Employer Branding Isn’t Just Marketing

Tom Nixon (00:01.56)
Welcome back everyone to bull horns and bulls eyes. We are not live this week. but Curtis, good to see you again. Yeah. Hey, I was just thinking the other day, cause you and I brought it up on a call. Do you remember the days when you and I both had employees and teams to manage and people to recruit and all of the fun stuff that went along with being an actual employer?

Curtis Hays (00:07.722)
Great to see you again.

Curtis Hays (00:18.367)
Mm.

Curtis Hays (00:23.744)
That was the hardest part of my job. So I think we were roughly both about the same agency size wise. I think we had 22 employees in our agency at its height. How many did you have?

Tom Nixon (00:25.774)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (00:37.908)
at our when I was there at our height was 27. I think that yeah. So, you know, that’s when it starts getting complex too. As I noticed once we got past the 18 mark, I’m like, whoa, this is a whole new animal.

Curtis Hays (00:41.342)
Okay. Yeah, and it…

Curtis Hays (00:51.028)
Well, it was fun and games in the beginning. I sort of enjoyed it. And related to the conversation we’re going to have today, I actually had a little bit of a background in HR. So my sister, when she got out of college, she worked for a company called Manpower. And I think most people here in Michigan probably know of Kelly Services, because I think Kelly’s headquartered here in Troy, if I’m not mistaken, or they’ve got a big office in Troy.

Tom Nixon (01:04.59)
That’s right.

Curtis Hays (01:17.844)
But so Manpower is a competitor in that space. And I got a job through my sister working at a Manpower interviewing and hiring factory workers at the age of 19. So I learned interviewing skills and different things like that and the hiring process, onboarding employees, training employees. And then my sister went over to a company called Adecco. And at Adecco, she was

Tom Nixon (01:33.325)
Wow.

Tom Nixon (01:45.646)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (01:47.659)
part of their, their Deco technical, they had a division that hired tech people. And she got me a job then at a Deco. And then I was helping recruit in California. So I lived in California for a short period of time, recruiting for various employers in the Berkeley area. And my sister’s still in that world, as she’s the vice president of talent acquisition for a large employer in the state of California. And

So when I was at the agency, getting back to the agency, I had my sister as kind of a mentor as well as my experience. So I volunteered, which was my mistake, at this small little agency to do the hiring. Unfortunately, that also means the firing and the orientations and the employee manuals and the training and the benefits and, you know, the conversations about pay raises and time off and…

Tom Nixon (02:27.534)
Hmm

Tom Nixon (02:44.718)
You’re giving me PTSD now. Hold on. Fast forward to the part where we bring in the guest.

Curtis Hays (02:47.072)
Right? So yeah, but the fun of it, there was fun in it. And the fun of it was, I think, you know, on the recruiting side and the conversation I think we want to have today is on this term employer branding, which is, I think, so I learned Simon Sinek around that time, Tom, which

is a big part of our methodology and the why, how, what, and that from what I understood was knowing your why so you could communicate your why to an ideal audience that you wanted to be employees because you wanted them to share in that vision.

Tom Nixon (03:34.328)
Right. And that was the fun part that I took away, too, is I love the idea of building a magnetic culture that people would be tripping over themselves to get in the door, you know, and again, it probably goes back to my roots as not being a salesperson. So like not being a good recruiter. But if I felt like if I could build this really attractive place where it was obvious why people would want to be there, then the right people would want to be there. And I think that’s part of what employer branding is, but it’s not.

Curtis Hays (03:35.818)
So.

Tom Nixon (04:02.09)
in entirety. I’m curious to bring on our expert who could tell us what it is, how you do it well, and what employers are missing out if they’re not taking this approach.

Curtis Hays (04:12.126)
Yeah, so we’re going to introduce Nolan Ryder and to bring this story sort of full circle. About a year ago, we’re getting close to my sister who’s still in talent acquisition sends me a text and says, I want to introduce you to somebody. I said, okay, great. My sister usually doesn’t throw me referrals. It’s like this is interesting. Though she’s she has been a big influence in my career in a lot of ways, but

I said, yeah, love to meet this person. Tell me about him. And she says, well, I’ve got this person who has been working for me. He’s going to start his own agency. I want to support him in that journey of building an agency. And since you’ve been doing this for the last 12 years and it appears that you’re somewhat successful in doing that, would you be willing to talk to him? And so I said, yes, of course.

And then it was a little while later, Nolan, you and I finally got a chance to talk and we probably half hour of me sharing some advice and different things about, you know, running a business and odds and ends like that. But I said, but before I let you go, Nolan, if you have a few more minutes, tell me what you do. And when he told me what he did, I was like, I have clients who need this.

