Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Employer Bland podcast. My guest today has been ahead of almost every wave in this industry.
Social before social, community before community, employer branding before the words existed. He founded the Employer Branding Club, he spent years inside Universum's research machine and he's been in my virtual high line for just about as long as I've worked in this space. Today we finally get to talk properly and I've asked him not to soften anything at all. Steve Ward, welcome to the show.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm really looking forward to getting involved and getting chatting through some good stuff.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out. And look, you know, we spoke very, very briefly before, before we just jumped on here. You literally just hopped off a plane and you. And you're talking to me like this is this.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I had three hours sleep, but no violins because I had at Barcelona for two days beforehand. Which is not a bad thing, is it really? So. But yes, that's the latest EB Club, which is obviously something we'll chat about.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Well, you're looking very good for the fact you've had three hours sleep, so hopefully that's. That's something.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Anyway, I'll collapse after,
[00:01:13] Speaker A: so. So look, before we get into the main chat, I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes if possible, Steve, for my benefit, and everybody listening, kind of, I suppose, pulling away the kind of LinkedIn profile and you know, that gives us kind of a view as it does with everybody of kind, what we've been doing since, you know, typically, you know, 20 years old onwards. Yeah, it would be great to rewind a little bit beyond that, you know, the starting wherever you like. Maybe it's the 8, 9, 10 year old Steve onwards. But you know, where did you grow up? You know, what, what did kind of, what did that part of your life look like? Were there any kind of patterns that emerged for you to then sort of burst into the.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Yeah, there's some, there's some landmarks for sure. So I grew up in Nottingham. I'm. I grew up in Nottingham in the 70s, which makes me, me a very proud Nottingham Forest fan. When I got into football, it was at the time when forests were winning things in Europe back in those guys start to show my age a little bit here now. I was great. So I was Nottingham. A younger brother, lovely two lovely parents, very painfully shy kids growing up I was smart, painfully shy, which nobody ever believes. Now, you know, I stand on stages and do all the things that I do now. But it's was painfully Shy. I was awfully kind of introverted. I, I, for a long, long time. I flunked my GCSes. I was first year of GCSE. I did appallingly well though, despite being pretty smart and predicted good grades. And then, and I started my career in retail. I kind of, I had no choice. I just ran into the, whatever job was available for somebody who would just try to do A levels and made an absolute pig's ear of them and, and so I walked into retail, which was for a shy kid was a really weird thing to do. But actually I kind of took to it in a way. I quite like the, I think I always had this sort of authentic cell thing about who I was because I hated the, hated the pitch. So, so yeah, so I, I was painfully shy, therefore probably kind of not many, you know, know remarkable things about my childhood other than the fact I just was a sports nut to, and, and just kind of stayed behind everything everybody else and everybody else was noisy. Although the one thing that was different to that maybe where there was a, there was a sideline is despite me being painfully shy, I used to put my hand up for the school panto every year.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Used to stand on stage and do impressions of teachers as part of every panto every year. And so it became known in school as the guy who did the, did the teacher impressions on stage, which is good for gaining a little bit of popularity with the students. Not great for getting popularity with the teachers. But what it showed, there was a little bit of a fire behind me that probably just wasn't quite coming out. So. So, yeah, so I think that's so, yeah, so I started in retail. Yeah, I just, I wasn't amazing at it but I did all right at it. And then I got made redundant and on my birthday one year, oh, I know this happened to me actually. I was terrible at the POS EPOS system.
But then I took a job where I sat on the phone from 6:30 in the morning through to 6:30 in the evening making over 300 calls a day.
And I didn't know then it was a recruitment agency. I just took this job that I needed a job and I'm like, I can do that. I can just pick up the phone. The guy who hired me said, I like you. And I sat on the phone. I used to ring transport managers in Nottingham and around the industrial area, transport managers, warehouse managed, and ring them at 6:30 in the morning to see if they needed a temp to start at 7 or 8 o'.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Clock.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Or whatever. That morning I had, you know, guys and ladies on standby, right? And then. And then. So I call those people and then I'd call them again an hour later to see if all of their attempts would turn up.
Then I call them again in the daytime to see if I could have a proper chat with them. And then I call them again at six o' clock in the evening to check what they needed for the next day, a day. And were they short and were they getting there? And so this cycle of doing 300 calls a day where. But it was all for temp work and all this. And I hated every moment of this job. And I had a bet. Well, yeah, also had a stick. He had a big piece of wood that he broke on his chair. Because when he did sales calls, he got angry. He used to piece. I used to do sales calls like that, you know, I'd be like. And there was a script on my table.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: I remember them. Yeah, I remember them.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Laminated script. If I went off the script in any way, he would slam this bit of wood on the table next to me, like this fear tactic to kind of make me do what I supposed to do. And it made me hate sales.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Right. I can imagine that moment onwards.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: I utterly hated the concept of sales, forced sales, all that, and. Which is weirdly sort of change shaped quite a lot of career.
But then a couple of things sort of happened. I was. I was going to get married very young. I just. I was made redundant from a company very young, about 22, 23 years old, had a car and all that kind of stuff. And there's a long story as to why that kind of was done in a very horrible way. And I moved to London. I.
I decided I wasn't gonna get married that young any longer. It was a good idea.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Moved to London, kind of had some fun for a couple of days in London. Thought I could. I could live here because it was the early 90s, the recession was. Was happening at the time. There wasn't a lot of jobs in Nottingham. And I saw a job in the ad in a newspaper called Recruitment Consultant. Actually, I didn't know what that was because I certainly regard what I did in the other place as a recruitment consultant. And yeah, I saw four bullet points. I thought, I can do all of those things, that's fine. And then got hired the next day. I interviewed the next day, got hired the next day and started it the following Monday. So I went from being at home with my parents, you know, one weekend to living in London with a job and starting what turned out to be a recruitment career that I never really didn't I take like most of us really, we never really knew what it was when we went into it, but that's, that's how it all sort of started. Really shy kid, amazing. Hated the concept of sales and was scared crapless by it. But, but it. Suppose it was the start of everything,
[00:07:44] Speaker A: the start of everything that was then to come. And it's, and it's really fascinating, it's really amazing to hear kind of how that, how that all unraveled and how it all started. It sounds as though, as well Steve, that you're probably. Whether you realized it or not, but it sounds like you were really self aware from the fact that you were clearly that very, very shy, introverted kid. There was, do you think there was probably something inside you that knew you had to put yourself outside of your comfort zone in like for example, retail that, that would have. I grew up in a little town called Leighton Buzzard.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: And my first job was in Leighton Buzzard and it was for an estate agency. I, I'd see jobs advertised in Milton Keynes and I thought, God, the bright lights of Milton Keynes. I could never even. That scared the life out of me. I remember, I remember kind of being in kind of a similar thing. But, but do you kind of almost remember though that those times of having to push yourself into slightly uncomfortable territory to maybe unlock something inside you.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: I think making the move, you know, I, I think I'll retain this sort of very close localness about me until that moment when, when the Dutch company I work for made me redundant in a very, very nasty way. They asked me to drive all the way down to the head office with a car and clean the car and then tell me that job the next day. And, and, and I was angry and, and I don't think I was ever really angry much as a.
