk? And a lot of it is very. Is financially based. So the first thing about roi, what do people get wrong about roi? If you’re having a conversation that doesn’t include something financial, you’re not having an ROI conversation. Because I see people talking about, and I’ve been at events where the poor people on the stage get a question from someone cocky in the crowd that says, well, what’s the ROI of employer branding? And they go on to talk about media metrics and other things that have no financial. And you see people getting frustrated in the audience, or maybe that’s just me. So it has to start there, it has to be financial. And how do you talk about it in a way that resonates with the C Suite? It is just that now the challenge is trying to forecast, predict future roi, because it’s easier sometimes to do retrospectively, right? You do an activity, you analyze how it performed and then you can kind of shoehorn an ROI metric into it. But ROI in itself is a very simple. It’s a very simple calculation and apologies to those I’m very aware of, you know, teaching in the uk, we say teaching people’s grandmothers how to suck eggs, I. E. People may know this already, but for those that don’t, if you look up ROI and you’re looking at it from the context of a financial professional, when you’re taught finance, it is a simple calculation. It’s gain from investment, take away cost from investment over cost of investment and the answer shown is a percentage. So we invested x 100 pounds, we returned y 100 pounds. You divide those together and it will say whether you’re negative or minus or positive percentage as your ROI calculation. So if you go back to what the C suite care about in the context where you are Talking to the C suite, if you say, well, from an employer brand practitioner perspective, number one, are we making money? Are we driving revenue? It’s really hard to do something and attribute our activities to that. So if you look at a salesperson in an organization, I talk about degrees of separation from the P and L. A salesperson, I say, is 1 degree separated from the top line of a P and L. And by that what I mean is if they make a sale, you see a spike in the P and L graphs, right? It’s quite immediate. And if they don’t, it flatlines or it declines slightly because you’ve got the cost of their over heads. Where we have always struggled and this has been the bane of HR’s life, I think since day dot is an employer brand practitioner working with a recruiter who hired the salesperson to make the sale, we are 4 or 5 degrees separated from the P and L. So it’s really hard for us to attribute what we do to actual sales. But where I think, and I’m not saying it’s the only thing, I’m not saying it’s perfect. Where we can definitely demonstrate ROI is in the second one. Are we driving down costs? Because roi, it’s either are we increasing profits or are we driving down cost? I think that is the world within which we can play. Now the frustrating thing is I talked about context. It depends who you’re having the ROI conversation with. If it’s the C suite, then yes, it has to be about costs. And if it’s the C suite, the chances are the conversation may be a capex conversation for overarching budget. And you’re up there fighting for money against supply, supply chain and consumer marketing who will all put together very solid cases for why they should have X percentage of the overall budget for the following year. Other conversations you might be having is more at a lower kind of departmental level where you’re a manager or a more junior practitioner and you’re fighting for budget with your department head. And that depends who you report into. So that might be a conversation with the head of TA or the HR director and they’ve got budget, they’ve had the capex conversation with the C suite, now they’ve got a pool of budget for the department and now you’ve got to justify the budget that you want and that often goes down that path of cost saving. So in the past we did X, whatever that might be and I’m proposing we do Y this year. We can go into more details about this in future. This conversation and the conversation happens there in a slightly different tone. But again, it has to be about financial. If it’s not financial, the chances are you’re having a cost benefit conversation. So kind of just to, just to summarize, there’s a chain of events that happens, right? You ask for some investment, stuff happens, reaction to that stuff happens and then there’s a non financial impact. So you ask for budget, you do something social media, let’s use a basic example reaction to that social media is you get likes, comments, shares, all that is non financial. So going back to your question, how do you talk about it in the way that C Suite cares about? If you go back and say, oh my ROIs, likes, comments and shares, they don’t care, they’re disengaged. That’s important at an operational level because you need to know that’s those profanity metrics are kind of lay the foundation, the basis for other things to be built up on. So sometimes you need to know how many clicks you’re getting to drive traffic to a site and then from there how many people apply and how many people apply, get hired, so on and so forth. So it is a necessity. People poo poo vanity metrics, but they do have a role to play. But it’s not an ROI conversation. But if you can turn around and say last year we did social and we spent, I don’t know, £100,000 or dollars and we hired however many people. But this year I’m proposing we put that money into a CRM strategy. I think I can pay or invest half the amount but return double the amount of candidates. Then you can kind of calculate that as a cost saving and go as a percentage. So Instead of investing 100 grand, I want to invest 50 grand. Ergo your ROI calculation could be whatever that percentage would be.100%,200%.
