[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Employer Bland podcast.
My guest today spent over a decade in advertising, working on some of the world's biggest brands before making a very deliberate move into employer brand. First in
[email protected], leading employer brand across over 17,000 people worldwide, and then founding the Truthworks, which I know many of you would have heard of. So the trusted marketplace for employees, every people and culture challenge which she runs today.
There's a lot for us to get into and I'm glad we finally made this happen, Emily, but welcome to employed land.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me, Chris. Feels like a long time coming. I've been watching you in my periphery for a while and watching your interesting guests and thinking, one day, one day I'll be invited. So thanks for making this happen.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Oh, not at all. To be honest with you, you've kind of been in my sight for such a long time. Then I kind of thought, need to send you the message. And then you came back to me relatively quickly. I was like, yes, we've got Emily. Emily's in the bag.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Was I too keen?
[00:01:01] Speaker A: No. No, you wasn't. You wasn't. I was just very, very pleased. You. You agreed and we can make it happen. But now it's really, really good to have you here. So if you were okay with this, how I wanted to kind of kick off, by pulling the curtain, you know, away from the LinkedIn profile, digging a bit deeper and just really understanding who you are, where you've come from. Because everything that I can see, you've done some amazing things through advertising, employer, brand, what you're doing at the moment with the truthworks is phenomenal. But can you give us a little bit of insight, context, where you've come from, where you grew up, the things that made you pick and made you probably make some of those decisions to move into advertising, employer, brand, get to where you are today. So if we can pull back that curtain, that would be amazing.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, firstly, would say, I think I'm fairly myself on LinkedIn, so I don't know how much more there is to reveal, but let's see, maybe there is something.
I mean, I've always been a really ambitious person and I've always been very comfortable on a stage, let's put it that way. And I. I think it's good to say those things, especially as a woman. I think sometimes we shy away from using the word ambition, um, or talking about being comfortable and confident in yourself. And I've. I've always been that way. So, I mean, I thought I was gonna be famous from a young age and While I'm now 42 almost, I still kind of have that belief. But I used to think I'd be famous for being a singer or an actress.
I wanted to be a war journalist at some point.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Oh wow, really?
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Parents bought me like the Kate Ady biography. I did like an internship at the BBC.
Um, I really thought I was going to be a journalist. What actually put me off, which is quite ironic now as I, I do a lot of speaking truth to power and asking uncomfortable questions was I did an another internship with a press agency around the time that it was sort of all those awful magazines around, you know, Heat. And I was, I grew up in the uk so for those of you who are in the uk, you'll know that like Heat magazine and all the sort of exposes of celebs, all of those really tattoo dailies, weeklies and the press agency had me sort of going around to love island contestants, houses and like staking out their parents and asking them awkward questions about their love life.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: No way.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: I hate people's privacy. I find it really uncomfortable.
But yeah, I mean obviously ask hard questions often of, of CEOs and of HR leaders in my work now so maybe I'd feel less uncomfortable now. But as a sort of 20 something I found it mortifying because I'm also a massive people pleaser and, and want to build nice relationships with people. So maybe I wasn't, wasn't hard headed enough for that.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: And what about the war chorus? Because that is fascinating like the war correspondent stuff. What was, was it just because I remember seeing those people and still today, but vividly remember seeing those people kind of on the news as a kid thinking oh my God, that is like, that is crazy that they're actually out there on the coal face. But was, was it just that kind of excitement of like potentially being in those environments or was there something in your life that was going on that kind of drew you to that world?
[00:04:16] Speaker B: I think it was, I think it was the like the depth and the interest of the story. I've always been quite a political person. I've always in world history.
I'm really interested in what's going on in the world. I mean most of it at the moment is absolutely shite, but I find it fascinating and I have a lot of opinions on it so I thought that would be interesting. And also I've always, I've always had it chiefly I've always wanted to be somewhere other than England. I have to say so I've been. I mean, I've been an expat in the Netherlands for a decade now, first in Amsterdam and now in Harlem. And I've always thought globally, so I've always worked on global accounts. I've always worked on global business. I've never particularly felt present and attached to being British. My mom's also from Guyana, so I have a. I guess a mixed heritage, which makes you feel a bit other sometimes.
So I've always believed you sort of make your home where you are. So I think some of it was being comfortable with the idea of moving around a lot and not really being in one place and just having a suitcase or a go bag.
Gets harder to think about a life like that when you have a family and roots, but always been a little unrooted in a good way, I think.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally get that. And to be honest, I resonate with parts of that story as well, Emily. Like, I've got. I've got four kids and we relocated very recently, like less than a year ago, still in the uk. So I haven't done kind of the big relocation stuff that you've done in regards to the kind of not feeling particularly rooted in an area and also wanting, like, these changes of scenery.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I grew up in Kent as well and I can't go back now because it's.
It's going through some reckoning with itself, let's just say.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And also, probably. Also the. Probably the family doors that you were knocking on in your 20s when you're trying to interview the parents, did that anything to do as well, offended the whole of.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Ken, don't worry, I was a terrible.
Yeah. I put my hands up and say it was never going to work out. Maybe singing is the backup, if not. Or acting.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So look, looking at your career, so you spend well over a decade doing some, like, phenomenal things and, you know, looking at kind of where you started in that industry to where you kind of, you know, ended up before leaping into employee brand. It looks as though you must have done some phenomenal things. Can you talk to us about that world? And, you know, how did you. How did you start in that world? And what was that world like?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: The ad world?
