Employer branding has been the hot topic for the last several years as companies vie for competitive advantage in tight talent markets. But, despite all the focus, is employer branding actually getting worse and what do companies have to do to get noticed and connect with their talent audiences?
My guest this week is Ed Nathanson from Red Pill Talent, Ed has a vast amount of experience in helping build employer brands that stand out from the crowd and has some great practical tips to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
- How employer brand is changing
- Creating something meaning and memorable
- The danger of being vanilla
- Engagement as the ultimate measurement
- Message and marketing
Ed also talks about making brands stand out and share some examples of what great looks like
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:56]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 219 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Employer branding has been the hot topic of the last several years as companies vie for competitive advantage in tight talent markets. But despite the focus on it, is employer branding actually getting worse? And what do companies have to do to get noticed and connect with their talent audiences? My guest this week is Ed Nathanson from Red Pill Talent. Ed has huge experience of helping build employer brands that stand out from the crowd and some great practical tips to share. Enjoy the interview. Hi Ed, and welcome to the podcast.
Ed Nathanson [00:01:45]:
Oh, I’m so pumped to be here. I feel like I’ve made the big time.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Ed Nathanson [00:01:57]:
So my name’s Ed Nathanson. I have my own consulting company called Red Pill Talent. It’s a very dorky reference to the movie the Matrix of the Blue Pill Red Pill choice given to Neo. But what I do is I work with companies, both multinational, Fortune 100s and small startups and across many verticals, helping them with their employer brand, strategy implementation and kickoff, and ultimately creating something meaningful and memorable that’s going to help them attract the right people.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
You’ve been in and around employer branding for a little while. There’s a massive sort of focus on it at the moment, but. But obviously it’s been something that companies have been looking at for a number of years. What’s sort of changed with employer branding recently?
Ed Nathanson [00:02:41]:
So there’s a lot that’s changed? Well, first off, I think that everyone seems to have gotten on the bandwagon, so to speak. And so what’s resulted from every company almost thinking that they need to be thinking about these things is that there’s much more noise and clutter to cut through. I also think, and this might be a little controversial, but I think we’ve gotten worse at it over the years. I think what people understand the need to do it, but they’re afraid to take any meaningful chances and be truly open about themselves. What their value add is. And it comes off as quite vanilla and quite stale and people forgot the entertainment aspect of getting people’s attention.
Matt Alder [00:03:27]:
Absolutely, I would agree with you. And I think that so many employer brands look and sound and to some extent feel the same these days. There’s not much differentiation coming through, is there?
Ed Nathanson [00:03:40]:
No, I always like to say vanilla is my favorite flavor in ice cream. I get it all day, every day. But in marketing, which is what this is, it does zero, it doesn’t attract, it doesn’t repel, it’s just there. And there’s an inherent fear, I think it’s at the base of all of this, Matt, which is that companies are afraid to not be appealing to the masses. And I think that’s a big mistake. I do.
Matt Alder [00:04:06]:
Yeah, absolutely. Particularly, you know, when, when employers normally have problems with very specific aspects of their, of their talent attraction. It doesn’t, doesn’t really make much sense.
Ed Nathanson [00:04:17]:
No, no. I mean, again, you look at any of the great brands in the world, they don’t try to put that net out to the biggest group of people. What they’re trying to do is get the people that align to what they’re, what they feel, what they believe and bringing them into the fold and making them excited, exuberant. But you know, again, it’s, I think it’s fear that ultimately is the reason that companies play it so safe.
Matt Alder [00:04:44]:
So I know that you specialize with working with smaller companies, you know, medium sized, smaller businesses. How, how can companies that are smaller compete in the employer branding space? And I suppose this also goes for big who only have a small budget. What can they do to stand out in this world of noise and distraction?
