Welcome to the Relancer podcast where we talk about talent acquisition topics. I'm Eero, the co -founder of Relancer, the platform where employers connect with freelancer recruiters. Today we have Nadia and we will be talking about how to realign corporate and employer band. Welcome Nadia. Hey Eero, so good to be on the show again. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's already the third time so we have like a mini series. This is the first for Relancer at least.

It's actually the first for me as well. I haven't done a series with any other company so far. So first series for me as well. Cool. So for the listeners who missed our last two episodes where we talk about using storytelling for job descriptions and interviewing, can you tell them a little bit about your experience with corporate and employer brand? Yeah, great question. I think that...

Most companies have this idea that an employer brand is all about this, you know, very specific strategy, but back to storytelling and our series about storytelling, I actually think the more authentic and the more transparent story that you're telling the world about the company should be part of your employer branding strategy, right? And so it is about being authentic about why people are working at

the company, right? What it's like to work there and what are those core components that make it such an amazing place to be. So what is the value proposition, right? But if that value proposition isn't authentic or isn't real, people will realize that very, very quickly, not just during the interviewing process, but if they do accept a position with the company, they'll leave, right? Your employee retention will absolutely show based on the 

authenticity of this story that you're telling the world. And many companies also gain a reputation, right? And so based on the story that you're telling, if that is different from the reputation that you have, it's probably a place where you either need to go through some sort of transformation or change to add that authentic story to the world of what your company is all about and what is the value proposition of working there.

Yeah, the reputation can be very different from reality. I think maybe the reputation is not very different from the reality, but the story can be very different from reality. Yeah. And so from a simplicity standpoint, I don't think it should be different. Right? If it's different, you need to start asking yourself why. If your value proposition is this is a great place to be and it's not, right? It's probably up to the leadership team

to first sit and change that before you start selling this beautiful story about what is so great about working at the company. I think the great saying, like, fake it until you make it. If you're a startup, it's really difficult to tell this amazing story because you're just starting out, right? You're still discovering the environment. And so, of course, the organization is going to go through major change and evolve as the company continues. But...

I think it's important that the founders or if it's already past that stage and it's more of an executive team or leadership team are just completely authentic and transparent about what it is that is the value proposition of working at this company. It could even be as simple as the mission, right? It could be as simple as sharing a bond and having a shared mission or vision

that really is working for everyone that works there. And sometimes you need to ask your employees, like, why are you still working at this company? And get that value proposition or that story from them. And I think that can help form a more authentic employer brand very early stages. Yeah, I think even startups in the early days are quite good at telling the story of the product.

But they're not so good probably about like employer brand or in a way because it probably is quite a mess. So the actual reality is not so... Some people like it. But the actual reality is not maybe so good because there is no benefits and then so on in the early days. And then maybe the compensation is not so good. But there is only this great vision and story where people come and join. So in the early days, it of course changes. But yeah.

Yeah, but if you're authentic about the chaos, right, that stage of the organization, I also believe there are certain people that is so ideal for that stage of the organization that won't always be ideal for the next stage of the organization, right? So if you're being authentic about, hey, we're in this chaotic point where the job descriptions are a bit fluid and ambiguous and not as

formalized as what it would be when you are 500 or 1000 people. But if you're interested in helping us build this company and get early stage stock options, that's usually quite an interesting value proposition. And if you're transparent about the chaotic experience or high performance that's required that early days, right, or becoming a founding engineer of a company, that in itself does help with the footprint of the company and

for some people, being part of that early stage product shaping or early stage process shaping is extremely lucrative and is a value proposition in itself. But I think if you're like, we have all our ducks in the row and this is the best company in the world, but behind the scenes, it's utter chaos. I think what you're selling and the people that you're hiring is gonna turn so quickly that your attrition is gonna start painting this very strange picture to people.

And so I do believe like even early stage, the more authentic and real you are about what people are stepping into, the better they will succeed in those roles because they know what to expect, right? And they're not, it's not a fake story, it's a real story. And so I still think real stories sells. And people prefer knowing that versus this perfect world. We, you know, Eero, you and I.

Early days, well, when we were thinking about the series, we spoke a little bit about the corporate and employer brand elements. And I also know an early stage company might have not even nailed the corporate brand, right? But to me, I think if you think about the two brands, the one is a value proposition for the customer and you'll probably know what it is from even early days, right? You will need to figure out like if you had funding

or if you're bootstrapping, you need to know what it is that your company, that your customers are finding as valuable and what is the value proposition of the company. And the employer brand is the value proposition for employees and people, right, to come and join and work there. And so I see the one as like prospecting customers and the other one is prospecting talent and potential candidates.

