Overview
It’s been a while since our last podcast episode, but we’re back! Ep. 7 is out and this time around, we interviewed Michiel Das, employer branding expert at Employer Branding Lab and CMO at Cuideo.
Michiel shared with us incredible insights on the state of employer branding now and in the years to come, but also lots of valuable information on how marketing and HR are starting to take employer branding more seriously. Tune in for more!
What you’ll learn by listening
- Guidelines to bridging the cultural and geographical barriers in employer branding
- The state of employer branding five years from now
- HR & the transition to a more marketing-oriented approach
- Why employer branding is a grey zone for HR and recruitment
- Why both HR and recruitment should embrace employer branding
- How HR, recruitment, marketing, and employer branding are all connected
About the company
Established in 2015, Employer Branding Lab is one of the pioneers in Employer Branding and Employee Experience in Spain. It’s the first HR community in Spain and Latin-America specialised exclusively in designing, implementing and executing Employer Branding & Employee Experience strategies. The Employer Branding Lab team helps companies in developing strategies aimed at attracting and motivating talented employees, and transforming them in attractive places to work.
Podcast link – Enjoy listening to S02Ep7 of The Inside Podcast!
Podcast transcription
Georgiana: Hi, everyone! This is Georgiana from Employer Branding: The Inside Podcast. We haven’t done any new episodes in quite a while, because it’s the holidays and it’s the summer and you know what it’s like in the summer – things are a little bit lighter and slower than usual.
But this has not been in vain, because today I’m talking to someone who’s super interesting and super interested in employer branding. His name is Michiel Das, from Barcelona. Michiel, please tell me a little bit about what you do. Because you do a lot of things. You work as a marketing director, you have an employer branding project on the side, please let us know exactly what you do on a daily basis.
Michiel Das: Okay, great. Yeah. First of all, thank you, Georgiana, for having me here with you. It’s a pleasure to be able to share some of my tips and tricks in the world of employer branding. As you already mentioned, I’m originally from Belgium, but currently living in Barcelona for the last 10 years. And basically, I’m interested in different things. What I’m doing is combining three of my passions. The first one is everything that’s related to marketing.
I’m currently the CMO of a startup here in Barcelona, that is operating in Spain. But also, we’re also opening in France, so I’m doing that on a daily basis, which is my main job. But also, I like the startup scene a lot. I’ve also created two projects, one of which is Employer Branding Lab, which is a startup where we focus specifically on implementing employer branding strategies for companies, for different types of companies. So that’s something that I like doing a lot – using marketing skills to grow other businesses and my own projects. And then the third passion that I also have is being able to share everything that I’m doing or that I’m learning to share with others. I’m also teaching in a few business schools here in Barcelona, and in Spain, in general.
Georgiana: That’s super nice. Michiel. I’m sort of also someone who has converted little by little from marketing to employer branding. And as I speak to more and more people during my podcast, and not only, I discovered that employer branding is at the confluence between marketing and human resources, but also other disciplines. What would you say about employer branding? Is it more about marketing, more about human resources? Or is it a mix of both?
Michiel Das: Yeah, it’s actually a very good question. And it was also a question that I asked myself in 2012, which was when The Volkswagen Group published a job offer for a person that they were looking for, to take care of the employer branding strategy, because SEAT and the Volkswagen Group in general, since 2012, they’ve known what is going to happen in the near future, because they’re doing all their planning, right.
And they saw that a lot of people were going to retire in the next couple of years, the next five to 10 years. And at the same time, we also saw it was difficult to attract certain types of profiles and so engineers, and computer programmers, which we all have problems with, all of the companies need now to find those profiles. So in 2012, they decided that they wanted to start with an employer branding strategy. I sought a job offer, it was something completely new to me because I wasn’t very familiar with employer branding. However, I did come from a background in marketing, and the job of employer branding sounded very much like a marketing job offer actually; because they were looking for someone to position the company, for someone to do an analysis of how the company was doing, not in terms of products and services, but in terms of people, right?!
In the end, employer branding has to do a lot with marketing. And that’s also why I enrolled myself and why in the end, I also started working at SEAT as the responsible employer branding person, running with a marketing/ PR background within the HR department. So, what I found was, you know, that human resources is transitioning, is evolving more and more towards a more marketing approach, where they also need to position the company from an employer point of view, not to be able to attract new talents, but also retain and motivate employees that are currently working at the company.
