Talking Talent: Rethinking employer branding with TQSolutions

In our first-ever episode of Talking Talent, our VP Global Channels, Dayne Nash, spoke to Gareth Flynn and Will Innes from TQSolutions about employer branding best practices.

[Transcript]

Dayne Nash:
Hi everyone, and welcome to our first episode of Talking Talent. I’m Dayne Nash VP of Global Channels here at PageUp. I’m very excited to kick off the first in our series of LinkedIn Live conversations we’ll be holding over the next few months, every week on a Thursday. We’re calling it Talking Talent and we’ll be touching on the hottest topics in recruiting, employer brand, DE&I, and talent management.

Dayne Nash:
Our first guests on the show today are from TQSolutions, Australia’s leading advisory firm for talent acquisition, engagement, mobility, and retention. At PageUp, we work closely with the TQ team to help organizationsorganisations improve their talent processes by combining strategy and technology. Joining us from TQ, Gareth Flynn, who is the founder and runs the consulting practice is widely regarded as a global expert in talent engagement and mobility strategy. We’re also joined by Will Innes. He leads TQ’s brand in experience practice. He has deep expertise in brand analysis, candidate experience and competitor analysis. Will and Gareth, it’s great to have you on the show today.

Gareth Flynn:
Hi Dayne. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for inviting us to your inaugural session. It’s really cool. I love the format.

Dayne Nash:
Excellent. We’re also very excited. So, for those that are viewing online live, there should be an option in the comment section to throw questions our way. If we get a chance, we’ll have a look at those and see if we can bring them in. But while we wait for some audience questions, why don’t I get us started?

Dayne Nash:
So, as experts in Employer Branding, you would have the industry insiders knowledge of best practice and strategies. So, maybe Gareth, you can start us off with what are the biggest shifts you’re seeing in TA strategy that will impact employer branding in particular?

Gareth Flynn:
Yeah, this is a super important topic, Dayne, at the moment. Reading in the Fin Review today, we have the hottest labor market for 12 years, the highest number of job ads for 12 years, since we’re starting to emerge out of COVID. It is white hot out there. Industry sectors, specifically healthcare resale, anything to do with digital and technology, it’s incredibly hard to find talent. So, that’s the context we’re operating in. It’s not going to change in the near future. I think, that has a massive impact on broader TA strategy, which has downstream impacts on what companies need to do about brand. Reflecting on our clients that we’re working with, what we’re seeing with companies that they’re looking at that business critical roles, they’re trying to understand, okay, we recognizerecognise we can’t do everything today, but what’s most to us? What are our business critical skills and roles?

Gareth Flynn:
Firstly, there’s a real focus on retention, talent development, working with that internal teams to try and upskill people internally. So, we are seeing a real move towards mobility and developments, which obviously has an important brand perspective as well.

Gareth Flynn:
And also the need to look at skill adjacencies. So, how can we build our own rather than just keep acquiring people from the external market? So, there’s a couple of things we’re seeing there. The other piece, I think Dayne is important, as we exhaust our internal workforce and talent, we need to do things differently. You just cannot rely on posting a job on a job board and hoping you’re going to get candidates coming in. In this labor market and the context we’re working in, that’s just not… It’s just not good enough.

Gareth Flynn:
So again, a lot of our clients are really flipping their strategy into, particularly for these hard to find in demand skills, into talent nurturing, talent engagement, and talent networking strategies. We’ve worked closely with PageUp with a couple of clients implementing your, obviously your recruitment marketing module That’s a great example of where we can leverage technology for some of that activity. But that really is having a big impact and companies are leading with brands, they’re not leading with necessarily with job ads. So, what we are seeing is a much more focus on brand-led recruitment marketing led strategies, again, pointed towards those business critical roles and skills that the organizationorganisation needs now and into the future. So, that’s some of the, I suppose, the sort of bigger macro things we’re seeing and companies needing to grapple with that at the moment.

Dayne Nash:
Great. Wonderful. Thanks Gareth. That’s a really interesting, and I guess very, very positive to hear that we’re at that white hot, highest in 12 years. Certainly from our statistics and our customer base, the last 12 months has been hard. So, I think that’s really heartwarming for everyone in the industry to sort of hear that we are really on that bounce back. But as a result, obviously that’s creating an enormous amount of competition and all of those challenges you’ve touched on. So in your roles, you’ve worked firsthand with innovative organizationsorganisations that lead the way. They try these new strategies putting solutions in place. So, maybe Will, I’ll throw it to you. What are the best companies doing right now in terms of their employer brand strategy?

Will Innes:
Yeah. Wow. I could go in so many directions here. There’s so much that’s happening at the moment. Great. I think actually just quickly referencing white hot talent segments, actually TA people themselves are white hot right now, right? But just thinking about employer brands, I would pull out kind of two areas to maybe touch upon. And like I said, I could go multiple directions, but the first one I’ll mention is just the re-focus on people’s actual EVP is really intense right now. So many organizationsorganisations are just reevaluating where they’re at. And by EVP, I don’t just mean the marketing messages, I actually mean the kind of concept of the deal itself is really being reviewed by organizationsorganisations right now. So we’re being asked a lot around things like salary benchmarking, flexibility policies. So, what this really talks to is the need for organizationsorganisations to understand what their people want, what people in the market want and what the talent wants.

