#2: Ex-Twitter Recruiters share how to get 60% more applicants

Transcript

Jon Gulick:
00:00

Thing we found is the weeks we launched podcasts, relaunched episodes of our podcasts. Our applications, that week would go up out by about 60%. We looked at applications over time. We saw all these spikes for every week that we launched our podcast. That's because we launched a podcast.

Jon Gulick:
00:15

We've sent out an email newsletter talking about the podcast, and you tweet a lot that we talked about this whatever topic was in the podcast.

Lauren Zabel:
00:21

With our digital strategy, we knew that we had to do it all because students live online. And specifically in season 2 and the pandemic, we knew that we needed a newsletter. We needed what we would do, listening parties on Twitter. So we'd say, we're about to have a listening party, like, hang up with John, Meany, and Lauren. And then we would go through the

Rhona Pierce:
00:42

whole episode and do tweets, and that showed so much engagement. Welcome to throughout the playbook, the podcast for recruiters tired of hearing that hiring is broken and ready to do something about it. I'm your host, Roja Pierce. In this episode, I sit down with John Julich and Lauren Zabel, former members of Twitter's university recruiting team, to talk about how they leverage podcasting to boost applications by 60% and hire 4 people directly from their podcast audience. You will hear how they came up with the idea for their hit podcast building character, how they got buy in and support from leadership, and their advice for other TA teams looking to start a recruiting podcast.

Rhona Pierce:
01:26

But first, let's hear about John and Lauren's unique journeys to talent acquisition.

Jon Gulick:
01:32

I used to be a circus acrobat, which is my weird backstory. And then, after circus, I got old, and I couldn't do circus anymore. So I moved to San Francisco hoping to get a job from Montreal to San Francisco hoping to get a job in tech, and I got a job at Twitter in the sales org. And then, I was doing that for a couple years, organizing diversity recruiting events for our BRGs or or our business resource groups or employee resource groups. I was working helping organize recruiting against for this, and then our university manager was like, hey, John.

Jon Gulick:
02:05

Do you wanna do what you're doing for fun organizing events, but do it for your job? And I was like, yeah. That sounds awesome. So I moved over to university recruiting, organizing, university events and diversity events.

Lauren Zabel:
02:16

So my journey to TA was that, I was living in San Francisco right when I graduated from college, and I was actually working at a nonprofit. And I really felt like I was missing out on history. I saw the rise of tech companies happening, making our world, you know, more interconnected, and I was like, what am I doing? So I pivoted, and started at a company called Brightrole, and I was embedded in their engineering organization. And, I supported engineering managers and this, CTO.

Lauren Zabel:
02:54

But my favorite part of my whole job was 20% of my job, and that was managing our 5 software engineering interns. And that has really just kind of been my career story is always finding the next job that takes that 20% and makes it larger. So after that, I, like, pivoted my whole career, went into university programs at Uber, various companies since, obviously worked with John for, 5 of those years at Twitter on their early talent team.

Rhona Pierce:
03:26

It's always so interesting how everyone lands in TA because hardly ever anyone says, I went to school for recruiting and ended up here.

Lauren Zabel:
03:34

No. This is not.

Rhona Pierce:
03:36

So you guys took a very creative approach to talent acquisition and attracting university, students to Twitter. What inspired you to integrate podcasting into your TA strategy?

Jon Gulick:
03:51

When Lauren and I first went to the university team, we were only hiring from, like, 5 or 6 Ivy League schools. It wasn't a very broad talent pool that we're going after. So some of the things we did when we went to the university team was went to more campuses. We started going to 30 campuses instead of 6 ish. Bit more diversity stool schools, HBCUs and HSIs.

Jon Gulick:
04:13

And then we wanted to get some of the smaller schools that we couldn't go to everywhere. So we had a pretty broad digital strategy where we had an email newsletter. We're very active with our Twitter, u Twitter handle, which no longer exists. And then the podcast added on to that digital strategy to try to give people a more in-depth look of what it's like working at Twitter, how to get a job at Twitter, how to get a good internship, but doing it at scale, trying to reach a lot of different people.

Lauren Zabel:
04:43

And all to John's horn because he won't do it. John was on our campus events team. It was called the hype team. At Twitter, everything had a little bit of a different name. And they were so innovative, that team in how they kept thinking about campus strategy, not doing the same old in terms of, you know, you must attend this, you know, campus event or things like that.

