The employer branding triangle: engineering, content and HR

Ivan Brezak Brkan: My talk is on the employer branding triangle between engineering content and hr. And it's based on a talk they've already given a number of times at HR conferences, engineering conferences, tech conferences. But this one has been revamped for the dev community since recently. myself and my team have become a part of it and that's why we wanted to be at the conference. That's why I wanted to actually meet you. But hey we'll see each other in Yokohama. I guess we'll see as a short intro, if you, after the talk need to ask me anything, you can use this email or you can tweak me on Twitter. hopefully Musk doesn't ban me. In between this and and the finish of my talk you can also call me I b b since I do have complex name and surname.

So anyways I'm the founding editor of Netokracija. For those who aren't from Southeastern Europe, Netokracijais the leading tech magazine in the region. So it's basically like the tech wrench of the region. We've written about tech startups scale up engineering companies for more than a decade. We've been part of the community. We have offices in Zagreb, o and in Belgrade. and basically, if anything has been written about the local and regional tech community, we were the ones probably doing it. and it's a really cool magazine. I would suggest you check it Netokracija, although we will have something in English very soon. And this is my very nice theme that actually through the years has learned how to target an audience that we all wanna target.

And that's of course engineers. and not all content creators can do that. Unfortunately, most media cannot create content for developers. but we manage to, we work with all the top tech companies in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, s sl and so on, working with them to create employer branding campaigns for, again, more than a decade. We, we were the first ones to do native content, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a lot of experience there. Now, for years, this was the setup. We were a good team. It was working out bootstrap, profitable, and proud baby. and then something happened. Basically, we got acquired we got acquired this year by in info as a media publication. for those of you who haven't yet met Julia and Neon, Boaz and the rest of the team, Mike and everyone, who is Joe and everyone who is there at DevRelCon in Info is the world's leading communication platform. And we were required as part of a strategy

To create an even better developer experience team or department. So basically at mfo, the setup is we are one of the teams in charge of developer content. That's my team. and we of course try to target developers as much as we can. along with those two permanent roles, I've been an employer branding consultant for some of the larger enterprises in the region working with IA one, telecom and Austrian, Croatia, I as in bank across the region in Romania, Croatia, and so on. Helping them to reach engineers because of course, you know, corporates are having a hard time hiring engineers and they do need some help. So we do have a bit of experience with employer branding. also recently I've started a blog. It has no content, but if you do want to subscribe after talk, go to engineers editor.com and subscribe to the newsletter.

Enough self promotion and intro. What I'm going to talk in, talk about in the stock is free things. First of all, who owns employer branding? I think it's very important for you to understand if you want to create employer burning can content, what your role is, and do you own it? Does someone else, and how do you basically word that out? Second of all, will do a deep dive into DevRel's strategic role for employer branding, because I do think after all this decade of experience working with both small companies, large companies, enterprises, I think Dev has a strategic role in employer branding and Ford. I would like to give you some tactical advice to create content specifically employer branding content. So let's go. Who owns employer branding? Well, a decade ago the question was completely different. It was, who owns social media? So the issue was that in 2009, 2010, a lot of different departments were looking at social media as a opportunity.

Okay, we can do marketing here, we can do support, et cetera, et cetera. But no one was really in charge of it. Does that sound familiar? So it's not Ellen Musk owning social media. It's maybe marketing. So marketing saw Facebook, they saw Twitter, they saw, well, they didn't see TikTok. It wasn't around yet, but they saw the marketing potential. So they said, social media, that's mine. I want to, I want to achieve my strategic goals of getting to users by using social media for marketing. On the other hand, you had support for the first time, social media, let us hear users opinions, help them with their issues answer questions. So support said, oh, maybe we should own it, because that's a channel for us to give our customers feedback. Maybe that works. And also you had of course, HR coming in and saying, we could use this to hire, because again, if your company has a LinkedIn page, I'm 90% sure that HR probably owns it, kind of sorta, right?

Everyone owns every different social media platform, but LinkedIn, they, that's HR first in most organizations. Having that in mind, what's the situation currently? Who owns employer branding in a tech company? So here we come to the crux of the problem, something I call the Bermuda Triangle of Employer Branding. This is an illustration done by a RIN artist called Zombie. She's very talented. And it, and it explains in my opinion, the concept of what happens in a typical tech company when engineering tries to hire more engineers. So we have developers at the top in the clouds, of course. they ask hr, oh, hr, we need to recruit more engineers. Go recruit, do your stuff, right? We need more engineers. HR says, okay, that's fine. We can post some job ads as, as you do. but you know, it's a very competitive market.

