How Australia Post Delivers Employer Branding

Real talent is getting harder and harder to find, especially as hiring those with exceptional digital abilities becomes more important to many and most companies around the world. We speak to an organization down under dating back over 200 years with very specific job roles across a huge country. Quila Israelson is the Employer Branding Manager at Australia Post, and in this episode, she shares how they go about attracting and retaining talent with employer brand.

Have a listen to the interview below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play or SoundCloud.

Can you tell us about Australia Post’s culture?

Not what you think: That’s what I would say if I was talking to someone casually. But professionally, I would talk about the scope and scale of the company. No two days are the same. You can have the same function but work across so many different projects.

What talent challenges do you face at Australia Post?

Like most companies, we’re looking at the top digital and tech talent. Whether that’s school leavers, stay at home moms or career changers. Our biggest challenge is that were almost two companies:

1. Blue Collar Sector: The people who deliver your mail, your parcels and driving the big vans who really make Australia Post happen
2. White Collar Sector: HQ-based employees who are a different type of talent.

So we have to be everything for everyone to attract all kinds of people.

How does employer brand help to address this challenges?

Our strategy started a year and a half ago, where we worked with PwC and other smaller groups to audit our recruitment function and they mapped us against companies nationally and internationally. What turned out was that we had the same problems as everyone else and it spat out about 20 different things that we called ‘Service Concepts‘ within the team which we prioritized to fix. So our strategy started with going to the business and asking them if they were interested in investing in this idea, and investment meant that we would hold focus groups with what we would call ‘Job Families‘ which consisted of our drivers, our mailmen, our digital talent and we went to these job families and picked people of different experiences and asked them questions about what kept them at the company and what mattered most.

Whether it’s high-vis that keeps today’s posties safe or the dapper outfits of the 70s, friendly service never goes out of style. #ThrowBackThursday #TBT#Postman #uniform #outgoingmail #postage #mail #stamps #parcel #post #postbike #mailbox

A post shared by Australia Post (@auspost) on Feb 7, 2018 at 2:13pm PST

What is your EVP and how do you activate it?

We don’t have just one, we have 9 EVPs for each family. It’s very segmented. But I would say 80% of the messaging is very similar. Things like no two days are the same or being proud of coming to work. The one overarching theme would be honoring our reach tradition and our promise for tomorrow.

• If we look at our digital employee family, they really spoke about the experience of coming to work every day and even say it feels like they work at a digital agency some days and another thing they felt is that it takes a unique person to join our company.
• If we look at our drivers, it was the idea of being proudly professional. They really honor the uniform and feel like they stand for something.

We’ve focused on helping our employees become advocates for our company, not becoming cheerleaders for Australia Post, but being really open about the projects they are working on. We held sessions with our employees to get them to grips with LinkedIn, took professional headshots and helping them brainstorm what topics they wanted to write about.

What’s your best source of hire?

1. Career Site
2. Indeed or Seek
3. Referrals

How do you measure the ROI on your employer brand?

It’s everything from measuring the source to different NPS metrics such as:

• What is the candidate NPS?
• What is the hiring manager NPS?
• What is the unsuccessful candidate NPS?

We’ve built a majority of our strategy from that data, and tend to calculate our ROI from these results both quantitatively and qualitatively.

What hard lesson can you share with us?

The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that it really takes a village. So my team is everything from recruiters, to marketers, to a stakeholder, to a conductor, just trying to get everyone living and breathing the EVP. So you don’t need to take it on yourself, just make sure you have the right people in place to become the influencers for you!

Who inspires you in terms of employer brand?

Deloitte. They have done a fantastic job of being so elegant with their employer brand. They took the green dot in their logo and incorporated that into their look and feel. If you go to their career site and it’s all bring your whole self to work. So not only what you do on the job but what you do outside of work. Focusing on their employer stories heavily and it works really well.

What’s up next for your employer brand?

If I’m thinking about Australia, I think we have a little bit to go to get up to speed with the UK and the US in terms of employer branding. Rather than focusing on our employee and candidate experience, we’re still focused on the fight for the best talent and how we can beat everyone else. We’re still finding the importance of that journey here.

Connect with Quila on LinkedIn.