Matt Eyre 

you know, there's, there's business headwinds and, and, and times are a bit tough and, you know, people are getting laid off and, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't always make for the plain of sailing at work. And, and I've long been a believer of just trying to be nice to the people that you work with. Work can be really tough and, and, you know, you don't always have, you're not always that close to the people that you work with. You know, I just spent two weeks working at my two weeks, two years working at my dining table, not meeting my colleagues. It's really important in those times just to try and look out for people and make sure your colleagues are doing okay. So you know, just sort of, sort of be kind to people. Look out for your, look out for your, your teammates and your, and your, and your colleagues, and they'll do the same for you. And, you know, I try to do that in, in every walk of life. So, yeah

Nasser Oudjidane 

Hello and welcome to our series of Scaling Stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the world's fastest growing companies . I'm excited to introduce our guests today. Matt Eyre, who is a recruitment marketing and employer branding specialists. He has helped companies like Intercom build their talent brands from scrap scratch. Matt, a huge welcome and thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, thanks buddy. Really happy to be here. My name is Matt. I'm basically a career brand marketer. I've walked, worked across a whole range of industries in a couple of different countries. Everything from video games El Electronic Arts, and Sega to finance Silicon Valley Bank before kind of jumping into recruitment marketing at Intercom. So hopefully I've got plenty of interesting stuff to talk to you about. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

Thank you. How did your experience in brand marketing in multiple industries help you with talent marketing strategies and execution?

Matt Eyre 

Yeah. Great. Great question. I, I think in summary what you learn as a brand marketer is a specific way of working, right? You, you learn to kind of be strategic and not just to think about sort of tactics or execution. So I made a couple of notes here that I wanna kind of refer to, but, Cause they're sort of generic definitions, but if you look for a definition of a brand strategy, you're generally gonna see something like a plan to achieve a series of goals resulting in the preference of your brand by consumers. So if we think about how to apply that to kind of talent. It seems pretty clear straight away, right? Like you're not just thinking about what's one thing that I can do to execute. You're thinking about how do I build a strategy that's going to last that's going to enable us to build a brand that is meaningful to the people that we're talking to. In this case, the talent that. That the company is trying to hire. So you know, it's easy to see, I think then why a company might look for a brand market or as they seek to make their recruitment marketing more consistent. Cause we don't tend to think in terms of like, here's a deliverable or here's a thing we've gotta achieve. We tend to think about, you know, we wanna build a brand that's gonna stand the test of time, that's gonna enable a business to compete for a, a huge range of talent against all kinds of competition in a bunch of different channels. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, I know that we didn't anticipate to go off topic so quickly, but I'm just thrilled to just actually dive straight In and 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, hit me.

Nasser Oudjidane 

My, question is how can you create a brand which is inclusive for all and can attract the talent across demographics and age? 

Matt Eyre

Yeah, I mean, a great question. A great question and something that I kind of came across time and time again as I start to think about, you know, target audiences for recruiting, whether I'm recruiting you know, whether you're recruiting sort of junior sales staff or very senior engineering staff. You know, there's some stuff that's obviously wildly different, right? You have to communicate different messages to those audiences. But there's some stuff that's super consistent. And an employer brand, you know, when you think about that is, is just how you present your company to the world. So, in some sense you're gonna have very, very consistent messaging that you wanna get out there, right? You're gonna wanna talk about what your company is, what it does, its mission it, its values. And then as you get more kind of tactical, as you start to break down perhaps the roles that you're trying to hire for you can get more specific. So I think I'm ruining I think I'm ruining something that I've sort of wanted to talk to you about later, but I just worked with a really interesting employer, Brando called James Ellis, and he says you know, his, his pitch basically when talking about employer branding is that you. You know, trying, He, he sees so many companies that are trying to be the same and he, he sort of tries to sum up his messaging in four specific ways. Are they, are the messages that you're getting across specific attractive, differentiated, and real? So, you know, when you think about that, you have a whole framework that you can jump into to talk to a whole bunch of different audiences in a bunch of different ways. And that's, you know, that's like, that's, that's a key part of the job.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Fascinating. And what do you think are the major differences or some of the surprises that you didn't anticipate from going from brand to talent? 

Matt Eyre 

Well I think there's two that spring to mind straight away, right. First of all, I'd never worked on a talent team before , so, so everything was new. You know, primarily I, I, I just really had to sort of learn a lot about the way that recruiters do their work. And, and what really impressed me with intercom's recruiters was just the amount of information that every single recruiter. Kind of has to retain and have available just to recall at any given time. You know, they have to be able to pitch a company, a team, maybe a hiring manager or a, a sort of, you know, a hiring structure that, that you might be working into. If you, if you start working there, you have to be able to pitch benefits. You have to be able to talk about you know, why. Your company might be preferential compared to some of your competition. Intercoms. Recruiters are super impressive. I've just blown away by the amount of kind of data that they have at their fingertips at any time. They all did an amazing job of that, of representing the business in that way. So, you know, that was, that was first, I think the second thing that kind of that was kind of surprising that I, well, that I definitely didn't anticipate to answer your question is that I basically joined the company on the first day of lockdown in San Francisco. So it was March, 2020. And, and you know, through the interview process, I'd sort of drafted some thoughts about, you know, what a strategy might look like for. For the company, what a recruitment marketing strategy might look like, what their employer brand might look like. And within about two weeks, just kind of to that up and threw it in the bin, there was no precedent at all for, for what the the market was gonna do you know, when, when kind of covid hit. So we really had to have a think about you know, how to hire talent in that market. You know, what the market was gonna do. We, you know, we, there was no real, there was no real precedent for that. Right? No way of saying, Okay, well, you know, when a global pandemic starts, this is what happens to your hiring plan. I don't think anyone had that in the locker. So you know, we really had to take stock of kind of where the market was, what the business needed what we had to achieve in that time scale and, and just build a new plan. So that was a, I would say a couple of things that kind of surprised me or that I didn't anticipate when I.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, and One of the perhaps strangest things is when the lockdown happened, there were layoffs and then there was this huge boom where you had to really hire up, like perhaps the company hasn't ever hired before. Yeah. How does, how does talent marketing act as a force multiplier to make the recruiters more efficient and to make recruiting overall more?