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Oh, man, I didn't know anything coming. I had an English lit degree from Durham, so it was quite intellectual. I didn't really know what to do with that, but I knew I liked telling stories. So I think I went to the careers office and, you know, advertising was fairly early on in the A folders. That I flipped through and was like, yeah, that sounds good. I get to communicate stuff that sounds brilliant and tell a story. So I went in for a load of internships. Didn't get quite a few of them because they were all like a sort of grad scheme. Didn't get quite a few of them because I obviously didn't know what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
But there was one that was sort of audition style.
So I actually got my first job. We were supposed to do a sort of marketing audition. I guess we were supposed to come in and present an idea that we'd had for a brand and sort of the marketing plan around it. Obviously I didn't know what a marketing plan was. I sort of thought it was going to be like Britain's Got Talent.
So I basically ended up producing a film with my mate and running around Durham uni. It was called the Love Buster and it was a, it was, it was a Valentine's sort of getting rid of people who were like loved up on the street. And I was not loved up at the time. So you'd push this like little panic button and then a ninja would come out from nowhere and like remove the kissing couple from your view. So we filmed running around the street, sort of rugby tackling some of our mates, making out serious. And I ended up sort of singing all you need is love in the, in the
[00:08:25] Speaker A: amazing.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: These like 10 point marketing plans with graphs. And I was like, oh my God, absolutely.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: This was completely wrong and you're rugby tackling smooches. It's like very different direction.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: They just love the creativity and the surprise element of what I presented and saw some potential. So I actually bled into that industry and then what followed was a series of flying by the seat of my pants in digital advertising, to be honest. And it was really when digital was a thing showing my age. But I was working for one of the cutting edge agencies at the time we were working on Sony about the time they were doing like the bravia balls and all of the like big, big film campaigns. Then we were doing all the digital elements on Sony. So I got to go and interview John Malkovich in Paris is like a 20 something year old. No idea what I was doing for a project we did for Sony Vaio.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: So just these amazing experiences that I think taught me a lot about, a lot about marketing, a lot about the foundations of telling a story, distributing that story, connecting with your audience and writing a hot brief which I think we're missing in employer branding. We write a Brief that says make me some content.
You know, I. The agency I started with was co founded by one of the founders of bbh. So we were really in Stratland, like Purist, you know, if you can't boil your strategy and your proposition, your insight down to like a sentence each, the brief get torn up.
So I learned a lot of like real discipline to strategic work and creative work and also the power of creativity and content and storytelling and the impact and the results that can have. So all of that marketing rigor was incredibly useful.
And then I got to work on Dove for years at Ogilvy on a lot of the real beauty stuff. But again, it was real beauty sort of next era. So it's not enough to take a picture of curvy women in their underpants. We need to mean something.
So we did amazing campaigns around challenging stereotypes, around challenging the negative ads that you see on Facebook all the time. You know, about lose 1 pound of belly fat by tomorrow.
So we did a lot of kind of gorilla stuff as well, which won lots of awards. So it was amazing.
Great.
Reason I left was partly I didn't see any senior women that looked happy at the time. I mean, I think things have slightly changed now. Luckily there's some pioneering women, but I didn't see a lot of women who were in very senior roles there who looked like they left at a decent hour, look like they had a family life or looked sort of healthy in themselves, to be honest.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: It must be such a difficult industry to be in. Firstly, I remember, I vividly remember that, that, that era of Dove marketing and those campaigns that, that was brown, you know, groundbreaking stuff, wasn't it? You know, at the time, you know, there was some, some, some amazing things, but, but just, just leaning into your point just about that industry and probably bleeding into other industries that, you know, whether it's recruitment, you know, that the wider recruitment industry, but looking advertising in a silo, what do you think it has changed a lot or do you still sense that unless you can run at 100 miles an hour and stay awake for like solid, you know, can you actually rise to those great heights or do you think, you know, just what are your thoughts generally? Because I know that's from an outsider's perspective, that's my understanding of that industry.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: I got asked this question at a, an event the other day that was on a similar topic and someone was saying, look, you know, I'm in the ad industry and I, I sort of want to see if I can make this work long term and I just said I think it's fairly obvious that the ad industry has not evolved fast enough to keep some of its best talent. And at the same time it's also not evolving, evolving fast enough to keep a lot of their clients.
You know, you see people like, like Martin Sorrell trying to create new models of how, you know, people pay for products. You see a couple of pioneering agencies also looking at, you know, fixed cost models and saying this is the cost of a product you buy or you don't buy it. And our minimum fee is this versus selling hours. The model of selling hours has always been problematic and I think it's something employer brand industry grapples with as well. Unfortunately, a lot of the employer brand industry has been built on the same frameworks and the same basis as the ad industry, which was already a model that was, was struggling when people started taking employer brands seriously. So I do think both industries are ripe for disruption. I think creativity has become commoditized.
But however, I think really solid strategic thinking and really disruptive creativity will still rise to the top. And the people do it can command, you know, great, the great salaries that they, they need to make it work for them.
