Is a talent marketing career something you have in your mind?
What could your career in employer branding and recruitment marketing look like if you could focus just on the marketing and communications side of it?
I’m happy to share with you a peer experience!
In this episode of Building the Modern Employer Brand podcast, I have a seasoned talent marketing professional as my guest: Claudia Nolan.
For the past seven years, they have worked in employer branding and content strategy for employers such as Accenture, Just Eat Takeaway and Workday.
Claudia approached me recently on LinkedIn, telling me my podcast episodes have sparked ideas and discussions with them that then sparked their own journey. And we decided to have a proper chat and share it with you on this podcast!
Learning how others have built their talent marketing careers and what they have learned on their career journey can be hugely inspiring.
Building a talent marketing career from scratch
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How Claudia’s career in employer branding and talent marketing started
Employers usually start investing in talent marketing and employer branding when the struggle with attracting and retaining people moves from occasional to permanent.
This happened in Claudia’s case, too. They were first invited to start work in a growth marketing position which quickly led for them to get into employee engagement.
Taking over internal communications really sparked their interest in employer branding and talent marketing, and what it is to be marketing internally.
This experience at Accenture on the Google account led them to notice a position at Workday advertised as a Talent Marketing Specialist. At the time, they had never heard of that role before and they didn’t really know what the world of employer branding was or could lead to.
Discover your ideal roles to build a talent marketing career
Delving into the world of talent marketing and employer branding
Luckily for Claudia, the new role was the first time they properly dove into the world of talent marketing and employer branding.
From there, they worked under a great manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“We worked on, of course, the digital advertising aspects, creating analytical frameworks of how to increase conversion rates and campaign views and stuff related to that. And also build out content for the company. We ran photo and video shoots and built out our careers website and things like that,” Claudia explains.
Then, the global pandemic happened to them and everybody else. And they found themselves looking for a new role in a company experiencing high growth. This was Just Eat Takeaway.
Building a recruitment marketing strategy in a high growth environment
The pandemic was a high-growth period for all takeaway businesses. Claudia’s new employer was most likely surprised by the sudden growth based on how little was done on the more strategic side of talent acquisition and recruiting. This opportunity gave them free hands to build frameworks and develop recruitment marketing playbooks for each market.
While joining Just Eat Takeaway was a career leap for them in many ways, it was also a personal leap as they moved from their native Ireland to the Netherlands where the company’s HQ is.
What they learned in this recruitment marketing role was that it can mean so many things in so many different countries.
Job cloning makes a great example of automated recruitment marketing
“In this company, recruitment marketing was skewed more toward the paid media side of things. It was not just creating content for social media, but also strategic planning and things like job cloning and working with the right career pages, and automating a lot of it,” Claudia says.
When I asked what job cloning means, they explained:
“It is used typically for high volume roles, maybe on the lower skilled side. You can clone jobs with automation tools in different languages, with different job titles, with different job descriptions, and, of course, with different tags. And within that tool built out for us, we could also automate and clone jobs to different job boards across Europe. So if that one job wasn’t performing well with one job title, say in the Netherlands, and we tried the job title translated to German in Germany with a German description, that was kind of why it was the quickest way of cloning and automating the entire process when there were so many jobs.”
Moving forward on their talent marketing career to work with a post-Covid EVP
When their former employer Accenture presented a new opportunity in their Dutch office to work on their new EVP (employer value proposition) for a post-Covid world, they could not pass the opportunity.
What really resonated with this opportunity was the opportunity the unique selling point being their people, like in all consulting companies.
In this role, they really learned how to work with many stakeholders who want to have their say and need to have their say. When asked later in the episode what they see as important skills to develop for the future, they immediately said: stakeholder relations.
Once the successful EVP project was over, their role changed from talent branding to candidate marketing and inclusion and diversity marketing, which was great for them being non-binary.
“But sometimes we need to move on with our career,” she tells. And for them, it was a direction more towards the creative side of things.
Craving for creativity from their career in employer branding
After going from developing employer branding to localising someone else’s creations in a big corporation, they felt like getting too tight between a rock and a hard place.
That’s when their current workplace came along.
Today, they are working as a Talent Brand Lead at a startup called Nebius.
“Which is exactly the type of thing I was looking for. Working for a startup, building stuff from scratch, not too much red tape and yeah, starting again. So this one is very interesting again because there’s a legacy of a much larger company where everyone has come from to join this new company in Europe, in probably one of the most liberal cities in Europe,” Claudia explains.
Claudia’s professional craving for creativity and development is evident when I ask what has been their favourite project out of all of their vast talent marketing experience.
“It has to be building out the new EVP for Accenture post-COVID because although there are so many people that you have to bring along and make sure that you have their buy-in along the way. When you do get to the end point of getting all of your approvals and people really believing in it, it feels such an accomplishment,” they say.
Watch or listen to this episode to learn more about Claudia’s talent marketing career and what tips they have for us already working in talent marketing or wanting a career in employer branding and recruitment marketing.
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Would you like to be a guest on the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast?
Contact me via email to introduce yourself and what topic you have on mind.
Please notice, this podcast is for those who want to learn how to build a modern employer brand, impact and influence talent audiences with words and content and build thriving careers in talent marketing and employer branding delivering business value.
Your topic must fit in this context, otherwise it will be a hard no.
Please forgive me if I don’t reply right away when you reach out. Podcasting is not my primary job, and I don’t have assistants helping me shuffle through emails. I will make sure to reply faster to those offers that match my podcast scope.