Episode 115 · 15 July 2024 · 45:34
How to get better candidates, with David Thompson
Featuring David Thompson
How to get better candidates, with David Thompson
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What is an employer brand?
interview#employer-brand#definition#branding
Why employer branding is now essential
Real-world examples of employer branding done well
Does it actually reduce recruitment costs?
Competing when you can't match salaries
Where to start — finding your unique story
Is there a minimum employee number?
What happens when you don't get it right
interview#employer-brand#mistakes#reputation
The 80/20 of employer branding
Quick wins and common pitfalls
interview#quick-wins#pitfalls#employer-brand
Show notes
How to Get Better Candidates, with David Thompson
Guest: David Thompson — co-founder of Employer Branding Made Easy, with over 20 years of experience helping organisations like Autoglass, The Met Office, and The Telegraph build powerful employer brands.
Most businesses obsess over their customer brand. But what about the brand that tells the world what it's actually like to work for you?
David joins Al and Leanne for a masterclass in employer branding — what it is, why it's no longer a nice-to-have, and how to build one that attracts better candidates and keeps your best people. He shares why the power balance has shifted in the job market, how to tell your organisation's unique story, and why advocacy from your own people is the 80/20 of employer branding.
Top 3 Takeaways
Employer branding is an essential, not a nice-to-have. The power balance has shifted — candidates have choices now, and they're looking for emotional validation that they're working for "the good guys." Your employer brand tells them what it actually feels like to work for you.
Start with your story, not your budget. You don't need a big marketing spend. Talk to your people, understand why it's genuinely different to work there, and turn that into a story you can take to market. Even simple fireside chats with your team can build your brand.
Advocacy is the 80/20. The single highest-leverage thing you can do is get your own people sharing your story. If you can't compete on salary or benefits, a strong employer brand helps you control salaries — people stay with organisations they love and feel something about.
More From David Thompson
- Employer Branding Made Easy — find out more via the links in the episode description
- Get Better Candidates — David's new website, mentioned at the end of the episode
- Connect with David on LinkedIn: David Thompson
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
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David ThompsonThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
David ThompsonNice.
David ThompsonCheck out hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning psychology podcast Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered psychologist.
David ThompsonMy name's Al. I'm a business owner.
Leanne ElliottWe are here to help you simplify the science of work. It just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
David ThompsonNo. I'm sure you've heard last week, uh, last episode, that Leanne got chartered. So she's a proper official chartered psychologist. She can psychologize anywhere she wants now. Um, but unfortunately it just doesn't work. I need to be— I need to have something before. I'm a successful business owner. There you go.
Leanne ElliottThere's a You are a successful— you're a serial entrepreneur and business owner.
David ThompsonOh, I hate that word entrepreneur.
Leanne ElliottWe'll work on it for next time. If you don't care and you're like, just call yourself a business psychologist, drop us a line.
David ThompsonYeah. Yeah. We'd like to hear from you. You might be expecting our normal Tuesday episode. You're not getting it because in July we are just doing interviews and then in August we're just doing Tuesday episodes. So it just means that you can dip in and out in August. You don't feel like you've got to, you know, you're falling behind or anything. And we don't want you to feel stressed if you're on holiday or vacation.
Leanne ElliottYou don't need that in your life. You don't, you don't need us coming in your ears saying things like you should do better, be better. Not when you're on holiday.
David ThompsonNo, no, it's gonna be a really relaxed August. Also relaxed for us as well because it'll be one episode a week, which means it's gonna be a lot less work and we can spend more time drinking margaritas by the pool, which would be lovely.
Leanne ElliottYeah, so if you are missing the usual Tuesday episode, there's loads of them. We've been doing one a week since April. Go back, re-listen, binge, um, and we'll be back with our regular This Week in Work Tuesday episodes In August, I think there'll be 4 or 5 of them in total. Long month, August. Happy days.
David ThompsonThat's enough about the future. Let's get back to the present.
Leanne ElliottYes. Today we have another incredible conversation with you from another incredible expert, but today is slightly different. It's probably a bit more Al's wheelhouse than mine.
David ThompsonYes. Today we have a masterclass in employer branding. You've heard of it. You may even be doing a bit of it, but how do you know if you're doing it right? That's where today's guest comes in. He is one half of the employer branding power couple who are experts in building amazing employer brands for organizations just like yours. Over the last 20 years, he's helped huge brands like Autoglass, the Met Office, The Telegraph, and many more build incredible employer brands that attract and retain the very best talent. He's been head of agency at the UK's number one employer branding agency. He's been a judge for the prestigious RAD— is it RAD Awards? RAD? Let's just— I can fix that in edit. And now, surely the pinnacle of his career, he's on the Truth, Lies and Work podcast.
