#88: How Honest Employer Branding Attracts Better Candidates

Bradley Clark (00:00.024)
We do not want to be an aspirational employer brand. We want to be a very transparent employer brand.

Rhona Pierce (00:04.568)
Most employer brand content is like trying to impress people.

Bradley Clark (00:08.462)
It's not good for your business strategy. As we look heavily at our LinkedIn content, our followers and how we compete against other brands. They don't see LinkedIn as a huge value. You want to work here, you know a brand and that's great. So you're not just looking for a job, you're looking to work for us. What we found was it was 60 % of our hires came from that first wave that allows us to move quickly because otherwise we're not going able to compete.

Rhona Pierce (00:30.232)
What if your LinkedIn company page was so good that candidates were lining up before the job even posted? That's not a hypothetical. That's exactly what Bradley Clark has built an article. He's turned their employer brand into a talent acquisition engine. And today we're getting into how. Brad, welcome to Workfluencer.

Bradley Clark (00:51.63)
I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rhona Pierce (00:54.606)
So give me the short version, like how did you end up doing this work?

Bradley Clark (01:01.582)
Okay, the short version. Okay, I'm old, so it's not gonna be that short, but I'll try my best to make it as quick as I can here. So like a lot of people, I fell into recruitment. It wasn't like a goal saying, let's, you know, and so I fell into recruitment. I worked in a recruitment agency for a number of years. That worked out really well. I didn't love kind of just running candidates over the fence, so to speak. And I felt like there was a lot of strategy missing and it was good testing grounds, but just wasn't meeting a lot of needs for me personally. And so...

I left on a high note. I got a big bonus and went to Europe to go travel for a few months and just figure what's next for me. And when I was gone, I had some companies reach out to me. So I was literally like interviewing, going to the beach during the daytime, having a good time and then interviewing in hostels on a web camera, a janky web camera on like... This was even before Zoom. So this is... don't know what this was where I'm video interviews from. But anyways, I ended up setting up my own recruitment consulting practice. And so...

end up doing eight years of that working for companies like Boeing and Best Buy and Samsung and parachuting in, helping rebuild processes and do a lot of hands-on hiring, but also that evolved to player branding quite often as well. so this was really great. And then the pandemic hit and I thought, oh no, what's going on? And I was like, this is... Am I gonna have a job? Am I gonna have work? Are my clients gonna feel this kind of stuff?

So I saw a company which was an online furniture company which kept hiring us. Holy cow, they keep hiring. Everyone's like froze hiring and they were hiring during the pandemic and they're hiring for recruiter. And so I reached out and I was like, I'll get an interview with them and I'll try and convince them to hire me as a contractor and help build the process because they're scaling so big. They've got no recruitment team, no talent acquisition. And so I was hoping to play the Uno reverse card and convince them, you know, they need a as a contractor and fix their link for them.

They pulled the universe card back and said, no, we want to hire you actually full time to do this and build up the talent acquisition function. so that was almost six years ago now. And so I joined article about six years ago and they had nothing like they had, you know, really great consumer brand, but they had no internal talent acquisition. And at that stage, they were a bit of a rocket ship and we were going like crazy. so that's the not short version. I'm sorry. That's a longer version, but that's how I got, that's how I got here. And so.

Bradley Clark (03:27.214)
Yeah, it's been a fun journey.

Rhona Pierce (03:28.366)
If you've made it this far into the episode and you're not subscribed yet, now's a good time. No, that's super cool. And we met last year at Transform and then this year reconnected at one of the happy hours. And we were just talking about like what you're doing. And I was so, so excited to have you on the show because

I don't know. Let me know what you think. Most employer brand content is like trying to impress people. I argue that what candidates actually want to know is one thing and only one thing. What is it actually like to work there? Is that how you think about it? Article.

Bradley Clark (04:10.83)
That's exactly it. We do not want to be an aspirational employer brand. We want to be a very transparent employer brand. And I look at it like a double-sided Magnus kind of horseshoe Magnus you see in cartoons. One needs to be there just attracting people who are going to do well. The other one is going to be informing people, hey, this isn't going to be somewhere that you're going to thrive. And that's okay. It's not a bad thing. But being radically transparent about what this looks like. So could not agree more. And I think this is where people just get wrong.

try and cast this wide net saying it's great for everything for everyone. And it's not. That's not the right thing to do. It's not good for your business strategy. And it just leads to a lot of problems down funnel.

Rhona Pierce (04:50.25)
And as I was preparing for this, I was looking at your LinkedIn company page, which by the way has a huge amount of followers. And usually when I see that, think, okay, it's mostly, I'm sure consumer content. And no, it isn't. When I went there, most of your content, like I did not find really any like consumer content. It was all employer.

branding content of all different types and we're going to get into that. But one of the things that really I'm fascinated with and we spoke about it a little is this early access job posting strategy that you have. Can you walk our listeners through how that works?

Bradley Clark (05:36.27)
Yeah. So one of challenges I think a lot of companies, we have a lot of ones is we get flooded full of applicants. that's hard. mean, like, and those applicants, you know, especially for frontline jobs, typically these are, you know, we're spending money on job boards, like Indeed, we're spending a bunch of money, we're getting this huge wave of applicants. And, you know, the people are looking for jobs. And that's fair. But what I want us to find a way to is like, how can we give early access for people who actually know who Article is?

