EP121: Johnson Controls - Humanizing Employer Branding

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Amresh Yadav of Johnson Controls. Hi, Amresh. Welcome to the show.

Amresh: Thank you so much, Lydia. It's my pleasure to be here.

Amresh’s Career Journey in Employer Branding

Lydia: So you're in a very interesting space and in-demand space, employer branding. Tell us about your background so far, Amresh. What keeps you in this dynamic intersection of many things; talent, brand, and content?

Amresh: That's a great question, Lydia. Let me tell you my story, how it all began. So, I started my career with L&T. That was my first company, and I was a part of the TA team. My responsibilities were pretty much in recruitment, headhunting, or campus recruitment. By doing campus recruitment, that was the first time I recognized the importance of employer branding, and I wanted to make a career in it.

So, when I worked there for about three years, I wanted to get into marketing and branding because I had acquired experience in TA and HR, but I was not very adept with the skills of marketing and branding. So, I decided to do my master's in Media and Advertising from the University of Leicester. I was there for about two years, and then I joined Santa Fe Location, which was my second company.

You would be a bit surprised to know that here I was a part of the marketing team. I was supporting my TA and other functions. The company had, in fact, started doing employer branding for the first time. So, I was collaborating with the HR leaders over there, the business leaders, and the TA function. At Santa Fe Location, I was part of this marketing team, supporting the employer branding and recruitment marketing projects.

And here, my interest developed in making a career entirely in this domain. Earlier, I was a part of the HR team, and here I was a part of the marketing team. After four years there, I was involved in different functions as well—marketing and sales, employer branding, and for some time, I was also doing HR. So, it was multiple roles and employer branding is a cross-functional role. So I was a bit of everywhere.

After four years over there, I joined this company, my current company, Johnson Controls. Here, I'm leading the entire function for India, the Pacific, and Northeast Asia—basically a few countries like Japan and Korea. We don't have much of a LinkedIn presence in those countries, and the ecosystem is quite different. So, my major focus is in India, and these are my major markets.

Talking about storytelling—see, it's a very interesting combination. Storytelling, strategy, and then data insights. So, it's a good blend of all these three things. And then you develop your employer branding strategy, which aligns with the business goals. This is something that is very interesting for me and keeps me going every day.

Realizing the Need for Employer Branding

Lydia: You’re talking about realizing the importance of employer branding when you were doing campus recruiting, was that right?

Amresh: Yes

Lydia: What instance did you realize? Was it a lack of presence somewhere, or did you have to talk about it over and over again? What was the challenge there that you felt needed to be fixed?

Amresh: So, I would love to tell you that during my time at L&T, there was a scholarship called the Build India Scholarship, and it was a flagship program. It was open to internal employees as well as external employees, but I didn't see much participation in that particular program. My manager told me that this year, we had to get more participation.

That was the time I realized that despite having so many good programs within the company, somehow, they were not being communicated to the external audience. In some instances, I could say, even to the internal employees. So, it was not communicated well through either medium.

See, employer branding was a very new concept back then. I didn’t know much about it—like, what is talent branding? What is employer branding? But I did realize that there was a need for marketing within the HR function, and that is how I discovered employer branding.

Let me tell you, this was back in 2012. Employer branding in India only really picked up after COVID. I started seeing a lot of companies hiring for employer branding after that. But that is how my interest started. I didn’t know where I was going to reach with that interest, but that’s how it all began.

Including Employees in Employer Branding

Lydia: Yes, and whether it's before COVID or even after, employer branding has always been a space. It just probably took on different names. So in terms of employer branding, and your focus on this particular area, what are some key areas that you're looking at this year? What are some key areas that you have looked at?

Amresh: So, this year, let me tell you that my focus is more on humanizing our employer brand. When I say humanizing our employer brand, my focus is on equipping our recruiters to be brand advocates. Because recruiters are the first point of contact for any candidate, and unless they are the marketers, we cannot achieve our goals.

A few days back, I was listening to a podcast, and one of the experts was talking about let's consider employer branding as dating. How good of an impression you can make on a candidate in the first meeting, or how charming you are as an employer.

What I have done at JCI is part of a global campaign. My work is more about adapting it locally to the APAC region. We have this digital library where recruiters have access to all the marketing collaterals. Basically, I call it recruitment marketing collaterals. They use it while posting something on social media, sharing their own experiences, and reaching out to potential candidates. That is one aspect of it.

The second aspect, I would say, is not just confining it to recruiters. Let’s include employees as well because they are also the brand ambassadors for a company. Until and unless they share their own experiences with the outside world, we won’t be able to generate the kind of interest we want.

To be a brand ambassador, everyone has to be a storyteller, and storytelling doesn’t come naturally to everyone. So, there are certain tools, like employee advocacy tools, but what I personally feel is when so many employees post the same content again and again, it becomes very monotonous and repetitive. That’s where coaching becomes very important for those employees—like what kind of stories they can include in their postings and what kind of genuine employee experiences they can portray on their accounts. This is one of my major focus areas.