Leanne ElliottIndeed. Today, we are delighted to welcome David Thompson from getbettercandidates.com. Let's go meet David and find out why an employer brand is more essential than ever.
David ThompsonI'm David Thompson. I am co-founder of Employer Branding Made Easy, co-founded with my business partner and lovely wife, Sarah Hockenhull. We help organizations to run employer branding and employer value proposition projects by upskilling their teams in-house. Our mission, our goal, our vision, what we would love to do is for in-house employer branding teams to be as influential, respected, skillful, and valued as in-house marketing teams. So that's what we're about.
David ThompsonLet's start at the very, very beginning. What is an employer brand?
David ThompsonAn employer brand is the way an organization tells the world about what it's like to work for them. It's the way they present themselves through the stories they tell, and it's the impression that people gather from that information and the image they form in their head of what it's like to work for that organization.
David ThompsonThis sounds a bit like a nice-to-have, not an essential. Change my mind.
David ThompsonNow, if you'd asked me that, if you'd said that maybe 3, 4 years ago, I probably would have said, yeah, kind of is. I think we've changed and people have changed enormously, and it's made employer branding really, you know, a must-have. I think principally employer branding is trying to tap into the emotions of people. Making them feel, you know, making them feel something about working for an organization. In the past, that didn't really used to matter to us much. I think kind of the attraction of talent and the retention of talent was largely based around kind of fairly transactional things. So, is this job near my house? Does it pay well? Does it have some decent benefits with it? After that, everything else was like, yes, that's nice to have stuff.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
David ThompsonBut I think we've changed over the last few years. We've become a lot more emotional. And these days, employees and potential employees are kind of looking for the story as to why they should join you, why you're different, why they should join you as opposed to somebody else. So, in the past, I would have said, yeah, it's a nice to have. Now, I think if you don't have it, you are really going to struggle to get the talent that you really need and to hold on to that talent.
David ThompsonWe'll come on to that in a second. You say that we've changed. Do you think that change is skewing towards the younger generations, the Gen Zs and the millennials, or do you think we've all changed?
David ThompsonI think we've all changed. I think we're all very much used to, you know, I think there's just much more information available to us now, so we go out and seek it. So, you know, we were looking at some statistics the other day that were saying kind of 80% of job seekers now look for information about the culture, the values, of an organization before they even consider putting in a job application. So I think we've all become more attuned to looking deeper for things, and I think we see that not just when we're looking for the right employer, we see it when we're looking for going on holiday. We look at TripAdvisor, we want to know more and more. When we go on Amazon, we want to see reviews from real people. I think the world of kind of job seeking has kind of followed that.
David ThompsonYeah.
David ThompsonWe're all just looking for more information and more validation that we're kind of working for the good guys and making the right choice. So, what employer branding enables us to do is kind of elevate an organization in the eyes of potential employees and their own employees, and take it beyond the transactional, take it beyond the basic, well, our pay is the same as their pay, our holiday entitlement is the same as their holiday entitlement.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
David ThompsonAnd give much more of a sense of what it feels like to work for an organization. So there's a stronger emotional connection. And then, you know, if given a choice, then, well, the candidate's going to choose that organization that they feel something for over the one that's just giving them a list of stuff, if you like. So I think we're just all a little bit more emotional now than we were in the past. It's moved from being something transactional to being something more emotional.
David ThompsonI think that before we spoke, I would think, I would have thought employer branding is, well, let's just do a Glassdoor account and hopefully everyone will say it's cool. It sounds like it's a lot more than that.
David ThompsonNo, it's more complicated than that. So, a Glassdoor account is part of it, but essentially what you're trying to do is create your own story, your own narrative. And so, you know, if you think about any brand, if you think about Nike, if you think about Audi, they create their own narrative. Why is it different? Why are we different? Why are our products different to others' products? What's our story? Essentially, employer branding does that as well. So, it's why is it different working here? Why are you going to feel different working here? And to do that, you need to, yes, have a Glassdoor account where people are leaving good reviews, but you need to have a career site which is giving a really great story about your people, why they feel different, what you're aiming to do. You need social media doing that work for you as well. So, there are many, many different touchpoints where you want to be telling that story. But the main thing is understanding what your story is and being able to kind of present that to the market. There's so many, you know, whenever I go and see clients and they kind of say, okay, we need to do something with our employer brand, first question I always ask is, Why is it different working here? And you can ask their CEO or their HR director, and usually the answer is, we're not really sure. Don't really know why we are different. Why— they don't really know why someone should come and join them beyond the transactional. So it's really important to research that and understand that and form that story so you can then take it out in lots of different places and tell it consistently. That's how you kind of change people's view and change the emotional kind of connection they have. I think essentially, Al, it's marketing for people rather than products. It's the confluence of kind of recruitment activity and retention activity and marketing, and it's putting the two together. It's still quite an alien concept in some ways. Marketeers are very used to the language of marketing and But actually, the people we're working with are mainly in human resources, mainly in talent acquisition, and they're not trained in that. So, their world, this is quite alien to them. So, it's taking some time for the principles of marketing to permeate into the world of people, but it's happening.
