EP132: exaqueo - Aligning Employer Brand with EX

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 this week is Shannon Smedstad of exaqueo. It’s good to have you with us, Shannon.

Shannon: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Lydia.

Common Misunderstandings About Employer Branding

Lydia: So, tell us about your journey in the employer branding space, Shannon. What are some key insights you've observed in this space recently?

Shannon: Sure. I've been in recruitment, employer brands, and employee communications for over 25 years. The majority of my career was spent in-house for organizations like GEICO, which is one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, where I built their first ever employer brand.

In 2016, I moved from in-house as a practitioner to consulting, and over the past eight plus years, I've worked with numerous clients around the world on understanding, building, designing their employer brand as well as activating it.

So, some insights that I've observed recently, is one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is, what is employer brand, right? I've been in the space since 2008, so it is a long time, but there is still a lot of noise or chatter or misunderstandings about what employer branding really is.

Lydia: What are some common misunderstandings about employer branding?

Shannon: That it is just something that talent acquisition does, or it is just this execution of storytelling or photos or that it's just an outward facing recruitment marketing.

Employer brand is often used almost interchangeably with EVP or employer value proposition or employee value proposition or recruitment marketing and when I think about employer brand at its very core, it's the promise an organization makes about the type of employment experience they're going to offer someone.

It is the promise that we make to our people, and we have to deliver the employee and candidate experiences on that over and over again. So employer brand isn't just something that talent acquisition or recruitment does. It really is more of a people and culture imperative, and it is something that should be felt and seen and experienced across the organization.

Lydia: Very organically and just moving into the organization and then taking it outwards, so that a candidate who sees it might be inspired to join a company. Is that right?

Shannon: Employer brands should be built from the inside out to understand our people, and then when we're sharing it externally, that is to attract people who will thrive inside the unique promise that we offer.

Employer Brand Touchpoints That Matter

Lydia: When you evaluate a company's employer brand across the whole employment life cycle, what are some key touch points that you look at?

Shannon: Yes, it's a great question. So when we're looking at understanding an employer brand, we always start by first talking with employees or looking externally with the talent market. The early touch points are first around understanding, do people even know that the organization exists? So we work with clients that are huge, where people would know them globally but we also work with organizations that don't have that brand recognition. So we want to understand how people first learn about them. We might look at their social media and their career site.

We might go to news websites to see how people are finding out about the company, and we ask individuals, how did you first learn about the opportunity here? So we don't make assumptions that we know the touch points. We ask individuals how they're learning, how they become aware, what made them interested, and who they are talking to that may have influenced them as well.

Then once someone is hired and they're onboarded, we'll work with our clients to understand, how they do onboarding? What are the platforms? How are you communicating the employment experience to your employees? What is your intranet? What are your email communications? Do you do a referral program? Do you have an internal career site? So we look at all of the touch points from hire to retire. When somebody is thinking about transitioning outside of the organization, or they might be retiring from that company. So it's very comprehensive.

Lydia: Yes, indeed. It's a whole long cycle that you look at, and it never ends, I suppose.

Shannon: We've got clients where people leave and come back. So, you've got Boomerang. Why did they boomerang and how to engage them. Some people will retire, and then they decide, "Actually, I want to come back and work a few hours, or I might go work at a different company. So their life cycle is pretty fluid and continuous.

Bringing Employer Brand Insights to Life

Lydia: When you communicate this value to the stakeholders and business, I mean, how do you, how do you story, tell that data, and how do you communicate, or, how do you visualize the impact on the business and its business overall, overall goals?

Shannon: When I was working in-house and with clients, talking to leaders, understanding what is important to them, what is the data that's important to them as it relates to people and culture as we go through and do our qualitative and quantitative research. We have got methodologies and procedures that we can dissect and understand the experience, and then we are visualizing it based on what we hear from people, learn about the work environment, and about the people that are there, and what we are learning about the culture?

Then we do use data storytelling. I work with my insights team to bring that data to life, to tell the story, and be able to socialize that with leadership to get their buy in and take them on that journey, to use the data, the authentic, unbiased research, to help them articulate what their employer brand and help them define and shape it.

Lydia: Then point towards the action steps that they would have to take internally as well.

Shannon: Yes. If we're working with a client that wants to do the workforce research, and they want to build the employer brand strategy, then we can. If a client wants, we can help them to launch and activate that strategy.

So from the research that's where we learn which touchpoints to focus on and are going to have the greatest impact, that have the most influence or the most frequent use, and we can help build and design, launch the activation and ongoing brand activation plans for client.

Aligning Brand Promise with Employee Experience

Lydia: You mentioned the brand promise and the experience having to be aligned. So how do you identify disconnects between the brand promise and the actual experience?

Shannon: Everything always starts with the conversation and the research for us.

I do a lot of focus groups and interviews. So I've spent this week doing quite a few leadership interviews, and I've also been conducting employee focus groups. In those conversations, we start to ask, "Can you tell me about this particular part of the culture?” How do you want to show up? We might get some general assumptions from leaders or our main points of contact, and then, in the focus groups or surveys, we can test those assumptions.

For example, if an organization says, "Part of our brand is that we care about our people,” we can go to the focus groups and ask, "Do you feel as though the organization cares about you?" In a survey, we might ask, "Do you feel as though your manager or your teams care about you?” Do you feel a sense of care? Why or why not? We can dig into that and then come back to leaders and say, "Yes, you're promising that, and it's authentically lived.”