Lauren Zabel:
05:07

Every year, they presented a strategy to our team of how to shake it up and how to do it differently. And so the hype team, and specifically one of his colleagues, Julie, was like, I'm addicted to podcasts. It's all I listen to. I listen to crime junkie. I listen to how things get made.

Lauren Zabel:
05:24

And she was like, why don't we do this? I mean and you have to put the the context and the time around this. This was 2019. So this is pre pandemic. This is when podcasts were like, oh, some cool people do it, but it was not as mainstream as it is today.

Lauren Zabel:
05:42

And so it was, to me, it was groundbreaking. I thought it was the most interesting thing happening in early talent was having this podcast.

Rhona Pierce:
05:53

Yeah. And I noticed that that it was pre pandemic. So it was pre, like, all of this, creative ways of attracting people because everyone was at home. How did that go down, John, when you presented it to the team and to management? Like, this is what we wanna do.

Rhona Pierce:
06:08

Did you get any pushback? How were people receptive?

Jon Gulick:
06:12

Well, our first season was way pre pandemic, and our second season, like, we started filming and then the pandemic happened. So, like, like, well, how are you gonna do this? Guess we'll record in people's homes. But it was our 2nd season. We we already did one season that went really well, and we had a lot of listens.

Jon Gulick:
06:31

So the 2nd season was a pretty good buy in. It didn't actually cost too much, and we were really organized to try to limit the amount of time it took. I think we only we filmed everything in, like, a month and a half. Yeah. Is that right, Lauren?

Jon Gulick:
06:43

We did we had a really tight schedule where we filmed everything really fast before our because with university recruiting, we started going on campus in, like, September, may, maybe late August. So we tried to film everything within, like, the month and a half before those dates we started going on campus. So it was a really tight schedule. We recorded everything really quickly, and then we're releasing episodes over time.

Lauren Zabel:
07:05

I will say the environment of Twitter allowed for this innovation and creativity. We had a really supportive CMO, Leslie Berlin, that was supportive of the podcast. Our talent acquisition team obviously had to green light season 2, which is the season that John and I cohosted. So they had to, you know, see the data, see the proof. Like, was this worth it?

Lauren Zabel:
07:26

And, not only that, they had to believe in us. There was a sense of, like, John and I, for season 2, in terms of our management leadership, the things that we wanted to accomplish. And that was, John, I'm sure we'll talk about his love of data. John is a very data driven person. And he was like, so that was season 1, but season 2 is a part of this digital strategy.

Lauren Zabel:
07:51

We want to John is very, very, focused on seeing numbers trend up. And so one of those numbers was applications because he likes quantifiable numbers. And so seeing your applications go up for your roles every time you drop a podcast is obviously a correlation that it's working.

Rhona Pierce:
08:12

Yeah. I I love data too. So love to being a company of people who are very data driven. So when you say that applications was really the main goal that you had when you started at least season 2?

Jon Gulick:
08:26

Applications and engagement with the tweets. We had some branding goals, which, like, engagements, downloads, like a branding goal, how long people were listening, and then those, quantifiable quantifiable goals like applications, making sure that applications were correlating to the podcast, release the podcast, making them go up.

Lauren Zabel:
08:45

John, being a Canvas recruiter, my background, I'm actually a early talent recruiter. I put candidates in the funnel. So my goal was I am going to hire people that listen. And I was you know, I set the goal at 1, and we actually made 4 diverse hires from season 2 that I'm incredibly proud of. And those were students that listened, DMed me, tweeted back to us about certain episodes, how they, you know, you know, really touch them.

Lauren Zabel:
09:15

I I got a, you know, an unbelievable DM from a working mom that was like, I'm in college. You know, my husband's in the military. I listen to this podcast, and I feel like I could be intact. I've never had that feeling before because I have so many challenges, And I I I really listen to this, and I I know I have what it takes. And I was so blown away by that that it was finally a way to engage a population.

Lauren Zabel:
09:44

Like, you know, she's a student. She's in school. She has all these other intersections in her mice. But at the end of the day, like, that was a population in a candidate pool we had never accessed before and is really hard to engage. And having this podcast where, you know, she could listen to it in her own time and in her own way was once again one of these, like, surprises of the podcast, engaging a a a diverse pool of candidates that we didn't even dream of.

