How Video Game Developer King Brought Its EVP to Life

How do you bring an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to life? How do you differentiate between a very popular consumer brand and your employer brand? What does “a great saga needs all sorts of heroes” actually mean?

To get some answers, I’ve had a chat with Natalie Mellin, Global Employer Brand Project Manager at King. You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts, or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.

Tell us about King and your employer brand.

We are a games company. We create games for Facebook, mobile, and the web. Candy Crush Saga is one of the games that everyone will know. What people don’t know is that we have over 200 games that we’ve developed. So it would’ve been Farm Heroes Saga, the sister title to Candy Crush, which is called Candy Crush Soda Saga. We also have one of our most recent releases which is Paradise Bay, which is a resource management game.

We’ve been around since 2003. Over the last two years, we’ve been in a hyper-growth phase. So we’ve literally been working hard on our EVP (Employee Value Proposition) and employer brand strategy in the last two years.
We work hard on our culture. We think this is important. This is how we move forward. And this is us, what we are. We’re King. So when we look at the culture, we can see the values we have, one of our values being fast and fluent. So we try a lot of things, see what works, and we will discard the ones that don’t work, and we move forward with the ones that do work.

On social media, for instance, we have been struggling a little bit around the IPO when we had a quiet period around how much we can talk about because of the regulations and what you have to do and can’t do around that.

And we’ve also had a bit of a challenge in the beginning to find that perfect mix between our EVP and Seriously Playful. So we were a little bit too playful on social media, which could be okay on social. But we still wanted to showcase how tech-savvy we are, so that’s something that we’re focusing on now. How can we bring that in.

How did you establish a strong EVP, and what are the core messages?

We put in a lot of research. We worked together with our creative agency. And we put in hours and hours of research, working with everyone in the business. It wasn’t just the leadership; although leadership and management, it’s really important to get their support. But working with people who’ve been in the company for a very long time, developers, artists, finance, et cetera.
And out of that, we looked at what was it that was unique to us. So how do we define ourselves as different from any other company, gaming company, or tech company. And from that, we came up with our EVP and our communication concept, which is Seriously Playful.

Our core messages work as equalizers. We use them to tweak our message and the way we need to talk about who we are. So to a developer, we will talk a little bit differently in Bucharest than when we are in the U.S., for instance.

RELATED: How L’Oreal Developed a New Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

How do you bring an EVP to life?

Again, it’s about aligning yourself to the business strategy. So, what are the essential priorities of the business right now? When we started out and we were integrating this, it was all about recruitment. We needed to recruit a massive amount of people.

To do that, we then looked at the employee lifecycle to keep that as a frame to look at where were the most prominent processes and touchpoints. What did we have to do to hit the most amount of people internally as well as externally. But we also focus on the culture. So you can trust your employees, or you can put in regulations and their policies, and we choose the former. We trust our employees. We focus on how we bring the culture to life, the EVP to life, and enable our employees to do the right thing.

How is your consumer brand different from your employer brand?

We’re one King. We are our games. It’s our people who created all of these games. But what we didn’t have when we started with this was the connection. Two years ago or so, when you opened up one of our games, you didn’t see the King logo anywhere. So you saw only the game’s logo. So that was actually an easy start, to make sure that when you’re opening up the game, there is a connection to the King brand. And that was one of the first things that we did.

Do you ever target gamers for jobs inside the actual games?

Yes. We looked at that. It doesn’t always translate that way, obviously, that the people playing our games will be the ones working for us. But we do constantly look at how we are going to utilize those. And right now, we probably couldn’t talk too much about the details. But we’re looking at a new way of targeting our vast network in how to bring information about our career opportunities to them. King had 340 million monthly average users in the last quarter. That’s almost as big as the U.S. and Canada’s population combined.

What are the most essential recruiting channels?