I was genuinely angry with them and I was, I was literally furious and I, I got this long train journey back to Nottingham and it, my whole brain changed in that journey. Like I, you know, I wasn't going to get married, I'm not going to stay in Nottingham, I'm going to do something different myself. I'm going to step up and do it. It was almost like a catalyst to. Somebody used to say to me, I got married redundant three times a year in around the 2000s with that, just because it was horrible times for so many.
And I got major redundant three times a year and there's a fellow I knew who just said, why is it every time you get knocked down, you just bounce back up again? Like one of the old wee balls type thing. Every time you get knocked out, you come back and you get it next. The next job you get is better than the one you had before. And I think that's where there's a resilience that always came in, this sort of reserved resilience that existed. And I think that resilience has probably powered a lot of what I've done through the career.
Definitely in. In the worst case of, you know, where you're kind of completely let down by a company made to look a fool, and then you realize that you. You just have to make a change. You just make a change. That's exactly what we did. I just went out there and made a change, moved down to London and it was a new world, really. It was like. And as the guy who hired me, he was a good guy at the time when he hired me, he was a horrible guy when he. He also sacked me a year later.
He said, streets aren't paved with gold. You know, Steve, it's like, you're coming down here because the streets are paved. It was a proper cockney anyway.
He was also a bastard of a bloke as well. But he was. But he was my first recruitment agency, you know, owner, manager, really. And, yeah, it kicked me off actually quite good. I think it was a good start to my career. Training was great and it did some really, really good stuff. He also called me the worst recruiter in the world a year later when he. When he sat.
Oh, God. It's just one of those two bad. You know, it's like in the recruitment agency world, back in those days, you have two bad months in your history. And I actually took a chance on me, a guy called Cliff Bradley, when I thought I was just gonna screw this recruitment. I'm the worst recruiter in the world.
And then a guy took a chance on me down in Sussex, and by which time I'd moved to Sussex. And, yeah, and the guy took a chance at me and said, you're not the worst recruiter in the world, Steve. But. And he actually gave me the management job in a recruitment office down in Crawley and start something from scratch. And I owe a lot to him for having that confidence in me to kind of go, actually, you've got a smart brain. Like, you're not. And you're not a.
You're not a typical recruitment hound. You've got a strategic brain. You've got A strategic mind. You think about things and see things in a different way. So he positioned me as a leader and gave me a management role and agency there for the office. And that was like a whoa moment, you know, where you kind of go, yeah, you saw something in me that other people didn't see. And that's fair play to Cliff, who's, you know, a guy I still know now kind of. Which is now what, 30 odd years on or whatever. Scary.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Limit is that was only 24 at the time and he shoved me into a management role which worked out really, really well.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Amazing. What an important guy in your story. That's, that's really interesting.
So.
Yeah, absolutely.
So sticking with that kind of that period. So going back to the 90s and everything that I've researched about you, read about you, it seems as though even when you're in traditional recruitment, you kind of cared about brand before employer brand was even a thing. So talk to me a little bit about that. Where did that. You know, because I know you're a, you're a storyteller at heart. Is that, is that just something you think innately is just inside you?
[00:12:47] Speaker B: I think it was absolutely. I think because I've seen that kind of horrible side of sales twice, both in that horrible sales.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Box environment and also with the recruitment agency which, which wasn't fun. Like, you know, there was a lot of not fun about that. And then I went into an environment where I could control the environment effectively. I was starting something from scratch, by the way. And so I always had that mind for it but wasn't sure what to do about it much of the time they had no experience. And then one day I kind of. And we were in the days where the Internet wasn't really a thing and all this kind of stuff. And then one day in the recruitment agency, because I built this recruitment agency for staff, three or four people in the room and one day, when we used to get CVs by post in those days and. Or occasionally by fax obviously, but. And then one this big A3 thing came through like, oh, what's this, like marketing stuff from some company or something like that? Because that's what you probably would expect if you're going to get a ba. Three things and I open it up, it's personally addressed to me as well. So somebody had read like an advert and property written it and it was this thing of beauty. It was this, this lady who's a graphic designer had decided she would do her CV in this A3 card and it was. And I always remember that sunflowers on it and like artistic sunflowers and the captain. Great font. Great choice of let's see. And from that moment I looked at that and thought feels amazing. It is incredible. And the way. And it kind of works out straight away the way it makes me feel the unpackaging of something and then that. That kind of whoa moment is powerful. Much better. And it made her stand out a million and what it did even though she didn't apply for a specific job it made me go to my colleague and go right let's go and call every company in town who yeah probably has a graphic design team or probably has an arts team or probably has a creative team and let them know about this cv. Like just talk over this CV with them and then we'll take down literally physically to these companies. And that. And it was. It was the realization there was a different way of doing things.
Blasting. Blasting one dimensional binary approach to. To. To market. And so I guess that kind of inspired me. It was kind of. I wish I could remember a name. I'm very good at remembering names from that period of people who kind of were very interesting to me at the time. I can't remember her name but. But it certainly was a landmark mode. It made me realize that. And therefore I started to change the way we marketed the agency because in those still use a lot of mail outs. Yeah marketing but it was always kind of here's six candidates that are available, blah blah, which one do you want and and all that kind of stuff. And it was crap or you do it facts. It was horrible. It was presented. No wonder nobody cared. And then so I started to. And actually it was when I moved to the next agency I worked for I. I started to become a bit of a. A bit a branch from start kind of guy. Yeah we've got nothing. We want to start something.