Ed Nathanson [00:05:10]:
Yeah, so I always like to bring it back to pop culture as a good reference. When Danielson had to go up against the formidable Cobra Kai or Rocky, against Apollo Creed or Avon Drago, many people counted them out. But the reality is that if you believe in what you do and go at it in a way that’s meaningful and true to who you are, you can always win. So I believe budget is always a great thing to have. But at the end of the day, what matters more is what you’re doing versus how big you can amplify it. I look at some of the best videos I’ve ever seen in recruitment marketing and they’re the ones that aren’t with the big glossy budgets. They’re the ones that are often more rugged and rough that really start to beat people, you know, to meet that audience expectations of who they are. You know, I look at, you know, social media. Social media is the great equalizer. Yes, you can buy promoted campaigns and put all these things out there and do promoted campaigns on different platforms. But at the end of the day, I don’t care how much money you put behind it. If the content isn’t good, it’s only gonna do so well. And you know, the big vanity stat, Matt, in a lot of social media or any marketing is views. And I think that’s a hollow, hollow stat. And I care so much more about engagement than I do people scrolling by it on their screen. I care about did something, did I stop first of all, did I click through it and did I do some sort of action from it? That to me is the ultimate measurement. And I believe the small companies can do that as good or better than the bigger companies, particularly if they’re true to what they are and the voice and the audience they want to attract.
Matt Alder [00:06:53]:
So break this down practically for us. What are the key elements that people should be looking at?
Ed Nathanson [00:06:58]:
Yeah, so I always start any engagement with, whether it’s a huge company or a small company is I say, let me take a step back. A lot of consultants, big marketing agencies in the world we operate in want to interview and do EVP building or Persona building on external and internal sentiment. I don’t give a crap what the people outside the company think. I care about your people. And so what I say is give me a sample percentage of your best, of your best, the people that you would literally clone if you could, from all different departments, different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different genders. And I don’t survey them. I don’t think people are honest on surveys. I truly don’t. I think that there’s a guardedness about anonymity, especially when they’re given by their own employer. So what I do is I have a conversation and I have someone there taking notes, literally like a court stenographer. And in that conversation with this group of people in a group setting, I ask lots and lots of questions. And why I do that is a conversation leads to much more than you would get on a survey simply from people hearing what others are saying and then adding on or taking it an entirely different direction. But then I take that information from a 2, 3 hour session with these folks and all around the world, depending on the size of the company, different pockets of the company, and then I build the voice from that. I don’t care what your executives think, because they’re going to tell me the halls are paved with gold and the fountains in the hallways spill out chocolate instead of water. But the reality is that their perception is not going to be with the people, the target audience that we want. So you build from there, and then from there, as you take that, what you’ve learned, what your secret sauce is, you build every piece of plan, whether it’s PR content, video, around this, and then you wear it like a badge of honor. I’m a big Game of Thrones geek, Matt. And I’ll tell you, there’s a quote from the very first episode that Tyrion says to Jon Snow. He says, and I’m paraphrasing, but he says, wear what you are like armor. That way the world can never hurt you. And I think the best employer brands are the ones that do that. And to the haters be damned. There’s always gonna be haters. I don’t care about them. I care about who we want to reach, those people that are going to fit best in this company, and how do we get their attention and be honest in doing it.
Matt Alder [00:09:26]:
And how much of this is messaging and how much of this is actually the quality of marketing that goes behind, behind that messaging?
Ed Nathanson [00:09:38]:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s a mix of both. The messaging has to be real, it has to be online. Because again, I’m sure you’ve heard a thousand people say in your podcast before, you want to bring people in false pretenses because they’re gonna leave. That’s a turnover issue and it’s wasted efforts. So the messaging is absolutely important, but the marketing is equally, equally as important because, again, I’ve studied. Well, I shouldn’t say. Again, I didn’t say this yet, but I study content every year, and not just employer content. At the end of every year, I literally go through and I start to build lists of what was the most popular content on LinkedIn, what was the most popular content on Facebook, what was the most popular content on Instagram, what were the most popular videos and going on and. And then I look at them and there is an absolute pattern that I hit on all the time. From the marketing side, that works. I call it humor or heart. You think about the iconic drama masks that across all cultures, across the world is so recognizable and iconic. It’s because that’s what we as human beings respond to. So I always say, if it doesn’t make you giggle or doesn’t make you feel something, some sort of emotion, why do it because it doesn’t work. I can tell you the most popular stuff year in, year out ascribes to that philosophy. And if you understand that with the right messaging, you will be successful.