The second important thing is recruitment marketing, which is a very important part of employer branding altogether. For recruitment marketing globally, we are very much interested in using programmatic advertising tools. These tools help us use different channels to advertise our job postings on various platforms across the internet. That is another aspect of it and there are different AI assistants.

Lydia: I was just going to bring that up. It’s Emma, isn’t it?

Amresh: Yes. In fact, you don't have to fill out the whole form because it is very boring for any candidate to just fill in all the fields in a job form. But if you go to our career site, you can chat with Emma, and Emma will ask you questions step by step, like, "What is your name? What is your experience? What was your university? What was your first company?" So, you'll feel like you're chatting with a real person, and while doing that, you will have completed your entire form.

So that is how it works. In between, if you would like to know more about the company culture—for example, you are at the fourth step where you talked about educational qualifications, but suddenly you thought, "Okay, let me ask about the status of diversity and inclusion in the company." Emma will take a pause, reply to you, and then get back to completing the form.

From Form Fatigue to Enhanced Engagement

Lydia: Amresh, in terms of comparing having an AI assistant, like “Emma,” a recruiting assistant, I think it's called. A recruiting AI avatar, so to speak, speaking to a candidate who's interested in knowing about the company vs having a real person talk to them or fill out the form, as you said.

What might be the difference in terms of the impact that you've observed so far?

Amresh: So we have seen the volume of applications have definitely increased per job posting or as we call it the bounce rate. The bounce rate has increased. Earlier, there used to be four or five pages to fill up the form, and most candidates would get bored after two or three pages.

But here we don't see the bounce rate has decreased. Definitely one of the major things. But also, let me tell you, the page visits. So suppose someone visited our career site but wants to know more about our products and services. Through Emma, they have been able to visit those pages as well. So we have been able to increase the page visits as well.

Lydia: And this goes back to the Talent Team then. So Emma sits under the employee branding team, or does it go under recruiting? How does it work?

Amresh: So it comes under TA. Our TA operations own it.

Lydia: So in terms of what Emma, when I experienced Emma earlier or tried her out a little bit, she asked me to let her know what kind of information I would need about the culture, etc.

So that kind of content, does it come from the employer branding side, or does it come from the TA team?

Amresh: I think you're talking about the content that Emma is able to respond to. Does that fall under employer branding? I think it's teamwork between our marketing communications, TA, and HR teams, and we have a certain set of content that is with Emma. So Emma decides at what point in time, what she has to show.

Lydia: So in terms of defining employer branding or identifying where it really sits, in your view or your experience, where do you think employer branding sits within an organization? It can sometimes be a function on its own, or it may sit within the HR function. What is your take on that?

Amresh: Employer branding is essentially about being able to communicate your culture, your EVP, and your employee experience with potential candidates, right? So that we can become the employer of choice and show how these things differentiate us from our competitors.

The question is, which department does it? Well, whether it's HR, TA, or marketing, I think it's not that employer branding didn’t exist before—it did exist in the early '90s and in the 2000s as well. But I think all the initiatives were not taken under one umbrella. Now, what we have done is we have brought everything that relates to employer branding under this one umbrella and called it Employer Branding.

Normally, what I have seen is that Employer Branding is nested under TA, and that is the case with us as well. At times, I have seen it fall under HR, and at times under marketing as well. But in my opinion, if you ask me, employer branding should be an independent function because it is, in itself, a cross-functional role.

It’s not that if it is a separate function, you won’t be working very closely with marketing, HR, and TA—you would still be working with them. But then, I think separating it from those departments will give it more power and make it more independent.

Lydia: Yes, and in terms of managing negative perceptions or negative feedback that comes through different channels, online, or even if you've got so many ways to access candidate experience. The way in which people give reviews to a company is not like how people give reviews to restaurants, for instance, or some service sector, right?

So what are some strategies or some ways that you use to manage this kind of negative perception?

Amresh: Okay, so let's call out the elephant in the room. I mean, this is one area where we are very much concerned, and I think every employer is as well. Here at JCI, we take the opportunity presented by negative reviews to improve ourselves. And I think it's very important as an employer to be transparent.

So whether it's Glassdoor reviews, Indeed reviews, AmbitionBox reviews—which are external platforms—or reviews coming through our internal surveys, we take these as opportunities to show employees that we are listening to them. And not just listening—we are improving.

We also make sure to get back to the employees with communication about what we have improved. A very popular campaign was run by our HR team called You Asked, and We Delivered. All the feedback was taken very seriously and sincerely by the HR team. They worked on it as a company, and then they communicated back to the employees, saying, You Asked, and We Delivered.

So, I think it's very important for any organization to have two-way communication. We have so many meetings and town halls, but let's also give employees a chance to share their feedback.

