Podcast: Cliquify’s Amit Parmar on What Platforms do for Employer Branding

Cliquify

Transcript

Mark:

Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Pfeffer. My guest today is Amit Parmar, the CEO of Cliquify. They’re an employee branding platform that helps recruiters and hiring managers create employer branding solutions that result faster cycle times, cost savings, and engagement. We’re going to talk about tools, the role of platforms, and the competitive landscape on this edition of People Tech. Hello Amit. It’s good to see you. What is Cliquify, and what makes it different?

Amit:

Yeah, thanks for having me today, Mark. Cliquify is, to put it simply, an employer branding platform that enables you to essentially do away with all these point solutions you have in a single platform to build your content. So that’s graphical content as well as video content activated across your social channels and emails and measuring all of that content all in one place. And that’s what makes us unique. We’re essentially one place for all of these things to elevate your employer brand.

Mark:

So who are the users? Are they people with marketing backgrounds? Are they talent acquisition people, recruiters? Who?

Amit:

The way our platform works is we’ve got initially the employer brand managers, and in many cases, sometimes the marketing agency is involved or marketing functions involved if there is no branding person to actually build these assets right within our editor, including video assets. And then once that environment is built, that’s when recruiters and hiring managers initially get invited to join the platform in terms of activating the stories across their social feeds. And then eventually employees start to get engaged because they see hiring managers, their managers getting engaged. So it’s like a maturity model, if you will, that is enabled by our technology that starts with recruiters and hiring managers first, and then essentially starts to get employees excited and invited to join the platform to start sharing their stories.

Mark:

So is it fair to say it puts employment marketing capabilities into the hands of people who don’t really have the background in that kind of communications?

Amit:

Absolutely. And it’s controlled because that’s a big thing for a lot of large enterprises is how do you control the narrative? So we have approval workflows. We also have templates that employees can easily pick up, and they’re very guided templates. We also have a little bit of AI where we’re actually suggesting to the employee what to write. So there’s a copy feature that is very specific to the tone and voice of that particular enterprise or the client. That’s a big feature that a lot of our users enjoy because many times, as a typical employee, even if you’re given the piece of content served to you, you don’t know what to write with it. You don’t know what to write with it in a very authentic and genuine way. We’re basically helping a non-marketing person to create those and develop those skills through our platform.

Mark:

Back in the day when the Mac was first introduced and suddenly a computer could generate things like newsletters and all of that, everybody started to create their own newsletter. And someone said, “You know what? Mac has brought us a lot of bad newsletters.” Just because you have the tool doesn’t mean you’ve got the talent for a particular task. So does Cliquify put any guardrails up to keep people out of trouble?

Amit:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it’s really owned by the organization. Within the templates that they’re creating, they can turn on certain aspects of that template that they actually want employees to edit or they can lock the whole template down. So it’s really up to the organization in terms of how much latitude they want to give to their employees in terms of building and sharing content. And we have approval workflows. So if the organization wants to turn it on and let’s say Mark, you say, “Okay, I want to share something about the culture at working at Recruiting Daily.” You share it and then it goes to approval to, let’s say you’re an employer branding person, they look at it, maybe there’s some tweaking or editing that they need to do. And then they’ll do that right within the platform and then send it back to you, Mark, to say, “Hey, this looks great.” Now you’re able to share this. So that is a feature that’s available.

Mark:

Let’s step back a little bit because one of the things that really intrigues me about this whole sort of arena is you don’t really think of companies marketing jobs, or at least you didn’t until recently. I’m wondering, what’s the dynamic behind that? Why is it important to market a job?

Amit:

Yeah, great question, Mark. I would say even 5 years ago, and it actually has nothing to do with what the labor market swings are right now, whether it’s the employers market or whether it’s the employees market or the candidate market. What it has to do with is the candidate behavior has shifted over the last 10 years or so where they want to hear more about the company. They want to get behind the curtains of the company beyond what you see on Glassdoor or on comparably… I want to hear from you, Mark, what is it like to work with you? And not necessarily a job even. I just initially want to understand, do I see myself working in this company even before I understand what the job even entails, right? So it is like marketing 101. What they teach in marketing is you got to sell the company first and what it all has to offer and then move over to, “Okay, hey, here’s a particular opportunity for you.”

What I see happening a lot these days, and we actually have data on this where we’re seeing when jobs are shared directly, they’re actually not as impactful versus a complete story about that organization. What are your benefits like? What are you doing about climate sustainability? These are all the things that candidates care about these days, and we believe that’s a trend that’s going to continue in the future where it’s not just about the job anymore, it’s the total story that candidates want to learn about and learn from your people versus the enterprise before they make that decision to click that apply button.

