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Reimagined Workforce - Workforce Transformation
Stories from people who are driving workforce transformation to deliver business performance and value that matters.
Reimagined Workforce - Workforce Transformation
Reimagining How Organisations Attract and Retain Talent with Simone Strachan
The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
Connect with Kath Hume on LinkedIn
Purchase Kath's book Learn Solve Thrive: Making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world:
Learn Solve Thrive: Making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world : Hume, Kathryn Lee: Amazon.com.au: Books
two or three things I think that people could do tomorrow. Be clear on the drivers of candidates and your existing team members. Listen to what they're saying and what is it that they care about, and there's a range of different ways that you can get that information. Obviously, internally, many organisations will have something like an employee engagement survey or a pulse survey. If you don't have that, you can do really informal focus groups with people, and it could be even one-on-one conversations with people, and what you're trying to get to the heart of is what really matters to them. That doesn't mean that you then offer people everything that they want, but you need to understand what their drivers are to begin with and why that's important and why do they come and work for you each day.
Voiceover:Welcome to the Reimagined Workforce Podcast brought to you by the Director of Workforce Transformations Australia, Kath Hume. In each episode, we explore the stories, strategies and successes of curious, creative and courageous people who are daring to address workforce challenges differently. Together, we'll discover how we can harness human potential and reimagine the workforce for a brighter, more fulfilling future for everyone. And if you would like to learn more from Kath about how we can make this happen, be sure to get a copy of her latest book, the number one Amazon bestseller Learn, solve Thrive making a difference that matters in a fast and complex world. Now for the episode.
Kath Hume:I was fortunate to meet Simone Straughan at the Gartner Conference last year. I loved the passion she exuded and found very quickly that she knew so much and there was so much I had to learn. Simone was humble in speaking about her work and I felt safe asking what I thought were pretty silly questions, and I felt that I might not be alone in lacking the nuance around the different terminology that we often use interchangeably. So I have invited Simone to share her insights and talk about the way she supports organisations. So welcome to the Reimagined Workforce, Simone.
Simone Strachan:Thank you so much, Kath, for having me, and I feel like I was reflecting about this last night. Gartner Conference, December last year, feels like light years ago. Where has the time gone and how is it? Mid-june already?
Kath Hume:I know I can't answer that question because I'm in exactly the same mindset as you there.
Simone Strachan:And I must say as well, no question is a silly question. Honestly, it might sound a little bit cheesy to say, but having worked in the space gosh, I feel like I've been in HR for about 20 years, but employer branding experience and EVP employee value proposition for probably about 10 years now. I am learning things every day just like anything else, you're always learning, so no question is a silly question.
Kath Hume:I think it's interesting because I'm showing my age, but I think I've been around for three decades or something now. I don't know, it's not to count, but it still fascinates me. Not that I think I'm an expert, but it still fascinates me. When I come up with something that we use, we bandy around. I do. I bandy around all the time, but I don't really know the level of detail that you do, so I'm really keen to dig into it and benefit from your expertise in this area.
Simone Strachan:Oh, thank you, and it is.
Simone Strachan:it's a topic I'm so passionate about I feel really fortunate that I get to do this every day and now that I get to pretty much solely focus on employer brand experience and employee value proposition aspects. It's just again sounds cheesy, but I feel like I'm living my best life. I got to do components of that for quite some time in the lead up to working on my own, but now getting to do that all the time it's yeah, it's never boring and it's so interesting working with different organizations on on their experience. So yeah, excellent.
Kath Hume:Well, on that, can you give us a little bit of a background around what it is you do and and why that makes you happy?
