[CTQ Smartcast] The Relevance of Employer Branding for Companies, With Adithya Venkatesan

Adithya Venkatesan is the Head of Employer Branding at Meesho. In his previous stint at Gojek, he worked to help the organisation attract the right kind of talent.

In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder J Ramanand, we discuss at length about employer branding and why trust and authenticity are extremely vital for the success of this role. We also talked about why it is important for leaders to be storytellers and how this can contribute to the success of the organisation.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Adithya’s definition of employer branding

  • Skills required for Employer Branding vertical

  • Employer Branding: Then vs Now

  • Foundations of a good employer brand

  • Why is it important to keep it authentic when communicating the brand values?

  • When must founders think about employer branding?

  • How to get people from the company towards building a brand?

  • How and why leaders must contribute towards building a brand?

  • Best metrics to measure the success of employer branding

  • To which function must the employer branding vertical report?

  • Has the employer branding narrative changed post covid?

  • The channels that companies must invest in to get their story out

PLUS

  • The role history plays in storytelling

  • Tools to capture tidbits

  • Leaders who are getting employer branding right

AND

  • Future relevance of old-style HR, corporate blogs, influencers and storytelling

LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, ARTICLES AND PODCASTS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

BOOKS

PEOPLE

ARTICLES

PODCASTS

AND

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like How Should Leaders Apply Branding Lessons To Create A Great Organizational Culture? With Ambi Parameswaran

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Ramanand: Adithya Venkatesan is Head of Employer Branding at Meesho and previously at Gojek. In 2018, he was handed a problem by Gojek. Can you help us attract the right kind of talent? In this CTQ Smartcast, Adithya tells us how he went about doing so. His definition of employer branding, why trust and authenticity are so vital for the success of this role. Why is being open about your fallibilities is so important? Why leaders need to be storytellers, and how he persuaded engineers to contribute to stories of both success and failure at work. He's in conversation with me, Ramanand. For more conversations on culture and stories, subscribe to the CTQ Smartcast on YouTube and on all podcasting platforms, and do visit us at www.choosetothinq.com. Enjoy this conversation.

00:01:11  

Ramanand: Hi, I'm Ramanand from the CTQ Smartcast. Today, I have Adithya Venkatesan with me to talk about all things Employer Branding. Hi there. Welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.

00:01:22  

Adithya: Thanks. Hi everyone, and thanks for having me.

00:01:25  

Ramanand: Adithya I want to learn a lot more about how you got into Employer Branding. But first, what is Employer Branding?

00:01:33  

Adithya: Got it. Honestly, even I don't know. When I was working with Gojek, right. So the way I started off with Gojek is I had a problem statement. And the problem statement was we don't have a product here. But we have really, really interesting work and really, really interesting challenges. But we're unable to hire at the pace in which Indian companies that have products are able to hire. So when you have a consumer-facing app, it gets a lot easier to hire, because people can check out your app like your Swiggy and Zomato. And all of these, right? And then when you have FreshWorks and the likes, you tend to use those apps when you're working with other companies. In some way you get some relevance to it. But the problem Gojek had was you couldn't use the app, right? And so and therefore they lost that huge chunk of an opportunity. And Gojek essentially said, Okay, they hired a PR agency. And then they said, Okay, help us, you know, hire more people, get us some publicity and things like that. Now, conventionally PR looks at leaders and says, Okay, we're going to give you publicity. Or they say, can you tell me what announcements you have? Now, Gojek didn't really have announcements, like what do you announce, right? But then they realised, okay, this is not working out, I need to figure this. And so they said, Okay, let's look at some marketer to do this. Right. And that's how I joined Gojek. And they said, look, this is a problem statement. And we need to hire more talent, let us know what we should do. And that's how I joined Gojek. Little did I know that what I was doing was known as Employer Branding. Right? Well, that's how it started. I think after two years, people just figured out, okay, this is known as employer branding. And I got slotted into that. But what I did was look at engineering product, solve design problems. And I said, Okay, these are interesting challenges and problems. And then I took typical marketing, conventional sort of tactics, and merged both of them together. And that became the genesis of how we looked at this whole Employer Branding role. Now, what does the role mean? Look, I've spoken to, I think about eight-nine unicorn companies now, more than two dozen startups. And everybody has a version of how this needs to be done, right? Some of them want this role to report into HR, because they're like it's all talent-related. Some of them want this role to report under product, right? Because, okay, we can get to know about products, sometimes reporting and engineering, because hey, companies like Gojek and there's a lot of success on it. So maybe that's where it needs to be. Some companies are bought into recruitment, because ultimately, it's a recruitment job. Some companies report into marketing because of you, we need conventionally marketing tactics and external-facing social channels. So you have to have great content and copy and we can't define it anywhere. So everyone has a different take on it. But the role in my best summary, I could potentially say, it's the ability to attract talent, for sure. But also convey the pulse of the brand in some fashion, because your marketing team is focused on core marketing objectives. It could be app installation, it could be increasing your sales in some fashion. It could be promotions and discounts, or it could be growth, marketing, all of that, right. No one's focusing on the core brand, which is how do I drive perception for this company? And I think that's where the magic of employer branding lies. It's a function of being able to attract talent, being able to do a little bit of public relations and making sure your senior leadership is positioned well. And lastly, how do you drive perception about this brand that they have top of mind recall when a particular emotion is invoked, or a particular word is invoked? When you think of food, you want to be seeing Okay, so he's top of the mind. Right? Yeah. So that's a brief overview or a mishmash of everything under one employer branding.

00:05:24  

Ramanand: Yeah. So what I love about this origin story is that it starts with a problem. It's not as if here is a role, we've been doing this forever, just come and fill it. But start with the problem statement and bring a bag of tricks to it, which people may have overlooked. And, you know, just looking at your background, right? You've been a student of journalism, you've written on, say, equity markets, you've been an account manager, you've done PR, you worked with CMOs. And in some sense, it looks like you were just accumulating those bags of skills. And I think most importantly, you are not an engineer. I think I could say that because it looks like this needed a fresh approach to solving the problem. So any thoughts on how these different parts to your background actually helped you ease or do well in this, in this role of yours, when you first got into Employer Branding?

