Atlassian's employer brand strategy focuses on content, partners, and platforms to engage candidates and tell its story. It establishes an employer value proposition centered on its culture of collaboration to craft a talent narrative. Atlassian measures areas like social engagement, surveys, and events to prove its employer brand's value beyond just cost per hire. The document provides three recipes for other companies - developing an employer value proposition from a candidate's perspective using traditional marketing funnels, equipping the brand to grow with an effective measurement strategy, and building authentic content.
2. • Marketing professional in TA
• Midwesterner (born, raised,
educated)
• Live music lover
• Desperately trying to learn
how to cook
A little about me
10. Our main challenges…
Competition for
engineering talent
R&D is the bulk of hires
New and emerging
markets
New offices in India and
across the US
Exponential growth
40% YoY growth
11. How we think about tackling our EB strategy
Content
Creating and distributing
careers comms to candidates
Partners
Identifying and managing
digital and event partners
Platforms
Maintaining the internal and external
sources that inform comms
12. How we think about tackling our EB strategy
Content
Creating and distributing
careers comms to candidates
19. How we think about tackling our EB strategy
Partners
Identifying and managing
digital and event partners
20. Teams who help us tell our story
Recognized by Great Place to Work® as a
Best Workplace around the World
50 Best Places To Work In Australia
2012-2019
Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For
2012-2020
Great Place to Work-Certified
Best Workplaces for Technology
Best Workplaces for Women
Best Workplaces for Millennials
2019
Asia’s Best Workplaces
2014-2018
Best Workplaces in the Netherlands
2016, 2018, 2019
23. Your brand’s promise to
employees (and prospective
ones) about the unique upside
to working at your organization
now and into the future. It’s
usually helpful to divide it into
pillars or categories.
What is an Employer Value Proposition (EVP)?
Source: Jeni Ginter-Lyght, PHR
27. Content ideas by medium
Video
Authentic way to tell a
story and experience
visually.
Profile/Interview
Flexible way to tell a story in
an easy to share way.
Complement with social.
Blogs
Great way to tell a story
through the words and
perspectives of your
company
Social
Easy way to share all
kinds of content and
deliver cultural
tidbits
Events
Invite members into
your community to
share in the thought-
leadership process
Technical content
Opportunity to give
audience a clear idea of
the work your company
does
Radio/Podcast
Get in front of your
audience in the form
of audio.
Visual/Ads/Updates
One-and-done. The
content you create to
keep the talent brand
breathing.
28. Steps you can take to create your content
strategy
1
4
3
2
5
Research
Who is my audience and what
motivates them?
Inventory
What content already exists?
Narrative
What stories can I tell? Content mix
What kinds of content
should I create?
Management
Who manages it?
29. A content strategy helps you
not only decide when and
where to produce content, but
also how
37. An employer brand that is built from the
POV of the candidate experience
• Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
Recipe 1
INGREDIENTS
• Think like a traditional brand marketer
when identifying what drives the
candidate
DIRECTIONS
40. Use the EVP to build from the POV of the
candidate experience
The Recruitment Marketing Funnel
How (and where) are you telling the world that you exist and that
you’re hiring?
How are you not only making them aware of your company,
culture, benefits, but also interested in the work?
How do you make sure your company is top of mind when they
start their job search? Where are you showing up?
How are you getting folks to apply? How do you make applying easy?
How are you building a successful onboarding experience and
making sure that your people stay?
42. An employer brand that is equipped to
grow and evolve
• A measurement strategy
Recipe 2
INGREDIENTS
• Use effective resourcing to amplify
what’s working and dismiss what isn’t
DIRECTIONS
44. Using your resources effectively
Your team goals
Team
Skills, Size, Accountability
Budget
Amount, allocation, source
Bandwidth
Time, competing priorities
45. Using your resources effectively
Your team goals
Team
Hire multiple people! Not a one-person
job in the long-run.
Budget
Secure a budget that you have ownership
over.
