Marketing Insights from Glassdoor’s Julie Wolfe Podcast and Transcript

Shane Hunt:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this edition of the Marketing Insights Podcast. I'm Shane Hunt from Cameron University. I am thrilled to be joined today by my friend and colleague Julie Wolfe. Julie serves as director of global revenue enablement at Glassdoor.

Julie, welcome to the show.

Julie Wolfe:

Oh, Shane, thank you so much. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here.

Shane Hunt:

Well, Julie, I'm thrilled to have you here, thrilled to have your executive perspective as part of our new textbook. I wanted to start by asking this. A lot of people who listen to this are going to be very familiar with Glassdoor. They go out there and they see the information about potential employers or where they're thinking about working. Can you just start by talking a little bit about how marketing impacts what you all do at Glassdoor?

Julie Wolfe:

I would love to, Shane. That is such a good question. The first way to answer that is we are in a very specific part of marketing, which is recruitment marketing. Marketing for us, the product that we sell is how do you share your employer brand with the world? How do you make people say, "Hey, I know Coca-Cola the brand, the product brand, but is it like to go work at Coca-Cola? Is this a good company to work for?" We help companies tell their authentic brand story through our products. For us, marketing is that's what we do.

At the same time, we also have to market ourselves to customers. Why do you want to come buy a product from Glassdoor? What is our value proposition? Part of good marketing for us being able to say to customers, "What is the value proposition that you're going to get when you partner with Glassdoor? What are you going to get that's uniquely offered by Glassdoor with our products?" Our product suites, I actually run a new hire orientation where I share with our new hires what do we sell in our go-to-market world and why would people want to buy it? It's really about being able to share that authentic brand story. Marketing is woven into so much of what we do at Glassdoor.

Shane Hunt:

We love to say that everyone is a marketer, Julie, and we truly believe that. Well, let me as this then. Glassdoor is an amazing company. When we think about developing marketing plans, and maybe even more specifically within that, how data-driven decision making fits into those marketing plans, can you talk a little bit about that? I think that's something that I think sometimes there's a disconnect between saying, "Okay, we have a marketing plan and we have these tools." But maybe just how those data-driven decision tools, how those can actually help in a marketing plan and developing marketing strategy?

Julie Wolfe:

I love this. I love this question, Shane. I love also the way you asked the question around data-driven decision making, but my understanding is that chapter two that everyone's currently engaged with is around marketing analytics. I think that can be a scary term if this is your first time through. Stepping back and saying, hey, it's just about making decisions based on the data that you have at hand. That's the analytics part of it.

Metrics that we look at. ROI is a metric that we talk about all the time at Glassdoor. We think about what is the ROI from ... Quite frankly, we think about it in marketing and we also think about it in terms of everything that we do in the business. What is the return on the investment of our time here? But it's a great lens that we use to look at for data-driven decision making. What is the return on this investment for us?

I think we also think about things like we are looking at our conversion rates. Are we converting people based on our campaigns? Are we driving new customer relationships? We use a lot of different tools. This is not the space that I work in directly, but I work with our product marketing team, and then I work with our consumer marketing team. But I work most closely with our product marketing team because we're trying to make sure that our products are really helping customers get their ROI.

Shane Hunt:

No, I think that's so important too, Julie, in a world that's so rapidly changing. From an employer marketing standpoint, from a branding standpoint, it feels like to me, this kind of data-driven decision making is more critical than ever because I think we have to make much timelier decisions than certainly when I started my career.

Julie Wolfe:

Oh, yeah. When I started my career, I'm going to date myself a bit here, there was no social media. A marketing campaign, when I started marketing, was very different than what it is today. Social media has changed so much of the landscape. Absolutely, you want to be able to make decisions much, much faster because everything is moving more quickly. Information is moving more quickly. Decision making is happening more quickly. Absolutely.

Shane Hunt:

No, I think having those tools and utilizing them, again, as part of developing that marketing plan and strategy are so critical.