David ThompsonSo, let's talk about people who do get it. Who, is there a public company? Is there someone we've heard of that you think is doing employer brand well?
David ThompsonI think maybe there is a perception that employer branding is for, you know, the big management consultancies, the great big financial institutions. They can afford to do it. But actually, it's not. It's for everybody. And there are a myriad of organizations who are doing it really, really well. But if you want to look at some really good examples, first of all, have a look at the NSPCC, which is a children's charity in the UK. I think they do some beautiful work. Just have a look at their career site. They tell an emotive story, so you really feel, my goodness, you know, that really moves me. They tell it through their own people, which is another very important facet of employer branding. And again, more research shows people trust the voice of employees 3 times more than they trust the voice of a corporate organisation. So, Really, you want your own people telling your stories. It adds authenticity and adds that emotional connection. So NSPCC do a beautiful job of that. Another organization to have a look at is an organization called Veolia. Now, they are a waste management company. I deliberately picked them because it's not a sexy business. It's not a kind of easy sell. They empty bins, they empty the bins in the streets, but they do some terrific work. The way they connect their purpose to their employment is fantastic. So literally, they are hiring people who will be running the bin lorries in the street, but they tell a story about how that makes the community cleaner, better for children, better place to live. And it's creating that link from the work you're doing to the purpose of the organization and the impact it has on the world. That's the kind of stuff that really—
David ThompsonYeah.
David Thompsonhits you in the heart and makes you remember an organization. And again, if I'm looking at that compared to organization B, who's just showing me a salary and some holiday entitlement, I'm going to go for the ones that move me, you know. So they do a beautiful job as well. And then a third one in the public sector in the UK, Essex County Council. Again, it's a county council, generally not sexy. They do some beautiful employer branding work. They do a great job again of showing how individuals in their organization make a huge impact in that community and make lives better. So just 3 varied but nice organizations that hopefully shows it's not just for the super big flash commercial organizations. You know, anybody, everybody can benefit from that. And in fact, many of the clients we work with are quite small organizations, and it can work for small organizations. You know, we work with— an end-of-life care hospice on the Isle of Wight called Mountbatten. Just an incredible place and amazing people doing amazing work, but obviously a very hard place to recruit into. End-of-life care, most people would just kind of go, I wouldn't go near it. You know, it would be terribly depressing. What we found when we did our research with them, it's one of the happiest places I've ever come across. They are the most fulfilled employees I've ever met. And it was an incredible place. Helping them tell that story and attract people to come and work there was just one of my favorite jobs I've ever done. But it just shows they're a small— that's just a small, you know, little organization where employer branding has made a huge difference, basically.
Leanne ElliottNobody's denying that running a business is tough these days. It seems that the cost of everything has gone up, and we just don't have the same budgets that we used to. So, my question is, who's going to pay for this? Let's rejoin Al and David as he asks this exact question and grills David on whether there is a demonstrable ROI.
David ThompsonI think organizations automatically assume, you know, we have a marketing budget, we don't have an employer branding budget, there's not such a thing, and we don't, you know, and times are hard at the moment, it's not easy, you know, so where am I going to find the money? to do this stuff, you know. And I know if I go to an agency, okay, I'm going to kiss goodbye to £75,000, £100,000, you know, dollars, $150K, you know. I haven't got that kind of money. So I think people get scared off by the numbers. But if you were to ask me, what does it cost to research, develop, and create an employer brand? I would say next to nothing if you can find some internal resource and you've got a bit of knowledge and skill. Many organizations I work with have become pretty competent and do a really good job with virtually no resource, just a few iPhones, a bit of knowledge, some enthusiastic ambassadors in their business going around finding stories, people who are willing to go and share their stories on social media. So cost needn't be an obstacle. It can be done pretty inexpensively.
