Marshall Adams: Episode 432

Transcript

[0:00:31] NVN: Charlotte Marshall and Bryan Adams teamed up for their new book, Give & Get: Employer Branding. Here, these employer brand industry leaders pull together their expertise to redefine the concept of employee value proposition. In this book, they will demonstrate how to harness the values to be found within your company in order to draw forward the candidates who are most likely to thrive and truly add to your culture and success. Today, I’m joined by two authors, Bryan Adams and Charlotte Marshall who came together to write Give & Get Employer Branding. Bryan, Charlotte, welcome.

[0:01:11] CM: Hi Nikki.

[0:01:13] BA: Hi.

[0:01:14] NVN: Let’s start, I’ll give each of you a chance to answer this by sharing with listeners a little bit about each of your backgrounds and also how you came together to write this book.

[0:01:24] CM: I always love telling the story so Bryan, I’m going to jump in first. My background is on the practitioner side and I’ve been working inside Fortune 500 companies for the last 15 years. In the early days as a best kept secret and now, a widely spreading role which is that of an employer brand practitioner helping companies brand themselves is a great place to work and along that journey, I have worked with a lot of different agency partners and I actually ended up hiring Bryan several years ago to help me really change the way I approach my work to solve some challenges I had encountered time and time again. And the philosophy that is the premise of this book that Bryan shared with me has changed the way I approached my work so fundamentally and so drastically that we chatted about writing a book and sharing it more broadly with the world.

[0:02:14] NVN: What a testament, no pressure Bryan.

[0:02:18] BA: Well, what can I add to that? You know, I’ve been doing this for a number of years, always believed that our approach was super effective and very aware it was different to how it’s conventionally approached in the industry. It was interesting because when we met Charlotte, you know, she was seen as one of the most sort of authoritative figures if you like and experienced employer brand leaders around so obviously to pleased to see such a reception. I think it’s fair to say that we also learned a hell of a lot about how to work with empathy with our corporate partners, what it means to actually deliver this type of work in corporate America. The learning we took and the improvements we could then make to our philosophy to make it more effective and practical. It just seemed to be you know, a really good idea to bring those two things together to change the employer brand industry so philosophically but also bring a tactical lens and a practical means of doing this with efficiency and even more effectiveness.

[0:03:21] NVN: You guys have all your bases covered, in other words, it sounds like?

[0:03:25] CM: You don’t often hear the two perspectives at once and I think that’s what I was most excited to partner on this initiative with Bryan because you’ll hear agency voices like Bryan at conferences and in podcasts and you’ll hear practitioners but I think the synergy that you get. You know, the saying two heads are better than one is actually the two perspectives combining to create a new way, that’s the most exciting thing that we’ve stumbled across.

[0:03:52] NVN: That makes sense. Charlotte, you mentioned something that I wanted to ask about which was that when you started doing this work, employee branding was sort of a secret in the background and now, it’s out front, excuse me, employer branding. Can you talk to me about what that shift has been and where we’re at now?

[0:04:16] CM: It’s been the most incredible unexpected career journey. Everyone who comes into employer branding comes from a different profession because it is still not something you can study or learn in school along the way. In the early 2000s, I was working in an internal employee communication capacity and I always worked for very large global companies that had at least 10,000 employees and as these challenges emerged with talent attraction, engagement and retention, I was sort of that natural person to tap and started to get exposed to this line of work. But I didn’t have any peers or I didn’t know anyone else really in the world that was doing the work I was doing, some of my learnings and my successes and my failures were all held pretty tightly and over the last I’d say, three to five years, the explosion and interest and development creation of the roles has been really inspiring. I looked on LinkedIn earlier last year and saw 21,000 people in the US added employer branding as one of their skillsets.

[0:05:18] NVN: Wow.

