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To see how business leaders across the country are driving impactful DEI efforts, we launched the Ally Series on our Talk Talent to Me podcast. In these episodes, host Rob Stevenson sits down with talent leaders from Match Group, Niantic, Tech Can [Do] Better, Frame.io, Hired, Capital One, and Leaf Group—learning what each company has […] More
Hidden biases are everywhere—the hiring world being no exception. As humans, we’re not always capable of recognizing our prejudices in the moment. Fortunately, modern technology is here to fill in that gap: empowering teams to build more equitable talent pipelines and pave pathways for previously overlooked talent. At Hired, we envision a world where all […] More
Watch Hired’s recent panel-style webinar, “Awareness, Action & Accountability Embedding Technology into DE&I Hiring Strategies,” to gain insights from industry leaders on how utilizing technology can strengthen your diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring strategies. This webinar was moderated by Jennifer Tardy, a leading DEI advocate, an expert in the recruiting space. Our panelists included: Ava […] More
Change was the only constant in 2020. For some companies (think: telehealth, food delivery, or streaming services), the COVID-19 outbreak meant rapidly increasing headcount to meet market demands. For countless others, it meant putting hiring on pause. To see how executives across the country navigated the challenges of COVID-19, Hired launched The Great Rehiring mini-series on our Talk Talent to Me podcast. In these episodes, host Rob Stevenson sits down with talent leaders from Hired, Dropbox, Oatly, HubSpot, GitLab, Battery Ventures, DoorDash, and SeatGeek—learning what each organization did to evolve during the pandemic.Here, we’ve taken the most actionable insights from these conversations and transformed them into a step-by-step playbook for hiring teams. The following pages will help your company not only survive, but thrive, in a changed climate.Ready to embark on your own great rehiring journey?Download the playbook More
“Adventure” isn’t just something Royal Caribbean Group offers its customers. It’s also a love shared by its employees, as well as the key to the brand’s exceptional success at engaging new and diverse talent.
How do you find the perfect employee when you’re a company as intrepid as an international cruise line? Royal Caribbean Group’s Talent Marketing Manager, Thea Neal, has done it through practices like investing in team morale, practicing inclusion, taking a holistic view of the employee experience, and careful listening.
The Challenge of Talent Marketing as a Cruise Line
Building out an authentic employee value proposition for a single organization is difficult enough. It can be even harder when that organization houses six different brands, as is the case with Royal Caribbean Group. Employer brand leaders may encounter hesitancy, as Neal did, from more senior leaders who are wary of defining an EVP that may not feel relevant to all branches and levels.
Invest in Morale
To attract and retain the best talent, Royal Caribbean Group makes serious investments in its culture and employees’ well-being. Even during a pandemic, the company has found ways to preserve and adapt its office traditions, like happy hours (now virtual) and Halloween (a staff favorite).
Practice Inclusion
Prioritizing diversity and inclusion has helped Royal Caribbean Group attract employees from a range of backgrounds and identities. This has been a special focus of Neal’s team, which recruits talent from around the globe. Cultural context is always top-of-mind for Neal when formulating her employer brand strategy: “The employer brand that I put out in America needs to resonate just as well as the employer brand I put out in the Philippines or Indonesia,” she says.
Consider the Whole Employee Journey
Neal’s team frames the employee experience as a journey—in fact, the “Journey with us” tagline appears across Royal Caribbean Group’s careers site, social media accounts, and internal communications. This framing reflects the emphasis they place on supporting people throughout their time with the company, from candidate to alum, and not just on the recruitment process or the “sell.”
Become a Better Listener
Neal urges other employer brand leaders to listen to fellow employees as closely as possible, especially when their feedback disrupts your assumptions. “A lot of times, as employer brand folks, we have these rosy glasses on. Sometimes you need that real perspective from an employee to create something better, listen, and evolve,” Neal says.
This approach to talent marketing has helped Royal Caribbean find perfect-fit candidates that join the family and stay for years (and voyages). These candidates-turned-colleagues share Neal’s love of seeing the world and helping others do the same. It’s a passion that unites the team, regardless of role; as Neal puts it, “Who doesn’t want to sell amazing memories and experiences?”
To follow Thea Neal’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For data-driven insights into your company that you can act on, get in touch. We can help you develop strategies for making real change.