Matt Alder [00:12:43]:
So it kind of comes down to what employer branding is about. It’s about people wanting to work at your business and being familiar with your business. You not having to do as much kind of that sort of top of the funnel marketing to sort of sell it to them, isn’t it?
Ben Phillips [00:12:59]:
Yeah. I think another thing where it gets really challenging is people don’t often ask the right question. And that question is, what’s the ROI of employer branding? Which I get, where the question comes from. I get, you know, why it’s asked, but the question itself is too broad. You know, what’s the ROI of employee branding? What, all of it.
Matt Alder [00:13:20]:
I remember someone once asked me what the ROI of the Internet was. It’s a kind of similar, it’s a similar question.
Ben Phillips [00:13:26]:
What do you mean specifically? Are you talking about content? Are you talking, are you talking about. Well, I guess we should have taken a step back at the very beginning of this conversation, Matt, and aligned on a definition of employer branding. But you’ve got to break it down. And for me, a question around this topic needs three components. Number one, obviously I’ve talked about it already, it has to include something financial, that’s a given. It also has to be activity specific. And finally, it has to be time bound. So what do I mean by that? Instead of asking what’s the ROI of employer branding? A better question to ask might be what would be the ROI of diverting, I don’t know, let’s say media spend into an Advocacy Strategy Q1 and 2 2025. So spend is the financial element activity specific. You’re going to take it from media maybe and put it into advocacy to see if you can achieve the same reach and engagement through your people versus paid ads. And it’s time bound. You’re going to do a trial in this first half of 2025 that’s easy to put your arms around, it’s still relatively difficult thing to calculate, but then you can kind of forecast it because then what you can do is say you’re spending, I don’t know, 50 grand on media and you work out that if you can get a trial up with, I don’t know, 30 employees, let’s just say as a test and learn experiment, and then you work out, like I’ve done in the past, that your particular audience, on average, they have certain number of followers. So let’s say you’re going to focus primarily on LinkedIn, let’s keep it simple and that you establish that those 30 people on average will have, let’s say, I don’t know, 500 connections and 250 followers. So let’s say an audience of 750, basically. And then you can start working out, you can dissect it and go, well, what’s the average reach from a personal profile? Don’t know what it is. Now I haven’t looked in the last few months, but last time I looked, I think it’s from a personal profile. It’s about 3% of your audience see your content. If it’s a brand, it’s less than 1%. Now I think if it’s a company page and you go, okay, well how many bits of content do you want these people to do? And you Say, well, let’s say two pieces a month and you start to build it out and then you can start to compare. Well, if we can get 30 people to share two bits of content a month to that audience with 3% reach, and then you can take it out further, then you can actually work out what you think the comparison would be to achieve the same level of talent, marketing, employer, brand benefit that the previous media spend activity would have achieved for you. And you can then forecast, if we do this right, then Instead of spending $50,000 on media, if we spend 25 grand to get this out the ground, we think we can double the impact with half the money. Which is that point I made earlier.
Matt Alder [00:16:24]:
Yeah, absolutely. So very specific.
Ben Phillips [00:16:27]:
Yeah, but it comes back to those three components, right? Financial, time bound, activity specific. It might be something else. You might decide that instead of doing organic social, in the past I’ve questioned the validity and the return of doing organic social. So many people doing organic social on LinkedIn and that takes a lot of time, right? A lot of team effort. Someone somewhere is doing that. It’s taking their time. Their time is money. What’s the return? What’s the real return on doing that? Now, bearing in mind that engagement reaches so low and in many cases, if you’re pumping out organic content on LinkedIn, then it’s usually your employees who are dealing with it. In the context of an SME startup business of larger corporates, they do get a more broader audience, but in a startup scale up SME environment, you go on any of those LinkedIn pages and see the content they’re sharing and I would say 80% plus is employees engaging with it, and the algorithm learns that. And guess every time you share more content, as you know, Matt, I know you know this, then guess what, the algorithm then starts pumping out to more employees, which is great if you’re looking at it from internal communications, employee engagement perspective, but most people aren’t. So you go, okay, well what if we take that effort and that money and put that into something else? Whether it’s CRM advocacy, whatever it might be, I think you can work it out that way. As a cost comparison from a previous activity..
