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.
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 joining us today is Yana Romanova of SEMrush. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today, Yana. Good afternoon.
Yana: Good afternoon and good evening to you. Happy to be here, and thank you for inviting me.
Building a Brand That Speaks to Everyone, Everywhere
Lydia: So, Yana, walk us through your journey in the employee branding space. What are some moments that have really shaped your experience so far?
Yana: It's a good question. I guess I can mention two key points here. First of all, the fact that I joined my current employer seven years ago has provided me with the opportunity to work with a really international market, to work with different people from different cultures, to understand them better, and to find some creative ways to solve some problems. This was very useful for my career and for my perspective on employer branding.
The second point is quite life-changing, I would say because I moved to Berlin, Germany, where I'm staying right now. By doing so, I focused on three main countries for our company: the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain where I had the opportunity to go deeper into the target audience, culture, and languages of these three countries. It also boosted my experience because it just broadened my horizons and when you understand people better from different points of view, it actually influences your work, because we work with employer brands. This is in marketing: people, emotions, people’s feelings, people’s ways of thinking, and how they make decisions.
The more diverse understanding you have on your side, the better it is for you and for your future campaigns.
Lydia: Yes, that's right. In terms of your focus in this space, what are some key areas that you're looking into right now?
Yana: Actually, this question is right on time because my team and I just wrapped up a strategic session yesterday. It was two days of brainstorming, and the main goal was to create a roadmap for the project next year, with my key focus on ideas for the following two or three months. I need to find a way to combine two different approaches.
First, we need to care about the brand globally, which is our current strategy. But at the same time, we should use a tailored approach with our key stakeholders, who come from different areas like marketing, development, and sales. They hire people from all over the world, in different countries, and we need to localize our strategy and messages while maintaining the uniqueness and identity of our brand.
It's quite tricky, and this is our challenge for next year, but I think it makes the next year more exciting and interesting for us. It seems we found a way to do this because we have created some ideas and projects, but this is my main focus right now.
Lydia: So you talked about collaboration with different stakeholders inside a company to create that cohesive brand. In terms of the initial ideas on how to make this happen have you had any different kinds of collaboration strategies with the different stakeholders in the company?
Yana: Oh yes, for sure, because we try to serve as an agency, mostly within the company, so they can ask us for help. We mostly help with hiring. We try to attract as many loyal candidates as we can or maybe not loyal, but our goal is also to make them loyal to our brand.
I collaborate with them, and my team also speaks about marketing as one of the departments within the company. I’ve heard a lot of stories about clashes between employer branding and marketing because we have quite a common area. In our company, I don’t know why, but historically, there have been no clashes. They work on the product, we work on employer branding promotion, and the only way to collaborate with them not so long ago, we tried to use one message. For example, they launched a huge campaign with some slogans or some messages. We adjusted our strategy and campaign with the same message. For example, the last campaign was about success, and it was called ‘Make It.’ They tried to explain, or people tried to highlight the fact that success is not what it used to be. Right now, it’s not about big, expensive cars, beautiful houses, and high fences. It’s actually about something different. It’s about your own world, your inner world, I would say. It’s about about harmony, about love for what you do. We just adjusted our strategy as well.
We launched the same campaign with the same slogan, ‘Make It,’ and it was very successful. People were very responsive to that, but it was very focused on employer branding for our roles.
Why Internal Culture is the Foundation of Successful Employer Branding
Lydia: And in terms of these employer branding strategies, this is one of those that you found to be very successful. In terms of any other kinds of innovative strategies that you have tried in the past, or you have seen in the past, what have you found to be most effective?
Yana: The most effective for me, is not very innovative, let me be honest, from my point of view.
Because the most effective strategy is when you build your brand based on your internal culture. Your internal culture should be strong enough, should be unique enough, and people really should share this perspective.
When your employees understand why you’re unique, it makes them proud of working with your brand. So it’s easier to promote the employer brand. It’s like a starting point. Work with culture, and after that, you’ll have plenty of brand ambassadors, plenty of loyal employees, who will be ready to share your content organically without any request, because they’re really proud of their culture and the company.
So I guess it’s the most successful approach in employer branding, because, by then, the candidates’ expectations and realities should be matched. If you have something internally, promote it. But if you don’t have it, don’t talk about it in your employer branding campaign.
Lydia: Yes. So in that case, employer branding is dynamic, especially in a very competitive space that Semrush is in right now, like tech analytics. So how do you keep that employer brand dynamic and speak to the kinds of people you want to attract?
Yana: If only I knew the right answer, but based on my experience, I guess the key here is constant experimentation. Be flexible enough to stop initiatives that don't work for you anymore. If you see it, please stop immediately and switch your focus to something else. Try it. Experiment. Be brave enough. I hope the company you work for will provide this opportunity.
Luckily, we’re not limited here at Semrush with all our experimenting. If you have dynamics within your team and your approaches, it will directly influence the brand and its dynamics as well. Also, as an additional piece of advice, keep an eye on the dynamics. Follow your competitors closely. Follow leaders and influencers in your industry because they can share insights that could inspire you as well. These are quite generic pieces of advice. They could work not only for branding but for other areas too. That’s what I can recommend.
