One of the biggest issues I’m seeing Resourcing leaders face this year is the challenge of introducing digital marketing methodologies and behaviours into their strategies. There are some great tech tools out there if they are not utilized in the right way then failure is assured, especially when working with passive talent.
There are a number of organizations who are adapting brilliantly to the new recruiting reality and using digital marketing tools extremely effectively to help them achieve their resourcing objectives. One such company is Salesforce and my guest this week is Jennifer Johnston who is their Head of Global Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing.
In the interview we discuss:
• The challenges of recruiting 7000 people a year in the toughest geographies and talent segments
• The importance of reputation and how to actively manage it
• How to qualify talent pipelines to avoid wasting people’s time
• Nurturing passive candidates using pre-tested, optimized content
• Using data to quantify addressable markets of talent
Jennifer also shares her strategy for educating line managers to improve the candidate experience and gives us an insight into her vision for the future of recruitment marketing.
This week’s podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it, too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit. And Lever is spelt L E V E R Lever. Where ATS meets CRM.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 58 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the biggest issues I’m seeing resourcing leaders face this year is the challenge of introducing digital marketing methodologies and behavior into their strategies. There are some brilliant technology tools out there, but unless you use them in the right way, you’re going to fail, especially when it comes to passive talent. My guest this week is Jennifer Johnston, global head of employer brand for Salesforce. Jennifer and her team are using digital marketing techniques brilliantly to build and nurture a pipeline of passive talent for Salesforce. To find out how they do it, just keep listening.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Hi, Jennifer, and welcome to the podcast.
Jennifer Johnston [00:01:59]:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone who you are and what you do?
Jennifer Johnston [00:02:07]:
Sure, absolutely. So my name is Jennifer Johnston, and I am head of global employer branding for Salesforce. And as part of that role, I play a large role in making sure that we create a wonderful, best place to work reputation out in the marketplace that helps us attract the best quality people.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
Fantastic. And I’m wondering whether you could just give people a sort of an idea of, you know, the scale of hiring at Salesforce. I mean, how many, you know, how fast are you expanding? How many people are you sort of bringing on board? You know, what are your. What are your sort of key challenges?
Jennifer Johnston [00:02:43]:
Sure, absolutely. So I started at Salesforce about four years ago when we had around 8,000 employees. And since that time, we have very rapidly grown to over 20,000 employees. Last year alone hiring about 6,000 people this year on pace to hire 7,000 people. And we are doing that actually in some of the toughest geographies and talent segments worldwide. And what I mean by that is we’re hiring software engineers in places like San Francisco and hiring Salesforce, sorry, software sales executives across some of the most Challenging geographies like London, Dublin, Tokyo, Sydney, New York, Chicago, very hotly contested markets. So we have a big challenge ahead of us.
Matt Alder [00:03:36]:
I can imagine. And I’m, you know, what’s that, what’s that like from an employer brand perspective? Because, you know, I would imagine that, you know, Salesforce has got quite a strong brand or, you know, do you still, you know, do you still really struggle with, with shortages in those areas?
Jennifer Johnston [00:03:53]:
You know, I think everyone is dealing with a challenge of scarcity. There’s simply not enough qualified talent to meet the number of roles that are open in the market. So Salesforce certainly has an incredible story, an incredible growth story right now. A very attractive company for sure, as the fastest growing of the world’s top ten enterprise software companies. One of the most innovative companies in the world five years in a row and of course the best company to work for 10, or sorry, eight years in a row. So we’ve got some great accolades under our belt. But we are an enterprise brand versus being a consumer brand and competing with the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook certainly is a challenge from an employer brand perspective. We are lucky to have an amazing amount of inbound applicant flow. However, not a lot of that applicant flow is really lining up with the types of roles that we have available. So while we have over last year we had over 500,000 applicants for those 6,000 roles we hired for, we hired very little of that inbound. We do primarily most of our hiring through employee referral, over 50%. So that makes having a great employee experience inside the company, that results in our employees being great brand ambassadors and also being willing to refer their friends and colleagues to us very, very important part of our brand strategy. And I mentioned the reputation as a great place to work being a big part of my role. And that has a huge employee pride factor. Those awards are as much about attracting talent as they are about making sure our employees are really proud of the workplace that we’ve created together. We also do about 30% of our hiring is recruiter sourced or sourcer sourced. If you’re in the recruiting game, you know what that means.