Rhona Pierce:
10:15

Can you walk us through a little of how you went about choosing topics for your podcast? So fun fact

Lauren Zabel:
10:24

about me is that, I live in Los Angeles. My whole family is in entertainment and media. I have a, degree, actually, film and media studies. And so when we went into season 2, I kind of took it to be the same as putting together a television or movie. And so we actually went in as a virtual writing room, me, John, and Mimi.

Lauren Zabel:
10:48

And we set the kind of mission statement that every idea is a good idea. Every idea would be heard. Like, give it your all. And we sat there for hours, and we pitched every idea that we had. And, we then narrowed that down to what we thought achieved our goals.

Lauren Zabel:
11:10

So not only was it a good idea, it was branding, catchy, you know, interesting, but did it did it hit those goals that we set out? And so that's how we created kind of the arc of the show.

Rhona Pierce:
11:22

That that's so important to be able to, like, not just launch a good idea, but it, like, it correlates directly back to your goals. So what types of podcast episodes did you see that were the most effective in attracting candidates?

Jon Gulick:
11:42

Well, one of our most listened to podcast was about our APM program, our associate product manager program, which is a 2 year post grad program where they moved around to different products inside Twitter. We had a big we had a event that would talk about this that would sell out because everyone would come to this event because it's a very popular program. So we decided to get something similar to help people learn about the program, but make it digital so more people could attend and more people had access to more information about this. I thought it was really cool. We got one of our p one of our APMs was the host.

Jon Gulick:
12:17

They interviewed other APMs about the program and talked about their experience. So I we didn't have to interview. It was great. We outsourced part of that, but it was the most listened to podcast also.

Rhona Pierce:
12:26

So let's talk a little, about measuring success and just like going into the data side of things. Can you share any specific examples of how the podcast directly impacted your talent acquisition efforts?

Jon Gulick:
12:43

So with our digital strategy, we had an email newsletter and their Twitter account and the podcast. So our email newsletter would go out to and then we had physical events on campus too and events at their office, one of our offices. So our, newsletter had a 120,000 recipients, which was our previous anyone who is currently in school and they applied for one of our jobs previously or they can they, registered for an event or they just register on our website. So this large group that was getting emails from us, and we help we use that to promote our live events, but also promote their podcast when it came out or our camps. We had some diversity camps, and we had other applications.

Jon Gulick:
13:22

The application went live. So use that email newsletter to get out as well as the, our Twitter account. We use our Twitter account a lot when our podcast went live. We would, live tweaks what was happening on the podcast Or during the week, we tweet both both on the podcast theme. We always, like, tweet signed up, and we had about 3,000,000 views for our for our tweets on there, which is pretty a lot.

Jon Gulick:
13:51

Yeah. A lot of things.

Lauren Zabel:
13:52

Yeah. Absolutely. And I I should say with our digital strategy, we knew that, we had to do it all because students live online. And specifically in season 2 and the pandemic, we knew that we needed a newsletter. We needed what we would do, listening parties on Twitter.

Lauren Zabel:
14:11

So we'd say, we're about to have a listening party, like, hang out with John, Mimi, and Lauren. And then we would go through the whole episode and do tweets. And that showed so much engagement of students being like, my resume needs to be a PDF. Like, word is the devil. Like, I have no idea.

Lauren Zabel:
14:27

So they those would be, like, tweets and responses that you could get, which would be awesome. But I should say, like, they're a highly, highly online population. So our email newsletter of this a 120,000 in email marketing, like, your open rate, like, a good open rate is above 1%. Like, it's that low that people don't open emails. Ours hovered, honestly, at 50%.

Lauren Zabel:
14:53

So yeah. They loved getting emails from Twitter. You. They loved learning about the podcast. So we knew we had to kind of deliver hyper engagement, on the digital side.

Rhona Pierce:
15:08

And we talked a little about, like, applications, and we've talked about some of the successes that you had. What about any of the other typical TA metrics that people measure? Did you see any, like, quantifiable impacts from the podcast on these metrics?

