Employer Brand Playbook and Strategies for Companies of all Sizes

First thing, this is the title. Just make sure everybody's in the right place and that is me. And secondly, yes, thank you so much to our sponsor. Proco a real wonderful platform for offering all of your employees an opportunity to share the good things about work. Then the next slide. Oh, I am wearing the same shirt today. As you might see, we have already covered a little bit about me. I'd love to hear a little bit more about you, but the first thing that I wanna offer is anybody like me who wants to kind of get a sneak peek or follow the presentation that I am sharing, you can just download it right now, right here along with me. Just use the QR code or go to the link that Sarah is sharing and you can download the deck and we will be fast friends. Sound good? Great. So here is, uh, the first way that you can tell me more about yourself. We're gonna launch a poll and I'd love to know from you, does your company have an articulated employer value proposition? So now is the time to weigh in. This is your opportunity to say, yes, we have an articulated employer value proposition, also known as EVP. We plan to initiate an EVP project within the next three to six months, or seven to 12 months. No, and I don't know. And then I will leave it to you to let us know when they stop coming in and share the results so we could take a look at them. Absolutely. Let's just give it a couple more seconds. Sure. We're at 60% participation. Love it. Love seeing this number climb. Awesome. Few more seconds for everyone to put their final answers in before we close the poll. Alright, so here's the results. Okay, so love this. Uh, congrats to everybody in the 27% that does have it. Congrats to everybody that is looking to do it within the next three to six months. It's probably a 2024 initiative. I love it. Uh, for all of you who don't have one, great, perfect that you're going to be here with me now. And for all of the people who don't know, yes, I get that. So thank you very much for weighing in. And the reason that I ask is that we, uh, every year we launch a state of the employer brand survey. In fact, we have one now for anybody who answered yes that they have one. Chances are you probably participated in that initiative. You could weigh in, take the survey. Sarah's posting a link to the survey right now, and what I thought I would do is share some of the findings that we had in our results from last year's survey. And very similar to what we have, half of the survey respondents have an articulated EVP or plan to initiate one sometime soon. So if you are a geek and you wanted to know the stats, you will see yes, uh, plan to initiate. Plan to initiate. And yes, and also very similar to what we heard is that no 30% of the people do not have one and 16% of the people I didn't know, they did not know if they had one or not. So perhaps the reason for that is they weren't quite sure what an articulated employer value proposition is or a reason for that. And we're going to get to that. But also I wanted you to see so that you can kind of compare to the organizational size where everybody landed. So for the people that did have one, you will see that a large majority of them had very large employee populations. And that is a strong correlation between the people that are looking for their employer value proposition to do some of the heavy lifting for their recruitment marketing. So that makes perfect sense. But you'll also see that large organizations also did not have one. And you know, if you look at the population of 1000 to over 5,000, you'll see that it didn't necessarily mean that just because you were large or were small, if you look at the small version, chances are if you're small, you may have one as well. So size is kind of not important. What is important is that you understand what it can do for you, which we will cover what it could do for you, which we'll cover and you understand a little bit more about what it's, so the employer value proposition, um, the many word, the many word description of it is the unique set of offerings, benefits, and experiences an employee receives in return for work. Some people think of it as a tagline, a slogan, a glimpse, a mirror. What I like to think of it is as the essence of your company's culture, what it stands for, how to get people around it, how to make sure that everybody communicates with it, shares for it, is motivated by it, and can kind of understand a little bit more about your culture through seeing it on the ways in which you are promoting it. Um, why it matters. Uh, yeah, it does matter because really over recent ADP research in May of this year said that there are 10 million job openings where only 6 million people are actively looking for work. And what that means is that people are fighting over a small and possibly shrinking pool of workers so that everybody, right now everybody should be thinking about your talent brand, the perceptions that your employees have about you as an employer, and how you can promote your brand architecture, your EVP to friends, family, shareable, have people really become ambassadors. So if you think about that, it does become a little bit more important in a way to have it, you get to own your narrative, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that. So if you think about yourselves as a consumer, if you have a great experience with a company, if you have a great experience with a product or service, you wanna share it, you wanna tell your friends about it. If you have a wonderful car, you want your friends to get the same car. Conversely, if you have a bad experience with your employer, if you