102 The Art of Working With Hiring Managers | Rachel Duran (Rosendin)

[00:00:00] Imagine I give you a quarter of a million dollars to solve a hiring problem. What do you need to know before you're willing to go spend that first budget dollar? I understand the hiring need, but what happens if we don't hire these people? Is there a dollar amount tied to that? I want to make sure that I am solving this for you in a way that understands your business problem. Is it harder to create a campaign if there's not a dollar value associated?

[00:00:27] Oh, 100%. To be able to talk them into why would you spend money on this instead of all of the other things that you need to spend money on? Have you ever had to tell someone, I can absolutely help you recruit more people, but recruitment marketing, collaborating, whatever you want to talk about, isn't actually a problem. Yes. And there's a very delicate way to handle that.

[00:00:53] Here's a strange fact. 42% of people watching this podcast aren't yet subscribed to our channel. Statistically, that might be you. So can I ask a small favor? If you've ever found value in these conversations, please hit the subscribe button. It costs nothing, but it helps us more than you know.

[00:01:13] And the bigger this channel gets, the more we can invest in bringing you incredible practitioners who are talent leaders, employee brand managers, recruitment marketers, and internal comms leaders. Real practitioners overcoming challenges in the workplace and sharing what actually is working. So thank you so much for your support. And I hope you enjoyed this episode. Welcome to the VideoMy Pod series where we go two inches wide and a mile deep on employee brand, recruitment marketing, and internal comms.

[00:01:43] I'm David Machucker. And joining me for this US series is co-host Brian Chaney, founder of People Nerd and PBC. Let's get into it. Welcome to the VideoMy Pod. I'm David Machucker. And I'm Brian Chaney. And I'm Rachel Duran. Rachel, so lovely to have you here. We're going to go really deep on how to collaborate with a hiring manager as an employee brander. It's a fascinating topic.

[00:02:10] Before we jump into it, do you mind if you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. And likewise, I'm so excited to be here. So a little bit about me. I've been specifically in the employer brand, recruitment marketing, talent brand, whatever you want to call it, space for nearly 15 years now. I've done that in RPOs on the agency side and mostly in-house. I've been at several Fortune 100 companies running global programs.

[00:02:39] And today, I lead employment marketing strategy at Rosenden Electric. Awesome. I'm so glad you're here. I've actually known you through a few different chapters of your career. And you've never struck me as a person particularly interested in, let's call it, employer brand theater. Where do you think, I'll just say, where did your intolerance for work that looks good but can't prove any real value actually come from?

[00:03:09] That's such a good question. I think part of it is innate, but I think a little bit of it is me understanding brand and how it impacts me as well. So I've understood for a long time, even back before I was ever in marketing or advertising, I was a retail store manager for years. And it was a similar situation where you have to be able to prove it. You have to have the numbers.

[00:03:35] And if you don't, it's going to cause more trouble in the long run. You have to be able to build trust by being able to speak to the actual business impact. So along those lines, is there anything that you used to consider good employer brand work that you wouldn't accept today? Oh, yes. I will say this with the caveat of, I do think it was good employer brand work at the time.

[00:04:05] And we just didn't know what we didn't know. And we may not have had all the resources and the empowerment and the trust that we have today. But the blogging, like just all the blogs, thinking people are going to read, you know, multi-paragraph blogs. I've been a huge fan of that for a long time. I think it still has a place in the strategy. But it definitely took up a lot of work that we couldn't track the ROI on. But now you've got AI, so that can just automate all that, right? Sure. In theory, yes.

[00:04:34] And did you come to that conclusion because you had access to data and the engagement metrics? Yeah. So it became a little bit of a shift on what the value actually was versus what we thought it was. So I think that it really gave a lot of exposure to the brand. And what we were getting right is hearing people's stories.

[00:04:57] Because even if you have an EVP, if you can't prove it, you know, with people who have had that experience and can speak to it, then, you know, it's not as impactful. So I think we got that part right. I think that where I started to shift the understanding of it and where I'll reluctantly agree that AI can do some of this today is I think it still has value in SEO and AEO and GEO, right? It's still picking up those keywords and giving you a little bit of credibility.

[00:05:22] But if your site that you're hosting that blog on is not a site that's going to get indexed for things like that, you're really just been in your wills these days. People are not going to read that kind of long form content like that.