Bandwidth
Be realistic about what you can achieve.
Focus on the big picture, not just quick wins.
48. An employer brand that is believed
because it is built on authenticity
• A content strategy
Recipe 3
INGREDIENTS
• Lead with authenticity to ensure
candidates believe what you’re saying
DIRECTIONS
49. If you tried to convince
someone to spend 25% of
their year doing
something, what would
you tell them?
Denys Nevozhai - Unsplash
50.
51. Tweetable Takeaways @GPTW_US
Think bigger than
cost per hire.
Knowing what to
measure helps you
prove your value
back to the
business.
Building an
Employer Brand is
a lot like creating
your own recipe.
Notes de l'éditeur
But before I get started on that, let me tell you a little bit about myself and Atlassian
One other thing to know about me is that I’m someone who is desperately trying to learn how to cook. I checked my bank account and it turns out that in true millennial fashion, most of my expenses are going towards two things: eating out and travelling. BUT, I’m trying to change that… Well maybe not the travel part, but most definitely the eating out. I’m starting to use the Blue Apron’s of the world and I’m learning a lot about following recipes, but what happens when you don’t have these perfectly easy packets to follow? You have to look in your fridge and pantry and get creative. But there always a few key things that you’re likely going to use. Salt, Pepper, and oil,
So when thinking about employer branding and what I wanted to discuss with you all today, that’s when it struck me – it’s often times that same thing.
Throughout this presentation, I’m going to use a couple of cooking references and metaphors. There are certain elements that go into creating a Talent Brand strategy that I think are the salt, pepper, and oil. Almost every cuisine has some element of this and if you look around at what others are doing in the industry, you’ll likely see that this is the case. What works for one team might not work for another. Your recipe for pasta might be the best in one town, but is it the best somewhere else? A budget of 1 million, gets you a lot more than 100,000.The recipe might ask you to grill it, but you only have a stove But the elements around storytelling, content, strategies, and more can all be the same. It’s up to you what recipes you create.
So today I want to go over a couple of key areas to introduce to you fist to us
- How we go about building an employer brand at Atlassian.
- Next, what I think are the salt, pepper, and oil, or the three of the most crucial ingredients that you'll find in any successful employer brand
- Lastly, I want to leave you with three recipes so, let's say you're starting from scratch, that you can use immediately
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So first, a little about us
- QUESTION - who here has heard of Atlassian or uses an Atlassian product in at work? Has teams at your company?
For those who don’t know much about Atlassian, we build software that’s used by more than 150,000 organizations who use our products like Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, and Trello to collaborate and get work done. We’re just over 4,000 global employees having grown from under 1,000 in just under 4 years. As we’ve quadrupuled in size,
there’s been quite a bit of change, but our mission has remained the same: we are big believers that behind every great human achievement, there is a team. And, it’s our mission to unleash the potential of every team.
At the core of who we are, are some pretty bold values. And these are ones that you'll find easily on our about page, careers site, or just referenced a lot. They fundamentally guide what we do, who we are, how we go about making decisions, and who we hire.
There's even a stage in our interview process called the Values Interview. Because while we know that our culture will change and actually encourage it as we invite new team members on board, we want to make sure that those who we hire have the same values.
So enough about Atlassian,
Now, let's talk about what we're doing on our Employment Brand team
So as a team, our task as any employer branding function is to build Atlassian's reputation as an employer of choice to support recruiting.
Think of a job at Atlassian as a product. We are tasked with selling it!
And here are our main challenges.
Now with all of these challenges, here's how we go about building our team, strategy, and ultimately, our gameplan
CONTENT - At it's core, this is everything that we say, and how we say it to candidates.
PLATFORMS - Platforms are the tools and sources where we house all of the information we share both internally and externally
PARTNERS - The folks who help us tell our talent narrative
So let's dive a bit deeper into each.
Content, at its heart, is about figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it in order to help drive candidates to hire.
