Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by  the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today exceptionally I have not one, but two guests, both coming from a company called Experian, which is not a travel website. They'll tell us about Experian and tell us about what they do  for this fast growing tech company. On the show we have Lena Lotsey, global employer brand director at Experian. Welcome to the show, Lena. Hello, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. And, Chris Brady global TA director at the same company. Hi, Chris. 

Chris: Welcome. 

Max: Are you guys gonna interview each other? And so I can sit back, relax.

Lena: Oh, we've done that before. It wasn't pretty, 

Chris: That's actually how she got the job. So, but I was interviewing her. 

Lena: There we go.

Max: So, Lena you've been there for three years, so obviously Chris had, made a good hire there and the right decision and, it's always a big gamble, a big roll of the dice, especially with a sensitive area such as the employer brand.

I don't know who should answer this question, but what was the impetus for creating this role? Okay.

Lena: I'm happy to take a stab at that. As I understand it prior to my arrival, this role, as you say, didn't exist. So this was a newly created role. And, my background was actually in entertainment marketing, and I worked in LA on the agency side and worked with Netflix and, all of the movie studios for digital marketing campaigns. And one of the last projects that I worked on actually was with Google working on their life at Google campaign and working with their employer brand team. So I spent a year working on that and realized the similarities. Between entertainment marketing, and marketing your employer brand and how you find your fans, because they can speak on your behalf in a more trustworthy, genuine way, telling their stories and providing evidence of these pillars, whether it's, in my case, with entertainment, new show launching or film. But with the employer brand case with Google, using the employee stories to represent and provide proof points of the aspects of the EDP that Google was trying to get across. And their challenge was that people were intimidated by Google.

So that was one of the many challenges that we had to overcome in working with their employer brand team. So in doing that, I realized how much I really loved it. So when Chris contacted me, I probably did think it was Expedia initially, and eventually I got back to him, And we chatted and he just sold me on what an incredible company Experian was.

And it really has, I mean, I was sold as soon as I hung up the phone with him after that first conversation. So as director of recruiting and talent acquisition at Experian, I think Chris has this critical role of showcasing our company. And, representing it in a way that I think dispels preconceived ideas about what Experian is, if we're just a credit bureau and really, amplifying the fact that we are the leading global information services provider, that we have over 17,000 employees around the world, that we have our hands in many different verticals, auto and health, and, you know, convene these, the scale of the company.

Was it a surprise to me all the awards that we've won as an employer? Around DNI, around innovation from Fortune and Forbes? I mean, there was just all this great information, coming at me. So I like to say we have an embarrassment of riches because it's so true. I think Experian is the best kept secret.

And within as an employer and within our company, I think there are so many stories to tell and that's my job. So in this newly created role, basically I had to say, where do I start looking at all the regions? everyone who touches external comms in some way or social media in some way, where do we start to tell this story?

And I want people to visit our site. Our career site or our social channels and come away with the same impression I came away with after my first conversation with Chris. 

Max: Yeah. So  you want to bottle up what you experience and make it available for the masses? 

Lena: Well said much more succinct now.

I totally get that. and  I think that we can talk a little bit about the communication to candidates. And how do you use employees as ambassadors? I think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done there.  But, Chris since you managed to sell Lena on this vision, maybe, tell us a little bit about what you do and, well if you want to expand a little bit on what Experian does.

Chris: Yeah. So, and I appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast, and you can see why I recruited Lena, just, in the way that she describes all of the opportunities we have, you know, all of that information that she just stated is awesome. And we have so much of it, but we didn't have a central way that we could kind of train and have a consistent message across our recruiting function. So within talent acquisition, you have a lot of different people that are in siloed, different environments. And so I can't, if somebody is recruiting for auto, it might be different than decision analytics or credit services or consumer services.

And so, that was one of the things that we worked on last year is a pitch book. So an actual document that the recruiters could reference and say, okay, if I talked to somebody last week, it's the same experience. and when I started back in 2012 as a consultant, I was working as, just kind of helping with some talent mapping.

And trying to figure out which locations we should hire these specific technologists, as well as help with some projects. And I came from an executive search background. So, I was on my own for 14 years. So it was so interesting that I was always helping people fix their staffing problems, but I would kind of approach things from the outside.

And so coming from the inside, I'm like, wow, there's so much information, but I was going through all this data that we had of all these great points. And I'm like, does nobody know about them? And when they asked me to help with that social media, that was the first thing I started looking at is like, okay, we need somebody to actually know that's what they're doing.

And that's why I kind of reached out to Lena, when we kind of  built the role and then figured out, Hey, if we want to bring somebody in, that's going to change things we should probably look outside our industry because we could hire people from a competitor, but we're going to get the same thing, the same ideas, same thoughts.

Max: Yeah. I've got to say, in my time, in this talente solution space, 10 plus years, some of the best people I've seen were kind of people who are just dropped into talent acquisition coming from another function entirely or another industry, even from finance or from sales, of course, sales and marketing, very effective transitions and people who look at the process and say, now, why are we...