Matt Alder [00:10:58]:
Very interesting stuff. Now could you give us some examples from great branding work that you’ve seen or been involved with? You know, what is. What does good really look like?
Ed Nathanson [00:11:08]:
So my employer brand journey started back in my last job before I started my company at a software security company in Boston called Rapid7 that at time was 100 people. No one knew who we were in a very crowded security tech market here in Massachusetts. And we had lots of hot employers like HubSpot, for example, in our backyard. And we needed to get known fast. And this was before employer brand was even a thing. This is going back like eight, nine years ago when I first started there. And what we did was we took a look at ourselves and said, this is what we are. We’re a very pop culture, geeky, proudly geeky kind of bro ish culture at the time, whether we wanted to admit it or not. And we owned it. And we did a whole series of videos called Rapid 7 at the Movies that literally took all of that stuff we knew about ourselves. So we referenced all the pop culture famous iconic movies and did parodies of them with our values. So for example, we did a parody video that won lots of awards, got us ton of attention called Passion, which was one of our as a parody of the Flashdance scene, dancing, one of our employees with the Flashdance wig dancing around the office getting water splashed on him. We did things about Rocky and Spartacus and all these things and it got us on the map. We started getting write ups, we started having people knocking on our doors, people saying, can I meet the Flashdance guy? When they came in, it built us up and we were able to grow from 100 to about 700 in just under two years. Very, very fast growth. Now they’re a publicly traded company, many years later, one of the big Boston tent poles. Now they’re very different today, but I’m proud of the fact that that was one of the things that started them on that journey and was true to who they were at the time. Now I look at a current client I work with like Toast, which is a very hot up and coming restaurant software company. And what they did is again, look at who they are, understood what they’re doing, and now they’re sharing things. If you look at their profiles on social media, for example, they’re sharing their own language that they Talk internally like everything is bread puns with them. So they have a thing called croutons, which are the children of employees and you see them identifying these things or multigrain their diversity initiatives and so on. And so these are just some. I could go on and on, but I love when companies do that. Embrace it and also make it entertaining. Let’s face it, with all the clutter of crap flowing in our faces constantly, I’ll kill myself if I see another talking head video in front of a white wall talking about why they love their job. Nobody gives a shit. You’ve gotta do something that gets their attention but also is on message.
Matt Alder [00:13:49]:
And I suppose picking up what you’ve been saying there about entertainment and content, to me, content marketing and you know, getting that right strategically are absolutely at the core of what good recruitment marketing should, should look like in you know, 2019. In 2020. What’s your sort of take on content marketing? What’s the strategy that sits behind this? You mentioned content on LinkedIn. What’s your sort of view on the channels? You know, talk me through it.
Ed Nathanson [00:14:22]:
Yeah, it’s a big question, so I’ll try to take to it. So what I do is again after we’ve understand going back to that building group session that I do with sample sets of employees is we build our content plan. We first of all say we literally list things we want to show based on what we’ve learned. So it could be vibrant culture, it could be hard work. Whatever the themes we know, we list them out and then we build our content plan. So I literally the first month of working together with a company, we spend a good amount of time on a content plan. So we build the plan for two years and it’s ideas based on if it doesn’t touch on one of those themes that we’re talking about that we want to show, we don’t do it. We build what I like to call a big bucket of plan. Then what we do is we always have this plan to dip into for each of the themes that we want and then plan our calendars on a content around how frequency the availability of getting this content from employees, what it’s going to take, the amount of effort for each piece of content and that’s how we start to build our cadence also specific to each channels. You know, something on Instagramopoly might be a lot more fluffy, light, disposable and other platforms maybe not so much. Maybe we’re going for more the meteor stuff. But I will say this going to platform Specific content. People are afraid of LinkedIn, of letting their hair down. And as a bald guy, I like to say that, you know, with, with a lot of hope that I one day would have it, but I never will. But on LinkedIn, for example, you know, it’s. People are afraid to let their hair down and not be so buttoned up. And I would argue of all the places to do it, that is the place to do it. A LinkedIn is where people go most on any social platform to think about jobs. Right. To think about their careers. So you wanna be part of that conversation. But secondly, everyone is so buttoned up, what an opportunity to be standing out and do something there that’s gonna get people’s attention and get them to stop. And a platform of everyone in shirts and ties, you know, that’s the place to do it. And if you ever see the companies that do do it on LinkedIn, and particularly like, I can see it specifically on the engagement that my clients do, it’s amazing because it truly stands out. Instagram, everyone’s fluffy because that’s what people expect. Same thing on some. You may be on like a Twitter or even on a Facebook, but I’m talking LinkedIn. There’s such an opportunity there to be different and bold. And so many companies are afraid to because they’re living in three years ago, five years ago mindset.