We need to do more. We need to do create content. And they tell engineering, well, we need content. And engineering says, we don't have time for that. We have some other goal, strategic, whatever. We don't have time to create the content that you need, find a solution. And then hr, size, size, size, and goes to marketing and tells marketing, oh, you knew you know how to do content. can you help? and marketing says, no, no, we like developers. Those like scary beasts, that different user target, we don't know how to talk to them. Do it yourself. And marketing size and HR size and developer size, and all the potential content that could be created for developers ends up stuck in the Remu triangle. As you can see, the LinkedIns, the YouTube videos, Instagram posts and texts, lock posts, they're all drowning in the Bermuda Triangle.

So it's so sad, really. But let's take it a step further. Let's take it to your companies, their first companies who owns employer branding and their first companies. Well, let's replace marketing with David. Let's replace it with you guys and gals and everybody at the conference. So the same thing happens. And again, the, the engineering and HR will might ask you, oh, can you help with recruiting? And this is happening more and more talking to colleagues from the region. what I've gotten the info is, oh, we get pinged from hr, from engineering, from leadership that we should help communicate to developers business, because of course, we're in the community. But that's, is, is that our job is, I'm, I'm not sure, because again, I'm not saying that HR does a bad job. I'm not saying that employer branding does a bad job.

Actually, employee employer branding can just one award. yesterday, I think that employer branding awards regionally, so they're doing a good job. But again, they ask for help. So what's the difference between HR and dev? When I, when I'm saying hr, also think of like for employer branding teams. If you have a dedicated team for employer branding in your company, for example, if we do have an dedicated employer branding team, these guys, these gals and guys so here are some of the differences for hr. The issue is that they're, whatever they do, they're always focused on their internal community, right? They're not focused on external developer community. The issues that I've had as a consultant for a lot of companies is that when HR is working on how to craft content for developers, it's always very internal. It's like stuff that they appreciate inside the company.

But when you explore it in the community, it's not interesting. a very simple example the community is growing in Croatian, Serbia and so on. And like I know five years ago, it was very cool to have whole articles about, oh, we have this brand new space. We have this brand new office. It's so cool. We have crap beer and everything else. You know, that, you know, what was in and fine at that time, it was interesting content maybe. But now a lot of HR people are still trying to promote that in the developer community. And most developers say, so what? Everyone else is doing it? Why should we care? So they're focused on internal things a lot, which is, I think, natural because HR is an internal focused department. On the other hand, we have us, we have you, we have dev, your focused guests on internal, of course you have to start from the internal developer community, but they're also very focused on their external community, on the developers at events.

You're building your own communities, as we heard in the talk before. So this is an, a very extreme division, HR with extreme focus on internal dev, very focused on external, on the content side. HR has its own types of content. It has its career pages job ads and so on. And these are the things that are very natural to hr. They own them obviously, but they're not something that you and Dev might wanna do if you're not posting jobs for your own team, obviously. And it's not that you're creating this type of content daily HR is, so they own that content. And on their other hand, dev owns dev logs, docs, everything that is again, is very dev focused, which HR should be doing, but just doesn't own it. Because again, we have different ownerships. when we come to events, and this is a photo from in Forbes shift conference from this year, please do join us next year as well.

We also have a divide. HR will go to events to hire the types of events that HR goes to and recruiting goes to is different than the ones that you go to recruit users is different geographically is different in focus. for example, you might want to focus on a, on a principal engineer, on a, I wouldn't say typical engineer, but like engineers that are individual contributors. Well, someone else, or in this case, HR wants to focus, for example, on engineering leadership or on students. You want, you do wanna go to developer events, but you're going to completely different spaces. As I said, they, they all goes to users. and this is a big divide. So if you even look at websites, for example, with us, with promoting EOB to developers, dev is focusing on developers as users. And of course, what HR does is it promotes its own basically story, its own CTA as an employer value proposition. So they have of their pitch that shows the company as a great employer. This pitch, in most cases, in 90% of cases, does not, I wouldn't say doesn't align, but has a completely different focus than your pitch because you are pitching the company as a platform. Maybe you are pitching an api, the pitches are completely different. We can look at some websites later, but it's all a matter actually of priorities. If we look at Kiwi, one of the sponsors of this event Kiwi jobs, the focus on the jobs website when you go under engineering is of course getting engineers to apply for jobs. The copy is focused on that. The value proposition is focused on that. Everything is focused on hiring engineers, which is kind of obvious on your hand. If we look at developer pages and websites and so on, for example.