Why Flexibility is Crucial in Reporting Employer Branding Metrics
Lydia: So in terms of measuring the impact, how do you measure and communicate that employer branding impact, or ROI, to the different stakeholder groups inside a company?
Yana: How do we measure it? We have numerous metrics. It’s about awareness. It’s about sources. For example, how exactly do we get CVs and which channels? Brand awareness metrics as well. It’s also about things like time to hire, cost of hiring, and all these related metrics. But how do I communicate this to our stakeholders? Actually, I handle it very individually, because I know that different stakeholders require different information, and I try not to overwhelm them with all our metrics. In general, most of them care about how many people we hire and how many people we reach with our activities.
From time to time, I also show them how brand activities influence the time to hire, because ideally, all your campaigns should reduce the time to hire. I share the regular funnel, showing how many people are at the top, how many people we reach (our awareness and total reach), and, in the end, how many people we hire because of the HR brand.
In between, I include how many people move from reach to the interview stage, then to the second interview, to the offer stage, and finally to hiring. In most cases, the funnel is quite self-explanatory and covers the main needs of stakeholders.
But again, it depends. For example, one time I had a stakeholder who wanted to closely monitor our meetup ad boards and see how campaigns were performing in real time, with all the metrics. That wasn’t a problem—we provided that information. But it’s a real case. So yeah, I guess you need to stay flexible here.
Lydia: In terms of working with HR, or rather, working with talent acquisition, what is the communication like between the two? How do you really collaborate to make sure that you get the talent, or you get the kind of candidates that you desire for specific roles?
Yana: With talent acquisition, we constantly work together. We have common channels, common meetings, and a clear process. We need to receive information about the main hiring challenges, right? First, about candidate profiles, who exactly they’re looking for and trying to reach, and second, the challenges they face on this journey. We discuss these regularly. It’s not a quarterly or annual process; it’s daily work. We collaborate closely.
As for HR, it’s tied to our organizational structure. Yeah, we’re in the same department, which means we work closely together. We have weekly meetings, bi-weekly stand-ups, and monthly demos. This helps us keep track of what’s going on, like turnover rates, account plans, and our main priorities for the company right now. Our position and place within the company’s organization solve most potential problems because we’re integrated with HR. We’re like a team, working closely as part of HR and talent acquisition.
Turning Criticism into Insight: The Power of Listening and Responding
Lydia: You've had this experience looking into employer branding for a pretty large brand, and also looking at how dynamic that space has become. So what advice would you give someone who is starting out in the employer branding space today?
Yana: I guess, first of all, you should understand why your company or brand needs employer branding. You can ask this question to the CEO, to the people who hired you, or to the manager who decided to establish this department. Ask them: why do you need employer branding? It’s very important because, based on that, you can build your strategy. Believe me, the answers to this question could be completely different, and it’s not always about awareness. Some people might mean internal culture or communications. It depends.
So, start with this question. Once you understand the answer and build a strategy, try to determine how you will measure whether you’ve actually achieved your goal, because it should be measurable. For example, imagine they ask you to increase awareness. Okay, how will you know you’ve actually increased awareness? Will it be enough if you stop 10 people on the street and they say, ‘Yeah, I know this brand’? Or maybe you need 50% of the population to be aware of your brand? That’s also quite important.
These two questions, I guess, are a good starting point for everyone, not only for those who are new to this sphere or in junior positions, but also for people who are starting to work on employer branding in a new company as well.
Lydia: I just have one additional question on top of this. When you're looking at why you need an employer brand, and also handling that employer brand, it is not necessarily a straight role. Sometimes you're hit with negative feedback coming from outside, or, you've got to navigate around a crisis situation. So how do you go about handling that from an employer branding perspective?
Yana: Actually, it’s a huge area of work, and we call it online reputation management. But it’s not always just about online reputation. In many cases, it’s about offline reputation as well. We try to go deeper into each case. For example, if we receive a negative review on Glassdoor, we gather information about what happened in real life. We share this information with recruitment or HR and ask them about the case like what happened, who was involved.
It’s not about punishing anyone but rather about understanding the real situation so we can craft a thoughtful response. We take a very unique approach because we’re not big fans of using generic replies for everything. We try to address each case specifically, solve the issue if possible, and offer help from our side. Sometimes, we provide our contact information for further discussion, but not in an open space. We usually go through direct messages.
Lydia: Indeed. Because this is obviously a space in which employer branding teams would have to face as well, while crafting that and also monitoring what is coming through in terms of feedback and experience of a candidate.
So Yana, thank you very much for these insights, and especially your time today. For those who are listening in, they are probably curious about starting the employer brand somewhere, or wanting to know a little bit more about what you've just shared, where can they contact you?
Yana: LinkedIn is the most effective way to reach me out, and I'll be happy to see your messages and additional questions you might have. It's easy to find me there, use my name and company name.
Lydia: Thank you again, Yana. We have been in conversation with Yana Romanova of Semrush. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe and stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All In Recruitment.
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