Trevor Vas Interviews Employer Branding Guru, Justin Clem, At #ERE14

This is the fourth post in a our series of Q&A Hot Seat interviews with the industry’s thought-leaders. This time, Trevor Vas, Director at ATC Events, sits down with Justin Clem (@justin_clem), Director of Global Recruitment at SolarWinds, at the US #ERE14 Conference to discuss how SolarWinds empowers their employees to be employment brand ambassadors.
Lessons from Justin Clem, SolarWinds:
• Don’t be limited by the number of recruiters you have, make everyone in your organisation a brand ambassador;
• If you want to empower your employees to be brand ambassadors, give them the tools to do this easily and frequently;
• Glassdoor is not just a US resource, and can help small companies, with small presences in other countries, to give their potential employees a snapshot of a day in the life at their organisation.
Watch the video interview or read the transcript below:

Trevor: Justin can you please introduce yourself and tell us who you work for?

Justin: I work for a company based in Austin Texas called SolarWinds and not like the name alludes, it is not a solar energy company, it is IT software, and they are one of the fasted growing IT software companies in the US today.
Trevor: What are your biggest challenges at this company?
Justin: I would say becoming an employer of choice in the areas we are going into globally, so Sydney, Singapore, Ireland, Czech Republic. We’re pretty well known here in the US, but making sure we’re an employment destination globally in those other countries; we also have a small presence when we open an office, so making sure we have an attractive culture, one that people know about and want to work at.
Trevor: What are you doing to really enhance your brand and make it well known?
Justin: Couple of things, other than the traditional, we’re working with Glassdoor. Glassdoor is not just a US resource, it is definitely a global resource, we get quite a few reviews and pings from locations outside of the US, so beside that, making sure that people that go to that website can see what a day in the life is like at SolarWinds.
We’re trying to do a lot of grassroots efforts internally in the company, trying to ensure that we encourage our current employees to be very active on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, we give them tools at their desk, so they can do that, and do that easily (by eden at testsforge). We have a widget on our website, through our ATS so they can cast out jobs on their own personal pages so they can say things like “hey if you want to work at a fabulous company like I do, take a look at this job”. We’re really trying to empower our current employees. Obviously I’m limited by my number of staff of recruiters, so I’m basically trying to leverage our employees to be brand ambassadors; employment brand ambassadors, and spread the word on what a day in the life is like at SolarWinds and how it’s such a contagious company to work for.
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