Matt Eyre 

So I think I, I think I recognize this line. You're very kindly throwing back at me. Something that I think I put on my LinkedIn profile. So so I guess I better age this answer, hadn't I? But here's the. Here's the kind of comp that I use the most here, right? Most marketers have seen this kind of marketing meme that says marketing is like asking someone on a date. Branding is the reason that they say yes. So so you have to think about a whole bunch of different things when you set out to, as a recruitment marketer for your company or when you set out to build an employer brand. You know, from a, from a kind of a talent perspective, you know, you need to reach out to talent so that they are aware of your business so that they know who you are. You know, there's only a sort of fairly small percentage of companies out there that have a brand big enough that every, you know, everyone that gets reached by a recruiter or that everyone sees a recruiting ad, it's like, Oh yeah, I'm familiar with those guys. It's nice if you are, you know, Apple or Amazon and you have that luxury, Much trickier if you're a company with a few hundred employees, you know, that may only work in a handful of markets. You know that that awareness just isn't necessarily there. And then, you know, it's, it's your brand. It's the, the employer brand or the talent brand that you build that really is what you are communicating to that talent, right? It's your, your you sort of impact their desire to consider you as an employer. When they, when they see that brand. So you are, you know, you are kind of you're trying to build that kind of consideration for them. So that's recruitment marketing in a nutshell. If you then think about like, the hiring process and how much information is shared between a business and a candidate. You know, there's so many different channels that, that as a candidate you can go to, to find out information about a business, right? It might start with a recruiter reaching out to you or you seeing a job ad you might really want to go and kind of do some research on a place like Glassdoor on LinkedIn. You know, there's just so many ways that a company can share information and as the company, you want all of that information to be to be sort of relevant, interesting, and favorable, right? So that the candidate says, Okay, I can find everything that I need to know about this company to satisfy my knowledge that they are gonna be a great place to work. You know, as a recruitment marketer, you're in charge of that, right? You are giving them that information. So, you know, it could be any one of a hundred things that you can do. It could be real simple stuff like, are you doing a great job of communicating your rewards and your benefits effectively? It might mean trying to do a great job of communicating something that might be a bit kind of ethereal or intractable, right? Are you really communicating? What your culture and what your values are like in a meaningful way to candidates. It might be just recruiter enablement, right? Do the recruiters have all the tools they need to do the job? Are they being consistent in the way they pitch the company? Are they doing it effectively? You know, or it might be running ad campaigns. You might just be trying to get on LinkedIn and get your business in front of the right kind of people that you wanna hire. So, you know, all of those things that I just listed are very different tasks, very different things, very different ways of reaching. A candidate and, and finding the right mix. That's how you make your recruiters more efficient or your recruiting more effective. That's the job in a nutshell.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Curious to learn. Have you ever engaged with the kind of journey mapping of a candidate and found that there are like these drop off points? You know, what are the most common, and perhaps could you share any experience around that? 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, I, I think it's really important because you know, every company is different. The way that companies do their recruiting is different. So, you know, I don't know if I can say to you, right, here's a place where everybody falls down. What I can say, you know, is, is that when I looked at it, You know, when I looked at it for Intercom, there were a couple of places where we felt we could get stronger right away. We did feel that we could give the recruiters a much better toolkit to sort of talk about the company in a really meaningful way. And, and so that, that's one thing that we wanted to do our sort of career site was, was, was not, not strong at all. Right. It was Intercom when I joined was about 600 people, a small company, and it just hadn't been a priority for anyone to get that right. What we did know was that the culture at the company was really highly thought of employees really like working there. We had very clear feedback on that from stuff like employee engagement surveys. So you know, to, to sort of on the one hand have that great asset in your locker, and on the other hand, not really. Enable that in any way, either on the career site or, or through the recruiter enablement. You know, that's a massive problem. So, you know, people, we, we, we were not doing a good enough job there of communicating that. So I tried to get that into every step of the way. I wanted the recruiters to be telling people from their first meeting or their first outreach that this is a company that, that employees really like working. I wanted the career site to reflect that. I wanted external sites to reflect that as well. So, you know, so we did kind of, we did kind of do not, not the most sophisticated journey map I've ever seen, I would say that. But we did say, Look, here are the places that we know. We need to reflect the company well in, and we need to make sure that each one of those is telling the right story for us. And I, you know, I listed a couple of them there for you. It was a bit more sophisticated than that. You know, I'm sure bigger companies you know, are probably more sophisticated than what I did as well, but I just wanted to make sure that we weren't missing opportunities to really talk about the stuff that mattered for us.

