The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition cuts through the noise in the crowded world of recruitment marketing, employer branding, workforce intelligence, and AI.
Hosted by Graham Thornton, President of Consulting & Growth at Talivity, this podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with industry founders, practitioners, and the occasional contrarian who's actually doing the work – not just selling you on it.
We're not here to hype the next big thing. We're here to help you separate signal from noise, understand what's actually working (and what's just well-marketed), and make smarter, data-backed decisions about your talent strategy.
You'll hear from TA leaders navigating real hiring challenges, founders building solutions worth paying attention to, and experts who see around corners before the rest of us catch up.
Whether you're navigating the AI arms race, trying to figure out your tech stack, or just trying to hire better people faster – this is the podcast for people who care more about ROI than buzzwords.
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
#56: Employer Branding From the Top Down – How To Move Beyond Tactics and Leverage Your Employer Brand as a Strategic Asset
This week we welcome Heather Tenuto to the podcast. Before taking on her current role as CEO of The Muse Group (owners of The Muse and Fairygodboss), Heather spent her early career as a public school teacher before pivoting to a range of sales enablement and revenue growth roles, including VP of Channels at ShoreTel, VP of Sales (SMB Services) at Office Depot, and Chief Revenue Officer of Zift Solutions.
Topics include: employer brand as a strategy vs. tactic, employer brand ambassadors, how to identify and activate employer brand ambassadors, the importance of incorporating regular employee feedback into employer brand management, DEI beyond gender and ethnic identity, and the value and power of introverts to an organization.
Heather Tenuto
CEO, The Muse Group
Welcome to the changing state of talent acquisition, where your hosts, graham Thornton and Martin Kred, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestateio. And now on to this week's episode.
Speaker 2:Alright, and we are back with another episode of the changing state of talent acquisition podcast, Extremely excited for our next guest, Heather Tanuto. Ceo of the Muse Group. Heather, great to have you here today. Let's start with an easy question what led you to your current role as the CEO of the Muse and how do you typically spend your days?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be on the show. So I've been the CEO of the Muse Group, which is we have two platforms the Muse and Fairy Godbaugh. So I've been CEO since September and it's been a great journey so far.
Speaker 3:I started my career in tech sales mostly because I was an English major and was looking for something to do after graduating with that, so I started in sales. I took a brief pause in my career and I taught high school which is a fun story. We can talk a little bit about that later and then I came back from my educational career, still loving sales, still loving coaching and teaching. I started a sales enablement company that was very focused on helping companies that were in that 10 to 15 million dollar range but stuck there, and so that's where I focused for the rest of my career helping companies break through that hurdle and having good success, good exits. So I did that until my last role, which is similar. I gave a chief revenue officer at a company called ZIF Solutions and spent four and a half years there, and we had a great exit recently. And then I got contacted by the founder of the Muse and the story ended well. We had great synergy, and here I am.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Well, I you know Marty knows this but my parents are both public school teachers. I have a very special place in my heart for anyone that is willing to enter the educational space, so a huge thank you for your service there Awesome.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I'm going to dive into something that I know is near and dear to Marty's heart.
Speaker 2:You spent a lot of time, or we spent a lot of time talking about your EVP, employer branding, and you know, one of the things that kind of stood out to us is one of your release and LinkedIn posts. You know, you kind of posed an interesting question about you know whether an organization is using their EVP as you know quote unquote a tactic or a strategy. So now I'm wondering, can you, you know, share a little bit more about the difference and you know, maybe, what is? What are some of the key differences between you know, using your EVP as a strategy versus a tactic? And well, how can organizations become a little bit more strategic and leveraging their employer brand?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an important question and it's something I really didn't start thinking about until I took this role, which is my first time as a CEO.
Speaker 3:So we see a lot of companies decide, hey, it'll be easier to find the talent we need if we have a better employer brand. So you know, let's go get one. And that's really a hard thing to do from scratch, especially when it's not coming from the top. So, as a CEO, I see how important it is that being a great employer and understanding the employer you have to be in order to attract the talent you want. It's a strategic issue and so if it starts at the top, if it's an agenda item in every leadership meeting, it becomes much easier for your talent team just to portray what already exists versus making something up which then just becomes a tactic. So what companies who want to be successful in this have to do is make it an initiative that runs through the company but absolutely starts at the top, and that's something I took for granted until I got higher up in the leadership ranks and realized how important it is.