And I was. I've never been afraid of the number 0 like starting things from the very beginning. And I became a bit of a specialist for a long time really at it and I used to do it so. And I was over in Basingstoke and I. And. And again still thinking about this mail this thing that lands on your desk when. And so I. So I devised this thing. We had a temp consultant in the office of the company I was working for at the time who only had three or four attempts out. She'd been hammering at it for months and she couldn't get any traction. Ratnall Bokingham Market that kind of neck of the woods, that kind of M4 corridor zone. And she and I say, why don't we. Why don't we try chocolate? Like, it was about February, it was like. So we thought we can get, you know, we'll do. Why don't we run a campaign where each month or each couple of weeks, whatever it was we did, we'll send a chocolate. But what we're not going to do is just send chocolate. We're gonna. To a card. We're going to do an A4 card. Not an A3 card, an A4 card. And the first one we strapped, we sent it out to 50 companies. We got 50 curly whirlies, perfect to fit in an envelope and on a car.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. They are that kind of perfect flat shape.
Appreciate why it was the ideal.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And the reason I know when I get a curly whirly now, there's nothing like the size it used to be back in the day is because I used to have to put it diagonally across an A4. So we would sellotape this curly whirly onto a. Onto a A4 card. The A4 card would be printed. We did. We just do it in the printer.
And it would be printed with the lines that I'll never forget. Take a break from the Hurley Burley. Have yourself a curly whirly Now. It's like, it's cringe to think about it in a sense now, but it absolutely went crazy. It was like all of a sudden the phone just started ringing for us. But Nikki was her lady and she'd be like. And then we did another one. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, have yourself a fudge or something like that. And then there's another one. By the time we got to about May, it was time to stop because the weather changed and so people were just getting sort of splats of chocolate on their, on their cars. But. But it was. But all of a sudden, the space of a month, she went from having sort of three or four temps out to having four, 40 or 50 temps.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: In the market. Because we just kept accelerating and accelerating. And again, it came back to the thing that said we could go to market and say, we have temps. Will you buy temps? You know, or with whatever characteristic we're going to put around that. Or you can just inspire people by doing something that makes them smile, laugh from whatever it is. And. And that, in essence, is so much of what branding is about, visioning a brand in the market. And that's what we did. And Then. So when they. When we did it there, then I was asked to go to Kingston and we did it in Kingston. Then I was asked to go to another place and we did it there as well. Basing Stoke. We did basing Stoke as well. So it was just. It was. It became a bit of a thing.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: But it start.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: It started to paint a picture of how I wanted.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Take things to market effectively. And I guess that was the origins of my branding career, even though it wasn't. But it was the origin of the mindset, that's for sure.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And I suppose there's. There's so many lessons in there, I think, Steve. And from the, from the A3CV to the chocolate campaign, probably to many other things that you've done, but kind of circling back round to kind of embracing doing things differently, breaking the mold, like. Yeah. There might be a blueprint and a way that you should be doing things.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Does that mean you should always follow that path? Absolutely not.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: And kind of. It sounds as though you've always thought like that.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And not to everybody's love as well.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: I can imagine. I can imagine.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: You know, as soon as I. I used to work for Select Appointments, which is Select Appointments, which was a great recruit nation. I love the people Select Appointments and. And the owners and everything. And then they got acquired by Randstad and Randstad. I. I hated my methodology. My bosses hated the fact that I wanted to. They would say, get your consultants to make things 30 calls a day. And I said, I don't want them to make 30 calls a day. I want them to make 10 to 12. High quality, highly researched. By this time we've got the Internet like this. You can. Nobody goes in with a cold call anymore. This was about 2001, 2002, whatever it was, I was like, I don't want that to be the way that people go to the marketplace. I want to go as smart. I want them to go with quality. I want them to look great in terms of the way in which they carry themselves. Not the way they look, but the way they carry themselves. I want people to like them. And I think that was. Yeah, reputation and the way people make people feel became so much central part of it. But something like a Randstad will look at me and go back in those days of agency around stat, we're looking at it and go, dumpster stupid, Steve. That's not the way we do things around here. And it constantly cause tensions in the slightly more corporate environment. But it's embraced a Lot more in the. More sort of boutique.
Yeah. So, yeah, I, I guess I always rub people the wrong way with it, but I like looking into new things. I like, yeah, the next corner and seeing if you can get ahead of somebody else in the curve.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: Yeah. But it is. And it's well documented as well, kind of across multiple industries. But first movers, obviously there's a huge amount of, kind of, you know, kind of innovation and forward thinking with that first movers have. But there's also a huge amount of risk, isn't there? Like, I've done some research and I understand, I think it, I think was Cloud 9 the original, you know, Cloud 9.
Yeah. Not the latest iteration, but, you know, I read you were, you know, looking at the timestamps on it, it must be true. But you know, applying like social recruitment and social employer brand methods to, you know, before anyone else is really doing that, you know, and that's been kind of pretty widely documented. But again, there must have been doubters and naysayers and like, what the hell are you doing that for? Why are you spending time in those, in those channels? But there's clearly something inside your brain that was like, I know this is going to be a place that, that we need to be fishing. Yeah.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: And it was. And it was again, I'm going to shout out somebody who was very integral to this because I, I'd actually just.