Nasser Oudjidane 

What are you, what are you most proud of when you look back at your journey with Intercom in terms of the. The, the results of establishing their employer brand from scratch. 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, I mean it's, I was the first person to, to sort of do to, to be, I was like the first person in my role at the company, obviously. You know, you, you, as soon as you have any kind of career site or do any kind of recruiting, you have an employer brand. You have, you are doing some recruitment marketing, but I was the first person that went in with a focus on it. So you know, I was I, I kind of had to review everything that we. And, and, and really think hard about, you know, what was gonna move the needle for intercom at, at the point in Intercom's journey, there were about just over 600 people when I started. So, you know, I, I think I, I talked a little bit about I talked a little bit about the importance of like building consideration with candidates, and I talked a little bit about. You know, like as a marketer, it can be also your job to raise awareness, right? So, so I did this research. I looked at I looked at what we were putting into the market, what Intercom was in control of. And it was very clear to me that we were not doing a great job of, of sort of providing candidate consideration tools, right? You, you want candidates let, let's say a recruiter reaches out to you and says, Hey, I work for Intercom. We're hiring engineers. You seem to fit the bill. I would love to talk to you about this. You know, most people's first thing isn't like, Oh, great, I'll just have a chat with this recruiter. It's like, Oh, maybe I don't know what that company is, or I haven't heard of them before, so I'm gonna go and do like a, a little checking, right. I'm gonna go and find out more about them to see, you know, honestly, if it's worth my time taking this call. So, So what what concerned me is that our consideration tools weren't that well organized, that we weren't doing the best possible job of representing ourselves. I was really nervous that we were underselling what a great place Intercom is to work, right? We, we had all this great employee engagement data telling us that our employees were happy but we weren't sharing that anywhere. I think about my. Experience when an intercom recruiter reached out to me and I'd heard of the company. You know, but I went to do this checking and, and, and, you know, you sort of go to Glassdoor and there's like not that much stuff there. The career site was very little more than just, you know, sort of a couple of paragraphs of copy and a list of roles. You know, so I, I called a friend who worked there who gave me this amazing download, like 30 minutes of, you know, how, what a fun workplace it was. How you know it. It was like a people centered, values driven company. The culture was great. People were friendly. You know, they were really like, the trajectory of the business was good. You know, they were doing really well. The mission of the business was interesting and engaging and something to get my teeth into, and I got all of this information that was just not there. and, you know, would not have been there for me had I not been fortunate enough to have a friend that worked. To, to help me out. So, you know, so, and, and I, you know, I didn't just use that anecdote, but I did a whole bunch of research and more and more it set, it became crystal clear that that was, you know, that was a problem that we were having across the board. So you know, we, we, I, I, I, I started to look at ways that we could share that information better. So, you know, I, I wanted to build a new career site. I, I wanted to try and do. Employee advocacy, get advocacy, get those employees talking about like why they like working there. I wanted to equip the recruiters with tools that talk to that, right? That, you know, that just shortcut some of the recruiter experience. So they're not necessarily having to pitch from scratch. With every kind of call that they get on, just give them stuff, some stuff that's interesting. Give them some content that they can share with candidates and prospects. So you know, we, we, we built a toolkit that really covered. All of that and included all of that. So we did make the career site better, and it's not perfect by any stretch, but it is better than it was. You know, we did some work on LinkedIn to sort of share more information. Again, not perfect, but, you know recruitment marketing is a journey, right? It's , you're constantly trying to improve and trying to get better. So that's kind of what I focused on first of all. This is turning into a hell of a long answer. But the sort of second part of that then is, you know, for a 600 person company, how do you compete for the very best talent with, you know, huge companies that do have brand recognition? And, and, and then you sort of starting to talk about awareness, right? And building awareness for the business. And that might be you know, that might be more advertising, that might be more employee advocacy. That might be, you know, pr working with the comms. And, and I did want to do all of that stuff. I felt like that was really important. But the analogy that I would use is you know, that that work is wasteful. If you, you know, if you suddenly reach out to you know thousands of candidates through an advertising campaign and half of them immediately drop out because they can't find the right information. About your company, then you are wasting your time and your money. Right? You're not doing a great job. I used to liking it to filling a bucket, right? I wanted to make sure that our bucket had no leaks, was not full of holes, so that everyone that we, you know, when we turned the tap on everyone, we, we, we got to retain everyone. We, they, they found us interesting. Not, you know, that we didn't just leak half of them right outta the bucket straight away and, and, and waste our time with them because it's harder and harder to go back to those people. So, yeah, there you go. Long answer, hope that helped . 

Nasser Oudjidane

 It's fascinating. I think we can even go one layer deeper, which is what are the key elements when you look at an organization, perhaps if you were supposed to do an, like an audit of their, of their employer brand? Yeah. How, what is your approach to make sure that that bucket isn't leaky? What are kind of the fundamental pillars? 