[00:05:35] So really kind of shifting to the video versions of that and understanding how else you can activate some of that search engine optimization and generative AI result optimization other than it's been in your wills writing all these blogs. Yeah, I love that. So you've not only told us that something that you've changed, but you've sort of gone into solution mode with something else. It's really neat.

[00:06:04] I will add that those blogs are really useful for the candidate who's up at 2 a.m. and is really looking for the thing to help them cure their insomnia. Very true. Videos can do that, too, especially in the age of TikTok. And that's probably where they are trying to cure their insomnia. And I can speak from personal experience, not curing, right? Like actually adding to the insomnia. But yeah, I think same concept, right?

[00:06:31] What worked about blogs in the past is what still works when you think about what is your end goal? What is it you're trying to drive? What behavior are you trying to drive? It's just the blogs aren't going to drive that behavior anymore. You have to switch the strategy. You've gone from some major technology players to a company like Rosendon. Different industry, different workforce, different business. Is there something that you've already had to unlearn?

[00:07:00] Oh, unlearn. Yeah, I will say I've had to unlearn the assumption that I know everything about employer brands because I came in knowing immediately. I don't know everything about what that would look like in the construction space. I certainly didn't know offhand what that would look like when we're talking about attracting people who work in the unions. Right.

[00:07:23] So if we're talking about labor, that there is that piece of the puzzle where it's a little bit broken compared to your typical funnel that you look at for talent attraction. I had to unlearn that. So I'm very much used to coming in as the expert. And this time I really came in as an absorber and a learner. Is there something from your previous playbook that you think could still work? A hundred percent.

[00:07:48] So going back to your comment about my my distaste for the theater of it all, I'm always going to dig to the actual solution of a problem. Right. And so I think that that's the instinct that I brought with me that's very helpful is I'm absorbing and I'm learning, but I'm starting to put together the pieces of the puzzle of what I do know and how technology stacks can work together. What's available?

[00:08:11] What different laws and regulations are out there to kind of build that process of what that could look like to solve that problem between marketing and talent acquisition? Well, let's let's jump into hiring managers and that topic because, yeah, I really feel like be able to share something that's really insightful and practical for people who are tuning in. What is the importance of of collaborating with a hiring manager as a talent brander?

[00:08:40] Yeah, I think it's really important in some ways. I think that it's as important as an intake with a recruiter and the hiring manager. And that doesn't mean that a talent brander has to be in every single intake for every single single requisition. We're really talking about a categorical conversation. Right.

[00:09:01] So when you're saying, hey, we are building this new product or we have to have this hiring ramp or we've switched the solution over and now we need to hire people for this. Any kind of larger conversation that is a shift in the business strategy or shift in this department strategy that impacts a hiring need, especially if the recruiter or HR has identified in the talent map that this is going to be a struggle. Right. In these locations that we're missing people.

[00:09:29] That's where that becomes extremely important. Besides just your overall EVP conversations, when you're you're building out what that overall messaging is, it becomes extremely important to speak to those different leaders and build that trust with them so that they know that your solutions and your process is here to help them get the right talent in the door at a speed that they need it to be. And that it will impact the business in a way that helps them when to.

[00:09:58] Ken, I've always appreciated your eye for the distinction between recruitment marketing and employer brand. Right. So let's jump into the recruitment marketing side a little bit. That's why we're calling it talent brand in this episode. Well, it's talent brand. Right. But so you're talking to a guy who's like, you've seen all the different things.

[00:10:20] If we've got if we've got 200 different job titles for this work, there's got to be some some some fungibility, some some some allowances. Right. And I tried to get less precious about the words that we're using. I just want to be clear for this. It's it's understanding a specific scenario. So imagine if you will. I give you a quarter of a million dollars to solve a hiring problem.

[00:10:45] What do you need to know before you're willing to go spend that first budget dollar? That's such a good question, because this comes up a lot for me. And I do always have a lot of questions. You have people throwing quarters of a million dollars at you? Yes. Oh, my God. I have.

[00:11:01] I've also had I will say what's the more realistic solution and one that I think will be identifiable by the audience much more clearly is throwing big ideas of what we can do to attract talent that you have to then tell them, you know, that's going to cost a quarter of a million dollars. It's right. And there's all different kinds of personalities that you'll deal with in these, you know, hiring managers, executive leaders. But one thing that's always going to be the same is helping them understand that you're speaking the same language.