There are lots of different types of content that we play with. Here is an example of content that our own leaders have created.
More recently, my team just finished up two video projects. The first one is around one of the lesser known roles that we have here at Atlassian - the TAM team.
And the second is around Building the Future at Atlassian. This is by no means exhaustive, but we experiment and play around with lots of different types of content to tell the Atlassian story.
Speaking of different types of content, we also heavily rely on graphic illustrations and collateral to help us stand out and tell the Atlassian story.
Here's an example of a career booth that we've built in partnership with our design team.
Sometimes, we'll include people photography to bring more humanity into our ads.
Or, we'll just have some fun and get creative with the types of collateral we'll hand out at career fairs or swag we give out.
The next area is Platforms.
One prime example we have of this is what we call Recruiter Central. In short, this is one space on Confluence where we house all of our resources that are always immediately available for recruiters
Let's dive in deeper to one example... Candidate Messaging Hub
Here, we've built out dozens of key talking points that teams across Atlassian, especially TA, can use to talk about all of the exciting upsides to working at Atlassian from a technical perspective.
you can even see we have points around negotiation, our global talent narrative, etc.
One of the more obvious areas is also our careers site. This is the main source of truth, in our own words, to candidates. And teams, even TA, use this.
The last area that shows how we tackle our EB strategy is our partners.
And we have lots of partners that help us tell our story.
One of those main partners is GPTW.
You can see that by being certified as a GPTW, we have a third-party (objective party) who helps us communicate to job seekers that we have been evaluated and vetted and they even feature our own employees' voices.
And this is something we also are going to feature on our careers site...
Teh others, like the muse, GD, etc. are all partners that talk on our behalf. This is a screenshot from our Glassdoor page where you can read reviews.
Great, so you've told us a lot about what you're doing, but how exactly did you get there? And really, it all comes down to having a strong strategy and POV. Otherwise, everything would be a mess.
So let's get back into our cooking metaphor by digging into what the ingredients are for our Talent Brand. In other words, what are some key attributes that you need to have.
This is likely the first thing you’ll see in all of the textbooks. Let's call this the "SALT"
Create your EVP,
So looking at this chart, you can see that an EVP comprises many different parts/attributes about working at your company.
For example, work - what is it about it that makes your work interesting? Unique? How do people advance at your company? What are your employees like?
Essentially, what an EVP is is -
At Atlassian, we’ve taken this EVP and created four pillars. We're actually in the process of creating a new one, but this is what has guided our EB for now.
So put simply, what does an EVP and having one really do for you?
In short, an EVP helps you craft your talent narrative
Photo by Calum Lewis on UnsplashSo you’ve got a great EVP or Talent Narrative, or whatever you call it! In other words, you’ve figured out your narrative, your story and what you could tell. So now, we gotta get strategic about how we tell it.
You know how to communicate and what you want to communicate. Now what? This is the easiest thing that you can do to get some structure.
So how does that strategy come to life in different ways?
There’s a whole landscape and so many different ways to tell your story. Whether it’s video, graphics, blogs, or even events, there’s so many ways!
But how do you decide what to say and how to say it?
So first, let’s look at how we can go about thinking about a strategy. Now this could be an entirely separate presentation, but let me show you some key steps you need to create a Content Strategy. And definitely consult the intenet where you can find some guides, but what I’ve tried to do is narrow it down.
Inventory - why recreate the wheel? Maybe someone in marketing has already done half the work? Maybe it’s just a matter of getting the content in front of candidates
Narrative – this is fun since now you can think about not just your narrative, but the different stories that you can tell as part of your talent narrative.
Content mix – What kinds of stories, you want to tell
Management – who manages it?
Don’t want to produce content for the sake of producing content
Now I thought a lot about whether I wanted to include this, but I felt that it was important, because throughout my career, I get asked this question a lot. Whether someone wants to know whether it’s “worth” sponsoring an event, or
Now, a good way to make sure all of your efforts don’t crash and burn is to make sure you’ve got a solid measurement strategy so you know what’s working and what needs to be improved.
