Does Your Brand Suck? Unleash LIVE!
- Chad and Cheese
- Oct 29, 2019
- 32 min read
Updated: Jun 4, 2020
Conferences are fun when Chad & Cheese take the stage. And they're twice as fun when big brands and influential voices join the boys on stage.
That's just what happened at Unleash in Paris last week when Brandy Ellis of Smashfly, Chris Wray of Sainsbury's and Adam Yearsley of Red Bull joined the fun. Hint: There were disagreements. And loads of knowledge droppin'.
Enjoy this Smashfly exclusive.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Chad: This Chad & Cheese cult brand podcast is supported by SmashFly, recruiting technology built for the talent lifecycle and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM.
Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's on for the Chad & Cheese podcast.
Lars: All of you, if you can find it on any podcast hosting tool you want I definitely recommend. It's fun. It's entertaining. It's lively. And it's going to challenge the way you think about the field. And that's what we want at a podcast. But I'd love to introduce the host of the chatting cheese podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman, and they're going to bring out their panel. Let's give them a warm welcome to the influencer stage. Sir. Have fun.
Joel: Should we bring out the folks while we're dealing with technical issues?
Chad: Yeah, go ahead.
Joel: Brandy, why don't you to come up? Brandy from SmashFly. Big round of applause for Brandy. Chris from Sainsbury's, everybody. Big round of applause. And Adam from Red Bull may have run away. He didn't want to be on... Oh, there he is. Okay. Adam from Red Bull. He has wings, everybody [crosstalk 00:01:33].
Chad: All right. Yeah. Technical issues, screw it. Okay. If you haven't listened to the Chad & Cheese podcast before, just so you know, this is an adult setting. They're going to be explicit, possibly F bombs dropping. We're dumb Americans. We do this shit, right?
Joel: Not safe for work is what this is.
Chad: Yes. So luckily-
Joel: Feel free to leave. Our feelings won't be hurt.
Chad: We have actually conned Red Bull, Sainsbury's, and SmashFly on stage to talk about brand today and candidate experience-
Joel: And we're sitting on bookings so they can't escape.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: We've got them.
Chad: Yes. And we have people in the audience that will stop them as well. We're going to start off first with the introductions. We're going to do that with Adam from Red Bull. So give us a Twitter version, who you are, what you do, why are you on stage.
Joel: Elevator pitch.
Adam: Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management at Red Bull. I do people.
Chad: I love that.
Joel: How much Red Bull are you on right now?
Adam: I'm actually tired so [crosstalk 00:02:29]-
Joel: Oh, you're tired? Okay. But you do come down off Red Bull eventually. Good to know. Brandy.
Brandy: I feel like that's kind of a bad representation of brand, right? You're supposed to be not tired.
Joel: Yeah, "I'm never tired."
Adam: I'm just human.
Brandy: Hi, guys. Brandy Ellis from SmashFly. I lead the recruitment marketing function there and previously I was a practitioner for about 18 years. We're going to stop counting right about there.
Joel: You were six years old.
Brandy: What?
Joel: You were six years old.
Brandy: Absolutely yes. I was six years old when I started. But no, I've come up through candidate experience and recruiting and all of the things. So very glad to see all of the mix of people here in the room because I think we've got a good group.
Chris: Hi, my name is Chris Wray. I'm head of recruitment strategy for Sainsbury's. I look after 60 work streams for the business and one of these work streams is brand and attraction.
Joel: Excellent. So I know, Chad, you have something you want to start off with.
Chad: Hell yeah.
Joel: Something Adam wrote.
Chad: So Adam wrote this awesome idea/article that you actually put into play where you partnered with marketing. Believe it or not, marketing you can do this.
Joel: It can happen.
Chad: So I want to learn and want these guys to hear more about the partnership of becoming a force multiplier with marketing.
Adam: Yeah. I'm a organizational psychologist by trade. So a lot of what I do is work out how to influence behavior. And at Red Bull we have a marketing department. Guess what they do? Influence behavior.
Chad: Give you wings.
Adam: Yeah, they give you wings but they do it on scale. So a lot of the techniques marketing is using to influence behavior to get people to buy products we also need to use to get people to use our products and get people engaged with our products. But probably taking three steps back, the first learning I really got from my marketing people was consumer centered design. Design-
Chad: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Say that again.
Adam: Consumer centered design.
Chad: When candidates or what also.
Adam: Right. But that's the point. They're consumers-
Chad: Yeah, I know. But I don't think in talent acquisition we get that shit.
Adam: No-
Chad: We think candidates are candidates and they're our customers. But carry on. Carry on.
Adam: Good. No, I think we do. I think people get it.
Adam: People I don't think they're aware of what you can really do with employee brand within the company. I think we sort of go, "Oh, well I'm going to create something and then I'll send it to my marketing department, see if they like it." Get your marketing department in and co-create with them something. And often marketing is really interested because around employee brand they've got more space to maneuver than they do around the company brand a lot of the time because normally it's quite a wide space. So normally you can get marketing in with you it's-
Chad: They have more influence. They have more influence. They have more
dollars.