David ThompsonI want to know, does it actually reduce— if I invested in this, is it actually going to reduce the cost of recruitment for me?
David ThompsonAbsolutely, it should do. I mean, one of its principles— there's lots of research out there, but there's, you know, recent research from LinkedIn, which was showing it should reduce your recruitment costs by about 50%. So, it has quite a profound influence on cost, but I think its influence is much broader than that. So, same research showing that it will increase retention by 28%. So, not only is recruitment costing you less, but you've got less people leaving your business, so you don't have to recruit that many in the first place. Now, why is that? Why does it improve retention? It's emotional connection. When you're telling your own people, hey guys, this is why we work here.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
David ThompsonThis is what's great about this place. It helps to kind of strengthen that bond, make people feel more connected to the organization. So, yes, it will improve. It'll bring you better people. It will reduce the cost of recruitment, but it'll also help you to retain and improve the performance of your existing people as well.
David ThompsonIf an employer is a little bit restricted on the amount that they can actually pay, then do you think that an employer brand could almost make up for that if they haven't got the ability to pay the huge bucks?
David ThompsonYeah, hugely, hugely. If you can't compete on a salary basis, on a benefits basis, you need to tell a different story. All right, we're not the best payers in town, but career development here is fantastic. The people here are wonderful. We are a connected bunch who enjoy each other's company. We have a really nice time. Go down the road, they'll pay you 10% more, but it's going to be horrible. So, absolutely. There is, again, research from LinkedIn, which I think was taken from Harvard University, which said organizations that don't have a strong employer brand have to pay, on average, a 10% premium on salary to attract and retain talent. So, if you imagine that, you imagine that on a sizable organization, if our employer brand could potentially reduce our salary bill by 10% over time. You know, you're starting to talk about multiples of millions and millions, you know, but that is the, you know, that's the truth. You have to, if you don't have a strong employer brand, you're going to have to pay a premium on salary because people won't want to join, won't understand why they should join you and why they should fit, why they would fit in. I wouldn't want to say, you know, the reason you should do an employer brand project is because you can cut your salary bill by 10%. What we want is that the The right balance. Without doubt, though, it will help to reduce your business costs. It will improve retention so people don't leave, so you don't have to hire as much talent. It will reduce your recruitment costs because you become a magnet for people. They want to come and work for you rather than you having to go to agencies and saying, just give me whatever you've got and charge me 15% for the privilege.
David ThompsonYeah.
David ThompsonIt will help you control salaries. People want to stay with organizations they love and feel something about. There will be less kind of, right, well, I don't like it here, so what am I going to go for? I've got to get more money. It just helps to create a stronger culture, but also reduce business costs, as we said. I think one of the problems with employer brand in the past has been people thought it was a nice-to-have, and it's a bit intangible, and it's nice, you know, some pretty pictures and some lines, but yeah, that's okay. you can connect it to solid kind of data, which shows, you know, you'll be able to prove that it's reducing cost and that it will give you a return on investment many, many times over. So, yeah, to me, it's kind of, why would you not do this, rather than why would you do this? To any organization who's not doing it, I just think it's insane. You know, it should be, and increasingly it's rising up the kind of, you know, absolutely essentials for talent acquisition. So, if you looked at the job description of a talent acquisition professional 3 or 4 years ago, it would all be about tactical recruitment. Now, they're talking a lot about employer branding, that you need to be able to do this, you need to be able to create and push forward the employer brand as an essential part of talent acquisition. And I think that's only going to grow.
David ThompsonYeah.
David Thompsonnext few years, it's just going to become an essential component of every organisation's talent plan.
David ThompsonNow, this is where Leanne and I overlap in professional terms. And it was this kind of realisation that inspired us to create our people culture, Oblong. For me, marketing and building a business from a customer's point of view is all about creating an offer that people actually want. From your point of view, Leanne, job analysis and job crafting is a similar thing. And it's about creating an offer of employment that appeals to a specific type of person. And both of these should be supported by data, because in marketing there is a cost per acquisition per customer and a refund and retention rate, and that will tell you if you got the offer right. And in recruitment, there is a cost per hire and a rate of employee retention, which tells you the same thing. You need data for both of these because you can't just craft products, services, offers in a dark room and expect to get it right the first time. You have to put it in front of the right customers to get the feedback.