have a bad experience as a candidate applying for a job, if you've gone into that black hole, you are gonna tell people about that. If you've gone to a restaurant and you've had a bad experience, you are going to tell more people about the bad experience than the good experience. So it's very important to understand what people are saying and sharing because there's no such thing as internal communications anymore. So I, I kind of look at these things, um, as kind of a, a social anthropologist. And I saw that an article that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine described the set of Jimmy Fallon's as Toxic workplace. And that becomes very big news. And that becomes news that you're going to read about in the New York Times because then Jimmy Fallon apologizes to his staff. And we could think about this things, you know, these things that have happened, I think, uh, famous people have been known for these kinds of toxic workplaces and things that used to happen that only a very small amount of people would share either to their coworkers or their social friends are now becoming more and more out there in the world. It also is a very, I saw when people were listing who they are, we had brand people, maybe marketing people, internal communications, but you may know this, there's a very strong correlation between what people are sharing about your organization as a workplace and how your consumers and your customers are thinking about it. And here's just one way that I found this, which is that I went to TripAdvisor to find out more about a pizza place and what their customers were saying about it. And they said that this service sucks. Okay? And then I found an article about what it's like to work there and it says, you'll likely work understaffed. So your culture is going to be one that you're asked to do more because it's short staffed and there is the connection. If you're understaffed, the service is going to suck. So it makes sense to make sure that you not only understand what people are sharing, but you have to make sure of what that employee experience is like and also what your candidate experience is like that allows you to own the narrative. So let's talk about that a little bit more. When you're doing recruitment marketing, when you're putting out your job postings, when you're putting forth your internal communications to your employees, chances are it's one way stream where you are communicating a message to your candidates or to your employees, and it's that one way stream. But if you think about this as this very intentional process to own the narrative, you think about what you want that narrative to be. What is it? What does it look like? How should it be? You're designing an experience that you are bringing to life, you're designing an experience that people will understand in advance of coming to you, and then chances are they're going to be a better culture fit, a better culture ed, it's going to be very consistent. There won't be any surprises and people will come stay and recommend, and that's what you want. So it's all connected, right? Everything starts with your mission, vision, values. And if you are in the branding side of things, you are thinking about your benefits, your differentiators, your reasons to believe, to get people to buy more of your products, to sample more of your services, build your customer base, build that loyalty. So it's the same thing. Your employer brand is really an EVP talking about the benefits of you as an employer, the differentiators of your culture, giving people reasons to believe as part of that segmented value proposition. And those reasons to believe could be different depending on what role and what segment or what geography you are working in. I saw that there's a lot of people from all over the world, so thanks for being here. And it's important to understand that your culture may change based on where you are, but you wanna make sure that there are no surprises when you are advertising for that. So for all of the people that are thinking about launching in the next three to six months, let's talk about what that looks like. Okay? When we talk about an articulated EVP, this is what we mean. It's a foundational house that we can look at from the bottom up that connects everybody in every position everywhere to that culture and their part in making sure that it is wonderful. So we build it from the bottom up. We look at what connects everybody by what they're doing. And I don't know if everybody's familiar with that, um, it's probably not true, but it's the story that JFK told about a janitor at nasa and he asked the janitor what he does, and the janitor said, I put men on the moon. So it's making sure that everybody is connected to that higher purpose purpose. So starting from there, what it is that you do is that employer brand vision. If you're putting men on the moon, how are you doing that differently? So chances are most of the people on the call are not putting men on the moon. So if you think about what you are doing with your organization, also, I'm gonna take a wild guess here, that you have competitors. And so it may be of interest to note how what you are doing, if you are doing pizza, how are you doing pizza differently? Those are your differentiators. And you think about it both, uh, as a brand business alignment, but also think about what makes your culture different. And then you ladder it up and using the pizza story, think about why people are joining you to do pizza with you, right? And that is the framework of the employer value proposition. And whether that appears anywhere, whether that appears on your wall, in your reception area, on your career