Building four tailored talent brands, with the Index showing how each audience sees Workday.

Background

Workday makes software that helps businesses manage their people and their finances, with more than 75 million users worldwide and around 20,000 employees. It is growing fast in new markets such as Costa Rica, India and Poland, and competes for scarce skills such as machine learning engineers and highly technical consultants.

When Stuart Hazell, Global Director for Talent Brand and Marketing, joined in spring 2022, Workday had no EVP and no talent brand identity. Within six months his team stood up both, built on Workday’s six company values and known internally as “Why Workday.”

Brief

• Understand how external talent sees Workday in its four biggest hiring areas: engineering, sales, customer experience (CX) and consulting, and early careers.
• Set that external view against what workmates say internally.
• Find the themes each tailored talent brand should lead with.

What we did

• Measured Workday’s Employer Brand Index, analyzing public conversation from 130+ sources and scoring all 16 Employer Brand Attributes.
• Segmented external sentiment by the four talent groups, so each tailored brand had its own outside view.
• Gave the team an external benchmark to compare with its internal employee listening and focus groups.

What Workday did with it

Instead of traditional personas, Workday built four tailored talent brands, each with its own look, messaging and tone of voice. Engineering uses dark-mode gradients and code in its headlines. CX and consulting uses sketches and sticky notes inspired by agile workshops. The sales brand is big and bold, and early careers uses icons for the skills young talent want to build.

Comparing external sentiment with internal listening showed where Workday’s real story was stronger than its reputation, including its inclusive workforce and diversity of thought in CX. “Freedom within a framework” became a theme of the CX brand, told through workmates’ own stories.

Workday’s Perspective

Results

The outcomes include:

• Four tailored talent brands for engineering, sales, CX and consulting, and early careers, launched together and grounded in external and internal sentiment.
• Stories where Workday was underrated. Where internal sentiment beat external perception, the team told those stories more, and “freedom within a framework” became a CX brand theme.
• Advocacy at scale. Stuart reports around 2,500 workmates sharing content in a single quarter, roughly 12% of employees, and around $180k in earned media value over a year.
• Pride that shows in referrals. Around one in three workmates referred someone in the last 12 months.