[00:11:31] And one of the biggest ways you can do that is say, let's take a step back. Let's talk about what is the business impact of this need? I understand the hiring need. But what happens if we don't hire these people? Is there a dollar amount tied to that? I want to make sure that I am solving this for you in a way that understands your business problem and helps solve it. So when you get harder to to create a campaign if there's not a dollar value associated.

[00:12:01] Oh, 100 percent. The biggest reason. And this is going to differ in every organization and every department, how you deal with it. Right. There's some situations where we're going to run into the hiring manager is the one offering to pay for it out of their budget. That can be an issue in the sense that then they're saying, yeah, sure. Here money is no object. Here's the money. Right. And so then you're really talking about great. Let me help you spend that money wisely and make sure that it's solving the problem that we're trying to solve. The other version of that is it's a corporate budget.

[00:12:29] I am taking their big idea and I'm going to have to massage that or work that out with them a little bit before I start taking that to marketing leadership or TA leadership. Whoever is going to be the ones paying for this campaign to be able to talk them into. Why would you spend money on this instead of all of the other things that you need to spend money on?

[00:12:48] So with that in mind, what's a metric that most, you know, your typical employer brand person, right? Or let's just say the person tasked with, you know, managing, marketing your employer brand. What's a metric that those folks love you wouldn't walk into a CFO meeting with? Yeah, that's a really good one.

[00:13:15] So a CFO meeting, I'm not going to walk in with engagement metrics. We love that in talent marketing for the same reason we love it in regular advertising and marketing, right? It's it. We understand the impact of engagement. We understand the long term impact of engagement. We understand the nitty gritty of breaking down the audience and how we A-B tested. They don't they're not going to talk to you about any of that. The problem that you're solving, and this is why you have to have this conversation very, very early.

[00:13:44] We all have to be in an agreement about what is the problem that we're solving and what is the business impact? Because then you can go into a CFO and say, we're at risk of losing one million dollar business opportunity if we don't have the software engineers to build this product by this date because we have to deliver and ship by this date. Right. That is a conversation that you have with the CFO when you say this is how much it's going to cost us. Let's divide that by the number of people.

[00:14:11] And I am I am willing to commit to this dollar per hire on a spend for attracting this talent and getting them in on time. So I'm committing to helping get these this number of applications in. We typically know if we have this number of applications, we'll have this many qualified applications. We'll have this many hires. Right. And so I can reverse engineer that and say, I need to be able to get this in front of this many people in front of this audience. This is how much that's going to cost.

[00:14:40] And then that's how much that's going to cost per eventual hire. And then subtract that from the ultimate business opportunity. Do you find that that conversation you're having with the CFO is similar to a hiring manager? Or do you find the hiring manager is interested in engagement? The hiring manager, it's going to depend on what they're interested in. If you have a hiring manager who's also a CFO, maybe not. If you have a hiring manager that's in marketing, absolutely. And there's so many things that are in between. Right.

[00:15:08] And that's where you have a little bit of the education piece. I just typically don't start with that if they don't already speak in those terms and think of marketing campaigns in that way. Yeah. Have you ever had to tell someone as you have these conversations over and over again where you're invited to help solve this problem? Have you ever told someone, I can absolutely help you recruit more people? But recruitment marketing, talent branding, whatever you want to call it, isn't actually a problem. Yes. Yes.

[00:15:40] And there's a very delicate way to handle that. I will say as a marketer, I don't task myself with that. As we say in Texas, come to Jesus conversation, if you will. Right. So I will typically assess and ask the questions that need to be asked around, you know, what what problem are we solving? What are the problems that you've run into in the past? What have you tried in the past? What are the problems that you've done in the past? And kind of bringing that all together.

[00:16:07] And then I will ask them questions that kind of help bring them to that being the potential issue as well. Well, tell me a little bit about like the market. I see the market maps are here. Like, have we thought about other locations? It's very, very similar at times to the conversations that you're going to have in an intake or like a recruiting leader with a hiring leader on an intake. Right.

[00:16:30] So, you know, I think that's a point where you have to be a little bit sensitive and understand what your parameters are, because you can really find out a lot about like, no, there's reasons why this is the location. There's reasons why this we can't do other locations. There's a lot of things that you can't control and you really want to focus in on what you can control. Okay. So in that scenario, would a responsible employer brand decision be to stop marketing? So, no.

