In each conversation, we extract the tactics, tools and routines that you can use to optimize your own career and help your company make talent a priority.

This week we sat down with Jennifer Newbill, who leads the Global Employer Brand team at Dell, to talk about the way that her team approach talent attraction and brand building.
 

How has your role as Director of Global Employment Brand changed over time?

My role was originally an individual contributor! To begin with, I was the only person in a full time Employment Branding position.

I have been lucky to build a global team that can manage our relationship with our in-house creative agency, all of our internal and external digital properties, content creation, storytelling/blogging, candidate experience and measuring results including sentiment.

How is the Employer Branding team at Dell set up?

The Employer Brand team is part of our Global Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence that manages all processes, standards, policies and programs.

The team is comprised of a leader, global project and programs lead, 4 ‘regional’ engagement and social media community leads and a global online editor responsible for all digital maintenance on both internal and external properties.

Can you talk a bit about Dell’s Employer brand strategy – what tactics have been successful?

Transparency has been central to the way we’ve marketed our brand. We’re very active on Glassdoor, (something that our CHRO is a huge proponent of), we respond to as many reviewers as possible. Last year, we responded to over 400 reviews globally.

We’re also pretty excited with results that we’ve been getting from our “Instagram takeovers” and we’ve had great feedback from our recruiting leaders around the world.

How are you using Instagram for Employer Branding?

We’ve run two “Instagram takeovers” so far so still very much in learning mode here. This is how it’s worked so far though:

An employee takes control of our Careers Instagram account for an entire week and manages all content posting. We have seen as much as double digit organic growth of our account during this time.

Usually, content that is fun and creative performs the best. For example, an employee used a drone to take a photo of him and his colleagues spelling out the word Dell. The same employee also filmed his commute over one of the Panama locks (he is based in our Panama location).

Our Ireland “Instagram takeover” went down really well with both the local team and leaders, and convinced them that employee generated content is really powerful. The employee who led that takeover also wrote a blog post after the fact about what she got out of the takeover.

For more on recruiting on Instagram, check out this post.

Has the Dell Talent Community been a powerful tool for recruiting?

Our Talent Community has really helped the most with driving referrals via our social sharing of jobs (with ease). Referrals are actually a big part of my responsibility at Dell.

We see a close tie with our employee advocacy and brand messaging and the willingness and desire to refer great talent.

What are some of the ways you encourage employee advocacy and referrals?

Dell has a robust global social media training program which encourages our employees to to understand the power of social and to be active.

Once the training is complete, employees are encouraged to attend monthly Power Hour and Dell Champion calls to engage further, as well as leverage our EveryoneSocial amplification tool to share content.

We have also demonstrated via our internal survey that employees who are socially trained have a higher eNPS score for both recommending Dell products and services and recommending Dell as a place to work (referrals)!

What wider industry trends are changing the nature of the Employer Branding role?

Measurement continues to be important and a lot of companies are trying to figure out HOW and WHAT to measure. Not just how is Employer Branding measured, but what is the ROI of the money and efforts spent.

What are the main metrics that you pay attention to?

Traditional KPIs (cost per hire and time to fill) as well as traffic and conversion, followers, impressions, engagement, sentiment and anecdotal feedback.

To my earlier point, when your executives around the world are sharing with their teams the importance of Glassdoor or why being social helps our brand you know that you are moving the needle.

You mention candidate sentiment a few times – how are you measuring this? 

We are measuring sentiment quantitatively a number of ways including:

• Internal annual surveys (with the occasional pulse survey),
• Glassdoor
• Fairygodboss
• InHerSight
• Comparably
• PotentialPark
• Great Place to Work
• Student surveys and sentiment from Universum
• Candidate Experience surveys (we are now expanding our current survey to all business units for every candidate interviewed)
• LinkedIn top ranked companies, as well as LinkedIn Talent Brand Index ratings, Talent Flows and Talent Drivers.

In summary, it is a LOT and we are trying to figure out how we place our arms around all of this data in a meaningful way.

What are the most important brand values at Dell?

Our brand values are: Putting the customer first, winning together, innovation (calculated and supported risk taking), driving results and doing all of this with integrity.

What is the main thing that you wish you knew when you first started out in Employer Branding?

How much fun it would be to build and lead an employment brand function for one of the world’s largest private companies.

What initiative are you proudest of?

Our relationship with our internal creative agency has been incredible. It is efficient and saves us money. It has also built our credibility with other groups across the company demonstrating our great collaboration.

About Jennifer

Jennifer is the Director of Global Employer Brand at Dell. Follow her on Twitter and connect with her on LinkedIn.

About Dell

Dell empowers countries, communities, customers and people everywhere to use technology to realize their dreams. Customers trust Dell to deliver technology solutions that help them do and achieve more, whether they’re at home, work, school or anywhere in their world.
 

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