Simone Strachan:yeah, absolutely so. I mentioned my background is human resources. I've been in HR for be around I I feel 20 years or so Just like you, I'm trying not to count and I've specialised predominantly in talent acquisition and talent management spaces. I sort of fell into recruitment I feel like a lot of people do and then I fell in love with the strategic side of recruitment, which, in my opinion, people either have or they don't. It was just a natural curiosity to get to know the businesses that I was working in and the different functions or business units that made up that organization and understanding really what it is those leaders and team members were doing. And leaders and team members usually love nothing better than having someone ask questions and be curious and want to listen to actually what it is they do day to day and I loved hearing about that and translating that into strategic initiatives to attract, source land the best talent and that sort of led me to work in more strategic roles around mapping talent, strategic sourcing and then eventually kind of project work in the HR space and leading teams.
Simone Strachan:I've worked in a number of industries. I was going to say I feel like there's not many industries I haven't worked in. There definitely are, but I sort of feel like I've done, been fortunate enough to have a real gamut and breadth. And then probably the last 15 years or so, I've specialised in talent acquisition, leading sort of various size teams, and then particularly specialised in employer branding and employee value proposition work. And that's all about helping businesses or organisations market themselves, both to their current team members as a way of retention, but also helping them market themselves to an external audience for attraction purposes. So it's a bit of a double-edged sword. And again I sort of fell a bit into employer branding and employee value proposition work. It's quite a niche space. It's particularly EVP. There's starting to get a lot more talk and chatter and experience in the employer branding space. But in Australia it's still kind of a little bit of uncharted territory, I think.
Simone Strachan:And I was fortunate enough to do about five years overseas oh wow and worked in London on international recruitment and that's where I probably got my real taste for employer branding. The market in Europe is very mature and advanced, in my opinion, when it comes to employer branding. So that captured my attention. And then when I came back to Australia about 10 years ago I decided I really wanted to be intentional about developing myself in the space and I joined Telstra. That was sort of where I worked for five and a half years in a range of different recruitment roles, but I wanted to work for an organization that was market leading at the time when it came to branding from a recruitment perspective and was fortunate enough to do that and eventually led the employer branding team, strategic sourcing team, grad space and recruitment project space, which was fabulous and learnt so much, and from there moved to sports bet into a head of talent role, which was employer branding, evp recruitment and talent management and succession planning focused, and then from there moved.
Simone Strachan:What a absolutely crazy thing to do. I was in a really steady, well-paying corporate job, loved where I worked. Why not just throw it all up in the air and start your own business? Right? That sounds really logical, doesn't it? So that's how I landed where I am now and I've been working on my own. The business I have is Bespoke Talent Solutions, and it's bespoke because I truly feel everything I do is tailored to the businesses I work with. There's no cut and paste or anything like that, and I work with them to specialize on how they market themselves. So help them develop EVPs, help them refresh EVPs and also do a lot of employee-generated content to help them boost their brand. So yeah, very fortunate, and that's been about two years now.
Kath Hume:It's such an important space and I think there's someone I am connected connected with on LinkedIn, ashley Sinclair, and she has niched into marketing for L&D and it's all about how do we get people to be interested in L&D and my background is L&D, and so it was just an eye-opener that if we don't actually understand what people are interested in and come to them and address their needs and aspirations, then we're really just pushing ourselves onto people and there's no place for that anymore, because it's way too competitive and others, if they're doing that, they're ahead of the game and so we need to keep up. But for me, it was very much. Oh, I've spent so much of my life learning HR and L&D. Now I have to learn marketing as well, and she's so good at really putting it in simple, layman's terms and actionable tasks that you can do, and I'm sure that you're helping clients with that as well, and we'll dig into that.
Kath Hume:What I am keen to ask at this point because I ask all my guests this but the question is what does your reimagined workforce look like? So I'm really always intrigued to understand what it is that people do and why. What does the world look like once you achieve your mission? I love that question.
Simone Strachan:I feel like that's one of the genuinely better questions I've been asked in a long time. It's really thought-provoking, I think. For me, if I think of workforce reimagined, I think of working with organisations that show up as their true selves and attract talent that's going to thrive in those organisations. But they're not trying to be something that they're not. They're truly underpinned by their values and helping bring that to life so they can attract the right talent but also have talent working in an organization where they can be their true selves.
