Chad & Cheese sit down with Celinda Appleby, Visa’s global director of talent attraction, for an in-depth discussion on navigating 2025’s talent acquisition hurdles—think economic uncertainty and a turbulent job market. Celinda reveals how Visa is refreshing its employer brand to align with evolving corporate strategies through EVP 2.0, powered by research and a dedicated center of excellence. 🚀 Shaker Green Room
She dives into creative wins like Olympics-inspired campaigns and a reimagined career site strategy to boost candidate engagement. Plus, a sneak peek at what’s next: targeted recruitment tools, a brand advocacy culture, and finalizing EVP 2.0. Don’t miss out—connect with Celinda on LinkedIn and explore exciting job openings at Visa! 🌐
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Who are you and why are you here?
Celinda Appleby: Oh, so my name is Celinda Appleby. I am the Global Director of Talent Attraction and Recently Acquired Employer Brand. I'm with Visa. I've been with Visa about six years. I'm here because my lovely friends at Shaker invited me to sit with you today. And I'm excited to be here.
Chad: Sweet. So as we look forward to Q4 and 2025, what advice would you have for your peers in that time?
Celinda Appleby: I think this is a time where we have to be okay with the uncertainty. I like to roll my eyes. The economy, there's an election cycle, the job market's a mess. Our industry's continuously been facing a lot of issues. We're always first to go and last to fix everything. And I think that in efforts to stay on top, like at the top of your game, we have to embody more empathy. It's something I'm personally working on. And resilience. Because I do think it's going to be harder in '25, especially in corporate America. I think our budgets are getting cut, I think our headcount's getting cut. And so you have to really fight a little harder than you did in like 2019, for example.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: How would you describe Visa's employment brand?
Celinda Appleby: Visa's employment brand is currently under a refresh. We just hired about 12 months ago a brand new CEO. We just launched a brand new corporate strategy, a corporate brand. I don't know if you all watch the Olympics or not. Visa was front and center and you saw a lot of that powerful moments of taking small steps to further your life. You know, Visa wants to be a part of that from the consumer journey. So super blessed to be working with our Chief Marketing Officer on building that brand. The extension, the employer brand is an extension of the consumer brand. This is the first time we've ever been able to do this. And so we're in the beginning stages of that work.
Joel: So share some of the sausage making with us. What questions? What's the brainstorming look like behind closed doors?
Chad: What's happening behind closed doors?
Joel: What does the opening discussions look like?
Celinda Appleby: So the opening discussions are, so we refreshed the EVP in 2122. And so for me, it was a lot of understanding what has happened in your eyes that we're no longer, the employee base is not resonating with the 2122. I love to call it EVP 1.0. And so ours would be 2.0 because I do think it's a living, breathing document, changing. So a lot of the past six months, all I've been doing is building a center of excellence where we brought in people from people marketing, comms and other departments around the world to hear from them. Like, let's look at the current EVP. What do you love? What do you hate? What should be changed? And then taking that to our Steerco, which is made of a lot of SVP, it's very big people. And having them opinionate back on that. And we weren't seeing, in all honesty, this happens everywhere. We weren't seeing eye to eye with some of the changes or recommendations. And so we're currently in the research stage and that basically is three prongs. We're doing internal and external research and then we're going to conduct focus groups after that. I'm a firm believer that I can't tell anyone that we need to change our tagline or our pillars or our comm strategy without showing the data.
Chad: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: And that all stems from your employees. So if we're going to tell employee stories later, we should bring the employee stories in now.
Chad: Know them now. Yes. Yes. So let's take a look at, look backward in 2024. What was the biggest surprise for you over the last year or so?
Celinda Appleby: Could it be work related? Like tactical?
Chad: Oh yeah.
Celinda Appleby: Okay. So we launched Avature about 18 months ago. First CRM that Visa has ever had. And with the Olympics, I created an email marketing campaign. The first we'd ever ran, ironically, the first one.
Chad: Wow.
Celinda Appleby: Outside of LinkedIn, LinkedIn used to be...
Joel: Well, email is a new technology. So it makes sense.
Celinda Appleby: That's why I want to say, it's honestly selling it wasn't hard because people were like, this is so safe. And they were like, but what's really going to come of it? So we messaged 18,000 people. I received 5,500 applications and no offers yet because our time is a little bit longer of a tail.