Then again, present event. It's a completely different call to action and it's very hard to combine these two. The important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that your, your okr your goal is not their goal. So if the company, the leadership comes to you to create employer branding content, it's not something you actually wanna focus on. I mentioned marketing before. So at one of the companies that I work with one of the bigger telecoms in the region, when I was talking with HR to try to get marketing to help with the developer content, the C M O told me, you know, we even, I understand the issue, I wanna help, but this is like 5% of my budget. I don't care. It, for me, it's not my goal. It's not that important. In the end, there must have, hiring engineers is your nice to have, and this is very important to have in mind, especially in a downturn.

We heard yesterday how it's important to go back to our origin story, right? To get back to some basics in a, you can't really focus on multiple things. You need to focus on your core goals on what you are here to do. And I'm not sure hiring was in your job description, right? So what does David do? What is your urgent story? Well, unfortunately, in my opinion, or fortunately maybe Dev shouldn't own employer branding content for developers, because it's not your strategic goal. It's not something that you should do should own. Someone should delegate it to you. You can help, but it's not Charlotte something you should own. But here's what you could do instead, because honestly, HR and employer branding needs both you and me. Because when we look at the content that comes out of employer branding and HR departments copy, so on in a lot of cases, prone to writing fiction.

Again, I mentioned HR is a very internal focused department. And a lot of cases, the stuff that comes in is true if for the people that are in the company that are in the like reality distortion field of the company, they're part of the team. But when you try to write that content for outsiders, it doesn't work. It sounds like fiction. And we've had this experience in netra. We've had briefs from companies that are really good, but the content that they come to us with wouldn't fly with the community, wouldn't fly with developers who are of course a bit more critical. Again, HR is mostly knock dev first, but there is something in between that we can work on, because I do think there's a love story here. I think that HR and or employer branding and DevOps can work together very nicely and can be a happier story than this one.

But hey, I had to use some picture. So employer branding can be a byproduct of great dev content and also employer branding can foster and create great dev content. So how do you do that? How do you create grab great dev content with employer branding by your side? For one thing, you can focus on big evergreen wins. So what does that mean? in my opinion, if you wanna do employer branding content you can't be doing it every week. You can't be doing it every month because again, in a downturn, it's not your focus. What you can do is a couple of times a year have big projects that can be evergreen, that then HR or employer branding can run with. And basically you can help them create it and then delegate running it to them. So what do I mean by this?

So one project that we did even before input acquired Netokracija is the input engineering handbook. So if we've had this issue, they were hiring a lot of engineers across the world. they started doing David L and everything else, but again, they needed some kind of content to help hire engineers. And they actually hired me before the acquisition as a consultant and asked, and we worked together. And the question was, okay, what kind of content can we create that will actually make an impact? Because the first thing was, oh, we should do blog posts and events and so on. Cool. We don't have the budget for it. We don't have the focus for it, we don't have the people for it yet. We need one thing that can like be an evergreen big win. And that thing was actually the infr engineering handbook inspired by GitLab actually.

So what we did is we did a workshop, we brought in engineering, we brought in plural branding, we brought it Edge HR for a three day workshop. And in three days, just three days, believe me, I have videos somewhere to prove it. We create the whole input engineering handbook that now on a daily basis is used by recruiting globally as a reference point for engineers. When engineers are being recruited, when they're asking about questions from culture to how we deploy stuff and so on, we actually just send them a link to this. And again, it's something that's evergreen, that gets updated, that we as developer experience don't have to work on daily, but it gets the job done. So we can, if you can find those big bins, it can work really well because again, there's not enough employer planning content in most engineering companies.