Simone Strachan:And that might sound a little bit, you know, cliche or whatnot these days, but I think a lot of people talk about that, but I think people really struggle to achieve that or even understand how to go about doing that. So I think for me, my ultimate goal is to work with organizations and help them show up and be their true selves when they're attracting talent, helping them attract the right talent that's going to thrive in their organizations and then making sure that when people are there, they have the best experience possible. Easier said than done, right, but I think that's my ultimate goal and just challenging people. To keep it simple, I loved your point before about things can get really complex and there's a time and a place for that. But I also think, you know, we can make things a lot more complex than they need to be, and often simple is better. So helping organizations go on that journey, but one, keeping it simple and two, really holding them to account to be authentic, because that's what people want is authenticity.
Kath Hume:So, yeah, that's kind of how I, you know, think of a reimagined workforce, because I think, when people apply for jobs or however, whatever the process is they go through to to arrive at the workplace that they're working in, I think there's so much effort and so much emotion. Personal people invest so much in themselves in that, and it must be so disappointing to then arrive and discover this actually isn't what I thought it was going to be and it's such a disservice and I mean it's no good for anyone that because, yes, you might have a bum on a seat for a little while, but how productive is that compared to what you know? The right bum who actually really values what your organisation's doing and it's really motivated to invest that discretionary effort, yeah, it's so interesting I was going to say.
Simone Strachan:Often I hear which is a little bit soul-destroying working in the industry, but hence genuinely why I do what I do. I often hear you know, at barbecue chats or whatever it might be people saying looking for a job is one of the most soul destroying things you can do. You know, I often hear people talk about it in the category of looking for a rental property, buying a house, looking for a job, and you know, I just think wow that there's so much room for improvement in that whole experience and, to your point, not only the soul-destroying, sometimes, experience. There are amazing experiences out there and there are actually quite a few employers doing some really awesome stuff. But imagine that whole experience of looking for a new job, landing in an organisation, then only to find that it's not what you thought it was. Wow, that creates a whole chain reaction, if you like.
Kath Hume:Yeah, especially if you've left something that was ticking lots of boxes anyway and you were looking for something that met other needs and then it doesn't deliver on that. We're playing with people's lives here. I think your point, too, around enabling people to find workplaces where they can thrive I think that's been my motivator from when I was in high school. It's to me, and I've said it a thousand times but we spend so much of our lives working. It to me is genuinely a tragedy if people are getting up and going to a job that they despise or that doesn't warm their heart and make them feel like they're actually contributing something meaningful and that their life isn't wasted away because they're doing something for so many hours every day. That's not bringing them joy.
Simone Strachan:Yeah, and you know there's been a bit of an evolution over probably the last, I want to say, one to two years. And we met at the Gartner conference, which I completely nerded out and I'm not, you know, I don't have any affiliation with Gartner, I just think they have amazing insights and research and a lot of the evolving thinking in the employee value proposition space, which sort of touches on what you just mentioned, is actually having a people. You don't just go to work and show up and you're one person there and you leave and then you're another person at home. Some people might do that, but in an optimal environment you should be able to show up and be your true isn't just providing you support, benefits, a culture that works for you when you're working. It should actually provide something of that nature throughout your entire life. So enable you to be the best person you can be both in and out of work.
Simone Strachan:That's really where employee value propositions are sort of moving towards. Is that whole person, that human deal, is what you tend to hear it referenced as, whereas you know, traditionally EVPs were sort of focused on well, what can we offer people when they're actually working for us in the workplace? And you know, even that's evolved in a sense of people used to think employee value proposition was just a list of benefits and it's so much more than that Still really common thinking, but yeah, that's kind of where it's evolving over the last couple of years. Is that human deal and what we can offer people in their entirety, regardless of whether they're at work or otherwise?
Kath Hume:What I'm really keen to have you unpack for us is that differentiation between employee brand, people promise, employee experience, employee value proposition. Can you break that down for us a little bit? So when I'm using these terms I'm not annoying other people who are thinking what's she talking about?