Leanne ElliottAnd yet the majority of employees spend about 20 minutes writing a job description, or indeed ask ChatGPT to do it for them, and then get annoyed when they get no responses or poorly suited applicants. Or similarly, the leadership team decides in a conference room what the values and culture of the organisation will be, and then wonder why it doesn't really resonate with their team, why people don't connect with it. In all circumstances, a strong knowledge and careful consideration of behavioral psychology is needed. Our work with clients centers on giving people the systems, processes, and independent data they need to build a great workplace culture. Last episode, we spoke to Alexis Zaner about this and her experiences as a leader at Patagonia. They had a customer-centric brand with clear and relatable values. That means customers go back to Patagonia over and over again and tell their friends about it. and their people stay for a long time, and then share that story on a podcast. If you can craft an employer brand that is similarly loved, then you're going to have people breaking down your door to come and work for you, even when you don't have any, have any open positions. At this point, if you still haven't clicked, the starting place for a great employer brand is a great workplace culture.
David ThompsonNow, David just said that you can start with very little investment. So, how exactly do we get started, and what does a good employer brand look like?
David ThompsonWhere does it start is, let's understand the story. We need our unique story to go to market with. So, we will research that. We'll talk to your people. We will pull together what we call our employer value proposition framework. Here's our 3 or 4 stories we're really happy with. That process takes about 4 or 5 weeks. We then shape that into a visual look and feel. that's going to look great and correct for the market, the tone of voice that's going to work on your career site and your social media. That takes another couple of weeks. We then look at kind of creating the main assets you're going to need to go to market, which will be your career site, your social media pages, your Glassdoor pages. So, you know, that process takes probably, you know, 2 months to do all of that process. Then it's a question of taking it to market, and the best route to market that you have is your own people. So, we spend a lot of time focusing on advocacy, getting your own employees to share the content that you're producing, share that story, and produce their own content, which kind of reflects our story. Your own people are free of charge. They are connected to the right people. more people like them. And as we said before, people trust their voices 3 times more than they do a corporate voice. So we very much focus on advocacy, using your own people to go out there and tell their story. That also has a very powerful internal effect as well. If your own people are kind of saying, here's my story, your employees are seeing these stories as well, it just creates a feel-good factor, you know. So yeah, advocacy is kind of the starting point. Then beyond that, we look at other methods of reaching the people we want to reach, so social media, paid advertising, things like exhibitions, careers fairs, etc. Lots and lots of different ways to reach those audiences, but it essentially all starts with the story. If you haven't got a unique differentiating story, there's no point in going to market. And one of the biggest mistakes we see in employer branding is organizations not having that focus story. So they come to me, right, we need to do something, okay? We need to go to market with some kind of employer branding. And they'll start telling lots of different stories. Hey, here's us at Macmillan Cake Day. Here's us wearing our Christmas jumpers. Here's a training session that we did the other week. But ultimately, they're telling too many different stories, and people can't remember what they're supposed to remember. So it's very important that you just Nail down those 1 or 2, 3 core stories and tell them repeatedly. Tell them in different ways, with different people, but keep telling the same story over and over again. That's how you get people to remember why you're different. It's a well-crafted marketing strategy transposed into the world of people recruitment and retention, into a world that was purely transactional before, But we're now introducing the theories and practices of marketing to give an edge, to give an emotional impact and an edge to help you get the best and keep the best people.
David ThompsonAm I understanding it that the aim of this kind of process is that by the end of the work you've done, you can go and ask anyone in the organization from the janitor to the CEO, and they should be giving you the same answer? Is that the aim of it?
David ThompsonAbsolutely, yes. So I ask The CEO, why do you think it's different here and a great place to work? But ultimately, we don't just want to depend on his view. So when we are constructing our story, we research through the whole organization. So we speak to as many people as we can through focus groups, through online surveys, and we're going to consolidate the views of everybody to reach what we call our employer value proposition. Essentially, that's our kind of 3 or 4 stories where you're going to go, that's us, guys. That's what we're about. That's what makes us different. And anybody in the organization should be able to look at that and go, yeah, I see that. Some bits I feel more strongly about than others. I feel more strongly about our purpose than I do about our technological innovation. But all of it is true and authentic. So you can take that to market with confidence. and say, okay, that's our story, we all believe in it. What you don't want to do is kind of invent it from the top and then have people elsewhere in the business going, I don't recognize that at all. That will have the exact opposite effect of what you're looking for. It will cause disengagement, it will cause people to feel alienated, it will just cause people to burst out laughing at your own pack of lies. So authenticity is absolutely key, and the And the route to that is through research. You can get a sense of what people think it's like to work for you by looking at things like Glassdoor and Indeed. If you, you know, that'll give you an indication of what people are saying about you, your own employees are saying about you, and you'll know pretty quickly, you know, if it's positive, negative. I think the truth is most organizations, If you were to go up to a person in the street and say, what's it like to work for Company X who are down the road? Vast majority of people say, I have no idea. So most organizations, when we say, you know, what's your employer brand? They don't currently have much of an employer brand, is the truth. They may have one or two kind of reviews on Glassdoor. But that's about it. Most people don't know what it's like to go and work for an organization. So, the other way a company can kind of figure out what people are saying about them is go and talk to your own people, go talk to your recruiters. So, your recruiters are talking to candidates every day, and they will be asking, you know, questions about, what do you know about us? What do you think about us? So, that's a really good source of data as well.