Matt Alder [00:18:23]:
Come back to the point about what is employer branding? I’m Interested in your sense of how it’s changing and how it’s changed as, as work has changed.
Matt Alder [00:18:32]:
Because I think if we go back, you know, if we go back a few years, for many people, rightly or wrongly, employer branding was a video about your nice office and that, what the work day looked like and all that sort of stuff. And as you know, work has, has become remote and more complicated. How is employer branding changing? What’s kind of driving. What’s driving it these days? Where can employers find that sort of differentiation?
Ben Phillips [00:18:57]:
Okay, so great question. How is it changing? It’s becoming more interconnected. And to your point, we used to be the people that put pretty pictures on social media and career sites. Rub your hands together, our job is done. But it’s becoming a lot. So let me, let me dissect that. And this is where my background in culture and learning leadership development comes in. Again, this is one of those other things I harp on about quite a lot. And I think more people are, I’m seeing more people talking about this. So I’ve shared in the past, you may have seen it four circles, and in the middle is culture. And then you ask, well, what is culture? And I give details on that. But summarizing, I think it’s the culture underpinned by values and behaviors. It’s what drives decisions when the rules aren’t there to guide you. Now, if you’ve got to make a decision or you’re having a conversation, you need to respond, react or do something. And there isn’t a process, there isn’t a system to show you how you do it, how you naturally react and deal with it, I think is your culture, your values, your behaviors. So it’s about behavior. And then you talk about, okay, well, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, Right? Culture. The leadership can articulate the culture they desire to foster, which in theory then drives your behaviors. But people will just naturally behave in a certain way. And that behavior drives your culture. So it becomes an infinity loop, you know, that figure of age, infinity, that they’re chasing each other’s tails, Right? And that’s important because. So park that for one second. That’s culture. Then you’ve got your evp, which is the next circle. Kind of these circles expand out. Then you’ve got your evp. Some people call it the employee value proposition. Some people call it employer value proposition. Some people say it’s the give and the get. Some people say it’s just the get because the give is banged on about ad nauseam everywhere. Else along the candidate journey from the job description, this is what you need to give us. Competency framework. This is what you need to give us. When you have an interview, you spend 90% of it going through what they need to give you, blah, blah, blah. But EVP is the logical thing for me. It’s the logical stuff, the pay, the perks, the prospects, both for yourself and your career trajectory and the company, the positive working environment and the cultural pillars and so on and so forth. And a great analogy. I always credit Marcus Body with this because I stole it from him and he LAUGHS he stole it from somebody else, but I always felt like I, you know, this, this is on him. The great analogy is when you’re buying a house, you have the logical things, right, this number of bedrooms you have, you want good transport links, you want good schools, whatever it might be, and you go and look at five properties but none of them quite hit the mark. You walk into the fifth one and all of a sudden, bang, this is the one. Can’t put my finger on why the heart’s telling me this is the one I want. And it’s the same with jobs, right? You want certain pay location, you meet the teams, everyone’s very nice and you’re looking at three or four jobs, but for some reason the fifth one stands out. You can’t quite put your hand on it. Hand on my. So for me the EVP is the head part. The brand then comes in as the third circle around the evp. And for me this is, and this is where people roll their eyes, the left brained people, the logical people roll their eyes and call this fluffy guff cringe. But this is the heart stuff, this is the long tail, the long term social mental priming, providing evidence across the touch points, the conversations you’re having, the content you’re seeing about what this company does, it’s. And that it’s great. Now, excuse the detour, the long winded answer to the question, but how is employer brand changing? If employer brand is the heart, it’s about behavior and it’s about emotion, then you have to understand that people are fickle. We change our minds like on a day to day basis and I will change that perception of you based on the experience I have