And I think they can command the way they work. I think it's the mediocre, the mediocre in the middle that will find it very difficult to continue to build clients and to work in the same way and also to retain staff. But I think best, I think the best people have more options. So hopefully it actually weeds out, weeds out some of the fat in the industry.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Something I read that you, that you published and this, what I'm about to say. I wondered whether this was kind of at the point of inflection of you moving from advertising through to employer branding in. But it was and again may not be verbatim, but you much preferred or you loved marketing culture versus kind of products.
And was there a point in advertising where. Because I think this was, this was a publication was something that you kind of put out into the world when you were in the advertising world, but it felt like it might have been at a point of inflection of like if culture and storytelling in that world is something I'm more passionate about than kind of, you know, here's a bottle of shampoo or whatever.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Was. Was that the point that you, that you burst into employer brand roughly?
[00:14:39] Speaker B: Yeah, a little bit. It wasn't as intentional as that, but it sounds very intentional. It's a nice, it's a nice way of putting it, but I think I realized that in retrospect.
So actually what happened was I'd had a pretty bad burnout in advertising.
I was off for about eight months sort of traveling around South America and I remember I was continually trying to apply for all these jobs and I was interviewing sort of like at the top of like a Mayan pyramid. And my husband was like, what are you doing so well, I have to have a job lined up when I get back and this is the only time the interviewer could do. And I realized at that point I'd crossed over into sort of the point of no return of ridiculous bending and adjusting myself to an industry rather than thinking about what I actually wanted.
An interview with Nike when I got back and ended up crying in the interview because I found the guy that just really put me off and I sort of, oh, God, I'm really not. I don't want to be in this world anymore.
So I ended up asking a then client from booking.com if there were any jobs going in house in the marketing department, even though I was sort of like, I don't know, maybe house, maybe for a company that's more about travel, which is something I was passionate about.
And he actually said to me, well, no, but there is a job going as sort of a head of employer brand. The employer brand team. There's a. And I didn't even know what that was at the time when he explained it to me was that, well, it sits in HR and you know, basically you'd be marketing the company and the culture. I thought, actually that sounds fantastic because the liked a lot about advertising was the people and everyone always says that. But it was when the ad industry had been at its best. It was when we'd had amazing leadership, when we'd had all hands meetings that left everyone inspired. When we'd hired some amazing new recruit who just completely changed the dynamic of the team. Or when you're in the trenches working really late and you felt that like, connection to the work and, and you felt that team synergy. And I just thought, yeah, that stuff's really interesting in and of itself.
And I'd already been thinking I was more interested in the management of people and the attraction of talent at that point anyway. So, yeah, it was a natural segue in some ways. But I obviously went for the interview and I was interviewing for this big job at this big company and I think the, the overconfidence of my.
That I previously said has sort of been baked into me since birth really pulled me through because I just said look, I feel like I've got all of the marketing skill set and discipline that this industry is probably missing. No, I don't know anything about HR really. I don't know anything about the recruitment industry but I can 100 see how I can apply this thinking and I think you're better off hiring something, someone I think it was between me and someone who had been head of employer brand somewhere else and at the time and I said look, I think you're better off employing me because I'll be a disruptor and I know the brand, I know the business, I've worked with you, you know, on from the marketing team. And I also said I feel like I can bridge that gap as well between your marketing and brand and PR teams and the in house and the, the in house employer brand team that I want to build. And I also will know how to build an in house agency which is what I think you need rather one external support. I will structure a little mini powerhouse team and that's exactly, exactly what I did when I got in. So it was amazing, brilliant people in my team and yeah was able to pitch marketing level budgets as well. Which is what I think is often really missing like having the confidence to know like this is what a production costs.
I'm going to get a great director in, I'm going to get them in for a great rate and I'm going to, you know, negotiate but shoot costs. You want the content, you don't want the content. And I think we're often lacking that context and confidence from in house employer brand leaders and it's not their fault, like they might not have come from that background and they're having to sell things to very skeptical teams who don't, who might not also have that content or who also don't want to give you that budget. You've got to be prepared to fight for it.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Yeah, and you clearly went on to have like great
[email protected]. but I'm, I'm fascinated by the fact that you've gone into a company of that magnitude at that kind of level. You know, that's a huge role in a company like that. Again, with no real background. Like obviously the transferable skills are massive, hence the reason you went on to have the huge success. But was, was there, you know, was there a point of where imposter syndrome started creeping in like those first, that first week for example, where you're in there thinking, you know, out of your depth because obviously you've Worked at a very level in the court. Well, but was. Was there a point in that first, like maybe 90 days or ever, you were like, I know I can do this, but this is still really, like, foreign to me.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: No.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Amazing. And I love that.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: I don't indulge. I don't indulge. Imposter syndrome. And I, like, I understand why people talk about it.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: They just don't.
I don't. My experience from years of working in the industry and working with big companies and big brands is most people do not know what they're doing 100%. Yes, some people are very good at pretending that they do, but most people do not. And I've worked with very senior, like, CMOs, CEOs, and sometimes I'm thinking, yeah, like, you're winging fine. Actually, it's not fine, but I think there's no. You're never going to be 100 qualified for a job. Even if you'd worked in employer branding, you might have worked in a completely different structure with completely different politics, with completely different stakeholders.