David ThompsonIs there a minimum sort of employee number for you to start working on your employer brand?
David ThompsonI don't think there is, because, you know, we've often been asked this question, you know, what's the minimum number of employees? I think it's more about the nature of the organization. So, we work with startups who are kind of, you know, going from, you know, 10 to 25 people, but they need some high-value difficult to find people, and they're not going to find them without having a strong employer brand and a good presence in the market. So, it can be small organizations or startups. If you are, you know, a kind of manufacturing organization or a service provider organization, I would say anything upwards of 100 employees, you are in the realms where you are starting to compete.
David ThompsonRight.
David Thompsonwith other people for talent, and they need to know why you're different if they're going to choose you.
Leanne ElliottAfter the break, we'll find out what happens when you don't get it right. Plus, David gives us some quick wins. See you in a sec. Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
David ThompsonWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
David ThompsonAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking.
David ThompsonAnd you're not going to say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in threes—
Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
David ThompsonSeamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil.
David ThompsonWe've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the worlds of politics, business, and brands as well.
Leanne ElliottIt is, it's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
David ThompsonIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
David ThompsonI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
David ThompsonYeah, come back.
David ThompsonDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back.
David ThompsonI'll cut that out. Keep that in.
Leanne ElliottWelcome back. A lot of people just don't see the point of employer brands, or worse, do a pretty rubbish job. So let's rejoin the interview as David explains what to say to get buy-in and some quick wins to get it right.
David ThompsonWhat would you say to someone who just hasn't quite got with the, with the times on that?
David ThompsonYeah, I think the power balance has shifted. I think, you know, people have choices now. Um, it used to be very much like you said, you know, you're lucky just to have a job. You're lucky that we're even considering you. That's not the way, you know, young people work now. They have choices. So I think the biggest mistake we probably see is just completely ignoring employer branding, just thinking people will find our jobs, people will come here, and they don't. You know, that's— well, some people will, but they'll probably be the ones that you don't really want. There'll be the people who are just going and mass-applying to any organization, but they're doing that because they don't have any kind of connection, emotional connection with that organization. What you want is the people who've taken the time and the care to select you as the right employer for them and are excited and motivated about joining you. So, I think the biggest mistake is probably just ignoring that and just saying, well, just stick a job on TotalJobs, and lots and lots of people will apply. They may do, but you'll get the wrong kind of people. I think the other big mistake we kind of touched on a bit before is people kind of going, right, let's just do something, let's just do anything. Here's a picture of us doing something. Here's a picture of us wearing some Christmas jumpers. People don't— it doesn't really tell them anything. And then you'll tell them, you'll get 20 different social media posts, and people will be looking at it going, that's very nice, but what am I supposed to feel? What am I supposed to remember? And they can't. So the second kind of, you know, the big mistake that people make is just not having total clarity on what their unique proposition is and what their unique selling point is. And every organization has a unique proposition. Sometimes it's not immediately clear. Sometimes you look at it and go, I'm quite sure we're not the best payers in town, you know, we don't have the best offices. So sometimes you've got to dig a bit deep, and sometimes it's things like the humour, sometimes it's the resilience, sometimes it's the fun, sometimes it's the warmth, you know. But every organisation has a unique story to tell. You just need to figure out what it is. So Kind of big mistake number 2 is not understanding what your unique story is. Then big mistake number 3 is probably consistency. Right, we've done it. We did a social media post. That's it. Our employer brand is up. It's like, no, this is an organic thing that takes effort and resource. We call our business Employer Branding Made Easy. We should have called it Employer Branding Made Easier, to be honest. Because it's not easy, but it's not a great name for a company. But it requires effort and consistency. So kind of losing momentum is probably the third biggest mistake we see.
David ThompsonYou come across the 80/20 rule where 80% of your results come from 20% of your output. Is there a kind of an 80/20 here? Is there something that is the most important thing that people can do to get themselves on this journey?
