How to Upskill Talent Acquisition to Amplify Your Employer Brand

HelloFresh is a global brand with a unique hiring challenge. This meal kit delivery business has brands in 18 countries across the globe, which means that while filling technology roles is important, their greatest need is for local talent with niche skills to support their complex distribution and logistics.

On The Employer Branding Podcast, we got a chance to sit down with Carolina Guillen, Head of Global Talent Marketing and Engagement at HelloFresh, to find out how they solve their massive sourcing challenge by upskilling their talent engagement team.

The Talent Challenge of Global Logistics

HelloFresh is headquartered in Berlin and New York but operates in eighteen countries worldwide (with more on the way). The core business model of delivering meal kits remains the same from country to country. Still, the logistical problem of storing, packaging, and shipping ingredients. Hence, they arrive fresh at a customer’s door in all of these different markets, creates a unique hiring challenge for Guillen and her team.

Different countries have different regulations governing food safety, food storage, shipping—the list goes on. HelloFresh needs to fill roles locally in supply chain, fulfillment, and technical specialist areas to meet these requirements in each market. “We often need to find local talent that comes with a very specific skill or certification,” she says.

In short, there’s a lot of work to be done in talent acquisition and talent engagement. And that got Guillen thinking: could we engage this team to activate our employer brand?

How HelloFresh Upskills Their Recruitment Team

The talent engagement team at HelloFresh comes from a background in traditional sourcing and recruiting, but Guillen has started to upskill them with marketing and project management skillsets. “Our main goal is for them to be delivering 360 solutions for top-of-funnel needs,” she says, and they’ve taken over the development of event, talent community, and referral strategies.

This approach creates alignment between Guillen’s employer branding team and the people who put it into action throughout the recruitment and hiring process. Talent acquisition has a say in what they’re being asked to do and also participates in developing strategies for reputation management and social media marketing.

Moreover, upskilling these employees into comb-shaped experts with new skill sets gives them more flexibility to grow into the career they want at HelloFresh.

5 Ideas for Recruitment Team Engagement

In the episode, we asked Guillen for some actionable tips you can use to engage your recruitment team in employer branding work, and she was happy to oblige.

1. Create a Content Strategy with Talent Acquisition in Mind: “Your talent acquisition team members have very direct control and influence on the candidate journey,” Guillen says, “and they can help you build pieces that are aligned with your employer brand.” So work with your recruitment team to develop a content strategy that goes along with what they’re doing on the TA side.
2. Fall in Love with Your Candidate, Not Your Brand: We put a lot of energy into developing an employer brand, but sometimes that makes it difficult to take a step back and see what’s working. “From my point of view, it’s much more beneficial to be a critic of your brand,” Guillen says. Instead, fall in love with your audience and build content that is made just for them.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Reuse Content: Developing quality content takes energy and focus. But when you’ve got something that works, how can you be sure it’s getting in front of the right people? And how can you get the most ROI for your efforts? Guillen recommends rehashing and recycling your campaigns and the pieces of content you create. You can get a lot of extra value by changing formats or platforms. One thing they’re doing at HelloFresh, for example, is transcribing videos they made earlier to use as the basis for new series of blog posts.
4. Every Good Story Needs a Hero: If you browse the HelloCommunity blog, something that becomes immediately apparent is the way Guillen and her team use stories about specific people to tell the bigger story of the Employer Brand. Every story needs a hero. We want to identify with their intentions, their emotions, and even their mistakes. And, through that specific story, we can learn about who you are as an employer. As Guillen says, “Focus on who you are, not what you want to say.”
5. Build for Scale by Making “Recipes”: Guillen’s small-but-mighty team is always looking to make processes that scale. When she creates a campaign or strategy, she tries to organize her process into a “recipe,” a step-by-step playbook someone can use to do something similar. This documentation helps Guillen to build processes that can scale, and it has a way of snowballing. Recipes are shared with the team, who can use them to create new campaigns and even tweak them into new recipes. For Guillen, it’s important to be very clear about what steps lead to success. You want to document the thought process because that’s what will help someone trying to use your recipe to make something new.

To follow Carolina Guillen’s work on employer brand, follow her on LinkedIn. For help creating data-driven, actionable strategies you can use to make real change in your company, talk to us.