And similar, my inspiration came from, you know, I like music. And so I get these emails, they'll say, Hey, your favorite bands in town, you get early access because you're a fan. You sign up to our newsletter. You follow us on Instagram or whatever else. And so you're an actual fan of the band, not just someone who's a casual listener. You should get the first chance to buy tickets. So in my mind, I thought, Hey, how can we do this for job postings? And so what we're doing now is we're sharing our jobs to our LinkedIn followers. So it's like, you already know who the article is. Like you want to work here, you know our brand.

And that's great. So you're not just looking for a job, you're looking to work for us. And so you get early access before that happens. We also open up internal in case there's internal applicants or referrals. And so this first wave of people we get, we're finding it and this is well this is, there'll be a higher quality candidate because again, they know who we are. They've already opted in. So they've already said, Hey, I want to work here. So we do these big customer care hiring classes. And so we have a big customer care group. We bring those people in, they go through a big hiring class and then they

They're the people who answer any of your tickets if you have any challenges buying our product. And so what's interesting is so the last time we did this for one... This is our big test one. Let's test this out because we do this couple times a year. And what we found was it was 60 % of our hires came from that first wave. So that first wave was 60 % of our hires. So it doesn't replace your job boards. as a result that we had to...

reduced our number of applicants by 40 % because we shut down jobs once we hit a number of viable candidates. So we go, we've got enough people through, we can pare this down. And so we ended up spending less on job boards, got a higher quality applicant, the process was quicker and we got people who already know who we are as a brand. And so the interview process was like, hey, we know you, we want to work for you. This is great. And so anyways, we've rolled this out. That was one of our earlier tests. We're doing this for almost all of our jobs.

Bradley Clark (07:52.942)
And it just gives this window again for fans, like fans of the band. And so that was the inspiration from it. It's free, it's cheap. I I encourage other people to steal my idea and test it out. And so you can apply before it hits the job boards if you actually like articles. So when you follow articles, you're following on my TA team, you get access to these jobs before it hits the big job board again, and the way applicants come in.

Rhona Pierce (08:15.15)
And I know a lot of people listening are probably going to have some concerns about like, how do you keep the process fair and all of this stuff? But like this early access link is literally a link to your ATS. So correct me if I'm wrong, but when it hits the job boards, those applicants are going into the same pool, right?

Bradley Clark (08:33.518)
the exact same place. Yeah, 100%, the exact same place. And it's not necessarily about, mean, end of the day, the process is the same. So once you're in there, the process is the exact same. It just gives early access to people who already want to work for us. So I think I don't have any fairness concerns about it. I mean, the same interview process, everything else, it's just giving like fans of the band first chance to the good tickets.

Rhona Pierce (08:56.214)
Yeah, and I'm sure the difference in the interviews and just like you said, the quality of the applicants is different because they already bought into they like they don't want just a job. They want to work at article. And something that I noticed is that the call to action on those posts is something like, if this job isn't for you, follow us. And that's not your typical recruiting tactic, right? Like, that's like a straight up content or like,

brand building thing, right? Strategy. Was that intentional for you from the start?

Bradley Clark (09:32.59)
Yeah, very much so. we understand like, you know, that might be, you know, we want to keep increasing our followers. And so it becomes this flywheel effect. And so again, the more people we can get who follow us, that's great. They can learn more about us, get opt in, opt out, like we really will be transparent. So it might be a fan. They might think they're a fan. They might see what your content realized. Hey, actually, articles not for us. And that's awesome. That's great. Like go find somewhere that is for you. That's amazing. Like we want that. But then, you know, and we do the same thing for

our rejection emails. I mean, our rejection emails have the same thing where it's, we have people... If we find someone who may not be a fan of the job, but we think they can be great for us in other areas, they get a different rejection email and that rejection email says, follow us for early access to jobs. This is how to do it. You can sign up for job notifications in the ATS, follow us on LinkedIn. Because we think, hey, there's something there. And just because this job didn't work out, that doesn't mean you would not be great at article.

And so again, so we divide people up based upon that interjection process. We're constantly trying to feed this flywheel effect, so to speak, for our brand.

Rhona Pierce (10:37.998)
That's so cool. And what has been the feedback that you've had from candidates on this entire early access process?

Bradley Clark (10:48.558)
Yeah. mean, I think people... One, mean, my team is sharing that it works. Their followers are increasing. All those things are great. Higher management are paying better quality applicants. And we're closing jobs quicker. But for Ken, it just shows we care. It's just another signal. We're putting humans, we're thinking about them. It's hard. mean, I'll be honest. It's a really tough job market. I don't see it getting easier. I think it's going to get worse. I think it's getting much worse, to be honest.

And so just trying to find ways to humanize it and be honest and be sincere with people I think is really important right now.

Rhona Pierce (11:25.762)
And internally, you mentioned, and I've seen this as well in your content, like when I look at your LinkedIn page, it generally answers the question of what's it like to work there. I see internal promotions, milestones, real moments. Is that an intentional editorial strategy or did it evolve organically?

Bradley Clark (11:48.436)
So I mean, we're constantly testing new things out and we try to be fairly dynamic in this. Our employer brand... So I've got to deal with my team who do employer brand on the side of their desk. And so they are... Which has some advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is they're talking to candidates or trying to hire managers all the time. So they have their finger on the pulse at all times. And so we're able to adjust accordingly. But I had them recently say, Hey, what should we do for employer brand? Let's kind of figure out what categories we have for content and what this looks like.