site, is totally up to you. Whether that appears in your internal communications also totally up to you. But the positioning statement is what typically people go to market with. And that's typically the tagline, the theme, the Nike, let's do it. That's the positioning statement. And chances are that's going to change a little bit more based on who you're advertising for, who in the internal comms space you might be talking to. And you could have segments of that. But the employer value proposition should be that one overarching foundational thing that pulls everyone together. So now I'm gonna ask you to do a little bit more work here. We're gonna launch another poll. And if you have been or are thinking about the primary goals, uh, and efforts of your employer branding efforts, if you have recently gone through this, if you're thinking about going through this, I would just like to know like why it is that you are doing this. Are you looking to become well known as an employer of choice? Are you looking for ease in attracting candidates? Is it that you're going through a corporate rebranding and looking to align with that? Uh, increased employee retention, increased employee engagement? Let me know what's the primary goal? Are they doing, are they coming in? Yes, they are. We are at 54% participation. All good god. And growing. I know there's no multitasking allowed when you're doing the polls. I it a couple more seconds before I close. All right, so here are the results. Okay? So 38% recognition as an employer of choice. That is really, really good. So I wanna come back to that towards the end because if that is your goal, we have at the end we'll talk about ways to measure that ease in attracting candidates. Yeah, it's, it's not easy, right? And the less people you're looking to hire, the harder it is to hire them, uh, because you don't have all of those funds available to make a big splash. Put that megaphone out there and it becomes really, really hard. So good for you. Alignment with corporate branding also very, very popular. Popular. Uh, and that's because people def people in human resources. Communications don't necessarily have to pay if the corporate is going through a rebranding that just comes out of the marketing brand. So that's great. Increased employee retention, surprisingly, I'm very surprised by that. But increased employee engagement, that's very cool also. So let's see, uh, also very similar to what we found, uh, very similar to what we found with perhaps a little bit of this, uh, split. So no surprise there. Uh, you are right on target. So let's talk about how to get to that house and the ways in which you could do it on your own. First thing I want you to understand is what you're always trying to do is answer the question, what the heck are we all doing here and why you belong here too? And then you'll see at the bottom why you don't and why you don't is something that we should spend some time thinking about. Because I was talking to a friend of mine and she's a, a broker, a real estate broker, and she said when she lists a house on the market and people call for interviews, she screens them so much to make sure that they are a good fit and they're not wasting anybody's time or overstating an expectation. And she asks those kinds of screening questions if you are gonna have difficulty climbing up a lot of stairs, or if you are looking for something that doesn't require a lot of work or if you're looking for something with a view to make sure that there's going to be a really good fit between what you're expecting and what you're going to see when you walk into that house. And I think that that's a really good analogy for the kind of work that we do as an agency to find out what those clarifying questions are that we need to ask employees or candidates about who works well in this kind of culture. Are you a multitasker? Are you going to do well? Are you somebody that's just going to need their handheld? Are you going to do well? And it's very important to kind of figure out what those questions are and those questions are launched through research. So we asked our survey participants, what kind of research did you launch when you were launching your employer branding initiative? And this is what they came back to us with a combination of surveys, employee focus groups, executive interviews, owned media audit. If you're not familiar with any of them, let me know. But I think that the first three are probably very familiar to everybody. And owned media audit is what are you saying on your website? What are you saying on your career site? If you have a job profile on Glassdoor? Indeed, what are you saying? What does it look like on Indeed? How are people finding you? What does that journey look like? Uh, those are the most popular and no surprise because in order of, in order of complexity, those are probably the easiest ones to do. When you're talking about external focus groups, then you have to figure out who you're going to be doing those focus groups with. If you're pulling them from your applicant tracking system, great, or if you're pulling them because you're buying research from, uh, a panel provider or if you're looking for people globally and you have to get, you have to recruit people to take that research, chances are there are recruiting fees and then there are, um, participation fees. So it becomes a little bit more expensive. Creative testing could be very difficult and very complicated depending on how many people are going to be involved in it. And so it's a little bit less used. And then the external perception surveys also less used for the very same reason because it costs a little bit more to get