Devon Jennings stepped into the role of Talent Marketing Manager at MarketStar with an opportunity to create a difference and a blank canvas. With no blueprint to follow, and with encouragement from his manager, Devon crafted MarketStar’s inaugural “Talent Marketing Playbook,” a comprehensive strategy that’s making an impact on the company’s talent acquisition results.
In this Q&A, Devon shares the journey behind building the playbook, the challenges he faced and some of the innovative talent attraction strategies he’s developed. Get ready to discover actionable insights that could reshape your own approach to Recruitment Marketing.
Meet Devon Jennings
Devon Jennings is Talent Marketing Manager at MarketStar. He joined MarketStar in January 2021 and has grown the Recruitment Marketing and employer branding strategy and function at the company. In addition to being passionate about talent branding, Devon also loves all things outdoors.
Creating a Talent Marketing Playbook
Rally: Can you share more about what inspired you to create MarketStar’s inaugural “Talent Marketing Playbook”?
Devon: When I joined MarketStar as a Talent Marketing Specialist, it was a completely new role. There wasn’t anyone who had been doing Recruitment Marketing previously so there was nobody to hold my hand and “show me the ropes”. Eventually, my manager asked me to create the playbook as a way to showcase my findings from years of research, experimentation and trial and error as well as a way to simply demonstrate our talent marketing strategy going forward.
Rally: Is it an actual document, or the name for your strategy? Who is the audience for the Playbook and how do they use it?
Devon: Yes, it’s a real thing! The “Talent Marketing Playbook” is a document that plainly lays out our organization’s talent marketing strategy. The playbook has two audiences. The primary audience is new team members of our talent acquisition, marketing or talent marketing teams. The secondary audience is senior leadership within our company. If a manager of a client team wants to understand the top of our recruitment funnel better, this playbook is a great resource. For both audiences, the playbook can be shared as a reference to see what the talent marketing team is doing, how we’re doing it and how it impacts our business.
At MarketStar, Talent Marketing Manager Devon Jennings documented his strategy in a Talent Marketing Playbook that helps align all internal stakeholders.
Rally: One of your Recruitment Marketing strategies has been shifting from a reliance on outbound sourcing and employee referrals to a strategy that’s brand-led and marketing-driven. What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced?
Devon: The biggest challenge we initially faced was convincing leadership that this strategy was cost-effective. Even after perfecting our digital ads and optimizing our hiring campaigns, our leadership team was very reluctant to spend recruitment advertising dollars. It wasn’t until a member of our team increased our ad spend by accident that we realized the impact this strategy could have. The team member mistakenly included an extra ‘0’ on the end of the monthly budget amount for a campaign supporting one of our hard-to-fill positions. At first we were panicking that we spent so much money until we realized how many qualified candidates this campaign brought in. We had been struggling for a long time to source for this role and all of a sudden it was like, “problem solved!” After that, we started scaling up our ad spend on all of our campaigns, enabling our recruiters to spend less time sourcing and more time doing what they do best, which is talking to and hiring top talent.
Another challenge we are still facing is getting leadership to see the value in long-term employer branding. There is a lot of focus right now on just hiring for the current month. Running job ads helps us solve our urgent hiring problems, but investing in employer branding helps us attract the talent we’ll be hiring next month, next quarter and next year. I’d like to see a greater understanding from senior leadership of the long-term impacts of well-done employer branding, and I think the playbook is helping with that.
Rally: Upgrading your careers site has been a core part of your playbook. Can you elaborate on the redesign of the careers page and how it supports your new global audience? What specific features were added or improved?
Devon: MarketStar has grown a lot in just the past few years (made possible in part by our talent marketing strategy) and we’ve expanded into multiple international geos. As we expanded, we found a need to update our careers page which up until this point was very focused on our hiring in Utah (where MarketStar is headquartered). To tackle this challenge, we organized the redesign into two phases.
Phase one was designed to be as quick as possible and to solve the most immediate problems. It included updating our branding and our company information, integrating our global job list and changing the images to reflect our global audience.
Phase two is much more comprehensive. In this redesign, in addition to the global careers page, we are creating geo-specific landing pages for each of the locations that we operate in. These pages include much more specific information about the different hiring processes and company benefits in each country. The images used are reflective of in-depth research of the demographics of our target candidates in each location. We have also segmented our job list to only show the roles that are relevant to the location associated with that geo-specific page, making it much easier for candidates to find and apply for the job that is a fit for them.