And so I do see alignment between these two worlds. Right. And what we often see is some organizations are even building products for the candidates that they are touching, right. That they are engaging, that they are, that they are sourcing, right. You could be sourcing someone that could be a potential customer. And that's why I see like branding as a whole and as a function can actually have a lot of overlap

where you can lean into different areas of that marketing brand or marketing strategy to start forming an employer brand. So you mentioned that the corporate brand is basically building the value proposition around the customer and then the employer brand is about building it around the candidate you want to get into the company. So are there any other differences and why it's important to align these two brands? Yeah.

I will again say, depending on the stage of the company, you can't always just align these things off the bat, but at a certain stage as your company matures, you want to align them. And I think the most important example of this is imagine you have this blueprint. We spoke about blueprint also very briefly, but imagine you have this blueprint or a slogan that everyone can remember. A very good example of that is Nike.

If you had to ask a 25 year old that's starting out their career and that's a job seeker versus an 85 year old volunteer giving yoga in a local park versus a 45 year old businessman, right, or business woman, you'll probably come across everyone knowing that Nike's slogan is "Just do it", right? You can ask these people at different stages of their careers, but they'll know it.

And I think what Nike did really well, and there's obviously a much more complex strategy behind it now and how the brand's evolved, but what they did really well in their early days was to align their employer brand was like, "Just do it", come and join us to just do this, right? And I think everyone knows Nike's slogan. And if you're interviewing with the company, the first thing that's going to come to mind is Nike's slogan, not the careers page, not all the amazing things that's on there.

But you're going to start realizing that the people that work there is also about just getting things done, just doing it, right? Not talking about it, but doing it. And then if you go into Nike's careers page, you'll obviously see how they used that as the foundation and then built on it. And so I see a slogan like that, like a little blueprint, something as basic as that can really change someone's perception of a company.

And as the organization matures its marketing brand, if you don't go and align your employer brand, you're probably targeting the wrong people. You're probably hiring from the wrong market. So imagine you are serving all these enterprise customers all of a sudden. You started out, you had a lot of very small customers, individual customers. I would nearly say like SMEs. And as the company progresses and the enterprise space became

a core market of theirs, if you don't start aligning your employer brand to this corporate or enterprise brand, you are not going to come across even to your customers in the way that you're aiming, right? And in the way that you're planning. If you don't go and hire people that can also sit in front of those enterprise customers. And so you have to then start evolving this very scrappy employer brand into what your marketing brand is and start having a unified approach

around what is this value proposition of working here and if working here, how are you going to impact those customers? What is that bigger mission or beautiful story that you're telling the world on what you want to achieve, right? Or how you impacting the world of work, enterprise sector, customer sector, customer story, et cetera. Do I understand it correctly that it's important to have them

the corporate brand into the employer brand so you get the right people in. Otherwise, there is a risk that they come only for the whatever your employer brand is about, but they might miss what you're actually doing and what you want to achieve with the company. Yeah, absolutely. You know, here at Camunda, I can imagine where our founders, when they started the company, I can imagine the employer brand looking very different 10 years ago than what it's looking right

right now, right? If you look at even how our customer trajectory has changed and evolved and how we have launched ourselves into this enterprise market, when you're hiring an engineer for just a team that's building features, if that engineer is going to be engaging or communicating directly with enterprise customers, you are looking for someone very different, right, than an engineer that's only going to engage in the open source community.

Or an engineer that's only doing backend work and doing no customer engagement, right? And so that proposition changes. And so as the company evolves and emotionally matures, so does your employer brand. I'll never forget the slogan when I was at GitLab and how it changed. I remember joining the company and we were still talking about open source repositories back in 2015 and 2016. And then by the time I left,

it felt like the whole world knew that GitLab was a DevOps platform, an end -to -end DevOps platform. And I remember selling that proposition. I was a recruiter at GitLab when I joined, right? So not in a senior management role until much later in my career at GitLab. But I remember being a recruiter. And when we had that employer brand change, being able to sell to a product manager that we are the world's first end -to -end DevOps platform.

And the product manager sitting in front of me that I'm interviewing and selling this proposition for, really buying into the idea of like, "Wow, I saw GitLab was just an open source repository. This is amazing. I want to be part of that." , right? And so I think it is about that story is going to change and Camunda's story has changed and we are now attracting, I would say the world's best talent when it comes to process orchestration. But what that looked like was not the same thing 10 years ago.

And so as I think about aligning these two things like marketing and employer brand, it's also going to change. It's not going to stay the same. It's not something you can like write down and put on a board or a Figma page or your careers page and just leave alone, right? You're going to have to iterate and evolve as the marketing and brand evolves as well and start keep selling that same story.