Adam: They do. They have more money.
Chad: They have more dollars.
Adam: Always more money.
Joel: More money.
Adam: Yeah. And then if you can convince them that your EVP play is actually a marketing play then you can take some of their money.
Joel: Does the Red Bull gives you wings work on the employment side as well? Do you guys sort of into each other?
Adam: Yeah, yeah. Gives you wings. Get up in the morning, man. That's….
Joel: So if I go to your career site am I going to see a career at Red Bull gives you wings? Do you carry over that same message?
Adam: Yeah, yeah we do.
Joel: Good.
Adam: It's also an internal message in terms of how we run and drive our people. So if you're not doing people development it's against the brand.
Chad: Jump in Chris.
Chris: So I think there's two points. You say people get it. I honestly don't think businesses actually get candidates king. I still think companies think they're better than the candidate. Also we talk about marketing and EHR and who's better to influence. Actually no. Marketing turn up with data, HR turn up with a presentation, which all looks fluffy. You need to turn up with data. And I think that's the reason why marketing are seen as respected at the table because they understand the data.
Joel: And what kind of data does marketing want to see to care?
Chris: They actually get a benchmark. They understand their click through rates. They understand what paid search is. Like trying to educate the business about paid search, I did it the other day to some senior leaders and used the analogy as see paid search as everyone knows park, they choose a theme park, it's fast tracked at a theme park. It's getting you to the top of the results, it's getting you there quick. And it's that education base and the storytelling I think marketing are great at. I just think sometimes HR colleagues, I'm not saying Sainbury's because we're great, could say it without getting fired, but I just think they just don't understand it. And I think is also is we don't pick the right agency sometimes.
Chad: So isn't that one of the reasons why we're not at the big kid's table?
Chris: We still can't even get an ATS right? And that's been around for 20, 30 years.
Chad: I mean, we try to make things more complex and we're not speaking the business speak. To be at the C suite table, to actually have a business conversation you're talking about marketing has data and that HR has all the fluffy shit. The reason why marketing gets the money is because they have the data to be able to demonstrate that they are actually impacting the bottom line.
Chris: Unless -
Chad: Who thinks at NTA we don't impact the bottom line on the consumer side? Who believes that they don't impact the bottom line? Yeah, exactly. We do. Why aren't we talking about that shit?
Chris: Let's use example. Would you wait 45 minutes for your Uber? No, you would not wait 45 minutes for Uber. But let's put a candidate through 45 minutes of shit and the hiring manager is never going to use it. I just think it's an absolute disgrace.
Brandy: I totally agree. However, Uber has set the expectation that they're going to be there immediately. Talent acquisition-
Joel: I like Amazon better. If it took 45 minutes to buy something you never would.
Chris: They started doing taxis?
Brandy: Whatever product. We already have an expectation of it's going to be here immediately, then it better be there immediately. Unfortunately, we've set the expectation with a lot of people and applicants and candidates or even employees today that the process sucks. They know it sucks, and they're willing to go through the
pain to fill out our applications. And that's bad.
Adam: Well, not in this market. They're not. I mean, the great candidates that are out there today who already have jobs will not go through 45 minutes of bullshit to be able to apply for a job, which is why you're losing them in the first place.
Chris: I think someone said it the best to me, and this is the best analogy. Most application forms are like Game Of Thrones. It's not the best person that actually gets the job. It's the person that actually lasted through the application. So I [crosstalk 00:08:55]-
Chad: Survive the winter.
Chris: Survive. That's what it is.
Joel: How surprised were your marketing departments when they learned how many profiles, resumes, data points were in your ATS?
Chris: So marketing don't actually get involved in any of our attraction. We have-
Joel: And how many resumes are in your ATS?
Chris: So if we look at we get about 500000 applications from our retail perspective at Sainsbury's.
Brandy: Is that annually?
Chris: Annually.
Joel: And do you think your marketing department would be interested in 500,000 potential customers?
Chris: They would do.
Joel: Yeah. That might be a conversation you want to have. Have you had that conversation?
Adam: We're in Europe. So we have a thing called GDPR.
Joel: GDPR.
Adam: It's like we care about -
Joel: There's the wet blanket overall.
Adam: I get the Americans to hear like, "Yeah, great. We'll grab the data." No, no, no, no... In Europe where we're a little bit more sensitive to data. Look, I think there's a starting point and the starting point is to take a lot of the things I think we all know really seriously. So just really look at what you already know. You know that it's your candidate experience is your recruiting flow. So really take a candidate view from that and just re-look at what [crosstalk 00:09:47]-
Joel: You know what though? I'm going to push back a little bit. Okay? So there's really nothing in your process that says if I apply to Red Bull that I don't get an email after saying, "Thanks for applying. Here's a 25% or whatever discount on your next purchase of Red Bull," which I assume you don't do, but you could. And GDPR does not affect that action whatsoever.