[0:05:19] CM: This community has got 20 plus thousand members now that are actively engaging in employer branding and recruitment marketing. I think the shift in the market has really led to this unemployment, is that an all-time low, less than 2% in the US and even the very best brands in the world fight for the same people to work for them. If you think of the top engineers coming out of the university or even in the world. The Amazons, the Googles, the Apples, they all fight for that same person so we’ve seen this emphasis shift from branding your products and services to more talking about the people behind the brand or what makes you unique and special so that you can win more than your fair share of top talent.

[0:06:00] NVN: It’s really interesting, just to think about how much the climate has changed in this way from a decade ago until now.

[0:06:10] CM: No one’s more surprised than Bryan and myself.

[0:06:15] NVN: What are the things I lov, when I look at books is when I see information that seems counter intuitive to me. Your book has one of those elements. You talk about how the most effective employers don’t actually attract candidates but they repel them. Talk to me about what you mean by this?

[0:06:37] BA: It’s an interesting – you know, everybody, it takes people by surprise, you know, because I think, this is still an industry in its infancy and it’s born out of organizations having to do something about the fact that the talent market is becoming more competitive so the natural instinct is, we need to get more magnetic and we need to start attracting more people towards our organization. A few years ago, there was a phrase that was on every conference and sort of stage in the industry around you know, recruiters need to think more like marketers. What’s happened is you know, to sort of fill the space of employer branding, that’s exactly what’s happened, you know? Conventional and traditional marketing frameworks have been adopted and sort of pulled over and into the space, where organizations have tried to just attract more people towards their organization but what’s happened is as a net result is recruitment teams are being overwhelmed by an incredible number of applicants, candid experience has suffered because of that. The culture fit or culture match has suffered as a consequence. We’re now in a place where it’s not more about attracting people towards your organization in terms of volume, it’s much more about attracting the right people towards your organization that are going to find a sense of purpose, a sense of impact and a sense of belonging. You know, it sounds counterintuitive but actually, all we’re doing really is addressing the fundamental basic human sort of curiosities, the people wants to satisfy when they’re deciding whether to apply for a role and organization or not, you know, we’re just giving them all of the information that they’re looking for so they can make better informed decisions, you know? We’ve spoken to a lot of people researching the concept of this book and just validating our approach, you know, been using it in the agency for more than a decade. Once we explain this concept, you know, we’re still yet to – [inaudible 0:08:39] that disagrees, it just makes sense, it’s common sense once explained.

[0:08:37] CM: It’s one of those things that you learn from doing it for the first time and there’s so many companies are investing in my role in hiring employer brand leaders. You’re going to uncover this as you activate your brands and it’s really what led me to hiring Bryan years ago. The brand I had developed prior took over 18 months to develop and over a million dollars and it was deemed a huge success, one of the most measurable case studies on employer brand ROI at the time. Yet, what we ended up doing was absolutely flooding our funnels with application volume because candidates were simply seduced with sizzle of this large brand they’ve never heard of, now advertising themselves as a stellar place to work. When I joined the next company, I knew this was something I wanted to approach differently to impact the quality of applicant coming in, reducing volume but I didn’t know how, it’s nice to be able to share with people before they encounter that challenge, some ways that they could mitigate against it.

[0:09:38] NVN: This all makes perfect sense. Basically, what you’re doing is refining your candidate pool before you even start.

[0:09:47] CM: Yes.

[0:09:47] BA: Yeah, that’s right, you know? I think – I read the other day that in a couple of years’ time, millennials will officially be running the world, you know, and I think we’re in a generation now where people are a little bit more cynical, it takes a lot more for a person to believe a brand message, advertising, and marketing is getting much harder. Actually, this is just a race towards real authenticity and transparency. You know, that’s what we’re offering our industry and the net result is candidates and employees, you know, are getting a much more well-rounded reality of the employee experience. So candidates can make a more informed decision and employees can feel acknowledged and appreciated so they’re much more likely to identify and engage with a brand that they believe in, you know?

[0:10:40] NVN: I want to dive into the things that candidates today are most looking for that come into consideration here, but I’d like to start by just sort of looking at the cross section, if there is one, between more overall product and company branding and employer branding. What’s the relationship there?

