Our next In Focus interview features multinational software company SAP and their Global Employer Brand Team, which is made up of experts in recruitment marketing, talent attraction, and engagement and employer branding. Producing Telly Award-winning video content in the employer brand space is just one of many tactics that their team is responsible for.
Here’s what we asked their team:
Where do you/where does your team gather inspiration?
We gather inspiration from our very own employees—more than 100,000 strong. Recruiting in the digital age, especially in the IT space, is a challenge. Recruiters and Talent Sourcers have to take their recruitment strategy to the next level to find the best talent. SAP has learned that by developing a strong employer value proposition and employment brand, and by coordinating efforts throughout the company, we can find the best talent and create strong brand evangelists that will help us thrive in the years to come.
What does a day look like for the team at the start of creative process?
When starting our creative process, we focus on two key questions:
- What makes a great employment brand?
- What makes a great place to work?
The key to answering these ‘what makes’ questions is understanding what employees, candidates, and the market truly think and feel toward working for a business; not what a marketing department says or ‘spins’. Real people, real authentic opinions, expressed honestly.
What do your Telly wins mean to you and the team?
Knowing that our videos attract great talent and engage audiences, but are also regarded highly by our peers is a great motivator. We continually look for ways to improve what we do, and so winning Telly Awards is a great motivator to continue to strive to be our best in the employment brand space, the best for our candidates and our employees. Having the recognition that our employer brand videos stack up against peers in commercial marketing is fantastic.
How has such a focus on people and diversity made your team different from others?
Mediocre recruitment is easy. Good recruitment is challenging. The best recruiting is more than tough: it’s an art.
Though often overlooked, recruiting can have a huge impact on an organization. What we do can make or break our organizations. If we attract average talent, the quality of the organization’s work and ultimately its financial profitability will only be average. But if we attract the best talent, our organizations will be stronger, and the bottom line can be phenomenal. It’s why talent-driven organizations tend to be the most successful.
This is where employment branding, essential to modern talent acquisition, comes into play. We need candidates to go beyond knowing and understanding SAP to actively caring about it. We need our employees to champion SAP as a great place to work. The employment brand team must harness the authentic voice of the employee to spread the word about SAP.
To find the right person, we make an effort to recruit from groups that are sometimes neglected by other companies. Historically, women have been underrepresented in the technology field and SAP is working to change that. Producing great video content that highlights these messages, showcases our people and allows our audiences to see the diversity within our organization is a huge factor in our employer brand.
