How to Brand a Culture
Welcome to the seventh episode of #peekintoprocess. In this episode, Erin meets with Mikal Harden of Juno Search Partners to discuss how a company’s culture is rooted in its core values, which play a huge role in branding. Mikal gives insight into how her company’s culture has evolved and strengthened over 10 years.
Or simply read the highlights below.
Erin
Thanks for joining us. So this is actually, believe it or not, the seventh episode of Peek Into Process. Yes, Jones & Co’s look behind the scenes at branding. So, although I don't talk to all people in branding I want to always bring the conversation back to how to use branding in your business. And today we're going to talk about branding a company culture. And so rather than me get into it, because it's not my expertise, it's yours - why don't you give us a little bit of an intro on who you are first and who Juno Search Partners is.
Mikal
So, Mikal Harden with Juno Search Partners, we just celebrated 10 years of Juno in 2020, which was meant to be with a monster party and live band, but instead it was a virtual zoom party. I was still able to drink too much though, I managed to do that.
We're a search and staffing firm headquartered in Philadelphia, and in 2020 we recently also launched Juno Capital, so we're making angel investments in other startups.
Erin
Okay. So, you've been around for 10 years. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what the culture was like when you first started Juno Search Partners.
Mikal
When we first started, I mean we really started the business on a shoestring budget. Myself, my business partner - home offices. Very scrappy, but we had a lot of intent, I would say, out of the gate. Our industry, agency search and staffing, can sometimes have a little bit of a bad reputation of being fee chasers, and concentrating more on numbers versus the people behind those numbers.
Blogging, calls, getting around gatekeepers, using some unsavory business tactics to sort of get to the numbers. And we were very thoughtful about wanting to disrupt that mentality. Although this should not be a disruptive idea, our disruptive idea was to care more about the relationships - and we never talked about the numbers. We never talked about how many job orders, how many connects, how many calls, how many touches; but instead, we really talked about our clients and what they do and why what they do is important and meaningful.
We got a full understanding of the positions, versus just scanning a position description and then hitting the market. Really understanding all the nuances of a position, why it's a critical position within a company and then again, that same approach on the candidate side.
Understanding our candidates, valuing our candidates as human beings who are in a job search and not just the short-sighted “What can this person do for me today?” but we always knew from day one, we knew that we were in the game to play long ball.
Erin
Do you think the culture then, organically created itself with those core values in mind? How much of it picked up your personality in the process?
Mikal
I think, for sure. This is how we train people, and of course, we've had hires along the way who didn't embrace that mentality and they are not ever long-term Juno people. Interesting, you talk about my personality and my business partner, Vicki, we have very different personalities, very different approaches to the business but, that thread is our commonality - the integrity, the relationship driven piece. There's a lot of different ways to be successful in doing this, but that is just something that neither one of us is ever willing to compromise on and that certainly does, of course, trickle down.
Erin
I feel like you're a people expert, and “people” is becoming a trend. I work with a lot of clients and when it comes down to their HR departments they're starting to become Chief of People or People Officers. What does that mean to the outside world or what does that mean to people that aren't in your space?
Mikal
So it's funny because we actually really saw that transition happen over the last decade of us running Juno. And so, out of the gate, we really focused on Human Resources. So, one of the reasons (and there were several) but one of the reasons was that as an agency recruiter with kind of an old school mentality, HR was sometimes the person who you perceived as the person who could get in the way of things. Like if they got HR involved they're gonna screw up this whole process, or HR didn't didn't do this, HR was supposed to do that. And we really saw an opportunity to make HR our friend, number one, and we really saw the value in what was trending in human resources.
So not just “so and so down the hall” who does benefits, and who you go to if you're in trouble about doing something wrong. But really being a valued strategic partner. And so I think we started to see the trend of the title shift. Not HR Business Partner or not Director of HR but People in Culture and, you know, I think that just does speak to the business community, recognizing what we've recognized all along - which is your people are your highest priority, your chief commodity, and if you don't have really talented employees that are tethered and bought into the culture, into the organization, then what do you have?
Erin
Let's talk about the concept of company culture. As a branding person, a lot of the work I do can be kind of squishy, and we have ways of defining it and frameworks and things like that. But culture it's a really hard one to put your finger on or to be able to synthesize exactly what it is to pass it along to new employees. How do you look at that, how do you tackle that, how do you get a pulse on a company's culture?
Mikal
I think that there can be a lot of talking in the talk, but not walking the walk, certainly in Philadelphia. I've been in Philadelphia for 15-ish years now and it is a surprisingly small city and by that I mean you can really quickly develop a reputation for having a toxic culture. So, despite what your website might say, people talk and people know. I find that can probably even be true nationally, there are lots of websites and everybody's connected to one social media handle or another. So I think that the culture thing, it can be tricky and can get away from you really quickly.
Erin
What would be your recommendation or guidance to people that are seeking a job to try to figure out a culture. Is there a way that you tell them - obviously in going to a website it says something, but do you ever have them ask specific questions in interviews or do you look to the Facebook pages or the Instagrams of these companies? How do they brand it?