So what are the signs that there is a misalignment between those corporate and employer brands? I think the number one sign is you'll have a candidate sitting in an interview that has no idea what the product or the company does and really has no interest in the mission because they probably don't know. Right. And so if you're not telling the world this bigger, what is the marketing brand? What is our company's mission?

If you're keeping that in private and you haven't aligned your marketing brand to your employer brand, no one will know. And that doesn't make any sense. Why wouldn't you want to be transparent about this mission? Why wouldn't you want to tell this story? So I often say when candidates, including highly technical candidates, have no idea what the company does, it's not on the candidate. It's probably on the talent acquisition team, right? It's probably on the sourcing team that hasn't been selling the right

value proposition, right? And the right brand. I have experience with that. I can imagine. I think I told you also, at some point, I think our, in a way, employer brand or whatever, our job description and stuff were quite good. So people would come and want to join because of that. Then I would ask them, hey,

what does Relancer do? They really struggled. All of them really struggled. And then I was thinking, is this our fault that we are not communicating well enough? So it's not clear enough or like they're not interested into the company or what we do. So I had very tough questions on that side. If you have invested into the corporate band or is it...

In the case it's clear, then at least you know that, okay, they haven't done the homework maybe well enough and for whatever reason they came and wanted to join your company. But if in our case, I think maybe it wasn't clear enough on that side. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's happened to every single company that I've ever worked at and every single...

company I've ever dealt with, even when I was still an executive sourcing, right? Where a candidate would sit in front of me and have no idea what the company is doing. And I do think it's on, it's on employer branding, it's on talent acquisition to sell that. If you also imagine it gets so granular, right? If you, you have this opportunity to send people emails, right? Because everything is a template now and nowadays, and we've all got access to automation

and stage automation when you're reaching out to candidates or when you're sourcing passive talent. And so even the way you have shaped that template and how it's landing in front of someone is about what does the company do? Like what is this value proposition of working there? And if that's fake and creates uncertainty, one, you'll probably see a reduction in response. So your response rates will probably be well below 50%. Or,

they might engage, but they still don't know what the company does. And so there's this weird uncertainty where they first want like an exploratory discussion to truly understand what the company does before they're even willing to step into an interview. And that's kind of the right way, right? If it's not clear. And so I think all these things become very granular. It's not just about the careers page. It's not just what you're telling each other about what your employer branding strategy is. It is about what you're willing to share

from a transparency perspective. And I still think transparency probably wins the first prize here, right? Because again, if you are telling yourself, "Wow, I need to target this passive talent specifically to my enterprise customers and this stage of the organization we're in right now", and you're not telling the candidates what the value proposition is and what the company is doing or the mission or the product, then I think you're doing something wrong, right?

And I do think that's how you also start attracting the wrong people that might look really good on paper, but doesn't have the skills for that stage or the competencies to handle that stage of the organization. So how do companies come up with the great boilerplate story? And I will ask you some additional part on that also. So let's take the example of Nike's Just Do It.

I haven't done the research what they had before. What I see that companies often usually do in the beginning, they want to be more like GitLab saying that we are end -to -end DevOps platform. So people understand what they do. And at some point, it becomes something bigger. So Nike's just do it is like a lifestyle, something saying. So it's not anymore about sneakers or clothes or whatever they're doing. It's a lifestyle thing. And then...

the brand is around that. So it's something more. Otherwise it's very hard to compete probably if you're saying, I don't know, we make the best shoes in the world. Like there is probably other companies doing that. So how should companies come up with a boiler plate and how does it evolve in time? Like as they get bigger maybe. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen enough people in culture teams and talent acquisition working closely with marketing.

So I will start with that. I think if you are not friends with your marketing team, and if you don't have a relationship and good collaboration between those two teams, start there, right? And if you don't have a marketing team, find out who at the company is responsible for some sort of branding, right? And for some sort of marketing strategy and initiatives. Even if it's the sales teams, very early days, you might have a chief revenue officer or a head of sales

that is shaping that value proposition for the sales teams, find out what they're saying. Find out what are they telling the world? What are they telling their customers? And then use that to come up with your own boilerplate that will really start attracting candidates to work at the company. I think I've heard beautiful boilerplates in the past about like, you know, even some of my previous employers saying something like,

let's put a billion people and dream jobs, right? That is a really nice slogan. That's very attractive for someone that is potentially passive and wants to have an impact on the future of work, right? But there's many, many others. I also think you've got to start figuring out what is attractive about your organization. And if it, whether it's one thing or five or 10 things, find that.

