Storytelling might be the most overused word in employer branding. Every company claims to tell stories, yet most of the content being produced sounds the same from one company to the next, and AI is about to make the problem significantly worse by flooding every channel with even more identikit messaging.
At the same time, the science behind how stories work on the human brain is well established, comprehensive, and much harder to apply than most people realise. The employers who understand it are creating content that connects on an emotional level, while everyone else is just adding to the noise.
So what separates real storytelling from content that just claims to be a story?
My guest this week is Susanna Rantanen, founder of Employer Branding Agency Emine and author of the book Story-Driven Employer Branding. In our conversation, she shares why so much storytelling isn’t storytelling at all, what the science tells us about how stories persuade, and how employers can use them to attract and retain the right people.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The biggest current challenges in Employer Branding
- Why branding is a long-term play, not a short-term campaign
- The internal audience employers overlook
- Attracting the right people via meaning, relevance, and emotion
- Why most Employer Brand storytelling isn’t storytelling at all
- The science of how stories work on the human brain
- How does proper storytelling work in practice
- The current and future impact of AI
- What does the future of employer branding look like?
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Transcript
Matt Alder 0:00
Many employers will say that they’re using storytelling in their employer branding activity. Very few of them are actually telling stories at all. There’s established science behind how stories persuade, and most employer branding content doesn’t come close to applying it. So what does real storytelling look like? And how can it help you attract and retain the right people? Keep listening to find out.
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Matt Alder 2:28
Hey there! Welcome to episode 814 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Storytelling might be the most overused word in employer branding. Every company claims to tell stories, yet most of the content being produced sounds the same from one company to the next, and AI is about to make the problem significantly worse by flooding every channel with even more identikit messaging. The science behind how stories work on the human brain is well-established, comprehensive, and much harder to apply than most people realise. The employers who understand it are creating content that connects on an emotional level, while everyone else is just adding to the noise. So, what separates real storytelling from content that just claims to be a story? My guest this week is Susanna Rantanen, founder of employer branding agency Emine, and author of the book Story-Driven Employer Branding. In our conversation, she shares why so much storytelling isn’t actually storytelling at all, what the science tells us about how stories persuade, and how employers can use them to attract and retain the right people. Hi, Susanna, and welcome to the podcast.
Susanna Rantanen 3:47
Hi, Matt. Thank you very much.
Matt Alder 3:48
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Susanna Rantanen 3:55
With pleasure. So my name is Susanna Rantanen, and I’m the founder of employer branding agency Emine in Finland. I’m also the author of Story-Driven Employer Branding and the creator of the Magnetic Employer Branding Method.
Matt Alder 4:11
Fantastic. And just give us a little bit of an insight into your background and how you’ve got to do what you do now.
Susanna Rantanen 4:17
Yeah, thank you. I initially wanted to be and studied to be working in marketing and communications. Did my university studies in UK, graduated in 2000, moved back to Finland, and quite soon found myself accidentally in an HR role. And that was kind of my path to the HR world. Obviously, with this marketing and especially writing background and more like a keen interest to produce whatever I’m doing through words and stories, I quite quickly adopted that to my work also in HR. I did loads of HR, loads of development, loads of leadership training and mentoring them to how to communicate internally and persuade their team members to do a good work. So later on branding came along and that for me came from a company where I worked as an HR communication manager and we were heavily expanding in Europe. This was a Finnish, or it’s a Finnish company. And I realised that even though that we had been very successful in Finland in hiring and we were really known as one of the best places to work, and when you started opening new offices in other countries, obviously, no one knew anything about us. We were a B2B business, so all that kind of marketing was only targeted at business people, not to candidates or job seekers. Then from that work, I realised I have to start talking about the culture and what I felt that made us special. And obviously also to integrate that kind of thinking into those country offices, and into how they work together and so on. That was like my sort of way into employer branding. Employer branding as a term wasn’t really used at the time. It was first invented in like 1996 or something like that. It was just intuitive. Then, after working there, I started my own business, a startup, back in 2010. I wanted to develop and provide the market with a recruitment system that would match minds with missions, which meant that matching organisations based on their organisational behaviour as in culture with job seekers’ personal work behaviour, how they like to, how they prefer to work. I did that for about five years, and realised that I was way too early on the market and it didn’t work out. But during those years, we’d started also developing employer branding agency, Emine. And this was really focusing on how to create content around those recruitment processes so that employers who are hiring could differentiate themselves based on their workplace culture. At the time, companies didn’t have any blogs. So we literally opened a blog on the Blogger platform, called it Behind the Job Scenes and started writing these stories and articles for our clients and promoted that site on Facebook, which was like booming at the time. And it made such a difference. And it really created, as one of our clients at the time said, it created a tsunami among the job seekers because they were able to really understand what are the differences between, for example, different software developing companies. And about two years, we did that alone. And then the market started to copy it. And it was time to move forward and think about what branding is, how can you do this outside a recruitment process, because what we realised is that if you only focus on marketing and talking about your culture and your people and so on doing a recruitment campaign, those are very short. Those are like, at the time, those were like 30 days, but these days, they are like anything from like seven days to 14 days. Preferably yesterday, it ends. It’s not enough time to actually win attention, to make the target audience curious about the opportunity, and then also to get them actually call to action, which means to prepare their application and send it forward. Most of the times, if you think about it, if you have like a 7 to 14 days application period, what is actually the likelihood that the candidates that you really want to attract are going to be looking for a new job during that short period of time. So that was how I started to work with the first versions of the Magnetic Employer Branding Method.