What I’m seeing nowadays is that a lot of HR departments still don’t have a high level of marketing knowledge. And that’s also why employer branding works very well if you can combine it with what you were saying. Having HR, obviously, because it’s a concept that’s focused 100% on HR, but has a very good basis there of marketing, of marketing people that can also help with strategies, with analysis. But also with, you know, just getting the message out there, right.
And if you combine that – HR and marketing with the people of the communications department, or the communication responsible, you get the ideal combination right. We’re doing employer branding strategies. And when we’re implementing solutions for companies, what we normally always tend to do is have HR, obviously, in the meetings, marketing as well, but also communications, right, the communications department, because most of the time, what we’re seeing is a lot of companies are doing great stuff. They’re doing a lot of things, but they’re not communicating it towards the outside, but especially towards their own employees. They’re just not reminding employees why it’s so good to be working at the current company. So that’s why it’s obviously an HR function. But with a lot of support, I think, that is necessary from marketing, and also from communication to make it a success.
Georgiana: Absolutely. And hopefully, as time passes, it gets to become more and more independent. And it gets to become a department on its own. And it gets to attract people from various disciplines to work, you know, single-handedly, in the EB department…
Michiel Das: Because nowadays it’s still a bit of a grey zone. HR doesn’t want to be too much involved in employer branding, because they don’t have the time most of the time, but also, because sometimes they lack a bit of knowledge to do it. But marketing also cannot do it on their own because they need this. And they need to know what is happening in HR, and then the communications department as well.
They can communicate, but if they don’t have the message that they want, or need to reinforce, it’s also difficult for them. So that’s why it’s a bit of a grey zone. But in most of the companies what we’re seeing lately is that finally, also marketing, HR, and communications are sitting together, and they’re working on a strategy that makes sense for the company as a whole.
Georgiana: Exactly. It’s a bit like it used to be with digital marketing about 10-12 years ago. Michiel, the Cuideo slogan says “We take care of great people”, how does Cuideo take care of its own people?
Michiel Das: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Cuideo is the company where I’m currently working as the Director of Marketing. What we’re doing in this particular startup, is we noticed that, particularly in Spain, and in France, it’s difficult for families to find someone to take care of their parents, or of their grandparents.
A lot of families are struggling, their parents or grandparents, they need help at home. And the family cannot deal with it, because they’re also working or they also have other things to do. And they cannot help their parents or grandparents as much as they would like to. So what they’re doing is they’re looking for help, right. And what we saw is in 2015, when a lot of people were looking for help, it was quite difficult to find help, right. It’s a bit like finding a good person to do employer branding or finding a good person to do marketing. Right? You have a lot of different profiles, but you need to find the place where those people are exactly.
So what we did is we created a sort of a marketplace, where we started validating people that had the experience and the studies to really take care of older people. And we started to create a marketplace and a database with those people. What we then did is when families had specific needs, we could then go to our database and put those families in contact with the specialized people that could help them take care when they needed to be taken care of. And that’s basically what we created.
We created a marketplace, where we put families into contact with people that can help them with their needs, and basically the slogan is “we take care of great people”. It basically refers to the positioning that we want to go after. So basically, the positioning of the company is that your parents or grandparents were taking care of you when you were little or when you were growing up. So now that they need our help, we also need to take care of them, right? And we don’t want to focus it around, you know, just taking care of them. And that’s because they’re the most important people in your lives, right. So that’s why we have the slogan, and we make sure what goes for the outside also goes for the inside. Because what we’re doing is we’re following a startup approach, which is very horizontal, where everybody can also share their ideas. And we’re working in small groups. And the good thing about this company is that we’re all aligned. So everybody is going towards the same goal. And that’s what we want to stress with that specific slogan.
Georgiana: Okay, but you also have a different project, entitled The Employer Branding Lab. Who are your clients here? What type of companies do you work for predominantly?
Michiel Das: Exactly. With Cuideo, what we mentioned before is basically what I’m doing on a daily basis, very marketing focused; I also have another project startup that I launched in 2015, which is called Employer Branding Lab. It basically started as a project, just to share – the same as you’re doing on your website – to share strategies on employer branding. We started sharing and created a blog, and we published a lot of articles. But then we started receiving requests from people that we’re reading the content, who liked the content, who asked us, “Hey, would you be willing to help us out with employer branding?” And then basically, it started growing organically.
The idea was originally to just publish some content and educate people. But then we started transitioning towards also offering our services to people. And that’s also why it basically started as a side project. Now it’s growing and growing and growing. We’re now a team of five people helping companies out. And what we’re doing is – the type of companies that we’re focusing on is – we basically have three different types of companies.