Matt Alder [00:05:43]:
Absolutely.
Jennifer Johnston [00:05:44]:
So we do a ton of reach. Yeah, we do a lot of reach outs. And so my job as head of employer branding is to warm that talent pool up by driving a lot of attention around the culture of Salesforce and the incredible experience we provide for our employees. And we do that in a number of ways. You know, as I mentioned, the awards factor is high. Also managing our presence on Glassdoor, making sure we have a good story to tell there and that our employees are giving us fair and authentic reviews that are compelling. And also through social. So we have a really strong Twitter and Instagram for our salesforce jobs where we like to feature a steady diet of incredible stories about what’s going on with the company from a business perspective, but also from a culture perspective and sharing our employee voices. So those two components, creating incredible employee brand ambassadors that really go out there and help us source talent from their networks and creating a warm and. And strong reputation out in the marketplace. So when our recruiters make those calls that people at least are curious and maybe want to hear what we have to offer when it comes to two jobs. Very important parts of our strategy.
Matt Alder [00:06:56]:
And if I could just sort of dig deeper into some of that. I saw you. I saw you do a presentation a few. A few months ago where you really kind of talked about this sort of ecosystem of passive talent that you have and how you, you know, how you sort of nurture people through. Well, first of all, how you identify people and then you sor. Nurture them through a. Through a bit of a journey. Could you tell us a bit more about. About that?
Jennifer Johnston [00:07:21]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned that that portion of our. Our hiring that really comes through, you know, reach outs to passive talent. And so a few things, you know, when we. We want to drive targeted leads, you know, we want to drive targeted traffic into our pipeline. And part of doing that is understanding the types of people that are successful at Salesforce. So we do a lot of research into the backgr, our successful sales representatives, as well as the backgrounds of our successful engineers that tell us what schools they come from, what companies they come from, so that we’re able to go out on places like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and put our messaging in front of them. So surface jobs to people that fit our profiles so that they might indicate to us that they’re interested. So that’s one of the ways we drive the targeted leads. And then as those leads come in, we do another step where everyone that comes into us, whether, whether through an applicant or a lead form, our recruiters look at those and they take a further kind of qualifying lens and say, is this truly someone we would want to hire? Because one thing we don’t want to do that I think really hurts a lot of companies and their brands is a lot of people do this talent community concept where they talk to anyone and everyone who they have a name for. And I think that’s actually kind of negative because for us, if we look at your background. And we know you’re probably not someone we’re going to hire. We don’t want to keep talking to you, you and encouraging you to keep expressing your interest if we’re not going to hire you. So once we’ve determined you’re a qualified lead, someone that, who on paper looks like we would hire, we do a few things. We do send you news and updates on what’s exciting going on in the business in the hopes that, you know, one of those emails will be the day when you’re maybe not having a great day at your current job and you’re saying what else is out there and that’s the day that you want to reach out to us or you have an email from us in your inbox. Maybe it’s from three months ago. And we often see this happen where someone will say, okay, I’ve had that day today. Talk to me. Salesforce, they know who we are. They know they want to potentially engage with us and they have our, I like to say they have our number. So that’s another nurturing piece that we do. Another great nurturing thing that we do is inviting people who have any level of interest in us to events. We love to invite them to our customer events where we do our big product keynotes and breakout sessions and you get to hear from our customers. And at those events, we actually do sessions on what life at Salesforce is like as well, that they can come and hear from our employees what working with us is like. And so those events are a great way for us to have kind of a two way exchange with them. We invite them to networking sessions where they meet with our hiring managers. And we find that really pushes a lot of people over the edge to say, okay, yeah, I’m ready, Salesforce, you know, let’s talk opportunities. So those are just a couple of the ways that we’re keeping in touch with people that we’ve identified that we know we want to hire you.