[0:11:03] BA: The relationship is there are two sides of the same coin and essentially they need to be in synergy and the foundational layer of values, guiding principles, philosophy, you know, in the sense of purpose for the overall brand needs to be rock solid and aligned across the board just like traditional marketing. We have one product but we might have a different message to satisfy different segments of the audience. An employer brand serves a different purpose, it’s just getting real about what the function of employer branding is for and what it’s designed to do and that’s really give an insight into the people behind the brand. All of our research and all of the insights that we have ever gleaned from all of the global brands that we work with typically, boil down to three derivative buckets that I mentioned earlier, the sense of purpose, the sense of impact and the sense of belonging. And then, it’s a case of articulating it in a very unique way, to realistically reflect what it’s really like to work in an organization. The sentiment and the affinity that you can achieve from that sort of communication needs to feel authentic and it needs to feel in line with the branding messages that you might find on a consumer side, interestingly enough, what we do find is, the messages and the activation of employer brand, really translates and crosses the line over into consumer marketing because you know, people do want to know that those coffee beans have been ethically sourced, the sneakers that you’re wearing have been manufactured in a sustainable manner, this is just part of the world now where people are making informed choices from a consumer point of view. As well as where to work and you know, we’ve also done work in the past where we’ve seen if candidates are being treated poorly, having a negative candidate experience, some of those candidates are customers of that brand. You know, we work with Virgin and found that their candidate experience was not where it needed to be and of a 120,000 applicants a year, actually, 18% of those were – of candidates were customers, 6% of those were having such a poor experience, they were going home, canceling their virgin contract and moving over to a competitor.

[0:13:25] NVN: Not good. Wow.

[0:13:27] BA: That was costing five million dollars a year in Virgin at the time had no idea that was happening. That was first case study, the first business case of the importance in the space.

[0:13:37] NVN: Virgin strikes me as particularly interesting in this way because I think that that’s a company that most of us have a really good impression of. It’s interesting that this part of their business was not up to snuff.

[0:13:51] BA: Well, if you think about it, if the employer brand and the consumer brand on operating hand in hand and at the same level, then a consumer applying for a job company has super high expectations because of the expectations set from a consumer side. You know, the person doesn’t know that they’re having a candidate experience or a customer experience, they’re just having a brand experience. You know, the consistency is essential.

[0:14:19] NVN: That makes sense.

[0:14:20] CM: That’s one of my favorite stories because what Bryan left out is that within 12 months after doing some candidate experience journey mapping and campaigning, they turned the talent acquisition function into a revenue generator for Virgin.

[0:14:37] NVN: Wow, impressive. Talk to me about what changed in those 12 months? You mentioned the candidate journey was part of that.

[0:14:47] BA: Yeah, to their credit, they were measuring the candidate experience and their MPS was minus 29 I think. We mapped every branded touch point of that, we looked at every branded moment and also the moments between the moments, the sort of periods of contemplation that people were left thinking about the brand. We identified what people were thinking, how they’re feeling, how easy it is to progress, what are the memorable moments. And then we designed an experience that was then positive with less friction, more memorable, and essentially with more empathy for the audience. You know, as a result, that took the MPS score to a positive figure, you know, and at that point, that’s when you know, if you’re delighting candidates or customers, they’re receptive to building and affinity with the brand and possibly those who aren’t customers might think better of them for the experience. You know, refer other people to apply for jobs and maybe even buy their products.

[0:15:49] CM: You’re leaving out the best parts [inaudible 0:15:52] Usain Bolt.

[0:15:53] BA: Yeah, one of the moments of magic was Usain Bolt, I don’t know whether he’s still an ambassador for the brand but we manage to convince Usain to record some footage for us relating his approach to training and preparation, competitiveness. The day before an interview, the candidate would receive a video from you saying, “Hey, you know, life’s all about preparation, give it your best shot and good luck.” That’s a great example of how to use the branded assets from a consumer side in the delight your customers, your candidates on the employer brand side.