Find those core elements and utilize that, right? And start really honing in on what makes it attractive. I've been thinking a lot about, if I had to think about five core things to build an employer brand and to reach that perfect boilerplate, I think it starts by who are you attracting? So it starts first by like, who are you targeting and who are you attracting to your company? It's also about then aligning with that marketing team or branding team

or whoever in the company is responsible for the value proposition that's customer facing and start collaborating with them, start forming a really good bond and relationship with them. Because whatever they're going to be telling the world in their go -to -market strategy or in their customer outreach, if you form alignment there early on, you're going to have this beautiful employer brand that lines up directly next to your corporate brand.

And we spoke about transparency earlier and I told you at first price, I think number three is always being hyper -transparent and being so authentic about what the company does and what it's like to work there. I remember a company told me that they have a very high performing culture, right? And I remember questioning the company and asking them in the interview process, tell me what high performance means to you and what it doesn't mean to you.

And the CEO was saying high performance to me means I don't need to know what this person is working on. I need to know that they understand the results and that they are going to do anything possible in alignment with the company's values to achieve those results. And that I don't need to worry about that day to day. To me, that's high performance, right? And I was like, and what is high performance not? And this CEO was saying high performance is not fixing every problem with long hours. And I was like,

That speaks to me. That's interesting. I'm glad that you mentioned that because high performing culture can come across as potentially burnout culture, right? And so again, you want to remove assumptions. You want to be hyper authentic and transparent about what it's like to work there. I think the fourth one is really nailing the candidate experience, but also the employee experience. So,

that hiring journey right into onboarding, right into the 30, 60, 90 day check process. Find out, get a meaningful process together, keep iterating, keep making it better and make sure that you really nail that journey, right? And then the fifth one, the last one is do what you say you will do. If you say the process is X, if you say the brand does Y, make sure that is true and that it's facts and that it's not

so ambiguous that no one even at the company understands what you mean when you say X or what you mean when you say the company has got a specific culture or environment. Yeah, I would like to go deeper into the transparency part because I think this is the biggest mistake in a way you can make. Like if you take this startup example, you might not have...

all those fancy things. But I remember very well when I started doing my first startup or whatever, people would come and say, hey, you're so lucky you can do this. This is the dream. You can do that. And basically, there is always people who would love to do that. And I think the worst example I have seen is that one friend of mine went to a company

that now is quite big and become like a corporate. But they still had all these values and all the employer branding was, I don't know if it's not updated or they just want to look in a way different that they actually are. And when he joined, it was so different from the reality. So in that way, he didn't stay very long for there because he...

He joined for the other reasons. So he expected that to be the reality. And if it's not, then there can be negative consequences, I think, in general. One is, of course, that people should not stick around. Because in a way, I don't know if it's the reality. Because everybody is a little bit like candidates will look a little better. And the companies want to look a little bit better. But there is a line. It can't be day and night

difference, there can be a little bit like buffer looking a little bit better than it actually is. Yeah, I have a secret. There's a select handful of people in the world that knows this about me, but I once took an offer. It's in the last nine years at a company that lasted four days. It was the first time in my life where I resigned on day four. And it's exactly that. This position that was sold to me,

and the reality of the company and where they were at was day and night. It was literally the exact opposite of what I expected, right? And initially, when I went through the shock of joining the company and on day one, realizing, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's a couple of things that I asked during the interview process that, you know, there wasn't transparency and they weren't real with me. I'm not going to say they were outright liars, but they certainly knew how to paint this beautiful picture

that absolutely wasn't true, right? And I remember sitting there and first going through like a guilt, like a self guilt trip where I blamed myself and go, how could I have missed it? How did I not ask the right questions? What did I do wrong? And after really unpacking it and finding all my interview notes and going through, I love documentation, right, so I documented everything. I had everything electronic. I knew what questions were asked. I knew what they told me.

I also had to double click on some of the granular items that I went into. And it turned out to just be the exact opposite of what I expected. And I made a very brave and very courageous decision in December, which is a very hard time in South Africa to find other work, right, to resign on day four. Obviously with my partner and my husband's blessing, because I think if I did that on my own

as a parent, that would have been very difficult and many people don't have the privilege of just resigning, right? But I made that decision because I realized this is not what I signed up for. When I signed that contract, the picture they told me about their employer brand, the story that they told me about the company's mission was utter rubbish and I cannot buy into rubbish. I cannot start a relationship on my trust being broken that badly. And...

I mean, I pivoted and I was able to carry on with my career and it turned out to be great in the end. It turned out to be great at other companies, right? Not at this company. But my point is that company really lacked transparency. And I remember thinking, why is there so little on the internet about them? And that became a red flag. It could also be a bias now. But if I see a company that has no information out there that has a

lack of transparency, it becomes a red flag for me because I genuinely worry that what they say what they say what it is compared to what it really is to work there is probably not the same thing. I think or at least for me employer brand... the big part of that is culture. So what is culture not about and what is it really about? Yeah good question.