Simone Strachan:And it's a really good point. I think the thing I would really emphasize is the terms are used interchangeably and it's actually, I feel, quite rare that there's a clear delineation and distinction between them, and that's where it gets confusing. No one's going to die if people use the wrong term right, so there's no judgment. The best way I think about it is your employee value proposition, which can have many different names. Sometimes people call it a people promise. Whatever it is referred to, it is essentially what you provide your team members in return for their skills, labour time, capabilities, what they bring to the table. And when I say what you provide them, it can be a range of different things. It's not just a list of benefits. It could be the culture, it could be the work environment, it could be opportunities, it could be the purpose of what they're working for or the impact of what their work has, both in community or for the organization. So it's a lot more rounded than just salary packaging or health insurance, which are all lovely things, but it definitely kind of evolves a lot more than that. That's what an EVP is, the flip side to that, which sits really neatly alongside it is employer brand and the way that I view employer brand is it's how you market yourself as an employer. So we often think about or hear about consumer branding. So you know, as consumers we have brands that we recognize. We have brands that are trusted and reliable in certain spaces or recognizable in certain spaces and have credibility. It's the same thing in recruitment, marketing and employer branding. It's just with a lens of an employer. So when you have your employer brand, it's how you market yourself as an employer, both internally and externally, so that you can attract and retain talent. One of the misconceptions people I think regularly fall into or kind of forget is probably a better way to phrase it is everyone has an employer brand right. Whether you have a team member dedicated to it, whether you put content out, whether you do nothing in the space, every employer has a reputation and a brand as an employer. It's just whether they choose to invest in that intentionally or not. And some have really good brands and some have not so good brands really good brands and some have not so good brands. But I think the other core element as well is it's just as much about attraction of future talent that you might want to bring into the business tomorrow, six months time, five years time, a decade later, as retaining your current talent. So I really firmly believe that recruitment, marketing and employer branding absolutely have a space to play in helping an organization keep their talent, and that's part of the work that I do at the moment.
Simone Strachan:And then the last element is the employee experience. So the journey that your individuals go through during their time working for you and you know that usually has milestone moments throughout it. It can be short, it can be long, people's drivers and desires can change throughout that employee life cycle and experience. You know they can be highly engaged, they can become disengaged and you know there's some really interesting work in that space. But essentially it's the journey that people have or, as it says on the tin, the experience they have whilst working for you.
Simone Strachan:I think it's also important to especially when I do a lot of branding work and employee value proposition work with employers is also remind people that, yes, maybe the employee journey officially starts once you kind of hired someone, but actually it's also about mapping the candidate journey. Employer branding also comes in about how do people first hear of your brand or get awareness of your brand and then consider your brand as someone that they would like to work for enough to then dip their toe in the water and maybe register interest to stay in touch or apply for a job advert or, you know, go along and speak to someone at a careers fair, whatever it might be. So that's how I sort of think of those three facets. They all are in parallel but they all sort of do slightly different things.
Kath Hume:It's interesting that employee journey and I love that you called out that it happens before anyone's even really considered us, and it speaks to what you mentioned about that brand. And I think I have my employee journey. I use slightly different terminology but I have an acknowledgement phase before the exploring phase. So it's really just I'm aware that that brand exists. I'm not necessarily interested in it, I'm not putting any conscious effort into it, but I'm just. I'm not putting any conscious effort into it, but I'm just. There's something that it's now in my level of awareness that that organisation is there and I think you know it's not crazy to think that this is something that happens when we're young. But what I really like too about what you're saying is it doesn't stop. Once you leave an organisation, that brand stays with you.