people to take those surveys. So on this slide I have broken out by the kinds of things that you would use the research to measure. And you can see here that what we're looking to measure and whatever research is that you decide to use, what we are measuring is we're measuring culture, we're measuring media habits. And you can think about all of the reasons why we're doing it. Um, one of the things that I wanna mention is a lot of times we get pushback when we're launching employer brand surveys because there's employee engagement surveys and people have survey fatigue and it's very difficult for people to feel like they can take another survey. So I wanna make sure that we get to that and we will, the kinds of questions that we ask because it's not really a big lift, uh, employee engagement surveys, depending on the complexity of them, they can be a very big lift. So I just want you to understand that there is a difference, difference and there's everything that you've ever wondered. Everything, you know, I know that once, uh, I heard somebody describe an employer brand is what people are saying about your organization as an employer when you leave the room, like when HR leaves the room. And it's very true. Like, what do people really think about your firm? Why are they there? What attracted them to being there and what surprised them the most? So we'll talk about that because you don't want any surprises. The idea of launching an employer brand research initiative, you don't want people to come in and say, oh, I didn't know this. Oh wow, I wasn't expecting that. Make sure there are no surprises. And then on the external side, you're gonna be measuring brand awareness. You're going to measure white space and messaging. What I mean by that is white space and messaging means that if you are making sneakers, you don't want your message to be just do it. Aside from the trade, the trade infringement, uh, you wanna make sure that what you're saying is differentiated. So if everybody else is saying one thing, you wanna be saying something different. You wanna find out what your audience cares about 'cause maybe you're promoting something that they don't care about, maybe whatever that is, um, is not important to your audience. And when you do these kinds of research, uh, initiatives, it's very interesting to find out what people do care about and what they care about by where they are in their life cycle, perhaps by where they are in the world. I love doing it because I'm always very surprised by the answer, if you are looking at new joiners into the workforce, maybe they don't care that you have onsite daycare, or maybe they don't care that you have this wonderful 4 0 1 K matching, but maybe they really do care that you're giving out like the latest and greatest tech toys, like the best new phones or the best new flat screens, or the best new whatever that looks like. So it's a good way to line up what you're giving to what the people you need are caring about. So for everybody that said that they are looking to get people in, what are the people that you are looking for? What do they care about? What do they think about your organization? Do have they ever heard of your organization? Have they a positive impression of their organization? What attracted them to apply? Anything that you could think about is a lot of fun. One of my favorites is that, uh, particularly if you're a small to mid-sized company and you're at a barbecue, and I'm so glad barbecues are back again. Um, when somebody asks you what you do or where you work and you tell 'em, and it's not a well known name and you're not working at Google or Netflix or someplace that, uh, everybody knows of, not just what you, what they say, but like if you give the name of your organization, how do they follow up? And what do you say when they say, oh, what do you do? And what's that boilerplate? What are those 10 words? Because you're at the barbecue that really describe what your company does or what you do. And then what do they ask next? Those are the greatest things to think about, right? And so I work at a company called Brandex and nobody's ever heard of Brandex. So if I said that I worked at, um, a larger, more well-known organization, I work at NBC, everybody knows NBC, but what do I say? Oh, and how do we describe it? And what's your boiler play and how, what is the fewest amount of words that you could use to describe the value of the organization or the value of what you do within the organization? So think about that, think about that as it relates to, you know, just play that little mind game by yourself and how you would answer that. And when I said that, the difference between an employee engagement survey and employee brand research question, again, no surprises. The second thing is we wanna talk about feelings. So a brand is very emotive. And I used to give the example of the earlier iterations of my cell phone, which I love dearly. I love my cell phone. It may not be the best at making calls. They may get dropped, you can't hear from them. Whatever. My self-service might not be good, but it doesn't matter because I love it so much. And a brand is this emotive experience. You love what your, a supporter of you love your brand of coffee, you love your sneaker. How do, what adjectives do you use to describe that, right? So do you feel great going to work? Do you feel enthusiastic? Do you feel empowered? Do you feel, how do you feel? So three adjectives that describe how you feel at work. And by the way, they could be bad adjectives, but it's very good to know how your employees feel about work. Do they feel rushed? Do they feel pressured? Do they feel stressed? Do they feel in