All About Employer Branding, Culture, and Recruitment Marketing with Christina Spadaro

Want to round out your knowledge of employer branding as well as learn what it takes to deliver an excellent candidate experience? Then watch this special Talent Acquisition Talks with our featured guest Christina Spadaro, Global Talent Brand Manager at Workhuman and 2021 Rally Awards Rising Star winner as she walks us through the ins and outs of employer branding, recruitment marketing, candidate personas, and how building a successful talent program starts from your company culture. 

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Excerpt Transcript

Joe Matar:

We've talked a lot about the candidates and understanding more about your candidates and kind of aligning your messaging with the candidates, through these integrated and comprehensive campaigns. So, let's talk a little bit about candidate personas, because I know that's something that everybody is like talking about, trying to figure out how to do it, but can you maybe first kick things off talking through the tactics that you used to identify and create your candidate personas?

Christina Spadaro:

Yeah. Perfect. So when we look at going way back to the beginning and say, okay, so we need to build out candidate personas. Like, okay, well, what are you of the personas that we want to build out, right? What are we investing our time in? So you have to have a handle on kind of like your head count planning and your forecasting, and be in tune with the hiring managers and with your recruiting partners to know exactly where the organization is going. So you can be proactive as you're identifying these different personas for targeting. We use a lot of different resources once we define where we want to go and we want to prioritize it's leveraging a lot of our internal feedback. So at Workhuman, like a lot of other organizations, we regularly participate in different workplace surveys. So things like great place to work.

Christina Spadaro:

Boston Globe does annual awards. Taking pieces of feedback from databases that already exist to identify some common trends and even break them down by different departments and job functions. So we can say, okay, the marketing team is really engaged with us because of X, Y, Z. The sales team, on the other hand, really, really likes this particular component that we stand for or this particular benefit. So identifying what it is internally that your employees are saying, and then taking advantage of the external tools that you have so that you can get a pulse on the market. LinkedIn Insights is a great product that we use to just look at the overall market trends. And I think you have those two pieces you identified what really drives your employees and what keeps people here. And you're looking at externally at what the market cares about.

Christina Spadaro:

You can kind of start to marry and draw matches between those two. And that's the kind of talk track, and those are the topics that you really want to hone in on. It's the things that you do well that you know are going to resonate with this particular audience based on the trends that you see in the marketplace. So it's an internal exercise, it's an external exercise. And then it's really going back to that employer brand, right? That strategy, that'll define your different talk tracks and plugging in where it makes sense, the talk track to the persona.

Joe Matar:

That's great. Now do the personas impact going back to the deploying of the employer brand through these campaigns, through those different personas, help you understand how you're going to deploy those campaigns to those different personas? And if so, talk to me a little bit about that.

Christina Spadaro:

Yeah. I think your different personas and your different job function targets, if you will, you could uncover, through this process that you find that marketing professionals they really use Instagram, or they use one particular channel a lot, but then your software developers, like they don't touch that particular tool. So it gives you insights on not only the talk track to use, but the channels that are going to be the most effective based on where they spend most of their time. So making sure that you have that messaging down, you've got it tailored to the right audience and then pulling the right levers and pulling the right levers and pulling the right channel so that it's in line with where they're spending their time externally. So you can again get that inbound traffic.

Joe Matar:

I love that. Spoken like a true marketer. I love that alignment. So I did a quick introduction of you Christina, at the onset of today's episode and in your title, it says global. So let's talk a little bit, there's so many organizations these days, especially as remote work has become more of a common part of how we work. It's really opened the door for organizations, I think, to not just think locally, regionally, or even nationally, but globally in who and where they hire. And I know that global employer branding is a part of your role. So talk to us or talk to the audience, viewers about how you are kind of calibrating, and I'm hesitant to even say post pandemic, but just talk to us about how you are kind of calibrating hiring across different countries. Yeah.

Christina Spadaro:

Yeah, for sure. So I think going back to those candidate personas and kind of building out. That's another component that comes into play is where are they located? How does their geographical region fit into their behaviors? I think with the pandemic there's so much variation between countries and return to office plans. There's just a lot out there to consider. So making sure that you have a strategy that is defined enough to be effective and marry up and line up to the audience in each region, but yet flexible enough to where, as we know, this is an evolving scenario and we're not through it yet.

Christina Spadaro:

The topic of post pandemic is that nobody really knows when that's officially going to come into play as things evolve. So I would say just being flexible enough, but being very much in tune and just keeping a close eye on what's happening in the different countries. How is that impacting the values that your candidates have? How is it impacting their appetite to return to work and what they're looking for and just making sure that your company is adapting appropriately.