Or we might come back and say, "Actually, that's how you want to show up, but it's not being authentically experienced by your employees, and we may need to address that.”

Lydia: Shannon, what elements do you think make the biggest impact on candidate engagement?

Shannon: So in that early stage when someone is first looking for opportunities, I think career sites, an organization's career site, are the largest and most visible expression of your employer brand. That's where we showcase what the culture is like. We're highlighting videos, recognizing our people, and displaying photos. We can clearly articulate what it's like to work here through that career site.

Whether it's a single-page scrolling site or a multi-page site with a lot of content, I think it has a significant impact in telling your story and helping you own your narrative. It's also going to either attract people who will thrive in your organization or encourage those who won't to opt out. So, I think the career site is really a place to focus and bring that story to life.

Lydia: When it comes to automation and using technology, it's how do companies or how should companies balance automation and that human touch in the whole candidate experience as they discover the company through their career page or social media or wherever.

Shannon: I was a recruiter for many years. I was a desk recruiter, managing requisitions, and this was a long time ago, right before we even had AI and all of these other tools. That high-touch interaction, that conversation, that relationship between the recruiter and the hiring manager with the candidate, if we can give our recruiters more time to focus on that and automate more of the tactical, high-volume logistics and administrative work, that's where I would prioritize automation.

If we know that scheduling takes a lot of time, how do we empower and enable our recruiters through a scheduling platform or technology? By automating that process, we free up their time so they can have more meaningful conversations. If we know that candidates repeatedly ask the same questions, instead of recruiters fielding countless emails and phone calls, perhaps that’s a use case for a chatbot on the career site.

When we can remove administrative and tactical tasks through automation, that's a great use of time. It allows recruiters to focus on building relationships, having meaningful conversations, and working with hiring managers as advisors to candidates.

That’s where my mind goes when it comes to balancing high-tech efficiency with high-touch engagement.

Lydia: How do you partner with internal stakeholders to amplify that employer brand message?

Shannon: Yes, so there are a lot of different stakeholders. I think it's important to identify your stakeholder audiences. One group that comes to mind is executives. How do we get them on board? How do we ensure everyone is aligned and working from the same playbook on how our organization is going to show up for our people? Part of that might involve roadshows, socialization, and having conversations at the executive level.

Then, there's another group that needs training and access to tools and resources. Our recruiters are key internal stakeholders who need to bring the employer brand to life for candidates. So, how are we thinking about training them and equipping them with the right information and tools to deliver on that? Are we creating toolkits and guides? Are we building an asset library where people can self-serve and access brand assets, so they’re not creating things on their own or going rogue? By providing the right information and tools, we enable them to do their day-to-day jobs effectively.

Is Your Onboarding Reflecting Your Brand Values?

Lydia: Now, in terms of missed opportunities when it comes to employer branding or even company onboarding programs, the very early stage is critical, obviously. So what are some common missed opportunities that you might have seen over the course of these years in company onboarding programs?

Shannon: Onboarding is a really interesting part of the employment lifecycle. You’ve gone from job seeker to candidate, and now you’re still new at the company, trying to figure things out. You’re also making a decision: Did I join the right place? Is what I learned externally or what my recruiter told me is actually what I’m experiencing now?

One of the biggest missed opportunities we see when digging into the employee experience around onboarding is that people either aren’t receiving onboarding at all or aren’t getting a consistent onboarding experience. I’ll go back to the care example. If our organization claims that one of our employer brand pillars is care, but then I hire someone, and on their first day, their manager says, "I didn’t even know you were starting today,” or they show up and are told, "Yes, your computer isn’t set up yet. You’ll have to wait another week,” or even if people know you're coming, they don’t check in on you, or they just sit you in front of a computer and say, "Here’s all your paperwork and go fill it out. See you later.” That kind of experience doesn’t deliver on the brand promise.

When we fail to onboard properly, don’t onboard consistently, or don’t train our people leaders and teams on how to align onboarding with the brand, we’re missing major opportunities.

Lydia: So, Shannon, you've had all these years of looking into employee branding and also hands on experience being a recruiter. What advice would you give someone who's starting out in the space today?

Shannon: I think it is to be curious. You do not have to have all of the answers, be a connector, have conversations, and find people across the organization. Have a conversation with them to find out why they joined? Why do they stay at the company? Be really well networked within and outside of your organization. Learn from the community because there are a lot of people on LinkedIn. There's a Facebook group called “The Employer Brand Forum” with over 2,000 people in that group talking about employer brand. There are communities and places where you can go for information. So stay curious, learn, stay connected, and think beyond social media. When we do an employer brand, it is very strategic because it can influence whether or not someone applies. It also influences your company's reputation and your consumer brand. It's not just taking photos and posting them on Instagram. So, think beyond social.

Lydia: Thank you, Shannon, for these insights, and especially for your time today. So for those listening in who might want to learn a little bit more about employer branding, or just want to connect with you, where can they find you?

Shannon: Thank you for having me and inviting me. I appreciate it. If anyone's interested in connecting, I'm on LinkedIn, Shannon Smedstad.

Lydia: Thank you, Shannon. We have been in conversation with Shannon Smedstad. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All In Recruitment.