00:06:19  

Adithya: Huge, right? I think all of these decisions that I made, ultimately sort of accumulated to where I'm getting now. Right? And I wish I could have done this a long time back. But then I always felt like every defining moment I took in my career was also a huge function of luck, right? And I'll walk you through that. So I started off with journalism, because I did journalism, right. So that was an easy decision, right? But the beauty is, when I joined Reuters, I wasn't doing conventional sort of journalism, I was reporting on equity markets, but not a typical reporter in that sense, but I got a nose for numbers. So I started understanding numbers and the importance of numbers. And that really, really helped because it gives you the ability to win trust with senior leadership, right? When you quote numbers and quote data, at some fraction, they understand, okay, you know my industry, right? So when you typically talk in that language to an addressable market, here's my customer acquisition costs and so on and so forth. They like that sort of language. Right. So Johnson helped me with that. And, then I just read voraciously as the most cliched advice is some of the best advice and, and reading voraciously just sort of helped me understand the space. So that's how journalism started. From journalism, I moved to PR because I didn't see a future in journalism anymore. Right. And a lot of reasons for that. And one of them is very simply I realised, I'm not going to get paid as well. And I looked around at the end of the day, and I cared for living the other pleasures of life. And I realised journalism is never going to give me a breakout career for sure. Number two is also I realised, I don't have the talent for it. Because journalism is about, you have to stay wired with your sources, there's no off day, because look at the trajectory of it. The company's product, the worst news they possibly have on a Friday evening, because that's, you know, making a journalist lose a will to really, you know, take that time to cover the story. And it's a painful process, right? So it never really worked out. Journalism is a very ruthless job. And it's a very, very hard job to maintain sources, pick all these sources, so on and so forth. Right. So I did that for two years, learned a lot. And then I moved from journalism to public relations. Again, I stumbled upon this career, it was almost run as a challenge to me, didn't really have much, I said, Okay, what I'm going to take it. And I quickly realised that public relations in India is not up to the mark. And that's the most diplomatic way of putting it right. Probably still holds true today, because you will see almost everyone complaining that PR in India is poor. But what happened was, I just realised, okay, look at this industry, I get to sort of make a niche in PR, right. So I just started writing voraciously there. So I went from reading quite a bit. And the irony of that is I was in journalism, but I wasn't writing as much. But I moved to PR, and then I started writing. So I did a lot of shadow writing for a lot of senior leaders in the industry, right? So I did that for a whole bunch of folks. And again, very, very lucky because I was in the thick and thin of the startup boom. I'm talking 2013-2014, when startups were multiplying like votes, right? Not as much as it is now. But let's say the groundwork was being laid there. So I got very fortunate because I worked with some really cool companies. So InMobi, Razorpay, worked with a lot of enterprise companies as well like RedHat, Salesforce, and a little bit for Quikr. So a whole bunch of companies like that. DigitalOcean was another great client. So I did a bunch of really amazing work like that. And that just sort of got into this amazing narrative of being able to look at public relations, but a little bit from a brand point of view. So the moment I started working with a lot of the CMOs, I just sort of understood, okay, writing is an obvious skill that not many folks have right? Then for some companies, I also started doing internal communications, which is when the CEOs wanted to write something to the entire org, inspire the org, I started doing a lot of that. So I use writing as the sort of bulwark to be able to, you know, explain and propagate what I would think would define a good career, right. So I saw a lot of relevance within public relations. But after about three, three and a half years in PR, I came to a point where I realised, okay, it's one person advising a bunch of CMOS or head of marketing in our, you know, your head of PR and whatnot. And that message gets lost in translation. Also it is up to them to decide whether they want to do it or not. So it becomes like a typical consultant, right? Where you're preaching, but practising is not in your domain at all. So therefore, you're probably not doing as well as you should. Right. And of course, ideas are easy, execution is hard. So I went from that mould now to understand, Okay, I've been doing this for a while now. But I want to pick one company and do this for one company, and how much success can I have for that one company, and I realised, I don't want to be a difficult sort of consumer-facing company. And I wasn't sure how much I would be able to do there. And the level of risk people would take. So Gojek, again, I stumbled upon, I was speaking to a journalist friend, and then he was telling me about Gojek. And I'm reading about how they're expanding. So I said, Okay, you know what, I'm going to give it a shot. I did a quick audit of Gojek. And then I wrote a pitch mail saying, hey, here are things you should be doing, here's what you're not doing. And yeah, it just made sense. And then that's how I came and joined Gojek. Yeah, started with the problem statement, had no idea what they wanted to do at that point. But then as we started building upon this, all these pieces came together.

00:11:52  

Ramanand: Lovely. You also mentioned the fact that for different people in the organisation, employer branding fits in different places, it could be talent acquisition, for some HR for some, maybe product for others. So clearly, the tentacles of the employer brand function, actually, you know, kind of span all through the organisation. I always say it like, embedded journalists with that military, war kit of teams to take along with themselves to tell their side of the story, because someone's got to be on your side telling your story. So now, one question I had was that, do you think Employer Branding has always been a sort of unmet, unfulfilled need? Or has something changed in the last decade? You know, with lots more competition for talent, we're actually at the very peak of it this year, in the last couple of years. So do you think the need for it has always been around? Or is it something has changed to kind of bring it to the forefront?

00:12:55  

Adithya: For sure, I think the last two years, a lot has changed, right? And primary among them is. So this is also COVID acceleration, I feel. The moment COVID hit, people started working at home. And eventually people also started realising, okay, we can work remotely. And we really can work remotely, we can work with any startup in the world, not just the ones in India. And if we can do that we can command significantly higher salaries. So what people started doing is they had at least initial days, then later became crazy. That people started working like crazy, but in the initial days, people realised they had a lot of time. And that time, I know a significant amount of people who are taking like a second gig or like a consulting gig, right? Let's see, okay, where does this consulting gig take us? And then they realised their talent is far higher than their peers in other organisations, especially the ones in the US. Right? And they're getting a similar or not much, much higher pay. Right. And the latter holds true even till date. Right? And yeah, and therefore, everyone just realised they're far more employable and in perpetuity, so now the arbitrage is, what are you offering me apart from just money? Because I know I can get that anywhere, right? So the moment that came into the forefront, everyone realised, okay, we need to narrate our story better, like here's why it makes sense, we will be associated with the company. Now, if you look at someone who is really really good, right? Like, let's say, a senior leader, employable anywhere, can walk into any organisation they are happy to hire. These kinds of folks want to be associated with companies that have an interesting story. Number one, they want interesting problems and challenges. Let's assume everyone has the ability to offer you interesting problems and challenges, obviously pay and all of that anyone can again offer you in a great way. So the only real difference became how my company is sort of more interesting, number one and how many like-minded people can you come and work so than culture with a combination of peers and you know, all of these interesting other visions that we have for the company mattered so much more. Right? So once those came into forefront employer branding became like a big, big deal to have, because typically otherwise your organisation's focus on marketing, and then they focus on a facet of public relations, which sort of works or doesn't work, you know, took its time sometimes didn't take its time and did not work, so on and so forth. But now everyone wants to build out a talent branding site which accelerates this whole idea of, here's what my company stands for, here's how we're different. Here's why we have interesting challenges, and we're doing interesting things. And yeah, I feel like now, all the companies that I've spoken to are figuring out how it needs to work. And there is an obvious template to go about it. But the paucity of talent to be able to fight really well and convey this is where there's chaos, and where there is a dire need for capital to be filled.

