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HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Mark Hornung, Senior Manager of Talent Marketing, Informatica
Episode: 144
Air Date: January 20, 2016
Mark Hornung has over 20 years in Employer Branding consulting, working with employers such as General Mills, Northrop-Grumman, PG&E, Conoco Philips and Cedars Sinai Medical Center to define, develop and communicate their Employer Brands. He currently manages employment marketing and branding for Informatica, LLC, an enterprise data software company in Silicon Valley.
Mark has appeared at events sponsored by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Conference Board, and at conferences throughout North America, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Peru, and Switzerland. Mark has won numerous awards for creative excellence from the Business/Professional Advertising Association, the Western Art Directors Club, the Royal Australian Fine Arts Commission, the International Radio & TV Festival, and the San Francisco Advertising Club. His work has appeared in ADWEEK and Print magazines.
Mark taught branding and advertising at San Jose State University. He has a degree in Philosophy from John Carroll University.
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Begin transcript
John Sumser:
Good morning and welcome to the HR Examiner Radio Show. I’m your host, John Sumser, and we’re coming to you from beautiful downtown Occidental, California where the rains are coming like Noah’s flood. Today, we’re going to be talking to Mark Hornung, who is currently the senior manager of talent and marketing for Informatica. Mark, how are you?
Mark Hornung:
I’m great, John. Half Moon Bay, which is about 70, 80 miles of you. We’re a little dryer but we had a good soaking as well.
John Sumser:
It’s great. You know one of the things people don’t realize about California is that when it’s winter everything is bright green here.
Mark Hornung:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Sumser:
We’re going to have a really bright green winter if we can ever see beyond the flooding.
Mark Hornung:
The hills will be gorgeous.
John Sumser:
The hills will be gorgeous. The ones that aren’t under water. Mark-
Mark Hornung:
[Crosstalk 00:01:15]
John Sumser:
-introduce yourself.
Mark Hornung:
Okay, well as you mentioned, I am currently the senior manager of talent and marketing and employer branding at Informatica. Informatica is a enterprise data software company. Basically, we address four very large markets: Big Data, cloud computing, data security and master data management. I think for me, personally, this has been in interesting year. I’m almost a year there with them. Prior to that, I was basically a consultant to the HR industry, working at Hodus Group and J. Walter Thompson INSIDE for many, many years. That’s where I really learned about and applied my learning in employer branding and always wanted to know what it was like on the client side. The opportunity came up at Informatica and I’ve just had a ball. It’s really been fascinating to see the other side of the desk; to see all the touch points that HR gets involved in and also to see how the brand works its way through the organization. It’s really been fun.
John Sumser:
You’re quite modest. As I understand it and as I tell the story, you are the original articulator of the idea of employment branding and you’ve been doing employment branding for 20 years.
Mark Hornung:
Well-
John Sumser:
I think most people think it’s a relatively new sport.
Mark Hornung:
Yeah. You know it was interesting. I was at J. Walter Thompson INSIDE and I was tapped to go to JWT’s brand school in Chicago and I said, “Sure. Yeah, I’d love to go.” Prior to that I had been a creative director in the agency world. I started out life as a copywriter and then became a creative director working with artists and writers. Went to brand school and, as your bio shows, my undergraduate degree is in philosophy and it was like I could take the fundamentals of philosophy and finally apply them because brand is a much more strategic concept to then near creative. I don’t want to dismiss creative but creative is the implementation of the brand.
I came away … I mean, I had seen the light. It was like Paul on the Road to Tarsus. It’s like, “Wow! This is really great.” Yes, speaking and evangelizing it and I’m not going to lay claim to the originator because you know the old saying, “Success has many fathers while failure is an orphan.” I’m sure there were a lot of people at that time who were starting to apply the principles of branding to employment marketing and I just happened to be there in the early days. Pardon me while I go and apply some Grecian formula to my scalp.