charge? Do they feel empowered? Do they feel? So think about that. And when you're launching these questions, whether it's in a focus group or a survey, make sure that you have a good amount of the positives and negatives. And again, if you need any help, just pinging me, I have my contact info and I'll be happy to share. We have all of these kinds of lists, like culture adjectives, good culture adjectives bad. And then another one of my favorite questions is, if you left the organization, what would you miss the most? But don't say the people. And the reason that we have that is because everybody will miss the people, but people is not good as an attractor. So for all of you interested in building out a brand to attract more people, you can't say you're gonna love the people because they already love the people where they're working because everybody loves the people and everybody will miss the people. So what else might it be that they will miss? Will they miss? And the things that you're looking to probe on is will they miss the freedom? Will they miss the work from home? Will they miss the food in the cafeteria? Whatever it is that you can think of that they might answer. Will they miss the opportunity to leave in the middle of the day to watch their kids play soccer? Will they miss the onsite gym or whatever it is? You know, no dress code comes your best person. What will you miss the most? All of these things are shaped into what you will build out within that framework and within your visual identity. So, so far it sounds easy, right? You already have your internal people, your internal research constituency that you can ask the questions, ask them to take the surveys. And I wanna say this, it's not that easy. And I give this beautiful cake picture as an example because I promise you I have flour in my house. I have sugar in my house, I can, I can, I have eggs. It's not easy to make this cake. And just because I have all of the ingredients and just because I have the recipe, I promise you right now my cake is not gonna look like this cake. So that's why in our survey, it's no surprise that half of the people responded, partnered with an outside vendor for their employer branding initiative. Also because the vendor brings some kind of agnostic, impartial experience to this. And when we as an agency come back with the research results and that house filled out, the idea isn't that we get people to say, oh my God, this is great. Oh my God, this is just such a surprise. It's not a surprise because we've gotten all of the information from working with the people. Well, from hearing what they're saying, from asking the right questions, it's not a surprise. But they never considered perhaps some of the ways in which that house got built. Okay? And we could talk more about that. But these are the ways that we evaluate that house. So that house, the more people that you ask, if you have 5,000 people that are going to participate in your exercise, you're going to get a lot of information. How do you organize it? How do you vet it? How do you go about with your post-it notes or your red dots to make sure that what you're getting is the best that it could be? And reminder, I've already given you a hint. Make sure that there's white space that none of your competitors are saying that, but these are the criteria that we use. It has to be authentic, right? So can't be. One of the questions that we once asked in research to the employees was if the organization was a car, what kind of car would it be? And it was the answer that we got was like, it was a Ford pickup and a used Ford pickup with over a hundred thousand miles on it. But when we presented it to the marketing, uh, the chief marketing officer, they were very disappointed. They wanted to be the red brand new convertible. So you can't be, but if you wanna be, let's discuss that and let's think of why they said that they're not and what you need to do to get to be that, right? So there's no bad answers, there's no wrong answers. It's all good. Every insight is a good insight. But you can't come out and be the red convertible if the employees are thinking that you are the used car. Okay? The other thing has to have brand business alignment. So it has to be connected. If you're a marketing, you're a marketing department, your advertising department, your internal communications department, your corporate communications department, your vendors, everybody is thinking and saying and share your talent acquisition people, everything has to sync up. That's how you build brand equity. It can't be a departure. And one of the things that, uh, you probably are aware of is that people have very strong policing around their identity, their guidelines, their logo infringement, their color palettes. Everything has to be integrated with that, but yet it has to be differentiated. So whether that is differentiated from your competitors, differentiated a little bit so that people know that yes, now we're talking to our employees or now we're talking to our candidates, or now we're talking in Singapore, it could be a little bit differentiated. You are allowed that maybe a secondary palette to the primary palette. And then the most important thing is that it has to really be emotive. So we talked about emotive, um, and it has to be something that people rally around. So as I present this, I'll give you a clue as to which one is the hardest of all of these. And the hardest one of all is number three, differentiation. It's very difficult to make your brand architecture stand out because you wanna go with what you think are kind of like the most politically correct things. And I give this to you as an example of a house that's