00:15:54  

Ramanand: Right, so I'm from Pune and, you know Pune was legendary at one point for its shops for its customer service, or lack thereof. In fact, there was a humorist who once said that the most neglected item in the shop was the customer. And Pune has come a long way off from there, where today customers will get noticed by the shopkeeper and setting similarly the employees were someone you could kind of take for granted. You could kind of throw out the scraps, and you could have them come to you, but the power equation has definitely shifted in favour of the employees. So since you mentioned things like the nature of culture, the nature of who you will get to work with, and what you get to work? It's a combination. So what are the foundations of a really good employer brand? Do you have to start with a really strong mission? Values are things that people kind of just did as an exercise and then put it on a plaque and forgot about it? Do they really have to take it seriously now?

00:16:53  

Adithya: So this is where things get tricky, right? Because an employer branding role is in some ways already set up for success. In the sense, if you don't have this core foundation of a great culture, the employer branding person cannot come and change it, right? So this is a tricky thing, the employer branding person comes in to narrate what already exists, if what already exists does not exist, then the employer branding person can not do anything, right. So in many ways, they are not really building much. But in organisations, they have the ability to identify and say, “Look, this is where things are not going well, these are the gaps in the organisation.” And so again, different organisations work differently, right? In some organisations, I've noticed the HR teams know what is missing, right? Because they do a dipstick analysis of what are the other orgs offering, and they have a fair idea to do this. In smaller organisations, probably they don't have that because HR is payroll and all of that, right, because it's too small to have like HR teams and things like that. This is where the employer branding person sort of tends to shine, right? Because they say, Hey, we need to do better by employees, we need to have a sort of code of conduct, we need to have a vision statement to rally around things like that. But I still feel a lot of company's mission, vision and all are things, are these the one-liners and someone just concocts out of nowhere, which is which I think it's good to call it like the Pune problem for all companies is just some random statement, which does not make sense, right. And great companies have a strong understanding of the importance of this. And an example for this is Stripe, right? Stripe's vision is to increase the GDP of the Internet, what a beautiful line. And if you see all the activities they do are amazingly aligned to this whole idea about increasing the gross domestic product of the internet and AI, which is transactions and beginning to crypto and so on and so forth. Right? And a lot of companies have pithy one-liners that just don't make sense. But yeah, it would be unfair, in essence before it would be sort of preposterous to suggest that an employer branding person comes and dictates how the culture of an auction should function, right? And I have again, also said this, imagine an employer branding person comes and says, “Okay, you need to change engineering, and this is how engineering should be done, right?” Because then the organisation has far more complex problems to solve. Yeah, but having said that, going through the exercise, which is figuring out all of these things. And as you rightly pointed out, an embedded journalist in the org, going through this fact-finding mission about how the org works as well because I don't know how many people use the survey and then how many people will say this to HR, but when an employer branding person has to fish out stories, dig out, okay, tell me what are the where were the areas you failed? Why has this product failed? What is not working in this product, right? You get to learn a lot more interesting insights. If that can be packaged if this person has a seat at the table. If you found us willing to listen and figure out a way in which we need to improve the org then of course, this role will shine right. And then it also depends on how willing the founders are to be acceptable about these mistakes. For some reason, I've always noticed organisations want this lean image, where they're saying nothing is wrong. Don't talk about anything that's wrong, everything is perfect, right. But in Gojek, for example, some of the best success stories we have had from stories where we spoke about failures, we spoke about things that are not working. And that just became very authentic, because everyone just realised, okay, I was doing great stuff. But hey, they messed up as well. But then like, Okay, wait a second, why are they talking about areas where they messed up? Like, which organisation is so open to talking about where their product went wrong? I mean, we've seen this on Swiggy. We've seen this on a lot of other apps, where for three hours, they've had downtime, so many downtimes, but no one talks about what happened. How can we get better? Here are the mistakes we made, here are the changes we're making, right? Those are far and few in between. But I think those deeply well-narrated stories make for great reading, but also speaks in some fashion to the culture of the org.

00:21:03  

Ramanand: Right. And all stories are about, you know, involving some kind of conflict or some kind of failure. And I remember some of the posts, you mentioned, the Gojek posts, the failure posts, I think, a lot of resonance. I know a lot of people who read that and shared those kinds of posts. In fact, in our own work, we have been telling people about the role of culture, in staying relevant in the future. And again, like you said, if you espouse the value of openness or fairness, you better have a few stories where a leader failed at it, admitted it, and that builds that trust like nothing, because otherwise it is just an extended form of PR within the organisation. Right? It's not good enough. So how important is authenticity in communicating the brand, like, especially for the founders, the people sort of saying, Yeah, this story, you know, it doesn't show us in great light, but it's an authentic story. So, I mean, how much do you have to counsel people in being authentic about also recognizing, “No, we are not there yet. We don't have the greatest talent, perhaps right now to talk about, but we have this other thing that we should focus on.” So tell me a little bit about the authenticity side to all of this.

00:22:13  

Adithya: Extremely, extremely important, right? And, and this is the problem when you hire people, you know, telling them that amazing company, great culture, and when they join them, they realise things are not as good, they're never going to be happy. You know, you're a snake oil salesman, right? Like you're, you're getting them in the hope that everything is good, but things are chaotic, right? But it's so much easier to tell them, “Look, things are broken, here are the problems I have, I need you to come and fix these things.”  Being open about it. Those things are far far more beneficial than us, you know, trying to portray everything in a good light. In fact, I mean, anecdotally, if I would say this, for Gojek. So many of the hired, always heavy lifting was done by the senior leadership at Gojek, right, where they said, Look, failure of systems have a lot of problems that we need to deal with financial regulations. And we need to counsel the bank and folks that the government, we need to figure out how to do this better, right? We need to improve our own storytelling to how we have to explain this to officials in the banks. So very, very important. And what also folks don't realise is, the moment you show your sort of value pillars of the organisation, you're showing core areas where someone can come and build out something very, very interesting, right? And engineers crave for this, right? They crave for great problems, product folks crave for great problems. But if you're coming in, and you have the typical management structure, your approval layers, and this is how an organisation needs to function. That is never going for a brand storyteller or for you know, the folks that you need to buy it as well. So yeah, I think authentic storytelling is a lost art. And I don't think it has even kickstarted. But having said that, this whole building public movement that's happening, right, and Twitter is a great source for that. And you will see some of the folks with great following and are able to hire really well of folks who are doing this exercise of being able to openly communicate, here's where we are doing well. And some folks are also extremely radical by communicating here's where our revenue is, here's where our or I don't know, GMV or whatever numbers that matter to them, right? Number of hires, they make even people who leave they're like, Okay, here's where things are not working out for us. So there's a radical way of doing it. But you will notice a small fraction of people who are talking about this, and all of those folks have been able to do really, really well in hiring and also building a brand for that particular organisation. And you will see a number of them, especially on Twitter, doing this really, really well and these are all sort of new-age founders who understand the power of being so transparent. It's a pity that so many orgs don't get it but I think we'll have to tow that line at some point of time.