John Sumser:
Well, I’ll give you the credit for originating it. I certainly was very aware of what was going on in the industry at the time and I’m able to find anybody else telling the story and I recalled you being very much the evangelist out in the woods preaching a story about employment branding that not everybody was paying attention to, so appreciate your modesty but I don’t buy it.
Mark Hornung:
Yeah, well it was a time where a lot of people were very skeptical because the good news/bad news about employer brands is that it’s like you’ve climbed the tiger; it’s a very powerful concept. It can, I believe, make tremendous impact on the performance of an organization. The bad news is you really need to pay attention to it. You need to administer to it very consciously and you need to be scrupulous about making sure that the brand is consistent. I’ve always defined and continued to preach that the brand is, essentially, at the end of the day a relationship. It’s the relationship between the employer and the employees.
I define employees as not only those currently working for the organization but also former employees who used to work for the organization who remember what that relationship was like and maybe they remember it fondly or not so fondly. Then, the other group are potential employees; all those folks who may, at some point, come into the sphere of influence of the brand. They only know the brand through what they see online or what they hear from their friends. Of course, which social media now they can connect with a lot more people. It’s making sure that that relationship is as authentic as possible and that it’s communicated authentically. If I have a criticism of the discussion today it’s people are trying to over think it.
They’re trying to parse it into different segments or they’re trying to look at it from too many different facets. I will be the first to say that employer branding, which is the act of communicating the brand, has become much more sophisticated, much more complex. That’s one of the challenges and one of the fun challenges, really, at my job. At the end of the end of the day, the basic concept, the fundamental principle of the brand, comes back to that idea of a relationship. If you think about the great brands today, and Apple is an easy example, you look at the relationship Apple owners have with their Macs or their iPhones or what have you and it’s a much more intense feeling about the product than those of us who have ThinkPads or Dells or HP computers or Samsung phones.
I always like to observe … It must frustrate Samsung tremendously because when you look at the list of features on their phones, it’s really quite impressive and in many cases they have a lot of things that the iPhone does not. Yet, when Apple announces a new iPhone, there is a queue around the block in front of their stores on the day of its release and you don’t see that with Samsung. I submit it’s because the Apple brand has that draw and that staying power that few other brands in the world have.
John Sumser:
Well, that’s interesting. I think one of the things you just said that is not often considered is the power of employment branding. Most of the conversation that I see these days in conferences or online or in conversation about employment branding is about the mechanics of some aspect of it rather than the overall capacity for employment branding to drive performance in an organization. Do you see that, too?
Mark Hornung:
Oh, absolutely. One of my big complaints with the HR tech industry, and when I was at Findley I was a part of that industry but I think overall a lot of vendors try to make the claim that if you buy their software or their application or what you, your employer brand’s going to be amazing. Well, that’s not true. All it’s going to do is communicate that brand more efficiently to a larger audience, whatever. If the brand itself is lacking or if your branding, your communication of the brand, is inauthentic that’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. That platform, that software, that app is not going to solve the underlying problems in the relationship. I understand why those vendors are making those claims, because they’re fighting for piece of the HR budget and how do you carve out your slice? Well, you have to do it at the expense of someone else.
One of the easiest ways is to say, “Oh, well you’re branding.” You don’t need to do all that promotion; you just take our app and it’ll solve all your problems. Maybe it will help but they sell it as a panacea and, in fact, it’s another tool. That’s one of the things, when I was on the consulting side, I liked to tell my clients was all these things are tools. Think of them as a drill or a saw or a hammer. They each have their purpose. Some perform their role better than others but at the end of the day it’s the person who wields that tool, and in our case the message and the brand, the underlying brand, that really make the difference. You can have a marvelous set of tools but if you don’t have a good set of plans or if the plans are poorly constructed, the resulting structure is going to be a pile of junk, even if you have the greatest tools in the world.
John Sumser:
Do you mind if we talk about the specifics of employment branding at Informatica? Is that reasonable territory?
Mark Hornung:
Yeah.