My oldest son was born, it was 2007, he was born and just before he was born, I quit London and working in London. So I'm going to start my own agency. That's where I started Cloud 9. And I, and I just did some local agency stuff while Connor was born and I was meant I could be around at home with my ex wife and, you know, converted the garage into an office and I sat there and just to do local fees to local people around Sussex. And then one day I got CV land in my inbox called a social media account manager. And I thought, I don't know what one of those is. I know what social media is because it was just sort of exploding at the time. I think, you know, Facebook had been around a little while. Twitter was becoming quite a new thing at the time. LinkedIn was not really probably regarded as very sociable, but it certainly was again starting to play a little bit more. And then I get this job title that's a social media account manager. So I went onto the Internet and kind of did searches for jobs because I thought, this is interesting, this is a very unique profile. So a Bit like the old graphic designer back in the day. I kind of thought, right, okay, this is a very. So I went out, found an affair, found a company who are hiring. They were called Innovation London or whatever they were called at the time. And they were hiring exactly this role. So social media account manager. So I sought out the person, Christian Gladwell is his name, and he's amazing guy who I, I sent, I, I said, I've got this cv. I've never seen one of these before, but you're hiring one, so I'm figuring they're pretty rare. And he says, oh, my goodness, they are. They're really, really. Well, it's great that you found one. However, Sodnor, I actually hired one yesterday. So the job was, you've just seen Gone. But he says, you know what? I'm hiring a social media analyst. Could you help me hire a social media analyst? And I kind of said to him, I don't know what you mean by that, because I know what, I know what social media is, but I don't know. I don't know what an analyst is, but I don't know what a social media analyst is. Like, can you explain? And Christian said, thank God. Like, you are the first, like, recruitment agency person to actually ask me what one is, because I've guessed he's a finance analyst and, and all this, media analysts and things like that. He said, right, I'm gonna buy you a couple of pints, come to London, we'll go, go pub in, in Farrington and we're going to sit down. I'm going to teach you about this new world of brand marketing that's going on. They were, he was very much, obviously in the consumer marketing kind of space before recruitment really got hold of social media properly and. But it was being used predominantly by brands, of course. So he told me the story, showed me how to do it. I was like, right, I'm off, off I go. I find him three social media analysts because I was quite good at recruitment, as it turns out, Chris, and, and I found him three. And he's like, how the hell did you find three fingers? You know, pies, use social, use the things, blah, blah. And then he's like, right, he says, I'm going to interview all three of them because they're so rare. And in the end he hired two of them because he says, I've only got a job for one, but they're so rare, I'm going to take a second one. I'm thinking, all right, so this is good. I Like this little industry. And he actually said to me then, he said, whatever you've done until now, stop it and focus on this, because this is going to explode.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: The foundation of so much of the way in which business is done and marketed and blah, blah. And that's what I did. I flipped it around. He helped me. He kind of almost trained me a little bit, approach it properly. I then went into the marketplace and just took this approach of using social as a foundation for identifying and recognizing people, but also marketing everything that I did or the roles that I was sporting and that. And that. That was the new. And then that was when it sort of, kind of broke the mold of, Of. Of in a way, because.
Because there were naysayers. I. I could name a naysayer, but I don't know, it was very publicly a naysayer. I did a talk. I stepped in for Bill Borman once.
This was about 2009 or something. Billboard do a talk on social recruiting at one of Leo Luis Triance's events.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I know.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she comes to me in the corridor and says, bill's not turned up for his dude's talk. Can you step in in his place and do his talk?
Yeah, oh, yeah, of course I can.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: I mean, I've never done big shoes to Phil.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Yeah, big old shoes to fill. Yeah, absolutely.
And. And the. And I said, well, yeah, I've never done. Never done it before. I'd never stood up in front of an audience before in that kind of way.
Yeah, absolutely. When do you want me to do it? She's like, well, in 10 minutes.
And this is to a recruitment agency audience. So. So I stood in front of about 60 or 70 kind of recruitment agency owners and directors with a screen behind me that just said Bill Borman on it and talked about social recruitments and the methodology that I've now been using for a couple of years by that point. Yeah, mainstream then. And there was a lady who I could name her, but there's no value in naming her, I guess. But she's. She's a. She's the leader of one of the agency network
[00:27:07] Speaker A: type things.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: And she kind of huffed constantly as I was talking. I was talking about new ways of doing things. Ditch the cold calling, move towards people, whether. And she helped. Then I walked out the room. I've done my thing. I've.
And then. Then she went on after. She was the next talk and apparently she ripped my talk to shreds in the first five minutes to everybody.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Oh, you joking? What Directly actually referencing your talk, literally referencing me.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: But then, then the irony was, two weeks later, so we put ourselves up for awards. By this time, I'd hired a brilliant person called J.J. miller, Jen Miller, who I've hired as a community member manager. I didn't hire any recruiters for Cloud 9, I only hired community managers. Now, community manager is somebody who cajoles an industry, controls a marketplace, kind of. We put on events, we put on things. She would chat, she would. She was a very natural social animal. Anyway, she was a very successful blogger at the time in a social sort of world, lifestyle blogger. And she was amazing. And we, and we. And that was our candidate for flow. The candid flow came from trust and appreciation and value and blah, blah, rather than what we had to sell and what they had to offer. It was like we created an ecosystem effectively. And in that ecosystem there are clients and there are candidates and there are people in the marketplace and we would put ourselves right in the middle of the room. That was always the star used to always bemoan the supplier industry, or particularly agency industry, as being sort of gnomes fishing into a market, was apologizing for being there, starting emails with, I'm really sorry for taking up your time or, you know, this kind of stuff. Right. And we were. And I was always like, no, I. I know my marketplace. I'm gonna stand right in the middle of that pond.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Be visible to as many people. I did it through community managers, great people like jj who are sort of magnetic to the industry. We won an award for innovation and we went to this World's Night just two weeks later. It was one of Simon Lewis's awards things, if I remember the maras that used to be called back in the day. And, and we, and we thought we, we'd missed out on the best Social Media Strategy award or whatever it was. And we're like, oh, come on. Like, really? We, we lost that one. We sat there. I can't remember who the sponsors were on the table. They just go, don't worry, Steve and jj, we'll just keep pouring wine in your glass.
Yeah, whatever. And then it was about. The second last award was the best innovation, which we'd put ourselves in for, and didn't think we were gonna win it because there's so many companies using starters.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: And all this sort of stuff. And then we won it. But. Well, this time JJ and I were absolutely smashed at this point. I remember staggered across the chairs and the person who announced the award, the winner was the same lady who no,
[00:29:54] Speaker A: that was on stage after you.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: I can't. I do not lie. We. We staggered across the ground, going.
Two fingers as we went by and collected the board from the, from the other end of the stage. It was just. But it was great. That was, but that was, it was another example of like there was a way of treating the market that was. I felt better. Better didn't mean I, I didn't become a multi millionaire because of it. Better just because I enjoyed it more. We enjoyed it more, appreciated it. And I think that's. That was the way really for me. I just had fun doing work. I just didn't want to do work. Not have fun.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And, and I think it's another. And there's been several already on in this conversation, but another marker to highlight being ahead of the curve. Because back then when you were talking about developing, nurturing communities. Yeah, that wasn't really a strategy. You know, I worked in traditional recruitment and that was kind of frowned upon and it was a little bit of a. Oh, what you want to, what you want to meet up with like 15, 20, 30 people and put on a couple of drinks and rent out a venue in central London. It's like, but what are you going to get out of that? People couldn't wrap their head around, couldn't that. Where the value was in that. It's like, well, are they hiring right now? If you've got vacancies today?