No one has cracked the universal code to this. But figuring out what the right things are for you to measure is up to you… So I’d first work on determining what is right for you AND your business.
Here are a couple of areas that we, as a team, measure and report back to leadership.
Hate this as a measure for EB initiatives since you’re setting yourself up for failure at this stage, especially if you’re just getting started. Plus, there are a lot of other benefits that come from the work that we do: Instead, we want to optimize through influence, because at the end of the day, that’s what brand and marketing work is doing. Leading through influence that will eventually, over time, sway someone. Plus, there are tons of positive externalities from a successful brand campaign - someone can tell their friends, or they may apply 6 months down the road. Asking to figure out cost per hire immediately is complicated and will do your team a disservice.
Don’t cross out, put think bigger – don’t just look at this, but consider the other impacts…
Talent Branding will actually be a cost-saving effort in the long run.
This whole field is new
What are the ingredients to a winning Talent Brand?
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This is likely the first thing you’ll see in all of the textbooks.
Create your EVP, or at the very least, your Talent Narrative – What you talk about related to talent and HOW you go about telling it.
With your EVP in check now you know your pillars for what you want to discuss. Now it’s time to ask the right questions about the psychological journey the candidate is going through so you can be savvy about how you go about building a plan.
First, let’s look at a pretty simple marketing concept, the marketing funnel. This is used to help visualize the psychological process that consumers might go through while making purchasing decisions.
These are really the same thing – so we can
In order to start to craft how EB activities can support candidates at each stage of the funnel, here are some questions you can start to ask…
Now I thought a lot about whether I wanted to include this, but I felt that it was important, because throughout my career, I get asked this question a lot. Whether someone wants to know whether it’s “worth” sponsoring an event, or
With your EVP in check now you know your pillars for what you want to discuss. Now it’s time to ask the right questions about the psychological journey the candidate is going through so you can be savvy about how you go about building a plan.
So let’s work backwards… We know how we’re measured as a team at the end of the day is around our goals. Cool! So let’s break down how we achieve our goals. Just like with any team, I see it meaning one thing.
Once you know what you’re going to measure, then you can figure out where you go from there. Here’s how I like to think of it…
Team – Who are the people on my team that I can rely on to help? Who do I need to hire? Who should I partner with outside of the org?
Budget – How much is it going to cost to get us there? Definitely don’t say Zero, because this is marketing after all, and it costs to play…
Bandwidth – Alright so who is going to take on all of this work?
Having clear goals should mean you also have these pieces figured out. That means you are now set to measure what’s right for you.
For example, asking to be measured on what is realistic for what you can achieve. So when it comes time to your review of the team, you can have more of a frank conversation around what is working. If it’s bandwidth, then focus on fewer things but better. Too many demands and too much important work to do? Talk to your leadership about hiring more people. Was there an event or initiative that we missed out on because we couldn’t afford it? See if you can secure more budget.
Having this in place can help you make the right arguments, measure the right things and ultimately resource in the best way possible.
Ultimately, this is helping you keep things in focus since there are lots of distractions
It really comes down to the human element of it all… We all have to work to earn money to operate in society, to maintain our way and standard of life. But this work is so important because even though it’s a given, you’re still responsible for someone’s reality day in and day out. Just as an employer, you need to be responsible for the safety of your employees while they’re in the office, we also should be concerned for their mental wellbeing. That starts with making sure that how you entice them to work
What stories are you telling them? What do you think they’ll find important? Is what you’re claiming honest? Candidates can sense when things aren’t what they seem even before stepping foot into your company. PLUS, we have partners who are here to help, but they are also here to keep us accountable.
This whole field is new. And depending on what stage you’re in and unless 100% of your leadership is bought into the important of having a strong TA function or even EB function, you might have to go the extra mile in proving the value