I'll start by saying that a company will form a culture, whether you plan to have a specific culture or not, right? So if you imagine that you'll just wing it and no matter what stage the company is at, you'll just see where it goes. I don't think that's ever a good idea. I even think as early stage as that founding stage, that pre -funding or bootstrapping stage, or if you're much further along, you've got to

have intentionality about the culture you want to create. And that might compose of a set of values or principles or boundaries, right? To help folks understand what good looks like and the direction you want to take the environment into. But to me, it is really about like those core components. Some companies call it values, some companies call it principles, right? And then there's many others.

And I think there are organizations in this world that's doing really well by defining like 5 to 10 core components, right? And if I had to name five off the bat today, I think the five things that I would immediately think about is what is the company's mission and strategy? Because that's going to impact the culture. No matter what your product is, no matter what your mission is, it will have a cultural impact on the environment, right? And the second thing is, is those values.

and those principles and boundaries, how you're setting boundaries with each other, how you're giving each other feedback, how are you deciding who's gonna work there? So is it skills, is it values, is it competencies, is it some form of technical assessment, those values? The third one is how you pay people, right? It is completely okay when you absolutely do not have the compensation ranges a company

that has major funding that's already doing, I don't know, $2 million ARR or $1 billion ARR, right? It's completely okay not to pay what those companies are paying. It's not your market, right? But how you pay people and how you talk about it is important, right? The transparency you create around pay and explaining what you came up with in terms of your pay structure, your compensation philosophy is important

from day one, because as you scale and as you progress, it either will need to change, right, or it's going to create a lot of problems for you if you don't get it right in the beginning. And then I think the fourth one to me is probably how you consider diversity, equity and inclusion, but maybe also accessibility under DEI. Do everyone have the same access to...

if it's benefits or if it's company perks or if it's documentation or information or transparency, like how you provide equitable access in your environment and how much you care about DEI. And then I think about the fifth one is your operating model, whether you are hybrid, remote, in office, it doesn't matter, but it is going to impact your culture. And I mean, there's probably like five more I can come up with, but

I think those first five is probably really important to start thinking about. This will impact our culture. What is our culture if I take these five components and then start saying what the culture is? But if it's completely organic and you let people just shape it, even every new person you add to the company is going to impact the culture and it will change and it should change, right? You have to evolve as a company, but...

You've got to be in control and you've got to do it with intention. You have to be transparent about what those components are that matter most. And I like taking those and then pulling it through into performance reviews and pulling it through into feedback conversations and pulling it through into compensation cycles. For example, if you're not aligning to the company's values, that I could give you feedback on that. If you're not aligning to the company's mission or strategy or business sort of,

trajectory that I can give you feedback on that because that's going to impact the culture and how we communicate to each other. Right. And the same about pay. If you can't give me feedback on pay and I'm like, no, this is what I pay. I don't want to hear anything that also makes it really difficult. Right? And so I think if there's transparency from the start around what matters most in this company's culture, it helps to create all these other beautiful processes. And you can start

operationalizing that culture elements into all your people operations and employee experience journeys. So something that we discussed earlier was that culture is not about pool parties and ping pong tables. You mentioned five different things. Are these the things that people really care about or is there anything else we could talk about there?

Gosh, I think there's a lot of things that people care about. If I have to think about like, we're in May 2024, right? If I had to think about what people care about right now, it's probably flexibility as a culture. No one likes to be micromanaged in May 2024. No one, right? People love flexibility. So I do think people care about that.

And if you can weave that into your culture, great. If you can't, because of the stage that you're at or your leadership style that you have created, right, then be real with yourself to see, do I want to reach flexibility into my culture? Do I want to gain? I also think there are still many people that care about how they're being paid. So I will say one of those five elements do matter. But I don't think it's about the paid check.

I think it's about how did you get to pay me this amount? If you can explain to me transparently why am I getting this amount of money and I understand it, then I think people truly care about that. It's less about the amount of zeros and less about the actual amount in their pockets and it's more about how did you find... What method did you use to pay me this much? Because if I can understand that, you're going to build trust with me.

But I think there are many, many other things. I think depending on where you're in what career stage, so which demographic you're speaking to, it might be benefits, but it might not be benefits, right? It might be healthcare in third world countries where companies and the government does not offer healthcare, right? So I think it depends on the demographic. And if you're in a global environment, you've got to start figuring out what do your employees want if you want to hire more of them.

you know, if you want to keep hiring into this culture and into this environment that is performing, how do you keep elevating those things to form your culture and then telling people that is how you build your culture? I think the bigger, I wouldn't say maybe it's a mistake, but it's quite common. What, what I see is like, let's take the job description example. They would have some, like a lot for requirements in there. And then they would have like, I have a, I don't know...