with you at every touch point of my experience with you. So if we go back and say, well, employer branding was just about pretty pictures on social media and the career website, then great, that may be amazing. I love you, your brand’s fantastic. But if I then apply, I sit the underbelly of an ATS and it’s like walking into the cabin in the woods, my perception of you goes down and your employer brand that impacts your employer brand, the interview process, is it good, is it timely? Do you respond? Do I get decent feedback whether I’m successful or not? Again, another opportunity to change my emotion, change my perception, how I feel about you, that’s linked to employer brand. When I’m onboarding, when I’m in the company, how am I treated? So how is employer branding changing for me, people are waking up to the fact it is more connected. It has to be a thread that runs through the culture, leadership, every touch point of the people experience because people need to be aware that if I have a bad experience with you and you piss me off, if I start having a negative perception of you, that is linked to employer brand. So it’s a lot more interconnected, it’s getting a lot more complex. So what I’ve kind of in my new role, one of the things I’m doing is building bridges and connecting with reward, connecting with learning and development and that team, connecting with the onboarding team, working very closely with the recruiters to make sure that if we’re going to start talking a great game up front, either it has to be believed inside first and foremost because your people don’t believe it, it’s not true. They don’t believe it, they don’t understand it, then they’re going to be the ones rolling their eyes when they see your fluffy content outside on LinkedIn or wherever it might be going. Well, that’s rubbish. That’s not true. So instead of where I’ve seen it change over the last few years, it used to start outwards in, let’s just put some fluffy, happy, clappy crap out there. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. We need people to actually know. This has got to start from the inside. If our people don’t buy it, then nobody else will and that’s where it falls over. So I think the more sophisticated employer brand is they are that strategic in mind. They’re not just thinking about the next content, they’re going to be pushing out. They really are getting under the skin of who are we as an organization, what do we stand for? Not just why should people work for us, but I think the real sophisticated ones, the ones who are really maturing now, are asking not just why should people work for us, but why shouldn’t they work for us and how do we push that message front and center as well? Because Otherwise, you’ve seen it, hey, here’s me playing, here’s the dog and here’s the beanbags and here’s us playing ping pong table. I think those days are gone. People don’t buy that crap anymore. Some of it might be true, but I think where I’m seeing the ones that make my kind of eyes and ears prick up is when I see them saying, this is the great stuff. But they acknowledge that for every success there’s a sacrifice. And that’s where I’m starting to see it change. I talked about, I think the problem with employer branding is that it’s called employer branding because for me, branding evokes the sense of selling. Now, I’ve had debates online about this many a time. I don’t think we do sell. Depends on your interpretation of selling, obviously. I think which led me to launch my website. Reveal the real. I think we reveal. And if you can do that in a balanced way, the good and the bad, the rough with the smooth, then it’s not a case of selling. It’s like, this is who we are, this is where we’re going. If you want to join the ride, hop aboard. But if you don’t, then please don’t. No sell, because the chances are you’re going to join, you’re going to hate it here, and then our attrition numbers are going to go up, which is a problem.
Matt Alder [00:26:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a, that’s such a brilliant insight into what it should be about, what it should have always been about. And I suppose it leads on nicely to the, the next question, which is, you know, are employers approach employer branding with the right level of sophistication, or are we still, you know, in the, in the days of pretty pictures or in, you know, in this case, probably pretty videos. And I suppose that the caveat around that question is, as I sort of said right at the start, it’s been a very sort of tough two years for people working in employer branding with budget cuts and resources and all those kind of things. So, you know, are people being strategic enough about this? How can they be strategic at a time when, you know, budget and resources might be at a premium?
