Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: How are you?
[00:00:03] Speaker B: I'm fine, thank you. I'm a bit nervous, but I'm gonna be fine.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: You've got nothing to be nervous about, I absolutely promise you.
But look, thank you so much for, for joining me on the Employer Bland podcast. It's really, really good to see you. And, and look, I've been following your content as you know, I've mentioned this to you, but you know, since the employer branding summit kicked off in Bulgaria last year and which was a huge success, you know, clearly. But I've been, been following your content and your kind of journey since. So that's why I was really keen for us to catch up. But, but Ventislava, instead of me kind of, you know, doing an introduction, you've got so many amazing things to talk about. Would you be able to, to kind of briefly introduce yourself, your background and the things that you're working on at the moment?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So my name is Vanzis Leva, as you mentioned, and I'm very honored to be part of your podcast and just take standing there across those great people that you had in the past is just amazing and I thank you from my heart, really appreciate it.
So as I mentioned, my name is Venti. You can call me Venti, not the full name because it's difficult, I gather.
I do employ branding and people like I do recruitment and I do things that make people shine and I love helping people find their place and change their lives. And this has been the narrative of my life from the, from the beginning, since I was a little girl.
And yeah, I, this is my professional thing that I do. But other than that, I'm a mother of two and I have a dog and I'm from Bulgaria.
And the interesting thing is that I'm not just from Bulgaria, but I decided to stick to my hometown, which is a small city on the border with Romania. And I didn't move to Sofia, which is the capital of Bulgaria.
I had many offers to move there, professional and non professional, but I decided to stick to Ruse. This is my, my hometown and this is also something that comes up as a focus or a major thing in my life through the years and through my professional career.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Amazing. Amazing. So, so when you look back at your, your career so far and you have done some amazing things, I think you played it down an awful lot in your introduction. You've done some incredible things so far. But when, when you look back, were, you know, were there any defining moments that steered you towards employer branding? So for example, was there something or a process or A situation that you thought was broken, you thought, I want to be part of the solution to fixing that? Or was there something that you really loved and that you was kind of drawn towards and you wanted to do more of that? You know, was there anything that you can remember that really kind of directed you towards this, this field?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that my journey was quite linear. I went to, to school, to high school.
Then I started my bachelor degree in management, actually then I had a master in management, another master in Innovation, and a third master in marketing.
So it's a different journey. And I've always studied through my career, so I don't have a moment in my life where not I'm not in some kind of certification or degree or something. So I'm a person that loves to study.
And actually before starting my professional career, like starting to work, to really work. During my university years, I founded an NGO called called Jump Project.
And the purpose of that NGO was to educate people, high school students and university students about how to bring the best of themselves. We designed this soft skill program and we had it in different schools and universities and we went to Ruse, to Bulgaria, to Sofia, to Varna, to different cities. And we had this program where we, we tried to help students just develop themselves and sell themselves better and just gain some soft skills that they were lacking because the educational system in Bulgaria is not so good, I think.
So this was a major thing happening in my life. At the same time I was part of the young Rotary organization here in my hometown. I guess, you know, Rotary, it's a, again an NGO organization, a networking organization.
And there we have been told to put service above self and like help people to have better lives.
So one of the sponsors of the NGO that I founded a company, the biggest actually logistic company here in Bulgaria, with operations in Greece and Romania, he saw potential. And me, I was like 24. I just had my first daughter. I haven't worked like a day in my life, really like a real, real job. But he saw potential in me and he invited me to become the leader, the manager of, of, of his learning and development team in, at his company. And he had like 4,500 people in the company. And I was, I was 24, without a day professional experience. And I was invited to lead a team and that was huge for me. And I said, okay, what's happening here? I have to, I don't know, I have to live with that. And I said, okay, yes, I'll do it. And it was quite a journey because I wasn't experienced it was learning by doing and learning by mistake after mistake. And soon after I became the head of the L and D team, then the head of the people team, then the head of the team. And in my last years I was also the head of the partnership team. So I span across four different teams and at times I had like 20 or 30 people under my leadership.