And so I just, I trust them. They're great what they do. And so I said, come back and give me some ideas and let's work through this. And so they came back and we had four pillars for our content. And one is like our article engine, we call it. And this is how the machine works. So it was like behind the scenes, all the content. This is a big bulk of the content we share. People want to see it. It's like, who are the people who work there? What are the jobs look like? What do they do? And so that's a big part of this. Other one is community. And so this is, so...

And this varies based on where we're hiring. And so we hired in Vietnam, we got a Vietnam office. Community and social events is a big part of Vietnamese work culture. And so we want to showcase and share that. It's also big part of like working in North America, but to lesser degree. so, but our events come bottom up. And so we don't have HR as fun people. know, we've aged, it actually comes like there's a separate group we call the particle board. Article has called particles as an employee of article, person of article. And so our particle board

goes and they get a budget and they create events and they say, this is what people want to do. So it's totally ground up and grassroots. And so we share the stuff they do. So that's our community channel. So we have community, one of our pillars is community. The other one is stability. this is, mean, like I said, it's a, it's an unstable world right now. I economically, there's a lot of stuff going on. And so we want to show that as an organization, we're thoughtful, we're stable, we're here for the long haul, we're doing, you know, and so we want to share that. So we want to share milestones. We want to share.

how long we've been in certain markets, what that looks like. So, okay, we're getting article. They're going to be here tomorrow. They're being very intentional about their growth and how they do things. And then the fourth one is talent access. And so that's the things we talked about for early access to jobs, we have hiring events coming up. so that article engine, stability, talent access, community are four pillars. We kind of group these things in. And then the sub content underneath, we're constantly experimenting with. And the team's the one driving this.

Bradley Clark (14:13.006)
team comes up with great ideas. very opportunistic at times where, you know, as a company, we're heavily on Slack and so people are sharing stuff on Slack. And so we'll see things happening. Oh, we didn't know this happened. Hey, can we repackage this? Can we share this? People want to see this. so there's some stuff which is planned, some stuff is very opportunistic on what's going on in the business. So sorry, long, long answer again. I apologize. feel like we need a long answer here.

Rhona Pierce (14:37.442)
I think at the core of what you're saying and what I'm hearing is that it's actually a great place to work at and that's why you have all this content.

Bradley Clark (14:48.622)
I think it's a great place to work for the right people for us. And some people... And so that's what we're trying to get at because it's not perfect for everyone. One of the early challenges we had when I first started was our product brand was really playful and fun. And so it had this playful... It was like, oh, our sofas and how we worded it was this really playful brand. And so people assumed Working Article was this really playful, fun place as well because they just equated our product brand to our employer brand.

reality is this Russia, the really serious company were founded by four software engineers. It's pretty, you know, like, and so we take, there's a lot of process, there's a lot of data focus on things. And so people go, I thought you were gonna find working. I thought you guys have a lot of parties and celebrations and all this fun stuff going on. We're like, no, we're actually really serious company. don't celebrate. In fact, when we hit milestones, it's usually like, we hit that. That's great. What can we do next time? Do better. Like it's very engineering, like in our culture. And so

We had to find ways to delineate that and find that because it's just like we're not for everyone. so, yeah, we have really fun people. would say like, you hey, we're a serious company which has fun people working at. We're not a fun company with serious people the other way around. so, trying to find ways to show that can be tricky sometimes.

Rhona Pierce (15:59.008)
Yeah. But I think the way that you guys are doing it is very effective because that comes across. It's not like it's not all ping pong tables and partying. It's like this is literally us working. This is what we're doing. And I think you can generally see that people love working there.

Again, the right people who like that would love working there. Because on the flip side, someone can see it and be like, my gosh, I don't want that. And I actually think that's the point of employer branding. You don't want those people to waste their time. You don't want to waste your time talking to people who are going to find out 90 days later, I don't actually like this.

Bradley Clark (16:44.382)
That's exactly it. so, a lot of times into like our employee brand, and I think this is where sometimes there's a miss, is the employee brand needs to feed into your talent acquisition strategy. And it needs to solve a problem. so, again, I think your original point was just, just is, hey, let's cast a wide net and say we're ready for everyone. But for Oracle, we have a very specific talent strategy and reality is, so our headquarters are based in Vancouver, which is also headquarters to three giant retails.

We have Lululemon here, we've got a Ritzy here, we've got our Tarex here. They're massive. We are David versus three Goliaths when comes to the same talent. they are... If we're going head head, they're crushing us, to be honest. That's just the reality we deal with. And so we need to move faster, we need to be more agile. And that's where our talent strategy comes in. Part of that is we're primarily focused on inbound applicants. Because if we're going outsourcing, it's going take too long, we're not going to able to compete, we're not going to able to pull people from these companies. But when someone hits the market...

I want to be able to get them an offer before they're even getting an interview somewhere else. Like that's how quickly we want to move. And so it takes a lot of work upfront to do this. So the part of that is that employment brand feeds into that talent strategy. it's like people know, again, that opt in, opt out, they know who we are. And so that allows us to move quickly because otherwise we're not going to able to compete. so talent strategy, employee brand needs to feed into that. And I think that's where sometimes people get a miss is they're not aligned. so...

In the future, our talent acquisition strategy will probably need to adjust based upon just different market realities and things like that. And then we'll change our employer branding strategy to match that. They just have to work two sides of the same coin is why I look at this.

Rhona Pierce (18:20.43)
How are you guys measuring? Like how do you know when it's working, right? What are you actually measuring?