Matt Alder [00:10:22]:
You, you, you sort of mentioned social media, you’ve mentioned awards, you’ve mentioned Glassdoor. You were talking about company, company news and things like that. Is that the kind of sort of the main content strategy to, to talk to these people? Do you, I mean, what kind of.
Matt Alder [00:10:39]:
Company news do you send them?
Matt Alder [00:10:40]:
What, what have you found? Kind of really sort of triggers that, that, that interesting passive candidate to, you know, to sort of pick up the phone and take things to the next stage.
Jennifer Johnston [00:10:52]:
Yeah, so we do a lot of actually testing of content. So I’m really proud of the way we use content in a very smart way. So one of the things that we do, I mentioned, we identify the targets and the backgrounds in education and experience. I have an amazing head of social, Chrissy Glover Thornhill, and she goes on LinkedIn and she does sponsored updates of pieces of content. So let’s say we have a great story about one came across the other day about Salesforce is still acting like an $8 billion startup. Great piece of content, because we know a lot of people, they want startup kind of culture of moving fast and being agile, but they also want the stability and security of a solid company. That’s a great article for us. So we’ll put that out to our targets in the engineering space. Particular companies and schools will surface that piece of content as a sponsored update on LinkedIn. Now, when we do that, we’re able to see the level of engagement that that content generates. You know, how many people like it, share it, and even trace a path to did they follow us after seeing that piece of content on LinkedIn. And so we do that with multiple pieces of content throughout the month. And at the end of the month, we have what we call our stickiest content, our content that was most engaging. And that’s the stuff that we’ll then filter into our email blasts that we send to our lead lists. And also we let our recruiters know that out of the 20 pieces of content we shared this month, these were the stickiest. These were the ones that really got people’s attention, and then they’ll use those in their, you know, emails or in mails over the course of the next month or so. So very much a science and a strategy behind what we’re sharing.
Matt Alder [00:12:33]:
That’s amazing. I think that’s. That’s such a great thing to do. And I think I’ve, you know, I don’t think I’ve heard of many other people, you know, kind of taking that very. That very sort of scientific marketing kind of approach to it. Obviously, testing and data is incredibly important to your process. How else do you use data to really get the most out of this and optimize it and make it run the way you want to?
Jennifer Johnston [00:13:06]:
We’re using data in a number of ways, and we’ve been at a few industry events talking about how we use data. Data for us is also hugely important when it comes to addressable market. And I mentioned that we do compete in some of the toughest markets. And one of the things that we’ve decided to do is try to find some markets to expand into where we aren’t oversaturated. And what I mean by that is when we’re looking at a market like San Francisco, and if we cross reference our data in our applicant tracking system and our lead tracking systems with our target, addressable target on like, let’s say we have, you know, 4,500 account executives that fit our profile in a market like San Francisco, we’re able to use our data from our applicant tracking and our lead tracking to understand how many of those 45 we’ve talked to, 4,500 we’ve talked to. So we were able to see, for instance, that in San Francisco we had talked to 28% of the account executives that fit our profile. Now, when you look at that, that says, well, there’s still a lot more talent to go after. But if you’re thinking of a company like Salesforce, we’re actually only looking for the top 20%. So we’ve really outstretched our limits of the top tier talent in the market. But then we go into a market like Boston and do that same analysis and we see that we’ve actually only talked to 4% of the addressable market. So we know if we’re going to expand, that’s a great expansion opportunity for us. A great place to focus some of our efforts and grow our team. So we’re really using data, you know, on a marketing side, you know, from. From a content perspective, but also from a. Just even a location strategy.