filled out where, um, the, what's bringing everybody together is this global performance, this high octane, um, wanting to really excel globally. So how are you doing that through enduring values, through being socially responsible, through being innovative in your products and services and through developing people. And then what is the EVP premise that given the get making a difference in lives globally, and I guess the, given the get is making a difference in lives of this, was for a healthcare organization making a difference in lives globally, of course, where the people around the world, a healthier life, a better life, but also making a difference for the employees. So if you are looking at this, you might think, well, yeah, great, got it done, nailed it. But again, don't forget differentiation. Like who's working for a company that thinks of themselves as socially irresponsible, as not innovative whatsoever, and know we never developed people. These things are not differentiators. And if you can't think of something that is a differentiator, if you haven't found that in your research, then just go back and think some more or think about a way, hire a copywriter, think about a way to differentiate exactly how you're saying it. Okay? So everybody wants to know how much it costs, how much it costs, how much it costs. And it's just like buying a car, right? It could cost zero, it could cost nothing. You can see from our answers, we had almost 15% of the people said it cost less than $5,000. Well, 5% of the people said it cost $250,000. So I would just tell you this as those people to all of you who are building this out next year, right? You said three to six months. So you are gonna start it in January. How much money should you squirrel away as a line item depending on what it is that you want to do? What are the things that are going to cost most? Think about it this way, break it out into those little buckets. The first bucket is how much are you going to spend on research? And I already gave you the tip that the kind of external research is going to really tip the scales. The internal research is not going to be, is gonna be very cost effective if you're doing it internally, um, because you already have the people you're not gonna pay to get the people to respond. And then if you're looking to bring it in versus a global perception survey and you have to pay for that research, that right there could be a hundred thousand dollars because you have to buy all of the respondents. And depending on how many you buy, is going to influence the costs. And of course, we wanna make sure that we are well-rounded in our diversity, ethnicity, geography, stage of employment, all of those things. Or maybe you're looking to do something where you're only interested in hearing what people from certain organizations who are your main competitors or say, and that gets very costly. Uh, but I would like to say to you all listening that you could do this for $75,000. If you can get $75,000, you could do a lot of things with that. You can, uh, launch your research. You can get some really great creative, you can do a really great career site, build out a recruiters toolkit. These are all of the things that you can do with that amount of money. Um, and these are all of the things that most people do after going through an employer branding initiative like this, right? So the first thing is you're gonna change your career site and you can do that as a a re-skinning. So just change the content on it or the imagery on it, which is also very important because if you find out that your brand is one of building these very strong connections, make sure that the images on your career site are people that are connecting with one another, don't have people working solo. All of those things need to be considered. And you will see that the recruiter's toolkit is going to really integrate with what people are saying about the culture. So if we had those four differentiators, they have to be worked into a recruiter's script, a toolkit, what people are sharing. You may wanna have your own employer brand guidelines, your own videos, your own recruiting brochures, diversity, recruiting communications. So all of these things go into it and they all will. If you don't have a wonderful relationship with your marketing department or you are a team of one, all of those things will undoubtedly cost you money. So try and get 75,000, that's just just saying, just saying if you can. Uh, and then the most important thing is to understand how you're going to market, and that's where you can really segment it. So I'm showing you this, this is what I think MailChimp does a really great job. They went through a rebranding and they really bucketed who they were looking for to use their products and services. So you have your control freak, you have the people that are just so busy and they need some way of sending out these e-blasts. You have your entrepreneurs, you have your creative teams. This is really, really good. And if you spend some time thinking about the people that you're looking for or the people that you hope for all of you who are looking to make sure that you had, uh, employees to retain, think about who they are and who were most at risk for leaving. And think about who you wanted to appeal to. Not every audience is equal, but I will say that according to this research, CHROs that are winning the talent war are taking a more segmented approach. For example, gen Xers are drawn to 4 0 1 k match. Oh, this is just what I was saying before. And Gen Zs are looking for flexibility, work from home, same day pay, all of those things. So again, think about that when you are charting