00:25:02  

Ramanand: Right. This is wonderful, I think the idea that you expose yourself and that's actually something that attracts people and you don't have to hide behind us, we already have a great culture, all you need to do is come and fit in. No, you're actually helping to build and take it forward. And if at all, it's that growth mindset in action, where you're saying, we are not good enough yet, you will help us get there. So, in fact, talking of founders, do you think that especially first-time founders, tend to overlook the role of all of this, and it is your second-time founder who's kind of burnt his fingers in the past because he didn't think so much about culture? They're the ones who are a little more aware of this. And my second part to this is, what is a good time for a founder to think about these aspects? Because they have plenty on their plate, but what's the best time in which you should also think about all of this?

00:25:57  

Adithya: So, my own thinking on this has changed a bit, right? Initially, I would always say don't ever think of sort of talent branding, at least when you are Series B and later, right. If you're a consulting startup then talent branding is everything for you, right? Because or even if you're in SaaS, because then you need people to narrate interesting stories or B2B sort of org then you need a talent branding role right? Or you can change how this is structured, it may not be called talent branding knowledge, it can be called a brand role. Right? So if there is no clear answer to this at one point, I did have a clear answer, my answer was simple, simple, that look, it's not the core job, you need to figure out products, you need to figure out marketing, all of these are important other functions. So, therefore, conventionally Series B would be 20 million or maybe less than that somewhere there. That is when you start figuring out okay, I need to build out this role and then you build it out as a branding role. And then maybe you structure it down to others. But if I look at the market now I say probably even Series A companies need this, right? Because your need for talent is across the board. Number one. Number two is now automatically because you have across the board, you have talent branding practitioners, who are also focusing on brand, you can just focus on this side of things, it's impossible to build it out one way, right? So then you're saying okay, then I need to hire a head of brand. And I need that brand person to focus on things because my marketing team is now just focusing on growth, right? PR, somewhere they're here, their leadership, you know, all of that I can get, but I'd rather get one person for the brand and get that person to focus on all of these aspects, including PR. So no easy answers here. Also the other side which is considering this role is now hot and is now getting more popular, the kind of talent you need to get others on board is a nightmare, right? For example, I'm trying to hire a content person now. I think for about two months, two and a half months it is impossible to hire someone who knows good writing. I've gotten to the point now I've said you know what, I'm just going to give up on this. I'm going to figure out, whoever is a good journalist whatever they are earning just give 2x and say please I can only throw money at you just forget journalism come and do this. So there's no easy answers for this at all right? And yeah, and your burn as well, because writing, at least nowadays, is changing. But before people who had about let's say five years experience, they used to get less than 15 to 16 lakhs max an annum which is nothing right compared to what the value that a good writer adds. Immense value, because there are storytelling core aspects that others just can't. So one is the paucity of talent and two is for a Series A starting 50 lakhs to get that one employee to do this is not a big deal. They can afford it very, very easily. So I guess right from the get-go because that's the nature of the market. And you have no other choice but to swim in this market and figure out among all the problems that you have.

00:29:13  

Ramanand: For the folks listening to this podcast and listening to Adithya. It's not just a war for engineers, it's also a war out there for anyone who can write reasonably well. And, actually, I'm surprised that we're talking about this in 2021 that we need people who can write and read, it's sort of like we've regressed. So you know, while you get the specialist to come and capture and tell the stories, one thing that you managed to also do at Gojek and I'm sure you will be doing this later as well, is to get people from the company to contribute. To use them to help them tell their stories. So I remember reading one of your blog posts where you talked about the different ways in which you got people to contribute. And I think it's wonderful because again, it's back to that authenticity, you can only amplify their stories and help them tell it better. But it has to originate with them. And we also know, this is not in their top 10, top 100 list of priorities. So tell me how did you manage to rope these people in? What did you do?

00:30:17  

Adithya: Got it. So again, I would say undue credit to me, because what happened was, again, high ownership bias, right? Everyone who joined just sort of the beauty of the org was structured like that, right, which told everyone you are an owne. Don't behave like an employee where you, need to be spoon fed, and you need adult supervision. No, you have to figure out what things need to be done. So the moment folks realised, Okay, I am the owner of this problem, or this product or this sort of function, I need to do well and abide by this. So all I did was come in and say, the only way you're going to be able to hire for your team is if you're able to write and generate content. And so that's number one. So seeding that idea. It's number one, number two is for some people to incentivize that saying that, okay, look, I'm going to write all this, but why should I do it. So then I said, Okay, we'll give you Amazon vouchers and things like that. And then we sort of sweetened the deal by saying that if you have good, deeply researched articles, you will get like an iPhone, or like a Samsung phone, all of that. So that just added this layer. But let's be real here, we are talking to engineers, product managers who earn a significant amount that they don't need your pity. You know, 2000-3000 rupees is not important. So, what we did differently is we said our job is to make sure whatever you write goes to the right set of people. Now, that became a sort of game changer, right, which is saying, write a good article. And we will ensure you get distribution, which is conventional distribution tactics, that marketing will roll out where other engineers or product managers, your peers will get to read this, and then your own brand equity will improve, right. And the subset of that is the org’s brand equity anyway improves. So that sort of incentivized folks to be able to want to contribute more, right. And then, of course, we added all these layers where we said, Okay, we take care of editorial, we help you with structure and flow. For a lot of folks, I sat and brainstormed about what interesting topics that they had in mind, what ideas they had in mind, all of that. Now, this is a template that I tell everyone, right? Now, again, the beauty of it is I know that the majority of them will not be able to follow this template and do this for a simple reason. Again, you need the kind of talent to be able to sit with folks and talk to them and understand. Now I got very lucky early on because I had some really good people who explained all of this to me, they explained okay, this is Golang is a programming language, what is a programming language, so on and so forth. Right? I had some really good educated folks who explained all this to me. And then, of course, I had the obvious curiosity to want to go and read and build this and then talk in a language engineers understand, ask them the right kind of questions, prepare for all my meetings not to appear so stupid and waste people's time. All of that jazz, again, finding the right people to win the trust and to be able to do this is a big, big deal. Yeah, so it's a bunch of these factors. But if I were to sort of summarising all of it, there needs to be some incentive and some monetary, right, there needs to be some incentive for people to write and contribute. And if you are saying that I'm going to be able to market this, I'm going to be able to promote these things. And I'm going to be able to build some brand for yourself as well. And yeah, that's where I think we actually did really well,

00:33:33  

Ramanand: Yeah. So different things are going to appeal to different kinds of people, I guess. And also, you know, everyone does want to be acknowledged and noted for their work. So this is a great way to bring that out. So, one question I had is that, you're talking about engineers and so on. What about people in leadership? So do you have to kind of encourage them to become their own storytellers? Because they'll have different kinds of stories to talk about and in general, you'd encourage more and more people to just know the basics of, say, storytelling, or even spot that story, bringing it to the team to help them take it forward. Do you think people should just turn on that antenna a little bit more? 