I don't believe Anyone is ever 100 qualified for a job. So, no, I didn't feel imposter syndrome. I did make loads of mistakes, though, really, honestly, just, you know, I'll give you one. We tried to launch a new career site and we launched it like round Christmas for some absolutely ridiculous reason. And I know this from. From launching tech platforms. Like, why would you launch anything around Christmas? I sat there on Christmas Eve, like, bug testing and dealing with. Dealing with problems and thinking, well, I guess no one's going to be recruiting, applying for jobs on Christmas Day, but they are, in theory going to be looking at jobs in that kind of down period between Christmas and New Year. So fix this.
And just also thinking that.
Thinking that everyone would be kind of easy to bring along the journey. I think I massively underestimated a matrix corporate organization. And booking's a really cool tech company, but it is also a massive company.
And, you know, at the time that came with a lot of people you needed to convince.
Not always clear pathways for, you know, what you. How to get something approved and what I didn't really appreciate. I guess I would be writing the playbook in some ways, so no one had necessarily given me at the time. Employer branding was quite, I think, newish there at the time. It looks much more established now and there's a great team running it. But at the time, there wasn't really a playbook. We didn't have a strategy, we didn't have A budget. We didn't really have a remit per se, so it was write your own goals, figure out what the objectives are and also move from being a reactive function. So function where recruiters would mostly come to the employer brand team and say, I need a video to promote engineering or I need some promotion for this event, to becoming a strategic team with its own vision, its own priorities, its own roadmap, its own goals. And then obviously work finding out the balance between also responding to things that come up, but also being able to stay on the bigger stuff that, that would actually have impact and cut through. And I see a lot of employee brand leaders in house struggling with that as well.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine.
One thing I noticed from your time, when there are a load of cool things that seem to have happened, but I think there was a big LinkedIn accolade, wasn't there? Was it best employer brand? Yeah, you know, I've got the note here somewhere, but it was over 10,000 employees. But that on the face of it, that must have been huge kind of, not just huge validation, but like that. That is a, that is an enormous kind of piece of recognition to get. Was that. Do you remember that moment? Do you remember the feeling, do you remember how that of time of your life?
[00:23:00] Speaker B: I remember there was a period where we were doing a lot and it was very high profile and we'd really pushed. We were really small in house team and we'd really push to do a lot and also to put proper marketing media budget behind it. So I don't want to negate how much distribution is important because to gain traction on a platform like LinkedIn you need to have a distribution strategy, you need to have a content strategy. But organic doesn't always work. Right. So you also need to think about who's seeing this content, how are they seeing it?
Am I getting leaders also to share this content? Like, do I have a plan?
So the content has to be good first of all, then you have to plan. So, yeah, really proud of the work we did. I think at the time we also had a really close partnership with LinkedIn. I've always believed that LinkedIn is a great platform at the moment they're changing their algorithm a lot and driving everyone crazy. But I do think it's one of the better networks and we worked very closely with that team at the time to say, okay, we actually want a strategy that works specifically for this platform versus we're just treating it like any other platform. So yeah, it did matter. It did mean a lot to the team, I think for us, like, any external recognition and goals were huge, especially because we were trying to gain, like, grow our own reputation. Also internal.
But what I think I didn't appreciate at booking was how much we were able to do in a short space of time. Partly because I'd come from that industry agency world where you're used to delivering insane amounts of things for a client of high quality, like, but the pace of an agency. So I think I really brought that in house and the team probably felt it a little bit, but they were like, right, let's go.
One of them said it to me, since I said, like, I didn't really still stay in touch occasionally. Didn't really appreciate, like, how much you were able to, you know, the traction you were able to get. And I think that is partly through slight naivety of what going to be able to launch WeChat in China and, you know, redo the Careers site and create a whole, like, diversity and inclusion series as well as supporting like 500 events globally. Like, no problem. Like, of course we can do that. That was a normal scale for an advertising, like, group account director to be juggling. You know, I'd done like these live events for absolute around the world that we also filmed a TV shoot in like a month in like five different countries. It was like, totally, like, for me, it wasn't a big lift. I think the. The company, I think they were surprised by how much we were producing and also the kinds of budgets we were continually going back and asking for. But we're like, where we've done this, right? Now we build something here and now this team really needs support here. So, like, let's go. What are we gonna. What are we gonna do? What them? Are we not gonna support them?
So I was quite pushy, probably pissed a lot of people off, muscled my way into a lot of things. So it was insane to me, for example, that we weren't hand in glove with PR who were running things like the Women in Tech Summit in Lisbon. Yeah, they had a whole lounge to fill. And we were like, we have assets, we have video, we have content. Like, we have people on the ground we can support.
And of course, a team usually wants your help if you pitch it in the right way. Like, it's not a land grab. It's, let's collaborate and make this, you know, a great opportunity for both of us. The CEO's on stage. Yeah, we don't have an employer brand presence there.
But I think what you find in a big company is everyone Works in their own lane. And there isn't necessarily anyone telling you you have to go collaborate, so you just have to go figure out where the opportunities are. And I would just talk to people and say, what are you working on? Realize they were working on stuff that we could be connecting on. So we were able to much bigger impact. And part of the reason I left was I was on a few stages at the time I was talking at LinkedIn conference and people were like, wow, like what you, what you and the team have achieved is really big.
I would love to pick your brains or could you help us or could you consult? And I was thinking might be time to go and consult.