Ben Phillips [00:26:50]:
It’s a hard question from what I’m seeing. Well, using LinkedIn as my point of reference, there’s still, I think for many companies, a long way to go in terms of having that more mature, that more balanced conversations. Now I get it, right. In larger corporates, it’s very difficult to do because you’ve got the Nervousness of, you know, you’ve got lawyers and corporate comms, you can’t say that. And it’s educating them around. It’s not about being negative, it’s about being realistic. So I see lots of people, you know, you’ve got the buzzwords where innovation and collaborative, and you might be those, but how can you do it differently? When I speak to people, I mentor a few people, they’re talking to me about what content they should be doing. And it’s content first as opposed to, well, who are you first? So that’s an indication of, is it sophisticated enough? I think there’s a long way to go. But I appreciate that I’m not exactly working off a representative sample to answer that question, I think so What I’m seeing on LinkedIn, in some cases, yes. And the conversations I’ve had recently and the conversation I’m having internally with my teams, I think one of the challenges you have to do when talking to senior leaders is they think of employer branding and talent marketing in the similar vein they do consumer marketing and consumer branding. And that’s where that strategic conversation needs to happen. And I’m having it right now, actually, where they think we need more traffic or what’s the strategy, whatever it might be. And it comes down to, I think a lot of people are still doing lots of stuff without asking the questions, why are we doing this? What are you trying to fix? And I think in the world of AI and applicants being not just recruiters being equipped with AI to automate and simplify, but applicants are armed with AI and they got bots auto applying on their behalf and drowning recruitment teams who can’t deal with the volume. So it starts there, right? What are you trying to fix? Is it too many applicants? Is it not enough applicants? Because if you’re a large. I remember working at IBM and I was asked to take over and support the young lady who was looking after entry level graduate hiring. And she came to me with her quote, unquote strategy. And it was like, we need, you know, we’re going to increase the volume of applicants. And I was like, well, how many applicants did IBM have? Oh, 2 million. How many did you employ? Circa 20,000. So what happened to the remaining 1.9, whatever it was, million candidates? So you don’t need. You need to turn the blooming tap off? Not turn it on, no. Is it a diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging issue you’re trying to fix? I think there’s still too many people and maybe because it’s maturity or often you Find people in employer branding who are kind of young in their career and they don’t have these experiences. They’re not asking those questions, what is the problem we are trying to solve? What is our problem statement? It could be, are you not known in certain markets, like Booksy, we’ve got expansion plans in certain geographies, and we’re not known. So that’s a challenge. How do we fix that? Or is it a case of, for example, you’re a Tesco or whoever, a large brand, you are known in certain markets, but people don’t know what it’s like to work for you. They may have a perception that you’re a boring dinosaur of an organization. You need to show them that you’re not that. And depending on those, then you know the analogy I’m using kind of to articulate it in a way that people understand because, you know, people say, oh, we need. Well, a. We don’t have a career. We don’t have a single career site. That’s a challenge we’re facing into. But we need more. We need more traffic. Why do you need more traffic? Because we need more candidates. What do you need more traffic for more candidates? Or do you see more candidates with less traffic? What would be better for the organization? And the analogy I’m using, which some may cringe at, Apologies. I’m a dad, so I’m always teaching around a dad joke somewhere. I said to them, what’s three? We talk about finding needles in haystacks in recruitment. So I say, okay, well, that’s fine, but what are three ways you can make finding a needle in a haystack easier? And they look at you and go, what are you on? Why? That’s a stupid question. Anyway, I’ll get to the punchline. The three ways you can find making needles in a haystack easier is, A, a powerful magnet, B, a bigger needle, and three, I’ve gone from letters to numbers there. So, number one, a powerful magnet, number two, a bigger needle, number three, smaller haystacks.
Matt Alder [00:31:03]:
Yes, right.
Ben Phillips [00:31:03]:
And people look at go, well, that’s why the. Why the weird metaphor. And I’m saying, well, in consumer marketing, every click is a good click. Every visit is a great visit. It’s volume. Every dollar is a great dollar. You want 99% of the market to buy into your proposition. And the education piece I’m going with my leaders is, we’re the opposite. We want 1 to 2% of the market to buy a proposition. We’re not for everybody. Yes, from a diversity, absolutely. We Are. I don’t mean from that perspective. What I mean is we’re startup kind of mentality. It’s not a physical startup, but it still feels like a startup in terms of the chaos, the ambiguity. So we’re not for everybody. Some people love that, some people hate it. So our employer brand that we’re looking to build that magnet has to tell that story and then, because that would attract more relevant people to the organization and hopefully you can find the people you’re looking for with less traffic and less applications. So again, I don’t know if it’s making sense, but the strategy we started to shape only seven, eight weeks in is, isn’t about volume and large numbers because a we’re not geared up to process it. I touched on that earlier. We can have loads of traffic, loads of applications, but if the recruiters don’t have the time to get back to them, you’re going to annoy them, which in future will then damage the employer brand. So it goes full circle. And I don’t know how many people are having those conversations. I think still in many cases quite transactional because maybe there’s lack of experience in the department. Someone comes to the business or the employer brander who might be their first, second job and says, right, we need a thousand applications, whatever it might be. I don’t know, they won’t say that. When do they ever say that? But you know what I mean. And I don’t know if there’s enough challenge going back. Why do you need it? Are you sure you need it?