Adam: No, 100%. But what we do is we come back to and say, "Well would you like to find out more about yourself and your strengths and how you could develop and grow? If you want to work with us, you're going to need to do that." And then we give you a free psychological assessment with a 20 page report. So we do that.
Chris: And how many people uptake that?
Joel: Well, that sounds sexy.
Chad: I just want a Red Bull hat, man. Just send me a Red Bull hat.
Joel: Because when I think Red Bull I think psychological assessment.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Give me something I can put some vodka in and have a good time.
Brandy: Question on that though, so I get my 20 page psychological assessment and somewhere along the way it says, "You're not right in the head to work here at Red Bull."
Chad: Well, it's good to know that now.
Joel: Here's your coupon.
Brandy: I know, but how do you deliver that message? Because that's where companies fall off the ledge every single time is it doesn't matter if you give them a 20 page assessment or just a quick email delivering that message. Is the tough news. How do you do that?
Adam: Well, I think that's exactly the point that I made with my marketing department. I said, "Look, wouldn't it be great if we could add some value to those people, whether they get a job or not?" And we said, "Well, let's help them uncover their story." And so they can use that for the next job or the next interview. They can talk more succinctly about their strengths, about how they can develop and how they can grow. So-
Joel: This is sort of for both of you. You guys have applications. Majority of people do not get a job at your companies. Are you doing anything to keep them warm, communicating with them on a regular basis as marketing and [crosstalk 00:11:47]-
Chad: Nurture.
Joel: Yeah, nurturing farming.
Chris: We're trying a lot of products at the moment and we're putting in a couple of SJTs, but also we're doing new app based at the moment. The app gives the candidates... we're bypassing Taleo. I'm not a big fan of Taleo and I'm just an awful ATS.
Chad: Who's a fan of Taleo? Yeah, one person. And they work for Taleo just so you know.
Chris: And it's interesting. We give the candidate an option. So I'm always candidates choice because I want choice when I go on to any website. So this instead of doing a CV sift we took the CV away and we've asked the candidate for three pieces of information. Quick, easy, let's get to the point. We give them two tests, critical mind thinking and a coding challenge. It's multiple choice. They get to pick it. Each question is
40 seconds. Inside 21 minutes they get a response saying they've pass/fail.
Chad: How long does that take though?
Chris: Straight away. It's instant.
Chad: So how long does the actual assessment-
Chris: End to end, 21 minutes. And that's your application as well. What we did do and what we're monitoring at the moment is we give the candidate choice to speak to a recruiter and we give the candidate choice to whether they want to discover about us. We had 100 downloads-
Joel: When you say speak to recruiters is that a human being?
Chris: Yes, speak to a recruiter, have a chat, automatic input.
Joel: That's crazy.
Chris: Here's a list of times, anytime you want to book in Monday to Friday. We're at 100 downloads in our first week. One person has picked to speak to a recruiter.
Joel: But they'll text them.
Chris: No. They don't even want to speak to... They just want to literally get to the next stage of assessment. So that starting us just understand is candidates just want convenience until actually they come through. And I'm reading loads of reports is brand loyalty doesn't happen until 60 days after into business. A lot of Gartner is starting to say that, Mercer is starting to say that, is candidates have got choice these days and if we don't realize that you're going to be left behind.
Chad: Well, that's the experience though, right? You're talking about the experiences now, but it carries on. It's not something that just happens in that moment. It happens in the moment, but it also carries on, which goes back to the whole nurturing conversation.
Joel: Brandy, you probably have an opinion on nurturing candidates, don't you?
Brandy: I do. I have a lot of opinions on nurturing. I'm not going to talk about the company that I worked for necessarily but-
Chad: When you were a level three.
Brandy: I was with IBM. I've been with-
Chad: I knew that.
Brandy: ... large organizations and-
Chad: Small companies.
Brandy: ... small companies, we never had a nurturing program. It was moment in time, fill out the application, whether it's 20 minutes or however long the psychological assessment take. But it's moment in time. That's what we're looking at. And today the conversation is shifting to that candidate's life cycle of a job. I mean, people are averaged in the workforce 40 years, unfortunately. And so they're going to come back to us.
Chad: They're not qualified today but they might be qualified tomorrow.
Brandy: Correct.
Chad: I think we're working too much in this segment in time as opposed to filling pipelines because we're going to have to fill these positions next year, the year after that, so on and so forth. And if we piss these people off not only they're not going to buy our product but they're not going to come fucking work for us.
Brandy: No, it's absolutely true. And you reduce the amount of workforce that you have access to. So the worst the experience the people go through it and then the available talent becomes talent scarcity even more because they don't want to work for your brand and they're not going to deal with your brand, both as a consumer and as a candidate. So the people you can recruit go down.