out your research. And then after you do that, now this is also fun as an exercise, grab a group, come together and think about every single touch point in the journey from awareness through engagement. So if you have a cross-functional team, one of the things that makes brand dynamics different as an agency is that, uh, we're equally schooled in talent acquisition and employee engagement. So all of the recruitment marketing and all of the internal communications, you think about that touchpoint. People are not stopping who they are because you've gotten them in and signed them up, but now they're your employees. So you have to make sure that they're continuing to be that invested in your brand equity. So what are those channels that you're going to market in? If you look at some of the things on the right hand side, you think about that pre-application experience, the application experience, the post application experience, your onboarding, your performance management, your talent management, how are you launching your benefits? Like benefits are a big deal. Benefit communications is a wonderful time to really engage people in just what a great company you are because you're offering all of these wonderful benefits. So think about that. And then the last thing in the world that you want to think about is this, you know, marketing versus recruitment marketing. So in marketing, you have this rule of seven where you have to get in front of your audience seven times before they take any action. But in recruitment marketing, it's upwards of 15 different touches that people need to have to engage with you and more. You know, moreover, if you're not a well-known brand, it's a lot more than that. So if you wanna think about how to really take everything that you have just done and create content, this is some of the things that you can move them towards. Videos, email campaigns, your career site, job boards, internal employee referral, all of the ways, uh, you know, think about proco, employee recognition. All of these ways are ways to move people and get them more invested into how to make sure that happens. So if you look at this particular strategy that we created for Marriott, they needed 500 openings in 45 days for people to work in a hotel. People that are not in front of their computer all of the time, which just makes it a little bit more complicated. We had digital advertising, we were doing text messaging, we had people come to events and then we retargeted them. If you're not familiar with the term retargeting, it's those, some people find it annoying. I find it very helpful. Like if you are looking for a car and then suddenly you see those car ads or a new pair of shoes, and then every time you're searching for something, you see those shoes. It's a lot, a lot of, um, algorithms and they are appealing to you because they know what you are looking for. So then making sure that people have this great experience all throughout these steps that you can control, including high converting social ads because everybody is on social media these days. And it's a great way to break down by demographic, by audience, by geofencing. Make sure that what you are doing is really even in your job postings saying something about your brand. So when was the last time any of you on the call actually applied for a job opening? Think about that. And maybe you could do or just pretend, apply for a job within your organization and see how easy it is. Take a look at your job postings and see what you're saying. If you're looking for a receptionist or somebody, uh, on the phone, are you gonna say that you'll be on the phone a lot, or perhaps you're an ambassador to our brand, you're the director of first impressions. This is a gateway opportunity. Here's another way that you can create HTML job openings, which take a job position. 'cause let's face it, people don't read anymore and important aspects of this job. This is what makes you great. This is what it means on your day to day. Here is a quote from somebody who had all of this to say about being in this role, and these are the benefits that we have. So just think about how you really are marketing yourself going through all of these things. Um, and then if you are doing it, think about what else is important. If you're sending out emails, timing is everything. I I just recently read an article that said that Tuesday and Wednesday are the new front runners for the highest volume of job applications in the past. This was Monday. So if you're getting in a lot of people on Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe send something out on Thursday to keep the thread going. And then, uh, here's some other things that you can think about how to optimize your job postings. Shorter job titles have a higher apply rate. Shorter job posts get almost 10% more applications. 