Speaker 4:Wow, I love this. Yeah Well, this is, you know, speaking to my heart, as Graham said. You know, I think a lot of organizations, as you mentioned, treat brand as something that they create, and we always encourage our clients to think about it more, as something that exists, whether or not you're paying attention to it or not, and I think one of the upshots of that is it's not something that you can suddenly start paying attention to and expect to serve your organization overnight. You know the strong, clear brands of the world, just say brands more generally.
Speaker 2:Are brands that?
Speaker 4:have been talking about in serious, thoughtful ways for a long time and they are topics of conversation at the boardroom on a regular basis. It's a bit like joining a good salesperson and having spent no time networking and then suddenly deciding that you want to build a pipeline and helping that somewhere you're going to get a lot of people coming in. You know, if you really want a strong employer brand, you really have to put them work in, and it's a long-term process, not something you can just kind of spin up. Is that a fair? Would you ever be pushed back to that? I mean, is that a fair way of capturing what you mean by sure?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I like the analogy to sales because you know that's how I grew up. You also mentioned the board. Right and like you have so many companies today with boards that are very operational, integral to their operations, and it has to be something that everyone agrees that is worth investing in and that there's alignment about what the brand should be across the board and the leadership team. Or, you know, maybe it starts with like what kind of talent we want to attract and who do we have to be able to do that. Very important for sure, and I think that company is that invest there, whether it's with dollars or, you know, leadership meeting time are going to do better at this and their talent teams are going to do better at this, for sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I do think it kind of comes down to a word that's unfortunately overused and I think people kind of glaze over when they hear it. But it is an important concept. This idea of authenticity and this idea of who are we as an organization, how do we treat our employees. That's something that takes a lot of thought and care to actually execute in a strategic way. And you do see organizations who are like pardon my French, but oh shit, we need to hire a bunch of people. What messages can we put out there? What bait can we put out there in the world that will attract a bunch of fish to this hook that we have and that may actually work in the short term? You know, you may actually put a message out there that succeeds in attracting and filling the seats that you need to fill in the short term, but of course, that's a very limited approach because people will eventually discover what it's really like to work for your organization and ultimately that will undermine your larger strategic goals as an organization.
Speaker 3:Well, that's right and it connects to what you said before. Like, your brand is out there, whether you've helped curate it or not, and so if you're putting something out there that's not aligned with what's already out there or that's going to be out there soon, if you've hired without that authenticity, it's going to fall apart pretty quickly.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is a natural segue to another topic and this is this idea of employer brand ambassadors. You know, I think a lot of our audience knows I grew up in the consumer brand space and in consumer branding we talk about brand ambassadors and these are connected to people that are actually hired to represent your brand. You know, if you think about a trade show, the hire attractive looking people that somehow embody what the brand images and they are out there to promote and represent the brand.
Speaker 4:So I think it's easy analogy to make. I understand the employer brand ambassador might be. I think one of the big differences that comes to mind is that employer brand ambassadors are full time employees. They don't have, you know, unlike the consumer brand ambassadors, who's that may actually be their full time job. These are people actually have to do work for the organization outside of representing the organization as an employer. So with that in mind, I'm just wondering if you could share a little bit about how you think of the role of employer brand ambassadors. How do organizations go about selecting the right folks to be those? And you know how do you balance the roles of an employer brand ambassador with the day job. You know that keeps the lights on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that's a great question. I think there's three parts that. The first is we already talked about.
Speaker 3:Like your, your EVP has to be a strategy, not a tactic, if you're going to take this step and recruit people to be an ambassador, because they will still see through that pretty quickly. The second part is when you're choosing people or they're choosing themselves to fill that role. I think there has to be an understanding and a belief that making sure the right people are coming into the organization is going to make it better for everybody, and so people who believe that are going to have a lot more energy for what's required in this role, but like to do it because, hey, it's going to be somebody maybe giving me some free time to do it, or I've been asked to do this and maybe it's a way to get to the next level of my career. I think we've got to convince people and this should be easy that everyone benefits when we're bringing in right, fit talent to the organization and it's going to you know, it's going to raise the tides of all the votes.