I've done a lot in a really short space of time with the team and I just thought I want to keep it fresh and interesting and I always want to be moving continuously.
I feel like I'm doing stuff on the cutting edge and we've sort of done a lot of the really exciting bits, so.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it seems as though like the more I learn about you as well, Emily, like these traits, like, I suppose it's like weaved into like how wildly ambitious you clearly are.
Like, you know, moving through from the advertising and the demands and it must have been exhausting by the way. You know, that industry and the work, really exciting. I bet there are some amazing moments. But super demanding. But taking that through into booking.com and also beyond now into truthworks, like I get the sense that, that hunger to that, you know, just how ambitious you clearly are and you know, just striving onto the next thing, you know, making like you
[email protected], you know, you're creating these new networks that probably didn't exist in the, in the typical employer brand ecosystem because actually employer brands should be connected to that department, that department, that department.
Do you, do you sense that is, do you think the advertising industry.
I suppose the question I'm trying to ask is I also think a lot about, you know, you've got skills based hiring versus like experience based hiring, for example. Now if someone was hell bent on. No, we're recruiting for a head of employer brand and we need someone that head of employer brand at another massive tech company you would never have got a look in.
However, they clearly hired the absolute right person. But I suppose, you know, people, people knew what you were bringing to the table, which wasn't necessarily like the cookie cutter of what should have worked, but it obviously did work really, really well.
Is that something you ever think about, you know, just how that's impacted you and your life. And is that something you take into storytelling and you're consulting life in the truth works at the moment?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I think it speaks to the power of the. The individual interview process, which is something obviously we're trying to automate as much as possible now, but it means you don't necessarily get candidates through the net like me. I probably have been rejected by AI at the first. Yeah, at the first hurdle.
So I do think there is real power in being able to get through that first hurdle if you are someone who on paper doesn't meet all the criteria. And I don't know what the answer is for that, but I do think we will swing wildly back towards more humanity in our recruitment processes for this exact reason, because I think you'll lose out on incredible talent through over automating the process.
I do think it was a huge opportunity in a turning point for me to get that. To get that experience. And yeah, I think my former teammate, Tatiana Obernaus had a lot to do with it, who's now the head of EB at Process here in Amsterdam, still a friend, because I think she was also pushing for her boss to be someone who was maybe outside of the usual.
The usual confines. I also think it's partly someone vouching for you and, and seeing something in you that they get excited about. But if you don't get that opportunity to get in front of people, then you don't get that moment. Right.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: And I do think that putting yourself forward, especially as a woman, for an opportunity that you're not, on paper, fully qualified for is also important.
I mean, there are numerous stats that speak to the fact that, you know, a guy will go for a job if he's only got like 50 of the qualifications, but a woman will wait till she's like 80 plus. Yeah, I was probably at about 50, so I probably wouldn't have gone for it if I'd been the kind of person that is. Holds myself to those ridiculous standards. I would just say you have inherently a lot of transferable skills. And I think actually now what we're seeing with Truth Work, so obviously now in the entrepreneur space with my co founder, Rhiannon Stroud, and we basically are creating a lot of those opportunities for people who want to carve a different path for themselves, who want to be independence. We have some incredible experts on the platform a lot in the employer branding space, even though we're much broader than that, who left the sort of traditional job market or, you know, Being in house or being part of a big agency and have basically said I've got all the skills to market myself as a one person expert in this space.
And you know, some of them are former universum, some of them are former, you know, people who've been in house at amazing brands like the likes of Booking and someone recently who's like former Mattel, people who've even founded agencies like Brian Adams, who, you know, at the forefront of what employer branding can and, and should look like, who have said there is room for another model here. And that model is also one that enables incredible talent to rise in a different way through their skills, through their own marketable, transferable experiences, not necessarily through the power of a brand name over the door.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and you've got some phenomenal names. I've looked at like some of the roster mainly from the, the posts that pop up on LinkedIn now and again and there are some phenomenal people. You've mentioned a couple there and in a really short period of time, you're clearly building something extremely valuable.
So just from my own understanding, and this is me kind of externally kind of viewing how it looks as though things have played out. So the truth works look as though they were a relatively traditional employee brand agency consultancy.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: About us, Chris.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Well, not traditional. Traditional is definitely the wrong word. But doing that work that we would expect an agency to do now, you've, you've gone through this kind of transitional kind of period where it's, you know, well, you can, you can talk, talk to me more about this but you know, it's, you're now a platform based business, is that correct? And I still, I take it, still taking a lot of that amazing work through and continuing that stuff. But can you talk to us about, about that, you know, where you've come from?
What was the inflection point? What was the, you know, we need to do this and you know, moving through what, what does that kind of look like?
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Yeah, the next evolution. Yeah, it feels a bit like sort of evolutions of career and, and, and the marketplace as well in parallel. So yes, I'm not going to use the word traditional but we were operating as a consultancy.
Sometimes there's a bit more of an agency depending on where we were and who we were working with.
And we built a team, we had, you know, some fantastic people and we basically said, you know, we'll build what we know. So the, the disruptive element for us originally was, was in the name and is, was in the brand. So this idea of Speaking truth to power, being fearless in, in challenging, in pushing back to briefs and making sure we get the right outcome by being really candid with care.