Will Innes:
So, right downstream of that, it means things like the way you build personas needs to be really accurate. The way you’re understanding what people want and how you’re actually architecting your value proposition to people is really hot right now. The shift towards things like flexibility.

Will Innes:
So, that kind of total concept of a deal. What people need to bring versus what they get given back in return, that deal, is certainly a really hot area right now. And then downstream that plays into, okay, what is the marketing and go to market of that look like? And of course, you’re they’re into storytelling and authenticity and kind of using your networks and things like that. But that whole area, I think is really important right now. And to say something else, which is really macro, I think that’s also the shift towards kind of employer brand leaders becoming much more like product managers. So not resigned in the corner about recruitment marketing and placing job ads and bits of content marketing, I think that it’s becoming – Employer Branding is maturing – and it’s becoming a much more strategic function and thinking about the actual construct of the product itself, the career and how that’s managed in terms of reputation marketing out in the market.

Will Innes:
So, I think it’s a really hot area right now, and you’re going to see lots of new brands and messages being deployed over the next 3, 6, 12 months. If you look across websites right now, career websites, how many have genuinely been updated with how the organization’sorganisation’s reacted to COVID and what are the policies going forward. So, I think there’s going to be a whole host of actual activity in the next few months.

Will Innes:
And the second area is organizationsorganisations experimenting with more agile approaches to building an Employer Brand Strategy, which was typically like whole of business, right, internal, external, all of your talent segments. What we’re seeing, actually working with two organizationsorganisations right now that are approaching it in a more sort of modular way.

Will Innes:
Two ends of the spectrum in a way. We’ve got a large sort of Aussie icon type of business where we’re working with four of their talent segments, and I think they probably have nine or 10. So, representative segments working with that to start with, building a strategy around that and then adding different segments as we go. So it’s enabling us to iterate and be much more agile rather than building something, and then that lasting for a few years. Building something that moves and grows with the business and as the importance of those roles come to the floor.

Will Innes:
And we’re also working with a more of a scale up business, so internationally. And there, we’re focusing on a really white, hot technology segment, which spans the US and Australia. And again, we’re working with that segment first, rather than thinking whole of business. I think that’s a really interesting dynamic as well.

Dayne Nash:
Great. Lots of white hot industries and certainly the… I’m sure all of our TA audience today who are listening in are super excited to hear that they’re in that white hot segment. So, maybe we’d just go to one more question. I am trying to keep the series relatively tight so that people can watch in their gaps during the day.

Dayne Nash:
But maybe one last question for our audience, which is what’s the ROI of having a strong EVP that you can showcase online? Happy for either of you to jump in on that one.

Gareth Flynn:
I think I may, well, I’ll kick this one off, but maybe you give this a sort of more brand focus and lens. I probably slightly reframe the question around why should we be doing this for a business, first of all? And I think, reflecting on the clients we’ve dealt with, whether it’s a prof service firm who are also white-hot as well at the moment, everybody they don’t have in a seat is revenue loss.

Gareth Flynn:
So, every vacancy they have is costing them money every single hour, every single day of every single week until they hire that person. And if we are relying on ad-led sourcing strategy to procure talent, we’re going to lose money hand over fist, if you’re a prof service firm, or if you’re a retail company that has to pay overtime to people where you’ve got vacancies.

Gareth Flynn:
So, for me, the ROI of having more of a brand pool strategy in place for talent is a hard dollar. It’s a hard dollar ROI. We’re not talking fluffy HR dollars here. The nice to haves, we’re not talking experience, we’re not talking some of the soft dollar benefits that we often see in business cases, we’re talking commercial hard dollars that your CFO and your operations teams are going to be all over. So, I think that there is a business imperative in these talent short segments to actually adopt some of these brand-led strategy. And the ROI is going to be very, very tangible and very, very compelling. So, I think that’s my first comment. Will?

Will Innes:
I really agree, just building on that, I say that really aligns into kind of direct sourcing models, trying to build sustainable pipelines. I think that’s closely linked to a question around kind of building business cases. And I think if you take that approach, I think it was Pam Stroud in our session talked about how you eat the elephant in chunks, right? I think that’s similar. The business case kind of writes itself, when you’re talking about critical hiring with real business value. Actually, sometimes that kind of EVP work somewhat is the barnacle on the whale as an enabler, but the business case writes itself. So I think focusing there, to my point around more modular approaches or thinking about more agile ways, it’s an easier ROI calculation then talking about the whole piece sometimes. In a market like this, that’s moving fast, multiple moving parts, I think that can be a really smart way to start thinking about ROI.

Dayne Nash:
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. I think that really resonates that often it’s just about knowing where to look. As you say, there’s already a bottom line cost that the business is carrying for that over time or any of the other downstream impacts of not having the vacancies filled. So, really good point is there.

Dayne Nash:
So, we will keep it tight today. So, I’m going to wrap us up there. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you to our audience for listening in and supporting this session. If you are interested in learning more about employee brand strategies and technology, we’re very excited to be hosting a live physical in-person event in Melbourne on the 12th of May with TQ Solutions. So, keep an eye out on our various LinkedIn pages and websites for the registration opportunity to attend that event.

Dayne Nash:
And yeah, thanks so much for having the time for our audience today and myself and joining us. And we’ll see you next week.

Gareth Flynn:
Thank you, Dayne. Thanks guys. Bye.