[0:16:29] NVN: That’s so cool. Thank you Charlotte for not letting Bryan leave that part out there.

[0:16:35] CM: The other one, the BS bingo is my personal favorite.

[0:16:39] BA: Yeah, the cut the quack. I think it’s live as well. The employer brand for virgin was built on fun, generous, and supportive, so everything we did for virgin had to center around those three things. We built a talent acquisition to all that you could cut and paste just CV or your LinkedIn profile into cut the quack and it replaced all the cliché words with ducks so you could shoot and it would – It replaced the duck with better English, it was fun, it was generous and supportive and what we set out to do is make the candidate a better candidate for the experience, whether they got the job or not. You know, living up to the Virgin brand, you know, it was a lot of fun, it was highly shareable. That was a really cool project. We really enjoyed working with virgin, they were great.

[0:17:26] NVN: I mean, I am paranoid about flying so I’m a horrible candidate for that company but just hearing about that makes me want to apply just to have the experience. I love that.

[0:17:40] BA: It was a lot of fun.

[0:17:41] NVN: A word that’s come up a couple of times now is authenticity which I would love you guys to speak to and I’m particularly interested in this idea of authenticity in the context of culture because obviously, culture has become king for so many candidates today and I feel like so many companies are advertising this culture that almost has started to sound, it almost sounds packaged because everyone is interpreting culture the same way. I’d love to get your thoughts on that?

[0:18:17] CM: One of the things we like to joke about in the industry is before they give in and get, when employer branding was starting to take hold of everybody’s attention, we were – if you went to our career website, you would very quickly encounter what we were like to work at on our very best day. It’s definitely the truth that the positive end of the truth and if we’re honest and realistic about what the real experience is like, a lot of times, we’re holding back the stuff that we think candidates would be less than excited to find out about. What we see is candidates going and droves to review sites like Glassdoor and we joke that that’s where you go to find out what we’re like on our worst day. Because on those sites it is typically disgruntled employees going to leave a less than stellar review about a company and Bryan and I actually chatted about this quite a bit and we’re like, “Is it because candidates feel like we won’t tell them the truth? That they can’t get the truth from us? Is that why Glassdoor sold for billions of dollars and has become this phenomenon in our experience? What if we owned the truth? What’s the worst that would happen?” Will some people pass us up because they might say, “That’s not for me. I could never endure a culture that was consensus driven for example because it would take forever to get anything done,” or they might respect us for telling the truth and even if they didn’t end up choosing us might leave with positive impression and we just saved ourselves the time and expenses putting someone forward but also like we can thrive within our culture reality.

[0:19:54] BM: It is interesting because authenticity is used so much in our space and so much in advertising and marketing but it’s got to be more than the authentic truth about the strengths, the benefits and the opportunities within an organization but it is much more than just being more truthful about an organization on its worst day. We are actually missing out on a huge opportunity to elicit an incredible wealth of pride and passion within an organization by not leaning into the harsh realities of any organization. And we always say as well, you know, your brand of difficult is what makes you different. So if you can take an employer brand tagline or headline and you can put that above any of your competitors and it would ring true then frankly you’re are just not digging deep enough working hard enough to define what makes your organization unique. If you think about it, if you imagine the Navy SEAL’s for example. There is a thing called hell week, right? In order to get into the Navy SEAL’s you have to get through this hell week and it sounds exactly what it is. It sounds like hell on earth but you know people don’t travel across America to San Diego to apply for the Navy SEAL’s despite hell week. They do it to because of hell week and once they get into the Navy SEAL’s, the reason they walk around with that badge on their chest with so much pride is because of what it stands for and it is also the same thing that people have held so much respect for it as well, you know. So if your employer brand doesn’t stand for something, you are missing out on an opportunity to elicit incredible pride and respect and by leaning in and talking openly about the harsh realities within an employee experience, you are missing out on an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate the real hard work that your rising stars and top performers are putting in day in and day out and still thriving within your organization. So if you have that more honest well-rounded conversation about the employee experience that is how to get true advocates who are passionate and willing to share their story and hopefully attract more likeminded people through a good culture match that can add value to your organization. So it just makes great business sense to follow this line of thinking.