61% of candidates say salary range is the most important part of the job. And I think for anybody that's doing any kind of recruitment, job posting right now, there are a lot of sites that require you to put that salary range in there, which I think is great. I never understood why we couldn't really just be transparent. Uh, LinkedIn found that job posts that are overly casual in tone tend to perform worse than more formal posts. Love that. And then look at this. So if you have more than two symbols in your job posting, it's a 30% decline in your apply rate. So it used to be that we would say, you know, when you're looking for a, when you're looking for, um, recruitment marketing, it's not rocket science, but it is rocket science and every single thing matters. So it's important to know that, promote what matters. We just went through the exercise to find out what your employees are interested in, what your candidates are interested in. Look at that against this list and think about what are the things that you can authentically and really truly come out with that people can expect to receive from working with your organization. Think about this list and then promote what matters. And then as I said, everything matters. So if you look at this, just this one example, the difference between clicks on the top part, if you say registered nurse as a job title versus registered nurse, rn, sign on, bonus relocation, housing, providing and training, just look at this number and cost per applicant in, uh, in, in the number of applications they got 20, more than 2000% more cost, uh, clicks. Clicks per app. And then on the bottom, this one was really fascinating for me, which is 20% more clicks just from having this difference in words applied verse, join us 20% more in clicks from join us. So how are you showing up? So all of these things are very much important, and I know it's a lot to think about, but I promised you one more thing and that is this. How did, what kind of metrics are you looking at to make sure that now that you have launched this, that you have been successful? According to our survey findings, people are looking at a decrease in time to fill, uh, a decrease in open to fill. They are looking at increased employee engagement, increased number of hires, increased cost per hire, and then you get into some of those more, uh, difficult to discern depending on who you have doing your HR metrics for you. Things like quality of hire. So I know a lot of you wanted to be known as an employer of choice. How are you going to know that you are an employer of choice? Which one of these things are going to mean that you have been successful? And I'll just leave you with this one thing, which is that I once went to a presentation and somebody said that the way that you know that you have become an employer of choice is that you are now getting more resumes from the people who are your direct competitors in business. So you are pulling them out of the companies that you compete with and getting them into your company, and that means that you have arrived. So I know I haven't left a lot of time for questions, but don't worry, don't be discouraged. You have the deck, you have the information, you are going to be getting an email. You can watch this on demand anytime. And moreover, connect with me on social, set up some time on my Calendly calendar. Don't be shy. Ask me any questions. And uh, I'd love to connect with you if you again, have gone through this or are going through this and have any questions. I love hearing stories and you know, I I just love it. So if you have success from going through this, if you have anything that you think that I should be adding to this, just let me know and let's connect. Just hop on my calendar. Calendar. Sound good? Okay. Well thank you very much and, uh, I appreciate being part of our day today. Thank you, Sarah. You did a great job on everything. Thanks for the pause. Of course. My pleasure. Wow, thank you so much for this enriching conversation. It was such a trait to be walked through pretty much A to Z when it comes to employer branding. Um, one thing that was coming up for me was if someone is, because I don't see any questions, so I'm just gonna jump in and, and uh, start this off here. What would you say would be the number one tip for somebody who is trying to start this employer branding initiative? Great question. Well, I'll tell you this. If you don't have adoption from your executive leadership and CEO, don't even bother. You have to make sure that you don't treat this as an HR project. This is, this has to have priority with everybody or it's not going to be, nothing is ever going to happen. It's just not going to go anywhere. You could have the greatest EVP, you could have the greatest body of work, but if people aren't taking this as something important, it's not going to go. It's not gonna have labs and nothing's gonna happen. So that would be my Awesome, thank you for that. That makes so much sense. Um, okay. We do have another question that came in. Yep. So David is wondering why is the word apply more effective than join us in postings? No, it wasn't, it was Join us, not apply. Join us was the one that was the, uh, that got more. Got it. Could, could you just elaborate? Uh, he got it switched, which is no worries at all. But could you elaborate a little bit on perhaps the wording there and some context behind that. Join us is such a more inclusive phrase, isn't it? It's warm. Do you think about like, applied versus Join us. Join us? Sounds like hands are, and that's what I mean is a great question because that's exactly what I mean about branding. Join us, join the talented people ready to embrace, empower, help you grow as an individual versus just click here, apply now. Apply now is, you know, different. It's just different. Every word matters. Mm-Hmm. So that's why AB testing is great. You could do the AB testing on your own too. Mm. So good. Please, uh, have these questions keep rolling and we would love to have a, uh, a great conversation. Um, well actually I see we're at the top of the hour, so, um, if you do have any questions, let's, let's go ahead and send them to Jody. You have her contact information in the chat here and, um, we're so grateful you were able to join us. Thank you so much. Thank You. Thank you so much for having me, and as I said, uh, looking to connect with all of you. So thanks very much for that. Bye. Have a great rest of the day, everyone. Take care.

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