00:34:15

Adithya: Yeah, you have to have people in the leadership batting for your org, right? And if they're not batting for your org, two things there. One is probably they're not so confident about the org. So that's number one. And number two is, of course, they don't have the time and they don't realise the importance of doing this in the public domain. Right. And for us, it became very easy because we had a bunch of leaders who just sort of understood okay, I really, really like the org and now because I can't just say that I like, I have to show I have to demonstrate and say why this is interesting. So the ‘how’ became very, very important. So in this sense, we needed to hire, let's say Senior Product Manager. How would we go about doing this in all the conventional ways? And then people realise, okay, look, Product Manager, itself is like such a new thing, right? Otherwise, we fall into this trap of program management. Right. So then we'll say okay, draft JD. Again now JD, how many people read? And how do you structure this? What do you write? And then they come up with, okay, this is what a good product manager should be like. So then my job became very easy. Okay, look, great article, we can put this out, why don't you go talk about this on social media? And why don't you sort of put a tweetstorm on or put on LinkedIn, and say, what makes for a great product manager, or what kind of product manager you're looking for? And then all your marketing activities tend to go, you know, share, that post will promote that post, so on and so forth. And then once leadership realised a lot more people were interacting with them. And a lot more people wanted advice from them, and a lot more people wanted to talk to them, or people had opinions, or people had a different lens at approaching it, then they realised, okay, these are interesting conversations I'm having. So now I'm willing to dedicate a certain portion of my time to do this on social media, because I am also in some sense, learning something. But also in a broader sense, I'm able to hire better, I'm also putting out how I think this needs to function. And there's an audience who's listening to me and is captivated by what I'm saying, right? And of course, we had to build this out at Gojek, right. And of course, we had to look at all the leaders and say, Hey, you're interesting things, you can talk about, share this article, please, if you have an opinion on this, we do have a framework on how this needs to work and so on. But all of them just sort of came into this, this idea of how this needs to work. And, yeah, it just helped me as a brand marketer because then I immediately had ambassadors for the organisation, who went ahead and made their own share of noise. And it all just again came together with the function that I was trying to propagate. But in the initial days, we did do this for a lot of leaders, especially in getting them to conferences and talks, you sort of amplified that. But big, big leveller. And the beauty of it is again, right? So I know enough stories where organisations try to structure this. And the way they do that is that a marketing person writing something for me that I can post on social media never works, because a marketing person will never have the domain knowledge that your own leader has, and time and time again people do this. And then I get this, did you see the CTO of this company put this up? And it was so stupid because I'm just reading them thinking, Oh, my God, what is this rubbish because you know that a marketing person has written this right? At best, the marketing person can correct grammar, maybe improve structure and flow, maybe give some references to polish it. But that's where it ends, it has to come from the leader, and the majority of them don't get it. And if they do, then it's gonna get easier for them.

00:37:53  

Ramanand: Right. I mean, I hate the moment when you said, oh god align, because it's essentially the kind of thing you would see in a very sort of templatized, sort of a document, right. And so, I sense this running thread of keep watching out for differentiation, keep watching out for your authenticity, don't sacrifice that maybe use a more mundane, everyday, normal word, but don't fall in that PR, corporate sort of thing. So, you know, since we're talking a little bit about leaders, and the function is kind of something that people understand sort of intuitively what it brings to the table. But more formally, how does a function like this show its values? Because it's sort of like you're playing a sort of long game, you're not, you don't have numbers like I want five applicants to my JD right? That's not the best way to look at this. So in your opinion, what are the best signals or metrics that one should look at to assess this in its true sense?

00:38:49  

Adithya: This is, again, organisations tend to get this wrong, right? So the role you're hiring has to have a strong bond with leadership, right? So you need to hire someone who is the founder or the senior, wherever the senior leader is, right? Let's say if it's in a CEOs office, or a founder, who does the hiring, or if it's a Chief Marketing Officer, whoever that person is, has to have a strong sort of sense that this person is the right candidate. For me, that's number one. If that does not work, and if you're hiring for a junior role and say do brand, it's never going to work, it has to be right there at a senior role, right? And think of it like this, when you hire a public relations person, the PR person has to, in some ways, engage with the CEO of the company. Right. And with investors and potentially all of that for startups, typically, right? So if you don't have a strong PR person here, who knows writing, it's never going to work very similarly in that sense, right? As an example, the way this has to be structured and there's no other way to do this right is to figure out what are the core tenants this person will look at in the first three months, six months, nine months and one year. And the beauty of when I joined is the first month, I was told don't do anything. Just observe the org. Right? So I had nothing to do. In fact, for the entire year, I didn't have an important sort of, if you looked at my OKRs, and said, Okay, show me what you've done, like a conventional sort of marketing person, or anyone would have just fired me. They said, Okay, I don't see anything here, I don't see the value here. There's nothing you have really done. But what we did was typical janitorial work, which is just hygiene, cleaning up the channels, cleaning up the website, and making sure everything is solid. And if people come and visit all of these properties, at some point, they will only have to see great content. So clean up all the rubbish that's there. Right? restructure, everything changed the format of how our article needs to look like so on and so forth. Even to date when people ask me Tell me metrics that matter for this role? Very difficult to say it right? Here, I'll give it a shot, right? Like, here are the things that I think mattered. Number one is we looked at the number of resumes that came in via the website, right, so that will give you an idea. In their resumes, we looked at the cost per developer resume, which is how many of them were developers, product managers, whoever. And we divided that by the cost we spent to do all of these activities, right? Promotions, whatever we did. The third one would be how many of them have tier one companies that we had categorised as tier one. So maybe your Facebook and all of those companies, right? Like we, these are human companies, let's categorise that. So those are some important metrics. But I think, and then, of course, you can track all your impressions, your likes, and shares and posts and like how all these posts perform, there are a whole bunch of those to track, right. But I think all of these metrics are not as they don't convey the pulse of the team or the function. Another one we did was we started surveying the employees who have joined us, right? And whoever joined us, we said, okay, tell us how did you hear about us? Did you hear about Gojek from a friend? Or was it from a blog post, so on? So then that gives you some sort of ethics in the channel. And that's directly from someone we've hired, right. So that became sort of easier. So that was one of them. So look, there are all these metrics. But I think, ultimately, the reason why I started this by saying that you need incredible amounts of trust with a founder, whoever this function is hiring is that the best way to do this is anecdotal examples of how this function is working, that is the only way this works. You need to hire a brand person, don't bog them with PPTs and all the reporting structures and saying, Tell me, please tell me what you're doing every week, let's have to catch up calls, the moment you sort of institutionalised and do ten things on this and tell me what metrics are reading, let's track those metrics, they are going to miss out on what the job is. The job is to be able to put out great content. And that has to be the voice of your individual teams, right? Hire that person, trust the person to do the job once in a while, catch up and say, Okay, what is the progress that's been made? Are you looking at hygiene? Are you looking at getting the right kind of content out? And instinctively, you will know that right? If your readership is methodically increasing, you know, this person is on the right track. But after 2, 3, 6, 9 months, the readership has just not improved, the quality of the content is not great, right. So there are obvious metrics. But invariably, again, I can assure you that all will complicate this, they will not look at simple things like his readership increasing, no, that's too small a metric to present, right? Because that's not a good enough metric. Need bigger, stronger metrics on and so forth. So simple things like that. And then eventually, anecdotally, you will realise this. My boss at Gojek, anecdotally, kept getting people saying that hey, great, great article, or hey, amazing, I saw a Gojek ad, it was so smart, I don't think anyone would have understood this. Or, Hey, I was reading something about Gojek. Or someone told me something about Gojek, and they realise this, or hey, I read something one of your leaders posted I thought was very, very smart. So anecdotally, you will have all of these examples coming through. And I think that really shines. And one of the reasons why this works so beautifully at Gojek was we had leaders who trusted function number one, and B, they said, we're not going to hold you accountable for metrics and things like that, because we understand that this is a process. And it's a long term process, and we will make it happen. The beauty of it was it lasted one year and two, three months till we did our first ATL campaign. And that did really, really well. And we got a lot of plaudits for that. But once that tempered down, consistency was maintained, and after 1.8 years or so, it just became that amazing brand. So it seems like an overnight success. But all those grass roots were laid way, way, way in advance. But yeah, I've spoken about this to multiple orgs. And I've told multiple people how this needs to be structured. I can also guarantee you that orgs will not structure it this way at all. They always hire someone and they'll say Okay, tell me if it's going well, what about metrics, what are the numbers and that's where they'll fail, I feel like that's where a competitive advantage for me is, right? Because probably among the rare few people who can say, Look, I've already built this function. So you're someone who's already done this, so please let me do my job and then you can hold me accountable much much later on. So as someone in this function for me, it gets a lot easier because I know how all the other orgs will fail at this.