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In our recent panel-style webinar, “State of Software Engineers: Using Data Insights to Meet Your 2021 Recruiting Goals,” we featured industry leaders from Amazon and General Assembly, and Hired. During the webinar, Rob Stevenson, Head of Hired’s podcast Talk Talent to Me, spoke with Erin Ford, Sr. Manager, Student Experience & Career Services at General Assembly, about the importance of hiring for skills, not labels, and how this broadens your talent pool and promotes diversity in your pipeline. The webinar also featured exclusive advice and recruiting tips from Jonathan Kidder, Technical Recruiter II at Amazon (and creator of Wizard Sourcer) as well as insights from the hiring manager perspective from Dave Walters, Hired’s very own CTO. The panelists shared valuable strategies on how to use data from our 2021 State of Software Engineers Report to define and attract the most in-demand tech talent in 2021.
Discussion Topics
Industry trends and insights from our SoSE Report
What engineers want in their next role
The power of skills-based hiring
How to leverage data in your hiring processes
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What makes your campaigns instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? When your employees talk about your brand online (and they do), do you know how and where? Your answers to these questions paint a picture of your brand consistency, a crucial element of a unified employer brand.
These are also the questions Kirsten Bethmann has been asking as Global Employer Reputation Lead for Mars, Incorporated. Mars has set an inspiring goal for itself: to become one of the most attractive employers in the world by 2025. Achieving this goal, Bethmann believes, requires a renewed focus on brand consistency.
Why Brand Consistency Is So Important to Growth
The journey toward greater employer brand consistency supports greater brand awareness—often the biggest ongoing talent challenge organizations face. Unless you’re a beloved consumer brand with widespread name recognition, your employer brand team is likely all too familiar with this struggle.
Establishing a Shared Vision
A clear employee value proposition is the cornerstone of a consistent employer brand. For Mars, that EVP is built on three pillars: people, purpose, and development. The employer brand team took this EVP development a step further by adapting the Mars statement of purpose (“The world we want tomorrow starts with how you do business today”) into a tagline: “Your tomorrow starts today,” which personalizes and transforms the Mars mission into a call to action for its employees.
Standardizing Brand Guidelines
Companies that operate in multiple markets must walk a fine line between enforcing brand guidelines and empowering markets to represent themselves authentically. Mars began this work by creating a central platform for its guidelines, a “one-stop-shop” for learning how to use color, messaging, and more.
Leaving Room for Personalization
Within these brand guidelines, employer brand teams in each of Mars’ markets have the flexibility to make campaigns their own. Brand guidelines dictate certain standards for social media messaging, but Mars’ employer brand leaders recognize that messaging from sales employees may sound different from engineering’s messaging. Bethmann and her team welcome those differences.
To follow Kirsten Bethmann’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help building your EVP, the foundation of your employer brand, get in touch with us.
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What if your brand isn’t a single organization but a family of several brands, each with its own priorities, competitors, and target candidates? That’s the challenge LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group (RSG) faced in 2020.
Under the leadership of Director for Employer Brand Shelley Jeffcoat, the company launched an EVP that served each of its eight brands while helping them distinguish themselves as employers. To do this, Jeffcoat’s team needed a strategy as unique as their organization.
Get Brand-Specific as Early as Possible
As early as the research stage, Jeffcoat’s team was organizing data by brand. With help from an external research firm, LexisNexis RSG explored each brand’s target candidates and demographics, its competitors, its functions, and more.
Think Bigger Than Promotion
The choice to equip each LexisNexis RSG sub-brand with its own EVP wasn’t simply marketing cleverness. Getting specific made the company more competitive as an employer and continues to impact the employee journey as well.
Empower Employees to Participate
Before the EVP launch, it was challenging for employees to engage with brand advocacy. They lacked clear pathways to actions like social promotion, leaving Glassdoor reviews (LexisNexis RSG had multiple Glassdoor profiles), and helping prospective candidates get in touch (there were multiple Careers web pages).
Invest in Your Employee Advocates
To generate internal momentum around brand advocacy, Jeffcoat knew she’d need to find employee advocates. She started her search with the talent acquisition team (a natural choice, as they were already skilled and experienced at representing the business to the public). But because of the company’s unique structure, Jeffcoat knew she couldn’t stop there; she’d need to pull in stakeholders from every brand and balance each brand’s representation.
To follow Shelley Jeffcoat’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. To identify the values and culture you want to create in your own company, get in touch.
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