Matt Alder 9:44
Cool. And we’ll come back to talk about that method in a second. Before we do, though, what are the current challenges you’re seeing in employer branding? What is the landscape like at the moment?
Susanna Rantanen 9:51
Yeah, I still feel that it’s a lot about how do we get more applications. And I feel that that leaves a lot of employer brand value on the table. As said, it’s too late if you only pop temporarily for a few days, for a couple of weeks when you need to hire. And then it’s also too little in terms of being remembered, being understood, or becoming trusted, becoming attracted to by the external audience. But I think that one of the main challenges is that we leave a lot on the table when we think that this is only about your external audience. Ever since I became an entrepreneur, we’ve worked mainly with companies that are going through very fast growth or some kind of a major business transformation due to the times. And oftentimes it’s the internal audience that actually matters to you most, more than the external audience. So I feel that that was an important gap to fill. How do we as an organisation make sure that the people that we have, that they believe in this change regardless of the fears the change they might have, and how do we make sure that they become excited and inspired and empowered about the change. So that’s what I feel like the greatest differentiator of what this method brings to companies as opposed to how anyone else does employer branding.
Matt Alder 11:34
So your method’s the Magnetic Employer Branding Method. You’ve also got a book about it. Tell us a little bit more about it. How does it work?
Susanna Rantanen 11:41
I’d love to. So basically, we’re talking about an ongoing communication system. So instead of those campaigns, we are constantly building a dialogue internally and externally with pretty much the same content. We can reach both internally and externally because what we’ve also learned over the years is that employees tend to look for the content that is available on social media by their company or by their peers. So you actually get more impact when you tell them and invite them to do a story and share them what’s going on externally. The main thing for me was how can we use social media? This was, I first initiated this in 2005. So obviously the social media marketing landscape was very different. I always said that as a former HR person, this was like the gift from the sky for HR and recruiting people who never have a budget for anything. It was, you know, free. And basically the method is about how to attract, retain, and empower the right people through meaning, relevance, emotion, evidence, and story. And the word magnetic, I feel, is important because the goal is not to chase everyone, not to impact everyone, not to persuade everyone, but to create this kind of a strong enough pull and connection that the right people will feel like this sounds like a place for someone like me, or if I already work there. Many of our clients have employees who are being headhunted all the time. So I tell them that this is also like when they are being headhunted and they’re thinking like, should I stay or should I go? So this work needs to give them the confirmation that I’ll pass, thank you. I’m going to stay.
Matt Alder 13:52
Absolutely. And it’s always interesting because we talk a lot about storytelling and employer branding and recruitment marketing just every day. In fact, in business, people are always talking about storytelling. I think what a lot of people don’t ever kind of necessarily realise or really dig into is that there is an established science that sits behind storytelling and persuasion, isn’t there? I mean, tell us a little bit more about the kind of the scientific basis.