So it was an amazing journey and I learned so much through that. And this actually shaped my view for fee, for people and for my work. And fortunately the company had and still has actually a very good matrix structure. They're not like a hierarchy, they have matrix structure. And I had the opportunity to work on different cross functional projects on empor branding, on design thinking, on service design and also on experience, user experience and people experience.
And this actually shaped me into the way that I am today and the background that I have coming from a small village in Bulgaria and the hunger that I have for achievement and the hunger for developing people and seeing through their potential because I was giving the chance someone to see my potential. And those factors shaped me and my work. Now.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: I love that, I love that, I love the fact that you've, you've, you've had that breadth of experience across like L and D people, Recruitment, employer branding. Because I think a lot of employer brand leaders come, they come into employee branding from so many different directions. Like often people will come from traditional marketing into recruitment marketing into employer brand. But I think the, and that they do a great job. Lots of those people do an amazing job. But I think they, they attack the, attack that kind of division and capability with the different set of kind of skills and mindset. As someone that's probably come from people operations, HR learning and development as an example, or internal comms as an example.
Do you think that's, do you think that rounded experience that you've got really helps in your role today as an employer brander?
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Absolutely, because I have this experience like 360 from everything. I also have payroll experience.
And when I look at a project or at a problem or at a need that the company has, I can look through the different lenses and POVs and I can see where the process breaks actually. And I can see what every stakeholder in this project has in his mind, which is very helpful for me.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Going back to something that you mentioned earlier, so the touch points that you had with the, these school leavers and the early careers kind of communities, you know, I feel that there's a huge employer brand problem in, in, you know, before early careers so early careers, I define that as people that are just joining companies, corporate companies. But when you look at school leavers, and if I look at my daughters, for example, my two eldest daughters, 12 and 14 years old, and the lack of visibility they have of careers that are available to them, you know, and, and, and what, what are the different job roles? You know, what does, what does a trainee architect do in a company? What does a surveyor actually do day to day? What's a day in the life of a surveyor?
What are your kind of thoughts and feelings about? You know, we've got employer branding as a, as a huge corporate function and problems that need to be solved, but what are your thoughts and feelings about the lack of visibility, I suppose for these school leaver communities? Do you think there is a problem there? Firstly,
[00:10:23] Speaker B: I'm not sure how to answer that, to be honest. I've never had any problem with that. I mean, I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur but then I had this, this chance of life to become something else and I took it.
So I haven't really thought of what other possibilities are there for me. I just went with the flow. So I'm not sure how it works for other people, to be honest.
I do have a daughter in her teen years, but I'm not pushing her. I think that, I think that your purpose and your career will come to you. You don't have to really work on it to find it.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good point.
Yeah, no, it definitely does. Yeah. Because I think we, we all have different experiences, don't we, in life and how different things kind of impact different people. But yeah, I was just really interested in the work that you've done and the help that you've given to those kind of communities. You know, how what your general kind of, you know, perspective was.
So talk to us a little bit about the employer Branding Summit. You know, how did, why, why did that start? Where did that kind of, you know. Because it is, I know it's only like less than one year old, but it is turning into a big, big thing now. You know, what's, what was the nucleus of starting the employer Branding Summit?
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Well, I think that there were two major factors that made me want to build the summit. The first one is that when I was in house, that company that I mentioned, I had the chance to, to be at many HR conferences or summits or whatever events that we had here in Bulgaria and mainly here in our country. The events are organized by big Media.
And they do it more for like, I wouldn't say a profit purpose, but they do it with the profit in mind. And the guests and the speakers and the keynotes on those conferences are always the same. The companies are always the same. They're always companies from Bulgaria with and HRS that we have seen and we have read about them. It's always, always the same. So this got a bit boring for me and I didn't like what's happening on our event stage. On the other hand, when I left the company, the, the big company, the big logistic company that I mentioned and I started my consultancy, I started meeting with other people with HRS, with CEOs and whenever I spoke about Empor branding, I heard them saying, oh, we already have ping pong tables, we already have fruits at the office.
Yeah, we do, we do some career fairs. We, we went there, but it doesn't make much sense. And I was like, okay, good for you. That, that's completely fine, but that's not important branding, you know, it's just so much more.
And I saw the need not to really educate people, but more of like bring them on the same page about what import branding is.