[00:16:58] I think what I typically do is I am a big fan of, and I probably learned this from working in retail and dealing with irate customers who are face-to-face, you know, like how do you, you know, resolve a situation like that? Is understanding, just saying, here's what I can do. Avoiding saying, no, we're not going to do that. That's not going to work. You misunderstood the business. That's a great way to not build a great relationship with your hiring managers.

[00:17:24] And in the future, that's not going to bode well when you're trying to get things done or trying to get a budget. And so really focusing in on, here's what I can do. So once you understand the problem so much more, if they're saying, I want to have the biggest digital billboard that's on the side of this building in downtown, you know, huge metro area, that's what's going to get us talent. Or they're saying, like, I'm one of us. I always start with, that's interesting, right?

[00:17:51] Like, we should really look into the audience and let's talk about who you want to hire. We want to make sure we get it on the right building that's facing the right direction. And kind of start talking to them through that and then bring them into the reality. Again, you can only control what you can control and talking to them about your parameters in the marketplace, right? I can't get you on the side of a building tomorrow. I might not even get to you on the side of the building in the next 30 days.

[00:18:16] If we have to fill these roles in the next 60 days, here's what I can do right now. And then I love a templatization of here's what we can do. And having a CMS setup of content that already exists, having an email template that already exists in your CRM, you know, an SMS campaign, and start talking about talent pools and retargeting and say, this is the stuff we can activate tomorrow, right? We have templates for this. We can activate it.

[00:18:43] We can start seeing what that's bringing in for talent, how that's impacting your applications while I start going to the market and pricing out some of these bigger, badder plans. And that way I'm not telling them, no, I'm not telling them their idea is crazy. I'm not telling them that's not going to solve their problem. I'm telling them I'm going to look into that more. I really like that idea. Let me look into the reality of it. How much it's going to cost? Is it worth it?

[00:19:08] And when we have that conversation, we'll also look at the impact of some of these other quicker things that we're doing and see how that's building the pool. And where does the recruiter fit into this? Because you're having a direct conversation with a hiring manager. I'm assuming there's representation from the in-house recruiter. Yeah. I would never go into that conversation without the recruiters being involved first.

[00:19:32] So I've been in several different versions of this process, right, depending on the company and what works best there. But I've been where recruiters will say, hey, you know what? I think we really need to bring in Rachel Duran. Let's get her on the phone and talk through this because she has really good ideas. That's good, too, because then your recruiter, your recruiting leader is vouching for you and bringing in that. Like she solved problems for us before. Let's bring her in to talk about this.

[00:19:59] And then I think on that larger scale, if you're talking about a bigger hiring ramp, again, even at that level, that's my TA later who has been in conversations with compensation, the HRBP. Right. There's already been a conversation that has established this role is needed. It is impactful to the business. It is a market map problem. Right. There's some sort of establishment that has already happened in the business that says we're going to need marketing to help us with this. That's where those conversations go a lot more smoothly.

[00:20:29] And what are the benefits of forward planning? Yeah. Huge, especially when we start talking about the checklist. Right. When you're going in there and saying, here's what I can do today. That checklist gets a lot more impressive and can bring the temperature down in the room a lot quicker when you have a plan that got you there in the first place. I'll give an example. Besides email template, there's a lot that are just easy. We can throw some money behind the job board, you know, like to boost it up.

[00:20:56] But I think one of the things that has made me be able to be more what I would call proactive in a responsive situation is being able to be responsive very quickly because you were proactive, because you have a CMS mindset. And this is a very marketing term, right? That content management system mindset.

[00:21:17] So I think about things, think about how much money and time it caught getting on the schedule, whether you're using an agency, even if you have an in-house video team, getting the schedule together, getting this person in a chair, getting the room booked, getting the lighting up, getting the video up. Now they have to, that's so much. It's a huge lift. If we did that every single time, we had a little bit of a hiring ramp and we've got a lot of hiring ramps popping up everywhere.

[00:21:42] That just gets, the jobs are filled by the time we've got this video campaign done, right? So really thinking about every time you're sitting down and interviewing people, making sure there is a core list of questions that applies to everything. Talk about the location you work in. What is that like? Talk about the department that you work in. What is that like? Tell me some of the projects that you, and then really thinking about that in a tagging system. So very similar to think about a candidate in a talent pool, you know, all of these things about them.

[00:22:12] Where did you originally meet them? How many times have they interviewed before? Have they worked here before? Were they a referral? We know all these little things that we can compile to make a talent pool. Same thing with video content. We can reconfigure video footage a million different ways. We can have a whole montage about people talking about the culture.