00:45:22

Ramanand: So who's the right person for the head of such a function to report to?

00:45:30

Adithya: Okay, so again, I've gone through an evolution on this right. And it depends on the organisation, so if an organisation is completely engineering driven, like a consultancy, then it is all like an engineering sort of consultancy, then it has to be with the engineering function, right? If you're a product driven organisation, like, let's say, your typical Swiggy, Zomato and everything, then it needs to sit with a product person. And the simple reason for that is because you read if one person is able to read a PRD, right, you will get everything about that organisation systematically, or that one particular problem statement that they're trying to solve. And it gets very easy to write a story and that problem statement. So yeah, it depends on the kind of organisation. But here's where I think it should definitely not sit. This is where roles die, right? HR, I don't think it should sit with HR for sure. Because HR has not evolved to get there. Like what can the HR person tell you apart from cultural aspects of the organisation, but that's not your role. You want to be explaining what product won't be staying, but engineering, you want to be explaining about design? Right? So those are core tenets, you want to propagate in the employer branding? So definitely not here. Number two is definitely not with recruitment, because it has nothing to do with recruitment. You're a storyteller, okay. Your outcome is recruitment, which I think, anyway, needs to look at it, need to look at those numbers, what is my funnel, and so on, and so forth. Right? So definitely not HR, definitely not recruitment. If it sits in the sort of CEOs office, I think that's great, especially for smaller organisations, because then you're directly interacting with the CEO, and some of the best stories originate from there. Right. So I think that's also a great fit. But again, the evolution of the organisation. If you're a Series D-E startup, and if you're still figuring out, do I need this, then probably it will never sit with the CEO, because the CEO himself cannot give time, right? So then you need to figure out other ancillary functions. So yeah, no straightjacket answer, but definitely not with HR and recruitment.

00:47:30

Ramanand: Right. And it's a slight indictment of some of these traditional functions, that they haven't really bothered to find out what design does or what product does. And unfortunately, they should have probably been playing this role by now. But I think we can go talk on and on about that. So we won't. So one question I had was that we know, a lot of people who've done content around Employer Branding, especially pre pandemic, the handful of them that were doing it a big part of that was the site, right, how your place looks, these amazing facilities, we had at some point, that tended to be a kind of a standard for culture, our foosball table. So now with things got, you know, gone distributed? Has the narrative sort of changed more in terms of those intangible things you can’t show? And how do you make it visible and tangible? Is that a challenge that you've had to encounter?

00:48:22

Adithya: Yeah, I think that's a phenomenal question, right? Like, and I'll explain why. The beauty of going to an org and working in an organisation is you get a lot of these sort of intangible benefits, these serendipitous moments that matter in an organisation, right? In a virtual Zoom call to build those relationships and trust is extremely complex and very, very difficult. Great question. Right. And, and I feel like this is where I feel cultural things that need to be done by HR teams, they just are not doing it, right. I know a couple of folks. One of them is that this folk called Sankit built this really cool thing on Slack, which is like a pop trivia quiz on Slack and a little bit of gaming, a few interesting things on Slack, right? So a lot of folks have done very, very interesting things like this, but not enough folks have focused on how I look at cultural aspects, and the closest folks I've come to is doing a Zoom virtual party. I have Netflix for that. This is not going to happen. And to make this work, replicating the offline environment is extremely complex. And I think interesting things need to be done. And so for example, one thing I had is, the HR team mandating that teams now have to come together, and they have to play a board game together. They have to do this for half an hour or 45 minutes, things like that, where you're looking at cultural aspects and when you're looking at team building, I don't think it's being done. And that is what happens in an offline environment in the office. So building this out, now, it needs to sit with HR. And it's very difficult for talent branding to be able to bigger these stories because all those water cooler moments are now dead right. So yeah, my function typically struggled to do this well. Let's see, let's see how this goes. I don't have a direct answer.

00:50:13

Ramanand: Right. I mean, interestingly, one of the things that we happen to get into because we were helping one leader, kind of build a lot of awareness about the cultures that they had chosen was just to kind of have or start a Slack channel for them and do some of the things that you mentioned in terms of running trivia and all that. But they also kind of invited people to this summary session about there's a book about Netflix, right? No Rules Rules. And people are very curious to know what the culture at Netflix is like. And it's been spoken about in this book. So we spoke about that book. And in the process, there were all these stories that just came out about how candour was practised in this organisation. And candour happened to be one of the values both at Netflix and this organisation. And that story, someone just captured it, we just turned it into a small, shareable piece of content. And, you know, you kind of have to organically lead them to those conversations. You cannot be here's half an hour, please play a game. And at the end of it, we want these five things, because it's back to that matrix thinking that you just spoke about a short while ago, right? Yeah, not replicate it So I think, yeah, I think things are happening. How do you capture them and turn them into that seed of a great story that is going to need a lot of imagination I think from a lot of folks.

00:51:30

Adithya: Yeah, yeah. I love your example of doing this. Right. I think it's a great example, like, how many times has the HR team sort of institutionalised this. People read a lot like every, every company has this hashtag books channel, right, which I think is great. At best, what I've seen is one person comes and talks about a book, right? But how many times have we said, okay, individual teams, please have a session where you talk about the book, right? And make sure we'll allocate half an hour, where it's not a company wide thing, right? It's not one person swinging to the entire company, but every team has to pitch in. And it's mandatory attendance, and where you have to talk about these things like that's forcefully being able to help coach and I'm talking about large organisations, right? These are the kinds of things that you need to do, which I think, are just not being done.