[00:31:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: No.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Well, it's not bringing value, is it? But again, you, you were clearly, you knew the signs and you knew that, that this thing, it has to work because there's. It. The long play was clearly there.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: It was the long play and it was accepting that you're playing along play. And I think that's. And, and I think. But everything came back to reputation, in my opinion, because I wanted to run an agency that people loved. I wanted to run a place that people kind of thought, I love what you do. They might not be able to adopt it themselves. They might not feel it's their zone, but they could look at it with admiration and go, I think this is awesome. I think this is.
And reputation meant everything. I think it just, it's just one of those things. And if you could scale what I did on a larger scale with a reputation base, I think it'd be really fascinating. But, but. And it was always done with a degree of. And I think the thing about being ahead of the curve is what I learned to do is, is rather than just run ahead of the Curve all the time and just 100 miles an hour and just kind of jump on every. Because we started to get into a world with social media where the recruitment industry would latch itself to every new thing. Take Snapchat, right? When Snapchat came around 10 or 11 years ago, whenever it was that Snapchat first came, there was this wave of noise recruitment, right, we should jump on Snapchat. And I had, I had a social media manager by this point who looked after all of our social media stuff. Cloud nine young lad, Jordan. And I said to Jordan, all right, because he's 19 years old, I'm like you. And I deliberately hired him young because he'd get all these channels and he'd get the, the, the world. And Snapchat came along and he was you, he was a user. I said, right, okay, Jordan, going to give you a bit of research job. Let's work out whether we should be doing Snapchat rather than just, we're a social recruiting agency, we must do Snapchat, we must do Tik Tok and all that kind of stuff. And, and, and, and he said, and he, he told me, even before we got into any kind of research thing, he said, steve, will you bloody recruiters leave us alone on Snapchat? I don't want you recruiters coming onto Snapchat and ruining. By trying to sell jobs. Is not. And that. And straight away, that was like, perfect. That's all Jordan. That's all I need to know. Yeah, this is all I need to know. Because if you're the Snapchat user and you say, and you work for a
[00:33:35] Speaker A: recruitment agency, it's a really, it's a really important distinction, isn't it? It's a really important distinction and I think it ties beautifully as well, Steve, into employer brand because, you know, we don't want to be the old uncles tapping on the door on Snapchat, pissing people off.
There's, there's an employer brand, you know, there's damage that's being done there as well, isn't there?
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:57] Speaker A: So not only are they not interested, they're also thinking, I wish they would f off. And I probably, if I see them on another channel, probably won't engage with them because they're annoying me. So it's. It all is in the same ecosystem, isn't it?
[00:34:12] Speaker B: And it became really important because the sort of journey towards employer branding, I sort of evolved. Cloud 9 started to become less of a recruitment agency, more of a campaign agency. So we'd run projects for companies like ebay and, and Telegraph Media Group and BBC where there was like where we. Where we'd market multiple roles effectively. But by this time LinkedIn allowed images and soon as LinkedIn allowed images the game changed in my world because I went straight to the client end and said right, I need a picture, something beautiful that represents who you are as an organization and we will overlay the sort of jobs and the three reasons why you should join them kind of thing. And it was like. And all of a sudden it was like. And now you look and go. I was kind of like a bit of employer branding. It was like branding didn't. Still didn't really exist. There was nobody employing brand jobs at the time. But we were all doing things that were similar and, and. But then all of a sudden what I was doing represented the brands. Right. It's like doing it for ebay or I'm doing it for Telegraph Media Group, I'm doing it for such and such a company. Therefore if you jump into the wrong channels with that brand brand or go with the wrong approach with that brand, guess what happens? Reputation gets damaged, back to reputation and brand again like. So what I started to do is then work out channel strategies and all that kind of stuff around this kind of thing and that's how. And that's how I started to realize that actually employer branding is a much more complex thing than just posting jobs and sharing things board look and feel and all that kind of stuff.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: And.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: And that was a catalyst really for. Along with a couple of other things. Things for me kind of walking away from Cloud nine. I'd actually, it actually been. I'd actually merged it with a larger recruitment agency group but it turned out to be a very bad idea. It was wrong choice of merger and all that kind of stuff and I walked away from it and went in house start to apply what I'd started to learn into companies in house. Really lovely companies. Whether we welcome trust sometimes some of them are startups, some of them were marketing agencies. It was. And it was such a fun little period to kind of play on the other side of the fence and start to apply this from a. From an internal viewpoint. That was a fascinating period.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome.
Leaning into the community stuff we were talking about a minute ago. Yeah, the EB Club.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: So you founded that 2020 I think it was.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: So yeah. By this time I done my little in house stim. It's great fun. Learned a lot, moved into universe was first time I probably joined an employer brand agency and universal time was the Best in the world. Like the, you know, the biggest and the largest in the world, multiple locations around the world and to join them was amazing. And, and I, from day one I said, right, you're giving me something from scratch. Funny enough, again, I was, I was opening UK for, for Universe and branching them into the UK market.
I was, I needed to build the brand and business there effectively and I, and I, I wanted to start a community. I want, I'd always had this thing to start an EB community and Universe, I'm like, we back you for this. This is, we love this. You should do this. Just get EB people in a room together.
So, and it was, and it was based on the fact I used to sort of spend 300 quid going to conferences and being one talk about employer branding and a talent acquisition conference. You kind of go, it's bad, isn't it? Really spent all this money going for just one talk directly relevant to my job. So, so I think I needed to find, I wanted to get EB people in tight rooms, get them together, get them talking and it was a great. I, I, I knew it would be a good idea. We were going to do it in person. To start with, I booked a venue, 100 Spaces, partnered with Bobby and Jamie Leonard to kind of get an audience to start with. They said, yeah, we'll will help you and just let our community know that you're, you've got the employer brand thing that's going to happen for the employer brand people.
The 100 places went in two, two days, people. It was free event and whoa, okay, people do need this. And then Covid came along and so I had to flip it, I had to cancel it and, and I moved to Crowdcast. I moved it all to Crowdcast which was a bit like, literally did that thing of like, what can I use? What, what can I use? Crowdcast. Amazing. This is good. I'm going to use Crowdcast. And then. And so flipped it to a digital event, same day, three hours, 270 people signed up.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Wow. Three hour thing to your first one to your first digital.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: It had absolutely no boundaries, although we tried to keep it purely sort of UK based as possible because I wanted to try and refine. I had three hours, amazing people doing panels and things that I hosted with Amazon and Rolls Royce and, and Lego and all sorts of great people that I yeah sort of knew in the industry and, and at any given point, because you can Crowdcast, you can see what the number, live numbers are at any given point in the event. Never went below 180 people at any given time.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:39:09] Speaker B: During a 3 hour period.