Adam: Yeah. There's a lot of companies here selling artificial intelligence, machine learning, and black box algorithms that'll magically match people to jobs.
Chad: Does that work? Well-
Joel: I don't think you can have a booth here unless less AI is somewhere.
Adam: I know. I know.
Chad: That's a checkbox.
Adam: Does it work? Well, I haven't seen it work with the sort of accuracy that I'd put my job on it. I haven't gone up to an AI yet and said, "Show me what my perfect job would be and have it spit back global head of talent management." Now, it could be I'm in the wrong job. I don't know. Let's see.
Chad: Take that assessment and you'll find out.
Adam: Right. But, I mean, even take five steps back from AI look at how you market the jobs. Look at how you position yourself as a company. Take a marketing approach to consumer segmentation. The people applying for jobs in your retail section at Sainbury's are radically different to the people that apply for jobs in marketing. Yes, you have a brand, but don't assume that that brand goes beyond everything. Different sorts of people go for different jobs. We know that. So segment based on that and then get your marketing group in and say, "Let's build a map of who that person is," and create that person and then say, "Now, how do I market to them? What does the job ad need to look like? What sort of words are going to trigger their attraction and where can we place that ad?" And it's just taking what we already do, I think, in recruiting three steps further, and then you end up with individual ads for different jobs, which makes sense [crosstalk 00:16:47].
Chad: So here's the question. Those are the people that you're targeting, but there are a ton of candidates that aren't going to be qualified for your job, and yet they could perspectively buy your brand and you still want to have that great brand loyalty with them. How do you still ensure that this person is never going to have a job perspectively within your brand, but yet you still have to give them a great experience? How do you focus on that too? Because I think we focus on talent acquisition and brand management on, okay, I've got to go find that perfect candidate. Well, that's great. But what about all those candidates who are silver medalist, bronze medalist, and ones who won't even ever work at your organization but yet could buy your product?
Joel: And also do you think about people who come to the site, don't see a job for them and then leave the site? There are ways to capture those folks, whether it be retargeting, advertising, or hey a pop up that says, "Hey, don't leave yet. We may not have a job for you but give us your information. We'll keep you updated on opportunities."
Adam: The candidate experience thing is exactly as you described it. So we have a tiered... so depending on how much interaction we've had, how much investment you've given to us depends on how much investment we give back to you. So if you're phone interviewed then we'll post you four cans of Red Bull and a nice note. So it depends. It's all gradual and it's graduated. And as I said, everyone touching us from a recruiting side gets a free psychological assessment with a 19 page report. So it's a beginning. It depends on what level. But each [crosstalk 00:18:19]-
Chris: Have you tracked what's candidate satisfaction? Do they actually read it? What feedback have you had regarding that report?
Adam: I've never asked them because we just look at social media, because what they do is they share it and they talk about it on social media.
Chris: What's your engagement in social... What percentage would it sit at or-
Adam: Yeah. About 40% of the people that do it share it.
Chris: Wow!
Adam: Yeah. It's okay.
Joel: What's the percentage of positive versus negative?
Adam: Negative is really, really small. Yeah. I went to SHL just a minute ago. So expect some negative feedback coming.
Chad: If you hang on our show you'll get a few negatives.
Adam: Great, great, great. But no, really it's people want to share the experiences and it's such an open playing field because so few companies are giving positive candidate experiences to a no response. So when you do it, it stands out so much that candidates share. And what do they do? They talk about your company in a positive way. "Oh, my God." You've got word of mouth marketing. Oh my God, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:19:15]-
Joel: But are you doing either a direct tracking or sort of passive of how much referral traffic you're getting from... I'm sharing this on Twitter, so all the Twitter traffic that comes in I assume that's been increasing over the years as you've done this as well.
Adam: Yeah. More on the professional for platforms like LinkedIn and Xing in the Germanic world than Twitter. Twitter is a little bit different platform for us.
Chris: And is that test used as a sifting or does the hiring manager give feedback? So you do it at the front end of the process. I come in and interview you. Is your managers giving feedback or -
Adam: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. We still very much rely on hiring managers. The candidates are imperfect. The hiring managers are imperfect, and somewhere in between we find beauty and love.
Brandy: So this is the one time when my inner recruiter... because I spent a lot of years recruiting. Recruiters used to have such a bad rep, and for that reason the hiring managers are equally as bad, if not worse. And so a lot of the best in breed companies that I'm seeing now are starting both recruiter education programs and hiring manager programs, how do you speak to the candidates, how do you get their mind around that experience itself. And one of my clients, actually CBS, I don't know that you guys have them here, they're just a US based company, but a very, very large pharmacy brand. They have over 4 million contacts in their talent community just alone. They get something like three million applications a year. It's absolutely insane. And if you think about they only hire about 130000 every year that's like 2.8 million thanks but no thanks.