Tom Nixon (05:28.11)
Big time.

Curtis Hays (05:38.315)
So Nolan, you’re here now, tell our audience your background. Well, you have a very interesting background I want you to share too, that you actually come from the world that we work in, marketing and branding, but you kind of got put into the employer side of it. So talk about that journey and help us understand a little bit about what employer branding is.

Nolan Reiter (05:49.71)
Okay, right.

Nolan Reiter (06:02.19)
Yeah, thanks Curtis. I was actually in a similar boat about five, seven years ago, not really knowing what employer brand was, at least officially as a term or as a specialization. When I first started, I graduated from college here in California and I started working in the graphic design space, graphic designer, working with marketing teams. I worked for a cement company. I worked for a t-shirt printer, a lot of different places and

when I was looking for a new role, I was talking to a recruiter. They said, I have this spot, it’s in an HR team. And I thought, that’s kind of weird. I didn’t imagine that HR teams would need graphic designers, but really that opened up my world to what I now know as employer branding, supporting HR teams, talent acquisition teams, people, culture teams, with how do you articulate what it means to work.

at a specific company, pulling out what are those unique differentiators in your culture and your total rewards package, the growth opportunities, why someone would want to bring their skills, their experiences, their talents to your company so they can make a difference there. And so really that’s about five, seven years ago is when I got into the world and I’ve been loving it ever since, being able to connect people to.

brands where they will thrive and be able to move the brand forward. It’s really just fulfilling for me. So I’ve really been enjoying it. And then about a year ago, like Curtis mentioned, I was able to start my own firm. And it’s just been really, really fun to be able to work with many different brands across a lot of different industries, helping them articulate their employer branding, supporting their talent acquisition teams, and just helping drive the business forward. It’s been really exciting.

Tom Nixon (07:56.942)
And we should mention that now a year later, you are welcomed into the kaleidoscope multiverse as another spoke to this ever growing wheel. So if there’s people employers out there that hear something that they like or want to know more about from Nolan, that we have your connection because he’s part of the team now. So so explain, Nolan, like I said, I think if you hear the term employer branding, the novice might say, OK, well, that’s just like recruitment marketing and everyone.

Everybody knows employers need to market to prospects as well as they do, you know, prospective employees, as well as prospective clients. So isn’t this just marketing given a different term, explain the nuance and how it’s different than that.

Nolan Reiter (08:41.7)
Yeah, I’m glad you said that because it’s a really helpful place to start. I would say if you were to define brand as what people say about your company behind your back, I know I’ve heard that a lot before. If you were to say employer brand, that’s more like what people would say it’s like to work at your company behind your back. It’s the combination of everything you offer, your reputation as an employer, all put together.

And it’s how you communicate that along the entire candidate journey. So from the job descriptions, the careers page, the interactions with a hiring manager, all the way through to your first day and beyond really, that encompasses really the employer brand. I’ll just think of a couple examples. I’ll mention a couple examples because I think it’s helpful because there are employer brands out there that we know of.

We’re just maybe not thinking about them specifically as employer brands. So I’ll think about SpaceX. We all know SpaceX, the expectation there, long hours, very demanding work, but the payoff is that you literally get to push the boundaries of what humans are capable of, where we go. I know their vision is to send humans to Mars. So when you articulate that to a candidate and you say very transparently,

Our goal is to send humans to Mars. It’s a very lofty goal, but that means that we are all going to work really hard. You’re going to work with the best of the best in order that we can get there. Now that is a really strong employer brand because it’s going to repel a lot of people. People who maybe do not want to put in long hours. They don’t want to go to Mars. don’t, know, whatever it is. But the people who it will attract.

are those people who have those big visions, they’re willing, they’re at a point in their lives, they wanna put in that work to make that difference. And so I think that’s just a really good example of early prominent employer brand. Is that helpful?

Tom Nixon (10:52.01)
Very helpful. And especially the example you chose because you, that company couldn’t be more clear nor audacious about their why the mission, right? It’s like so many, this, think is where it starts is that a lot of companies are unclear on their vision or they don’t have one or it’s to make a buck. And so really they have to make up a vision and make up a culture and it’s not authentic. And you don’t do any of those things, right? Then you’re going to, obviously everything’s going to fail on the execution side. But Curtis, you obviously, you saw the value in this conversation. You want to

Nolan Reiter (11:00.356)
Right.

Tom Nixon (11:21.904)
to bring him into the kaleidoscope fold, as I said, but you also have already made some introductions to clients, right? So, what were your early impressions of what have those early returns been?

