The Optus Talent Story – developing an EVP that reaches diverse Talent

About Optus:

Established in 1992, Optus is an Australian leader in integrated telecommunications, delivering cutting-edge communication, information technology and entertainment services. Our vision is to be a world-class, mobile-led digital service provider.

OUR PROBLEM

From the outside in there was the misconception that Optus just sells phones. Telecommunications remains a core part of our business, but Optus has been evolving for some time now and has really expanded to become an entertainment and technology company.  Our success is heavily dependent upon our ability to attract diverse talent. Our transformation has expanded the talent pool that we want to engage with.

We knew Optus had a strong consumer brand that connected with our customers, but when we surveyed our employees to define our Employment Value Proposition we realised our employer brand approach needed to change. People are attracted to who you are and what you do however, the employment decision is highly driven by a company’s EVP.

Recognising this opportunity, we set out on a journey to develop an employer brand that would provide greater insight and proof points to help people make their decision to work for Optus.

OUR INITIATIVE

We decided the best way to amplify our employer brand was through our people, so we’ve told their stories through blogs, digital campaigns and advertising to give new candidates insight into what a career at Optus might look like.

This project gave us the chance to really understand our people and not just the role they perform. Through face-to-face workshops with existing employees we got an insight into our employees as whole people, their passions and drivers, what they wanted to be when they were kids, where their career journey started, where they are now and where they might want to be in the future.

OUR PROCESS

We wanted to build an employer brand that attracts the best people, and keeps them – making them loyal advocates and champions for Optus.

After mapping out the plan, we broke the project down to four phases.

1. Phase 1 – Research
2. Phase 2 – Creative development
3. Phase 3 – Consultation
4. Phase 4 – Rollout

Phase 1 – Research

The biggest challenge with developing an employer brand is ensuring it is authentic and resonates with your employees.  It is essential to have alignment on what you say you are and what you do –  employer brand and employment experience. Research included interviewing a diverse range of employees from different backgrounds, experience, tenure, skills, location, ages, ethnicities, and much more. During these sessions, we gathered insights to really break down how our people described life at Optus and what it’s really like to work here.

Phase 2 – Creative Development

During the research phase, we spotted three consistent trends in the feedback from our employees in regard to the overall employee experience.

• Future focused – Because we’re moving away from being a traditional telco, it means we’re innovators and have a strong focus on the future.
• Collaboration – We foster a culture that embraces new ideas where we love to see our people grow and thrive.
• Growth – Employees felt there was continuous opportunities at Optus.

Pulling the research together, we then developed a proposition called ‘Tomorrow is ours to create’.

Our proposition is all about progression, change, and a keen focus on the future through exciting opportunities with Optus.

Phase 3 – Consultation

Once we had the overall concept, ‘Tomorrow is ours to create’, and a handful of creatives to bring it to life, we conducted national focus groups to sense check with our people. We also tested our ideas with new employees (from outside the original research group) and external candidates in the market to ensure it resonated. From there, we compiled the feedback, made necessary tweaks and began the final phase – rollout.

Phase 4 – Rollout

From photoshoots to copywriting, we did a full creative rollout to ensure our new employer brand delivered across the key touchpoints.

We particularly focused on attraction and the channels candidates research when they’re considering a new opportunity with a new company.  As such, a refresh of our careers page was a major focus of this project.

We also created a whole suite of content involving the career stories of our people. Mitesh’s story, below, is one of them. Mitesh’s first job was on the checkout at a supermarket. He started at Optus 10 years ago as a Commercial Analyst. Ten years and seven roles later, he’s on the other side of the desk as Director of Commercial and Digital Transformation.

SEE MITESH’S STORY

The idea of the creative execution is that on the left side, it was fine, but nothing ground breaking. When he moved to Optus, his career became exciting, bright, and future focused. Hence the messaging, from small change to big business.

Our journey has only really just begun and we have a lot more planned, but so far, we’ve rolled out our employer brand across the Optus website and LinkedIn, and we’ve changed the look and feel of our job adverts, messaging and creative look.

An important element of reinvigorating our employer brand was ensuring that it aligned with the brand that our customers see, so the language and design elements all have the same Optus look and feel.

Over the past 12 months we’ve made a concerted effort to encourage our people to be brand advocates, and share their experiences about life at Optus on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.

OUR RESULTS

It’s a little early for deep analytics, however I can say that since we launched in March we’ve seen a significant increase in engagement on LinkedIn which has led to an increase in visitors to our careers pages. We’re really happy that one of the key aims of the rebranding, which was to attract new candidates to Optus, seems to be working. We’ve also seen an increase in engagement by existing employees across our internal social networking channels.

OUR %$#@ UP

Realise the brand power of your people early.  Our initial approach to encouraging our employees to amplify their employee experience stories (Life at Optus) through channels such as LinkedIn was a little overly cautious. We have this well on track now!

WRAP UP

Now that we have momentum, we need to continue to enhance and refine our approach. We’ve started to look at ways we can embed our employer brand across the full candidate and employee life cycle at Optus. We also plan to expand our employee brand ambassador program and continue to create rich content to attract, commit and engage talent. We’ll be looking at targeting campaigns to attract emerging and future capabilities, and exploring new channels to ensure our engagement strategy reaches our desired audiences.

Do you have a Talent story to share? Drop us a note at info@atcevents.com.au with a brief summary and we’ll get back to you!