Brandy: And what they've started doing is putting the candidate experience survey throughout the recruiting process. So anytime you send an automatic letter out of the system it has a link to tell us what you think. And they've gotten several comments, and one of them stood out to me so much, especially for this panel, and it said, "I feel like your company actually cares. Thank you. I'm going to buy more products," verbatim in the survey.
Chad: Yeah. And how does that impact do you think the line of business, and do you talk to the line of business? Because we impact product. We impact customers. I mean, are we doing that?
Chris: So we did a rough estimate. So we worked out in Sainsbury's retail from a 10% candidate experience. We looked at our average number of applications. We then looked at the average number of job offers versus a 10% candidate bad experience. And we worked out about 147 million in sales it would cost us as a business. My team has been here a year, and it was newly created into the business. Those conversations people started to listen. People started to go, "Holy shit."
Chad: Who did you go to with that number? Because that's a big number.
Chris: So that's the heads of departments, that's my boss. And that opens up a conversation when you're saying number people go, "Whoa."
Chad: Well, that's a business conversation.
Chris: He didn't want to know more. But this comes back to data is we don't have data or we don't understand that and we don't pull. So again, best friends. We talk about marketing being our friends. Is the chief data scientist officers my best friend?
Joel: That's a good point.
Chris: The Sainsbury's data and I'm all over them because they're the expert, and I use the example is they always say is I come to you for data but when you ask me about recruitment I'm the expert. And I think our recruiters are shit at doing that, is I don't tell you how to code you shouldn't tell me how to recruit.
Adam: Chris, there's two sides to this though, the data, yes, 100% data, the best friend, but at the same time I really think you need a story as well and that's why you need the marketing best. You need all the best friends, right?
Chris: I think you need a story, but I also think is the data will help inform where do you put that story or what site you put it on.
Chad: I think it's impacted too, right? Because it provides a bigger impact. It's not just a bunch of fluffy talent acquisition bullshit. When you can go to them and say $145 million that provides really impact to that story.
Chris: To some businesses dirt is I like to call them the vanity projects. They don't want to have the conversation so they put a billboard outside of their office and, "Look I'm doing some work," is actually that really frustrates me. And I do come back and say to the data is it will speak itself and you understand where you need to be, your priorities. So-
Adam: Getting marketing in those, it's not too hard because, I mean, you just need-
Chad: Talk about that though because I think everybody out there is like, "How in the hell do I connect marketing? They won't give me the time of day." Who's tried to actually connect with marketing before and they're like, "Go away"? I mean, that's not easy. Tell us how you did-
Joel: Who has connected with their marketing department and has a good relationship with them?
Chad: Excellent. So-
Joel: Good for you.
Chad: Good collaboration. How do you get the-
Chris: Let me ask the question, who owns their own brand guidelines? Who's gained that trust with marketing where they just say is, "We trust you to do your job"?
Chad: Two people.
Joel: The minority I think.
Chad: Two people. We're going to podcast. So I've got to actually say this. Go ahead.
Adam: For me, and I mean I've no idea how you need to do it in your companies, I mean, Red Bull is a marketing company. So it makes it easy. Most things come from marketing. But it was really a case of sitting down and saying, "Look, we have these people coming to us, 500000 every year who actually invest 20 minutes to apply for a role. They're not candidates. They are fans." And then I took a step back and said, "In life there's three really big decisions. Who am I going to marry, what house am I going to buy, and what company will I work for." And I said, "They're willing to make that bet on us." Now the question is, what are you going to do with that? What can we do with that together? Marketing. How could you maximize that experience? They're open. They want us.
Adam: And then at the same time you stand there and you show marketing its numbers in terms of how much does it spend trying to find new people to attract to the brand. And you say, but these guys are already coming and they're already saying they love us. We've just got to have a better conversation with them and add some value to them.
Brandy: I think it's two part. One, with marketing you have to go to them and translate the data because you're both right in saying that you have to have the data. And in HR in general we're not very good at translating the data into the impact and into the story. And I think that's one of the pieces. But then at the second time creating a candidate, a journey map of some sort, is one of the more important things because we forget in the transaction of recruiting the moment in time what that person is feeling when they choose to commit to your brand and be willing to work for your organization. That's an emotional high. And then they drop off. I mean it's a roller coaster.
Joel: I want to talk about some external issues. So many times your brand is what other people say about you and not what you say about yourself. So the advent of Glassdoor and other employer review sites obviously impacts what you guys are doing. Talk about what you're all doing or what you're seeing in terms of how companies are engaging with Glassdoor, what's best practices, what you're saying, or what you're doing.
Adam: I ignore them. I don't deal with them.
Brandy: I would love to advise my clients and in a past life I would love to say that we didn't deal with Glassdoor, but we did for the reason that I worked for a very small technology company that was recruiting data scientists and we were competing with the likes of Intel and Google. And there was just no way that we would get them. And so we had to reply to our Glassdoor responses, but it had to be incredibly authentic. And that's a word that gets thrown around all the time. What I mean by that is we owned our shit. I mean, we said, "Yes, it's bad. Yes, we're fixing it, and yes, here's a program. Give us specific example, proof if you will, of what we're doing to make the environment better." And we actually had really great feedback from the data science candidates that appreciated it. But it takes time.