Mikal
Collecting all the data points, right? LinkedIn, as you can imagine, is a tool we use quite a bit. You know whenever you see people who have really good tenure at an organization right, there's not a lot of turnover. When you can see that folks have had progression in their career and they've gotten promotions and they've gotten opportunities. It seems as though nowadays everybody makes some sort of DEI (diversity, equity, & inclusion) statement, but are they living that? You can sort of discover that really quickly as well which is something that we personally worked on very, very diligently 2020 and 2021 and I think you can tell in the interview process too.
Erin
How about, because we're talking about branding, can you explain to me what is talent branding?
Mikal
You and I just talked about this, oftentimes you can go to some beautiful website, and it seems as though they've put a lot of time and energy into the product or whatever the company does. Then you go to a careers page, and it's like a portal to a list of jobs. To me, talent branding is really just putting out to the world what your core values are, what your culture is, what your benefits are - really providing a deeper lens into position versus just a sort of cookie cutter job description. And really, putting out the content that sort of tethers back to your people and culture.
Erin
Let's dig into some of those Juno Search Partner’s culture. What is Juno's company song?
Mikal
So, for some reason we always burst into - remember that last scene of Karate Kid when they start singing You're The Best Around? That is our song. I mean, we've won a few awards so anytime we go to an award show, and they ask you to submit your song for when you’re called -it's always You're The Best Around.
Erin
When it comes to your core values, you talked about relationships, of course, but I would imagine from looking at your website, knowing you, knowing some of the people that you work with - how do you incorporate a sense of playfulness or a sense of fun into company culture in a way that doesn't feel fake or doesn't feel forced, or does it just happen?
Mikal
Well, I think some of it just happened, and, by the way, we weren't always perfect at everything. I’ll tackle the first part, the fun part. We are big celebrators, and we always have been - every milestone, birthday, baby shower, engagement, bridal. And then, internally - it's not just the really big stuff, but we celebrate like people's first placements, and every holiday we have big potluck lunches and we do lots of happy hours together and we do axe throwing tournaments, sand volleyball leagues and softball leagues.
And I think some of that has always happened organically because...I don't know what the magic has been, but we've just hired these really brilliant, fun, interesting people that really work hard and are just a delight every day. And so we have really deep friendships and relationships outside of the office, I mean this is a group of people that really cares about each other on a really human level.
I can't say for sure how that happened, other than we've hired really well, but we didn't always get it perfect, of course. And I think one of the lessons that we learned over the years is a bad hire can do a lot of damage and unfortunately that's happened a time or two, and can really quickly take a lovely culture and make it toxic. I think one of the things that we maybe weren't always good at was allowing that to go on for a little too long and I think that not only do you potentially kind of lose the respect of the team, right, like why is this person still here? But can also do a lot of damage. So, we've gotten better at sniffing that out sooner, but we have struggled with that in the past.
Erin
Is there anything you want to tell me about that’s happening at Juno that's new. I know you've talked about Juno Capital - anything else you want to share? And then, when you add something new, where's the continuity with the culture of the brand into a new division?
Mikal
2020 was a very interesting year for probably everybody, I don't think we're unique in that, but the business was definitely devastated by the impact of COVID in March and April. As you can imagine, we do search and staffing, so it was pretty much like we drove right into a brick wall and morale was very low - we didn't have activity. We didn't know what the hell was happening - we literally thought we would go home for two weeks, the curve would flatten (whatever the hell that meant), and we would be back.
Upon reflection, it was just such an interesting reset for us in a lot of ways. There were things that we talked about as part of our belief system and core values and so on and so forth and we weren't always living up to them in a manner that we could have or should have. I think 2020 for us, and for a lot of different companies I talked to, has been a really interesting sort of inflection point and turning point. As an example, we've had two employees who we love and who have worked with us for years who moved out of the area.
Previously I think I would have been really weary of how that might work out, and it's working out beautifully! We've discovered we've been really successful taking this company virtual. And while we do miss a lot of the togetherness that I described earlier, we're always going to now have virtual employees. And I think we've opened up the geography in terms of how we can grow Juno, and how we can have employees in different cities. The puzzle pieces that we had been trying to figure out suddenly became very clear.
Two years ago we started a project staffing division or many people would call it RPO, which is like going in on a retainer basis, and signing on for a lengthy contract and helping companies figure out whatever staffing problems they might have. Maybe it's high volume or maybe it's that they just got funding and they need to add a bunch of people and that division grew exponentially in 2020. So we certainly found out that our diversification helped us quite a bit in weathering the storm. That is a division, while not exactly new, has been really growing and building.
Then, of course, the Juno Capital side, which we're just very proud of because we think that it's a great way to grow a business, great supportive community, Philadelphia is a place where you will find a CEO at the bar with a beer talking about the Eagles. Although not 100% philanthropic, we really wanted to give back and that was a really fun way to do that.
Erin
You’re just branding the culture as you do it. So I know I've taken some of your time and I really appreciate it, but I want it before we kind of sign off. I don't know if any of the people out there want to ask you a question or have anything to say.
Mikal
For some reason, I have no idea, this is not by design but many of my best friends in life are creative directors and branding strategy people. So I get a lot of good free advice and we end up talking about all things strategy and marketing.
Erin
It’s probably because you like conceptual-thinkers, maybe. We’re way more fun at a cocktail party too, let’s be honest.