Matt Eyre 

So, the thing that I wanted and that I, you know, I spent quite a lot of time going and getting was, was data, right? Like, I, I don't think there's a generic answer to your question. I said that before. I think that anyone doing this work really needs to understand their business, right? What problems are you trying to solve for your recruiting team? So, That will really like, really crystallizing those and breaking them down and clearly understanding them and sharing them and, you know, validating them with hiring managers, with the recruiters, with talent leadership is, is vital because if you don't do that, what problem are you trying to solve? We already kind of covered the fact that there's a million ways to recruitment market, right? So talent brand. So to make sure you're doing the right one, you have to be fixing the problems that your company has. So, You know, I talked a little bit about Intercom's one there, which, you know, which was very, very clear to me. They weren't doing a good enough job of candidate consideration for an amazing company with a great reputation. That's, you know, that was really being very sort of, that was really kind of highly successful. They weren't doing enough to communicate that stuff, so you know, so, so first point data, I went and when I started, I went and spoke to probably 40 people as part of a listening tour all across the organization. That was recruiters that was some of the senior leadership. That was some of the hiring managers, people hiring the biggest teams, people having the most difficult problems you know, with, with hiring. And sort of started to try and break that down and synthesize those problems and then go back to them and say, Okay, it sounds like this to me. Is this what you're experiencing? Like, are we crystal clear that this is the problem that we're having? Then I sort of went to take a look at I went to take a look at competitors. You know, it's always interesting to. What other people are doing. And, and any marketer that says that they're not doing that, I think is, is not telling the truth. So, you know, you want to know what your competitors are doing. Are they, you know, how are they beating you to talent? Or, you know, how are they messing up? What are they not doing that you could do that makes you more compelling? So you know, so I went and, and sort of broke a whole bunch of that stuff down. You know, and that, and that kind of brings us back to where we started, which is from there I was able to say, Okay, you know, like these are the two, or. Really crystal clear goals that matter that matter the most for us. Intercom. These are the things that we absolutely need to do if we're gonna recruit more effectively. And, and, you know, I was able to, I was sort of quite. Fortunate that, that they seemed really clear and that the alignment was there, right? That people, you know, when I went back to them and said, Okay, our career site just isn't really very good. We have all this information that we could be sharing with talent and we're just not doing that. You know, we're not talking about our mission. We're not talking about our trajectory, the fact that the company is winning, that it's doing well. We aren't celebrating our people, despite the fact we've hired some incredible talent who've grown with us through, you know, eight or nine years of being here and who are now incredibly well respected. You know, we don't showcase those people enough. We have a, we have this amazing employee culture, this incredibly kind, sort of helpful, supportive culture. You know, there's just no way of figuring out, unless you know someone that works here. We have very clear working values that that show up every single day in our business. We have incredibly interesting leaders and you, you just can't find any of this stuff, right? How do we , how do we make sure that we fix that and make some of that stuff available? And happily for me, when I sort of presented that, most people, you know, just head nod and were like, Yep, great. Off you go. Get on with it then. So you know, so that was that, That got me off to a really strong.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, I want to talk about recruiter enablement. One of the key challenges in addition to discovery is engagement and recruiters are facing challenges standing out from the crowd. Yeah. What are your opinions on how they can differentiate themselves? Increase open acceptance rates, response rates. 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, it, I, I, I sort of I, I tried to understand this as best as I could. I, I feel like probably, you know, if you asked 10 recruiters this question, you'd probably get 10 different answers. From a recruiter marketing perspective, what I wanted to do you know, what I really wanted to do was, was a couple of things, right? One was not have our recruiters reach out with like a generic or an uninteresting message. You know, and, and I was, you know, I was pretty fortunate here that incomes, recruiters were across the board, well led, well organized and, and awesome. So, you know, for me it was about, you know, what can you do to stand out from a crowd? Are you thinking about standing out from a crowd? Because that's absolutely critical. I think we've all had. You know, like the we've all had like the crappy recruiter outreach where it's like you know, and I get this all the time as a recruitment marketer, right? Like, it's like, Hey Matt as a recruiter, how are you doing this, that, or the other, or facing that challenge? And I'm like, well, well straight away. I'm not a recruiter. So you, you've kind of failed in your research because all you have to do is look at the first line of my LinkedIn profile, the platform that you are using. To reach out to me on to sort of see that. So I know that you're either just kind of spamming or that you, you know, or that you're too busy or you don't care. None of which to me are really that acceptable, right? I'm already judging your competence if that's the way you choose to reach out. So, you know, personalization is important. I understand the people that you're reaching to. Then actually provide some value to them, right? It's , you know, if, again, the thing that I get all the time is, you know, we're looking for a senior recruiter or a talent manager and I'm like, great you know, I wish you the best of luck in your search, but I'm not one of those and nothing in my background, you know, which you could spend probably three minute ski reading to understand that is suggest that I'm a recruiter. So, you know, so you are wasting your time and you're wasting my time, which sucks, right? That's a bad experience. The best recruiters in my experience reach out and they're like, Hey you know, you are doing you are doing this and I can see something in your background you know, from somewhere you've worked. That seems like it would be interesting for us. And that's maybe you know, maybe, maybe that's where we should start a conversation cuz I've got this role that might be interesting for you immediately. I'm like, oh, great. Okay. So this isn't a waste of my time right off the bat. So personalization and I mean that on a, on like first of. You know, a very personal level. I like it when the recruiter's like, Hey I mean this is probably, you know, like, not the best example, but hey, you know, I'm sat here in Austin it's a sunny day and I'm doing some outreach and here's where I, you know, like here's why I wanted to talk to you. Here's what I saw in your profile. That's interesting. So pro personalize. Yourself, make yourself seem interesting and not just faceless and provide some relevant detail about the role. So when I thought about that, I was trying to give our recruiters, you know, like a little short video that, that maybe if if it's one of our technical recruiters, it's like, Hey, here's a video of one of our engineers talking about why he likes. Working at Intercom, so you can work that in. It's like, Hey I'm a technical recruiter. I do this. And I, I you know, I'm working for a company that really values engineers. You know, here's one of our guys talking about what he does. And you know, at least then you've included some interesting content. You've said something personal, you're not wasting people's time. I, I would say that's probably like the number one thing that I wanted our recruiters to do and, and to enable them. I just built them a toolkit, right? It was, here's some videos here's links to relevant blog posts that, that, you know, our engineers have written. Here's maybe a PR piece. You know, about one of our engineers that we, that we got published somewhere along the way. You know, you have a toolkit of stuff that is interesting for you to then use to reach out to people and, and not just be one of those very generic you know, kind of easily ignorable messages that we're all kind of, you know, that we all just kind of drift past on a, you know, you know, on a daily basis at this point.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. And, the essence of what you've said has parallels with sales and marketing. I mean I love with what you've just said is just speak like a human being and how, how closely aligned do you think recruiting is and recruiting marketing is to sales and marketing? Do you find that they're, they're cousins or do you prefer to use a different mental model

Matt Eyre

 . . No, I mean, I, I think I kind of touched on that earlier, right? When I, when I sort of said you know, use that kind of, that classic marketing meme, right? Recruitment marketing is, is how you reach people and your brand is why people are interested in you.

You know? They're, but they're the same, right? You know, as a recruitment marketer, you are the same as a, you're just a marketer and, you know, instead of working perhaps with a sales team, you know, you're working with recruiters. It's, I, I, I like to think of them as very, very similar

Nasser Oudjidane 

And do you think recruiters are performing a sales role? in that sense.