Matt Alder [00:16:53]:
Absolutely. I think that’s, that’s a really good point, particularly the three years ago or the five years ago or even ten years ago mindset. It happens all the time. So what’s the role of technology in employer branding?
Ed Nathanson [00:17:08]:
So it’s funny, your timing is perfect because I’m speaking at LinkedIn Talent Connect next week and my topic is Rage against the Machines, because I think technology is killing recruiting in general. I think I have a philosophy, I have a theory. I like to think I’m Ed Stradamus here, but look, I could be wrong. But I think the companies that are going to ultimately win in the next five to 10 years are the companies that go back to being more human than technology. What I mean by that is that think about, picture yourself on any customer call and you get that automated prompt, right? I don’t know about you, but I’m hitting zero from about 30 seconds in to get to a real life human being. And the longer it takes me to get to a real life human being, the angrier I get. So that by the time I do get to a human being, after going through prompt after prompt or chatbot after chatbot from an Applicant perspective, the experience is tainted. It is my philosophy is, is that and I truly believe this, that the best marketing, the best recruiters are the ones who are gonna take it back to more simpler approach where I can actually interact with an actual real human being, get real, not spammy auto prompt templated communications through the process that I can actually talk to a human and not do test upon test or video interview systems where they’re analyzing my facial expressions or the tone of my voice. I think we’re over complicating systems and processes for the ease of simplicity rather than the good of the process and our effectiveness. This is something I’m incredibly passionate about. Matt. Yes, there are obviously good things that come from technology taking a lot of the administrative out of the day to day and letting recruiters be more functional in what they do. But a lot of these algorithms can never beat the conversation that happens between people or a handshake or a meeting and having a cup of coffee together. And I think we’re losing our way a little bit with our fascination with technology. There is literally technology for just about every aspect of a process that should literally have three process that three steps, intro, meeting, resolution. But at the end of the day we’ve made it 700 steps with all this technology. It’s something I don’t think is a good trend. Maybe I’m old school.
Matt Alder [00:19:40]:
So leading on from that and as a final question, what does the future for employer brands look like?
Ed Nathanson [00:19:49]:
Yeah, I think we’re going to get more personal and I hope it will. Meaning that I think the more we get into understanding our audience, the more we get into understanding the messaging we want to get. But I do want to hope to create more personal experiences for people within each brand right now, particularly in the world I live in with the small to mid sized companies, you have one crack because you don’t have the budget to do specific Persona driven campaigns, for example, or geographical campaigns or skill set based campaigns. So you’re kind of putting out a broad messaging. What I think is going to happen is technology will help in this regard to create personal experiences for say an engineer versus a scientist versus an HR person versus a finance person of how they engage with the brand and what matters to each of them that these companies can offer. But I do also hope that we take a step back like I was just ranting about a few minutes earlier, take a deep breath and start to pick up the phone again to start to talk to people again, to start to say it’s not about numbers and volume it’s about interactions. It’s about communication. I’d rather have two great conversations than 20 quick, meaningless ones, if you get what I’m saying. And I’m hoping, hoping that we learn those lessons as we start to see the data kind of bear out that maybe that’s the way we should be going.
Matt Alder [00:21:20]:
Ed, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ed Nathanson [00:21:22]:
Oh, my pleasure, Matt. Like I said, I feel like I made it. Now I can go put like a star on my LinkedIn profile.
Matt Alder [00:21:29]:
Absolutely. Absolutely brilliant. Brilliant to talk to you.
Ed Nathanson [00:21:33]:
Oh, my pleasure. Have a good one.
Matt Alder [00:21:35]:
My thanks to Ed Nathanson. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram, where we’re recruiting Future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can 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.