Mark:

This just occurs to me for the people on the employers side, do they really need another platform? I mean, wouldn’t this be better kind of integrated into an ATS or something?

Amit:

Yeah. Look, I come from the other side. So I used to be a talent leader, Mark, for a number of years. A big believer in a single unified platform, and hence what we have built because ATSs, as you know, are not inherently built to market jobs. More literally that’s what they are. They’re tracking systems. That’s how they were in their DNA. So we basically enable integrations where if a client says, “Hey, I’m using a particular ATS and I want my recruiters or my hiring managers to simply kick off Cliquify right within the ATS.” We’re able to enable that for the client in an integrated fashion.

Mark:

Can you take me under the hood a little bit or open the hood and tell me how it works? What’s the technology behind it?

Amit:

Yeah. Think of the editor first. So if you’re a marketing or a branding person, you’re probably using Adobe or Canva today. Think of that in a very similar technology that we have that’s proprietary to Cliquify. We have the editor functionality just like Canva and/or Adobe. Not as many bells and whistles, if you will, because we believe in simplicity of use. So that’s on the build side. Once the content is actually built, now you’re welcome to… A lot of our clients, they’re like, “Okay, yeah, this is great.” But let’s say I already have assets that have already built in these other platforms, you can port them over within Cliquify as well. That’s the build feature. You’re basically telling and crafting your narrative, your EVP messaging and so on.

Then you move over to, “All right, now I’m ready to actually activate this content.” It just doesn’t need to sit in a particular CMS, which by the way, we’re a CMS as well. So we’re a centralized repository of all of your assets. We’re a content management system as well. So on the activation side is when the employees get invited, hiring managers get invited along with recruiters to say, “All right, now we’ve built these stories for you around our benefits or what we’re doing to protect the environment or diversity and inclusion efforts that the company is driving. Here are all of your assets.” They’re literally handed to the user, and the user is able to then say, “All right. Yeah, today…” Let’s say, Mark, you’re passionate about giving back to the society. There’s a particular piece of asset around volunteering efforts that the company has done.

You can then go and share that template straight through your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook profile. We have a connectivity where you as a user can connect your social handles before you start sharing the content right through Cliquify. Because you’re sharing it through Cliquify, Mark, there’s a measurement component. That’s the final stage, which is, okay, I’m sharing all this content. By the way, anybody can share content, but not a lot of companies and organizations are today really looking at it in a big data way and saying, “Hey, how is it resonating with the audience out there, with the network of Mark and Mark’s hiring managers?” If Mark, you’re a recruiter. We’re able to track all of the analytics around Mark posted something about volunteerism. And then basically you’re driving all the traffic back. There’s a CTA. So you’re able to drive all the traffic back to either your career site or that particular job. Even though the asset is actually related to volunteerism, you can actually drive all the traffic and actually analyze, okay, this candidate actually came from this particular post. It has nothing to do with the job. It was all about volunteerism.

So now you can actually see what’s driving candidate behavior beyond just looking at jobs. That’s what we’ve built is a one stop shop to build, activate your content, as well as measure how it’s performing in terms of ROI back to the applicant.

Mark:

Talent acquisition has gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last few years. It’s giving birth to tools like Cliquify. What’s the competitive landscape out there for you? Do you have a lot of people you have to go against?

Amit:

Yeah. Because our strategy is to be a single platform for everything employer branding related, we’re coming across multiple tools, and our strategy is to simplify the life of the talent leader or the branding leader. Today, as I mentioned earlier, Mark, they might be using three to four different tools to build and manage and activate their employer brand and measure it. On the content editor side, we’re running up against Adobe and Canva. So that’s one piece, right? On the activation side, we’re running against some of the social media advocacy tools that are out there, like Hootsuite as an example. And then on the measurement side, we’re running up against Dynamic Signal and those kinds of companies where they’re separate platforms that are actually measuring how content is performing.

And then video. Video is huge. They’re a lot of these point solutions of video software that are out there. So we are consolidating that as well. So you no longer need a separate solution for video. You can kind of have it all in one place, and that’s how we view our competitive landscape, Mark.

Mark:

Well, Amit, I really appreciate you talking with me today. I hope sometime you’ll come back.

Amit:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity, Mark. Really great to connect.

Mark:

My guest today has been Amit Parmar, the CEO of Cliquify, 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 Pfeffer.

Image: Cliquify

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