Matt Eyre 

Yeah. I mean, yeah, a hundred percent right. You , you know, the way that, the way that recruiters work nowadays. Yes. You, you, they, they, their role fundamentally is you know, is, is trying to find the right customer to, to fit their needs. So I, I don't wanna labor this too much, but yeah, my belief is, There's a clear through line between, you know, what I did as a marketer and what I do as a recruitment marketer and what my recruiters or, you know, or sales people were doing. You know, you're trying to find the right assets for them. You're trying to equip them to do the job as effectively as they possibly can. That's, that's the role. So, yeah. You know, sort of super simple.

Nasser Oudjidane 

How would you summarize the qualities and traits of a good recruiting marketer today? Perhaps. It would be great if you can also pull a lens on how the landscape is changing.

Matt Eyre 

Yeah. I mean, it, it's I think what, what I've seen and what I heard you know, sort of speaking to peers over the last couple of years is, is that a lot of companies, and I think about, you know, I think one of my recruiting partners. Intercom when I first got there, sort of talked about how they try to engage in recruitment marketing work before hiring a recruitment marketer. You know, know, and I think this isn't supposed to be critical of anybody. I, this is, this is a pretty nascent space, but I think a lot of companies. Go through a, a bit of a cycle before they get into, we need to hire a recruitment marketer, right? First of all, it's like, okay let's ask the marketing team if they can help us with this. You know, like a talent leader says, let's ask the, the marketing team if we can if they can help us with this. And the answer normally is like, Yeah, sure. You know, we we're kind of busy but we'll see if we can help you out. You know, and, and I don't know, most marketing teams stay pretty busy, right? They're not sat there like, Oh man, I wish I just had a wish I had a fewer extra hours a week to think about, you know, Oh, alright. I've suddenly matched up these fewer extra hours a week to, you know, to maybe try and settle some of these thorny recruitment marketing challenges that we've got. That doesn't happen. So, you know, like so many things, if it's, if it's not somebody's problem, then it's everybody's problem and nobody really deals with it. So not. You know, then I think what you do is, you know, sort of, oh, maybe a few of the recruiters would love to kind of jump into this. Like they're interested in recruitment marketing. Maybe they've worked with a recruitment marketer before, but, you know, recruiters also have full-time jobs. So you, you kind of wind up you know, looking at maybe like an initiative that might help or trying to cobble together you know, what might make a great career site between the marketing team who may not necessarily have the and the, and the talent team, you know, who don't necessarily know like what, what it takes to kind of get that done and get that built. So, you know, I think that's why you're seeing companies doing what I have to say somewhat smugly, intercom, very smart to realize you know, look for, look for a brand marketer, right? Look for someone who's used to you know, who's used to sort of building campaigns and thinking about the work in this way. To sort of directly answer your question what makes a good recruitment marketer? You have to be both strategic and tactical, right? There are, there are companies out there who have teams of people doing this work. You know, like good luck to them. But generally, most of the sort of peers that I've spoken to at the level that I was doing this at similar size company, et cetera, you know, you're a team of ones, so, It's not great if you just pile in there and be super strategic and you can't deliver work, right? You, you have to kind of get some stuff done. There's no point just being like, Hey I've carefully studied our career site and and it's really problematic. And then you, you don't do anything to change it, right? You have to, you have to jump into to getting the work done as well. So you know, that can be hard to balance. That's not always easy. You know, and I, I, I found that really challenging in, in some parts of the. Intercom. So, you know, being aware of that is, is kind of critical. I would say be a builder of relationships. It's, it's just not possible as a team of one to sort of do that job on your own. Right. I, I am not a content writer. I am not a website designer. I am not a PR or a specialist. You know, but, but as a brand marketer, you, I am aware of when we need to kind of turn to those skills and utilize those skills, so, you know, build relationships with your colleagues, it's not possible to do the job on your own. Right? Nobody is interested in hearing what the recruitment marketing dude has to say. You have to give others a voice and you have to work with teams of people to be able to achieve that. So, you know, so go into any job where you're a team as one, thinking about how you can get help from the people around you. Don't lose sight of measuring and reporting because you're busy kind of building a strategy or executing . You, you absolutely have to be able to share about, share how your work goes and that, you know, that can be kind of challenging. That's not always easy as a team of one, so And, and, and kind of lastly, I guess you need to make your company stand out for what it is, not just kind of clone what your competitors have done. There's always gonna be one of your competitors or someone that you really admire that's further down the, the employer brand or talent brand road than you. You can't just do what they did. And hope it works for you. You have to really kind of find out what, what, what is gonna work for your business and make sure that that's what you're communicating, even if it is different to what everyone else is else does. You know, that's, that's kind of important. So you know, and there's, there's sort of schools of thought that really, that really talk to that, right? That finding out you know, how to how to make your company stand out in a crowd is much, much more valuable than just kind of replicating what everybody else. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah.

Matt Eyre

I think that's, yeah, that's, that's probably yeah, that's, that, that's like a few things that kind of came to me. Yeah.

Nasser Oudjidane 

With the benefit of hindsight, what advice have you heard or perhaps witnessed or I mean in the Bay Area, scaling startups all around you when building talent, brand strategies that you think is total bias, do you think there are any myths perhaps theorized or actually put into practice that you ought to think belongs in the trash? 