And maybe a third factor that now comes to my mind is that I've been told to set the standard high.
And through my work and I was thinking that maybe someone should make a good event here that sets the standard high, like really high, so others can catch up and grow higher.
And I thought of that like a purpose, a cause that I want to build. And also I had the great, great example of my colleagues from Catalyst Romania, I'm showing there because Romania is just there in front of me.
So from Catalyst Bucharest, they built Ibicon and then Catalina from Empel, from Serbia, they, they're bringing, they're building the Empel Festival.
And I saw, okay, we have Serbia and we have Romania building that for the fifth or sixth year and we don't have it here in Bulgaria. So we need to catch up, we need to build that.
So I wrote couple of LinkedIn messages to potential speakers, I wrote to some of my network for sponsorships and like three weeks later we had a website, an agenda and sponsors and early tickets already sold. And it was so fast that I didn't have the time to question myself and to question what the hell am I doing right now. And it just happened and it was, it was a success. I think at the day I was still very critical of myself, of the agenda, but at the end of the day I said, okay, I Brought Revolut and Mars and Coca Cola and Jet Brains to Bulgaria. I mean, Revolut, this is like, who brings that to your stage? And that was amazing. And I think that people, the audience really needed that, because I know that I mentioned probably this too much, but I'm from Bulgaria. We are from Bulgaria. We're Eastern Europeans. And we need those examples of people of big companies. And we need to see them, to feel them, like, not only online, but to see them on the stage. And we need to hear their stories, to inspire ourselves and say, okay, that's easy. I can do that. It's not so much of an effort. If they can do it, I can do it. So, yeah, this what brought me to the EV Summit last November. And right now I'm still thinking if we should have the EV Summit this year. But, yeah, probably we'll be. We'll be doing that again.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Amazing. And. And I'd imagine in those early kind of weeks and months, did it ever feel kind of risky, you know, to put it on? Because what. What, you know, is such. And it went so well, but it was obviously such an ambitious plan to start this thing from scratch. There's a lot of, you know, there are local competitors in other territories, kind of neighboring territories. Did. Did it feel a risk at any point, or did it always just feel right? And the early signals were clearly so positive so quickly that. That probably let a lot of your nerves kind of go away pretty quickly, didn't it?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I didn't feel any risk for the first one, but I'm feeling the risk now because now I'm thinking, if I can do that the same, but I have to do it better.
So I'm thinking, will I do it better, actually? Is that possible?
And I'm also thinking, because my. My goal for the first summit is to. To have, like, to. To say something, to.
To just do something different. And right now, if I have to do it for a second time, I have to find my motivation.
And it doesn't have to be money or just event management. It has to be something deeper. So right now it feels risky.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally understand that. It's kind of. Especially when the first thing went so well, you want to make sure you kind of back it up, don't you? But, you know, I've got every confidence that you'll do that.
And is community a big part? You know, a lot of the reason I say that is a lot of events go extremely well, but they can become forgettable. Like, you can go. You can have a good time, but then you've got this high that then just drops and you don't really hear anything else about them until there's a buildup of like ticket sales in the, in the months leading up to the event.
Is community building a big part of your kind of ethos with the summit moving forward?
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it is. Definitely it is because I'm a person who loves to receive and share knowledge.
So for me, part of the organization of the summit was to have this community that you're talking about and to warm them up before the events. So we had some pre event webinars on the subject of recruitment and talent acquisition and employee branding. Then after, now after the event and before the second one, we have some recorded fireside chats with our keynote speakers from the first one. So we're always bringing some content in our channels and we also have this internal platform where we brought all the attendees and the keynote speakers in one platform and they have the opportunity to speak to themselves and just discuss problems or case studies that they're having.
So yeah, I think that the community is very important and actually this is why I'm trying and trying to post at least three times on my LinkedIn so I can just give my experience and my knowledge to other people.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. What were your main kind of learnings or takeaways from the summit? Because you must have.
Because it's such a kind of defining point in your career, isn't it? Like hosting that, you know, getting the speakers, getting the attendees, that thing happening. It clearly went so well.