Matt Alder [00:32:45]:
It’s funny, it reminds me of the time, of the very, very first time I heard the phrase employer branding. When I was working, I was selling newspaper recruitment, newspaper advertising space for the Guardian. It was a very long time ago and my boss at the time said something about. And obviously for people who don’t know what newspapers, newspapers used to be like, they used to be full of recruitment adverts. And the bigger the recruitment advert, the more money the newspaper made. And she said something like, if someone phones in and wants to pick an ad, tell them, talk to them all about employer branding. And I was like, well, what’s employer branding? She said, I’ve got no idea.
Matt Alder [00:33:20]:
But they buy a bigger ad so they can put a picture in it. And in some ways, I’m not sure that some of the thinking around employer branding has sort of moved on since then. It tends to very much focus on that kind of, you know, those sort of upfront outputs.
Ben Phillips [00:33:34]:
Well, and it comes down to the measurements as well. So it’s little things. So I’ve been fortunate to, as I said at the start, worked in multiple environments. I worked at employer branding and marketing agency. And we know, and we knew very clearly that traffic to career websites is directly correlated to the number of jobs on a website. So by that I mean if you have a recruitment freeze and wipe out half your jobs, then we saw across the board, globally in 300 plus career sites, you know, not all of them had the freeze at the same time, but every time it happened, if you took 50% of your jobs off, almost in direct correlation, your traffic dropped by 50%. If you had hyper growth and you put 50% more jobs on, guess what? Your traffic went up by 50%. So when this goes back to being strategic and strategy requires measurement, what you’re going to measure as a sign of success. People were going out there saying, oh, because they’ve heard it and they think it’s what’s done. They go, oh, as a brand awareness, we’re going to measure traffic to our website as a point of success. It’s like, well, if you have a cut and the traffic to your Website declines by 50% in line with the amount of jobs you’ve removed, does that mean your employer brand is. People don’t know you and people go, oh yeah, oh yeah, you’ve got a point. So you start then tweaking the metrics and the KPIs. And in the previous life we went from kind of that absolute, hey, let’s just measure traffic to the website as a sign of career, either awareness or intent. And you looked at traffic as an average traffic per live jobs. So if every job, if every job onto the site, on average, you’re getting, I don’t know, 100 visits, then that should roughly remain the same whether you’ve got 50 jobs or a thousand jobs, if each job is getting that many visits. But it’s just having that understanding, that knowledge and knowing those data points and having that insight that not just setting a strategy of what are we trying to achieve? What’s the problem statement we’re trying to resolve? But it’s then going back to go, okay, making sure you’ve got the right measurement framework in place.
Matt Alder [00:35:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. So as kind of a final question, we’ve not talked about AI at all in this conversation, which is a kind of a pleasant rarity in podcasting. What do you think the future holds? What part does AI play in all of this? Just give us sort of a quick sense of where you think things might be in a few years time.
Ben Phillips [00:35:58]:
I think the need for human augmentation is going to remain paramount. Human and AI augmentation because we have a massive issue with trust globally. If you look at the is it the Edelman Trust barometer, they bring out their trust report every year and it doesn’t look great, especially in the West. Trusting governments, trusting media outlets, trusting corporations, they are all going in a downward trajectory at an increasingly alarming rate. And we’re already seeing it right. And we talk about trust. And one of the buzzwords in employer brand prepare to be sticking your mouths everyone is authenticity. And increasingly because I spend a lot of time playing with these AI tools as I’m sure you do, Matt. I can often spot when copy has been written by AI, one of the, you know, you’ve got telltale signs. If it says let’s dive in, you.
Matt Alder [00:36:47]:
Know it’s the number one. It’s the number one.
