Talent Brand Leaders: How Teradata Engaged 286K More Professionals Via Smart Branding

At Talent Connect last year we unveiled Talent Brand Index (“TBI”) – a tool that extracts and makes sense of the millions of talent brand signals that happen on LinkedIn every day. TBI is an indispensable (and free!) tool in tracking whether your employer brand is growing or shrinking in the eyes of 225+ million LinkedIn members.

Over the past six months, one of the fastest growing talent brands on LinkedIn is Teradata, a Dayton, Ohio-based company that focuses on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics and business applications – to give customers an integrated view of their data. Their TBI score has more than doubled in the last year, meaning significantly more LinkedIn members have become interested in Teradata as a place to work.

What does it mean to double TBI?  Well for Teradata, it meant they engaged an additional 286,000 more members on LinkedIn this year than if their TBI had remained unchanged since last year.  That’s 286,000 more members who are viewing Teradata’s Jobs, Career Page, or following them on LinkedIn:

TALENT BRAND INDEX OVER TIME – TERADATA VS PEERS

To find out what Teradata is doing right, we reached out to their Director of Talent Acquisition, Gordon Davidson. During his six years at Teradata he helped the company double in size to over 10,000 employees worldwide in 42 countries.

1. If you had to describe Teradata’s talent brand using just three adjectives, what would they be, and why?

1. Customer-focused – the Teradata story is told through our customers’ successes.
2. Innovative – being at the forefront of the big data movement means that our business is constantly changing.
3. Smart – our technology isn’t simple. Every one of our employees has to understand our business, including some very complex technical subjects.

2. Who owns talent brand at Teradata, and how does your team partner with other teams across the organization?   

It’s a group effort. HR takes the lead, but Marketing, Public Relations, and the Executive team all play a role in crafting our talent brand. We schedule monthly meetings with social media stakeholders, executives, and regional leads to check in on talent brand projects and customer wins.

As a global organization, one of our biggest challenges is managing regional differentiation of our talent brand. In addition to cultural and language differences, Teradata’s products, services and competitors vary across regions. We need to be flexible with our in-region messaging to adapt to the values of local talent, and trust the input of our ‘feet on the ground’ employees.

3. How does Teradata use social media to engage with prospective employees?

Given the diversity of our audience, we must be open to new channels. We strive to be agile: quickly doubling down on what’s working, and dialing back on what’s not.

One advantage of LinkedIn is that it allows us to tell the ‘full story’ of Teradata as a place to work. Our products are complex. On LinkedIn, we can post multimedia content that allows prospective employees to consume as much or as little as they want.

We’ve found that the most effective messages feature real-world applications of our products. For example, if you’ve ever received a courtesy text message or phone call from your credit card company after you make an “irregular” purchase to check for fraud, that’s one way our banking customers use Teradata. Most people don’t realize that, so we get a “that’s neat” reaction -- which is the first step toward considering Teradata as a place to work.

4. How do you empower your employees as brand ambassadors?

Social media is effective, but our employees are the most important “channel” for telling the Teradata story. When I think about employees as brand ambassadors, I picture them at a neighborhood cookout. If a neighbor were to ask them “what do you do?” - I want every one of our employees to be able to explain Teradata in a way that people can understand.

To help them out, it’s important to consistently communicate who we are and what we do -- celebrate accomplishments, circulate customer success stories and share employees’ involvement in the communities where we work and live. For example, our “Teradata Cares” program encourages employees to volunteer in their local communities and we regularly share these activities through social networks. By sharing employees’ regional impact across the company, we’re raising the “brand IQ” of our employees globally.

5. Teradata is all about analytics . . . so what’s your big data prediction for Talent Acquisition?

In the coming years, talent organizations will quantify more real-world outcomes and tie together disparate systems. The result: a holistic picture of what’s going on inside and outside the organization. Ultimately, big data analytics will enable us match more people to the right opportunity at the right time.

Want to measure your company’s employer brand strength relative to competitors? To learn more from Gordon in person, register for Talent Connect 2013, where Gordon will share his secrets on data-driven decision making. In the meantime, if you are interested in measuring your company’s employer brand strength relative to competitors our team is on standby to help.