Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Ryan Naylor, the CEO of VIVAHR. VIVAHR aims to help businesses, mostly small businesses leverage their culture to improve their efforts in talent acquisition. We’re going to talk about how that works, how companies can nurture their culture and why transparency is an employer’s friend on this edition of People Tech. Welcome Ryan, it’s nice to meet you. So let’s start by talking about culture marketing. What is it, how does it work and why is it different from the usual ways people approach this?
Ryan:
Yeah. A lot of people look at recruitment marketing really as the science, which is how many eyeballs can I get my job ad in front of? How do I optimize it to be search results driven, SEO focused? What we found is candidates in today’s day and age, obviously care so much more and so much more passion around purpose, mission, vision of the company. What are the core values and the culture component, so we wanted to create a full well-rounded approach to marketing positions by leveraging culture. So we call it culture marketing, and it really focuses on not only the functional side of hiring, but the social and emotional. So what are the things that’s going to get a candidate to emotionally connect with a brand so that they want to tell everyone that they know socially where they work. And that’s kind of the mission is that we help specifically small to medium sized businesses who typically are a little bit laggards in this approach to culture alignment. And help bring them up to attracting better talent.
Mark:
So some might say that it sounds an awful lot like recruitment marketing. What are your thoughts about that? And why do you see it as different or distinct?
Ryan:
Listen, I’ve been doing recruitment marketing for over a decade. I think the nuts and bolts of recruitment marketing are PPC, keyword optimization. There’s a little bit of storytelling, but they don’t go as far as to making micro landing pages at the job level. I think a lot of companies have great organizational culture. I think you’ll agree that’s been a big focus over the last decade, is how do we create organizational culture? And a lot of times we’ve got a one career page for my entire company with 1200 employees. But you miss out on the microculture, and the microculture is at the job level. What does the day in a life look like for the diesel mechanic, as opposed to the CFO in the break room? Totally different experience, one wants air conditioning. The other one wants a really cool lunch break area, different experience. So culture marketing is telling the culture story at the job level.
Mark:
So you’ve talked a lot about how small business people are under the gun today, really under a lot of pressure. What kind of follow does that have on their hiring efforts? I mean, culture marketing sounds like something that is going to take a certain amount of thought and a certain amount of energy to really pull off when you’re a pressured business owner, or pressured CEO, how do you juggle that?
Ryan:
So we’ve seen that when employers use a text only job posting, they average around between five to 7% conversion rate, the number of candidates that see the job description to actually convert to apply. And what we’ve found is that by helping a small business, just understand the power of culture marketing by inserting a picture, one picture even. It can dramatically change the conversion rate just by giving some level of transparency. That doesn’t take a lot of time, but it’s just that extra effort to do it makes a big difference. So that’s part of our vision over at Viva HR is how do we create a more transparent recruitment experience for candidates?
So each job posting is allowed to create their own culture profile that sits on top of the job posting. So it’s pictures, videos, testimonials, experience stories at the job level that sits on top of the job description. So to a small business, you’re right, they don’t have a huge marketing budget to dedicate towards this. They don’t want to go hire a big crew, but the things that make the biggest difference oftentimes are the selfie videos. It’s using these iPhones, it’s using your technology you already have at your fingertips and making it authentic. And just presenting it in a way that’s easy to digest.
Mark:
And I apologize for the commotion. You may have just heard, I have two senior schnauzers and they make noise. Do you find when you’re talking to CEOs or someone in the C suite of 1200 person company or something like that, that you have to really convince them about the value of culture marketing or do they intrinsically get it?
Ryan:
Yeah, there’s definitely this kind of waterfall experience. You talk to CEOs over a thousand employees, they get it, they want to invest into it. They’re looking for something of this nature. As you go downstream though, you tend to find more and more resistance. And usually it comes down to you get to that 50 or less employee count. You have zero HR people inside the company. It is the CEO that’s posting the jobs, it is the CFO that’s sifting through. Maybe they even have an office manager that’s doing it and it’s just, they don’t care. It’s more about, I just need candidates today.
So to us, that’s where we’re actually spending most of our time, we love to help small businesses. We want to help bring them up to where they can see the value. We’re deploying a tremendous amount of content and research and education for those micro small business owners. To say, Hey, how you’ve been doing it in the past is not going to get you good talent in the future. Here’s what your peers are doing that happen to have more employees than you do. And let’s get on the same page, because you’re right the conversations it’s just different at the different stages.
Mark:
And one of the things I wonder is we were talking about recruitment marketing before, but how do you think company culture fits into the overall recruiting process? I mean, what’s its role?