David ThompsonAdvocacy. Getting your own people, absolutely. That's, you know, if you can get your own people sharing your open vacancies, sharing some stories that you've produced about, here we are, this is what we do, here are the people who work here before, sharing their own stories about Here's my job, here's what I do day to day. That can have the most profound impact, and it's probably the simple and quickest thing to do because, as I said, you can probably produce most of that content with an iPhone and a little bit of knowledge of how to put together a social media post in Canva. You know, it doesn't require technical expertise, but it can have such a profound impact. So yeah, I would be focusing on First of all, let's do some internal research, ask just, you know, ask some of our people why it's different, nail that story, and then get our own people to share those stories and tell those stories. Now, it's a really powerful thing to do. So it's always been there. Advocacy has always been a recommend a friend. It's always been a fantastic thing. What we now have more of is the tools to amplify it. So we have social media networks, you know, people have their own networks that they can talk to and people who trust them. That's an incredibly powerful thing. If you've got 500 employees and they've all got networks of a few hundred people who trust their views, all of a sudden you've got amplification you could never achieve. If you tried to do that with paid media, it cost you millions. So you've got this kind of free resource sat there. All you need to do— And in my experience, This is kind of anecdotal, but I've seen it plenty, plenty of times. Most employees are pretty willing to share content and information about their organization, but they don't do it for 2 reasons. First one is they don't know what to say, so they're scared of, you know, they're just like, I don't really know what to say, so I'm a bit scared of that. Second thing is they're scared of getting it wrong. Because what we tend to do is issue social media guidelines which say you cannot do this, you cannot say this, you cannot do this. They're terrified. They're scared of messing it up, and they don't quite know what to say. Now, if you empower them and encourage them, and in some way, and sometimes incentivize them, say, go out and tell your story. Go on. There's the guidelines. There's the guide rails for you. These subjects would be great to talk about, but—
Leanne ElliottYeah.
David ThompsonYou're perfectly at liberty to go and say, tell your story, and we'll encourage it and we'll support it and we'll celebrate it. They'll do it. You'll be amazed how many people are really willing and excited to do it, but we hold them back because usually we're too scared. My God, have our own employees say stuff? You know, we've just got to kind of get over ourselves and empower people and trust them a bit more and allow them to make mistakes. Forgive them rather than saying, don't go near it in case they say the wrong thing.
David ThompsonI've noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you do a fair amount of, I think they're called fireside chats or interviews. Yeah, that looks to me like a deliberate strategy. Is that something which people could use to improve their employer brand?
David ThompsonYeah, absolutely. Again, just little things, simple things like conversations with, you know, Here's us talking to a few of our employees about why they find it different here, what they enjoy about it here. Simple little things, you know, little YouTube videos that you shot on an iPhone, which are bringing to life day in the life. Okay, here. Hello, I'm David. I work for this organization. Here's what I'm doing today. Doesn't have to be lavish, expensive, highly produced content. It could be really simple stuff, but it's all just helping to bring authenticity and bringing an emotional connection to your to, you know, to the audience you're speaking to. So yeah, sometimes simple is better, and sometimes rough and ready is better as well. You know, again, it can add a layer of authenticity saying, here's a real person just filming themselves going about their business, showing you what it's like to work for their organization. It feels truthful, it feels honest, it doesn't feel overproduced. That can be the best way. So it doesn't require huge budgets. It just requires effort and thought. Just think carefully about what the story is and how you're going to tell that story. You know, it's authentic, it's revealing, it's got an emotional connection, it's entertaining. We love, you know, the world of inside work has become a thing. You know, we all watch Greg Wallace's Inside the Factory. On the surface, you think that's the most boring program ever, just watching people doing their jobs, right? It's not. It's really interesting. So, people like watching other people doing their work. And if you can show them that and show them engaged people and show people succeeding and feeling fulfilled in their roles, it just elevates you as an employer above all others. And it can mean that most organizations are in a battle with other either local employers or battling for people with the same skill sets, but it just gives you the edge over them that will make sure that you find and retain the best talent.
David ThompsonThere you have it, pretty much everything you need to know to decide if employer branding is going to work in your recruitment stack. Like anything, you kind of have 2 options at this point. You either go and get an agency to do it, or you go and do it all on your own. There is a 3rd option, which is insanely cost-effective and also means you can train someone in your organization to do this for you. And by the way, we We're not getting paid from David to say this. So let's go and hear from David about his new course.
