Why you must love your leavers!

Back in June I did a presentation at an Employer Branding event here in Stockholm. The title of my talk was “Why you must love your leavers!” (Thanks to Katrina Collier for coming up with the title!). The talk was about the alumni interviews I do over at Bonnier Broadcasting Product & Developments Department’s own blog. I really enjoyed giving the talk and thought it was worthy of it’s own blog post. But if you rather see my presentation than read the written version you can find the presentation here.

The beginning

I started at Bonnier Broadcasting back in march 2017 and they were just about to launch their new career site. I wish I had started a bit earlier so that I could have had more input to it but unfortunately I didn’t so it was launched as is. It had all the basics of a career site, such as the open positions, a bit about the company culture, information about the benefits and testimonals from current employees. Seeing as the previous career site was non-existant this was a BIG improvement. But I had one issue; it was too generic. I want to attract and recruit developers!

The site did well in explaining the company as a whole but not much to attract those most difficult to get to; developers. So I took matters into my own hands.

The blog

The Product & Development department already had blog but it had been laying dormant for a while, not much updating going on and the whole look of it was outdated. I made use of my very old HTML skills and my new found WordPress skills and created a new layout for the blog alongside with a new landing page (Feel free to check out the result here).

I wanted to contet of the blog, or “mini career site” to be updated too and decided to included the following:

• Blog posts – both techincal and general
• Job postings (however, not the focal point)
• Interviews with
  • new hires
  • team managers
  • alumni (An alumni in this case is someone who used to work for us but has moved on to new challenges.)

The technical blog post are written by our developers designers etc. The general posts, perhaps about a meetup, can be written by me or members from the Product & Development teams. I’m the one in charge of the interviews.

The alumni interviews

About 6 months after the person has left the company I e-mail them to ask if they’d be willing to do the interview for our blog. I will then e-mail them the questions and harass them until I get the answers (this bit can take a while 😛 ).

I really enjoy the various answers I get and I especially like to read their answer to the question “What’s your favourite memory from your time with us?”. As we are a media company with a news studio in the centre of the building (where Sweden’s biggets morning show, “Nyhetsmorgon”, is produced) they have some quite funny memories to share.

You can find all interviews, new hires, managers and almuni, here. However, they are all in Swedish so either you have to learn Swedish or use some crappy translation site 🙂

The Purpose

So what’s the purpose of posting these interviews on our blog?
Well, there are a few reasons.

• Transparency
  We are not hiding the fact that people leave
• Honesty
  They no longer work for us and therefore don’t HAVE to say good things about us
• Credability
  You’ll be more inclined to believe our other claims
• Career Development
  ”Come work for us and you will gain the knowledge and experience to help you reach your career goals”

Out of all the various post on our blog the almuni-interviews are the ones to generate most traffic. They’re also my favourite type of posts. I believe they give good insight into us as a company, what it’s like working for us and what type of experience you’ll gain. Better than the “traditional” testimonials.

What’s next?

So far these tyoe of interviews has been limited to the tech department and our blog but come this autumn I will be taking the concept to our main career site interviewing people from all departments. So I am really looking forward to going back to work next week after a few weeks of summer holidays!

And there’s still more to do with the blog and various content to attract those we want so I will be keeping busy 🙂

The Presentation

Alright then. I might as well include the recorded presentation as well. Enjoy!