Jon Gulick:
15:25

One thing we found is the weeks we launched podcasts or we launched episodes of our podcasts, our applications that week would go up about by about 60%. We looked at applications over time, saw all these spikes for every week that we launched our podcast. That's because we launched the podcast. We've sent out an email newsletter talking about the podcast, and we tweet a lot that week talking about this whatever topic was in the podcast. So that really helped our applications go up and it correlated really highly for when we launched the podcast episodes.

Rhona Pierce:
15:55

How did you guys go about tracking and, like, analyzing the success of the podcast? Like, what tools did you guys use? How did you go about it?

Jon Gulick:
16:06

We use a lot of Google Sheets. I love some Google Sheets. But tweet activity, you could download that from the tweet analytics dashboard, which probably doesn't exist anymore, but we, we can download engagements and views for all of our

Lauren Zabel:
16:20

teams

Jon Gulick:
16:21

that we had. And, for our email newsletter, we could track that within our email software. We could see how many opens we had or open rates and how many people clicked on the links there. We could use we use Google Analytics to see what traffic came from the email newsletters and then, listens on the podcast also. And engagement when people are communicating with us about the podcast.

Rhona Pierce:
16:43

What cool thing that I saw, I got a a sneak peeker and a little preview of how you would present things to management, which I thought was amazing. So when you were presenting your analytics and your ROI to management, how do you, like, structure your presentation to highlight impact and value effectively?

Lauren Zabel:
17:03

Yeah. And this is the brainchild of our, behind the scenes third cohost, which is Numi. Mimi and in really conjunction with John put together a one pager of our season. We all knew at the end of it that we didn't want to forget all the things we accomplished. We really felt like building characters was the highlight of all of our careers, and it was super important for us to remember this milestone.

Lauren Zabel:
17:29

So we put together this incredible one major. And I'll put I'll pass it over to John to walk through what it looked like.

Jon Gulick:
17:35

Yeah. So we had some of the metrics on here, like our some of our tangible metrics, like downloads of the podcast, what how, I guess, podcast episodes were the most popular. We had 10,000 down downloads, which I think was amazing. So, quite a bit of audience there Then some of our other digital audiences like email, newsletter, we had 3,000,000 impressions with our tweets about the podcast and 40,000 engagements with our tweets. So pretty large social media, metrics there.

Jon Gulick:
18:05

We had the 4 hires. Lauren hired 4 people directly from the podcast, which is amazing. And then we had a 4.9 star review on Apple Podcasts, and we highlighted some of the reviews that people put on there on how, how helpful the podcast was for them. So those are some of our metrics that we included in this one pager. One thing that was pretty cool when we were launching the podcast, like, the word got around a little bit, and people are other guys are getting excited about it.

Jon Gulick:
18:30

So, our CHRO, our head of HR and recruiting, she was on the podcast with us, talking about our our, remote strategy. Because we were doing remote before the pandemic. So we talked about our remote strategy and why we were being remote and why we were doing this before everyone else was. We had, which snippets from Ned Siegel, our CFO. There's a snippet of Jack on there.

Jon Gulick:
18:56

Our VP of engineering, did an interview with us about about diversity in, tech. So it's pretty some heavy hitters were interested in it. Last time I made for a Webby award, which is pretty cool. Nominated for a Webby, which our CMO had to sign off on. So we're talking to our CMO about this.

Jon Gulick:
19:13

So it's pretty cool. We had all these, like, c level executives that gave us buy in for this podcast who were featured on it and who were excited that we were doing it. So it was pretty, it was pretty fun.

Rhona Pierce:
19:24

Yeah. And it's always so cool to get buy in from everyone, especially people from different departments. That always helps everything go well. But I think a lot of it has to do with how well you guys were presenting and how well you were tracking things and making sure that it wasn't just a cool podcast, but it was a podcast that they could see the return on the investment all the time on this. Absolutely.

Rhona Pierce:
19:50

Did you guys face any challenges with using the podcast as other proven tool?

Lauren Zabel:
19:58

Yes. Microphones. John will tell you all about it. What a challenge.

Jon Gulick:
20:03

Oh, microphones. So we're all at home now. Pandemic hit. Everyone's at home. How do I get everyone a microphone?

Jon Gulick:
20:11

And we were on a shoestring budget. That was part of the deal, was we could do the podcast, but we had very little budget to do it. So I couldn't just keep buying, podcast, but we had very little budget to do it. So I couldn't just keep buying microphones. So I was based in San but but Warren and I were based in San Francisco at the time.