Matt Eyre

Yeah, I mean, I, I sort of just started to talk to it there. Absolutely. The, there's a couple that really jump out at me that I sort of see kind of happen time and time again. So, you know, this, this concept that, that seems to be. Yeah, it's a little old fashioned now, but I think a lot of companies fall into this trap, right? That your employer brand should be built to appeal to everyone and just make your business seem absolutely perfect. You know, if work was perfect. They wouldn't pay us to do it, would they? Like, as John Draper says in Mad Men, that's what the money's for. So and there's a school of thought that I just, that I love and, and really subscribe to you that I barely see anyone recruiting Well, because it sorry. Executing well because it's difficult. It's kind of called give and Get Employer branding. And I'm referencing specifically the work. A great employer brand or a couple of great employer branders called Charlotte Marshall and Brian Adams. They wrote a book called Give and Get Employer Branding. And the premise of this is basically that the most effective employer brands don't actually sort of just focus on attracting people. They really focus on repelling them as well. And this, to me makes so much sense. I, I, I sort of heard, I heard them speak to. It was a couple of years ago now, like a seminar or some kind of a podcast. There's so few businesses where, you know, just getting thousands of applications is actually a benefit, right? You swamp your recruiters and all this work by sort of trying to be perfect to everyone. You're much better off getting five applications from candidates who've seen what you've said. Are completely aligned with your mission, your culture, your values, you know, the way that you do business, the work that you're trying to do, the mission that you're trying to accomplish. The 50 who've just seen a job post on LinkedIn and decided to fire you an application, you know, there's a million reasons why that's better, right? You, those people who are more aligned. We'll come in, we'll be culture drivers. We'll be more successful. We'll probably stay longer than someone who's just like, yeah. Saw a job description and, and decided to apply. So I, I love the idea that actually your employer brand should should just, should repel people you know, who aren't gonna enjoy working there. So yeah. Charlotte, Matt, Charlotte Marshall and Brian Adams. Do, did a, like a great job of articulating this I talked about James Ellis. This is his thing as well. He's like, you know, what are you doing if you're, if you appeal to everyone, you appeal to, no one be more brutal. Think about how to think about how to really attract the people that you really want. And, and the reality of this is it's hard, right? It's much more difficult than just trying to make your company look great. You have to really think about it. You need real great alignment between hiring managers, execs, the way that you're gonna do this work. It's not easy. But I, you know, the, the idea that everything has to look perfect. I think it was James Elli that said, If everything looks perfect, you look like a cult. So, so I was like, Okay. Yeah, that's, that's kind of a great point. So, So that's one. It was kind of a long answer. Do you want a second one as well, ? 

Nasser Oudjidane

Absolutely. If you've got one.

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, I do. And, and this is very topical and maybe a little personal but in this current market right now I hate that I'm seeing lots of recruitment marketers getting moved on, right? It's absolutely wild to me. But at a time when huge. Companies that spend fortunes on recruiting and hiring the very best talent are literally laying off thousands of people. Why are smaller companies laying off their recruitment marketing people? , this is when your, you should be trying to be the very best that you can possibly be. This is when your employer brand, your talent branding all of your recruitment marketing needs. Absolutely on point because there's this amazing wave of talent that are, that are sort of coming into the market, that are looking for work. You should be being as, as sort of specific and attractive to these people as you could possibly be. So I definitely, you know, I'm not like just business unaware. I get that this is an incredibly tough market, especially in tech. You know, the headwinds are, are immense and we're seeing real challenges. So, you know, I do understand. But recruitment marketing isn't like a light switch. You don't just turn it on and turn it off when you want it. I, I, I likened it frequently to kind of building a wall, right? You don't just build a 10 foot high wall by stacking bricks on top of each other. You have to put down a layer of bricks, then you have to put down another layer of bricks. Then you have to put down another layer of bricks, right? You are building a. You are building an employer brand, you are building a talent brand, You are doing your recruitment marketing, and you are consistently adding to it. You know, And if you want like a marketing analogy here, Nike didn't just, you know, like slap a swoosh on a shoe, go, Oh, that worked nicely, and then sit back for the last 50 years telling themselves that they kicked ass, right? They have constantly reinvented their brand, kept working, building, and communicating to stay relevant. And that's every. That's everyone's employer brand, talent, brand, brand recruitment, marketing strategy, whatever you wanna call it. This, this kind of reminds me of, of like my old ceo, Electronic Arts, just one of the most brilliant business people I, I ever kind of worked for or with more for honestly. But you know, he was, he's brilliant and he used to say to us all the. Electronic arts was, was, was booming when I was there. And he'd say for us to stay, number one, we have to think like we're number two. So, you know, always be competing, improving, or someone is gonna come along and eat your lunch. So, and I, I think that's particularly relevant now. So, you know, that's the second thing. It's not. You know, I, it's not BS that, that recruitment marketers are getting laid off that the, that the business is tough. Right. But I, I hate that I'm seeing it at a time when companies should be trying to crush, should be trying to, you know, should be looking at these people and saying, How do we empower you? What do you need to make us look as good as we can possibly be so we can be out there getting the very best talent in the world to come and work. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That, that resonates so much. It's also similar to Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. And in addition to, in addition to your point it's extremely important as the landscape is changing because mission, culture and values are coming. Ever more important in a candidate's, you know not only deciding factor, but you know, the, the filtering factor on whether they actually want to follow that brand or consider working for them.