[0:22:26] CM: And it is not just applying the two things in isolation there is this formulaic approach and I think the most inspiring part for me to discover is going on this journey with Bryan and building a brand based on those principles was candidates don’t expect for things to always be sunny. They know that times are going to get hard and they’re actually craving for more information about what it’s going to feel like when it does. And despite there being a harsh reality at every organization in the world it is not a negative for everybody. There is a reason or a benefit that someone gets in exchange for that side of a culture and watching Bryan sort of work and iterate and have these conversations in different workshops is really inspiring because you ask people like what is it like here in the worst day and I’ve heard him say, “You know if it was your job to convince a candidate not to accept a job here and you couldn’t lie, what would you say?” And really quickly, you start to get this weird looks dashing across the room like, “Can I say it, do I say it?” But something comes through and I have asked this exercise on stage a number of times and there’s always it comes to people’s minds quite quickly and you can uncover what those harsh realities are and then you say, “All right, so you deal with that perhaps day in and day out. Why? Why do you stick around? What do you get in return for that? Why is it worth it? Why is the juice worth the squeeze?” And that is where you start to find some real magic that the give and get can help to encapsulate to make it easy for candidates to understand your experience.

[0:24:00] NVN: That makes so much sense. Looking at this as a job seeker, I mean we all know after our first job generally that there are going to be these bad days at a company and so yeah, it seems to me like there would be a lot of comfort in knowing what that would look like and choosing that as opposed to not knowing exactly what sort of culture you are looking into outside of the kombucha on tap. In your book, you guys talk about creating a smart filter. Explain to me what that is.

[0:24:34] BM: So the smart filter is essentially using a set of brand messages or a proposition, a two-way proposition to allow candidates to self-select out. So rather than just be attractive based on positive funny side sort of opportunity to be found within an organization, it has giving that well-rounded more grounded truth about a company you know including the obstacles and challenges to be found. Depending on the mindset, if you present a challenge or an obstacle or harsh reality to be found within your organization, some people will be looking at that obstacle with a mindset that’s, “Wow that is too big for me to climb over. I don’t want to take on that challenge” and they move on. Somebody else maybe with the same competency and the same experience might look at it and say, “Is that big enough for it to be worthwhile for me to commit to and how am I going to feel when I get on the other side?” you know, they are looking for a sense of being able to really make an impact on an organization. They relish that challenge. They are the type of people that you want to carry on in that process. If you put your audience to those types of decisions then naturally they’re going to self-select in or self-select out and the fact is the biggest difference between what we are doing and marketing is 99% of your audience are not going to be successful. You know you can’t give everybody a job whereas in marketing, you’ll sell everybody the product if they show interest. So that is the idea of the smart filter. We are not trying to get more people to apply to your organization but trying to get more of the right people.

[0:26:18] NVN: That makes sense. Is there anything you guys see that somewhat chronically companies tend not to think through or not to think through correctly for lack of a better word when it comes to employer branding?

[0:26:36] CM: I’d say two come to mind, Bryan yes. The first is this broadcast – this one way value proposition that broadcasts strengths and we have a chapter in the book that talks about why this came to be and as employer brand started, none of us knew how to do it. We saw a need and we leaned into our friends in marketing to teach us how to do it and if you look at how marketing sells a product or service, it certainly does talk about those strengths, benefits, features and it’s a transactional thing. Because anyone who can afford the product we would gladly sell it to and it is quite a different proposition in employer branding when as Bryan said, we’re rejecting 99% of the candidates who apply and there is a very real risk to our brand for every declined candidate who doesn’t have a stellar experience. So it is something that we want to start to manage more closely as we get smarter about the repercussions and implications of this body of work. The other thing I see is this set it and forget it. So there is a swath of brands out there that have invested in building an employer brand but then they don’t activate it. They don’t quite know what to do with it and while it might be activated with candidates, it is not activated as strongly internally as it could be and when used right your employer brand is not only externally facing but it is an internal engagement tool and I have seen it used to great effect to re-recruit their existing workforce. To remind them why they should show up every single day and why it’s worth putting in a discretionary effort.