And we really got a reputation and a name for that. You know, we'd go out and pitch and we would say, look, if you don't really want the honest truth about both your employer brand, your culture, your employee experience, your leadership team, then we are absolutely not the team or the organization for you. And the partnerships that you build through being the upfront about that were, were incredible. We have clients who stay with us through this next evolution as a result of that brand building and the trust that that engendered.
What we realized was increasingly whilst we loved and did employer brand work, we were actually really far upstream in a lot of the work we were doing. We were doing a lot of work on leadership development, on organizational culture, on change management, on so many aspects of, of the people and culture experience. We didn't want to be put in that box anymore.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: What we also realized was a lot of our clients had a bias for trying to do a lot of this work in house as much as possible, which I really respect. I think there's always been, you know, it's what I did at booking. I built my own in house team. And yes, we work with agency partners, but very selectively and it really was the pieces we needed. And then we'd say, look, we're going to take this strategy and we're going to execute it ourselves, which no agency wants to hear. Right. But it's that sort of protectionist mindset that actually doesn't help you get upstream.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: And what we realized was the clients that really got value from us were where they would work with us in the way they wanted, in a very agile way. They'd work with not a whole agency team from us, but they'd work usually with one expert, one consultant who really knew their staff, who could almost kind of become an extension of their team, help them get through a particular period, whether it was, you know, a six week sprint on values or you know, designing an employer brand value proposition with their, with their in house team, hand in hand.
And they would really be grateful because what you're doing then is you're empowering them and you're upskilling their team. You're not.
See that comes in jazz hands and goes, look what we made and only we can do it. And I just find thinking very limited. And it's never been what our clients wanted and where they really saw value.
But of course it's the model that works because you want the client to continue.
So we wanted to find another way through and we also wanted to scale because we believe that truth works as a brand and as a proposition, has so much more to offer. We would constantly get people saying, can I come and work for you? Can I be a part of the team? But we were small, we were boutique, we didn't have big network money yet.
So what was, how can we make this into a platform, in all senses of the word, allows more people under the tent who believe what we believe, who have that fearlessness in the way they do their work, who are comfortable speaking truth to power. And also how can we create opportunities for those people? Because we don't need to hire them. We actually think the best talent out there is freelance, is fractional, does not want to be part of an agency. In fact, it's probably an agency or a big consultancy.
You know, we have people who've left like really big name teams who are like, I just want to build my own brand and my own business. So what we offer with the platform is for clients. We offer that agility and that flexibility to find a curated group of talent who are all independent, they work for themselves and they have that accountability of getting it right. Because it's their reputation on the line. Yeah, of course, it's not an agency, it's their individual reputation. And they will get rated by that client publicly and transparently at the end of the project, booking.com like an Airbnb, the consultant can rate the client. So we start to weed out clients that don't operate in good faith.
And then from the, from the expert side, they get to keep their independence. But they're part of a collective, they're part of something bigger than themselves. We have a whole community. There are community events. You can share notes, brief, you can ask people for a consult. You know, you can create your own dream team. Because what also happens sometimes as an expert, apart from getting lonely, is someone to stress test stuff with or you get limit of where your expertise ends and, you know, an agency model, you've sort of sold the team. That's kind of it. And you might not have that expertise in house, but within the network you need a Spanish speaker who can facilitate a, you know, workshop for you. You need a neurodiverse, you know, diversity expert. Absolutely. Like we've got those people within the community. And I don't think employer branding, all people and culture topics are siloed anymore. I think they're so interchangeable. Often an employer brand can actually be about change. An employer brand about the leadership team needing some upskilling.
I think putting things in those little boxes is also very limiting. So we enable people to clients and experts to basically meet each other, find each other, be booked much more easily and seamlessly and with transparent ratings, reviews and also day rates so you can see upfront what you're paying for someone. There's no sort of smoke and mirrors as well.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it sounds as though there's quite a nice irony to it as well, Emily. In the way of like we preach in employer brand about the, the power of authenticity and needing to be incredibly transparent. And then you have these agencies that move into businesses, they've got this one, you know, client directs a contact and then there's all of this like really discreet work that's going in the background. No one knows actually who's managing what.
So I do love that aspect of it. Like there's nowhere to hide.
There's nowhere to hide. It's super transparent. So, but talk to me a little bit about, you know, in practice.
You know, I'm, I'm the CEO of a thousand person FMCG company. I'm like, okay, need to speak to Emily and Rhiannon. We've got some, some big employee experience, employer brand problems. You come in, we do this discovery Voyse How does it look for me thereafter? I've then got these like other like eight pillars that need to be resolved. Like do I, do I go onto the platform? Do you consult me through the process?
[00:40:45] Speaker B: You don't have to speak to me and Rhiannon at all. It's self served. So the beauty is all you have to do is create a free account and then as a, as a user of the platform you can browse for what you need. So you can create your own shortlist within it. You can then decide you want to speak to three or four different experts. You can have a free 30 minute call with each of them and you can do your discovery directly with the expert. We're not the gatekeepers.