John Sumser:
You get to Informatica and Informatica is David in a sea of Goliaths and you’ve got to compete because you’re within spitting distance of the big players in your industry. You have to compete relatively directly with them and so the employment brand must take on special meaning at Informatica.
Mark Hornung:
Oh, absolutely. Informatica … and ironically, Informatica was a client of mine back in 2008, 2009. At the time, I remember thinking, “Wow. These guys are really punching above their weight.” They’re going up against some pretty big companies and we’re only 3,600 people worldwide. That’s in the scheme of things very, very small. It’s one of those brands and there are other examples in Silicon Valley of companies where if you ask people in the data-integration, data-quality industry, which is admittedly a very vertical industry, who would you like to work for, they’re going to rattle off the usual suspects: Oracle, [SAT 00:12:43], IBM, on and on and on. If you were to prompt them, though, and say, “Well, what about Informatica,” people go, “Oh, yeah. That’s great. Oh, yeah. They’re really good.”
Our problem was, and continues to be, to a certain extent, just that lack of top-of-mind awareness. Just getting people to remember, “Oh, yeah. There’s Informatica.” My challenge has been to raise that awareness and, quite honestly, to do it with fairly limited budget. Again, we’re not a big company and it’s historically … I mean, Informatica has been around since 1993 so we’re not a brand-new startup. It was founded and continues to be run by engineers. They’re not opening their wallets for marketing of any type freely. You’ve got to make the case and be able to demonstrate the efficacy of what you’re doing.
I’ve relied primarily on social media and started using social media broadcasting platform. I’m not going to plug anybody but using a platform that allows employees to rebroadcast content about Big Data, cloud and Informatica. Since July, we’ve been able to generate 25 million page views and we’re at a clip now … It’s been very interesting to see the progression. We’re running at about a million page views a week. We typically get about 3,000 to 4,000 clicks of some kind where people either follow the link in the Tweet or on the LinkedIn sharing and we get a lot of positive commentary about that. We’re beginning to see some increase in traffic. One of the things that has been challenging is we changed our applicant-tracking system in the third quarter of last year and at the same time, we also launched our second-generation careers website.
That was not by design; it just happened to work out that way due to a number of factors. It’s been hard to separate what impact did the applicant-tracking system have on improving flow to the jobs and applications as opposed to the careers website. We’ve been very fortunate that our corporate-marking department … again, they work under the same constraints that we do, which is they have to do most of their work online so they become very adept at it. In fact, they’re probably one of the most sophisticated B2B users of LinkedIn I’ve ever seen. They use it very effectively.
Anyway, they have helped us a great deal in terms of auditing the SEO of our careers website. They immediately identified some tweaks that we could make to the new design that would really help us improve our SEO. We’ve done that and we’re seeing the results of that. Slowly but surely, we’re building that reputation. In this year, my goal is to build out the content on that careers website because I’m a great believer that content is something that people do take a look at. It’s interesting and it’s … again, I don’t want to plug but I have to attribute the source … PMP has done, I think, some really good research on SEO and what people look for when they’re looking for a job.
Their research seems to indicate that people who are experienced … say, five-plus years in a particular industry or role, tend to use more content on careers websites because they basically know what the job is all about. Now, what they’re trying to figure out is, “Okay, what’s the best place for me to pursue this career?” They want to know about things like, “What is the work environment like and what are the benefits like? Does this place really have a vision and mission? If so, what is it and can I buy into it?” They get a lot of that on the careers website. We’re going to be adding to that. We also know that people are very interested in locations. What is the office like? Where is it located in a particular city? What are the amenities? and so forth.
We’re building that out, as well. I think between social media and owned media, I think we’re doing pretty well. I have a little formula that I like to use, which is what I call PESO. P is paid media; E is for earned media such as PR. S is for social media and O is for owned media. I think we’ve got the social media and the owned media working pretty well. Obviously, anything can be improved and we’re working on that. The next thing is to try and get more PR and we’ve been working with our corporate PR folks to weed messaging about Informatica is a great place to work whenever our sea-level executives are speaking at conferences because we know that that works.