We have startups on one side, so startups need to find the best possible people because in terms of startups, the success specifically for early-stage startups depends on how good your first employees are. So a lot of startups, they’re looking for very good people to lift the business to the next level. And that’s what we’re doing there; helping them to really stand out as a startup, to really focus on that messaging towards the exterior, because a lot of startups still cannot compete with multinational companies in terms of salary, or in terms of benefits.
What we do is help them really see, you know, what is your target audience and your target candidates, what are they looking for, right, and going a bit beyond the typical ping pong tables or the typical fruits that you have, or the parties that we have, because that’s not a value proposition, that’s not something that’s going to attract people and motivate them to come to work at your startup, right.
So you need to think about what your vision is, you need to have information about the founders on the website, about investors. Now, that’s going to attract people. So what we’re doing and that specific aspect is helping startups with that specific message to attract those top talents that they need at the beginning.
We’re also on the other hand working together with small, medium-sized enterprises. Small, medium-sized enterprises, they’re not looking to attract the top talents. What they’re looking for is they don’t have time to do employer branding, they know it’s important, and also know that something needs to change because people aren’t willing to come to the office any or every day of the week. So they know that something needs to change, but it’s that they just don’t have the time. They don’t have the time to do it. And what we’re doing there is we’re helping them as a partner, taking care of some of the aspects like updating the website, updating the messages, also taking care of the job adverts, right, so making sure that we’re communicating what the company wants to be positioned for.
The third focus that we have are bigger companies and multinational companies, who most of the time do have the budget but what they sometimes don’t have is a clear strategy as to where to go because they’re so big, and they’re in so many different locations, that sometimes it’s different. So what we’re doing with those multinational companies is helping them a bit more with the strategic point of view. And what we’re doing here specifically is the connection between Spain and Latin America, because, from a language point of view, they’re very similar. And it’s the same language, it’s all Spanish with some small differences, but it’s all Spanish.
But there are a lot of cultural differences, right? And when you’re a multinational company, specifically a multinational company, with offices in Spain, and in Colombia, or in Argentina, etc, etc., you also need to have that specific cultural mindset, in your strategy, to adapt assets, and to not go with a generic message that perhaps works in Spain, but isn’t going to work in Argentina, for example?
So basically a few different types of projects for different types of companies and different types of needs. And so the startups, specifically interested in attracting those top talents; small and medium-sized companies, helping them out a bit more with the practical side of the employer branding strategies, and then multinational companies, with a more strategic point of view.
Georgiana: And now a bit of a different question. You are someone who has studied abroad quite a lot. Okay. And you speak many languages. So this is really interesting for me, I’m really eager to know, would you say employer branding varies culturally? And if so, would you say that Spanish employees, for example, prefer different strategies that may be the Western European employees, companies don’t really feel so strongly about? What’s your take on this?
Michiel Das: Yeah, it’s actually a very good question. Because more and more, what’s happening is we were born in one country, then we moved to another country. And so we have a lot of examples, now we ourselves are two examples of that specific situation. But also, a lot of friends. We’re in a similar situation. So that makes it even more challenging. You have the cultural aspect of each of the countries, but then you also have the cultural aspects of each of those people living in each of these countries, who at the same time also come from different cultures or from different countries.
It’s going to be very interesting in the near future because what I’m thinking is that, or what we’re seeing as well, is that globalization is going to keep increasing because specifically in Europe, it’s easy to move to another country. And so especially nowadays, with the possibility to work from home, where we also, even though we’re not going to be physically in another country, we’re going to have to collaborate with people from other countries or other cultures. So that’s actually a very good question. And the answer, as always, in employer branding is a bit difficult.
And it’s going to differ a bit with each specific company, but just to give you some insights now, what we’re seeing is, with the project that we’ve been doing in Spain and Latin America, and also in Belgium, we see that most of the time, in most of the countries, people tend to prioritize the same things. So nowadays, with the pandemic, the flexibility of working from home, salary is also obviously important. And also having a good company culture. So we know that those are, in most of the countries, the most important factors. However, there’s going to be differences sometimes in countries in terms of you know, what’s going to be the top one, top two or top three, but we know that those four, most of the time, are the most important factors that people take into account specifically nowadays, with the corona pandemic.