Julie, one of the things you and I have talked about that I think is, again, more important today than ever before is helping people develop their personal brand. In a world where it is getting more and more competitive, and in many ways, more and more difficult to stand out and be, and a word you used earlier that I love in marketing, authentic.

Julie Wolfe:

Yeah.

Shane Hunt:

What advice would you have for people who are listening to this that are looking to develop or enhance their personal brand?

Julie Wolfe:

Okay, I love this question, Shane, because in a tech company, what we're talking about right now is AI. AI has leveled the playing field in a lot of ways because right now, it's easier to write good copy. It's a lot easier to do things now with AI as a teammate, or a tool, or an intern. But AI is not an authentic human being.

One of the things that I think is so important about a personal brand is first defining what it is. Figuring out who you are, and recognizing then what attributes help support that. For me, my personal brand is I am an authentic servant-style leader. You can see that on my LinkedIn profile. I am branding myself as that, and then I need to show up as that.

What that can look like, and advice I would have for students, is first figure out what you want your personal brand to be, and then show up authentically as that. Ask, "Is what I'm doing reflective of my actual personal brand?" There's tool out there that can help with this. AI can actually help you define your brand. You can prompt it and say, "What is my personal brand based on these things?" But at the end of the day, people buy from people still.

Shane Hunt:

Oh, yeah.

Julie Wolfe:

We like relationships. One of the values at Glassdoor, one of our company values is good people. That is, again, the stronger your personal brand and the more you're showing up as your authentic self, the more you are fitting into that good people mold. Here at Glassdoor, but also in the world of work.

Shane Hunt:

Julie, I love that answer and I think that's such great advice for everyone whose listening. I think too, Julie, it stands out more today than at any time in my career. I think people are searching for those authentic things that connect them, and I think really in a lot of ways, drive revenue and drive repeat customers, and business growth as you go forward.

Julie Wolfe:

I agree completely. We have noticed ... One of the things that we see trending, we look for keywords that trend on our website at Glassdoor. We look for what we can understand about the job seeker and the job market. A trending word for the last year was actually anxiety. That was concerning because we realized there's a lot of anxiety in the world right now, there's a lot of stress in the world.

One of the things, I know you and I have talked about this before, is finding ways that you can find your purpose and your passion at work. Because your anxiety about work maybe is less if you're doing something you're truly passionate about, and that when your work aligns with your values, you have less anxiety about work. When you work for an organization where you're like, "Hey, I'm doing good," or, "I believe in what we're doing," or, "I don't not believe in what we're doing," I think that disconnect, that cognitive dissonance is where a lot of anxiety comes in for people.

Not to just give a pitch for Glassdoor, but one of the beauties of our website is when you go to glassdoor.com, you can see if you would fit into an organization's culture, its values, its missions. Companies put their why work with us on their page. You can say, "Yeah, I could see myself working at this company."

Shane Hunt:

Well, Julie, I love that. I always say this. As someone who is the proud father of a recent college graduate and the proud father of another student who's majoring in marketing currently in college, I think knowing your personal brand and really defining that also helps them find organizations where that personal brand matches with where they're going to show up for work every day. At the core of that professional happiness I think is that, Julie.

Julie Wolfe:

I could not agree more. As I've shared with you, I have a kid out of college and a kid in college as well. My son, he had two paths, and he chose the path that was more aligned with his passion because he is a music education major planning to be a band director. He was debating between engineering and the computer science space. He has an interest in both, but he's like, "I want to be more authentic and true to my passion," so that's the direction that he went in. I think the more you can lean into those things, hopefully the happier you will be in your life.

Shane Hunt:

I think the better marketer you'll be, and the brighter future that you have ahead. Julie, thank you so much for joining us today on the Marketing Insights Podcast.

Julie Wolfe:

Shane, thank you so much for having me.

Shane Hunt:

Thank you all for joining us. I hope everyone has a great day. We look forward to visiting again on the Marketing Insights Podcast. Have a great afternoon.