Matt Alder [00:14:47]:
Interesting. No, that’s. That, that, that. Yeah. Again, that, that makes a, that makes a lot of sense and it’s obviously a very strategic way of working. You mentioned the, you know, the importance of the quality of the employment experience. So people are being brand advocates for the company and all that kind of stuff. Where, where does the candidate experience fit into this? Is that something that you guys, that you guys, you guys focus on? Where does it fit into the overall strategy?
Jennifer Johnston [00:15:17]:
Well, Matt, I’m really glad you asked that question because this is my current passion project for the year. It’s. It’s. It’s very, very, very important. So right now at Salesforce, we’ve built an incredible brand reputation that gets us to the prospects part. Right. We’re able to get people interested in us. We’ve also really reimagined the onboarding experience. So there’s a fabulous experience. Once you sign on with us, we really have a great immersive process. We also do a wonderful job with our ongoing engagement with our existing employees. But where I saw a huge weakness in our strategy, I call it the weak link in our cycle right now is that candidate experience. You know, quite frankly, we just weren’t being very intentional about it. When people ask, what, what is the process? What is the strategy? There really wasn’t one. So in November of last year, I said, you know, can I have the keys to this? I really want to take this on. And did a lot of research around, you know, what is the state of our current candidate experience? Using we have a candidate experience survey that we do internally, but also was able to glean a tremendous amount of information from Glassdoor. If you sign up for an employer account, which anyone can do, you get access to some great analytics in the back end. And what, what I learned from that was at first disturbing, I would say, when I looked at our overall positive interview experience score at 57% on Glassdoor. But when I compared that to our competitors for talent, actually I found out that’s pretty standard. We’re right in the range with everyone else. So that was comforting and reassuring that actually. But we don’t want to be with everyone else. We want to be world class. We want to be really innovative. That’s our reputation as a company. We take that seriously on the employee side as well. So I’m attacking that project right now and kind of going across a few different tracks. One of the tracks is working with our hiring managers to really educate them that the market has changed. You know, we’re living in a time of scarcity that the talent like to call it has dried up and we really need them to change their mindset and approach when I can’t have them grilling people. I mentioned most of the people in our, in our process are either a referral or a source hire, a recruiter source hire. So about 80% of the people sitting in front of you didn’t actually probably apply to work with us. They’re not banging down our door to get in here. So we can’t have you asking them like, why should I hire you? That’s just such a huge disconnect. We have to have our hiring managers talking to these candidates with a level of respect for the fact that we’re actually trying to pry them loose, probably from a job they even enjoy. Right. And if they’re, if they’re experimenting, they’re probably experimenting and checking out two to three other companies too. You know, if they’re toying with the idea of leaving their current employer. So you really have to change from a grilling to a selling mindset. So that’s one big candidate experience is Just taking this massive group of hiring managers and reeducating them that the game has changed and we need you to change your approach to talent. And that’s also things like etiquette, right? Showing up on time for an interview, not canceling an interview, being fully present when you’re showing respect for that person’s time. Like I said, I’d love to live in a world where our hiring managers are actually thanking someone for coming in with a thank you by email before they even have the chance to reach out to us and say thank you, thank them for their interest before they even thank us. So that the hiring manager piece is a big part of it. Also just creating a wonderful communications journey so that every time we have an opportunity to talk to a candidate, we’re really infusing the why factor. Why would you want to join us throughout the entire interview process where we’re also educating them throughout the entire interview process, we want to be authentic about. When I talk about brand, I want it to be not just about the awesomeness of Salesforce, but also about the challenges of working here to give people a really authentic and realistic view so that they can opt in or out. If it sounds like them or does sound like them, I like to say sell or repel. In some ways, you really want people to make a good choice for themselves, to come into a culture that really fits them. Lots of work around candidate experience. Very, very, very, very interested in that area right now.