Speaker 3:So that's number two, and I think that that's about great messaging, great coaching, but also finding people who are very invested in the success of the business. And then as far as, like you know, obviously people have jobs, I think we just have to do a good space, a good job of creating space with employees that can be ambassadors, to make sure we're not overwhelming them, because you certainly don't want an overwhelmed ambassador out there talking about how great work, life balance is at the company. So doing something to create space for that person and making it part of their role description and how their, how their measured, how their performance is measured, I think is the only fair way to do it. I hope that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that does. So you know I'm curious, heather, so can we talk? Maybe give us some examples of you know an employer ambassador Program in practice? Right, so I can't sounds like you know find people there. You know passionate about organizations. Obviously you know certain one, certainly one of the key lovers. So you know I'm curious like for an organization that you know, maybe a bit or small, that you know is thinking through. You know ways that they can help, you know, better utilize your use, their employers to sort of represent. You know body, their brand. You know publicly, whether it's across social channels. You know, at these events, you know what does that look like in practice? You know, are you seeing that? No employers you know often don't know where to start. Or you know, talk a little bit. You know more about what this concept of you know and a brand ambassador looks like in the day to day, maybe even that you know at the news sure.
Speaker 3:No, that makes the yeah for sure. So I think where it starts is the change your thinking about. Like this ambassador is not just this person that is going to go out and say great things about your company. I think that person needs to be connected to the evolution of the company and the brand of the company. So think of it as a two way street.
Speaker 3:Maybe there is A group together that's helping the leadership team make decisions about how we evolve the brand or how we evolve Initiatives at the company to be able to create the environment that is going to get us the talent we want, right? So a feedback group or focus group based on a few, on a few initiatives are important. I think the n I is a good example. If you have a d n I focus group at your company, we want that group to give us feedback on how it's going and things we can do to create a better environment and also help us Find more people to come into the organization by by being an ambassador for for a brand. So it's not just the outward part, it's having a role in how we make decisions and how we evolve as a workplace community. So I think that's the place to start. Who's that group? Let's start working on the things that will advance us internally, and then step two is how to? How does this group help us spread the message? Once we've got those initiatives in place?
Speaker 4:I really love that idea.
Speaker 4:You know, often when we're helping clients think through or define for lack of a better term there Evp's, you know we make a point at the very beginning of the project of establishing a core group that doesn't include just people in hr or t?
Speaker 4:A but includes people in marketing and from all aspects of the organization. Of course the reason we do that is because I'm then at the end of the project we have a core group that feels like they co created what you know the public face of our employer brand is going to be. But I think what you're suggesting is almost taking that idea a step further, because oftentimes those people are executives, their senior level people in the organization, with good reason, you know. I think that's make sense to have those folks in the room, but often at the end of the project then we're like okay, here's what our evp is. Now we need some testimonial videos that we gotta find people to actually bring this to life. Those folks can actually be part of the process. You know I'm not saying they'll be in every weekly meeting about the evp, but I think the sooner you can involve these people that were later be identified as employer brand ambassadors, the better.
Speaker 3:I don't know if you have any thoughts about that I mean, I think that's a, I think you said it, that's exactly right. What part can they play in creating the evp, or helping at least guide what it is today, before we ask them to go out and proselytize on our behalf? Yeah, sure, like, if you think about, you know it's an election year, right, like you, you've gotta believe in your candidate and feel like you know your issues are being represented before you're gonna start hanging posters and knocking on doors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know if we're gonna go into politics today, but you need some more time if you do yeah, yeah, no, I do like I'm thinking like, alright, so you know, in relation to our projects, marty, you know, trying to look at this from a consumer lens, right, so I, you know an apple brand and that you know a consumer brand ambassador, people that just love apple, you know, line up outside of the store like I'm sure I'm some levels. You know, what we're trying to do in our brand projects is no, in that first phase of four, take a like what do people feel? Like your brand exists, regardless of whether you're doing brand studies, right, so it's. You know you're going to that In our standpoint of four step process. Like who are the people that are, you know, most representative of?
Speaker 2:You know some of the supporting pillars of ep and how can we remember, you know, three months into a project to go back to jim, bob, or you know, mary, kate and pepper them? You know some of the questions that support a word and innovative organization. And here's why I'm like, hey, we support work life balance, but like, in what particular ways? And so, in a way, like I think I'm gonna bring a bastard, just making sure that you have a clean connection between some of the data that you're getting in your ep projects, in your candidate surveys, and you're choosing how to sort of direct some of the employer stories in a way that you know resonates with your talent. Is that a bad analogy, marty? How did I kind of Well.
Speaker 4:I think that's right. You know, I actually where I started this conversation about consumer brand ambassadors. I actually feel like that almost cheapens the image of an employer brand ambassador because you know you can find, post things on Craigslist, frankly, for people to be quote, unquote consumer brand ambassadors that hand out free energy drinks at, you know, sporting events and stuff like that. It's a job that pays $10 an hour.
Speaker 4:The person may not care at all about the brand they're not necessarily the folks that are camping outside the Apple store who are truly passionate about it. You know, in the case of employer, brand ambassadors.