You can also search for real specifics that might be, you want industry specific. So for example, we have a company at the moment we're working with who's in the freight forwarding space, logistics space, and they were able to work with a strategist on their EVP who not only is hugely experienced in X universe, like all of that big agency, big rigorous experience, but is now independent, but who has huge logistics experience, so really understands the industry, you know, was the perfect fit for them. Strategically and then when it got into execution, they're able to cherry pick who they want to work with creatively. So are we creating a documentary? Cool. Are we creating a content series? Are we doing, you know, a fairly standard toolkit? What are we creating and who's the right fit for that? You're not wedded to one person and our experts will do handoffs between them. So there's a mutual respect there. They're all part of a shared community.
So if you are handing off to someone else, there's that connectivity. But you don't then need to have that whole team sat there trying to cover their overheads. You're not paying for an office cost, you're not paying for all of that. Rhiannon and I and the, and the customer service people that you know, work within our team are all available if a client wants a recommendation or they want, you know, a short list of people who meet their criteria.
However, the platform is designed for you to browse yourself and it's designed for you to reach out, to send messages in the same way as you would browse booking.com for your perfect holiday villa. The smarter algorithm gets, the more self serve is, is easy and then all of the booking is done within the platform. So it's all one contract. You have a platform contract and then you agree the scope deliverables directly with the extra expert. You can see the cost they put together for you. You can finish the scope of work within the platform and then it generates a contract that both parties sign. So you're also taking away all of that administrative burden of continually onboarding new as it's one payment process, you know, all of that administrative burden which I think often puts off clients from working with indies. They go, well, I've got to go to the big agency because I've got to do a three way RFP and I have to go now for find three agencies arbitrarily usually or three.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And then, then they've got 55 invoices coming in at different times of the month and all this stuff. Yeah, it's a, it's a pain, isn't it?
[00:43:26] Speaker B: And like, let's be real, most agencies are now working with freelancers and marking them up, you know, a chunky percentage.
Yeah, this just makes that process transparent. You know, you can see the talent you're working with yourself and you can see how much they cost.
There's no sort of we're presenting this person as an employee, but they're not actually really an employee.
You know, they're not working for us.
But you do know that they've been verified by us and that we have given them the quality mark of approval, which is important.
Yeah, we hand verifying at the moment, so we will automate some elements of it. But actually that, that in person verification is really important for us. They have to show their work, but they also go through a live consulting test. A live problem with us.
And we've been, Rhiannon and I have been in the industry for a long time.
We've seen a lot and we know the kinds of challenges that clients throw. So it's not just about being able to answer a brief, it's actually sometimes about being able to define the brief. So play clients that don't really know what they want. You know, actually it's quite important to be consultative in that process and actually ask the difficult questions to get to the right brief in the first place.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I love the, to be honest, you know, what you're doing with the platform I absolutely love. I think the industry needs it and I think it's arrived at a perfect time. Looking at a scenario because what you have here is something that is enormously scalable and I'd imagine understanding how ambitious you are, that you're going on a journey to try and realize some of that scalability.
But with scalability, certainly with something like this, especially in the people and culture place, you know, comes with like dangerous territory as well. It's like getting bigger.
You know, there's a lot more places for people to hide, deliver bad experiences, negative feedback, etc. Etc.
So it's that double edged sword of like, yeah, brilliant, things are going amazingly well, but it's so big that there's all these new corners that people can hide around. Is that, how are you feeling about that? I know you're not, you know, at that point right now, but is that something, is that, is that a thought that wells through the mind?
[00:45:36] Speaker B: I feel, I feel like that risk is inherent in any agency that would scale. Right. Because you hire people and you're like, oh, we've launched an office in Vietnam. Like you don't quality standards being retained. The way you do it obviously is through hearing client feedback. So of course as with anything, there will be times when you know a client is not as happy as they could be. But I think what our platform does is allow us to see that much more quickly because we have this very transparent two way feedback system. You will see if an expert is not getting good ratings and you'll see if they're consistently not getting good ratings. And we have already set within the contract that there is a standard they have to meet and if they're not meeting it, that we're within our rights to remove them from the platform. So there is a standard experts have to meet. I think the other thing is there's greater accountability in our model. So the experts also have their own personal brand and their personal brand is really on show here. They are very much, much, you know, accountable for the scope, for the deliverables, for what ends up being the output and then hiding with a whole team of agency folk like they have to deliver.
And it's their personal brand on the line, right? There is, you know, there's nowhere to hide behind art with so and so or the creative team messed up.
So we actually think that personal accountability works in our favor. Experts want to do a great job. They want to put more jobs on the platform platform. They want to get a good review so that their profile on the platform becomes more findable because you can also search like, you know, the quality of the reviews.
They want to retain that reputation. The other thing I think that's really powerful is this community element.
So the experts really know each other, they care about each other, they support each other, they also hold each other accountable. So you almost have this kind of perfect storm of people trying to level each other up and, and they're all sharing their insight. You know, we have learning sessions.
Someone hosted a mental health sort of walk yesterday with our contingent. So experts are really supporting each other behind the scenes, which I think makes this also levels up the standard and makes people feel like they don't want to let each other down or they don't want to let the, the platform and the experience for the clients down either. So yeah, scalability is hard. We also tend to have experts as, you know, ambassadors. So the ones that continually get really good ratings to be champions for others and to support others if things aren't going well.