All right, this is something people want. They need to connect with each other. But of course the added thing was Covid was happening and, and we're branding upside down in that little period that we had to address whole change in what we stood for as organizations and I think people needed that community to be able to listen to stories, listen to ideas, ask questions in a safe in house collective space. And that was a deliberate thing of EB Club is to create a space that safe Chatham House rules great stories. Elevating their skill, elevating their abilities, elevating the profession as a whole. And, and that's become a thing that's been really important because as I've continued to do it over these years the, the landscape has evolved and moved so fast with and technology and, and budget problems and redundancies that it's become quite a big deal to kind of try and work out and actually employed brand is broadening all the time as well. So it became very important to industry. I would say like emporium brand club in the mix.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Amazing. You're doing a phenomenal job. I keep seeing it pop up, I keep seeing people talk about it. It's across so many territories now. Yeah, it must, this is an assumption more than anything Steve but it's probably quite an important kind of thing for you to, to just keep your finger on the pulse of what is actually going on. Territory to territory, region to region, country to country. Because is it fair to say that the conversations that come up in London are pretty different in Singapore are pretty different in New York like the, the, the good, the bad and the ugly. I, I imagine it changes, doesn't it from.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: From city to city, country to country.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: And this is all the sort of in part sort of hand in hand with the fact it just went from being a London, London, London and London event to this last year or last or eight months really becoming an international thing as I'm now self employed and, and decided to make it a thing, you know and because I'd worked with so many global companies at Universa I was fascinated by localization and different markets.
I always had a thing for this anyway. It was always something that you know the client work that I did with the universe and then with Blackbridge after that. I love the different nuance on so actually now going to a Krakow one week and going to Berlin the next and going to Paris and going to. And as you said later in the Year there'll be things like New York and Boston and Singapore and all these sort of other places. You, you're right. There is a different approach to employer branding in every corner and, and I'm, I feel like I'm in a privileged position now where not just have I had that universal knowledge of working with companies on multinational basis and where you see these different flavors all around the world trying to adapt employee branding strategies to match that. Now I get to listen to it in story Bill. I listen to the people who are doing the job in Berlin, who are doing the job in, in Barcelona as it was this week or wherever, and listening to the way in which they're dressing the market or the way in which they're. And different layers of sort of enthusiasm about. You know, when I went to Krakow earlier this year and I thought, thought I wasn't sure whether in Krakoff and, but my partner, you know, the lady is my local ambassador there, said, oh, you have to do crack off. This is going to be really, really good. Sure, 72 people signed up to come and 55 to 60 people actually arrived, which is bigger than I normally have for employer branding class. But it's like, but it represented the passion and excitement around the subjects almost like we did seven or eight years ago.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Where sort of explode it. Now they're at that stage where they're adopting it, growing it, testing things and it's just, it's kind of exciting to see these and what it does. Two things. It invigorates my feeling about my profession and my, my subject area, particularly because I'm still a consultant, I still do work for cats, still do projects and, and I still use my ex expertise.
But now I'm seeing the breadth of it and every little story and every little angle. It, it makes me better at what I do but hopefully in the marketplace better at what they do as well. And, and like I say, it's all about elevating and the industry and helping people get better at the job and having more significance inside their organizations. But yeah, place to place makes it, makes it a lot of fun. I can't deny I've really enjoyed the trips, you know, and the travel and that's been a lot of fun. But I think ultimately though, the buzz I get is from the people you meet and yeah. You know, and that's what community comes, you know, comes back to that passion I've always had for community and yeah, people feel and the way it makes people feel and obviously you can see it with the way That I market employee branding club.
I bring high energy to it. I try and bring lots of positive and champion individuals. I mean that's really one of the thing of EB Club is championing different people and different voices and different experience levels and different stories. And I think that's fun as well. I've provided a platform for a lot of people to tell their story in, in rooms of sort of 30, 40 people or sometimes just 20, 25 people but depending on this location. But you know, it's, it's, it's really satisfying. Gives me a lot of fun.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine. And I must say that kind of regional kind of territory, cultural nuances that exist across organizations, across territories like that, that's what gives me a buzz for employer branding, like understanding. Especially if you look at like, you know, a typical size enterprise that might operate across eight, 10 countries, whatever it is, multiple languages, there's so many differences and there's so much nuance that exists between the lines and I think that's where employee branding becomes really exciting.
How can you capture that stuff and how can you storytell between those lines?
[00:45:26] Speaker B: You know, it's a storyteller and I think it's like, and it empowers, I think it reminds us to empower the process professional really. Well, you know, I still do client work. I was mentioning earlier, I was sat on a call at 11 o' clock last night with a company that are in America who are doing a reaching out to Canada, a tech company. And, and, and over the last two months in, in and around the EB Club, I've been doing the sort of research pods of bits and pieces I need to do to try and understand the audience they're trying to, to, to get in order to be able to, you know, build a strategic case as to what, how they should approach that market in a distinguished and clear way. And what's fascinating is you take that market that was looking at which was Vancouver and Canada, right? So it's quite a very specific market. And I took that market and, and as I presented it to them last night, I'm like, there are things here around the tech market, the needs of tech talent and the things that you should and shouldn't approach tech people with. And they're the same anywhere in the world. I could, I could repeat, rinse and repeat, repeat this in London to a degree.
But the reason you can't is because of point three. Like the point three is, that's the unique bit there's, in every market there is a twist that says, this is, this is Vancouver, this is Atlanta, this is London, this is Barcelona. There is a twist. So whilst on the outside lazy employer branding is usually like, well, this is what tech people think. Let's just write a blog about what tech people think people think. Let's just put cliche out there about what tech people smart, nuanced, localized thinking. Employee branding says no, actually, there is one important twist. It might only be like in a cocktail mix, the one important ingredient that makes the difference between somebody spitting it out or drinking one and ordering another one. And I think that that thing is very, very important. Employee branding and nuanced employees. Employer branding. And I think that's. And I think that's, that's fun and that's the opportunity we've got. But we, but I think, and, and it also raises the point as to why it's so important. Employee branding, the research and the dynamic around understanding different markets is, Is so really important. We can't just. And I suppose, you know, that probably is one of those areas where AI has come in and made everything. Middle ground. If we're not care if we ask the wrong question. To AI, you get middle ground.
Yeah, funny enough, to your, to your podcast name, you get employer blands because you get the middle ground. Nobody wants to be in the middle ground.
