In this episode Matt Alder talks to Andy Curlewis of Cielo Talent
Employer Brand is a very hot topic at moment and the number of episodes of this podcast which have been dedicated to it recently reflect the level of interest in the market. The one vital element that is often missing from employer brand conversation though is how you measure effectiveness.
In this episode Matt and Andy discuss employer branding’s relationship to both talent attraction and talent management, the five core areas where the effectiveness of an employer brand can be measured and what this means in the social media age of truth and transparency. Andy also share his thoughts on the importance of content marketing and what the future of employer branding might look like.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:12]:
Hello, and welcome to episode 19 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The last few episodes of the show have dealt with employer branding in one way or another, and I think this reflects the current interest in the topic in the marketplace. It’s certainly something that a lot of my clients are talking to me about at the moment. One of the areas of employer branding that doesn’t get much airtime, though, is how you measure its impact. My guest this week is Andy Curlewis from Cielo. Andy has a huge amount of experience in the employer branding space and was very happy to share Cielo’s methodology for employer brand measurement. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. It’s Monday morning and it’s bright and sunny where I am, and my guest this week is Andy Curlewis from Cielo. Hi, Andy. How are you?
Andy Curlewis [00:01:14]:
Good morning, Matt. Yes. Hazar for Monday. All very good.
Matt Alder [00:01:17]:
Always a pleasure. Could you sort of tell everyone a little bit about. About yourself, you know, what you do at Cielo, who you work with, that kind of stuff.
Andy Curlewis [00:01:26]:
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I run the global brand digital and communications practice for Cielo. Cielo, for those that don’t know, it’s a talent consulting and outsourcing business, more commonly known as RPO. So I guess RPOs are interesting businesses. We, I guess, for Cielo, have, I know, somewhere between 100, 150 enterprise relationships with generally large multinational businesses or healthcare systems whereby they’ll outsource part or all of the recruitment process. So the practice that we run within that business is, if you like, a business within a business which looks after the brand digital and communications components of that, I guess I’ve been here three or four years now. My background is marketing agencies, digital agencies, both corporate and consumer, which is obviously where I had the pleasure of meeting you many years ago.
Matt Alder [00:02:23]:
Of course, Absolutely.
Andy Curlewis [00:02:24]:
Many years ago. 15.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
You’re not supposed to say how many. That’s not good.
Andy Curlewis [00:02:31]:
Absolutely. But as with a common theme with many of the folk that I think you’ve interviewed over these podcasts, my original business entry was around. It was casinos and logistics and airplanes. So often people, we find ourselves coming into it from very different perspectives.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
Cool. Okay. And I think this is actually the third or sort of fourth episode in a row where we’ve been talking about employer branding in some kind of aspect. What’s your definition of employer branding?
Andy Curlewis [00:03:03]:
That’s a great question. Look, I guess there’s two statements I often kind of gravitate to. And as you may know, there’s been a lot of discussion recently and I’ve been talking a lot around that, you know, what actually do we mean by this? But okay, so the first one that I often kind of go back to is that, look, a brand isn’t a product, a promise or a feeling. It’s the sum of all the experiences you have with a company, and most crucially of all, what differentiates that company from the rest. And obviously, when we’re talking about a career, it’s a pretty sophisticated sell. You’re not selling a widget or a solution. I think the other thing that I find kind of cuts through and makes things a little bit clearer for a lot of folk as well is finding people is only half the challenge in these days of the Tinter Web and all the great tools and recruiters and infrastructure that we have. But I guess it’s more about convincing the right ones to join now and then, hey, maybe even inspiring them to stay and do great things. So I guess those are the two dimensions or outputs of brand.
Matt Alder [00:04:02]:
Okay. And I think the interesting thing is about people, people staying and doing great things. And I think increasingly, you know, what I’m finding in the conversations that I’m having is that’s becoming the most important part sort of recruiting the right people. But people who are going to, you know, embrace the company’s brand and sort of really perform in their jobs. Do you find that as well?