00:52:17

Ramanand: Correct. Yeah. And I think everyone has something to contribute. But just get into this environment where you feel, you know, it's all about work. And I think that's where having seen other people get their stories out can have this sort of positive cycle. So Adithya we have about 10 minutes left. So let me ask you a few more questions. Before we get to a more personal set of questions. One is that what are the kinds of channels that you think companies need to invest in to get their story out? One is, you know, there is the world of PR, you have external established sources to go to that's, that's its own game. But if companies were starting from scratch, investing in their own channels, what sort of channels should you just absolutely have, before you can think of bigger and broader things? 

00:53:05

Adithya: Again, very, very easy, right? Think of a candidate, a candidate wants to know about your company, right? There are some things you can control, some things you can't control, can't control things like Glassdoor. And also just generally word of mouth...

00:53:20

Ramanand: You can't control anyone bitching about you to someone else.

00:53:23

Adithya: Right. So then you have to categorise Okay, own media, how thin can I spread myself now. So all media, LinkedIn, you obviously need that because people need to identify who your company is. And that's where people go and search. So definitely LinkedIn, Twitter becomes a great distribution platform. And this is why great content is there. So you need the general social media landscape, you need to do a quick audit of your industry and figure out okay, I need the landscape there. Right. Three, a blog, this is where you need to invest heavily, right? Have a good blog, where you're talking about problems, you're talking about leadership, this is what my leadership is, the calibre of my leadership. And then lastly, you're talking about interesting things the company has done, for example, a funding announcement here is yours, or evolution of a product that we have launched or things like that, right? So blogging becomes one strong component. And every time you publish that blog, and you just put it on your website, it's not going to get anywhere. So you use channels like LinkedIn, Twitter as a distribution mechanism, right? So yeah, Twitter, LinkedIn, a blog, I think three absolute essentials to kick off and then YouTube, and you folks are doing podcasts and things like that. Then you figure out what other channels start with their bare essentials and then move on as you get more people to contribute.

00:54:39

Ramanand: Yeah. And would you advise things like you know, meetups and having your own small forums to get people talking and things like that?

00:54:56

Adithya: Yeah, so meetups and things like that are a little more high agency things right? So you start with this. And then you build out a strong pipeline for all of this, especially when you're just starting off, right? And then meetups and conferences, but remember this right? Like when you have a meetup, the calibre of the speaker has to be really, really good. You need to vet the speaker to make sure they know what they're talking about. And it can't be generic gyan like 90% of people who come and talk all generic gyan. So you either pick one, one of the interesting things that people have realised is okay, we're getting everyone to do generic gyan, let's do product teardown now. Right? So they pick one product, and they're like, let's tear down one by one. Yeah, interesting stuff. So yeah, do that. But make sure all the others are sorted out first.

00:55:33

Ramanand: Yeah that's what behind the scenes things. I think it's always something people love to hear. All right. So before we close a few questions about what you've done to stay relevant, you've done a lot of things already, and you clearly are interested in so many things. And I'm glad you spoke about reading and writing. Because it's just timeless stuff, right? So I know you're a little bit into history or a not a little bit, I think is an understatement. So tell me a little bit about the history and how does it really help you? I mean, what do you get out of reading history?

00:56:05

Adithya: Okay, so I've actually scaled that down significantly, right? I'm not as equipped or knowledgeable as I used to be. I've stopped reading a lot more. But I do read. I've also stopped reading a lot of books, right? I used to be a voracious reader and read tonnes of books, but now it's become articles, podcasts and so many other distractions. I failed to and I’m ashamed to say this, but you know, it is what it is right? In fact, I tend to read more fiction now. Because I'm devouring and consuming all of the non-fiction, right? And everything that we like. So for example, Twitter's become this great force of distraction and good, right? Because you read something interesting in it. Okay. I'm gonna check this article. Also, I have noticed my time being expended everywhere, but then I don't control it because I realised, okay, all knowledge is good knowledge. But yeah, specifically on why history has helped. It's able to sort of deducing context for me, if you read history, you will always notice there are five other tangents to a storyline. There is never one source of truth for history. It's not and it's never arranged. Right. So there's that Freakonomics example, right? And take two completely unrelated things, right? Like, why are ladoos being sold in India? And why are wrestlers in Japan, being able to sell those, and they'll tie those to it sometimes makes sense? Sometimes it's stupid, right? But I feel like history, long historical context gives you these tangents. And these tangents help you to explore other things. And I was a big sucker of geopolitics also. So I really wanted to understand geopolitics. And I think that in some ways, things that I write also, is I'm able to pull out context, historical context, because people love a great for example, in Norse mythology, I love putting in Norse mythology examples because people also sort of relating to it, it gets easier for people to understand and read it. And you will see a lot of people also doing that who understand these things. Right? Alexander the Great and Byjus, what is similar between them, right? So yeah, I typically love history. And in fact, one of my favourite genres is historical fiction, right? And it's this amazing category where it's a fictional story, but with real life historical events and love some books in that world.

00:58:22

Ramanand: Would you recommend one or two of them?

00:58:23

Adithya: Would I recommend it? Okay, one of them. One of my favourites is this book called Homegoing. by Yaa Gyasi. Absolutely phenomenal book. Absolutely love that book. Also, William Dalrymple writes some really, really amazing stuff. White Mughals is one of my favourites. Yeah, tonnes and tonnes out there.

00:58:42

Ramanand: Great. You spoke about having all these articles open and Twitter, rabbit holes and things like that. We'll also notice that you have not neglected your LinkedIn; you do keep posting occasionally. So you do practice what you tell your leaders to do. So one challenge is right, just kind of when you see something, capture it, has that tidbit been a system for you, where you kind of do this very systematically of time set aside, you have tools and bookmarks and things like that, or is it still fairly ad hoc? And if it's the former, you've kind of worked out some components? Can you tell us some tools, apps and approaches that have worked for you?

00:59:19

Adithya: Oh, this is a huge one. I have like a whole bunch of frameworks, not frameworks as much as how do I consume plus, how do I post right? But the simple rule is this. I have not done a good job on LinkedIn. I'll admit this. I have not done a good job because I feel like the LinkedIn audience is there because they see okay, you are a particular leader in your function. And we expect you to post things on that function. That's how LinkedIn is structured, right? But Twitter's not structured like that. Twitter's like you're a personality. And I want to understand as a personality, what are the facets you have. So things that go on LinkedIn and things that go on Twitter, really different. But the way I have treated it is unlike both platforms the same, I don't have time for LinkedIn, I'm just going to see whatever I post on Twitter, I'll just cross post that on LinkedIn. I've used that which means, in some ways, you could say I've done a disservice to how LinkedIn is structured, right? But I honestly don't care much on how I look at LinkedIn. I'm more interested in Twitter. And I'll tell you why. The beauty of Twitter is whatever information I put out, right, invariably, in a lot of cases, there's room for debate. Right? And, and of course, for some people, this debate gets into an area where the people are just rude and offensive. But luckily, I've never gotten to that space. And I've been very fortunate in that space. But one is room for debate. So you get to engage and learn interesting things, number one. Number two is, in some contexts, when I put out information on a particular story, I get to learn a lot more about that one particular story, because I realised that there is a summation of people who are far more knowledgeable, and the Twitter feed crunches you to that 280 characters. So invariably, you consume a lot more. And at the same time, if you're interested, and you click on one particular thing, you can see people responding and their opinions on that particular thing. Right. So the information gathering and information that you're consuming is far, far higher on Twitter. And my simple rule on this is very simple. You read something interesting, you think is very cool. You want to know more about it posted on Twitter, people will tell you more about it. So I use it in that fashion. And in other ways, I also use it as a repository to be able to track how my own thinking is and how my own evolution is of how I'm processing frameworks, our processing principles, a product way of looking at things like different things like that. But yeah, it's been really helpful.