What, what were your, what were the main takeaways? What have you come away with? Do you attack employer branding through a slightly different lens now? Do you do things slightly differently or what, what changes have been made in your, I suppose, professional or personal life since the summit? I take it life's a little bit, I'll take it life's a little bit different since, since that happened.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the main takeaway was that people needed that. The HR audience, we had like 80% of the audience was hrs. So the hrs needed that. They loved it and they need those companies to, to come back again or other companies, other big companies.
I also felt the need of the audience to have more co creation because the summit was focused on short keynotes, about 20, 25 minutes and we just scratched the, the top of the, of the subject and people need to co create, people need to express experience through their hands and eyes and mind the things that we're talking about.
So probably we'll do some workshops maybe for this year or I don't know, we're still brainstorming that or how we'll do it. And the third thing that I learned through the summit and through my consultancy is that we have to stop talking about empor branding with the phrase and poor branding. And we have to stop talking about example, cx, EVP and other acronyms that they're out there. Because every time I mention something of this to a CEO or another C level manager, I can see the soul leaving their bodies. Like they're like, what are you talking about? It's something so untouchable for them, so they don't need it in their minds.
And so I don't know, I think that we have to, to change our vocabulary. And right now I'm reading the new book by James Ellis, Becoming Choosable, I think that was the title and he talks about that and he actually, he doesn't use the term empor branding. He use it like two or three times at the max. And I love it. And I think that all of us, we should start talking in, in words and terms that the C level understands and we have to start talking about the profit or the pain that they are going to experience if they don't have what we are offering to them.
So I think those are the things that change for me after and around the summit.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting. And James is a master, isn't he? He's a great person for a soldier to kind of learn from. But, but I agree with you and I think, I think at the heart of everything that we do is storytelling and it's storytelling in, you know, and, and that's the phrase I tend to, which I know is. It's not, it's not a unique or new phrase, it's something we will use anyway. But storytelling in lots and lots of different avenues, really, just so anyone watching those stories can actually understand through a much clearer lens what that particular thing is or if I'm interested in that particular avenue, why should I be interested or potentially not interested? Why is it for me or potentially why is it not for me?
So, yeah, I'm with you and I think as well I need to read the book. But when you said about the link back to profit and roi, I think, I don't know if you agree or not, but there's a lot of negative connotations attached to employer branding and its relationship with bottom line business success and profit.
Because I don't think there's enough connection between the work that we do and the, and the bottom line impact it has on companies. And I think there needs to, that line needs to be connected. Do you agree? I don't know if you've got any thoughts on how, how we can start to connect that because I don't know if anyone's got the answer to that. But have you got any thoughts on how we can start connecting that, that line of, you know, connection between the work we do and, and, and, and business success and profit?
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Well, I think that we're going there, I think that it's, it's taking some time because if we see the history of branding itself, not employ branding, but just branding, it was the same. What companies didn't understand that they have to build a brand. They didn't understand that they have to build relationship with their customers. They didn't understand that they have to make their customer feel very special.
But now it's the opposite. Now every company is so customer centered and so much, there's so much effort put in that to know your customers and know your market and know the birthday and the name and everything about your customer. And this is like how it is done now. And I think that this is coming to empower branding as well. And it will be coming probably in 10 years, I don't know.
But we need to, to bring those subjects and just to show sea level that it's the same like you market in front of your customers in order to sell your product and you need to market in front of your employees and potential employees in order to have a good team.
Because without the good team you're nothing. You're just a trademark there with the logo and colors and that's it.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, such a good point. I think, I think the whole internal mobility and internal comms conversation is often forgotten about.
When we talk about employee branding as well. I think a lot of people talk about employee branding, storytelling, talent attraction as an externally facing only activity.
But it, it does have a really important role internally, doesn't it? And I think certainly like this year, moving into next year onwards and the, there's a lot of teams that are shrinking. There's you know, companies that are becoming more profitable with less staff.
Internal mobility is naturally going to, you know, be a bigger and bigger topic of discussion.
Do you think employer branding and storytelling can often be forgotten about internally and an afterthought and maybe, maybe it shouldn't be. What your kind of general thoughts on that?