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, I, I, I have a, I have a little anecdote here that I, that I like to use on the importance of this stuff. And, and, you know, I think about when I got my, my very first job. I applied for an ad in a newspaper, right? Like, I'm probably really aging myself here, but I literally, my, my, I, it was, it was electronic arts. I was finishing college. My housemate came in and slung a newspaper at me and said, Hey these guys make that game. They're always playing. It was FIFA just for, for clarity. These guys make that game always playing, and they're hiring people. To work on, like their customer service team. You should apply for that. And that's what I did. Right. I didn't know anything else about this business at all. I was a college student. I applied from a newspaper ad. Can you imagine doing that now? Can you, Do you think anyone in, in any, for any role is just kind of like, Yeah. Cool. I, I just, I saw a job description and went for it. Like , there are so many ways that you can educate yourself on a company now. There are so many ways for a company to sort of share what it means, and, and. You know, without trying to sound like an old fart. You know, I think that, that the younger people coming into the workforce now are way more, you know, they understand this, right? They know that they can jump on TikTok and find out what a company is like and. They wanna do that. Like they, it's, to them it really matters. They're not happy to, you know, to be like, Oh yeah, I play video games. I'll go work for a video game company. They wanna know how that company treats its employees. You know, video games has had a real problem with this over the last few years. They wanna know what a company stands for. They wanna know what the work experience is gonna be like when they get there. They do want to understand that working culture, you know, they. Appealed to by stuff like values. And I don't mean like sticking, you know, 20 words up on your website. I mean, you know, like validated values. How do they show up? What does it mean? You know, what does it mean? What do these values mean to me and how am I gonna kind of engage with them on a day to day basis? You know, it's not just right. How much am I gonna earn and what's my title gonna be anymore? Those days are gone. So you know it, when I think about that it's really, really important that you find the right ways to get this work out. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Yeah. I know that we are gonna be stretching for time, but one thing that I, I'm fascinated with, what I've seen is the impact of the layoffs and how different companies have approached it and how candidates can read Twitter and see how Stripe approached it versus Twitter. And there are even foreigns, like blind. I'm not sure if, if I'm, if I've got that right where you can actually register. within large organizations literally have a, a pulse on what the existing employees are saying. Yeah, So there is really no escaping. 

Matt Eyre

Yeah, that, I mean, that, that truly isn't right. I, I, I'm not suggesting that everyone has to, to like, do things exactly the same way, so companies are gonna behave differently. You know, I think back a couple of years, Coinbase took an extremely strong position that, you know, like I. Personally didn't, didn't really resonate with me when it came to kind of employees bringing you know, bringing like politics to work or, or, or that kind of thing. So, you know, I personally didn't love it, but I'm sure there were some people who might have just found like the, the bluntness refreshing. So, you know, they, they decided that they were gonna make a stand for the way that they wanted to work, and they put it out into the world. You know, that's, that at least is. Being true to the values that you hold, right? As a leadership team or as a company, however you wanna describe that. So you know, as I said, not, not really my cup of tea, but but an interesting, like an interesting way of going about it. You know, yeah, I did see Strike and, and, you know, and, and Intercom sort of managing layoffs in an extremely sort of professional manner. Trying to look out for the people that, that, that they dealt with, saying to them, Look, you know, we brought you on board in the best possible faith. We wanted you to be part of a successful journey with us, and that hasn't happened, and we take some responsibility for that, and as a result, we're gonna do our best to look after. As you go through a difficult period in your career and you know that that stuff resonates, people remember that it is important, so, you know, and it's only gonna get more important as well.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Moving into closing questions. What's one piece of a device that you wish you had when you started? Talent marketing, brand marketing.

Matt Eyre 

Oh, this one. This one I think about all the time. And it's, and it's if everything's a priority, nothing is I, I, I am not a ruthless person, but being ruthless in your prioritization is important. Otherwise, you just don't achieve the things that you, that you want to achieve. And, you know, as a team of one going to a place. I was the first person to do do the job, the sort of temptation to get sucked into everybody's problem and to try and help. Was just massive. I wanted to try and, you know, just help everybody with everything all the time. And honestly, it made it really hard, you know, after a few months I was kind of I was sort of swamped under the weight of , the way of expectation and stuff that I wanted to do my own and other people. So, you know, I got great advice, which was, you know, take half the things off your plate and just nail the other half. Do this from, from. From one of, from one of the sort of VPs there. And, and it was, you know, it was incredibly helpful. It really cleared my mind, cleared my ability to kind of go and do this stuff and go and deliver some work. You know, and, and, and it helped me understand that you know, that that sort of saying yes to everyone all the time, which is kind of my personal trait as like a people pleasing person doesn't actually help. You know, you're not, you're not doing work the right way that way. So, you know, that, that for me, especially in this field, I think is absolutely critical.

Nasser Oudjidane

Is there anything that you're listening to, reading or watching for inspiration that you think our audience may find helpful and interesting? 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah. Who did I, I, I name dropped a couple of people already. Read, read Charlotte Marshall and Brian Adams book on give and get employer branding. It's, it's, it's brilliant. Follow James Ellis. He's, he's this, just this amazing instinctive employer, brander. He literally both wrote what, what I think most people kind of refer to as the Bible on recruitment marketing. It's a book I, I it's called it's called Talent Chooses You. And it's, you know, it's just a great place to start if you're thinking about doing something that you haven't done before. James is also sort of prolific with his content. I think you can find him on YouTube, TikTok, lots of LinkedIn Twitter. He's, he runs classes for recruiters and, and sort of recruitment marketers. I, I jumped into one of them about six weeks ago. Just finished it, you know, just one of the most interesting people working in the space. I just discovered the Talent Brand Alliance and joined. They seem to have a lot of really good stuff going on. Big Facebook group, lots of people kind of helping and contributing and asking and answering question. So, so those three things really stand out. People who are great at this job you know, again, I mentioned a couple, but I, I was told by I was told to look out for when I started in this place to look at kind of the work that Instacart were doing. That was a, a recruitment market called Marta Riggins. She's brilliant. I think she consults now. I follow her on LinkedIn. It was one of her team or someone that worked for her called Dan Gokin, who's been super helpful to me personally who's just started a new role at Cash App. She's brilliant to, So, you know, those are, those are great names in the space that I've like really come to respect and enjoy following.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Is there anything you are listening to, reading or watching for 