[0:28:13] NVN: That actually leads into something I wanted to talk to you about, which is if you guys are seeing this have an impact on retention rates or any other statistics that might be relevant here.

[0:28:26] BM: Yeah absolutely, my sort of pait is you know as soon as organizations complete an employer brand for the first time, they might download a vanilla employer brand dashboard of new metrics that they introduced to the organization, things that the organization hasn’t measured or cared about since the conception of the organization. It is really important to find metrics that matter that move the dial and add value to the organization. And actually we have boiled it down to two main metrics, you know the rest really indicates is in and around me. Is the first one from an attraction point of view is like we said a number of times it is not volume, really it’s the percentage of valued applicants that you are receiving and how that’s changing over time because it is possible that you might reduce the overall volume of applicants coming and flowing into your funnel on a weekly-monthly basis. But if the percentage of valued applicants is going up and that tells you that your smart filter is actually working and then internally, you know we talked about retention for years and it’s always been something an organization works hard to improve but actually that’s in this day and age, it is not good enough. If you’ve got a thousand person organization and a hundred people are leaving every month then you’ve got 90% retention and that sounds like a problem. But let’s look at that, if a 100 of those people you wouldn’t re-recruit at all then suddenly not so much of a big problem. However if those same 100 people on a monthly basis were all your top performers and rising stars then you have a catastrophe. So actually rather than retention we should be looking at regrettable loss. You know how are we using employer brand to re-recruit the talent we’ve got and remind them why they’re there. And Charlotte’s got a great story of how she’s done some amazing investigation work over the years to discover really human specific stories of how products of the organization has impacted people’s lives and track them down and brought them in and told their personal stories and you know when she tells a story, it gives you goose bumps and it’s not difficult to imagine you know the difference it would make to an engaged employee based. I don’t know whether you want to tell that story Charlotte. I love it every time you tell that story.

[0:30:42] NVN: Charlotte you have to tell that story now.

[0:30:44] CM: Okay, so it was early 2010s and I was working for a large life science organization that was one of the toughest cultures I had ever been part of and the chief people officer at the time had come to internal communication team and given us an engagement challenge if we could raise engagement I think five points over the next two years and we took after finding the stories that would connect with people on a human level and some of the stories I encountered changed me forever as just a human in terms of what a good story can do. And working for life science brand obviously there is a lot of life saving implication to the work going on. So one of the stories that I found was a man who had been wrongly accused of a crime and he was incarcerated and false imprisoned for 11 years and during the course of his incarceration DNA analysis became possible and the company was of course part of creating those DNA instruments. And he had written to The Innocence Project and eventually they took on his case, found his evidence, got it tested for DNA and found out that he in fact had not committed this crime. He was exonerated. Of course this is an amazing story my market dev team had told me about it and I said, “Great, I like to use this for recruitment” and they’re like, “Oh we can’t. We don’t actually know with confidence that it was one of our products. We own 80% of the market but it could have been a competitor’s product.” I said, “All right, well then do you have the phone number of the lab that tested his evidence?” and within two phone calls and within two weeks identified that it was the AB profiler plus, which is one of our legacy products and it was in fact one of our stories. So what I did is I found Herman Atkins and I flew him out to our headquarters in Southern California and I asked him to speak at an all-employee meeting that was being broadcast to 10,000 around the world. About 2,000 people live and what I didn’t know at that day was that the company was going through such an economic winter that there was really nothing positive that was going to come out of that all employee meeting and our CEO used to open every single meeting with a joke and as he took that stage that day, he said that he wasn’t going to start with a joke today because there was nothing funny about what we were facing if we didn’t get it together we wouldn’t survive as an organization. Well Herman was backstage with me listening to all of this and as he took the stage, he told the story about what it felt like to have his mother look at him with doubt in her eyes whether or not he had committed this crime and then this deep admiration for the scientists who he had flown in who actually created the product that he got to show his gratefulness for because they gave him his life back and he thanked everyone in that room for giving him his life back. He was a 3rd year law student who was going back to school to dedicate his life to helping other people who had been wrongly convicted of crimes to get a second chance and he said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I heard your CEO say his opening remarks that you guys need to get your head back in the game,” and that started gosh, one of probably one of probably 30 stories that were brought to life for the next couple of years of my career where just this hunger for the stories that matter. And tracking people down and inviting them to share with employees and as I flew out to one of our lowest engaged sites later that year, I was interviewing an employee who told me how much he hated his boss, he hated his team, he hated his life where he didn’t really hold much back but he said, “You know what? I still give my all every single day” and I said, “Well why is that? Why do you still work here and why do you still care so much?” He said, “Well I know that the work that we do matters and I have a daughter who has special needs in the products that I create day in and day out on this manufacturing line wouldn’t negatively impact this company. They would impact someone like my daughter and then I am here to make sure people have a better tomorrow” it was those kinds of testimonials that we saw take shape after sharing and reminding people why their work really matters. Now that is in a very tough culture. Some other cultures I have worked in have not had that challenge, but the same source of pride and admiration and it flows quite freely up so you then start to unearth 8those stories.