I think that Matrix network system is something that will really scale over time because we know who the ones are on the, on the platform that are doing incredibly well and we want to replicate what they're doing well and help them to upgrade upskill and embrace everyone else. So that model over time will become self perpetuating in my view.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: Amazing. I love what you're doing. Keep the updates flowing as I know they will. Because like you said at the top of the call, I love how kind of you, kind of you're building in public theoretically, like the updates and I like to kind of see how things are flowing. I loved a recent post of yours, by the way. A couple of posts which is around, I think there was a VC contact of some description. It was around founder pay and yeah, I must. Yeah, it was your sentiment around it
[00:48:53] Speaker B: getting myself blacklisted left, right and center.
Again, like I said, what you see is what you get on LinkedIn. I really do try and try and shoot from the hip most of the time and sometimes I end up thinking, oh God, what have I said now?
But I do prefer to live my life in that way and I think it really speaks to the values we have as a company as well. Obviously I speak for myself when I write on LinkedIn, but at the same time, our team will believe in each other and believe in what we're here to do. We are an all female team, so from our head of products to myself and Ria's co founders, our CTO is a guy, but the core team is women.
And we do believe we also have a role to play both in the employer brand industry, which I have to say is. Is surprisingly male dominated in some places.
In terms of the voices. Anyway, I know a hell of a lot of women who are doing amazing work, many of whom are on the platform.
And I feel like we just have a responsibility to be vocal, to challenge this space, to say that there's room for everyone in this space. Because I sometimes feel like the employer brand industry for some reason has decided there's only room for a few voices and there's only room for people to own certain segments of it, whether it's conferences or days or, you know, or communities. And there is room for all of us. There's room for models. I'm not sitting here saying agencies don't have a place in this model, they absolutely do. But. But I argue that that's not what every client wants. And I think it's okay to provide choice. You know, you had businesses like Upwork coming in and shaking up the marketing industry. It's okay for disruptors to move this industry. It doesn't mean you're under threat. There are people who will use a freelancer on Upwork or on Fiverr who. And there are people who would never do that and they will always go to agency. You know, there is so much opportunity here. But if we don't evolve and shift as an agency agency, if we don't allow more disruptive voices, sometimes the quieter, more reticent voices, sometimes women's voices, then we aren't going to get Anywhere. And I feel the same about the tech industry.
You know, it's like 2% of women that get funded. It's not good enough and it's only going backwards. And that when you add in all female teams or teams where you have a person of color like myself, we're not getting funded. So we have to challenge the system. We can't just keep playing by the rules. And Rhiannon and I are certainly ready to play outside of the rules if we have to. With respect to everyone that has come before. Yeah, we're not here to, to go quietly and enter the awards and keep feeding the system in the way that people are feeding it because it has to change.
[00:51:50] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll keep up the amazing work. As a, as a dad to four little girls, I'm here for voices like yours. And you know, you're doing amazing work and just keep it up. Before I let you go.
We always finish on the same really small segment.
Funny play on words with the podcast name. You're on the Employer Bland podcast, as you know.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:13] Speaker A: If you could give one piece of advice for companies to avoid being employer bland.
Anything at all, anything that comes to mind. But how should companies avoid being employer Bland?
[00:52:33] Speaker B: I got loads of advice on this, but one thing that's front of mind for me at the moment is listen to your most sort of potentially controversial or vocal employee for a really awkward, uncomfortable truth about your company and then figure out where the gift is in that. Instead of kind of brushing it under the carpet, think, well, what's a. If I was the right person that that would make me feel something, then like, what would I feel? So a company came to me recently and said, it can be hard to progress here.
And that was sort of their awkward, honest truth. You know, it can be quite form formulaic, really. Climb every rung. And I said, okay, well then the kind of person you're appealing, you're not going to change that overnight. The kind of person you're appealing to then is someone who doesn't take no for an answer, is someone who doesn't want to be given that next opportunity. You know, the sort of, the, the thing we always joke about is a, you know, the sort of Gen Z as a expected to be promoted on day two. Like, this is a company where we're only going to promote you if you're damn ready. And like that for someone. Also someone like me is a gauntlet being thrown down because I wouldn't accept that. I wouldn't climb that ladder. So I think you can Tap into something that's maybe uncomfortable and just be really honest about it. It's actually that's. Those are the powerful, spicy insights. I love that you get to a bloody good creative idea. The other stuff is the stuff that's comfortable is rarely where exciting creativity lives.
[00:54:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And I think just generally getting more comfortable in the uncomfortable. You know, just that as a broader lesson is. Is something really cool, but that I love it. Yeah. Thank you so much, Emily. You've been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me
[00:54:22] Speaker B: and for having me and for. And for doing this podcast. It's a great listen.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: No, no, I really appreciate that. But yeah, it's been brilliant having you on. Great catching up and hopefully catch up with you in the summer at one of these many events that are going on. But yeah, I'm sure we'll catch up.
[00:54:38] Speaker B: If I'm still invited to any of these after this conversation, then, yeah, I'll see you there. Or we'll have our own. We'll host our own event.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Or if you're blacklisted, I'll just find the back door and I'll quickly open it. You can run in.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: I always think that I have upset everyone and then I have enough people saying to me, so refreshing that I keep doing.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: So, yeah, no, we need your Voyse and we need it to be even louder. So, yeah, keep up the amazing work that you're doing. But really nice to see you and yeah, look forward to catching up soon.
[00:55:08] Speaker B: You too, Chris. Thanks.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: See you. Bye.