Lydia: So going back to these little points of data that you get feedback, whether it's internal tools that you use all the different points of data. I mean, what might be some ways for a specialist in employer branding? What may be some ways for them to be able to analyze this data and also effectively story tell that data to their talent teams or their marketing teams, or even branding or even senior management?

Amresh: I would say ROI in employer branding is very important, and it can be looked at in two different ways. One is qualitative, and the second is quantitative. So when you talk about conversions from the page visits or the conversion sponsors, we have data for that. But there are certain aspects where, basically, what we’re trying to do is change the perception of potential candidates and employees.

But how do you measure that? For that, we have different feedback forms, and we calculate the NPS scores—Net Promoter Score. Now, as a recruiter or as an employer branding specialist, we have the data, but how do we present it to our internal stakeholders and external stakeholders?

For this, I think it’s very important to be a good storyteller. So we convert this data into proper storytelling—like how the project was initiated, what the purpose behind it was, where we have reached now, and what our goal is. We map out our journey from start to end, and that is how we communicate with our internal stakeholders.

Externally, I think it becomes very important to pick certain data points. For example, we did this Great Place to Work certification last year, and about 78%—just to give you an example—78% of the employees said that it’s a great place to work, or 73% of the employees feel that they are valued and listened to by their managers.

So we keep picking up this data and utilizing it during our employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts. This is how we do it.

Lydia: So employer branding and the data that comes out of employer branding I would imagine it's not always a straight road upwards. It is always this way and that way. You've got different reasons for your employer brand, right?

So in terms of making sure that you deliver those figures or be on top of the sentiments, they come out. A lot of employer brand is about sentiments internal and also external. So how do you effectively keep tabs on that, and how frequently do you need to review the way in which your employer brand is going?

Amresh: We do track it on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. We have QBR meetings. But if you want to know how the perception of employees has improved—whether it’s your ex-employees, current employees, or candidates—I think review sites, which are also called reputation sites, like Glassdoor reviews and Indeed reviews, are a great reflection of that.

There are certain other applications, like TalentNeuron and Talent Insights by LinkedIn, where you can actually see what keywords are being used by candidates and employees. Through that, you can analyze whether the sentiments of the employees are positive or negative. So that’s one way of doing it.

Secondly, you can look at the conversion rates and the TTF—time to fill. If you’re able to reach out to the right candidates and attract the right kind of candidates—the quality candidates—your TTF, or time to fill, will be reduced.

This is another way of looking at it. So, this is how we use data in different aspects to analyze how our employer branding journey is progressing, right?

Lydia: Amresh, you've also been a recruiter right in the first part of your career, before moving in. It was a coordinator for recruitment. Do you happen to have a favorite story on recruitment, or any kind of anecdote that you'd like to share on recruitment?

Amresh: Yes, I think it also relates to employer branding. This was in my second company, where I was supporting my TA function. My second company had been in business for about 140 years, and during a walk-in, we happened to encounter a candidate who was the third generation applying to the same company.

His grandfather worked for the company for 35 years. His father worked for the company for 35 years. And now he was joining the same company. This is how you look at legacy. We wanted to understand why he was joining Santa Fe Location, and he had a unique story to tell. He said that because of the values you have, it's in my DNA now.

So, I would say that recruitment and onboarding are not just random practices. They have a lot to do with the sentiments of people. That is why, in employer branding, we always say that we touch human emotions. Employer branding is the flag bearer of company culture.

It becomes very important that you are actually changing people's experiences, whether they are your ex-employees, current employees, or potential candidates.

Lydia: So for those starting out in employer branding today, or who want to consider a career or future focusing on employer branding, what advice would you give them?

Amresh: Well, I would say that they have to be passionate about people, about storytelling, and about brands. This is one function where you have to be a good marketeer, and you also have to be a people person. Only then can you achieve success in this particular field.

And if people are transitioning from other roles into this, then again, I would say, get some professional certifications and focus on upskilling. But if someone wants to start from the beginning, they want to choose this as a career, I’m not very sure that many institutes have this as an independent course.

However, I remember studying a lot of related topics under OD—organizational development—as part of HR. I also bring a lot of applications and leverage the learnings I had in my marketing classes over here. So, it’s an amalgamation of both fields, you see.

Yeah, so I would go back to my first statement: people have to be passionate about people, and they have to be good marketers.

Lydia: And being good marketers also means being great with data and being able to analyze that data. Thank you so much, Amresh, for your time and your insights into employee branding specifically. And I wish you all the best. But for those who are listening in, who might want to pick up a conversation with you, who want to connect with you, what’s the best platform?

Amresh: Thank you so much, Lydia. I really enjoyed this session. People can reach out to me on my LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/amreshpy, and if someone is a candidate, and interested in Johnson Controls, you can just log on to jobs.johnsoncontrols.com and look at our career site. If you're interested, you can chat with Emma, and then Emma will surely help you out.

Lydia: Yes, thank you, Amresh. We've been in conversation with Amresh Yadav of Johnson Controls. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.