Free pizza, ping pong table and I don't know, game nights. Game nights is quite in a way good probably. But I saw a really good LinkedIn post on this that don't give me like free food, give me days off and don't give me, I don't know, ping pong table, give me flexibility. So these are more of example what people really care about and what can make a big impact. And...

And sometimes maybe you can't afford everything, but it's not so important. I think it's important to understand who you as a company are, what culture you have, what you want to do. And then to find those people who want to do the same thing and who will fit in into that culture. Otherwise you try to be somebody else and then you actually don't need to be because there is people who's going to

join you as you are. Yeah, this pizza example is so, so good. When I joined Remote in my first three months, I came up with a concept of starting a self -care day every single quarter. Once a quarter, we would, you know, tell the whole company to take a day off. And we were really clever about it because we also knew we can't close our doors every quarter once a quarter, considering we have global customers,

enterprise customers, we have payroll, we have finance people, we have legal people, right? The company has to keep running, but we did it over a week or two week period, right? And we would call it self -care week. And then any time in that week, eventually it became two weeks, you could take one day for self -care and it was all about you. It was just about taking care of yourself. And it had to do with mental health. It had to do with high performance. It had to do...

with bringing the concept of rest in. You're allowed to work really hard, but you're also allowed to rest. You're allowed to take a mental break from work because if you're resting well, and if you're taking care of yourself in a really great way, you'll be way more productive at work. And I cannot tell you how well that plan landed with our employees, and it became a cultural element.

People cared about it so much. We never asked people to post on social media about their self -care day. We had an internal channel for that. But what was interesting is on every quarterly self -care day, I would see thousands of posts on LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter, now X. I'm not on Facebook from a business perspective, so I don't know if my colleagues posted on Facebook, but I saw all these self -care

day images just popping up and that started painting a picture of remote.com , right? It started painting this beautiful picture that Remote cares about self -care and they care about mental health. And I think what that reached is you can work really hard but you can also rest really hard. Not work hard, play hard, work hard, rest hard. And I think that was never a slogan or a boilerplate I would have used.

But this is probably a free gift to someone, right? It's a really great way to take care of people when you give something back. It had, they didn't have a monetary value. So I've been thinking about this for a lot. Did the company spend money on that self -care day? I don't think so. Because, because we rotated it, we didn't have a bulk, like a large amount of people that were just gone and not doing their work. And because we had all these time zones, it was a 24 /7 environment,

things would just continue, right? Because you can hand off to someone and it was like a follow the sun model was out of any person having to follow the sun. So I don't even think Remote lost a single cent to give this day. And because we had unlimited time off with a minimum of 20 days a year, and these were additional days, it became a minimum of 24 days a year, right? And so it started sending a picture

that Remote wants everyone at the company to take a minimum of 24 days off every year. Not maximum, there was no max, but it sent a picture that I need to rest for at least 24 work days every single year. Not 15, not 10, not 17 – 24. And I think we are at some stage also aligned it to what is the country that's got the most amount of annual compulsory mandatory leave?

Let's find that country and let's make sure we cover that so everyone globally has an equitable experience, right? And it sent to picture that you were allowed to rest, you were allowed to work hard, you were allowed to be very high performing, you're allowed to drive this beautiful mission, but you have to rest and you have to take care of yourself. And I think that's why many people are still at remote .com today, right? And still thriving in that environment.

And they've gone through many changes. They've evolved the employer brand. They've evolved their marketing brand. Their product is evolved, right? It's a different company from when I joined back in 2019, 2020. But people stayed. Yeah, I think there is one very important factor that has to be in there is that the leadership actually also takes those days off like, otherwise...

It's the example also in Netflix. I think they have this that you can take as many days off as you want, but if nobody does, and if the leadership doesn't, then everybody's feeling like if he's not taking or she's not taking, then how can I take it off? So it's very important in that. And I imagine you probably had a really good communications if it went well. Like we have that also in Relancer and we also in Estonia, we have 28 days. So.

Amazing. Well done. You beat me. We have 28 plus, we give some extra if they really need it or whatever. So we have it open. So there is this. But it also comes to the point that the leadership has to take them. Otherwise people don't want or will feel guilty. And that's really bad if you take time off to...