Back in the early 2000s I was working with Cisco Systems and every time John Chambers would mention that Cisco was a great place to work and had opportunities for engineers, Cisco would see an immediate rise in traffic to their careers website. My experience is that that kind of exposure helps a great deal. We’re working to get that into the messaging of our sea-level executives at Informatica. Then, the paid media … I think if we could get everything else working pretty well, we did a test in the fourth quarter and it seemed to show you put the word out there and you pay for it, you’re going to get more traffic. As we get better at identifying sources and analytics, I think we’ll be able to make the case for that, as well.
John Sumser:
Let me just recap that a little bit and then move you to the next thing. What you basically just said is that on a tactical level, employment branding is about managing four categories of media: Paid, which is advertising, job ads, billboards, all of that stuff; Earned, which is word of mouth, things like this radio show, this stuff that a PR agency can do for you, the stuff that you get by going elbow to elbow with people at trade shows and that sort of thing; social, which is reasonably obvious; and owned, which are the various properties, email lists, distribution stuff that you have. It’s the harnessing of those four things, which you call PESO … Paid, Earned, Social, Owned … that are the tactical components of great employment branding. Now, I want to back you up to something that we said at the beginning of the show, which is that employment branding can have a powerful effect on the productivity of the company itself. Would you talk about that a little bit and talk about how that influences those categories of media?
Mark Hornung:
Sure. People join an organization … First and foremost, let’s be clear that a lot of people take a job because they need a job. “I need a job.” Okay, you go get one. Now, you may be fortunate enough, if you’re really good, that you’ll have multiple offers. Now, you can say, “Okay, now of all these offers which one do I want to be a part of?” More often than not, people will choose the one that … the employer whose values, whose whole gestalt, to use an old philosophy/psychology term, seem to match their own. They join the organization and we’ve all had the experience of being new in an employer and there have been times, and I’ve experienced … I know we all have … where you’re about four or six weeks into it and you go, “Oh, man. I made a mistake. Oh, boy. This is not what I thought it would be.”
You begin to say, “Okay, how do I get myself out of this?” Then, there are others where … and I will raise my hand and say in my case, coming to Informatica, it was better than I was hoping for. That can be a good thing, too. The result is if you get that second response where it’s like, “Wow. I really buy into this vision. I think this is really great,” you’re more likely to devote extra effort to really put your shoulder to the wheel because you believe in what the organization is doing and you want to make that happen.
You take great pride when it does happen and you can say, “I’m part of that. I made that possible.” You see in organizations that have a strong employer brand typically have better financial performance. Now, since you and I have known each other more than 20 years and this argument has gone round and round, how can you attribute … It’s really a chicken and egg situation: does the company perform better because the employees are engaged and they buy into the brand or are employees engaged and buy into the brand because the organization is successful? No one, to my mind, has been able to definitively answer that. What I can say is that when you look at those high performers, one of the metrics that seems to be consistent is their profit-per-employee tends to be very high, which tells me that the employees are really pulling their weight.
Again, to use Apple, Apple’s profit-per-employee is just legendary compared to most other players in the consumer electronics realm. I think that there’s aspect to it. I’ll give you a contrary example. I was working with a company in the high-tech field and the head of HR came to Hodus at the time and said, “You know, I need to figure out what our brand is because we’re having trouble attracting talent.” No big surprise; it was a tight labor market and people were looking for talent.
Long story short, the company on paper looked very successful. They were a leader in their field; they had relatively low turnover. One would think, “Hey, it’s a great success story. Let’s talk about that.” When we did focus groups of the employees, what we learned was that the company was a leader in its field because it’s field was rapidly becoming obsolete. They were basically the last man standing in that industry. The reason there was low turnover was because most of the employees felt like they didn’t have any transferable skills. The net net was you had a population of people who felt imprisoned and told me stories about being a sweatshop and all that kind of stuff.