[00:22:30] We can talk about one pillar of the culture and have all the, you know, really thinking about that content management system mindset, that tagging mindset of what are the Lego pieces that I can put together to make it represent this need and the content need for this. And then you're activating email campaigns with a video. Then you're putting a video in a job description.

[00:22:52] Then you're, you know, able to put together a really good, well-written job description that you feel good putting money behind because you built these modular pieces over time and you're not starting from scratch with every different hiring ramp. Yeah. And I think that's, it's both of that. It's like, what are you walking into that room with in your quiver, your arsenal, whatever you want to call it, right? What do you have in that, in your Lego box? Right. Right. Right.

[00:23:22] And I love that analogy. I use that a lot because it's like, okay, how do you pull, put these stories together? We can put it together this way. Right. The pieces that we've got. So how do we build with it? Right. And then I think that's the, it's the equivalent of, um, this is our escalation path. When we, this was what we start with. This is when we, when we need more traffic. Here's what we do. When we need, when we need more, uh, more candidates, here's what we do. When we're not reaching the right candidates or we're not getting the volume, like here's where, here are the channels that we go. And then some of that's content based. Some of it's channel based.

[00:23:50] Some of it's, um, element, uh, elements of the experience. Right. To your point, having that tagged. Uh, I love that approach. Something that I've used before, but I don't think a whole lot of people do it in that way. A lot of people end up saying, yeah, we've got, you know, $10,000. Let's go shoot the three minute video that goes on our culture page. Right.

[00:24:13] But they're not thinking about what 84 pieces of content should be coming out of that culture video shoot and how it can be leveraged. Right. Right. I love to say, what are the reels we're getting out of this? What do you think about like an Instagram standpoint? Right. Like what are the clips? Totally. Um, that kind of makes me think about, uh, maybe employee generated content and those kinds of things because you're creating, you're asking them to create.

[00:24:41] You actually wrote about employee advocacy like 10 years ago and we're still presenting some of these concepts as if they're brand new. Um, what do you think we've gotten better at? And what do you think we're just renaming every five years? Oh, I think we've gotten better at showing that we can be a consultative partner.

[00:25:09] I think that we are slowly and surely getting further away from being the order takers in TA. Um, as far as like coming and saying like, Hey, we need an ad. Hey, we need a social media post. Hey, right. Like I remember in the beginning being told like, Oh, we need a social media post about this. And that took up so much of the time. I think that in some ways though, that's still happening and we're relabeling it as, you know, innovation, right?

[00:25:37] Like we need to jump on AI. We need to jump on like this other company is doing it. I heard it at a conference and it's just a relabeling of order taking, right? It's just now it's larger tech systems. It's larger concepts. Um, and I think that it deserves the same kind of focus, right? To go back to that consultative conversation. And what problem are we trying to solve? Yeah.

[00:26:01] I do think we, we tend it recently within the past few years, it's felt like we're calling all these things just different names. And, you know, it's a, it's a micro retirement. No, no. It's called taking a, taking a holiday or a vacation. It's not like we're literally talking about two weeks. No, no. That's called taking time off. Uh, or, or, or, or, oh, it's quiet quitting. No, it's called disengagement. Yes. Right. All of, all of these things. What are your thoughts, Brian? About what? About lots.

[00:26:33] Regarding the question that you just asked. What do I think we're doing well? And what do I think we're just renaming? Yeah. In talent branding. I think we're re, we'll renaming the profession. I think we tend, we, a new name, a new verbiage, a new angle tends to come out every five to 10 years. And there's so many people doing it. I, the stat that I mentioned was over 200 different job titles. There's no standard.

[00:27:00] There's no, uh, you don't know what you're going to get because a lot of these companies are trying to figure out what they call it. I was a talent brand manager back in 2004. Before I knew, I was like, what the heck is a talent brand? I had no idea. I'm like, I've heard of brand manager, but I haven't heard of a talent brand manager. And understanding that and what it meant and what you're going to be held accountable for and what skills you had to have. All of those things.

[00:27:24] I think standards and what we call ourselves and then what, what people should expect from us. What are stakeholders? What are the people who are hiring us? Because a lot of times like, oh yeah, you should, I know you need, you need somebody who knows employer brand. You need an employer brand person. That means so many different things. Oh, and we all are so different in our approaches. Or, or you're in talent brand or recruitment marketing and they've painted it with an employer brand brush. And that happened to me in more than one role.