Kath Hume:You've just talked to us about all of those organisations that you've worked at and I wouldn't mind wondering, like Telstra, for example I think most people would be aware they're a telecommunications company in Australia Back in the day. It was a bit of a monopoly and so it was a very common household name. Interesting. I'd love to hear how you went with selling the employer brand at Sportsbet, especially things like and just coming to mind, things like the whole the Melbourne Cup. It used to be the race that stopped the nation in Australia and it was very much a part of our heart and souls, but over more recent times it's become a bit of an animal rights issue, and so sports betting, too, might have a bit of negative connotations because it's the possibility of it leading to gambling and negative social elements. So I'm really interested I'm going off on a tangent, but I'm wondering, and you might not actually be able to talk about those brands.
Simone Strachan:No, no, no, totally fine, totally fine.
Kath Hume:But I think it's really tricky sometimes and I remember someone talking to me once about working for an oil company and she was saying it's such a hard sell because who wants to go and work for an oil company? So sorry, over to you.
Simone Strachan:No, and I love, I love the question, kath, and do you know what? Especially when I was working at Sportsbet, it was a really common question that I'd get and probably something to share in terms of my mindset with yourself and those listening. I thought really long and hard about joining Sportsbet and this was actually a good insight for me early on about perhaps what thoughts others might go through when considering even engaging with Sportsbet, and so I made a decision. I'd been involved in employer branding at Telstra, and Telstra, to a degree, is a pretty lovely brand to market. No employer is perfect and there's always going to be people that it's not the right employer for them. But compared to someone like a sports bet, which was a completely different offering, I was really intentional about joining sports bet because I thought if I can market sports bet, I can market anything, and that's not in a disrespectful way at all to sports bet. It's actually one of the best places I've worked at hand on heart.
Simone Strachan:But I think one of the things that's important to remember with employer branding and EVP work is every person doesn't want to work for every organization and not every person is right for every organization, so your employee value proposition is just as much about helping people opt in as opt out, so I think you know that's where your employee value proposition is very clear about. Yes, these are the benefits that we offer you, both tangible and intangible, and what we're like as a workplace, etc. What we value, what we place emphasis on, but it's also just as much about this is what we're not, and this is what we don't rate in our organization, or what we don't strive for in our organization, and that allows people to opt out and go. Do you know what? Not my cup of tea, and that's okay. That's actually a really effective EVP.
Simone Strachan:When I think of Sportsbet, when I started, we didn't have any employer branding work. We had a really strong consumer brand and it was a very playful brand. I think there are a couple of things that were really for my consideration when I was developing an employer brand strategy for them and every business doesn't need to have an employer brand strategy. I felt like that was best for Sportsbet because we one I had the experience to do it. Two, we hadn't really invested in employer branding and the business didn't really understand what that was, and so I wanted to really have a strategic approach over a number of years about how we would evolve that brand to the point where Sportsbet was winning awards for best careers website LinkedIn, top employer to work for some really good, genuine accolades.
Simone Strachan:One of the things that I was really clear early on with about the employer brand at Sportsbet was, to the point I mentioned earlier. We weren't trying to appeal to everyone. I kind of broke people into three categories. One was people that Sportsbet might be their dream organization to work for. Maybe they're a sports fanatic and you didn't need to be a sports fanatic and you didn't need to be a sports fanatic to work at sports bet, which might sound a bit counterintuitive. There were other things that it offered people. But, yes, certainly there's one category where sports fanatic, nothing better than working for sports bet. Then there would be a category at the other end of the spectrum which would be absolutely not interested in touching wagering, gambling, aspects to do with animal welfare, which you touched on earlier from you know, even like a horse racing perspective. So that was one camp. And then there's this camp in the middle which is what I sort of fell into when I was thinking about working at Sportsbet and that was, hmm, never really thought about them, but I don't know how I feel. I'm kind of on, I'm on the fence. So I was on the fence and so that's the sweet spot of what I said.