Curtis Hays (11:32.927)
Yeah, so we were already doing some form of recruitment marketing with some clients that needed help on the talent side, utilizing the skills that we have and what we’re doing on the sales and marketing side. Facebook advertising, Google advertising for a number of years, we’ve been managing campaigns for clients. What I realized eventually that we could do better on was

where I think we struggled was on the positioning and I see our customers struggling there. Yeah, we can pull the levers within these channels. We can certainly manage your budget and the CPCs and we can track and do attribution. Hey, if you’re spending money here versus Indeed versus Google and all these other places, what’s our cost per acquisition on a new hire on a new

Tom Nixon (12:06.286)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (12:28.638)
interviewer on a new applicant, like those same things that we would do for qualified lead or converted lead on the sales side. Actually, that was one of the things I showed Nolan in our first conversation was like, let me show you the spreadsheets that we do on this on both the sales side and this because it was like we were talking the same language. And so he understood the systems that we were using and they translated to what he’s been doing for my sister’s company. And

You know, then I said, okay, I have clients who struggle. They struggle with no show rates. So they get applicants that go through the process, but then they don’t show up to an interview. We’ve got clients who don’t know how to articulate their why on a careers page. And they say, hey, can you rebuild us an about page and a careers page on our website? It’s like, well, what do you want it to say? Well, we’re not sure. We want to attract this type of

employee over here, and then this type of employee here, because they’re drastically different, we really don’t know how to do that. Okay, let’s stop before we go and redesign something. And let’s figure out the strategy. And let’s maybe take a lesson from your book, Tom. Let’s interview some existing employees. Let’s find out their whys, and then take that and put that into language.

Tom Nixon (13:43.758)
There you go.

Curtis Hays (13:51.702)
that we can have on the website. But all of that starts with employer brand. And the way I saw it, Nolan, was to actually take the marketing brand guide, that there should be a corporate guide that is an extension to that sales and marketing thing that says, here’s how we talk to employees. Here’s how we talk about the company to potential employees.

Nolan Reiter (14:04.665)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Nolan Reiter (14:12.772)
Right? Yeah, exactly. 100%. And I think part of the nuance about what you’re saying is, and we’ll get into this a little later, but there are so many through lines between consumer marketing and employer brand and recruitment marketing. The one big difference though, is that at the end of the day, it’s almost like talent acquisition teams, recruiters are almost in the rejection business because you can have, I think the average is almost 250 candidates.

for one role, there’s gonna be one person. So 249 of those people are eventually gonna be rejected. And so it’s so important to really think through what that experience is gonna be because if you end up hiring one person, the experience that everybody else has is all that they’re left with. And a lot of times that impression that they have can also be their first experience with the brand, even as a consumer.

And so if they have a bad experience as a candidate, that can really cement in their mind the actual brand. And so I think there are so many tactics and so many strategies that are similar, but there’s so much more focus that has to be put on the candidate’s experience just because they’re looking for, you know, livelihood, they’re looking for purpose and to make an impact. And we really have to be careful with how we’re treating all of those candidates.

and how we’re thinking about that experience. Just thought that was helpful to add.

Tom Nixon (15:41.656)
Yeah, for sure.

Curtis Hays (15:41.825)
So, Tom, that reminds me of this quote we saw. We’ve been talking about brand a lot lately. so, Brayden Kelly, who’s an author, speaker, says, brands are created by companies but belong to customers. And so, you could also say the employer brand is created by a company, but it belongs to the employees. And what you’re saying, Nolan, it’s…

Nolan Reiter (16:00.036)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (16:10.184)
It belongs to those people who even go through that process and don’t become employees that that experience and how they felt about that experience and their perception of the company and all that encompasses what that brand actually means. Tom, what do you think about that?

Tom Nixon (16:27.906)
Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. know, back to Nolan’s earlier point, I do remember the rejections I’ve gotten over the years and you know, there’s another expression that people will forget what you say, but they will not forget, but they will always remember how you made them feel and I can’t tell you exactly what those people told me, but I can tell you which ones kind of made me feel crappy in, know, and that was reflection on the overall brand and which ones, you know, whether they were, you know, stroking me or not. This was a tough decision, you know,

Nolan Reiter (16:41.432)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Nolan Reiter (16:47.972)
Right.

Tom Nixon (16:57.85)
any other situation, we would have loved to, know, if we could have had two of you, you would have been, you know, that sort of thing. But, I wanted to go back to what Curtis said earlier too, about like the wait, stop before we start executing. Cause this is what we tell our clients. Like let’s, there’s some things we got to get right first. What does an engagement typically look like for you at the beginning? What are you digging into before people start just throwing up, you know, job listings on Indeed or LinkedIn or whatever?