Ryan:
Well, I think company culture is so vague and I think that’s one of my biggest pet peeves is it’s different for everyone. There’s not a clear definition as to what it means, cut and dry. But I believe that small businesses, they look at company culture as how do I treat each other inside the workplace to maximize efficiency in our functions of our jobs. To others, it might be our purpose, our mission, it’s our drive. And as we’re down streams talking to small business leaders, we look at company culture to say, how do you tell a transparent story as to what your culture is? Don’t paint a picture of what it is not and what you want it to be. Paint a picture of what it is. Because when you do get that candidate that jumps on and joins your team, you don’t want them to hit a bump in the road in their first two, three weeks working for you and then bounce, because they realize there was a misalignment. So company culture to us is telling the culture story, as it lies.
Mark:
Let me shift gears for a little bit, the labor market’s kind of weird right now with this perceived imbalance. And I’m wondering, how do you think that dynamic impacts culture marketing and vice versa?
Ryan:
Well, I think you’re seeing a lot of companies they’re shifting their focus of hiring to the best fit to the quickest someone will say yes to the job. You’re seeing transition from the great resignation to the great booming as well. You’re seeing candidates that kind of got the FOMO. They’re hearing peers, chasing dollars, getting raises, moving. And now they also quickly landed at jobs that didn’t fit their true purpose or core values, because they got that quick raise. And now they’re bouncing back to where they were before. So I think there’re arguments on both side of the table here.
Job seekers are realizing, and maybe some sooner than others, that chasing that dollar probably didn’t add a lot more to their value of their life other than a little monetary uplift. But I think the employers are realizing, Hey, we can’t sacrifice quality just to chase a pulse, just to get someone in the door that said yes to this job. I know the labor market is tight, but we do need to have some level of barrier there as to what we really will as a go versus no go on the right hire. And it’s tough. I get it a lot of businesses, I mean, they feel the pressure. They need someone in there, but at the sacrifice of hurting your customer base, product errors, oversight, it could really compromise a business.
Mark:
So coming back to culture marketing, how do culture and culture marketing fit together? I mean, do you need a really strong culture to successfully execute culture marketing? Or can you use culture marketing to strengthen a culture? Or how do they get along, I guess is my question.
Ryan:
I love that question because I think a lot of businesses are resistant to sharing who they are as a company, because they’re a little bit, maybe embarrassed. Their peers might have better t-shirts for the team. They might have more lab at barbecues on Fridays for company parties. But the reality is it’s just starting with a transparent story of here’s who we are. It’s okay if we have a little bit of a dusty office and our garbage don’t get taken out every single night, but this is where we work. This is who we are. This is our vision and mission. I think that’s the authenticity that actually job seekers are appreciating now more than the company that goes over the top to have these fabricated elaborate video production.
Even I’ve seen companies bringing in hired talent to represent the culture and tell this story. And it’s like, it’s just giving people the wrong impression. And I’ve seen firsthand companies that we work with. See their talent, go out the back door as fast as they come in the front door because it’s not authentic. And I believe that companies can start with their culture, their culture marketing, as it lies. Just play as it is now with your culture, and just by demonstrating it, I think companies notice areas of opportunity for improvement.
Mark:
Let me ask you one last question, which is, you just mentioned authenticity. And how do you go about building an authentic culture? It seems to be a very important concept, but is it something you can plan for and design? Can you design a culture to be authentic, or is there something else to it to make it work?
Ryan:
I think it’s two parts of this. There’s how it’s always top down. And those that disagree, they’re probably just wrong. But the leadership’s got to buy in, and if you walk in with a cliquey attitude as I’m a C level executive, and you’re not willing to just go in and ask people how their day is. That’s where it starts. It starts at the interconnected office, how you’re really establishing leadership to your everyday employee is where it starts. But I think another part reminds me of a great company based in Phoenix, Arizona. A1 Garage Door run by Tommy Mellow. This is a company that he started it in his twenties, a garage door repair service. The guy is so over the top, transparent employees don’t have any other option, but to just love and trust where things are going. Every day, the numbers are on the board, real time data, how much revenue the company is making, how many phone calls the company is making. It’s plastered everywhere.
You cannot go in a room in their company without a monitor showing here we are as a company. And it’s spelled out here’s, where’s our green marks. Here’s our goals. Here’s our area where we’re going to have some concerns. And if we’re in this red area, Hey folks, we’re going to have to have a team meeting here to discover what’s going on. And people buy into it because it’s so transparent. It doesn’t come up as a surprise to them. But part two is they celebrate the wins together. If the sales team that’s out, meeting with the customer, exceeds their goals, everyone in the call center, all technicians, everyone celebrates that goal together. And that creates a winning culture that we all celebrate each other’s achievements in a very transparent way. And that’s the kind of stuff that establishes trust and authenticity from day one.
Mark:
Well, Ryan, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.
Ryan:
Hey, my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Mark:
My guest today has been Ryan Naylor, the CEO of VIVAHR. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report, we’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry, find us at www.HCMTechnologyReport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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