Bradley Clark (18:28.43)
Yeah. So one the things I look at is we look heavily at our LinkedIn content, our followers, and how we compete against other brands. so... then we scale it. I end of the day, Lutileven is 10 times their size. And so it's going to make sense. But we punch up... So when you scale it down, we punch wheels out of our weight class, which is really exciting. So it's like that David versus Goliath mindset extends into our employer brand. So

So we look at all the stats that LinkedIn has and that gives us a good chance to just say, are we where we need to be for interactions and all those other kinds of things, which LinkedIn automatically does. But some things we do is, so our ATS provides a candid survey, everyone who applies. so, know, employment is basically saying like,

Yeah, here's our expectations. We're being transparent who we are and are we living up to those expectations. And so, and you see it in candidate surveys. And so we get the survey feedback. And so we look at this feedback and we're a consumer brand. so, you know, end of the day, people who apply to us are often people who buy our product. And so we want to make sure that that candidate experience is exceptional because it's a customer experience, it's an extension of customer experience. And so the candidate survey is huge, but also there's a qualitative side where my team is talking to people

And they're hearing it saying, oh, wow, this is so great. I know what to expect. I knew going in, this felt right. I applied. I got this interview. And there's no surprises. so, then as they're hired, we're asking them as well, like, hey, during that process, was anything from the application process to the job posting to the interview assessment side of it, did anything not match the reality of the work? And so there's that extra feedback loop. so,

And if there is, then it's like, okay, how do we dial that in? How do we take that feedback and keep changing there? And so again, there's an art and science to it. that's, and I think, I really think too often, I like, you know, I love data, we use a lot of data for decisions, but there also has to be judgment. And there has to be like this side of it. And I think people hide behind data. They make excuses, they make reasons why to do something or not do something. And sometimes there has to be just like...

Bradley Clark (20:43.682)
There's gotta be some judgment and you gotta use your knowledge and apply your knowledge and hear what you're saying and take that data with that. But it can't be your only thing you use. can't just be a purely like empirical data driven. Those things sound great for buzzwords, but the reality is you need human judgment to figure out what's working and what's not and the human feedback.

Rhona Pierce (21:04.046)
I'm curious, how did you get control, and I'm saying that in quotes, of the LinkedIn page? Because anytime I've worked at a place that has a strong consumer brand and needs it because of the product, there's always this like, no, we want LinkedIn. No, you only get a piece or you get this other side stepchild page.

Bradley Clark (21:27.906)
mean, so our article is a DTC furniture brand. We're primarily online. We're actually now starting to expand into physical retail, which is an exciting new problem to solve. And that's really fun. But it's not one of our main sales channels. really for us, it's Google and Meta are our main sales channels. And so as a result of that, like the marketing machine, if they see...

They don't see LinkedIn as a huge value. We're actually the ones wanting to actually increase that, not the other way around. So we're actually going to like... So we have a new marketing VP. He just got recently promoted. He's amazing. And we're talking about employer brand because I think there's a... I think some organizations do a great job where it's like you show the human beside the product. And so we've done a little bit of this. We've had people pick other fair products, especially for our product design people or category management or the ones who are really deciding what we sell.

And so show is like, here's the human, here's how you came to this conclusion, and now here's the final product. And so we actually want to more of that stuff. Because we see it's not a huge sales channel, but there's actually that... There's a sense of privacy. It's like the people behind this actual fiscal... And the products are beautiful, incredible. And they have these amazing people who make it. So we want to show there's two sides to this. And so we're actually pushing for that. But I mean, think lucky for us, it came down to just on a big sales channel.

I think the harder part, and this was early on, was dealing for a creative team because we have an in-house creative team and they do amazing work. The problem is, and so we were part of them early on and the stuff they do is so beautiful because that's how you want to sell a product. Employee branch, the best traction we got was for things which isn't beautiful and having things which weren't perfect, not polished and just real people. And it was hard for them because they wanted these big campaigns and they wanted to have this like...

all these... And I totally get it because their mindset is about product and they're amazing at it. But it doesn't translate to employer brand. Unpolished and real is what people love. we do video and obviously they're not unpolished, but they're not to the same level that we do our product and they shouldn't be. Because people see it and you get the sense like, this real? This just seems too staged and too much.

Rhona Pierce (23:42.648)
I know that struggle all too well. The agency, Workfluencer Media that I own and run, we do a lot of employee like EGC for people. just explaining to editors, especially when I onboard new video editors, it's like, I love your portfolio. I absolutely love what you do. We need to take that same technical ability.

but not make it extra pretty. doesn't have to look like a professional editor did this in this super expensive software that we use. It needs to look like someone did it on their iPhone, on the Instagram app, but professionally done. Cause that's what resonates when people are looking at this type of content. So I totally, totally get that, that whole difference. And it's always this whole like, you're asking me to do what now? It's like, yes, I'm asking you to

dumb down your editing process, but still be highly technical about it.

Bradley Clark (24:45.294)
No, it's tricky. And we're trying, you know, because like, you know, we're a team, but we want to try and take some donors as we can. And so my team recently has done some video editing on their own. And so they're trying to take more that in-house, so to speak, just, you know, and we still have brand guidelines and other things. We to write logos and fonts and all, of course, we have to play by those rules. But the nice thing is, is we're given a lot of trust and

And that's earned. mean, we want to make sure we keep that trust. And so we're not there going against the brand guidelines. But at the same time, it is different from product versus people. And it should be real. It should feel.