Nolan Reiter (17:24.91)
Right, I think that’s a great, I’m glad you said that because Curtis and I have actually ran into this with a few of our clients where they’ll come in asking for updates to their careers website or updates to we need to run more ads or we need to do something that’s more on the tactical side or on the recruitment marketing side. And what we like to do, yes.

Curtis Hays (17:44.455)
Add technology, that’s a big one, isn’t it Nolan? Like there is so much technology out there today that they want to slap on technology to solve problems, which just increase cost and complexity of the process, but doesn’t actually solve the root problem. So sorry, go ahead, Nolan.

Tom Nixon (18:00.886)
Yeah, but we’re so used to speaking that language, Kurt, because the same thing happens on the customer acquisition side. That’s right. Just like start throwing out some lead magnets and something’s bound to happen or so I’ve read online. So I believe, you know, anyways, go ahead back to where you start, Kurt.

Nolan Reiter (18:02.05)
No, no, no, no.

Curtis Hays (18:08.074)
Right.

Nolan Reiter (18:12.92)
Right, right, right. No, no, this is perfect because I like to call it almost like technical debt. I like to call it recruitment debt where over time these sort of quick fix mentalities or I’m just going to do this. They start to pile up and then you end up with a really complicated ineffective process for hiring where your recruiters are asked to sort of

talk about the culture, one off your repeating processes one at a time. There’s no systems, there’s no automation, those types of things. But in order to get to that point, you really have to start at the beginning, which I know Tom and Curtis, you would both agree, starting with the discovery interviews with employees, starting with the messaging, getting those pillars. So that way, everything that comes from that is authentic and real.

and we’re not gonna do any sort of bait and switch. We need to communicate the real challenges, the real payoffs upfront. That way, when we do find those candidates, we can find better candidates, more qualified candidates who are going to move on to thrive there because turnover costs are real, recruiter time is real. A lot of these things have real costs for the business. And so being able to identify the messaging first.

is usually the first step. From there, we do what I like to call a candidate journey audit. So we go through the candidate journey. What does it mean to set up an application to, know, what are the communications look like, the interview process. And then from there, once we get all of those pieces elevated on brand working nicely, there’s automation, there’s technology, those types of things. Then we can use recruitment marketing to really just dial everything up.

to scale all of those things, to bring more candidates through the funnel and communicate the employer brand. So that’s typically how an engagement works in those three different buckets, employer brand, candidate experience, and then recruitment marketing.

Tom Nixon (20:24.142)
love that because I here’s a pull through to our Cracker Barrel episode. Curtis is you know, I said the mistake often comes from the C-suite saying I want our brand to be X. I want to modernize our brand. And I just got a message that he Curtis has lost power. So he’s coming back to join us. So so what we talked about Nolan was this that

I feel like that was a function of being aspirational about what you want your brand to be as opposed to discovering what it truly authentic is and should be. Same thing I see happens all the time in employer. We’re going to create a mission statement or we’re going to define our core values and the leadership team sits in a boardroom somewhere and says, what are our core values? Well, integrity and it’s all these things that they want it to be. It’s all aspirational, but they never go ask the team like, what’s it like to live here?

Nolan Reiter (21:04.387)
Yeah.

Nolan Reiter (21:14.158)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (21:19.724)
I’m sorry, what’s like to work here? Why did you choose this place? Why do you stay here? You’ve been here 25 years. Why have you stayed? Right? All of that stuff so that you can authentically say, okay, leadership team, here’s your culture. Here’s your brand, right? Here’s your story. You may want it to be this and maybe we take some, you know, steps to get you there. But today, as we stand here, this is it. And this is why people choose you, why they stay here and why they, by the way, refer you to their friends.

Nolan Reiter (21:20.004)
Right.

Nolan Reiter (21:47.054)
Right, right, right. And if you try to just lead that from the very top, it’s never gonna work. This is where people spend the majority of their time and it’s not gonna work if you try to cram that down and it’s not sort of starting from the ground on what employees are actually experiencing. So I think that’s a great point.

Tom Nixon (22:07.576)
Do you do you have I wanted to ask you about so aligning with the obviously whatever you’re doing, I think to your internal audiences, say employees and prospective employees needs to I would imagine align with your external branding, right? So do you when you come into these situations, do you ask for that sort of documentation like, have you done the work of defining what your brand voice is and what your messaging is and you ask for that or do you need to create that as part of this process or?

Do they have it? And then you find it’s completely misaligned with what you’re discovering. So how do you handle that part of it?