[00:47:55] Speaker A: No, you don't want to be in that, that, that floating in that vanilla state. But, but it's funny because you've just triggered something. So you mentioned AI. Then you and I exchanged a couple of messages not that long ago, and we were speaking about AI. And if you don't mind me quoting you. Yeah, I think, I think you said something along the lines of. Which I agree with, by the way, but AI, what the. Are we doing to ourselves? Yeah, which I agree with, but can you expand on that? You know, we're, you know, we, we can talk openly about this.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: Yeah, we can, we can. And look, I know I've always stood for the same thing for, for a number of years on this now, and, and albeit now, remember mine thing of the years and years and years. Always wanted to be ahead of the curve. Always wants to make sure that I'm addressing the thing that's coming next and all that kind of stuff, but the point about the, The Snapchat story earlier was built on the idea that sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes, sometimes that avenue around the corner is the wrong corner to take. Right. Sometimes you fall into a trap.
And an AI, for me has been an example of that in the sense that there Are we knew straight away there are going to be some zones. This is going to be fantastic for us. And I think we caught those pretty quickly. Process management, you know, collection of multiple things, the removal of the crap, tasks in order. We can focus time better on the human time. That's always been the case, particularly when automation came in and, and the early forms of what we might now call AI and, and those were always fine, we were always fine with that, that was always good. But then all of a sudden we've got products and technology and I get however many emails and LinkedIn inboxes a day about. We have got an AI powered product that does this for employer, that replaces this, that removes this.
I look at and go you're talking to an employer, brand professional telling me that I need to replace, remove, eliminate, blah blah. I don't want to replace, remove, eliminate core things that are our prized possession, our skill, our art, our instinct, the things that we do incredibly well. I don't want to extinguish those room of the room of people at EB Club and kind of go sorry guys, AI is, you know, taking over, you know, and I think so, so it's that. So I've, I've taken a very steady path with it around trying to avoid cannibalization standing against the sort of cannibalization element, you know, the, the element where the company says great news, we can now reduce 10,000 heads because we're going to use AI to do those things. Which by the way what a crap brand perception message that is as well. Like, you know, we are a company who proudly go out and say we're eliminating 20,000 people because we've, because of AI or the. It isn't always AIA as a good excuse sometimes.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: Well yeah, yeah, it's terrible for brands.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: But also there's a point where by Matt Buckland wrote a really good piece this week and if encourage anybody to have a look at it on, on LinkedIn that, that listed about 10 big AI legal cases that are going on with some real big kind of tech players in the industry where AI is being used at the point of application into selection and rejection. And that those four things I've just said, you know, the job seeking application, the interview, the rejection and selection are highly emotional human junctures in the ecosystem of our life, not just in our bubble of recruitment.
[00:51:35] Speaker A: Right, absolutely, yeah.
[00:51:37] Speaker B: And, and, and because these things are building a mechanism, there's one example I think where a guy had been rejected now over between 80 and 100 times by workday platform. That's nothing against workday. We all know what workday can and cannot do. But the point is, because workday is almost like workday is worked out, that this profile is not a very good profile.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: And it repeats itself.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Yeah. The door is now shut to you, unfortunately. Probably through.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Well that's certainly the impression you get as that.
[00:52:12] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. I'm not saying that's exactly how it works.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: Yeah. But you're absolutely right handed.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: The perspective. That's the impression that it's constantly being rejected and then again that has negative impact on brand. If we give people a very bad brand experience. So, so I think we're in a very dangerous place where, where if we run too hard, too fast without stepping back and being accountable for every one of our choices and decisions with AI and working out the methodology before we adopt and the impact on the candidates and the impact on the brand experience, then we've just got to be careful about the route. And I've done it because I've now built product that's got AI in the midst of it and I used it as part of this project. Project I just referred to. And I found a way that I think it's brilliant for the purposes of the things that I need to use, but only with me holding its hand, only with me questioning its validity, only with me telling it off when it does it wrong and, and, and advising it that maybe it needs to think about something like that a little bit better. Me telling it that. Hang on, you're lying. You're telling me. I know that isn't true. Have a look at this again because then you might. And just working away because it's still a robotic process. It's still a human guided robotic process and I'm simplifying that very deliberately so that we recognize that actually we can't let it rule the world yet. We just, we have to make sure it guides our path or acts as an assistant in our path rather than being our. When somebody said to me the other day AI is everything in recruitment now.
No, it's not. There's like a, there's candidates and people
[00:54:00] Speaker A: applying for jobs which people seem to kind of be forgetting and neglecting slow. And I think, and I, and I echo all of what you've said there, Steve. And I think one of my biggest concerns and you know, with my vendor hat on, you know, and a builder of products as well, similar to you, I've got some strong Voyse but I, I think there's a Lot of tooling that's being built in the market, you know, across ta, employee branding, recruitment, marketing, the wider spectrum that is incredibly focused on recruiter efficiencies.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:54:34] Speaker A: And neglecting experience, neglecting kind of ultimately the entire audience that is engaging with this tooling.
[00:54:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:46] Speaker A: And yes, a lot of this tooling enables you to process way more, do way more with less.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: But at the expense of what we haven't seen it all yet. Because I think that's going to really start washing out in the, in the months and years ahead. You know, I think we're going to see some serious backlash in, in the next one, two, three years.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:55:07] Speaker A: But for me, you know, and it's something we're doing Voyse and I know other vendors are doing it, but I don't know why more tool creators and vendors out there aren't creating systems that are taking a read on all this stuff that has just been done for a long, long time.
[00:55:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: Processing those signals, processing that behavior and telling you why it's going well, why it's not going well, what you could be doing differently. Differently to get better results.
So not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but just actually starting to put some context around why stuff happens.
[00:55:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And there is a backlash. I think you mentioned the thought of backlash and I think the backlash is real. I've got 19. 19 year old and a 16 year old.
[00:55:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:52] Speaker B: Who are now obviously very natural users of when they need to, to use AI to go and search an idea here, think of a thing or whatever. But they're also in a zone where they don't trust anything anymore. They don't believe what they read anymore because they, they live in a world now where a high percentage of what they scan through is, is fake. It's built sometimes fun fake. Like fun fake, fun AI fake. There's a lot of that, it's great. But also you, sometimes you don't know what's the, the right answer and the wrong end. And that what that does to critical thinking young minds is to kind of recognize that actually can I, can somebody just show me something that's real and, and this is employer branding. Right. You know, if we live in a world. I judged employee branding wars a couple years ago and somebody did an entire employer brand video by AI and it was so obvious it was AI because everybody was shiny and everybody was beautiful and that the mix of people was perfectly inclusive and the landscape and everything was groomed and, and it was the most unemployer branding, employer branding video ever because it Showed no authenticist authenticity at all. It demonstrated it was a marketing gimmick in a way. It wasn't even funny. It wasn't even inspired. Going back to my thing about top of the funnel of do things that make people go wow. Make people go cry, make people laugh.