Chad: Sure.
Celinda Appleby: But our open ratio was 71% across the board. That means people are... So my takeaway from that is we're not messaging our candidates enough. We're not messaging our applicants enough. They want to hear from Visa, they want to learn more about Visa. So for one of my OKRs for FY25 is to continue, build a whole email marketing strategy so we're not doing one a year.
Joel: Talk about the importance of social media, what your strategy is around it and maybe tactically some things that you're doing that are working.
Celinda Appleby: You know, I love social media. I find that there is a little bit of a fatigue in our employees wanting to be brand ambassadors. And what I mean by that is they'll get in front of a camera and talk about what they love. They might even take a picture of your brand. But when it comes to tweeting or Facebooking or whatever people are doing, even myself, I sort of like one more post, right?
Chad: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: And so to turn a culture of brand advocacy, we have to make it very easy for people and they have to get something out of it because no one wants to message their mom and dad anymore. Because that's who I think that's my followers. About their company brand. Right? One of... So I don't have many wins on social media because we're still building that out. But I want to say something that really blew me out of the water this year, we implemented Google Search Engine Marketing when a search engine optimization and an integrated strategy. At the time, when we started this in January, Google was not even the top 25 source of what do you call that? Attribution.
Chad: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: And now paid search is number four and Google Search is number one. We got about 10,000 applications in a three-month period and about 30 hires. 30 hires, and keep in mind we only did this for high key market areas and technology products. So difficult roles.
Joel: Talk about the organic part. Are these job postings, are they specific articles about getting a job or targeted positions for you?
Celinda Appleby: So we launched a brand new career site in December of '24. And for my whole tenure that I'd been there, we'd had a desperate career site. One page, 300 across 300 countries. So a total of 300 pages that I manage. And there was no content. It was really just like search for a job.
Joel: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: 24, January 24th, we launched a new page. If you go now we have about 12 pages. We have teams. It's very robust. There's still work to be done in my opinion. But what we did with search engine, we've never had that done before, obviously with 300 pages, you know.
Chad: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: So we focus on key market areas, Poland, India, the US, the UK and then using all of those keywords. We drive people to the life that pages, where the teams pages and then job search. Because Google gives you a lot of credit if you do job searches at the top of the nav.
Chad: Yeah. So in 2025, looking forward, what's your biggest priority?
Celinda Appleby: Launching this EVP. We should be done with the research stage in November. We are promising to have a messaging done, a toolkit if you will, by January 2025. And then we move into the fun stuff of really creating a brand components, banners, photos, images, videos.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: We talked about Avature. I'm sure you're looking at a lot of different solutions for the upcoming year. What are some that you're excited about or some that you are using now that are working or you're looking forward to using?
Celinda Appleby: Visa is very risk averse when it comes to tools and you should be excited about that because we obviously protect your money. So our current CTO is sort of in the lean stages of not really doing too much, but we currently work with Appcast for all of our media and creative services. Looking to expand our creative capabilities a little bit in the year of '25. Continue working with Avature. Visa is also moving into ATS implementation. We're going with Workday. Who is our HRIS.
Chad: Yeah.
Celinda Appleby: We realize there's a lot of icks in the room for that. Not here but overall. And then higher score I think is the layer, the intelligence layer on top. For me, I'm so obsessed that there's so many recruitment marketing tools. In fact, I said to Joe earlier, I'm like, talk to me like I'm in kindergarten. What are the differences? Do we need all of them? Who's a competitor? And so I'd like some more advocacy around that because I feel like some amazing companies have popped up, but I just don't really know what everyone, how they intersect with each other.
Chad: Yeah. Keep listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast as we talk about that.
Celinda Appleby: Oh, 100%.
Chad: But thank you for taking the time and coming and sitting down with us. If somebody wants to connect with you or maybe even, I don't know, take a look at jobs at Visa. Where would you send them?
Celinda Appleby: My LinkedIn is best. I'm really boring on Twitter, but Celinda Appleby on LinkedIn. Our visa careers is visa.com/careers. Super easy. We have about 1200 open roles now across the globe, so we are definitely hiring.
Chad: Excellent.
Joel: Thanks for hanging out with us.
Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No. You hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.
Comments