Simone Strachan:The whole point of our brand was not to market to the fanatics, not to market to those that clearly wanted to remove themselves from that environment. It was those people on the fence and the main purpose underpinning our employer brand strategy was let's show people what it's really like to work at Sportsbet and what we're really about, what we're passionate about, and that's either going to make them want to join or make them want to opt out. So that's kind of what it was really about, and I think one of the things that was really important was just being genuine and authentic. I think that's one of the things. I don't think there's a lot of things you can do wrong in employer branding. There's a couple, but for the most part there's not many things that I think you can do wrong. But one is to not be genuine and authentic and too polished and too maybe aspirational and not being transparent about what you're communicating is, in fact, aspirational, because that's where you can kind of mislead and, I guess, missell people what you're about. But that was kind of the purpose for Sportsbet, whereas Telstra really really well known brand, very powerful brand.
Simone Strachan:I think one of the things that there were areas at Telstra, where it was more tricky to recruit talent, and that was often in sort of the earlier days. That tended to be more in sort of the tech spaces software engineering spaces, even things like data science, cybersecurity. Telstra wasn't this is a little bit of time ago now but they weren't necessarily known for being, you know, that tech company, and while I was there they went on this journey to be, I guess, more than telecommunications and more than just mobile and internet, and so part of the branding focus was how do we communicate that we are a destination for tech talent? Some of the other areas tend to look a bit after themselves because of the power of the consumer brand, but again you've all of a sudden got two really different needs and focuses across two completely different organizations, and so having that strategic approach to your employer brand and your EVP allows you to talk to people about what matters to them but aligns to the organisation's strategic goals as well.
Kath Hume:Which circles back to what you said in the first place around what your reimagined workforce looks like and having people there who thrive because you've got the right person in the first place, around what your reimagined workforce looks like, and having people there who thrive because you've got the right person in the right places, and those people who wouldn't thrive there can hopefully be directed away from the organisation, not necessarily to others A really important point you're pointing out too around. Like I said, I do a lot of work in government and often the perception of government is people in suits and it's boring.
Kath Hume:I think people think government's boring and I'm generalising, but the brand isn't always there, and maybe individual agencies do, but the government as a whole. I think the employer brand could really be an opportunity to really sell. And do you know, this is some of the stuff we do and you know, there's an organisation who, I think, does it really well, and it's Defence and their ads are. This is a day in the life and I think that's really interesting to me, because there's no way I could be aware of that unless I know someone who's in Defence. I'm not able to see that, and so bringing that to life is really helpful, and I think part of their strategy is there's all of these opportunities that you might not think about. It's not just in the army and it's not just being on a submarine. There's all sorts of other things that are involved in that as well.
Simone Strachan:Defence do, do it really well, and the other one who I think is an anomaly in government that does it really well and I researched them last year when I was working with a client in the health industry is New South Wales Health. I'm not saying they're perfect at everything they're doing, but they are doing some really cool stuff in the employer branding space.
Kath Hume:Yeah, and their term language is in millions of ways. Yeah, and their term language is in millions of ways, and it's beautiful because it means that it doesn't matter who you are in that organisation and there are so many small things that happen every day that contribute, and I think that is, I agree, it just warms my heart, that one. It just sends shivers down the spine. It's such a good one it is. We are running out of time, but you mentioned before around let's keep it simple for people. So what can we do tomorrow that you know I don't have to go and get someone to help me with what can. What can we do ourselves to promote the organizations to attract the talent that we need. Retain them, because they're finding the employee experience is what they need to have a healthy, happy life.
Simone Strachan:As a really valid point. I think a really good point to wrap up on. I'm a very kind of tactical person. When I listen to podcasts, webinars, go to conferences, I love to kind of go okay, but what could I literally do tomorrow and take away? Great to know theory, great to have conversations, but what can I do tomorrow? Do tomorrow and take away Great to know theory, great to have conversations, but what can I do tomorrow? So my best tips would be two or three things I think that people could do tomorrow.
Simone Strachan:Be clear on the drivers of candidates and your existing team members. Listen to what they're saying and what is it that they care about, and there's a range of different ways that you can get that information. Obviously, internally, many organisations will have something like an employee engagement survey or a pulse survey. If you don't have that, you can do really informal focus groups with people, and it could be even one-on-one conversations with people, and what you're trying to get to the heart of is what really matters to them. That doesn't mean that you then offer people everything that they want.