[0:34:49] NVN: That is powerful and also you’re like an investigative journalist. I am sort of stunned after that story. Thank you for prompting that Bryan.

[0:34:59] BM: Yeah and if that isn’t an example of giving that principle in action, you know I don’t know what is because there is a disengaged group of employees reminded that in this tough time, in these harsh realities here’s why your work matters, you know and immediately that employee base is lifted because they are acknowledged, they are appreciated, they are inspired. You know it is like what we are talking about before, you know that is the type of story and there is ingredients that needed to instill passion and to illicit pride from any employee base, you know?

[0:35:35] CM: I think engagement did go up 11%, 11 points within the last year spent because every monthly meeting we are flying in people that could share a story like Herman’s.

[0:35:46] NVN: That is incredible, absolutely incredible. It just really speaks to the – I think even with all of these improvements in culture we can sometimes lose sight of the humanity that is the constitution of work places and that is such a great reminder of that.

[0:36:05] BM: Absolutely.

[0:36:06] NVN: So before I let you guys go, I want to switch gears here a little bit. Obviously this book is geared toward employers but I am assuming that you guys have some insights that could be interesting or valuable to job seekers. Do you have anything that you can share that might help job seekers more easily identify the places where they should be working where they will thrive the most?

[0:36:33] BM: I think if the average job seeker reads this book they’ll probably get an immediate insight into what questions they should be asking and what answers they should be searching for in order to better attest whether they have what it takes to thrive in the organization and that is essentially the big question on a job seeker’s mind is actually, “Do I have what it takes to thrive? How am I going to feel? Will I be accepted and would I belong? Can I add value and make impact? Does my personal purpose align with the purpose of the organization?” So I guess this book it is calibrated and pointed very firmly at an industry that we’re trying to change and bring around to our way of thinking but it definitely equips the average job seeker and points them in the direction of exactly how to assess organizations as to whether they’d be a good match or not and nowadays people are interviewing the companies as much as the companies are interviewing them. So it’s exactly how it should be.

[0:37:34] NVN: Excellent. Again, the book is Give and Get: Employer Branding. Charlotte and Bryan, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you give listeners an idea of where they can find you outside of the book?

[0:37:46] CM: Absolutely, you can find us both on LinkedIn. You can find us on giveandget.net and you can find Bryan also at ph-creative.com.

[0:37:57] NVN: Perfect, thanks for joining us.

[0:37:59] CM: Thanks so much Nikki, it was a pleasure.

[0:38:01] BM: Thanks Nikki.

[0:38:03] NVN: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find Give and Get: Employer Branding, on Amazon. For more Author Hour, hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.