Rhona Pierce (25:27.662)
Exactly. Let's talk a little about employee generated content. Do you have like a formal program or do you guys even do EGC?

Bradley Clark (25:38.702)
Yeah, that's, so where we've tried and we've struggled in the past, actually, it's interesting on the video production side of EGC is, because I think it's so great, is actually on sound. And so we've had things in the past where we said, you know, hey, we want to some content from people on site and record yourself. And the video quality is often fantastic. And the sound quality is usually where things

fall apart. even... mean, again, we can filter those and remove noise in the background stuff. But it's really hard to get something which is listenable, so to speak. And that's hard. So however, what we're trying... For video stuff. Now for other content, often we will work with teams. We'll see someone who will share something on Slack. We're like, wow, this is a great shout out. So photos of your team, you're doing something cool. This is a big milestone or something else. so

our first call out is saying, can you post on LinkedIn? Then we'll reshare it. Cause it just gets distributed so much better, right? Versus, and sometimes people don't feel comfortable with that. say, that okay? If not, then hey, we'll take it and then we'll reshare it. And that's all right kind of thing. And we offer to ghost, right? Things and help people out because I know it's not their strong student. They might feel awkward about it, but the more it happens, the better. And so we're seeing more and more of this, you know, like

less on the video side, but more on still images or just posts and other things. And the fraction that gets just due to the authenticity is so much better. It's so much better than big companies saying, you know, again, we want to try to show, tell. You know, if we can show stuff and get people to show for us and we can reshare, that's so much better than saying, oh, hey, we're this. People want to see it. People want to validate it. so, but we're what some things we're finding is helpful is

again, on the non-polished side is doing videos and doing interviews with people working jobs. Again, customer care, it's a hard job. It's a hard job. We use a bunch of systems. You're dealing with people when things don't go well. You're not doing things with... And so we pay well and it's remote. And so we get tons of applications. And so again, that comes down to that. We talked about that early access to apply. But in that process, we interviewed people on the team and not to talk about what was good about the job. We said, hey, what's hard?

Bradley Clark (27:59.438)
was surprised about the job. so, and the quality of this video is literally, it's like Zoom meeting, being recorded, stitched together, gritty and raw, not the best sound quality. And we've got, you know, it's five or six people who interviewed and asking this kind of question. Of course we asked them what they liked about the job, but the whole point was, this is a filter. And it was just, you we didn't edit it and make it smooth. It's just like, this is hard. And so people see this. And so when you apply, this is post application. This video gets sent to you and say, Hey, thanks for applying.

you know, by the way, like if you didn't get a chance to check out this video, this talks about the job is like and what people find in this job. And we say like, if it's not for you, that's OK. Like, feel free to kind of pull the shoe. And that's great. And then again, we get the interview process, you'll see they go, oh, so great. Thanks for showing me what it looks like. I now can I can feel what it is where I thought I had an idea. I because the best job postings are never perfect. It's not the same as hearing from someone's mouth. Right. And so.

So again, it's not quite ECG, but on the same time, it is as close as we can get to just helping generate and make it happen. But that is something I love to more of, be honest, because it's so powerful. People want to hear from people.

Rhona Pierce (29:11.114)
Yeah, yeah, people definitely want to hear from people. And I think you guys have got the the prime like it's it's ready for more EGC because of one, how you understand how distribution needs to work. really needs to come from the employee. Like employee generated content should be distributed by the employee who generated the content like that. I can do I can talk about that for two hours.

boy.

Bradley Clark (29:41.986)
Yeah, I get it. I think that's, you know, and this is, you know, being a small team, this is sometimes those battles we have where it's just like, how do we prioritize? What's the problem to solve? You know, and but I think this is where we need to evolve more to is much more, again, employee. It just deepens all the things we care about authenticity, show, not tell all those kind of things. So it's very much aligned to how we think as a team.

Rhona Pierce (30:09.986)
If you could get every employer brand team to take one thing from the article playbook and actually do it, what would it be?

Bradley Clark (30:22.414)
Be okay talking about the hard parts. In fact, like double down on that. Talk about the things which aren't perfect. Talk about the challenges. Talk about the realities more than all the good stuff. Because I think that's what people... The right people should be excited about those things. Like, give them an opportunity to change those things to know what they're getting into. So I think that's where employee brand... I think the other thing... And I'm curious your take on this, I've got a hypothesis that...

your career site is more for validation post-application than actual help before you apply. I think most people are smashing that apply button on the job board on LinkedIn, wherever that is. And then if they get that interview, then they're going to your career site to actually validate and research and make sure what they signed up for is what they like. Because I think in the past, was I'd go to the career site and look around, I would then apply. But so

I think that's another part of it is like your career side. And we're trying to do more of this is like trying to add a lot of candidate resources because I think it's post, it's a supplemental to decision. Like I've already applied and now it's confirmation of decision and then preparation for interview. This is my take on it right now, but I'm curious because you're the expert in this. like, are you hearing people think this way or what's your thoughts?

Rhona Pierce (31:42.57)
Yes, I hear people think this way and I think about it in two ways, right? Like you, I've worked at companies where I'm the tiny person in the sea of people, like huge, companies, and I never had the budget or the clout that a bigger company has. think those companies like, okay, people actually go to let me go to Netflix and see what jobs they have.