David ThompsonPart of the problem we have is that the principles of employer branding are like marketing. People in marketing have these skills. People in talent acquisition and in HR don't have these skills. So at the moment, to develop an employer brand, the only option that these people have is to go to their marketing team who haven't got time to work with them. And I've got better things to do, or go externally to an agency, which is— you'll get great work, but it's at a cost. It's highly expensive. The other thing you can try and do is do it yourself, and that's what our course is there to do. It's there to help upskill people in talent acquisition and in HR with the skills they need to be able to research and develop their own employer value proposition. build their own employer brand and take it to market, basically. So it's giving them all of the skills they need across the entire employer brand lifecycle. It is priced, we think, very competitively. It's £495, so you can get the skills you need. It's all online, so you're going through a series of video modules, but you can go from someone who's never really heard of employer brand to somebody who's pretty proficient.
David ThompsonYeah.
David ThompsonFor £495 with about 20 hours of study. What we sometimes find then, there are organizations go, that's great, I've learned a lot, but it'd be just nice to have you walking alongside me as I'm doing this, just to make sure I'm doing it right. So our mentoring service kind of supports them, and we give as little or as much help as needed. Sometimes we have clients who just say, I just need you to do this. I haven't got the resource, I haven't got time, there are bits I can't do. I haven't got a creative team, I haven't got a social media expert. Can you just do these bits for us? So we can plug the gaps where there are gaps as well. But the whole ethos is to try and put as much of the work and responsibility into the hands of these teams so they can upskill and manage it themselves, rather than being dependent and always going out to an agency and the cost that's involved with that. So we're trying to make in-house employer branding teams like in-house marketing teams with all the skills and respect that they have. And then when you've got that, you can build and maintain your brand because it's an organic thing. It's not something you do once. Like any brand, it takes maintenance. You've got to keep doing it, you know. So it just allows you to carry on and do that and reap the benefits over time.
Leanne ElliottThat's it until next time when we will be back with something that's a bit more in my wheelhouse. I'll feel a bit more A bit more in my comfort zone, which is, which is relevant. You'll get that when you listen next week. We have a neuroscientist expert on, Hilary Scarlett, a speaker, consultant, Cambridge University graduate, and author of the amazing book— it is, it is well read in my house— it's called Neuroscience for Organisational Change. She is here to talk about the neuroscience of change. In other words, why understanding how the brain deals with change can help you avoid big problems associated with said change in the workplace.
David ThompsonYeah, I asked Leanne if I could interview Hillary. I know she was, but primarily because as a total non-expert, I knew I'd be asking the stupid questions that most people, including my wife and co-host, would be afraid to ask. But don't worry, Leanne will be helping me to understand how it all fits together in the workplace.
Leanne ElliottSo yeah, join us next week for a genuinely fascinating talk about the brain and how it deals with change with the awesome Hillary Scarlett. Before we go, if you want to find out more from our guest, David Thompson, today, here's where to go.
David ThompsonCool. Well, they can find me on LinkedIn, David Thompson 4 on LinkedIn, or they can come to our website, which is www.employerbrandingmadeeasy.com.
David ThompsonBefore we say goodbye, just a quick note. Since we recorded this, David has a new website called getbettercandidates.com, which is definitely worth a look. Lee, have we got anything else to add, or can these kind people go and get a beer?
Leanne ElliottUh, oh, go, go, go! But if you should have time whilst sipping that beer, or indeed any other alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage, um, subscribe, like, leave a comment. Um, always good. Leave a review, even better. If you can't bother to write one, just the rating, the 5-star rating is nice. Um, if you are that one person out there that gave us a 2-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Please reveal yourself. Yeah, please tell us why. We'll try and fix it.
David ThompsonAnyway, for the rest of you, thank you for podding with us. We are aware you have a choice, and we will see you next time for the amazing Hillary. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I don't know why I am talking like this, like a 1950s Hello and welcome to the BBC.
Leanne ElliottBusiness founder and leader— no, that's not who we're talking to.
David ThompsonThis is David Thompson.
Leanne ElliottSorry, David. Sorry, Dave. We've already done Kate.
David ThompsonWe've done Kate.
Leanne ElliottShe's on my mind because I'm doing the— and grills David on whether there's a demonstrable— good word though.
David ThompsonThat's a great word. I like it because it's got monster in it as well.
Leanne ElliottAs well as what people commonly, commonly, commonly—
David ThompsonYou got demonstrable, right? You got commonly wrong.
Leanne ElliottAnd some quick rings, quick wings. I could eat chicken wings.
David ThompsonI could eat chicken wings. Do a—