But then going a bit more into detail in all of the countries. What we’re seeing, for instance, in Spain is that Spain previously had a work culture where you would be in the office from eight in the morning till eight in the afternoon. You’d have like a two-hour lunch break at midday, and then you’d go back to the office. So very long days that the large companies are doing; so in Spain, for instance, that aspect, the work-life balance is getting more and more traction, right. People are prioritising working for companies that have more work-life balance, as being more and more important. On the contrary, salary has always been a difficult aspect in Spain, because salaries if you compare it to Germany, perhaps or to Belgium, or to the Netherlands, are lower in general. So that’s also going to be something that when we compare perhaps people from Belgium or the Netherlands with people from Spain, the salary in Spain would be a bit lower on the scale of importance, right, because salaries, in general, are a bit lower.
So you have these geographical differences now in terms of what people are looking for. But then we also have, and this is also something very interesting what we’re seeing – differences in terms of messages. And also in terms of, you know, ways to talk to people. So, giving some very specific examples. In Spain, when you meet someone, it’s very common not at the time with the corona pandemic, but before the corona pandemic, if it was in an informal situation, it was normal to give that person two kisses, right, which is something that perhaps in Belgium is very strange; you would give a hand or you would create some distance. And also, this is something that we’re also seeing when we’re doing employer branding strategies.
In terms of the pictures – what we’re seeing is in Spain, in the pictures, you know, they need to be close, people need to be touching, slightly touching each other. In Belgium, for instance, where we did an A B test with the pictures that we’re using in Spain, so people gave each other a hug, which we would then place on, on the company website. In Belgium, for instance, those pictures didn’t work that well, and Belgian people prefer, you know, two people sitting together, but you know, not giving themselves a hug or something like that. Right.
So we’re seeing those differences as well. Even on a picture level. So answering your question, yeah, when you combine all of those factors, you have geographical differences, but then you also have cultural differences. But then, you know, you’re also adding foreign people to that equation. I mean, yeah, there are a lot of different cultural assumptions. Yeah, like a lot of different cultures that you’re mixing.
So yeah, a difficult question to really answer with a clear conclusion, but what we’re seeing is, you know, and that’s also what we’re doing, we’re doing A B testing. And so what we’re doing is we have the websites, you have the company website, you have the job offers there, and you have the description. What we’re doing is people have entered a website, 50% of the people see a picture, 50% of the people see another picture, right? And the same thing with the content as well. We’re doing tests with writing more in an informal way, which in Spain tends to work a bit better. But then, you know, if we do the same thing in Belgium or the Netherlands, we see that it converts less, so fewer people are reading the entire job adverts.
So, yeah, those are the main conclusions that we have right now. What we’re now doing as well is going a step further and really detecting if that’s also the same thing for different people that are foreigners in that specific country. But that’s something that we’re still investigating, and it’s something that’s going to take some time. I don’t know what your experience is with that, because you’re also living in another country if you also started to adopt some of the practices.
Georgiana: So to me, it’s a bit vice versa. You know, I come from a Latin culture. And I moved to Germany, which is the opposite of that, in a way. But then Berlin is different. It’s a mix of many, many nationalities. So I don’t feel such a huge difference compared to where I come from. Whereas for you, I think, from Belgium to Spain, and then for Spain, going back to Belgium, that must be quite a cultural difference. Not to say a shock.
Michiel Das: Yeah, no, it was very, very strange, but in a good way; it’s a totally different experience that you have here, where you know, you’re, calling your boss or your teachers YOU as well. Which was also something very strange. And so there’s a lot of distance that we’re creating in other cultures, perhaps that doesn’t exist here in Spain. If a Spanish company is going to attract people from other countries, that’s also something that they need to take into account. No, you can’t go so directly with your messages, because you know, when you’re doing or trying to attract people from other countries that might come as a shock.
Georgiana: But Michiel, where do you think employer branding is going to be five years from now?
Michiel Das: There’s a very good question. I’ve also been thinking about it. First, if we compare before and after the Corona pandemic. Most of the companies, you know, knew about the concept of working from home already, but you know, they were still waiting a bit now, seeing where it was going. They were obviously reading what other companies were doing, but there were still, you know, like, “we’ll do it when it’s needed.” And this is something that we particularly saw while working from home.
A lot of our clients saw the advantages, because of, you know, the work-life balance that we mentioned before, which in Spain, at that moment, was still very, very difficult to obtain, because you had to be in the office from eight to eight. So they saw advantages there. But most of the companies wouldn’t want to enter the topic in too much detail. Because we’re still waiting a bit, and seeing if they could try to avoid the whole flexibility of working from home, work-life balance, matter.
