Revamping Visa’s Brand: Data & Engagement Journey w/ Celinda Appleby – The Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Ep. 17

[Music] who are you and why are you here oh so my name is Sinda applebe I am the global director of talent attraction and recently acquired employer Brands I’m with Visa been with Visa about six years I’m here because my lovely friends at Shaker invited me to sit with you today um and I’m excited to be here sweet so as we look forward Q4 in 202 what advice would you have for your peers in that S I think this is a time where we have to um be okay with the uncertainty yeah I like to roll my eyes the economy there’s an election cycle you know the job Market’s a mess um our industry’s continuously been facing a lot of issues you know we’re always first to go and all last to fix everything and I think that in efforts to stay on top you know or like at top of your game we have to um embody more empathy it’s something I’m personally working on uh and resilience uh because I do think it’s going to be harder in 25 especially in Corporate America you know I think our budgets are getting cut I think our headcounts getting cut and so you have to really fight a little harder than you did in like 2019 for example yeah how would you describe Visa’s employment brand visas employment brand is currently under a refresh uh we just hired about 12 months ago a brand new CEO uh we just launched a brand new corporate strategy a corporate brand I don’t know if you all watch the Olympics or not Visa was front and center and you saw a lot of that powerful moments of taking small steps to further your life you know and Visa wants to be a part of that from the consumer Journey so super blessed to be working with our chief marketing officer on building that brand uh the extension of the employer is an extension of the consumer brand this is the first time we’ve ever been able to do this and so we’re in the beginning stages of that work so share share some of the sausage making with us what questions what’s the brainstorming look like Happ behind closed doors yeah what what what do the opening discussions look like um so the opening discussions are so we refreshed the EVP in 2122 and so for me it was a lot of understanding what has happened in your eyes that you we’re no longer the employee base is not resonating with the 2122 I love to call it EVP 1.0 um and so ours would be EVP 2.0 cuz I do think it’s a living breathing document changing so a lot of the past six months all I’ve been doing is building a center of excellence where we Brad in people from people marketing comms in other departments around the world to hear from them like let’s look at the current EVP what do you love what do you hate what should be changed and then taking that to our stero which is made of a lot of svps very big people and have having them like opinionate back on that and we weren’t seeing in all honesty this happens everywhere we weren’t seeing eye to eye with some of the changes or recommendations and so we’re currently in the research stage and that basically is three prongs we’re doing internal and external research and then we’re going to conduct focus groups after that I’m a firm believer that I can’t tell anyone that we need to change our tagline or our pillars or our Comm strategy without showing the data yeah um and that all stems from your employees so if we’re going to tell employee stories later we should bring the employee stories in now we should know them now yes yes so let’s take a look at look backward in 2024 what was the biggest surprise for you over the last year or so could it be work related like tactical oh yeah okay so we launched avature about 18 months ago first CRM that Visa’s ever had um and with the Olympics I created an email marketing campaign the first we’d ever ran ironically rant it the first one outside of LinkedIn email is a new technology so it makes sense that’s what I want to say like it’s honestly like selling it wasn’t hard cuz people were like this is so safe and they were like but what’s really going to come of it so we messaged 18,000 people I received 5,500 applications and no offers yet cuz our time is a little bit longer of a tale but our open ratio was 71% across the board I that means people are want so my take away from that is we’re not messaging our candidates enough we’re not messaging our applicants enough they want to hear from Visa they want to learn more about life at Visa so for our one of my okrs for fy2 is to continue like build a whole email marketing strategy so we’re not doing one a year talk about the importance of social media what your strategy is around it and maybe tactically some things that you’re doing that are working you know um I love social media um I find that there is a little bit of a fatigue in our employees wanting to be brand ambassadors and what I mean by that is they’ll get in front of a camera and talk about what they love they might even take a picture of your brand but when it comes to Tweeting or Facebooking or whatever people are doing even myself like I sort of like H one more post right and so to turn a culture of brand advocacy we have to make it very easy for people and they have to get something out of it because no one wants to message their mom and dad anymore you know cuz that’s who was at least that’s my followers um about their company brand right one of so I don’t have many wins on social media just because we’re still building that out but I want to say something that I really blew me out of the water this year we implemented uh Google search engine marketing with a search engine optimization and an integrated strategy um at the time when we started this in January Google was not even the top 25 uh source of what do you call that attribution yeah and now Page search is number four and Google search is number one uh we got about 10,000 applications in in a 3-month period and about 30 hires 30 highes and keep in mind we only did this for high key Market areas and Technology products so difficult roles talk about the organic part are these job postings are they specific yeah articles about getting a job or or targeted uh positions for you so we launched a brand new career site uh in December of 24 and for my whole tenure that i’ been there we’ve had a desperate career site one page 300 across 300 countries so a total of 300 pages that I manage and there was no content it was really just like search for a job yeah 24 January 24 we launched a new page if you go now we have about 12 Pages we have teams it’s it’s very robust there’s still work to be done in my opinion but what we did with search engine we had never had that done before obviously with 300 Pages you know so we focus on key Market areas you know Poland India the US um the UK okay and then using all of those keywords we drive people to the lifeat pages or the teams pages and then job search because you you know Google gives you a lot of credit if you do job searches at the top of the nav yeah so in 2025 looking forward what’s your biggest priority launching this EVP we should be done with the research stage in November um we are promising to have like a messaging um done you know like a toolkit if you will by January 2025 five and then we move into the fun stuff of like really creating a brand components banners photos images videos yeah you talked about avature I’m sure you’re looking a lot of different solutions for the for the upcoming year what are some that you’re excited about or some that you are using now that are working or you’re looking forward to using Visa is very risk adverse when it comes to tools and you should be excited about that because you know we obviously protect your money um so our current CTO is sort of in the lean stages of not really doing too much but we currently work with appcast for all of our media um and creative Services um looking to expand our creative capabilities a little bit in the year of 25 we’ll continue working with avature we uh Visa is also moving into uh ATS implementation we’re going with workday who is our hris yeah we realize there’s a lot of um I in the room for that me not here but overall um and then uh higher score I think is the layer the intelligence layer on top yeah for me I’m so obsessed that there’s so many recruitment marketing Tools in fact I said to Joe earlier I’m like talk to me like I’m in kindergarten like what are the differences do we need all of them like or who’s a competitor and so I’d like some more advocacy around that cuz I feel like some amazing companies have popped up but I just don’t really know what everyone how they intersect with each other yeah keep listening to the Chad and cheese podcast as we talk about that 100% but thank you for taking the time and coming sitting down with us if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe even I don’t know take a look at uh jobs at Visa where would you send them um my LinkedIn is best I’m really boring on Twitter but slend to app will be on LinkedIn uh our Visa careers is visa.com careers super easy we have about 1200 open rolls now across the globe so we are definitely hiring excellent thanks for hanging out with us [Music]