And these big projects can really help and you can get them done fast. The second thing is supercharging ad advocacy with employer branding. What do I mean by this? Well, here are most, well, maybe not most, but a lot of employees, engineers at our yearly dev conference dev base. here you might see 900 engineers. What I see, I see is 900 dev bloggers, right? We heard in the talk before about how we can use advocacy in the community. We heard yesterday how we can supercharge advocacy. The thing is that esl, you're really good at running advocacy programs, which is awesome. The, the even more important thing is you can use employer brandings basically influence and budget to help foster these advocacy programs. So for example, for what I found is that for a lot of engineering managers and engineering teams, they will understand hiring as a goal before understanding like how we get developers as users.

So for example, I've been talking to all of info vis engineering managers and all of them say, oh, we need to work on retention. We need to work on recruiting. That's their focus because they're engineering managers. And when we explain that, oh, we can create content to help you with these basically employer branding goals, they say, let's do it. And what happens is we create content that actually helps with dev, that helps with developer marketing, that helps with developer experience. So we have the example of the handbook, right? So we got on it and we have another example. This is a couple of the guys from Engineering. We had a workshop a couple weeks ago because they had an issue they wanted to work on employer branding content as a team to create it, to help them as a team recruit better because it's hard.

And what we ended up doing is doing a workshop where they created articles that are going to be published and was the result we're going to get content that helps them with employer branding content and then helps us with Fargo. And that's developer content developer content to promote info as a platform for users. So basically, you and I work hand in hand with per branding, achieve your goals while helping them achieve theirs. But it's important that sometimes you might need to pitch the stuff you want to achieve as an employer branding or hiring thing. Then a dev developing, because a lot of engineers, a lot of engineering managers might understand hiring before they understand dev marketing.

And this leads us to, one of the things I like doing is combining budgets, right? So dev, dev, dev, marketing, everyone has their budget, especially in large organizations. But again, employer branding has their own budget. HR has their own budget. Why shouldn't we combine budgets to create them in better projects, right? So I'm a very big proponent of working with different teams and departments to combine resources, not just budgets, but people time and so on, to create something better that can achieve all our goals. So I'm not sure how many of you have watched captain Planet in your youth. I hope some have watched Cartoon Network, which has recently been closed. So sad. but let our powers be combined and our budgets be combined and our resources be combined so we can create projects like the handbook, the blogs, the podcasts, and so on.

And with this kind of stuff, what you can do is actually focused on areas that you usually wouldn't have the resources to do. One area that I would suggest you focus on is actually paid media. So from what I've seen and I've tried to educate myself more about DLE and building deaf committees and so on, you are very, which is normal. You're very community focused, right? Everything is either own media, it's shared media. We're building our own communities, we're participating in other communities. And when it comes to paid stuff, it's mostly like sponsorships of events. I haven't seen that much of basically makeup advertising. I haven't seen a lot of you doing things that companies do when they're doing advertising in the media. If you do paid, it's mostly like maybe Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe Reddit, something like that. But one thing you should explore, explore in 2023, especially because it's downturn.

So you might get a bigger discount, is paid media. It's reaching out to different media outlets, netra are included. and basically working with them to create articles that are written by experts, by other writers, sorry, by other writers. and using the expertise that the employer branding has in HR for that kind of stuff to again, achieve your goals. So we've done a lot of this at ocra. Yeah. Here are some examples of articles. Unfortunately, in Croatian, again, we're a local media company. So there, there are articles that have been written to promote these companies as employers. But if you do the same thing for outlets in English or wherever you're maybe trying to promote your platform, it can be Latin, it can be the us it can be Asia. If you do the same thing with, for example, in Asia, you can do it with tech in Asia, right?

If you're doing it in Africa, you can do it with tech, tech cable. you can achieve basically awareness of your platform through other media platforms. Something that I, again, haven't seen them as much in devel. So how does it work at Info? Just to get to my point. we have in info developers of Devel. You've met probably Julia and Joe, Mike and so on. We have Mike team. We're doing developer content. You have startup tribe, they work with startups. And of course you have our shift team and shift conferences happening in Zada and hopefully all around the world as well as meetups in the us. What's important with all these things when you are trying to create employer branding content is that everything you do, every project that you do and so on, shouldn't, again, when you're doing employer brand shouldn't be owned by you, but you can use these projects to further your goals and you can promote some different goal that you might have. For example, promoting your team as a part of a bigger project that's more focused on employer brand.