Jon Gulick:
20:24

So I get a microphone and we ship it. And when we ship it to someone, the label for the next person would be in the box, and then they would ship it to the next person, and the label the or go back to San Francisco, be in the box, and come home. So we had, like, a Google spreadsheet of every microphone and, like, where it was going and what days it had to go there and when it was coming back. And when you print labels with, USPS or FedEx, you have to, like, say the estimated dates that they're gonna get shipped. So, like, okay.

Jon Gulick:
20:54

They need this on, like, Friday, so I'm gonna ship it on Wednesday. I'll get there on Thursday. They'll report on Friday, and they put it back on Monday in the mailbox. And then I'll, like, ship on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, it's gonna get to the other place in New York. So it's like all these logistics of one thing get to another.

Lauren Zabel:
21:08

If there was any delay in, like, the microphone arising, that was a nightmare. I had a task rabbit in deep, deep Brooklyn, New York, like, deep. Like, they're the you had to drive, like, 15 miles to go to a Best Buy to buy a microphone because one didn't show up for, class of 2020, episode. So, yeah, microphones are genuinely a challenge.

Rhona Pierce:
21:32

And this is so important for a podcast because the audio is, like, really the most important thing. So I understand why it was so important for you guys to get microphones to everyone. So what were some surprising benefits that you got from this podcasting initiative?

Lauren Zabel:
21:51

Well, I think on the just on the talent acquisition side, for John and I to have, senior level leadership conversations about early talent hiring. You know, early talent hiring, unfortunately, is always looked over even though it's such volume to the company. So it was really nice to just get their attention for a moment about the impact we were having on Twitter by hiring students into all these different, you know, departments.

Jon Gulick:
22:19

And when we had the nomination to Webby award, there's, like, some press behind that. We didn't win, unfortunately. There would have been more press. But, since that was happening, we had a loop in marketing, and then that went all the way up to our CMO to approve us, like, doing this nomination, which is pretty fun. One thing that happened that was kinda cool was, we talked about a few sensitive subjects.

Jon Gulick:
22:43

Yeah. Once we talked about verification, and we talked about election security. So we had these 2 sensitive topics we talked about, and those had to go through comms all like, all the way through comms, through security.

Lauren Zabel:
22:57

Yeah.

Jon Gulick:
22:57

Like, because we didn't know if we could talk about this or not. And then we had a verification episode talking about our verification, like, strategy, and that got cut. So we're like, no. We don't wanna talk about this. So so one of our episodes one of our sections did get cut out.

Lauren Zabel:
23:11

That episode was called ask me anything. So we wanted to really, like, live up to the AMA title of things that people are always so curious about Twitter.

Rhona Pierce:
23:19

Yeah. Because verification was definitely one of Oh, yeah. Biggest, things that everyone wanted to figure out on Twitter for sure.

Jon Gulick:
23:27

She talked to the product manager in charge of it to explain it to us so we would know, and then they're like, we can't tell this to everybody. Like, they need we need to keep this on the because they're gonna start complaining. Like, okay.

Rhona Pierce:
23:39

I think it was really part of of the the magic of verification on Twitter. It's very different now, but like the whole no one really knew what was the criteria and people just applied. And it's like, I didn't get it, and how did this person get it, all of that. I think that was really a big part of Twitter culture. So what advice would you give for other TA professionals that are considering launching a podcast?

Lauren Zabel:
24:09

We did it in a time where podcasts were niche interest. Like, they were definitely gaining popularity, had followings, but more more like cult followings. Now I think podcasts asked each other, like, what would we, you know, do now that podcast, for example, are videos? You know, that's a huge change. So we think there's no question your podcast has to include, the video recording of it.

Lauren Zabel:
24:41

That's a huge change. And we were talking about how much we would have actually really loved that if we did that way, back in 2020 because we had such amazing guests, and we would have also just loved to showcase our students. Not that their voices don't matter, but, that their video obviously would have just really highlighted them as well.

Rhona Pierce:
25:02

Yeah. Video definitely. I'm a big fan of video. It's the best way to really get people to trust you. And that's really what you're doing when you're hiring.