Andy Curlewis [00:04:23]:
Yeah, it is. It’s one of the talent or HR operations or however we kind of name the structure that looks after people. You know, often there was traditionally been a gap between talent acquisition and talent management, or as we used to call in the old days, recruitment and talent management. And I guess, you know, one can’t be successful without the other getting people in through the front door to see them just swing straight out the back door. You know, that can’t be fruitful or effective. And I guess that’s why it’s interesting as an RPO business when you’re looking at the metrics that you’re applying to value. You know, value is about total value, total value of cost. And this means recruitment, prevention, and stopping some of the regretted attrition that can kind of happen. So if a recruitment or talent acquisition to be truly successful, it’s got to be feeding into an ongoing process that in itself is successful. And there is a virtual circle there. If one is completely broken, then the other by definition is going to be a real Challenge.
Matt Alder [00:05:33]:
I think that’s interesting in terms of you touched on measurement there, which is what I really want to talk about. But before I ask you about that, how do you think the Internet and perhaps social media in particular, has changed the way that organizations should think about employer branding?
Andy Curlewis [00:05:54]:
Well, I think employee branding as a notion probably goes back even further than when the phrase was first coined. This is not something that we’ve just invented for the modern world. This is how we think and act within wider structures, in this case companies. So it’s very much been around for a long time. But I guess the real impact or consequence of the digital age is just the acceleration of access to knowledge and transparency. You know, if we talk about a digital age, really it’s in many respects it’s the age of truth and transparency. It’s difficult to hide behind those corporate walls of management babble. And so for me, when it comes to the digital channels, social media, so forth, you know, there’s just a real need to make sure that what we’re saying and how we’re saying really does reflect who and what we are. Because if it doesn’t, it’s very clear to those immediate stakeholders, whether they’re employees or candidates or customers or whatever it might be, that actually, you know, there’s a visage there, but it’s not necessarily true. And that’s often more dangerous than not having any communications at all.
Matt Alder [00:07:06]:
Okay. No, I think I completely agree. So coming back to measurement then, I think you guys have done some really interesting stuff in terms of measuring employer brand impact, measuring what you’re doing, all that kind of stuff. How do you measure this stuff?
Andy Curlewis [00:07:23]:
Well, I think the first, the starting point is, is an acceptance that employer brand has, has, has truly succumbed to buzzword bingo. It’s, it’s, I mean, look, it’s gone so mainstream over the last few years. There’s that the number of marketing agencies that will still do that, the number of in house heads of employer brand, employer brand manager officers, and then obviously a lot of other players within the marketplace such as RPO businesses, consulting businesses, outsourced partners. There are so many different organizations out there which are really kind of talking about this or offering services and solutions. It’s really difficult for organizations to kind of cut through all of that and go, well, okay, what actually is really, really important and how can I measure that? And so I think one of the great things that we’ve been able to do is, you know, if you’re representing employer brand for 100 multinational businesses, whereby an RPO commercials are only really focused on successful outcomes, not just transactional recruitment fees, but time to hire, quality of hire, recruitment, prevention, these kind of things. What that does is to really focus the mind on what works. If our team creates an employer brand that actually doesn’t resonate and isn’t true, or a website that actually doesn’t drive the right conversions of the right people, then we’ve got a whole load of recruiters that know where we sit. So that does kind of focus them. Fair enough. So look, I guess we looked at all the different models that were out there, from the CEB to Talent Brand Index, to all sorts of things that were there, and all of which were great and robust in many respects, but obviously all of which were also from those with vested interest as well. So we try to distill all of that down into four or five core areas of measurement. The first one of which is obviously brand. So awareness, perception, engagement, consideration and advocacy universe, and obviously for their emerging talent, have a similar kind of model. And these generally tend to be some of the places where you’ll see a lot of the current measurements focus most of their time. So the number of followers, fans, media, reach, perceptions, you might have the Talent Brand Index, our old friend Sunday Times, all these kind of things. The second kind of call that we have is attraction. Bit of an old school word that these days, but here we’re talking about reach, engagement, conversion and roi. And that ROI is the critical thing. That’s where the rubber hits the road from brand into attraction. Now obviously, if ROI is good, that means that your baseline metrics, which is our third component, this is cost of hire, time to hire, quality of hire, conversion ratios, those kind of levers. If those are right, then your ROI is fine. However, there are three more on the balanced scorecard that we look at. One is performance. This is regretted. Attrition, engagement surveys, performance rankings, succession planning, the diversity and agility of your business. Which then opens us up to the fifth, which is diversity in itself, and again through the different stages of recruitment and even engagement and beyond. And then the final one is these are business constructs or programs within complicated organizations. So you’ve got to be able to build a business case, you’ve got to be able to deploy these programs, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve engaged the stakeholders in the right way, you’ve got to be able to budget accordingly for it, and then you’ve got to be able to manage it, measure it, improve the ROI of the program itself. So it’s becoming More complicated as our businesses get more sophisticated. But those. That’s the kind of balance scorecard that we look at.