So then Corona happens. And then all of a sudden, everybody had to start working from home. That made things a bit more complicated for those companies now, because all of a sudden, some of those companies that perhaps didn’t trust employees, and that’s why they wanted to have them in the office all the time; you know, those employees started working from home and with good results, and at the same time, also companies that already offered work from home options had the chance to increase their work from home possibilities and to even further motivate people.
And what we’re seeing now is that most of the companies have seen the benefits of working from home, they’re now working on hybrid solutions, where some of the days you’ll be at the office. But some days, you also get home. Now I’ve heard about this very small portion of the companies, they’ve already communicated to their staff that in September, everybody has to be at the office again, 100% of the time. What we’re seeing now is that those companies are starting to notice how people are leaving. And we’ve been in contact with some of them. And they don’t know what’s happening. All of a sudden they’re discovering employer branding, and they’re discovering that something exists, like, you know, the value proposition, how to investigate what people really want, how to take care of your employee experience.
I think Corona basically has accelerated everything. And that’s, you know, where employer branding would be in five years in a normal situation, that now has accelerated, and that happens perhaps next year already, or within two years now. Which is basically companies starting to really understand that, in order to attract and retain and motivate people, they need to understand what people want. And they also need to be able to trust people and to also evolve a bit more towards a situation where people will start working more for projects where it might be possible that you might work a bit more during some specific periods. But then in other periods, you might have a bit more spare time.
What we’re seeing now is a lot of people are changing jobs as well. This is something that you’ve probably noticed as well. So my LinkedIn every time I open it, it’s full of people changing jobs, because people also saw that the pandemic really was like a stress test to see the company that has been telling me for years that they take care of me. Now, how did they react during the crisis situation? Did they really take care of me or not? Or do I really want to continue with this company? Or do I want to evolve?
A lot of companies are now discovering, you know, that that is happening, and they’re now getting more and more interested in employer branding. I think that the future of employer branding looks very bright, and more and more people are willing to investigate what it’s all about, and how you can implement it. And yeah, for people like us. Because we’ve been talking about employer branding for quite a while now. And sometimes specifically at the beginning, it was a bit like, you know, yeah, of course, you know, the typical marketing, blah, blah, blah. But I think now more and more people in companies are also discovering the advantages that it really has.
Georgiana: Absolutely. And since we are approaching the end of our podcast, I’m really curious. Was there ever in your professional career an instance where your employer branding efforts, your strategies made a significant difference in the lives of the employees or in the working of the company?
Michiel Das: Yeah, that’s a very good one. The first example that came to mind, is in Seat when we started the employer branding projects that we did for the Volkswagen Group, which we detected around 2014 or less, which was when the startup boom started here in Barcelona. Around 2014, more or less, more and more programmers were leaving the company to join startups, which was sad.
So the Volkswagen Group is located on the outskirts of Barcelona. It’s a 20-minute bus ride towards the office. And in 2014, working from home still wasn’t a possibility, because, you know, Corona still hasn’t happened and everything like that. We started seeing that more and more programmers and engineers wanted to be in the city center, where they were five minutes from, you know, from a startup, where they would work at. So we started investigating and the main reason was based on salary. So we saw that startups started to pay a higher salaries. And some companies now that eagerly wanted to attract those specific profiles, started to pay a higher salary than the salary that was being paid at that moment in SEAT. So in the Volkswagen Group, what we did was a communication campaign and a marketing campaign as well to inform employees about all the benefits apart from the salary that they had for working at SEAT.
So basically with your annual survey, in Spain, we have an annual document where you have your salary, and you also have it on a monthly basis. Back in the days, you received it by post, right. So you received like a card in the mail, with your salary, with the typical letter of your salary. So what we did is a communication campaign were on the second page, we added the second page to the salary, right on the second page, we added everything that the company spends on education, on fruit on, you know, on the buses, because, you know, you have like free buses that go to the office, we don’t need to go by car.
Or you had a child’s health care program as well, like leasing discounts. We started just making a list of all of those additional topics that employees also received when working for the company. So what people received was, their salary, so what they would have every month in their bank account, but also the additional non-monetary advantages that you have for working at the company.
And we saw that helped to decrease the rate of employees that went to another company because what we’re also seeing is that a lot of times we’re working at a company, and the first six months, it’s like the honeymoon phase, we’re very excited and everything is great now, but then after six months, you know, that’s free fruit or that’s, you know, free bus ride or, you know, that extra health care insurance that you have, you start seeing it as something normal, and you start forgetting that that’s also part of your salary package.