But I've worked at the place where no one knows what this is necessarily. So they're not going to my page. They're finding out about me on social media, on LinkedIn, on job boards and stuff like that. And my career site was always the, like you said, after, okay, I got an interview. Let me go see who these people are. Cause I saw a job I liked, I applied for it for whatever reason. Let me go see who these people are. And that's where we had.

resources for candidates. had everything. The last place I worked, we even had our demographics and everything laid out on the careers page. people were like, wow. Shout out to Tara Turk-Haines, who was the VP of Talent there. And that was her initiative. And that was amazing. Candidates loved that. They knew everything about...

This is how many women we have in leadership. This is this. This is that like. But yes, it was more so for after the interview. Now, for people with larger brands, they have to think about both sides of both like different entry points to it. But 100 percent your careers page is for most people, a candidate asset and not so much a talent attraction type of thing.

Bradley Clark (33:31.32)
Yeah, that's, I don't know when there's actually later today, we're like team, we're working on this where we, we sold this idea from Stripe and that was great. They shared, you know, their, their annual surveys, like their employee surveys and the results and good, bad and ugly. so was like, this is great idea. you know, we, we, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm happy to steal better ideas from other people and I hope you'll steal stuff from me, but, know, and so we're going to be updating our quarterly, but you know,

this next quarter and we showed the old ones. If you can look back, you can say, here's the things when, here's the things look. But I think that transparency, is, you one thing that, you know, I think which has helped us out and it appears, because again, like you work with so many brands, is the friction to change their career site and add content. And so like, I know when I selected ATS, that was part of my decision making process was it had a, you know, a career side builder, which is

Rhona Pierce (34:06.286)
Yes.

Bradley Clark (34:27.054)
There's limitations to it, there's trade-offs, but the fact that I can do it, and it's relatively drag and drop and simple, and my team can do it versus having... Because in the past, I've had this where, want just a career site. And then it's like this big project which has to go through all these channels and approval and everything else. And I'm curious, have you seen a shift to more like DIY career sites, so to speak, and like TA owning them? is that battle still exists for other TA teams out there?

Rhona Pierce (34:55.218)
That battle exists for a lot of TA teams, but I think the vendors are actually helping with this. Some of the newer ATSs on the market, shout out to Team Taylor and the Rice, are the ones that have helped with this because the ATS has the career site builder, someone in TA can do it. Yeah, most TA teams don't have a dedicated person for marketing. Most marketing people don't.

dedicate someone for TA type of stuff. then you, some people then you have PR involved and what you put in, it's this whole process. it's like, TA is a thing of speed. We can't be going through this process because it's not a product. It's not this looks like we need to be winning. So yes, a lot of the teams and that's why these ATSs are becoming more popular is because they are giving

the TA teams that ability to do that. And then yeah, there's some oversight and all of that stuff. But as long as you follow brand guidelines and people feel that it's going to look like and represent the brand correctly, then teams are using these things to just like move faster.

Bradley Clark (36:10.312)
my visual effects, my background is no longer blurred out. So apparently you can see my toy collection behind me. So and book collection. So. But yeah, that's I mean, that's I mean, we've been boys are in tracking system and team Taylor is one of the ones I looked at as well. That was one of our shortlist. But I think that's the future for these ATSs and they have to give control and that ability. It's still put in.

Rhona Pierce (36:18.35)
No, that's totally fine.

Bradley Clark (36:39.33)
I think that's... I look at TA leaders and I think this is one of challenges is how do you... Your point is like, how do you get control? How do you get access and make it quick? Because, know, something stuck in my mind is like speed fills. Speed fills jobs. You know, like in that idea and like you have to constantly pivot, has to be dynamic. It's really hard to be successful if you're not able to make that happen.

Rhona Pierce (37:04.95)
Yes, I think the other big opportunity for teams to be able to explain this is how AI is now a thing, right? People are finding out about jobs from searches in AI. So you have to think about that when you're creating your careers page and having like answers to questions and things like that so that you can show up. So

Also a thing with speed and I think this would help with making the case for TA has to have more control over the site because then you guys have the information, you know what FAQs are getting, you're getting all the time, you know what answers need to be on the site so that then you show up on those AI searches and people come into your funnel. So I think it's changing. think I love I'm

I love that employer brand is really merging with TA as it always should have, if you ask me. And I'm excited for also how vendors, the smart vendors are seeing this and jumping on this and giving TA teams more access to the things that they actually need.

Bradley Clark (38:22.466)
Yeah, no, I agree. It's interesting that when we say on the the AI side, mean, you recently, we were experimenting with an employer brand tool we made in-house and it's an agent which can go and look at our competitors and compare them to us on brand reputation. And it does a deep dive search. So it's not just... And so, you know, it's looking at Glassdoor, it's looking at LinkedIn, it's going to Reddit, it's going to like find like those in the cracks in the end and then summarize it and seeing how you stack up and seeing

you know, what these things look like. because ultimately you're, you're, you're trying to showcase who you are, but there's, there's, there's things which exist out there, which you, we may surprise you. And so you sit there and you go, Oh, wow, this is what's out there. How does, again, our content strategy address this? How do we actually get ahead of this? How do we say something which, you know, or just own it. And that's the other reality I know, like, you know, I think employee brand also gets into things like, you know, we're in charge of our glass store reviews. And that's something again, like,

There's been times we've had challenging times. We need to own that. We can't just say, know, and leave that unaddressed and just be... And so, but with AI, it's really interesting what it can pull out there. And from a CAD perspective, if you're searching, you should be using this. I mean, that's the reality is like you should be there doing a deep dive, figuring out what the realities are, not just what the branding says. It's like comparing products out there.