Simone Strachan:But you need to understand what their drivers are, to begin with, and why that's important, and why do they come and work for you each day? What do they care about, short-term versus long-term? And then, externally, you can get some really awesome information broken down by job, family or talent segment on it's a government website, actually, and it's free and it's called, off the top of my head, job Skills Index and you can go have a look at that and look by occupation and it tells you, largely speaking, what the interests and what matters to those cohorts of talent. So that's number one know what people want and what matters. I think number two would be be clear and know what your actual candidate and employee journey is. So if you haven't mapped out and it could be on a simple page done by hand, doesn't matter how it's done but actually map, end to end, what the journey is that candidates and employees go through, and be clear on what the milestone moments are and a milestone moment could be day one that someone joins, for example, or maybe it's a service anniversary or something like that. So be clear on what that journey is, because you can then use that later to underpin you know decisions that you make, how you introduce benefits, how you communicate and engage with employees, how you introduce benefits, how you communicate and engage with employees.
Simone Strachan:And then the third thing would be. The last thing would be get stories from your people. Listen, listen and get stories from your people and create some really simple, short content that you can communicate internally on, you know, intranets or Slack channels or whatever your internal comms platform might be email doesn't matter and that content can also be repurposed externally to attract people, and you can get that content in a range of different ways. You could send people an email with a couple of questions in it, getting their thoughts and experiences. You could do a survey on SurveyMonkey that's really short.
Simone Strachan:You could have a phone call, go get a cup of coffee with someone and have a chat with them and create that into a little article or a testimonial, and you can, all of a sudden, you've got some authentic content, because what people want to hear from internally and externally is the people that are actually working there, and there's a stat that I always refer to, which is the voice of employees and team members. That content gets three times more traction than what corporate content does, and that doesn't mean corporate content isn't relevant and valid. It absolutely has a space to play, but people want to hear from real people. So they would be my top three tips.
Kath Hume:That's excellent. It reminds me when I was looking at different high schools for my kids and I'd find friends who had older kids who were already there. I'd go to them. What do you think about it Exactly? Yeah, so that's great and all very actionable things that we could do, so super duper helpful, thank you. There's a couple of things that you suggested in there that I think would be great to include as links too, so we might catch up yeah absolutely Throw those in. If people want to contact you, what's the best way?
Simone Strachan:Oh yes, so I've got a website bespoketalentsolutionscomau so people can check that out. Otherwise, I am a recruiter by nature. I'm always on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn's a really good way you know responsive on there, and I think one of the things I'd stress and emphasize is I'm not in the business of selling people things. I couldn't sell something to save my life if I tried. I'm really passionate, like you said at the start, about talent and I've been really fortunate that I've had a network and coaches and mentors throughout my career to date who have been really giving of their time. So I'm also more than happy to go grab a coffee, pick up the phone, do a Teams and just bounce ideas with people, and that doesn't need to be anything relating to you know the line of work I do or anything like that. So people are welcome to reach out and just have a chat.
Kath Hume:Excellent, that is great. And just in case people did want to have a coffee, you are Melbourne based that's correct.
Simone Strachan:Yes, Melbourne based. Yeah.
Kath Hume:You know, four seasons in a day Excellent. Well, this has definitely lived up to the promise and it's taken a while to get here, but it's been such a good conversation. Thank you so much and we look forward to staying in contact. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.
Voiceover:Kath thank you for listening to this episode of the reimagined workforce podcast. We hope the conversation inspires you to consider new ways to solve your workforce challenges. Feel free to check out our other episodes that are available on our website workforcetransformationscomau slash podcast. And if you're looking to create a brighter future for yourself, be sure to grab a copy of Learn, solve Thrive Making a Difference that Matters in a Fast and Complex World, available on Amazon and most book retailers globally.