For yourself and you need it, but you feel guilty about it, then it has like, in a way, quite bad effect on that part. And you just said something spot on. That leadership behavior does build culture. So how leadership shows up for these initiatives, how leadership behaves day to day will directly impact what the company culture is like, because people love mimicking, right? And...

nearly look up to leaders. And so what they see they're going to be doing. And so if a leader doesn't take leave, this person won't take leave and they will see it as the norm, right? And that's also where I think the misalignment starts happening, where you send this picture out to the world that you have all these amazing things, but in reality it's not happening. It's probably because your leadership team isn't showing up for any of those cultural elements that you're trying to build.

That's the mistake you take when you see what everybody's doing. Maybe you try to copy it without thinking if this is something for you. For example, there is still a lot of companies, like if you take the micromanagement, there are definitely cultures where people are still used to that. And if you would say, hey, think independently now, they would struggle. So in a way, if that works in there and they feel safe with that,

I wouldn't say it's bad in the end. There are many ways to achieve goals and business goals. Whatever works for you guys, just keep doing it if you're happy with that. I want to know also when companies grow and mature, how it will affect both brands. I think you said it's not something that you make and forget. I really think that's why you need that

bond and relationship between your marketing and people team. And, you know, we're talking about talent acquisition and employer brand, but remember employer brand is also internal employees. It's impacting the internal employees, the people you've already hired, right? And so I see this as a continuous relationship that needs to keep evolving. I was so lucky at Remote where the marketing teams,

you know, persona that they were targeting was me, right? They were literally looking for all the VP of people and culture or CPOs or HR directors or folks that were working as a head of people somewhere around the world. And so we could really work together and they could utilize me to help with the storytelling and employer brand because they knew they were selling to people just like me, not my demographic,

not my skin color, not my hair color, not who I am, not my South African history, but my job title, right? And so that really helped in alignment with marketing and employer brand. What I'm seeing what's working really well at Camunda right now is the marketing brand has evolved, right? Our go -to -market strategy has evolved beautifully and how we're speaking to customers has changed. But if we don't start speaking to candidates in the same way,

we're selling an old product, we're selling an old brand, the previous version, which isn't good enough anymore. And so if I'm still talking about something like automating processes, and I'm not using the term process orchestration, right? End -to -end process orchestration, I'm not speaking to the marketing brand. And if I'm speaking to a product manager, engineer, salesperson, someone to join,

you know, the talent acquisition team, they simply won't understand the product or what the bigger picture is. And if you don't understand those things, it's really difficult to buy into it, especially when it's a passive candidate. And so I do think it's an ongoing iteration. It's not something you can just plug in and leave it, right? You've got to continuously work with your marketing team. A great way to do that is, as I mentioned earlier, to get granular, to look at templates, to do...

To ask their sales development reps, what does the outreach templates look like? How do they reach out to a customer? When you start looking at that and you're finding that language that's in the go -to -market and marketing branding strategy, and you're mapping that to your employer brand, you are doing two things. Not only are you attracting talent and being transparent about what the company does, but you're also creating a community of people.

You know, you interview so many people every day. You're creating a massive community of people that now knows exactly what the company does and starts using that boilerplate, right? I think, Eero you will agree with me. When you decline someone, and I think we speak about it in one of the episodes of the series, if someone is being declined, you want them to either go away and tell someone else to go and work there. You want them to become your employer branding advocate.

Or you want them to become a customer, right? And it's the same in branding. If that candidate really understands that boilerplate, that messaging, they are going to tell their boss. Not that, hey, I interviewed with this company, but they might say, hey, you might need to chat to Camunda about our process orchestration in our finance team or in our engineering team or in our logistics team, right? Because I've heard great things about them. Because this person,

really understood the employer brand during the interview process. And that did happen at companies like Remote and GitLab. We would interview all these amazing people that weren't necessarily successful for that role because I could only give it to one person at a time, right? I could only hire, I don't know, 800 people that year or a year at Camunda, 120 or 100 people this year.

All the other people become a talent community. And if you sell that brand, they can also become a customer community. And so I think it's about that. Yeah, it's ongoing. You can basically with one effort, like if you have aligned the corporate and let's say marketing brand and employer brand, then you have this opportunity to in a way get new customers,

potential customers. If they don't maybe buy, if somebody asks them, they will be able to give a reference and the word of mouth is the strongest out there. So in that way, if you have communicated well and they understand what you do, then if they give a word to mouth recommendation, and I see it a lot like happening actually. And I see even people sending clients:

Hey, this is a good lead for you. If they have been through the process, they like it, they like the company, but for whatever reason, they, for example, didn't join, they still recommend and send them clients. So it's definitely a huge opportunity to use if you do it well. Yeah, absolutely. But again, it's not about bows and whistles, right? It's about being so real about it because that person is going to experience it that when you're trying to make up, I don't know,

smoke and mirrors, how they call people just talking nonsense about the company and what it's like to work there, their candidates will realize at some way along the line, they will see the misalignment, people that work at the company will leave, and if that's not the authentic story, and so again, as long as you're authentic and transparent about what it's really like, I do actually think it's a way better experience for that candidate, and the story they're gonna tell is way better

than making up some nonsense story that they can't even retell because they felt that it wasn't a good experience. Or that's going to hurt your brand, right? If they start talking like this is a toxic culture, they absolutely tried to sell me something it's not. I really didn't believe a single word that they said. I think then you're also harming your employer brand. And so I think it still comes down to authenticity and just being who you are and just being very real about the...

the brand and what it's like to work there. Yeah. People are very good at reading body language, so you can say them or people who will say that, hey, I don't know, we don't have any micromanagement and in their body language, you can see that something is off. They don't believe it. So, yeah, in the end, they will get red flags.

Maybe they will go through it for whatever reason, but they probably can

not go through the whole process, but yeah, you can't fool the body. So you can tell the not realities, but it will come up. Even the questions you ask, yeah, we'll be telling, right? A candidate will realize based on the questions you're asking them, right? We'll also very quickly realize if it's the kind of culture they're interested in working at. So can you share some examples of companies who have done...

done it successfully who aligned those both brands. I think we chatted about Nike, but I really think HubSpot is a really good example and I'm bringing up their careers page. And now many people will say, hold on, HubSpot is so large, you know, how can I even compete against that? It's not about that. It's about taking what you can from brands like that and learning through how they got where they are today.

On HubSpot's careers page, they have this little slogan that says, like, let's grow together. But if you like start looking at their employer brand, that is their blueprint right now, right? That is their little slogan that they've created, like, let's grow together. They're already at a point where the employer brand is established. And interestingly enough, when I looked at Nike's slogan on their careers page now,

it's also evolved tremendously. They don't need to say, "Just do it" on their slogan anymore. But now they say, "Move the world". Right? And so I feel like this is what happens with these very established brands. They did it so well in terms of aligning those two corporate and employer brands so well that eventually they can start talking about it in a much bigger way. Right?

You can start driving that slogan to something you truly want in terms of your mission and how the employee is going to impact that mission. And so I do think like these are really, there's many other small companies. I think if you want to keep it really simple in the beginning, I would keep it quite, you know, quite technical and very simple and just align what that, what is it. Like I remember at GitLab, we would say like, come,

come and help us build the world's first end -to -end DevOps platform. And people became obsessed with that term, end -to -end DevOps platform. And nearly everyone I spoke to in the world of engineering and product and open source knew that GitLab was a DevOps platform. They stopped talking about it as just a place to store your repository of code. And that's a very basic example, but

it is one. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's good if you can in the end have this one simple story. I will give you a funny story about my co -founder when we very early days, it really started out and we were just pitching what we're doing. And that's the one. And if it's very complicated, then, then, then I don't remember where we were, but somebody asked him, Hey, what you're doing? So we are doing this HR thing. Like, and this was the best way he could explain it. Like

on the way. But when you have developed something, like you said, like end- to end DevOps platform, that's something that is quite easy to remember and easy to explain. So you can help all the employees or people explain what you do. And then that can be a powerful thing. It doesn't have to be. I think it evolves in time that you have like this, like Nike said, that "Move the world".

So in the beginning, you maybe don't have something so flashy, but it's fine. It's important just that people understand what you do. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I would also just give a final tip. If you have a beautiful customer story, sometimes you can lean into this customer story. So imagine you have a customer like NASA, right? And your product is being used there.

You could also say like, "Come and help us take people to the moon." I mean, it's quite far -fetched, but it's true, right? And so if you have this amazing customer story or customer stories, that is also part of the marketing and go -to -market brand and strategy, right? It's part of their world. But in people and culture and talent acquisition, you're not going to know those stories, which is why you want to keep leaning into like, what is the marketing brand about? What's the go -to -market strategy?

Is there an amazing customer story that you can listen to, that you can sit in on, right? Or that you can watch asynchronously and lean into what that customer is saying and bring that back. And if you're telling candidates what customers are saying about the company, amazing, right? Because then they start realizing how they're going to impact Deloitte's or this brand, right, that the company is dealing with.

And when you're small and starting out, those are the brands that helps your go -to -market strategy, right? That helps you land new customers. And so I think all of this is interconnected. So that's it for the episode 10 of Relancer Podcast. You could say it's a small anniversary, first 10 episodes. If you like this episode, feel free to subscribe and share it. Thank you for tuning in and hope to see you in the next one.