01:01:45

Ramanand: You mentioned history, you mentioned geopolitics, any other domains in which you kind of just keep tabs on or take inspiration for the kind of work you do right now?

01:01:53

Adithya: I love reading annual reports of companies, I think, a treasure trove of knowledge, amazing. People don't do this enough, right? If you read an annual report of a company you will come out incredibly knowledgeable, the pulse and especially for India. If you read a Reliance annual report, you will come back understanding an insane amount of knowledge, like who controls a TV empire? Where are the levers for a particular business? So yeah, annual reports are a big, big deal. Podcasts. Again, I listen to a lot of podcasts, again, companies and things like that. Anything I want on the software aspects of fiction, books. But yeah, geopolitics history, companies and how companies are built. And I do once in a while, I tend to listen to a particular product and how it’s structured, where it's numbers coming from which who are the consumption patterns, all of this via podcasts, but generally, what companies is another area that really, really interesting,

01:02:59

Ramanand: Very interesting. Are there certain companies or leaders that you look at who are doing a good job of employer branding that someone should start following just to get a sense of what the gold standard really is?

01:03:11

Adithya: I don't know about Employer Branding. But I would if I would look at branding as a whole, right? Of course, I feel Kunal Shah does a fantastic job at this. And he's cracked this to a point where he sets the base and sets the standard for what needs to be spoken as well. Right, it becomes like a theme and fantastic job with this. But other folks, I think my own boss Sidu Ponappa, right, does a fantastic job of this, because he understands that he's like the voice for engineering. This is what he really, really understands. So he does a fantastic job of consistently talking about engineering. Right. So I think he does a really, really good job with this. So yeah, at least they really stand out. And I think they've had a fantastic Twitter game. There are other folks who use it differently, right, like so one of my folks, I've seen him grow is Mahesh who leads recruitment at Unacademy and I think he does a really really good job. He posts memes and fun stuff. Right? That's all he does. But in some ways that translates into how the org thinks and how the org behaves. And he's done a fantastic job of memes, fun things and, a great fun person to follow. And you're always engaged in something funny in the startup ecosystem. But yeah, some examples.

01:04:39

Ramanand: Right. So you don't have to kind of tow the playbook just you can do different things and still get noticed for it. For sure. Awesome. So last segment. We call this the future relevance of X, I'm going to toss out a few X's at you. And just tell me what comes to mind in terms of their future relevance. And if you want to pass you can. So let's start with the future relevance of HR, old style HR.

01:05:06

Adithya: Dead. It's like a one word answer or?

01:05:11

Ramanand: One word is fine. You don't have to qualify it. But if you want to say more, go ahead. 

01:05:17

Adithya: You don’t even need me to say this. Yes. Anyone and everyone will say this. The only people who don't say it are scared for the way they work, but largely abysmal at what they need to be doing. And hopefully things get better. And I think, I think it will do that there is no other choice, you have to be able to do better by the org. So yeah, let's see.

01:05:44

Ramanand: Fair enough. Corporate blogs.

01:05:47

Adithya: I think it's beautiful. People, right, and there's just pasted there, no one cares. No one goes to see it. It's just there. But the beauty of this is this, like, you'll get a digital marketer who will promote it and you will say, Hey, I got like 1 million impressions on my blog, and everyone is like, oh, wow, amazing stuff. You got 1 million impressions, everyone's happy. But no one's read that story. It's a difference between reading the story and impressions, corporate blogs need to majorly reinvent themselves. But also having said that, sometimes I feel it's not the marketers problem, right? What is happening all the time in branding persons from what has happened is the organisation of founders and leaders are so averse to talking about some things, they don't give you the opportunity to narrate interesting stories. So it's a two-way problem. I won't blame one side alone. But how many people are doing really interesting stuff and have good stories and the rate and have leadership allows you to narrate those, far and few in between. So not as good, I would say.

01:06:50

Ramanand: Second last topic, the future relevance of influencers?

01:06:54

Ramanand: Oh, big, big deal. We are in the midst of an influencer economy, right. In many ways, you can say your own leadership is in some ways influencers, right, you're building them up to be influencers? Yeah, I think a really, really big say in how brands are built. And you can look at micro influencers. And you can look at, you know, influencers with just like 2000-3000 followers and what part they play as well. Huge, huge. Companies have to figure out a way where they get employees to also bat for them, because collectively they can get more far, far stronger. And I feel like that is the evolution of where in the next three years, four years, how many people are talking about. For example, I would like to quote over here is Razorpay. You will notice a lot of employees of this Razorpay, especially are more active on social media and their batting for their organisation. And you will notice that trend, especially for Razorpay, as compared to other companies, I think it's fabulous. And it all comes down right if it makes sense, because then you look at the founders, whoever has the great fortune of working with and I know them. So it's not it's not like it was forced on them. But it's incidental. And people have realised, okay, we want to go and talk more about a company because it's so amazing, the greatest testimonial to how an org is built, an amazing example.

01:08:18

Ramanand: Lovely. And and the last one the future relevance of the story

01:08:23

Adithya: Of the story. I said this a while back, right? The difference between Uber being valued at $6 billion to $53 billion later is only one aspect. And that's storytelling. And these are not my words. These are words from Aswath Damodaran. And who wrote the valuation thesis for Uber and Bill Gurley, the investor who changed it by saying, Hey, we are not a transportation startup. We're a mobility startup. And that just expanded. So how important is the story? I myself know enough examples of how storytelling has helped you raise massive amounts of money. Right? And your Series A is what you don't have, you don't have anything, you have a story. And that's the story you sell. So the importance of story, and storytellers are going to be the next crorepatis. That's my hunch.

01:09:12

Ramanand: Alright, Adithya. Here’s to more stories and more big stories to you. Thank you so much for your time on the CTQ Smartcast.

01:09:20

Adithya: Thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute pleasure hearing you well on so many examples. Thank you for having me. 

01:09:26

Ramanand: Thank you.

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CTQ Smartcast, Future Relevance, SmartConversations, Systematic CuriosityChoose To ThinqEmployer Branding, Authencity, Trust, StorytellingComment