Susanna Rantanen 14:20
Yeah, I’m glad you asked because I think this is one of the things that really bugs me. I’ve been studying this science of storytelling since 2005, 2006, and the more I’ve learned about it, the more I understand how actually comprehensive it is, how scientific it is, and how difficult it is. And then when people keep saying like, oh, we’re doing storytelling, and I’m like, no, you’re not. So it kind of bugs me. But basically, we as human beings, we were wired to understand stories. And the science of story is older than 2,000 years old. So from those caveman times when we used smoke to communicate with each other, literally. And the human brain is wired for stories, remember information in patterns, in structure, through emotions, and social cues. There are many areas in our brain that are impacted based on research. I mean, research has been done for over like 70 years about this. Those areas that are influenced are, for example, the mirror neurons. So when you identify a person or a situation that you feel relevant to, it’s kind of like you’re looking at a mirror and seeing yourself. So that makes that situation, that person, that story attractive to you. There are areas, for example, where dopamine is released, which is like a glue. So it memorises that story in your mind. Many, many areas that I’m not going to go into deeply into that science. But basically, when you actually apply the science of storytelling, it is many, many, many times more impactful as a method of communication than any other form of communication. So when we list information such as employer benefits, they may inform people, but they don’t connect with them necessarily. They don’t make people think about what does that mean to me in my life? How is that relevant? And same goes for any sort of data that obviously businesses communicate a lot. Also, the other thing is that even though we were wired to understand stories, we were not wired to tell stories. So that is actually a skill that we can learn. So I find it really exciting having used storytelling for such a long time to see the difference in how that impacts people. How does that make people feel? We have so many customer cases where we’ve written stories, you know, use storytelling to write articles for employee stories, job posts for clients where they actually start crying because they felt so emotionally connected with that story, with that text. And it’s a really powerful way to communicate.
Matt Alder 17:39
And I suppose on that, just give us some examples of employers who are doing this really well.
Susanna Rantanen 17:44
Well, one of our longtime customers, Airbus Defence and Space Finland, part of the Airbus group. But in Finland, they don’t do planes. We’ve been working with them now for over three years. And every single post on social media is formulated in a way where we position the employee or the job seeker as the hero of the story. So it’s always about a person that we’ve defined what is that persona like, and that is based on their culture, based on the kinds of roles that they have and based on their values and so on. And when you’ve worked with someone for such a long time and every month you go through the data and you see the impact and the influence, it’s just like, I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like really gives me the chills, what the impact is. And what I find the most rewarding for us is that when we started this work with them, we asked a lot of employees questions. To participate in this and I would say that the majority is not something I want to do, I don’t want to be part of anything like that. And then when we were able to get a few people in and create those content and stories about them and their experiences and then the other people saw that internally, more and more people who had very strongly refused to take part came back and said like, oh, it’s not what I thought it was. And you still make a story about me. Something that is always quite hard for companies, a lot of our customers also ask, like, how do you get employees to actually take part and engage in this? They have today so many employees who, without any of our guidance anymore, regularly produce thought leadership kind of content on LinkedIn and make it visible externally what they do, what they work at, what are they, you know, how the company changed over time, what’s the business that they do, even though it’s very confidential. I love that example.
Matt Alder 20:02
And what was the impact of AI on all of this? What are the implications of the AI revolution?
Susanna Rantanen 20:09
I think that AI will change employer branding massively, but not necessarily in the ways that we’re now using it. So I think that the obvious impact right now is the productivity question. So AI can help us create content faster, analyse data, repurpose material, personalised communication, support recruitment marketing. This is all very useful. But I think that the bigger implication is that AI will flood the market with more and more average content. And I saw, and I think you also saw this when, you know, when social media came and companies realised that, oh, we can now be our own sort of media and do our own press releases and content and share our news and stuff. And all of a sudden you had like poor and really bad stuff on the internet. So I think we’re going to see the same. So there’s going to be more posts, more job ads, more content on career pages, more like people first culture and messages wearing the same kind of cardigan.
Matt Alder 21:22
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think the importance of standing out and connecting with your audience has never been higher as we’re just drowning in slop everywhere, particularly on LinkedIn. Just as a final question, kind of bring this all together for us, what do you think the future looks like for employer branding?
Susanna Rantanen 21:42
I believe that the future of employer branding is much more strategic. It’s also all about human to human, and it’s very much connected to business transformation. And with this, I’m not meaning necessarily a transformation like a new strategy, or merger and acquisition, them. But as this environment and this world is moving forward so fast, it requires all of the business to adapt, so transform. So I think that the future of employer branding is connected to that. Also, more and more B2B organisations understand that actually our company brand is our people brand because our people are daily in connection with our clients. And if, you know, they actually either build a trust or build the relevance, communicate the results, and put that client on this like a hero position. If they don’t do that, then obviously that’s going to harm the business. With that, I think that the recruitment function and the campaigns that we do for recruiting, which are still important, are going to be seen as a different entity as employer branding. And with recruitment, what impacts employer branding is not just the content during the promotional campaign, but the actual candidate experiences and what they talk about during the process, especially if they were declined. And what are the initial experiences of what I call the newcomers, so new employees, during those very first weeks, months in the company. So I see that as a larger whole that will influence the employer brand.
Matt Alder 23:45
Absolutely. Susanna, thank you very much for talking to me.
Susanna Rantanen 23:48
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder 23:50
My thanks to Susanna. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future 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.