LinkedIn is key, and I don’t say that just because we’re here at the LinkedIn conference [Talent Connect London 2015]. It is a huge one. But referrals are also critical. Again, it goes back to our employees, who are so important. They’re our ambassadors. We’re lucky that when we look at our social media channels, we see our employees being very active without being asked for it. So you can see them carrying our brand out but also actively recruiting for us.

Tell us about your new career site.

The new career site (jobs.king.com) had 56,000 applications last year. I guess everyone has to go through there, regardless of if they’re coming in through as a referral, or we’re headhunting someone, or they’re applying to us. It’s our main window. I don’t know about you, but if you have ever been contacted for a job or are looking for a job, even if you’re not applying through the career site, you will go there and do the research. Right? Well, as you would look at the company section of that company.

It was really important for us to do a little cleanup when we started with this because we had so many different microsites. And they weren’t connected. They were maybe a little bit outdated when it came to the brands. And they weren’t working for us. So we had to do a cleanup operation where we closed down a lot of websites and moved everything into one but still left room to showcase the local adaptations. So that’s important.

What’s been the return on investment of this program?

We’ve done it in two phases. We went live with a website last year, just after we created our EVP. It’s just something that would get us to an okay stage. And then, the big website came live in February this year. What we’ve seen since then is growth in terms of traffic. But also really important stuff, not the fun and sexy stuff, like the SEO and the mobile optimization, is now working, which maybe it wasn’t correctly everywhere before that.

We won the best employer brand award by the RADs and CIPD this year. We also won the best use of copywriting for our Life at King booklet, which is like our handbook at King. We also won Sweden’s best employer by Universum the last two years in a row. And Great Place to Work, we’ve also been in top spots across Europe.

What hard lessons can you share with us?

Do the prep work properly first. Get everyone on board. Get them to understand an EVP and what it will do for you as a company. I think that’s key. Sometimes you want to rush through that because you want to get into the research and the integration stage, but it’s really important to get that right because it will help you later.

The other thing is communicating a quick win pretty early on when you’re starting to integrate it and launching your EVP because people are impatient and want to see something happening quickly. We were lucky that we won Sweden’s best employer, and that helped us to be able to carry on.

And it’s not just our employer branding. It’s everyone who needs to celebrate that because we’re helping to enable this, but it’s not us doing all the work.

What companies inspire you on social media?

IKEA has focused a lot on culture, which I think is the right thing to do, so I look up to them for that. I think General Electric has been brilliant when it comes to the marketing side. They are not as well known on their employee branding side, but on the marketing side, I think they’ve been perfect. So I find bits and pieces from different companies, and I put them together because I like things that they do on various platforms.

What does “a great saga needs all sorts of heroes” mean?

That’s, you can say, our tagline for diversity inclusion. This was an area where we hadn’t been strategic before. We’d done many things, but we hadn’t been so strategic. And it was also funny that we didn’t need to be that strategic because it’s ingrained in our culture. But we started to feel that we needed to put words on it. And this just really fits within our EVP, within our culture. So that’s what we used, and we’ve built on that for a year.

Most recently, we just redid our job posting guidelines. So that’s the guideline that our hiring managers from crews will use when they put together new job adverts, where we have a checklist. Look at making sure that you remove any unconscious bias or any words that is more targeted to the male population. And if we want to look at it, we might maybe want to bring in a more diverse workforce; what is it that we do, and what words did we use to appeal to a larger audience?

What’s the next big thing in employer branding and for King?

Coming closer together. Brand PR marketing and employee brand need to come closer together, which is the big thing. If you can get that right, you will do much better as a company. We need to start remembering that this is one story; it’s one company that we’re telling the world.

Any candidate of today will be interested in knowing about the stuff that we’re putting out to our investors and the stuff that we’re putting out to our players. They will not just be set in the stuff on the career site. So that’s important, and we need to start working better and more closely together.

And I think marketing and PR are starting to understand that as well. Players and consumers today want to know that the company is a responsible corporate citizen. They want to understand what they are like to their employees. So, it does help both ways. It’s not just a one-way street.

Follow Natalie on Twitter @mellinnatalie.