Nolan Reiter (22:41.25)
Yeah, it’s a great point. And I think that’s something as I’ve been doing this, I see more and more there’s usually typically a disconnect between the marketing team and the HR team because there’s usually not a lot of opportunities for them to naturally overlap other than employer branding. And so typically one of the first things that I’ll do if an HR team comes, need some help, I’ll offer to bring in the marketing team. Let’s talk to marketing team. Let’s see what’s going on. Let’s build a…

partnership with them early on because those things are so connected. What you’re telling your customers, if you’re doing your work right, is going to be true to your company, to your purpose, those types of things. And then you want to package that up for employees. so typically there will be something, even if it’s pulling from a website or pulling from a really short brand book or anything like that.

We just need to latch on to something, even if it’s not super built out, but we do need to latch on to something from the marketing team or something external facing. So that way we can make sure that the employer brand is authentic, it is connected, and will ultimately work.

Tom Nixon (23:55.617)
It strikes me that a couple things. One is the resources that you’re spending on recruiting, say, are ultimately going to cost the company something in terms of salary and benefits and all of that stuff. But I think most employers realize that that’s an investment, right? You need that employee or that employee group to get the company where you need it to go. But I also think that they look at

So much of this as in an annoyance as well, right? The recruiting and getting this flood of resumes and doing it. And so are you taking a company from a point of pain to a point of once they get into this in the embrace everything that you have to say and they become a quote unquote employer of choice. Can you get them to a place where now they’re like, alright, this is competitive advantage. This is we got something now that our competitors don’t have, right? Yeah.

Nolan Reiter (24:23.726)
Thank

Nolan Reiter (24:49.092)
Right, think that’s the goal. Yes, exactly, because a lot of times when I go through this exercise with companies, we’ll redefine, there’s one client I’m working with right now, we’re redefining the mission, the vision, the values, and then when we move into the actual employer brand, what we’re gonna do is we’re actually gonna take a look at what are we offering employees in terms of benefits? Are there people who, how can we make this

demographic that we want to thrive here, how can we make sure that they will actually thrive here? You saw a lot of that in the tech industry where they would lure people in with coffee machines and baristas and ping pong tables and, you yeah, exactly. You could be yourself here. Of course, unlimited vacation, all of those things over time have sort of backfired because it wasn’t really truly aligned. It was sort of to help.

Tom Nixon (25:30.946)
Who’s ball? Yeah.

Nolan Reiter (25:45.848)
woo them to come in, but then it was really hard, hard work grueling and there was sort of a disconnect there. But ultimately Patagonia is a really good example because they have such a focus on being innovative in the sustainability practices of their company that what they do is they structure their benefits for better or for worse, they structure their benefits around that. sort of one of the more extreme examples is if

you are gonna go and protest something sustainability wise, they will actually give you that time off so you can go and protest and do that. And also there’s been samples where people have been put in jail for that and then Patagonia has bailed them out. It’s a really, I think, poignant example of how people who thrive in that type of environment, Patagonia has structured those benefits to meet those people specifically.

and offer them something really unique that aligns with their own personal values.

Tom Nixon (26:48.288)
Yeah, and that goes back to what I said about it being authentic and bottom up as opposed to top down, right? So, I wanna get your take on why this is especially critical now. It seems like for as long as I can remember, knock on wood, today we didn’t get a very good jobs report, but the there’s been a talent shortage, it seems like for a good long time. And then COVID hit and then people didn’t want to, lot of people didn’t wanna go back to the office. So now you’re competing for

Nolan Reiter (26:53.059)
Right.

Tom Nixon (27:18.158)
you know, even more limited talent pool. how does why does the candidate experience what you know in the concept of a talent shortage or a preference for work at home all of that stuff. How are you addressing all of that stuff? Because it seems to all be coming to a head and I don’t see again. Knock on wood the talent shortage going away anytime soon.

Nolan Reiter (27:38.692)
Right. Right. It’s a great point. And I think the reality is just like with any type of brand, you have a brand, you have a reputation. It’s whether or not you’re actively managing it or aware that it even exists. And employer branding is exactly the same. And I think what we’re seeing is it’s no longer, you know, just a nice to have. I actually, I believe that it’s one of a company’s biggest competitive advantages is how they present themselves

as an employer, because like you said, there’s lots of headlines about layoffs in tech, those types of things, but for certain sectors like healthcare or law or skilled trades, the job market’s really, really tight. And your employer brand really can make the difference between getting that amazing candidate who’s going to come in, innovate, be responsible for the next step of the company.

or losing them to a competitor. And so being able to think about that really clearly about what is our employer brand actively managing that, actively figuring out what are those unique things is gonna make a big difference. And I think while we’re on the topic, think there’s also, you mentioned COVID, there’s been a huge shift in candidate expectations, I think over the past few years, especially with remote work, flexibility.