[00:27:54] Like, oh, 90% of your job is actually driving funnel. Oh, okay. So I'm not really an employer brand. Well, I need these things in order to be able to drive that, the right message. Yeah. We don't have time for that. So I literally had to go, okay, great. Well, now I've got to create an EVP from not a true process. Where can I get this information and pulling it together? I think we've gotten better at that, at calling it out as EVP. What's our value proposition?

[00:28:21] But your value proposition is not your employer brand. And I think we've also been using, sorry, I'm going down the negative path here instead of the positive path. But I do think we've been using what your experience brand can do as talent attraction. And as Confucius, you know, says, you know, don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito. I do think we've kind of been doing that. It can do so much more.

[00:28:47] So I think there's a little bit of misuse, but I do think we are getting better at recognizing that people care more about the reputation of the company, how they show up, what they're providing, what that means to somebody. It's a very personal decision. Now, the gig economy, it means less and less, but it's still a very powerful thing. Where is it powerful? It's powerful on your resume or CV. It's powerful on your LinkedIn profile.

[00:29:17] It's powerful at the dinner party or, as they used to say, as an old movie used to say, between three feet of mahogany. Like when you're at a happy hour or you're networking or cocktail party, whatever, it's valuable there because that represents a choice you made and what was important. Right. And by the way, I think this all kind of comes back to that getting on the same page and having that business acumen. Right.

[00:29:44] I think that all loops back to it because talking about the changing names of things, by the way, they still can't define it. But, you know, let's go back and say define that. And to your point about the difference between employer brand and recruitment marketing, I have found personally, we can probably talk about this for five hours. And I'm sure plenty of amazing employer brand professionals will argue with me on this.

[00:30:07] But, you know, sometimes we're so busy talking about the differences and I'm like the employer brand, recruitment marketing is saying what you're offering jobs and all the details to go with that. Employer brand is saying what's in it for you. It's true brand versus marketing, that product, the funnel, all of those things, the job descriptions. So I have just gone to if it is job specific, it is in the tactics behind getting that out there and letting people know this job is available.

[00:30:36] That is recruitment marketing. All of the messaging and the content development around why it's so cool to work here and any efforts that go into already building that impression of being an employer of choice before they ever even see that application in the first place or maybe two seconds after they looked at it and decided whether they were going to apply or not. That's employer brand. And they work together, but they do very, very different things and they have different tactical outcomes.

[00:31:05] Yeah. And when you think about the hiring manager, they're probably wanting a recruitment marketer. Most of the time, yes. And that's where that education piece comes in. And I will say this, this is what goes back to my philosophy of always saying what problem are we solving, backing it up a few seconds, because we need to not only define the problem and like I said, attach a dollar to it if you can, but you can attach different numbers if you can.

[00:31:31] And then the KPIs that go into that, I'm always trying to make sure that we're all on the same page. We're all speaking the same language about what do we need this to ultimately do? How do we measure that and where can we actually measure that? I started adding, where can we actually measure that? Because some people say like, oh, quality of hire. Great. What do you use to measure that today? Is this coming out of work day? What are we talking about? Right.

[00:31:55] Because then that starts a conversation that can be much larger than the hiring manager of, hey, we actually all need to get on the same page about from a funnel standpoint. What is quality of hiring and what does a quality of applicant mean? Because I have some ideas of how we can measure that. Did they get to a first interview? Well, they must have gone through some sort of like process of saying that they match the profile of the job enough to have been interviewed.

[00:32:25] So that's a quality of applicants and they may not be the person who got the job. Maybe they're a silver medalist. Right. But you have to get everybody on the same page about what that means and then what the viability of being able to track that is. And if you if we're not willing to put in whatever functionality or workarounds to build that, then we have to decide on another KPI. And that is going to go directly back to your strategy. When you think about reverse engineering, what's the call to action?

[00:32:55] And your call to action that you're asking people to do when you pay money to put that content in front of them better be an action that matches back to a KPI that everyone agreed was solving the problem. It's really good advice. So so what I'm hearing is don't ask people to join your talent community if the KPI is in how many screened applicants. Correct. That's 100 percent what I'm referring to. So and by the way, I love it.

[00:33:23] Join our talent community as long as it's true. Yes. If join the talent community is including a line about why you would even want to do that. What are you getting out of it? And you can follow that promise. You're going to get, you know, recommended job alerts. Our recruiters will look here first to hire people. I would love to be able to say that if we can all agree that that's the process. Right. Like that's that's a pool. I'm going to want to sign up for that as a candidate.