Chad: Well, aren't those great signals though? I think there's so many signals that are out there and a lot of them are noise, but these could be signals that actually demonstrate that this is a problem and it might be a problem that you're not even aware of until it pops up.
Adam: Yeah. I've just got to say something that I forgot. We actually as part of that the decision not to work with Glassdoor was one part. The other part was to put a big fat contact us button in the middle of it. So we got the signals direct from the candidates themselves and not via a social media platform. So we let them come to us and talk with us a lot more easily.
Chad: So you do listen. It's just the whole Glassdoor mafia game you're just, "Screw Glassdoor." Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Joel: I think it's stupid to ignore reviews that are online. And it's not just Glassdoor. There are 20 plus sites out there that are dedicated to anonymous employee feedback, and whether it's InHerSight or Fairygodboss or WomenHack that is dedicated to female engineers or females, I just think it's a mistake to ignore it. Obviously you've done this a long time and it works for you, but I think as a company you should at least listen to what's going on. Whether you engage or not, I would invite you to engage.
Chris: So that's the difference.
Joel: Just simply ignoring it I think is a bad strategy.
Chris: So the differences is engaging with it is you maybe don't want to engage on their platform, but it's showing you've actually done something about it and seeing there's going to be a trend to that. So I don't read Glassdoor. I do read Indeed. I know Indeed own Glassdoor now, but to me is as long as you're monitoring it and you're understanding what's going on and doing something about it-
Joel: So are you engaging with reviews?
Chris: So we're not engaging with. We're looking at them and we're understanding what's going on and what people are saying.
Joel: Was there a decision to not engage? Was there a discussion at the work?
Chris: Yeah.
Joel: And why did you come to the conclusion of not engaging?
Chris: We wanted to show we're doing something about it and it's that uptake of do we have the resource to actually continue to answer and respond [crosstalk 00:29:01].
Joel: So it's a resources question.
Brandy: So do you have on your Glassdoor pages or your sites, because you don't have to pay in order to put something out there, do you have a statement that says while we're not responding to these we are looking and listening?
Adam: We have curated our Glassdoor page and yes, occasionally we do look at it to monitor it and to curate it. I think that's a differential.
Joel: So forget Glassdoor for a second. I mean, you mentioned Indeed. Indeed will tell you the have more reviews than Glassdoor. So do you pay attention to indeed and what's going on there? Ignore it. Okay.
Brandy: Chris, do you guys have a statement that says, "We're reading this and-"
Chris: No, but I'm taking that straight away and texting like, "Please update."
Brandy: Honestly, that's one of the things we're here to talk about though, is we're impacting brand and experience. And if you're not telling them that you're doing it then how do they know?
Chris: 100%. And I always say is we're not perfect. And I wouldn't sit here on stage and say we're perfect, is we're on a journey and I've never seen... it's such a fast paced moving social. You just got to keep up, keep on evolving, and keep learning. That's the big thing is learning from people's mistakes and from your network as well.
Joel: Yeah. Let's to get to some questions here on the board. Max, is that you, Max? No. Maybe. All right. All right. This one is for Red Bull. Do global employers like Red bull get a different CRM in Europe versus the US versus... ROW is what? Rest of the world. Okay. Americans don't care about the rest of the world. In order to adapt to local preferences, regulations. Different CRMs.
Adam: Candidate CRM I assume we're talking.
Brandy: Yes.
Adam: No, we actually have one global CRM. We have a few different workflows for exactly that, for adapting to both regulations and volume because some markets, like the US for instance, very large volume. We have different roles there, high turnover recruiting as well. Other markets are incredibly small. We only have 150 people so we can have very different candidate workflow. So we built it very flexible depending on volume but also on legal requirements.
Joel: Chris.
Chris: We've got Taleo, which kills me inside, mindful this is being recorded. But we're having conversations now. We're really understanding, and again it's back to the figures. We're starting to educate the business. I'm really telling that story to the businesses. If we don't step up we are going to lose candidates. And we use the example now, which I say is in retail we do not struggle to recruit. Some of our adverts have to be taken down in 24 hours because you get 600 applicants for one role where in data, digital and tech, we do. People can see past the shop window. They see us as a retailer. They see us as this 150 year old boring business. So that's when we do have to change the experience and bringing in apps and bringing in different systems.
Joel: So Mario wants to know about multimedia. As you guys know, video is eating the internet. Video is huge, right? You've got TikTok, you've got Snapchat, Instagram videos. What are you guys-
Chad: Podcasts.
Joel: And podcast. Yes. Thank you. What are you guys doing multimedia wise? I'm sure Red Bull, you guys are probably doing something interesting in that way with either video or podcast or blog.