Matt Eyre 

inspiration? Yeah, I, I think I, I sort of name dropped a couple of people as we went through this. But yeah, I definitely read Charlotte Marshall and Brian Adams book Give, get Employer branding. It's great. It, it, even if it's hard to achieve, just the way they think about stuff is so, so interesting and they're both super experienced practitioners. So, so that's. Follow James Ellis. He's this, he's this brilliant kind of instinctive employer brander. He, he literally wrote what I think some people refer to as the Bible on recruitment marketing. It's called Talent Chooses You. He's really prolific content producer at the moment. He's doing kind of one minute videos every day on YouTube just talking about a different topic. I, I, I did a little course with him recently, like a six week course on employer branding. And just the way that he thinks about this work is he, he has tons of experience and is, and is, you know, really, really good at just kind of rolling it out and bringing you along with him. So he teaches recruiters how to recruit the market as well. So if you're a recruiter that you, you know, and, and you're thinking about how to get into this space, then or how, you know, you could do stuff to augment the job that you do. He, he's brilliant. I just discovered the Talent Brand Alliance and joined that. I'm not that familiar with what they do yet. I'm just excited because they seem to have a lot going on. It's a big community of people who work in this space. Big Facebook group full of kind of lots of people kind of helping out, asking and answering questions. They, they run some podcasts and seminars and stuff, so really excited to kind in to lean into that a bit more. And then, you know, sort of influences on a personal level. You know, the ones that I named I, when I started. In this space. I got connected through a friend to an awesome Instacart recruiter, well, sorry, Instacart, Recruitment marketer. She's just, I think she's working at Cash App now called Kin. She's brilliant. And and she was working, I think for Marta Riggins, who is another awesome kind of exponent of this work. So any of those people, any and all of those people are doing really cool stuff and I look up to them a lot. There's, there's loads more. I know you've. I know you've had Alex her on, on your podcast before. He's great. Super interesting person to follow. You know, it seems to be a very welcoming and friendly space. And I really, you know, I, I've sort of really enjoyed kind of immersing myself in it. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Alex is awesome, and we'll absolutely put the books that you've you've mentioned several times into the show, show notes, so I already can actually pick that up.

Matt Eyre 

Yeah. Awesome. 

Nasser Oudjidane

there any, any tools that you are using what tech are you using to, to do your job that are delivering value? Feel free to shout out the product. 

Matt Eyre 

Yeah, I, there's, there's there's, I, there's loads of ways to kind of think about this stuff that I've found kind of helpful. The first thing that I wanted to, to mention was a product called Rally Inside. It's, it's a new content measurement tool from a super smart recruitment marketer called Laurie. Sylvia I, I guess another great person to follow, but she's sort of, A year or two ago, correctly determined that recruitment marketers tend to be sat on kind of talent teams, often as individual contributors. They're not necessarily sat like in the marketing team with, you know, with access all of, to all the marketing teams incredible tools. And she built she just built this tool to help us measure the effectiveness of content that we put out into the world. I tested it. For about two weeks, and then called her and asked her how I could pay her for it. It it was super, super helpful. And I would, I, you know, would, would use that anywhere. I, we, we, we just got into using we just got into using Octa Post as a, as a cool, a very cool social advocacy tool you know, enabling employees to kind of take some of your messaging and get it out into the world. I was really impressed. The intercom's community manager did an amazing job of sort of setting it up and I leaned into it pretty hard. It was cool. I, I'm just a big fan of finding the right. Tool for the job. I was trying to think about how I could give advice in answer to this question, not just stuff that may or may not be relevant, but you know, I, I was able to go and find some incredibly cool people doing amazing work, right? We, we were struggling to get bandwidth to build our career site. So someone pointed me to before you apply and they're awesome, they just basically build a career site for you, or a careers page, or you know, a page that includes relevant information and helps enable your recruiters. Just an incredible business. They do great. You know, if you're looking for content, if you're finding it hard to get content you know, places like just comparably or Great Place to work, right? You know, give you, give you a great way of sort of talking about your culture and getting your employees to talk about your culture. You know, you can, you can get nominated or, or win an award there. You know, and then you've got content for. It comes in your social team, you can put that stuff on your career site. You can enable your recruiters with it, you know, maximize every channel. So so those things are all good. I really loved using Isems video Studio. I, I I, it does take some time and resource to use, but it's a way of just getting your hiring managers or recruiters to record quick and easy videos. And, you know, I talked earlier in the pod about like personalizing. There's nothing more personal than sort of recording a video saying, Hi I'm reaching out to you about this job. It's awesome. And here's. A couple of terms. Recruiters got really good and really creative at using these and, and you know, just got great responses from, from candidates you know, sort of driving up LinkedIn in mail response rates and stuff like that. So, I dunno, that was a bit of a, that was a bit of a, that was a word salad of an answer for you, but hopefully there was some interesting stuff in there. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, that is great. Thank you for sharing. And last one, what is one thought, if any, or value or phrase that you live. 

Matt Eyre 

So I, I'd, I'd I, I'd sort of thought about this a little bit and then and then realized that it was, it was basically almost exactly the same answer as Alex her gave, and it's, you know, especially at the moment, right? Work's quite tough for a lot of people. It's, you know, there's, there's business headwinds and, and, and times are a bit tough and, you know, people are getting laid off and, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't always make for the plain of sailing at work. And, and I've long been a believer of just trying to be nice to the people that you work with. Work can be really tough and, and, you know, you don't always have, you're not always that close to the people that you work with. You know, I just spent two weeks working at my two weeks, two years working at my dining table, not meeting my colleagues. It's really important in those times just to try and look out for people and make sure your colleagues are doing okay. So you know, just sort of, sort of be kind to people. Look out for your, look out for your, your teammates and your, and your, and your colleagues, and they'll do the same for you. And, you know, I try to do that in, in every walk of life. So, yeah, that's it. It's a little, I guess, a little trite sounding, but it's important for me.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for being so open and generous of your time. This has been a pleasure. 

Matt Eyre 

Absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed it Was my, was my first ever podcast, so so if I waffle on any of the answers, bear with me. I'm I'm learning a new skill. . I'll be all. You should do more of them though, for sure.

Nasser Oudjidane

Thanks Matt . 

Matt Eyre 

Thanks buddy. I appreciate it. It was really fun.