Ben Phillips [00:36:52]:
If you have a long hyphen versus a short hyphen, you know it’s been AI. So straight away I see that and I wince and I go, oh, did you write this or did AI write it? So that whole trust that human thing is going to be. You’re almost going to have to spend more time proving that it is human, which I think is where it’s going and even in your writing. Then there’s the automation piece because you can’t talk about AI with automation. They go hand in glove. So I do think things are going to become more efficient. But there’s the watch out with that. You know, it’s not just about chucking out volume of content. If that content is. And it’s very easy to do. Now I go on TikTok a lot. I probably spend far too much time on TikTok for a middle aged man. My kids tell me it’s not cool. In fact, they don’t use the word cool because they are cool. But everyone makes it so easy. Oh hey, do this AI layer this AI tool with that AI so easy. And then I go and go okay, well let’s give this a try. It’s never that easy. You got to be quite technical. So I see that changing. I do see it becoming more plug and play more like the Apple experience out the box. You can just do it. And I also see, and I’m doing this myself, I’ve done it myself already. If anything, I’m not just in this space. I do worry for SaaS, startup vendors. I’ll tell you what I’ve done myself. Someone gave a demo of their product in the employer branding space. It’s something I had done with Party Rock, which is, if your listeners haven’t heard of Party Rock, go and have a play. You can build AI apps very easily. I think it’s AWS owned, Amazon owned, and you can go and program and build your own apps. The difficulty being it’s you don’t own it and it’s, you know, you can’t upload sensitive information because of security concerns, but you can go and have a play. So anyway, evolving from that, that was last year. This year what I’m now doing is playing with this. So I saw someone give a demo, a video of their product and they were very chuffed about it. It automates the whole process from writing job ads. You take a few keywords, it writes the job ads, it helps you write the advert because you can program it almost with your employer brand and your EVP and your cultural messaging. So it almost creates like a very small language model which then feeds off to create your content and it spits out a social post, it spits out your job ad, it spits out talking tracks for your recruiters and sources to do outreach with. It does it all automated. And I started doing this at Party Rock last year, but they’ve built this thing. I thought, that’s cool. Went to YouTube, got the transcript, I put the transcript into ChatGPT and I said, build me an RFP, listen to this video and create me an RFP for this product, please. And it did. A bloody brilliant one. I then go on to another site which your listeners, if they haven’t heard of it, go and play with this thing, it will blow your mind. It’s called v0.dev, v the letter v number0.dev. I took the RFP from ChatGPT and I uploaded it into v0.dev. And I said, I’m going to upload an RFP. I want you to build me a proof of concept of the product described in this RFP. And v0.dev. It splits the window a bit like Claude, where it’s got its artifacts, which is just the canvas. On the right hand side it shows you what it’s doing. ChatGPT now has it as well. ChatGPT has the canvas. They’re all just bloody. They all copy each other, just brand it differently. And on the right hand side it will start coding it for you and then it will switch to an interactive front end GUI graphical user interface. I can then go Back if I had time, which I haven’t had time to do now. You can do two things here. I can go back to ChatGPT and say I am an absolute beginner, show me how to build this thing. And I’ve done that with something else. No coding experience before in my life, Matt. I’m set up on Visual Studio code. I’ve got REACT on my laptop. I’ve never heard of these things. Six months ago. I know developers and programmers are laughing at me thinking my God, who is this newbie? I am coding. Last time I did coding was HTML at university, 20 plus years ago. But I don’t have time to do that. But what I can do is go to one of our, however many hundreds of developers I’ve got in booksy and say here’s the code. Well, I’ve built this. I don’t know how to deploy it. I don’t have time to learn how to deploy it. Can you build this for us internally? And they’ll go, yeah, give me three days. That, that is both exciting and if I’m a SaaS startup that is incredibly scary. I don’t think those guys have long. Sorry to, you know, because if I can do that in like a couple of hours with no coding experience, developers who know what they’re doing with this stuff and who can deploy it and see it through end to end, give them five days, they could take anything that anyone’s built and replicate it.
Matt Alder [00:41:31]:
It’s a fascinating point. It’s probably a whole new podcast around that.
Ben Phillips [00:41:34]:
Yes. That’s where I see this world going. With internal teams becoming more self sufficient. Again. Going back to the ROI question, why? Because I can show to my leaders that I can reduce costs. You used to spend 50 grand a year for a license on that thing. I think I could code a proof of concept in a week. With no experience whatsoever. I know how to use AI. And then can I borrow one of your or two of your developers for 10 days, five days to build it in house and we build our own one?
Matt Alder [00:41:58]:
No, absolutely. I think it’s we, we live in interesting times. Ben, thank you very much for joining me.
Ben Phillips [00:42:04]:
Thanks so much Matt. Appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:42:07]:
My thanks to Ben. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting feature Feast and get the inside track on 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.