Rhona Pierce:
25:11

You're getting people who wouldn't usually apply to your company to get to know you, to trust you. And, I mean, you guys did a great job with the podcast, but video for sure would, like, level that up.

Jon Gulick:
25:25

I think also when we're telling recommendations on people who are interested in starting a podcast for recruiting, understand what your goals are of your company. What are the company goals? What's your tangible ROI going to be of this podcast? Is it branding? Are you doing branding and hiring?

Jon Gulick:
25:41

Do you want applications? Like, what are you trying to solve for? And make sure you're targeting that when you're making your podcast and it's measurable and you can measure it. Also, I thought our topics went really well with things that differentiated us at Twitter, like our work from home. We had a big big work from home culture, so we had an episode about working from home and highlighting that.

Jon Gulick:
26:02

We had a lot of new grads, so we talked about our, class of 2020 where we had all our new grads. So we tried to focus on our differentiators on what we were good at when we're doing

Lauren Zabel:
26:12

Out of August.

Jon Gulick:
26:14

Also, I'm a big fan of, like, what value are we adding to the people listening to this. So we tried to have, like, a list at the end of, like, resume tips. Here's a list of 10 resume tips you have to make sure you're doing. Here's, like, how to how to stand out when you're at a recruiting event. Like, having lists and try to, make sure people retain what we wanted them to retain to make them better, to add value to their lives.

Lauren Zabel:
26:36

To add to John, I think now in 2024, long form conversations on video for are kind of the norm, but we wanted ours to be educational and instructional. It was not a long form conversation podcast. So we had different sections, different formats, that were really like you could take notes. We had a whole section for how to show up and stand out at a conference, and there was a whole section by recruiter. Here are the things you should do.

Lauren Zabel:
27:08

So we wanted kind of, I guess, that element of education and instruction to our podcast.

Rhona Pierce:
27:15

And I think that's still something that would be very relevant in 2024 because at the end of the day, candidates, though, they want this information. There's so much information out there, what to do and how to get a job. But if you're, listening or watching a podcast from a company that you want to work at and they're telling you specifically their tips and breaking it down in a way where you can take notes, I mean, that's gold.

Lauren Zabel:
27:39

I would send I would send the building characters link to every, candidate in the process. I've said, listen to our podcast, and I would you know, every week, I would send emails if there was a new episode coming out. I would change that in my email being, like, next week is you belong in tech. Like, listen to this episode about blank blank blank.

Rhona Pierce:
27:59

Will you guys do this again? Like, you're now at different companies. Would you start a podcast again?

Jon Gulick:
28:06

Oh, it was long.

Rhona Pierce:
28:06

Jonathan and I have got this a lot. Yes. Yeah. We had so

Jon Gulick:
28:10

much fun.

Lauren Zabel:
28:10

We miss it. We had so much fun. We loved doing this. It was it played to our strengths, and things that we love about being in talent acquisition. So it really just, like, filled our heart.

Lauren Zabel:
28:23

It filled our cup. Absolutely. Do we know what podcast we would bring to this world? Who knows? But, yeah, anything with John.

Rhona Pierce:
28:31

Lauren and John's enthusiasm and passion for their work is truly contagious. It's clear that building characters was more than just a recruiting initiative. It was a labor of love that showcased their creativity, strategic thinking, and dedication to creating an exceptional candidate experience. If you'd like to learn more about Twitter's Building Characters podcast, connect with Lauren and John on LinkedIn. I've included the links to their profiles, as well as the link to the Building Characters podcast in the show notes.

Rhona Pierce:
29:02

Next week, I'm chatting with Amy Miller, a senior recruiter at Amazon and LinkedIn Top Voice about building successful partnerships with hiring managers. If you know anything about Amy, you know that she doesn't follow outdated playbooks. You don't wanna miss that episode. And if you wanna learn more about podcasting to attract talent, check out episode 1, where I sat down with Tanam Sullivan, the employer branding and people experience manager at Golden Hippo. She focuses on featuring employee stories on her podcast and has seen a significant improvement in quality of applications and employee engagement.

Rhona Pierce:
29:39

If you're enjoying throughout the playbook, leave us a 5 star review. Reviews help listeners find us. And by all means, click share, and send throughout the playbook to anyone you think might be into it. Thanks for listening, and I'll chat with you next week.