Rhona Pierce (39:44.726)
Yeah, I'm excited for it. And I think it's high time. And yes, I think the candidates I haven't recruited only for my company. So people aren't going to tell the CEO of a company like I found this on Glassdoor as they would to a recruiter. But I think if the smart candidates are using AI and finding these things, if I were a candidate, I would be like chat GPT or the simplest one. Go to Reddit and tell me what people are saying about working at this company.

Yeah. So you should know as a team, you as a team, you should know before a candidate what's out there. So yeah.

Bradley Clark (40:22.318)
Yeah, that education piece is basically, yeah, like I said, the team should know they should be, and that's why we're trying this tool out because I guess sometimes it can be hard. Like you're in the middle, you're juggling a million things. You're trying to catch on your higher managers or anything else, but just like make it easy to go and like surface that information.

Rhona Pierce (40:41.814)
I love that. I've loved this conversation. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think listeners should know?

Bradley Clark (40:50.926)
question. That's such a good question there. I don't know. mean, for things I don't think you know, but I mean, I think one of the, again, it's on the AI train is organizations should be very clear about what their approach is to AI and hiring and be very transparent about this. And not just one, you know, one page hidden on a career site that someone will probably never stumble upon, like really making it intentional and throughout the

experience, this is our approach to AI and keep that update and changing. And so if you're using AI in how you hire, that's great. mean, think be responsible and do the right things, but be transparent. And then also the other side is set those expectations for candidates and saying, hey, here's what's allowable for us and here's what's not. And if we see these things, this is what's going to result in. And just keep those things alive and updated and multi-touch wise.

It's one of those things which I think people are scared to share right now because there's this AI backlash and the fact like, you see someone like, there's so much misnowers out there that the ATS automatically rejects to me and it's using AI and it's using all these things that aren't really probably happening. But things that are happening are usually pretty helpful, I think, for the Canon experience because it can actually help the teams move faster and spend more time with humans.

share that and share what your expectations are. And so I think that's one of things I just really suggest for the TA leaders and employer brand leaders out there is like, be transparent, your expectations and make it really clear, not just one thing hidden somewhere, like multiple touch points, because this is one of the things that I find candidates constantly are talking about. Actually, I took it too. the other thing I share is, once you start the interview process, is shut your job down for new applicants.

I'm a big believer in this. Don't just collect resumes for the sake of collecting resumes. It's misleading to candidates. It's a bad candidate experience. And so, once we hit a number of viable candidates, we go, hey, we've got a great shortlist here. We won't proceed to interviews. We close down that job. And now things can happen. We might go through that and we move quickly so that cycle goes fast. And it may result in something where we realize, hey, this wasn't the right people or our process needs to be different, how we go to market needs to be different, something needs to change.

Bradley Clark (43:14.894)
great, open up again, and start again. Don't just keep collecting applicants. I think right now, given the market, it's damaging to your brand. You never get back to these people. More people fall through the cracks. Their expectations are excited. It's misleading. And so I think really, it's the right thing to do for your brand. the right thing to do for people. like, you started interviewing. You're not probably going to get chance to review these applicants. Close the job down. Be respectful to people and respectful to your own brand too. So those are my two things I'd probably...

safe.

Rhona Pierce (43:45.782)
Very, very good things. And I love that you add the word viable candidates, because there's a lot of people out there advocating for once you reach this X number, shut down the no, you can't have an arbitrary number, because I can have 100 people that are not a fit. And then I shut down the role and then I'm starting and wasting everyone's time. No.

Once you reach a certain amount of viable candidates and you will know what viable candidates are if you have a good process and you'll know how much the number that you need, if you have a good process and you think about things strategically and in a data driven way, then yes, that is a, I would also do that because there's no reason in collecting tons of resumes. And also, like you said, if none of those viable candidates ends up working,

It's not necessarily just reopen the role just for reopen it. Go and look why were those viable, not viable candidates. And you might have to rework things in your process or in your job description or anything anyway. So.

Bradley Clark (44:51.47)
Yeah, do another loop, learn from it, do another loop. It's a great feedback loop. yeah, those are two things I think are really important. So I'm you got it. I'm curious, you on other side of things, you obviously talked about employer, you know, created content, employer generated content. What are the big trends you're seeing? Like, what are you seeing? Just like, hey, this is where we see the future of this. Sorry, I want to reverse on, please. I want to get your ideas here because you're the expert. So yeah.

Rhona Pierce (45:15.566)
I

Rhona Pierce (45:20.608)
No, I love this. trends that I'm seeing are really authenticity. People, there's so much out there. People are tired of the polished stuff. So they want to know and they don't want like we've reached a point where candidates can see when it's a staged authentic video. They don't want to hear, I love working here. Blah, Look, like.

That's really the main trend. People want to know what it's really like. There's people killing it on TikTok right now. There's the Staples baddie who has really changed what Staples is. People didn't even know that Staples offered some of the services that she's talking about. that brings me to the biggest trend that I'm seeing is companies are starting to see EGC as more than a talent attraction thing.

EGC is a form of consumer marketing as well, and it's starting to be respected. I'm seeing companies include in their like, they have IGC, so influencer generated content. have UGC, which is their user generated content, and they're adding in EGC. And this is for consumer brands. So I think this is our moment where anyone who's worked in employer brand and talent acquisition who has been

running these employee ambassador programs and things like that are now working side by side with marketing for these EGC campaigns because they are different than a straight IGC or UGC campaign. But companies are starting to see like, ooh, this authentic trend. There's so much inauthenticity out there that consumers and candidates alike are craving authentic lower production just

straight up what's it really like to work there? What's it really like? What's this product really like type of thing?