So what we did at that moment was, you know, really focus, put the focus on that as well. So that, you know, instead of your salary, you also had 20% more in terms of, you know, additional benefits that we would give and that had a very good impact. And that’s actually something that we’re implementing when we’re seeing this with other clients. So when we’re seeing that a lot of people are starting to leave, we always just obviously start to analyze what is happening and what’s the problem, but also, we also always recommend doing that. Apart from the salary, add just an additional paper, an additional page, or put it online or whatever, or where you just mention all the benefits that people have for working with your company, and that way you’re reinforcing your positioning continuously.
Georgiana: I think sometimes people forget or sometimes they simply just don’t acknowledge it, they don’t know about the extra money that the company is spending on their behalf.
Michiel Das: Exactly. That’s also a very good one because we also did a questionnaire afterward and a lot of people were unaware, you like you’re mentioning, completely unaware that the company was paying for all the passes that you know, the insurance, or the leasing discount. We also have a company restaurant, and food would cost you one euro and it was like a complete menu. So the company was paying nine euros per employee on a daily basis for the 14,000 employees that were working at the company. Just so everybody can have a free meal, basically a free meal, right? So putting all that in value rather than adding that too, you know, your salary as an additional benefit.
Georgiana: And you basically only highlight what was already happening. Genius, very nice, very, very nice strategy. Okay, cool. So now the question that I ask all of my guests, I ask everyone to provide us with a resource that can be useful for us, whether it’s a book or a movie, or an article, and it doesn’t really have to be employer branding related, just something that we can all look at after we end this discussion.
Michiel Das: I was thinking about it because there are a lot of good books on employer branding and a lot of good resources. They’re starting to be more and more publications on employer branding, and etc, etc. But I think there’s one book that was also mentioned, or it’s being mentioned, as well, in a lot of employer branding discussions. It’s a book by Simon Sinek called “Start with Why”, which is a book about what is your value proposition not only from a company point of view but also from a personal point of view.
So what am I doing now, what do I want to achieve as a person, as a company, but also from an employer branding point of view? Because most of the time, what we’re doing is, we’re thinking about employer branding, and that strategy is attracting, motivating, no, and we start getting ideas and we start implementing stuff. But you know, we need to start with, why are we doing this? What do we want to achieve? How do you want to be perceived, and the book of Simon Sinek is a very interesting book, to just help with that, not to just understand, you know, why are we doing this?
And how can we be better at what we’re doing, and that’s also what we tried to do as well. And so instead of starting with the nice website, or with the onboarding package that we sent to employees, start with why. I mean, that’s also great now, those are great employer branding actions. But you know, if they’re not aligned within a general strategy, and within you know, your reasoning, why you’re doing this, you’re not going to have your effect. No, you’re not going to really reinforce your positioning.
That’s the starting point. And that’s when companies reach out to us and they have like a very specific request, which is, you know, we want to be more, we want to have more awareness in job fairs, or we want to have a better website. Now, what we’re doing is asking, why, why do you want to do this? And you know, if the answer is, you know because we’ve seen that our competitors are doing it, because, you know, our main competitor has added a video to the website. And we also want to do that now. We start at the beginning now, and we start with “Why are we doing this?” How are people perceiving you from the inside? What are they seeing from the outside? What are your KPIs? What do you really want to track and when we have all that, we then go to the beautiful website, or to the additional video, etc, etc. And that’s a good book.
And, well, we were talking before about having kids now and I was also watching kids’ movies, lately. And there’s one movie which, which actually is very interesting from an employer branding point of view is called Bee Movie. But really, the beginning of the movie has a lot to do with employer branding. To very, very briefly summarise it, it’s a colony of bees. There’s the main character, Barry. And you know what the bees are doing from the moment they’re born until they die, you know, they do exactly the same job. So he starts questioning that now.
And he starts questioning, you know, why? Why are we doing the same job and why, you know, should we do the same job for the rest of our lives? Which is a bit, you know, what the company cultures were before the nineties, so in previous years, you started working at the same company for the rest of your life. So he started questioning this, and you know, then the movie changed the subject a bit. But the first part is very interesting because it’s still sometimes a synonym to what some CEOs or some HR managers are still viewing as the main goal – not to have people working in the same company for 20-25 years.
Georgiana: That’s a very good example of a movie and I think I’m gonna watch it again with my daughter. Okay, thank you so much, Michiel, for talking to me today. This was really nice and really useful and informative. And I wish you good luck with everything you’re doing.
German 
English