Then, you begin to see that the profit-per-employee had been ebbing for several years. Now, the company continued to make money and at the end of the day that’s what shareholders typically care about but the long-term prognosis was not good. I’d think that … and I know my former colleagues at Hodus and TMP and JWT and other agencies and the consulting firms … the McKinsey and the Aon Hewitts and all those are all looking for that magic formula that will once and for all answer the question, “Which comes first: the strong employer brand and engaged employees lead to financial performance or the other way around?”
Until we do, I think there’s enough evidence that strong employer brands, at a minimum, and of course Brett Minchington and the Employer Brand Institute have tons of data on this, it does shorten the time to hire. It does reduce the cost of hire because, obviously, if you’re one of those stellar brands and you say, “We’ve got opportunities,” well, you’re going to have a strong pipeline of people who want to be a part of that. Conversely, if you’re a resume stain, you’re going to have to work that much harder and probably pay that much more in order to get top talent to be willing to come to your organization.
You know, a good example that just popped in my mind and for people who are not football fans, the San Francisco 49ers, once at the top of the heap, now at the bottom of the junk pile, went out and got Chip Kelly as their head coach. The speculation has been, “Lord, what did they have to pay this guy?” The head coach job of the 49ers is one of those that’s like, “Really? Seriously, you want that?” I can only imagine the deal they had to forge in order to get him to come there. I think that’s an example of that’s what can happen when you have a bad brand.
John Sumser:
That’s wild. I’m going to take away and use for all of time the term that you just tossed out there: a resume stain. Is your company a resume stain. God bless you, Mark Hornung. We should just quit while we’re ahead. That’s great.
Mark Hornung:
It’s so true. It’s so true.
John Sumser:
That’s fantastic. We have deliciously exhausted our time together. Is there anything you’d like the people who are listening to take away from this call?
Mark Hornung:
I would like people to take away the idea that the brand is that relationship and you need to figure out what that relationship is. It doesn’t have to be warm, fuzzy, pink ponies, rainbows. If your company is like Sparta, circa 200 B.C., fine. You’re going to attract Spartans and that’s okay because they like that kind of environment but just be authentic to what that relationship is. Then, you can worry about the branding. The communication of the brand and PESO. Keep those two distinct so when those vendors come to you and anybody who reads my LinkedIn postings will tell you I rail about this … When those vendors come to you and say, “Oh, this is going to make your brand so great,” no. The brand is what the brand is. It’s either great or it’s not.
If it’s not great, then you need to address the problems that are preventing you from having a great brand. Once you have that and you want to communicate it and you want to get it out there … and that’s the other thing. Last thought is not communicating it makes it an attraction. I mean, if you have a great brand and you say, “Well, everybody should want to go come to us because we have a great relationship with our employees,” well if you don’t tell people that how are they going to know? You’ve got to make the effort, whether it’s with social, your own media, what have you. You need to make that effort to get the word out because if you don’t, nobody’s going to know about you.
John Sumser:
That’s great. Would you take a moment and reintroduce yourself and tell people how we get ahold of you?
Mark Hornung:
Sure. I am Mark Hornung and I am the talent marketing manager at Informatica. My email is mhornung, M H O R N U N G, @informatica.com. You can follow me on Twitter at … it’s going to sound weird … waqueau1, W A Q U E A U 1, numeral 1. Obviously, I encourage everyone to go to careers.informatica.com to go look at the great opportunities we have. If you have any genuine suggestions as to how we an improve, you have my email. Be happy to hear it and love to get any suggestions I can get.
John Sumser:
Thanks so much. We’ve been talking with Mark Hornung, who is the talent marketing manager for Informatica and, in my opinion, the guy who invented employment branding. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today, Mark. It’s been great having you on.
Mark Hornung:
It was my pleasure. Always great to talk with you, John.
John Sumser:
Yeah, thanks. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host, John Sumser, and have a great rest of the day. It’s been great having you here. Thanks for joining us.
End transcript