Gen Z, millennials, they’re prioritizing this alignment with purpose and values, flexibility, growth opportunities. They’re asking some of these questions now because it’s not exactly how it used to be where you could join a company, work there for 40 years, retire. People are asking a lot more questions about how can I grow here? What’s the flexibility like? How can I align with my own personal purpose?

And so we need to think about those things and design the candidate experience that matches the expectations that candidates have.

Tom Nixon (29:42.969)
Yeah. And I would say employers ignore that at your own peril. I mean, that’s the new reality. You might not like it, but that’s the new reality. We should welcome back Curtis to the podcast. We should mention that to listeners outside of Michigan. We are currently recording during this like like almost like a Wizard of Oz type win situation. So you lost power, but you’re back. Curtis. Welcome back.

Curtis Hays (30:07.082)
I did, that was wild. have a battery backup and everything, but the systems didn’t work the way they’re supposed to. But I’m back online for now.

Tom Nixon (30:14.764)
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about, since you’re back, I know you’ve, you’ve brought Nolan in his experience into some of your client engagements. You mentioned, won’t mention any by name, but, there’s one in particular that’s in a very competitive sort of recruiting, posture. the company can only grow as it’s human resources grow.

Nolan Reiter (30:15.268)
play.

Tom Nixon (30:35.502)
You probably know who I’m speaking. So what were some of the things that you were able to identify early on with them and address and what have they seen as outcomes so far?

Curtis Hays (30:45.346)
What’s interesting is actually both companies that we’re working with right now have that issue where they are dependent on the employees for growth. They’re service-based companies. the bigger issues right now are on the talent acquisition side of finding the right employees, finding…

candidates who will show up for interviews, you know, a lot of, I would say, Nolan, you know, on the recruiting side, like you had mentioned, you’re just the time and cost these, these employers go through in order to actually get to that final point, like how much does it cost? Maybe you know, some of these numbers of what does it cost to actually do the hire?

Nolan Reiter (31:26.404)
I mean.

Curtis Hays (31:37.92)
Like up until that point, or you say like how much it costs a company to maybe, you know, have to replace an employee. This is kind of like the customer acquisition costs. Sometimes we’ll talk about talent. Like, Hey, you want to retain a client versus losing them because it costs so much to acquire them. And we’ve just seen these clients who really struggled. And like I mentioned before, what they wanted to do with slap on technology, if they hear a new buzzword and there are some great technologies out there, aren’t there Nolan, but

we’re sort of in that like space in the HR world similar to where we were 10 years ago on the sales and marketing side with the CRM, the boom of the CRM. Now we have these talent acquisition platforms and these recruiting software platforms that are going to magically solve your problems. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have your process down, it isn’t going to solve anything. Right? You’re just adding cost.

without actually fixing the problem, just like a HubSpot isn’t going to solve your sales problems, especially if the sales and marketing team aren’t actually entering any information into it, which is a problem we frequently see. So yeah, so we brought in Nolan to just like we brought in you Tom to say, hey, let’s stop for a second. Let’s do these discoveries. Let’s talk to people. And then let’s come to an agreement on

Not just the positioning, the content pillars and those types of things, but let’s understand your process. And once we understand your process and how naturally somebody does go through the hiring process, because every company is going to be different. The way McDonald’s hires is going to be different than the way Taco Bell hires. So that’s going to be unique to your company. Now we can fit the candidate journey, which involves both messaging as well as the technology and the process altogether into one.

which solves, that solves the problem.

Nolan Reiter (33:36.302)
Right, yeah, that was great. That was great. And one thing we noticed with one of our clients, Curtis was getting to know who the candidate is, building a candidate persona. So many learnings come out that then affect how you communicate with them and what technology you choose. If you just go after some new HR tech, and like you said, over the past five years, it is

Curtis Hays (33:36.386)
Did I articulate that okay, Nolan?

Tom Nixon (33:50.327)
Hmm.