Chad: Dude, they've got people jumping out of space and shit. I mean-
Joel: Yeah. That was crazy by the way. There wasn't an apply at Red Bull link anywhere but I'm sure they got the message.
Adam: From an employee branding point of view, yeah, I mean, we leveraged the different plat social platforms. From a video side I integrated videos into the psychological assessments. You get video coaching from Red Bull athletes based on your personality. That seemed to work very well. We have video-
Joel: So Red Bull athletes.
Adam: Yeah.
Joel: So the athletes that represent your brand, they're the ones that are engaging with candidates.
Adam: Yeah.
Joel: That's cool.
Chad: That's pretty fricking awesome.
Adam: And then we use companies like HireVue for video interviewing platform. We have that as well. A lot of the branding activity I'm doing on LinkedIn... and we post content that is work related on LinkedIn. Sometimes it's video content, sometimes it's funny video content, sometimes it's an athlete racing to get to a plane and he's a parkour athlete. So he's running, jumping, and diving as he tries to get to the plane. So it-
Chad: Hertz and OJ Simpson.
Adam: Kind of. Yeah. So it depends on what we're doing, how we use it. But yeah, video, multimedia -
Joel: We brought up OJ in a podcast. Yes.
Chad: I should take that.
Brandy: Since I'm not in the recruiting space specifically anymore, I'm consulting now, I'm seeing across the board AI especially, buzzword for the conference, interlocking all of your technologies. So AI can trigger recruiter, can trigger workflow to talk to the person in the moment. And then video is taking over. I think predictive intelligence is probably the next that we're going to start to see of candidate matching. And we talked briefly about that. Candidate matching with jobs and that sort of thing is starting to be the next on the list.
Chris: So are we talking from a brand awareness or are we talking about through the process? Because from a brand point of view is... so we've created a new EVP, which I'm going to talk about later. Awful. Please come. But we're starting to do a lot of video content. So we're split into two pieces. We're split into thought leadership content because people are starting to move for thought leaders. So we're doing 30 to 60 second videos, which we're pushing out to multiple channels and starting to look at the impressions and the click through rates and understanding. Our engagement rates are through the roof. We're sitting at 4.8%.
Chad: These are videos.
Chris: Videos. So Cisco have used a stat by 2022 82% of people will watch video. That's what you're saying is if you are... I use the example is and I use my dad for example, is hate when he's building something he looks at the instructions. When I'm building something I go on YouTube. And that's what gen Z are doing. Gen Z are watching two hours to fours video a day. If you don't have a video strategy in your marketing pace you're going to be screwed in two years time because people don't want to read stuff. They think it's HR and they think HR sat in their ivory tower and they've read it out and they've published it. Video doesn't lie. You can see authenticity, and it's.... The whole corporate stuff annoys me as well. It has to be authentic.
Joel: So will job descriptions start having videos within the job description or should they?
Chris: I think they should.
Chad: Like a day in the life kind of [crosstalk 00:35:24]?
Chris: And I saw in ATS and ATS has done it. And also they've done endorse where they've got colleagues going on and endorsing the job. So it's video endorsement. I'm like how authentic can that be -
Chad: So how you're getting engagement? Because we see a ton of video out on YouTube and it'll get like 10 views. They're like, "We did this great video. We put it on YouTube, and then we put it on our website." How are you getting the engagement? What kind of strategy do you have from an engagement standpoint?
Adam: We just take a content marketing view of it. So what we need to do is add value to the candidate. It's got to be valuable information either about the company or about enhancing themselves, growing themselves. So we kind of stick to that from a content side. We have videos-
Joel: And when you create content are you leveraging the main Red Bull
brand-
Adam: Sometimes.
Joel: ... or is it a separate?
Adam: These days I'm asking the brand guys to go create a piece of content weaving their stuff with my stuff. So it's going backwards and forth.
Joel: Smart.
Brandy: That's how it should work. Eventually hopefully that's how it will work.
Joel: Historically it hasn't.
Adam: And we have four-
Joel: Employing brand has their YouTube channel and the main market [crosstalk 00:36:32]-
Adam: No, no, no, no, don't do that. That's bad. But we have four day in the life micro-sites as well with video integrated showing people. These are high volume roles. We have a lot of them to show people really what the job is about because the best AI at the moment for me is a candidate that really understands what the job is and also really understands themselves. And if they can do that, they can make a match, and that's very cheap for me. It's very time efficient for me, and it's normally fairly accurate.
Joel: So does this video go across all social media platforms or what is sort of the distribution strategy for you guys?
Adam: Yeah. It's LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. There is YouTube parts of it, but it's a micro site with video components. So it lends -
Joel: More social media that YouTube.
Chris: Just out of curiosity, do you have to love Red Bull? I'm getting a feeling is you have to love Red Bull to work for them. If I say at Sainsbury's we see people walking with Tesco bags. We see people walking Ocado. But I get a feeling is you have to live, breathe red Bull to work there.