Bradley Clark (47:19.886)
I love that. And it's interesting because it'd be like article, I we have user-free content and we have influencer-free content. And so the idea of layering on this kind of thing, this is a great takeaway. One more question if you can... it's a hard market and we see a lot of frustrated candidates out there and you can feel it and you can see it people. I equated to, it's like musical chairs where very few people are getting off that chair. So it's not just the employment levels are high, but it's like...

people and unemployed longer. How can employer brand... It's not helping them find jobs, but help them understand the market realities and what that looks like. And again, it's just like the idea of being kind and being real because I know it's hard. I know it's hard being on that side of the fence. And I feel for people on that side. But how can employer brand speak to these people in a real way without feeling...

like, you know, not doing the disservice, so to speak. So here's your take on the market realities and the job seekers is tough.

Rhona Pierce (48:24.226)
would say being transparent about it. I don't know if you publicly share this, but definitely to anyone who's in your process. Look, this is how many applicants we have. This is how we shut down a thing after this amount of viable applicants. This is how long the process is typically taking for us. Like give people that type of transparency and absolutely get back to people. The longer you are, if you've ever been a job seeker and I have with a long

unemployment period, the harder it gets as you go and the harder the rejections are. So if you're telling people as soon as you know that they're not moving on in the process, I think that's a way of respect and I think that's something that candidates talk about and will earn you. Like it's a true candidate experience. So be honest to people, be transparent, tell them what they're doing, share more of the process than what you're usually

I'm used to sharing. Obviously follow the law. Don't do illegal things and share stuff like that. But like we're in a, in a period where when you order something online, just like you can see your, can follow Amazon and see when it's getting there and all of that. Like take that mentality with your candidate experience and give people full transparency into what's happening when they can expect answers from you and give them answers.

Bradley Clark (49:52.846)
I love that. No, think that's, yeah, it's interesting. Like I know our retail hiring, because now we're opening physical retail stores. That's something where we've been sharing timelines. Hey, this job's in close down here. We're going to interview this. If you don't hear by this time, this is likely the answer. I know even just a lot of our rejection. We have a whole bunch of different rejection emails because we want to have, we want to try and give feedback if we can, but it's not going to be bespoke. we don't have this. It's not scalable to do that. It's not going be on brand. So

But our best way to do that is having a ton of different templates, which we can choose the right one based upon this. But one thing we've added on is sharing that we're unable to give you that because we've literally received hundreds of applicants per each hire. And so just because I don't always realize like the competition level, like it's on average, know, 200 applicants reach hire. And that's not something we're proud of. Like we're trying to make that less and less. Like we want to have fewer applicants and increase the signal to noise. But like, that's the reality. And I think...

One of the other ones we're trying to share is that you may have had all the requirements for the job, but someone had more. And so wasn't that you missed something. So I think people get frustrated. say, you know, hey, I can do all the stuff at the job. I've done this job. And that's great. You can, but someone else can do that plus extra. And so that's what we chose. Like that was right thing for the business. So it's not saying... Because I think I hope you guys understand that. And we're trying to share that is it's like, this doesn't mean you... It's not a personal thing. It doesn't mean you can't do this job. It just means someone else, unfortunately,

out market themselves out competed you as hard. Like you're not giving me the job, you're competing as the person you don't even know who exists, unfortunately.

Rhona Pierce (51:28.716)
I think it's hard for candidates to understand that, but at the end of the day, and the way I've always approached employer branding, candidate experience, anything, I'm not optimizing for someone feeling good. I'm optimizing for being as transparent as I legally can be and fair with everyone in the process. How you receive that as a candidate, I have zero control over.

What I have control over is I know and I can sleep well at night because I shared the most that I could share about it. If you're gonna, because of your feelings or what you're going through in your life, if you're gonna take that the right way or not, is nothing I can do about it.

Bradley Clark (52:10.414)
Yeah, that's great. I often tell my team that because sometimes we get feedback, is people are upset. And I understand that. But we talked about this idea, like you might disagree with the outcome or decision, but at least you understood the process, like you understood. So it's tough. Again, I really do empathize with job seekers right now.

Rhona Pierce (52:28.886)
Yeah, same. So thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Where can listeners connect with you?

Bradley Clark (52:37.134)
You can find me on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to find and I love this stuff. And so if people want to continue this conversation, reach out, connect. mean, I'm happy to geek out on this stuff for other topics as well. I just, think, you know, I want to learn from others as well. So it's not saying I have the answers. I would learn from people. Challenge my thinking, reach out. Like I love it. So.

Rhona Pierce (52:58.414)
Thank you so much. And I'll add all of the links to your LinkedIn and all of that. I end the show notes.

Bradley Clark (53:04.918)
Awesome, thank you so much, this is so great.

Rhona Pierce (53:07.128)
you're enjoying the Workfluencer pod, share it with someone who's changing how we talk about work or who should be. And hey, if this episode gave you ideas or inspiration, leave us a five-star review. Reviews help other listeners find us. And honestly, it makes my day. This show is produced by Workfluencer Media. Visit workfluencermedia.com to learn how we help companies build video-first content systems that attract, engage, and retain qualified talent.

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