[00:33:50] But the ROI, if I'm putting money behind that, I need to have some executive agreement that the ROI behind that was building out the pools and understanding that having the pools and having data around who's coming to the pools is ultimately helping our strategy to be able to be proactive next time there's a hiring ramp and get campaigns out. Well, beyond that, you can you've got your own test group. Right. Right.

[00:34:15] So if you have a talent community, you can actually market the things to them as long as you're tagging them and categorizing the topics of the content and all the things. Then you can actually use them as a test group to tell you what are they clicking on? What are they paying attention to? How are they stack ranking these things that we are using to go to market? So I love that that angle. I don't think a lot of people are using their I'm still going to do talent communities to to to take advantage of. Right.

[00:34:44] Quick word from our sponsor, VideoMy, the company I founded at VideoMy. We believe that people trust people. We help organizations capture and amplify authentic employee stories that bring their culture and moments that matter to life. If you're looking to use employee stories to attract, engage and retain talent, visit VideoMy.co or send me a LinkedIn message. I'd love to hear what you're working on. Now back to the episode.

[00:35:12] I think I want to talk a little bit about what you used to believe. What's a hill that Rachel Duran used to die on that Rachel Duran no longer has the energy to climb? Oh, goodness. Little naive Rachel Duran used to believe that everyone just intrinsically understood what marketing does and how important it is. Isn't that cute? Isn't that adorable? That's adorable.

[00:35:40] And battle worn Rachel Duran that's sitting in front of you is talking about this topic because of that not being the case at all. Right. Like understanding you have to bring people along with you. You might have to educate, but you can't like you can't over educate. You only have so much time to win somebody over. Right. And understanding other people's pain points and the empathy involved in that and understanding where they're coming from to build that business acumen. I think that's a really good answer.

[00:36:09] Do you have any final questions for Rachel? What do you wish people understood about you that might not be obvious from the work you're known for? I think that one thing that frustrates me and has been pretty consistent sometimes just overall is the idea of the left brain, right brain of she's so creative and love storytelling and she's a marketer and she's in branding. And if you remember, you may, David, I used to have like all kinds of colors hair, right?

[00:36:38] So I was really kind of put in that creative bucket. And I really wish people understood my love of math and the fact that I, you know, minored in computer science when I went back to school to really understand that backend and user experience. I think that that is just as important for marketers to understand those tech stack connections so that you can functionally operate and be able to tell that story.

[00:37:03] Not just from a creative standpoint, but from that highly technical and analytical standpoint. And I want us to all stop pretending that we have to be in one box or the other. Yeah. You have to be able to either straddle it or you have to have enough people on the team so that you can have an amazing message or creative. But you also have to understand the numbers and how to interpret and analyze that so that, so the creative can actually perform. Right.

[00:37:32] It's one thing that we've learned. It's like the most amazing brand message can just fall and completely fail if you don't understand where it should be or who it should be shown to. And I think that's the, that's the other side of it. And so a lot of people are trying to do both with one brain. Yes. And I think that it's important too, to remember, you don't have to be an expert at both or all of those things,

[00:37:57] but being, knowing enough and feeling confident enough to have those conversations with the people that can help you put those together. All right. Last question. So for, for those who are on a rocky road, not, not achieving what they really want to achieve when engaging with a hiring manager, what advice would you give a talent brander? I think a long play of building trust is really, really important.

[00:38:24] Have right off the bat already know the things that you can do for them tomorrow, the things that you can realistically deliver tomorrow that can make an impact and have a quick version of explaining to them how that will have an impact. While you work on the larger things that will build trust over time that you're not pushing them off. You're not making things too complicated. You're not doing, you know, artsy, creative stuff and they just need something done today. I think that really helps with building that trust and that trust is going to go a long way.

[00:38:52] If you want long-term success, especially when hiring goes down and you need to be able to present your value when hiring slows down. So templates, escalation paths, and being able to explain that you've been here before. Yes. And you know that you have options for what's next. Yeah. I love what typically works for something like this, right? That helps build trust too.

[00:39:21] Not saying you know for a fact it will. You want to gather more information, but letting them know, to your point, you've been there before. Like here's some tricks out of my toolbox that I can employ right away. And then we'll learn together as we go. Well, Rachel, this has been a fascinating conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.