Speaker 3:There's something a lot more authentic and genuine going on at least I would hope so no, I don't think that's necessarily a bad analogy. The other thing I would say just for our audiences.
Speaker 4:You know, I think an important component when you're thinking about your developing an EVP and I know Heather just touched on this is, yeah, you do need to bring in the people who might be the employer brand ambassadors early in the process if you can, and that can be as simple as you know, when you're developing an EVP or at least when we do it we come up with a few different options and then we put them in front of employees and say what do you think about this? Does this accurately capture why you like to work for our organization? And you can quickly then identify the folks who say yes, that doesn't capture it and this is why I love working for you. And then later you have a pool of people who you can say well, we've got 100 people who said the winning EVP that we chose to take forward to the public market represents how they feel about us.
Speaker 4:And they wrote eloquently in the text box about how great we are. You can speak to the core ideas or the pillars that are under scrutiny of our employer brand, and so by doing that, this is not hard, it's just simply survey and at the end, of the survey asking him would you be willing to speak publicly about us as an employer? That's one simple way, I think, of identifying employer brand ambassadors in an early stage in the process.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we get companies that come to us that haven't spent time on their EVP and we help them through the process that you just described. Like it's not in depth, that's not really what we do, it's what you guys do, but we have a way to get them to start thinking about it, and it starts with getting feedback from their teams. Like that's where we feel like our role is in it, to make sure we're supporting authenticity, and so especially companies in the mid market may have not spent quite enough time here. We try to help them get started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is great. Well, I want to pivot a little bit because it's a topic that I was very interesting to cover. So we talk a lot about DEI, heather and obviously the muse, very God boss, the whole group there has very unique demographics across your properties. But another topic you've kind of been vocal about is they need to expand DEI efforts to consider other forms of diversity beyond gender and ethnic identity. So one point that you made was talking about, I believe, the ability to, or the missed opportunity just to, empower introverts right, who contribute maybe some less obvious ways. So I'm curious can you maybe share a little bit more about your interest in this topic specifically?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure, and this goes back to my teacher days. So I think, like I taught in a hard to staff high school I had maybe five classes a day with 37 students in each class and as a teacher like you get presented with this group of personalities and you can't just be like, well, there's a bunch of kids that don't like to raise their hands, so I'm just going to ignore them, right, like you and you've all had teachers like this like they change the desk around, they they call on people who don't talk as much, they create exercises so that everyone can get involved. They put you in a group with. You know in groups that to support your learning style. And so, as a teacher and getting my degree in education and being in the classroom, I learned all these strategies about how to make sure the classroom we were hearing all the voices in the classroom and then also making sure different learning styles were all able to advance. And that was the job and it was hard and it was wonderful all at the same time. And then you take a step into corporate America and it's like none of that happens anymore, right? It's just like here's the job, no matter who you are, this is what we expect and go, and we know that most people aren't going to identify as someone who may need a little bit more help because they're shy or or they you know, they just live in it and and we don't hear from them very often.
Speaker 3:I had a CEO back when I worked at M5 Networks. His name is Dan Hoffman, who was a master at this. Like he felt like the quietest people have the best ideas because they're listening to everybody and they're formulating while the rest of us are like screaming all over each other. And they have the best ideas and if you don't create an environment where you're going to get the best out of them, like you're leaving innovation on the table. And so he was a master at that. And actually, after we sold that company, he often started a technology company that actually facilitates getting everyone to participate equally in a meeting, which is really cool, and we can talk about another time. Anyway, with my experience with all this, I just realized that not everyone is in tune, as I am because of my experiences, and I think leaders just don't know what they're missing if they're not getting the best out of the people who might not be the first to speak up.
Speaker 4:Wow, I really love this. As an introvert myself, I can. You know. I just have, frankly, not great memories of primary school. It's just like the first day of school, any kind of new beginning. Oh, we have to do these icebreaker activities and yeah, I mean, I think the point is well taken that we have a school system maybe that's changing slowly in a workplace default that is built around the needs of extroverts, and even to the extent that we may be now considering that there are introverts in the room that have different needs, it almost can come across as well.
Speaker 4:How do we coax this introvert into acting like an extrovert, you know, rather than actually just allowing them to be who they are, which is someone who may be very quiet?