[00:57:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: None of that. It was just this bland middle of the road polished puke of AI and, and it, and I, and I marked it really low down and it. Because I just thought this is not. I didn't even say they didn't admit that they used AI. It was just so obvious. It was dreadful. And it was. And, and the, the word trust is really important in the midst of all of this because I think what we, we have a society with a greater erosion of trust. And yeah, we, we're told not to trust people by the way. I mean social media has told us not trust. Even the news tells you to switch on the television and Good Morning Britain or whatever is on them. I don't know what's on these days and they're on daytime TV or what they call it, but they're telling you to question everything. You know, don't, don't accept what the credit card company does. It don't accept what that leader says there. Don't accept politicians. So young, young people and us are being told don't trust anybody any longer. An AI comes along and accentuates it by we can't trust that either. But somewhere in the way we have
[00:58:18] Speaker A: to find some trust.
[00:58:19] Speaker B: Like we, we have to kind of capture some trust. And I think this comes back to this employer branding thing of like. And I think one of the biggest evolutions of employer brand in recent time is the shift from ironically given what we've talked about in the past that it the from cell to trust with things like EVPs. And the way we talk about our, our companies and our experience is less sell more trust now. Build trust. Build an environment of, of, of fairness and reality and real experience. And rather than one that glosses over the yeah cracks and avoids the reality because people want, people want the real the story now. They want the real. And I think this is where all products that look at how we engage our employees better. How do we get people saying real things to each other? How do we get people telling the. The war not warts and all is in. I, I think the warts and all is not a new strategy to talk about warts and all in employer brand, but it's how it's done. It's how it's spoken about it's kind of trying to capture the mirror to the real world and mirroring the real world and saying the real world happens here too. Yeah, there's some awesome things, but it's a real world. Yeah, Monday mornings are a bit crap and yeah, nobody likes it when you've got to do that kind of tough job or that tough thing that you've got to do. But it's part of.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:48] Speaker B: And so I think we're just in the world now where the AI thing is get creating a trust breakdown along with all the other societal things. And we have an opportunity in our corner of all of the ecosystem and employer branding to kind of just be inspiring, to kind of inspire reality. And I think people might buy reality if we actually sold reality, would it be amazing? And I think that's where, I think that's where I think we've gone to now. And I think I see it with much more around the experience and the culture rather than the reasons why it's amazing to work here. And I think there's a very important, distinct difference because EVPs were always originally built on the concept of talent acquisition, which meant you always sold a version of the truth. You sold, you sold the one that was related to the external talent needs you. And you were thinking of it in a talent acquisition sense. You kind of thought, what do we need to sell to get people through the door kind of approach. Whereas now EVPs are far more built on the reality, the culture, culture, the experience, the live lived life effectively and then demonstrating that as a retention and a collective piece and ironically sort of going back to the community discussion, almost creating community inside organizations to say we're in this together, we're back each other. It's tough times at the minute. And, and I think that shift in employer branding right now to the sort of collective experience rather than the mission cell is, is I think very invigorating for the industry. And I think that's why, you know what, that's why I think we can kind of successfully, if we're really good about hold off AI, eliminating some of this kind of stuff from us.
Because I think the human experience, the real Voyse the real, the real story is still the most valuable asset that we have in employment.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. So, so true and well put.
Steve, you've been an absolute joy. I knew it was going to be good, but you've, yeah, you've definitely delivered. So thank you so, so much for joining me.
One thing I can't let you leave without kind of contributing towards is I ask all guests the same thing.
But if you could give one piece of advice to help companies avoid being employ of land.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:02:12] Speaker A: What would it be?
[01:02:16] Speaker B: Listen to what people say.
Now I know that sounds really simple.
There's a difference between collecting what people say and listening to what people say, really hearing them.
I think the best employer brand identities out there are the ones that come out of the words of employee Voyse like because they're the lived experience.
What I quite like about I use the phrase bloodline which is when you really listen to a company and you capture the way they talk to each other, the things they say, the sort of geeky differences about the organization and you find those when you really listen and hear people, people that you generally take it all in. I would advise people to do that. There's lots of things we can collect through AI that give us a landscape and all this custom. But never ever replace listening to what people care about the most, what they're proud of and what they love about working. And as soon as those words come out of somebody's mouth and capture it, either audio, video, whatever way you do it to make sure you capture the emotion.
When you collect those emotions together in your kind of manual work of employer brands and listening, you start to paint a real interesting picture of the reasons why somebody might stay or leave or join say or join a company because they look at go. I like that, I like that moment and I think that's never, never lose that in all this kind of groomed AI kind of world. Never lose the moment when I did a, did a project for AstraZeneca a few years ago where a lady, she told the story of the vaccine creation thing and blah blah, this project I was doing for them which and she, and she was so proud and she was so emotional about and she cracked when she talked about, her Voyse cracks when she said her pride and love for her colleagues and the one thing they did together and, and the video guys still said oh we'll take that out, don't worry. I'm like no, that is truth, that's reality. So that's her talking the way she talks to her colleagues. She's not talking to a camera, she's talking her way.
Leave those in, leave that in and leave those in. Because that's where emotional connection happens.
I think we need to capture emotional connection better and employer branding than
[01:04:43] Speaker A: well,
[01:04:44] Speaker B: we're going to be employed bland, aren't we? Because it's all going to be middle ground. So that's what I would say truly listen, truly listen.
[01:04:51] Speaker A: Great advice, brilliant advice and something AI certainly can't do. Something AI can assist you with in the process. Yeah. Another great example of it's boots on the ground. It's do the. Do the long yards because that's the stuff that's gonna going to return.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's not get lazy easy. Let's still listen to. Yeah. For sure.
[01:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Steve, you've been great. Really appreciate you joining me. And yeah, looking forward to catching up with you, I'm sure, at one of many events this summer.
[01:05:19] Speaker B: Absolutely. Indeed. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.
[01:05:22] Speaker A: Take care. Bye.
[01:05:23] Speaker B: Cheers.