Adam: No.
Joel: You're saying like it's a bad thing. Shouldn't employees love the brand?
Chris: It from a diversity point because I'm like is consumer different to employer brand?
Adam: Yeah, it is. That's a really good question. So our consumer brand is very risk-taking, very rebellious, whereas my EVP brand is very professional and it's about the quality of the projects and the executions we do. And there's a nuance between those two. There's similarities.
Chris: And what is that nuance? So I give you Sainsbury's. So let's look at the digital and tech. Our Achilles heel is the stores. People don't realize the coll shit we do. They don't realize the 1.2 billion transactions, they don't realize about the nectar card, et cetera. What is the perception gap between the Red Bull brand versus the consumer?
Adam: Like I said, from a brand side it's extreme sports. It's about taking risks constantly and it's very winning sport based. On the company side, it's a lot about failure and making mistakes and learning very rapidly. It's about having an extremely high level of professionalism and I think it's a lot about being authentic in terms of how we deal with each other within the organization. So there're nuances, and so what I have to do is counteract my company's brand. If I put running, jumping, flying imagery I've got to be very careful to counteract that with professionalism, look at the execution of that event, look at how we do this, think about how that comes to life to counteract if you like.
Chad: Let's hit these next ones pretty quick.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: So talking about experience and Ethel asks about employee experience, customer experience, candidate experience. My question to you is do we make things harder than it should be? Shouldn't it just be that human experience that they have with your brand, whether they're an employee, whether they're a customer, whether they're a candidate. Shouldn't we always just be focused about the human at the end of the experience and stop fucking labeling it with all these different labels?
Brandy: Yes.
Chad: We make it too hard.
Brandy: Yes. Well, as humans we naturally over-engineer things anyway and humans are complicated. So if you take the human on that journey whether it's the consumer buying journey or the candidate journey, whatever it is, they're in the emotional highs and lows. But then at some point you do have to track and map out what they're going to interact with and where they interact. And that's where it becomes somewhat complicated internally in the organization.
Chad: So a candidate experience for somebody who is a developer could be entirely different for somebody who's in brand marketing or something of that nature. I mean, we could chop this up all day, but if we're just focused on the human being, I mean, shouldn't that be what the focus is? I mean, am I making this too simplistic, Chris?
Chris: I think you are. I think it also comes down to resources as well, is certain processes in high volume you have to automate the process. You have to be able to give that tough shit through.
Chad: That's not a bad experience though.
Chris: No, it's definitely not a bad experience, but I do think you have to adopt. It depends. Is there a talent shortage in the market? The thing also annoys me sometimes is the exec recruitment hire is why sometimes, not Sainsbury's but out there, but is they get the golden glove or the white glove treatment and then the rest of the business gets something different. And I never remember. I was actually speaking to a C suite team. They told me how to recruit one time and I said, "When is the last time you actually applied for a job?" And they all looked at me and go, "They usually get phone calls, wined and dined, flown in, taken around a racetrack," I won't say which company and then put up in a nice five star hotel. That's not the typical candidate experience. So I do think you have to adapt sometimes, but I don't think there should be such a big difference between a C suite candidate to your experienced higher point of view.
Joel: Next question. Emily asked do we always have to go cap in hand to marketing or should we be pushing to attract more rockstar marketers to employment brand? And I'll also add I see more companies having a middle person that talks to both entities. They talk employment and they also talk marketing to be a bridge between the two. So do you guys have any opinion on that question from Emily?
Brandy: Never go cap in hand. That's my first piece of advice.
Chad: Go data in hand is what I'm hearing from Chris.
Brandy: Well, that's what I was about to say.
Chad: Go data in hand. Yeah.
Brandy: Go data in hand and-
Chad: With the story.
Brandy: With the story.
Chad: With the story. There you go.
Brandy: Exactly. Go data in hand with the story. Don't go cap in hand because if you go cap in hand it's devaluing what we do in the talent function, and by devaluing that going cap in hand you're not leveraging all of the resources and the data that you have. HR and recruiting, we've got a ton of data whether we can do something with it or whether it's organized that's a whole different topic, but go with confidence and go saying this is my number of people who interact with my side of the brand every single day and wouldn't it be nice if those people were also brand advocates and start there.
Chad: Beautiful. Well, thank you very much.
Joel: Thank you guys. Everybody let's hear it for them.
Chad: Chris, Adam, Brandy, give it.
Joel: Hey, guys, real quick. If anyone out there wants to learn more about you guys Twitter handles LinkedIn-
Chad: Where can they find you?
Joel: ... any last words.
Adam: LinkedIn. Thank you.
Brandy: Twitter @BEllisrecruits.
Chris: LinkedIn. I won't share my Instagram. It's too dodgy.
Joel: Chadcheese.com.
Chad: Thanks everybody.
Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad & Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com.
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