Matt Alder [00:11:13]:
Okay, what have you learned from applying that to employer brand activity? What kind of comes out of it?
Andy Curlewis [00:11:24]:
So we find that on the maturity curve, there are two things that we look. We’re looking for those quick wins. We’re looking for those really visible or effective activities that can be deployed. The other thing that we look for a lot is sustainability. How can we put in place something which is truly going to measure effective performance? But you know what? More importantly, how can you put in place something which is going to be adopted, that is people are actually going to use these measurements? There’s no point having a fantastic dashboard if no one’s putting the right data in. Yes. If you haven’t got the guys or the girls putting that data in in the first place, caring about how important that data is and why it needs to be loved and looked after and put into the dashboard and then analyzed and reported on the right way. If they. If they’re not getting that, then they’re not going to put it incorrectly. And the whole process really becomes playing with numbers and statistics. So, yeah, just trying to make it as sustainable as possible. And the key thing there is adoption.
Matt Alder [00:12:31]:
Okay, so what’s next? We’ve talked about how employer branding has changed with the Internet and social media. What do you think’s next in this space? What’s going to happen in the next 18 months to three years?
Andy Curlewis [00:12:48]:
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, in the sense that, you know, when. When people talk about a lot of the current market trends around. Around where we are at the moment. You know, we increasingly talk around things like convergence or, you know, what’s the relationship with candidate communications and the customer, particularly when, you know, let’s say you’re in a B2B environment, you know, you’re selling to and hiring from the same group of people, and it’s your people that deliver the customer experience and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, there continues to be a significant kind of focus on that. I’m not really sure that we’ve got that right yet. You know, Cielo’s greatest ever case study was Summerfield or the co op, where, you know, their recruitment fees were aligned directly into sales per square foot of stores that they recruited into. You know, just such a great story that I’d love to see those kind of scenarios happening again and, you know, the principles of brand and how that translates in between your recruitment and your your sales or your customer satisfaction would just be fantastic. I do think that content will content marketing will take a renewed focus. The old buzzwords of talent pools and communities and so forth, we’ve really kind of flogged those to death over the last few years. I do think that people are getting better now at understanding what it means to set those up and also what it means to kind of manage those and drive meaningful outcomes from it. And again, this whole business of sustainability, none of this stuff is going to work. Whether it’s dashboards, reporting, brand strategies, beautiful, creative, wonderful websites, none of it’s going to work if people don’t adopt it. And content generation and marketing, or as I think it was Matt Charney or Lars in his previous podcast said the hiring managers have got to own this. When the hiring managers are generating the right content, when they’re owning recruitment, when they’re owning brands for their teams and their people as well as the wider organizations, that’s what’s going to really drive effective conversions.
Matt Alder [00:14:49]:
Andy, thank you very much for talking to me.
Andy Curlewis [00:14:52]:
Matt, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Have a great day.
Matt Alder [00:14:55]:
My thanks to Andy Curlewis. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes and read show notes and also subscribe to the mailing list@www.rfpodcast.com. thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