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that right now storytelling, the storytelling of companies are, is focused on who is the company when the company was founded, who is the CEO and how many, how many customers they have and how many markets they operate in. But the real storytelling is about the person inside. So, so how he get the job, how he got there, how he grew to this role that he's having now, what was his challenges and actually the story about himself. We need to make the employee the hero of the journey. Like if we are talking about storytelling techniques, this is the hero, not the company and we need to speak about those people actually. And yeah, regarding the internal mobility, I think it's is a great tool for employ branding and retention because every, each of us has read about the Gen Z and their need of flexibility and new things and etc. Etc. So mobility is a great tool to retain people and to give them the opportunity to just try out new things and also to build some stories for external positioning based on the, the journey that the person have through the internal mobility.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed, agreed. So if we, if we look at like you know, going back to the connection of, of employer branding and, and bottom line business impact, are there certain measurements for you that matter more than others? You know, whether it's based on traffic, engagement, intent, signal, whatever it might be. But when you're defining an employer brand strategy or you're implementing a new plan for one of your partners, is there often a North Star metric like something that you hang your hat on that is super, super important from a measurement or from a data standpoint?
[00:29:02] Speaker B: It depends on the project and on the need and the company. But the two things that I'm always looking for is are the employees of this company willing to refer friends without the financial game of gain of the referral, Are they referring their family, are they welcoming their friends as their colleagues or their wife more, let's see. Probably try at another place. We're not ready for that.
That's for me is one of the major KPIs that shows what exactly is happening. And also I, I love to ask people, candidates and employees, how was your journey without a number? But how do you think, what's your journey through the candidate process, through the onboarding, through the probably some training or even through your or when you decided to leave the company, how did you feel?
So this is not so much tangible I think, but it's something that's important and we should focus on the feelings of the people in every touch point that they have with the company and we should measure that. And I think that the employee surveys that we are doing are not measuring that because many of the companies are just doing engagement surveys once per year and they're like, they have those big surveys with a hundred questions or more and then they have a report and PDF that the CEO probably doesn't read and nothing actually happens after that.
And I wouldn't do it that way. I would create a system them where you ask your people in every stage, on every touch point, on every step of their journey, how are they feeling? You just had a baby, how are you feeling? You just, your daughter just started university, how are you feeling? How can we support you? And actually this is going to be much more than just asking people who they rate the company from 1 to 10.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Yeah, such a, such a good point. And I think it's such an important activity to do, not just from a retention perspective, but just because you know that that is how a good company should operate. Because I think for a lot of people they will almost, they'll almost become like therapy sessions, won't they? Like they've actually got an opportunity with, have got someone in front of them that cares, wants to understand how things are going, how they're feeling and if they have got anything on their chest that they want to talk about, that's the perfect opportunity, isn't it, for you to kind of learn, understand. And if you need to move something left or right, then you can, can't you? So such a, such a good point.
So if we just focus for a minute in this kind of closing part of the conversation, there'll be a lot of people listening that are like, you know, either solo practitioners or maybe they're, they're just, you know, just about to kick off a new employer brand initiative. Maybe they're not even an employer brander, but they're, they're in TA or HR and they've been tasked with a new employer brand project or whatever.
If you were starting from scratch in a, in a smallish company, you know, call it a hundred to two hundred person company, what are the fundamental things, the building blocks that you would put in place to create some employer brand impact from scratch in a new company?
[00:32:55] Speaker B: First of all, I would see what my need is. Do I need more candidates? Do I need to retain people more? Do I need just to position myself and defer my company from the other companies and then I'll start building things step by step? Because I see that in many companies their fear is that they have to do this big and poor branding project that will take like two years. And it's not like that we can do it, Sprint by Sprint. And we can just take something, test it, prototype it, and then implement it and start measuring its impact on the company or the problem that we were trying to solve.
So I will do it that way. And if I don't have a budget, I will just focus on the on the experience and on the human touch that we can have between us as a company, as an employer, and the employees or potential employees that we are having.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: I love that. Really good advice. Amazing.
Venti, it's been really, really nice catching up with you. Thanks so much for taking the time out for us to talk today.
And yeah, thank you so much.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you. Great having. Great being here. And thank you again. Appreciate it.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Take care. Bye.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Bye.