Nolan Reiter (34:03.554)
really just exploded the amount of things that you can do, which is great. But if you don’t know who your candidate is, how they want to be communicated with, you could be sending them emails when they’re not reading emails, they’re on their phone, they need to be texted or these types of things. They need reminders or they still need to be sold on the company with videos or all of these types of things. Once you can know what the challenges are for your candidate,

You can tailor the messaging, the experience for them to really level it up. There’s some technologies out there specifically geared for high volume hiring that is solely based on texting and they’re able to get an incredible ROI. There’s some amazing stuff that this company Paradox has done for Chipotle and has just drastically reduced the time to hire for these people.

which allows the recruiting team to not have to deal with so much of the friction and the manual processes, but it frees them up to have these more human interactions to be able to sell the company that they’re hiring for. One thing that I like to talk about is this philosophy called moments that matter. They talk a lot about this in Play Experience, but if you take the entire candidate journey from the first time they experience your company that you’re hiring,

all way through your first day, you can plot out all of these touch points with candidates. But what you can do is layer on top of that, where are the moments where you can have an outsized impact on somebody? And if you’re able to say, okay, the moment when a recruiter can call the candidate and say that they got the job, like that is a huge life moment for the candidate. And if you’re able to…

or create surprise or create something really special, you can create engagement, trust, and just really ensure that when they hit the ground running on day one, they are bought into the company, they are ready to make a difference because you took the time at these little moments to really go above and beyond. And so I think, Curtis, like what you’re saying, technology should be something that takes some of the automation in a meaningful way.

Nolan Reiter (36:25.112)
but just allows you to focus even more effort on these more human moments that matter.

Tom Nixon (36:32.456)
So you’re creating an ideal client or candidate persona, right? We have ideal customer personas, right? So, and then something else you just mentioned resonate is there’s a, theory or a concept in the marketing world called peak end theory about customer experience. And that is that the two things that people will remember from any journey is the moment at which their emotions peaked.

Nolan Reiter (36:58.212)
you

Tom Nixon (36:58.668)
And then the last emotion that they experienced at the end. And so what you just described is that peak is when they’ve got the job, right? But then the end is going to be, I’m going to send you a bunch of paperwork. And so you don’t want that to be the lasting impression, right? You want to that elevated. So, real quick, before we wrap up, explain, I know what it is and you mentioned it. So I think you should explain what,

Nolan Reiter (37:06.338)
Right, right.

Nolan Reiter (37:10.808)
Right, right.

Nolan Reiter (37:14.916)
All right.

Tom Nixon (37:24.01)
Olivia is and what paradox does because I think that’s very interesting. I think people might be interested in knowing about that.

Curtis Hays (37:29.344)
Yeah, let me tee this up for Nolan too, because this was actually one of the, well, the first client that we had Nolan work on. They came to us with this specific problem of no shows and the time it took for recruiters to work through scheduling. And they heard the name paradox and said, hey, there’s this tool that could solve our problem paradox. We’re going to get it. But paradoxes, it’s not cheap.

Tom Nixon (37:53.325)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (37:56.586)
And so we said, you know, yeah, it probably could solve this problem. We actually have other clients who have implemented it and we’ve seen it work and they swear by it. But before we do that, you’re going to need to do this process anyway, let’s understand your process first. And so I had asked and only said, yep, interviewed it the, or interviewed it, we implemented it at the company we’re currently at and we’ve had great success with it.

Olivia is the AI part of paradox. But what I get excited about most people hear AI and it’s like, no, this is like a bot. But Olivia is actually pretty cool, isn’t it Nolan and how you can actually personalize the AI system to your brand within paradox. Tell us about that.

Tom Nixon (38:36.227)
Mm-hmm.

Nolan Reiter (38:48.408)
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. They’ve done a really good job where they are blending AI with also best in class consumer marketing tactics, which I think really is one of the benefits because HR really hasn’t seen much of that for the past couple of years. And so what they’re able to do is you can take this persona that helps guide you through

the application process and it takes the form of a sort of a chat bot on your site, but it’s so much more than that. You can develop this persona to align with your brand. Maybe it’s named after the founder or named after, know, a mascot, whatever it is. But that tool brings together all of the complexities between the different systems and just creates a seamless experience. This persona will guide you to the right job.

It will guide you through the application. It will schedule the interviews for you. It’ll send you confirmation emails. And it takes this really complicated system and it just brings it through one interface, one persona that just guides you through. And I’ve done it both as a candidate as well as an implementer. And it is a really, really seamless process that makes a big difference because I’m sure we’ve all heard stories of

interview applications that are 20 questions long, they take two hours to fill out, and then you don’t hear from anybody, and you’re hearing from different people with a tool like Paradox. There’s a few others out there that do similar things, but it really just creates this cohesive branded experience, which creates really great sentiment with the candidates for sure.

Tom Nixon (40:35.48)
So, and then Olivia is like an AI agent that does what pre-screening interviews and stuff. So you’re focused only on those that get through a certain part. Is that right? Yeah.