Matt Alder [00:19:48]:
And, and how, I mean, how are the line managers responding to that? Because I know that a lot of people I talked about candidate experience. It always kind of comes down to the. To the line managers, are they. Are they responding? Are they easy to influence? Is there a particular tactical strategy that you’re finding is. Is really working?
Jennifer Johnston [00:20:06]:
Well, I’m so glad you asked that question too, because actually, you know, immediately upon seeing some of the data around our experience, we started to educate. The first thing we did was create awareness with our hiring managers that, you know, our candidate experience isn’t as fantastic as we would want it to be. And just educating them on how our candidates were rating us via our internal candidate survey. And Glassdoor, we saw in the first quarter of this year a 3% jump in our review ratings on our overall positive experiences, up to 60%. And that was before we’ve even gotten any initiatives off the ground. It was simply by educating them that we’re not doing as good a job here as we need to be doing. So awareness was the first factor. And the fact that we moved in Fast that quickly told me that the hiring managers actually do care. They just need to be educated and enabled and engaged. So another piece that we’re doing that we’re just getting ready to launch is we’re actually going to be asking everybody who hires at Salesforce to go through a strategic hiring training module. You know and this is something we do by our, we have an awesome gamified learning system at Salesforce called Trailhead where we ask them to take these training, training trails and we’re having a trailer on that and we have buy in from the business that they would like us to put every hiring manager at Salesforce through this training. And it’s just a quick low calorie, you know, 60 minute overview to just again my main goal is a mindset shift just to really educate them on the new realities of the market.
Matt Alder [00:21:39]:
So final question, sort of kind of you know, looking externally into the, into the market. There’s obviously lots of change happening around technology and recruiting and everything at the moment.
Matt Alder [00:21:53]:
What’s, what’s on your radar in the future?
Matt Alder [00:21:55]:
Where you know what, what’s most interesting you about where, where the industry and tools and technologies might be going in the next SOR of 12 to 18 months?
Jennifer Johnston [00:22:06]:
Well you know Salesforce actually sells, you know, the customer success platform which is all the tools that you use to market and to engage Salesforce and market to customers. So I have the awesome ability to tap that same customer success platform and use all those same tactics and tools and flip them to the employee side of the house and use it also as the platform for employee success. And so I’m actually most intrigued around applying the same kind of customer relationship management practices to relationship management. I’m also super excited about all the marketing technology that’s available to you. We have an awesome product, Salesforce marketing cloud and most companies packaging technology whether it’s Eloqua, Marketo, Adobe, great marketing cloud type technologies that you can use. And so I’m looking at cool things like journeys like setting up when someone comes into the process, setting up an automated flow of communication that drips them out, further education about us and gets us more excited about us throughout the whole process about using text technology with our candidates. So being able to, you know, as they arrive in our building I have them geo located and I’m able to push a text to them as they get into my fenced area, you know and say hey welcome, we just came on site sending them a text in the morning instead of an email sending them a text that says today’s the day we can’t wait to see you and then sending them a mobile resources guide. So one of the things we do to our candidates is they get a mobile website that we call it a candidate resource site that tells them like here’s where you park if you need to grab a cup of coffee. We recommend this cafe. If you have a lunch break, here’s some cool thing, places to pop by around our office. So just really taking it to a very personal using the same marketing techniques that companies are using to kind of create passionate customers to really engage and create passionate candidates.
Matt Alder [00:24:07]:
That sounds like a brilliant feature and I can’t wait to see sort of how you put all that into action, basically. Jennifer, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jennifer Johnston [00:24:18]:
It was such a pleasure. Matt, always happy to I’m a huge we call it hashtag EB Nerd. I’m a huge employer branding nerd and always have happy to share all the exciting things we’re working on at Salesforce.
Matt Alder [00:24:30]:
My thanks to Jennifer Johnston. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search on Recruiting Future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com and on that site you can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