Speaker 4:You know, growing up, what you just said resonates really strongly with me, because I was not someone who raised my hand often, but at some point I don't remember what grade this was Someone said you know, marty doesn't speak much, but you know, when he does, the whole room gets quiet and everyone listens because it's probably something important. You know, and I think there's a lot of that that happens in the workplace, and so I think it's just really encouraging to hear someone thinking about diversity outside of the usual ways that we think about it, which are, of course, very important, but this is, I think, a long overlooked way. Last thing I'll mention and you may have already read this book, heather, but there's a really great book, I think it's called the Power of Introverts or something like that, or the Secret Power of Introverts. I think the author's name is Susan King which makes a real case for, you know, cultivating this type of, let's say, neurological diversity in schools and workplaces.
Speaker 3:I have not read the book, but I've definitely heard of that book. My he'll kill me for saying it my husband I'm an extrovert, my husband's an introvert and what you said resonates like. When he says something, it's powerful. He's also spending a lot of time listening right and is formulating a really good opinion based on what he hears. I think extroverts tend to be not as good at listening, and so there's really untapped potential in teams when there's both introverts and extroverts at the table, and it's the job of the leader to make sure they're getting those employees what they need and being able to extract what they think, because we all want to innovate and introverts tend to have the best ideas, in my opinion.
Speaker 4:Hear that, Graham.
Speaker 2:I do, and as a leader I don't know. Marty, I gotta tell you like I think part of the reason we have this podcast is because everyone wants to get you to speak a little bit more and like in a nice comfortable environment. So I hear that it's on on.
Speaker 2:Well, I do want to get back to topics that are certainly interesting to, I think, the broader market here. Heather, and I think you've kind of took a new role at CEO at the Muse and a bit of a new industry. So I'm curious, hey, I'd love to know how it's going. But I'm also interested for our audience has anything? What surprised you most about being CEO at the Muse, maybe? Or what surprised you most about the town acquisition industry, if anything at all?
Speaker 3:I think the thing this is gonna sound like you know I'm just putting on happy years here but the thing that surprised me the most is how welcoming everybody was. I suspected there would be a lot of raised eyebrows, of a CEO coming into the Muse without a lot of experience in town and acquisition. But everyone, including yourselves when I met you, were very helpful in pointing me in the right direction and helping me understand the industry and that was great and it made it a lot easier for me to get up to speed. Like becoming a CEO in a new industry first time CEO in a new industry it could be overwhelming, especially you know the first few months and there's lots of people willing to help but there's also lots of people with needs in the organization and you know the first few months. You just like write everything down like, okay, I wanna help that person and fix that and fix this.
Speaker 3:And the thing I learned and the advice I'd give for someone else, in my opinion is to really get to quickly, like what are the three to five most important things for this business right now? And I wanna hear what the other things are and put them on the list that we'll get to eventually. But I really need to move the needle in these three to five different places because this is gonna have the most impact on the organization and it may not get everyone's needs met right away, but it'll help us take the biggest step and then we can work. We can work down the list. It's hard to see those three to five sometimes but you've got to force yourself back to it and you know, stick to your guns on that and eventually it all starts to come together. But in general my team at the Muse and Very God Boss and the the town acquisition community has been very supportive and I'm very thankful to have to be in this industry and to get the support I'm getting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I, we're super happy that you joined us and, you know, won a heavy on earlier and I know that there's just so much to learn, you know, coming into a brand new industry.
Speaker 2:I kind of echo one thing that you said, heather, and that's, you know, I think the TA space is. I think we should at least be a very welcoming industry, like the thing that we are. But I also think, like there's, you know, there's a lot of people that are holding the megaphone that you know have had the same opinions for 20 years and my opinion is like having new, fresh perspectives from someone like you who comes into a new industry, you know, without sort of you know, so the preconceived notions of how TA and recruiting has worked for the last 20, 30 years is just super interesting, right and like we've talked a lot about programmatic advertising, how job boards work, and you know, to me I think we've got a great opportunity to take a lot of steps forward in in town, because I actually as a whole and you know, super thrilled with having new voices coming in from TA, that maybe you're just a little bit different than what we've been listening to for a couple decades. There's no question there. I'm just excited.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you and thanks for for letting me let me become part of the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Well, I have one last question. It is, I think, the easiest one, and that is you know, where can people find more about you and find you online?
Speaker 3:Sure, so I'm on LinkedIn. So Heather Tanuto and also Heathertanuto at TheMusecom. I'd love to hear from everybody and again, thanks everyone for all the support.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. We'll link everything in the show notes and I can say, heather, you're very active with some great content that you share on LinkedIn, so I'll encourage everyone to definitely give Heather a follow and, yeah, really appreciate you joining us. Excited to see you know how things progress with TheMuse. Great thanks. So much, guys. Alright, thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestateio or shoot us a note on all the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week.