Nolan Reiter (40:45.252)
Correct, yeah, yeah, you can set it up however you want, but yes, that’s a way that a lot of people will use it, is it will start having a conversation with you, it’ll start asking you some basic questions, but on the back end, those are what they call knockout questions, so they can maybe ask about your schedule, are you available on weekends, are you in school, are you this, and then it can sort of guide you off if it’s not a good fit, or it can move you into the next stage, where then a recruiter would come in.

They would know all about your background. They’d be prepped for a conversation. It can be really meaningful.

Curtis Hays (41:18.74)
And, but Tom, Olivia would stay with you through that process potentially. So that’s where the branding part of it comes in is if that’s your first experience with the brand and you do want that to be memorable and you do want that to be a good experience, Olivia has this opportunity to stay with you all the way up till you come in and do your new hire paperwork and those types of things. Right, Nolan? So, know, it’s sending, Olivia’s sending you text messages and it’s personalized like,

again, to be in the brand’s voice, to communicate with you just as if you’re communicating with an actual recruiter. And so that’s why we’re saying the importance of the branding, you have to do that in order to be able to utilize these technologies. Because essentially, if you don’t, you have a vanilla brand, or you have Olivia that is saying and doing things that don’t align to who you are. Right? You can’t, even though

Chipotle’s had success with paradox doesn’t necessarily mean you can take Chipotle’s process Slap it on to what you’re doing and see the exact same success Just like I said, you know, the hiring process at McDonald’s is gonna be different than the hiring process at Taco Bell They have two different brands That likely internally have different wise potentially, right? So certainly a chipotle is different than you know, a Taco Bell just purely Mexican food, right?

Tom Nixon (42:24.491)
after that.

Nolan Reiter (42:44.292)
Right. Right.

Curtis Hays (42:46.302)
And so they likely are targeting a different candidate. And so that candidate experience is going to be different. And the way that they communicate to those candidates is going to be different. So do the branding part first. Then go to the technology. Choose the right one. And now you’ve got a process that you can make it yours.

Tom Nixon (42:59.502)
Thanks

Tom Nixon (43:04.792)
Yep.

And that’s my big takeaway as we wrap up is I think as is often the case, think Curtis technology and tactics will ultimately be what solves the problem, but they can’t come before the truth. Tactics and technology can’t come before the truth and too many companies are either not looking for the truth or they’re trying to deny the truth. So, Nolan, how about your final thought? What should people take away from this episode?

Nolan Reiter (43:32.856)
Yeah, I would love people to take away that employer brand really is not a nice to have anymore. It’s a core part of your differentiation as a company. And we can’t overlook that because there’s so many, there’s gonna be candidates who are coming in, getting first impressions with your brand. And I would just ask anyone who is thinking about this, just do a quick audit. mean, something really easy as asking a few recent hires or your recruiting team.

What is the challenging part about working here, but what makes it worth it? I think that’ll uncover some really great insights that then you can use as the foundation for your messaging.

Tom Nixon (44:12.972)
Love that. Curtis, any final thoughts? Maybe get two generators.

Curtis Hays (44:15.959)
Well, no, yeah. I have a generator. It’s it’s more batteries, I guess. Nolan, tell us quickly about Scout. So you so for our audience, you are part of the kaleidoscope team. So people can work with kaleidoscope and kind of get the benefits of the whole team as well as Nolan. But but tell us a little bit about Scout and your own branding your own agency.

Nolan Reiter (44:44.706)
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so I started Scout. We’re an employer branding firm and this is our bread and butter. So we help clients articulate anything from a company’s mission, vision, values, all the way through your employer branding and then activating and embedding that into the organization. Because when you have your employer brand and your culture, you need to make that expressed all throughout the touch points, even as an employee.

And so at Scout, that’s what we do. We partner with companies to really uncover what that is and help employees and candidates thrive at these companies.

Tom Nixon (45:25.28)
awesome. We’ll link to that in the show notes. We’ll link to your LinkedIn in the show notes and I just I found out one bonus takeaway that I’m gonna leave listeners with because you mentioned knowing the preferential communications preferences of your audience, right? And I just dawned on me that if there’s anyone out there who’s looking to disappear, go just disappear from the grid never to be heard from again. Send one of my teenage kids an email. You might as well get sucked into a black hole.

Curtis Hays (45:25.632)
Awesome.

Tom Nixon (45:55.246)
because you don’t exist in their world. anyways, that’s it. Thanks again, Nolan. People will be seeing you around because I’m going to introduce you to everyone we know. So thanks again and we’ll see you all. See you next time on Bullhoards and Bullseyes.

Nolan Reiter (46:03.608)
Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.