Rally: You’ve shared the importance of social recruiting to your playbook and mentioned that your social strategy focuses on education and creating positive brand impressions rather than direct conversions. Can you give examples of the type of content you share and the results you’ve seen?
Devon: The whole idea here is to create content that actually creates value for our audience and that will actually get impressions. The vast majority of our social media audience are either current employees or not likely to apply to a job this month. But we do want to help those followers that aren’t current employees to get familiar with our brand, what we do and how much our employees love their jobs. That way when they eventually are job hunting and they see one of our digital ads that is focused on hiring, it won’t be the first time they’ve seen our brand and they will be much more likely to apply.
We don’t track this as much as we probably should, but I can say confidently that this strategy creates so much more interaction that if we just boringly posted job openings all the time that people would swipe right past. Recruiters tell me all the time that during phone screens their candidates bring up our most recent social posts.
Here are some recent examples of Instagram posts that highlight our culture and show how we give back to the community:
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
Rally: Your approach to building a talent pipeline is quite interesting. How have your partnerships with local organizations like Utah State University and Talent Ready Utah helped build a steady talent pipeline, and what advice would you give to others looking to establish similar partnerships?
Our partnerships with organizations like Utah State University, Talent Ready Utah and others are focused on giving back to our community through education that teaches the skills needed to be successful in sales, regardless of where they work. Consequently, many of the participants in these community skill-up programs find themselves interested in working at MarketStar. Because we’ve trained them, we know they have the skills needed to be successful at our company, and because the students have interacted with many of our sales leaders, they know what it’s like to work here. This effectively creates a “talent bench” of qualified individuals who apply to our roles as soon as they become available.
I would advise others looking to establish similar partnerships to find a way to create community value. Our partners execute these programs with us because it benefits their people and builds their reputation. The students that participate in these programs do so because there is a lot for them to gain in their careers. By finding a unique way to simultaneously create community value and fill a business need, you create a program that benefits everyone involved.
Rally: If you could create your Talent Marketing Playbook over again, what would you do differently?
Devon: Doing it over again, I would probably include a few case studies that illustrate the claims I make in this playbook. It’s one thing to read it as a strategy, but another to see why it is our strategy. What project or experiment taught us this principle that we are basing our strategy on? I think that doing this would help to gain buy-in from senior leadership in the company.
Rally: Looking forward, what are the next steps or future enhancements you plan to make to your Talent Marketing Playbook?
Devon: I mentioned that MarketStar has grown a lot over the past few years. It’s time to update this playbook to reflect our global strategy and to incorporate the Recruitment Marketing best practices that we’ve gained from each of the companies we’ve acquired. The next iteration of this playbook will take our global talent audience into account and will focus on how to appropriately implement these strategies at scale.
Rally: In your opinion, what are the essential elements of a successful recruitment marketer? What advice would you give others who are interested in this field?
Devon: In my opinion, a successful recruitment marketer is a successful marketer who also understands the unique needs of their talent acquisition team. You’ll find that most best practices in general marketing will also apply to Recruitment Marketing, but it is absolutely essential to work closely with the talent acquisition team. Understand their needs and what is working for them and what isn’t. At the end of the day, just make sure that what you are doing is actually helping them to do their jobs and not making things harder.
It’s also important to optimize your job ads daily. This can be the most tedious part of Recruitment Marketing, and it might feel like you aren’t accomplishing much when you do this. But it is imperative that as the recruitment marketer, you understand the health of your job ads, what has been working and what hasn’t so that you can prescribe an effective solution when the situation calls for it.
You also can’t be afraid to experiment and to try things that your organization hasn’t done before. A lot of what I’ve learned has come from trial and error, or from “this crazy idea I had”. Whether it works out or not, what you learn from this will inform your next project.
Finally, I think it’s important for recruitment marketers to realize that although the work they do is usually behind the scenes, what they are doing is really important. Helping someone get a new job is a really big deal to them, and when we effectively fulfill our responsibilities, we can make a difference in a lot of peoples’ lives. To put it this way, try to think about how important your career is to you. Then remember that you get to provide that to many other talented people around the world!
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Thank you, Devon, for sharing your Recruitment Marketing approach and strategy with the Rally community! If you’d like to get in touch with Devon and learn more about his playbook, connect with him on LinkedIn.
