Daria Rudnik (00:02.57)
Welcome to Build By People Leaders podcast brought to you by Hydra AI, your AI-powered coach for leaders in tech. I'm your host, Daria Rudnik, and this show is for HR and L &D leaders in fast-growing companies and scale-ups, those building real impact from within. If you go to dariarudnik.com, you can download your AI-ready Teams framework, a practical guide to build team maturity in the age of AI. And today, I'm very excited about our guest. Today we have
Daniela Morain-Barr. She's the founder of Inspired Marketing, an agency that works with B2B tech brands to build strategic marketing infrastructure. She leads employer branding and recruitment marketing initiatives for companies such as Teva, HyBob, Intel, others, helping them turn talent attraction into measurable growth engine. Wow, I'm so excited to have this conversation. Daniela, thanks for joining. Thanks for being here today.
Daniela Morein Bar (00:59.99)
Hi Daria, it's so nice to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me today. I'm really excited to be here with you.
Daria Rudnik (01:06.38)
Yeah. So tell us a bit about what you do and your path to employer branding and equipment marketing.
Daniela Morein Bar (01:14.572)
So as you mentioned, I created this agency, which actually wasn't supposed to be an agency. I was an independent consultant and I just wanted a way to be creative. And slowly the agency grew and we're a team of marketers who started working with bigger companies. We started off with startups and slowly we grew as a team. Today we're 16.
marketing managers, recruitment managers, designers, developers, demand generation specialists, who all here in this very strong team. And we were working with our clients who are B2B tech. And a lot of the questions that we were getting was, can you help the HR team? It was kind of weird for us because we've been working with marketing teams.
And we understood that what we were doing for the product actually was needed for the HR divisions for their recruitment. And so that was a very interesting part where communications and social media and everything came together to actually bring us forward into place where we were talking about how do we brand the recruitment? How do we build funnels? How do we build messaging?
but no longer for the product, but for the recruitment aspect. And it became a really interesting discussion, which we were in the beginning, we were like, can we do this? And then when we started doing this, we understood, we can be actually really good because we have like the marketing basics. So that was kind of the journey into this. were, let's say, opportunistic. It wasn't something that we thought we would be doing.
But then we found that actually we had a methodology. The methodology started off with understanding the DNA of these companies. And a lot of them were telling us, we're innovative. Everybody wants to work with us because of our technology. And then when we said, okay, you know what? We don't believe you. We want to interview and check the teams in the company.
Daniela Morein Bar (03:39.292)
Then we started getting real nuggets because we were understanding that the people in the company they had their own ideas and management had a totally different idea of why people wanted to work for them and So we started a system of doing roundtables interviews Validation and it was a really interesting process
It was actually very similar to product marketing because you would do the same validation process with your end customer. And then we actually showed management what we had found. Many times they were confused, disagreed, wouldn't agree. And then there were those leadership teams where we're saying, you know, it's very nice that you've done this research, but actually we don't want to talk about
friendliness and open and then it becomes a real issue. Okay, why does it become an issue? Because from this DNA that you collect, we're supposed to build a messaging structure and we're supposed to build a brand, a new brand for culture. And if the teams see the new brand and they say this doesn't make sense, this doesn't fit, this is...
you know, not real and not authentic, then there's like a disconnect between what the recruitment marketing and the employer brand is and what it really is. And that disconnect is like a big issue which nobody wants to talk about and nobody wants to deal with. But a lot of the time you see companies changing, businesses change, the teams change, the DNA changes.
And so does the employer branding proposition. It has to change. It has to evolve. A company that was 100 people is not the same in its authenticity as a 500 people company. And it's a big challenge. And we always like the challenge. But that's kind of like the basics, the first steps of creating this brand.
Daniela Morein Bar (05:56.556)
And then afterwards we had like the planning and the strategy of how do you take that DNA and build something that is long standing. we would afterwards, we would create the activation plan, which is the basic marketing activation. How does this look on social media? What kind of campaigns will we run? What is this going to look like on an internal email? And we would roll out all of these parts.
And so you would have the beginning infrastructure and afterwards you would have the ongoing maintenance. Now what we also found was that the HR teams were missing the ongoing maintenance. So they had all the DNA, they had the infrastructure, they had the messaging, but now what? How do I run a campaign? How do I do a remarketing? How do I create a campaign for the summer recruitment? And so also that ongoing activity
That was something that HR teams were lacking. And because we were doing the ongoing marketing for the product, we knew how to supplement this. What an interesting story was actually, was when we saw that HR teams were also looking to, you know, they were turning to the marketing departments and saying, guys, can you help us with this? You know, we're not marketers. How do you want us to do this?
And the marketing teams were like, this is not our KPI. What do you want from me? know, what is this? good. You know, where this is not about more leads for the product or for sale. So how does this connect with my and that is the challenge because the marketing teams don't always feel like this is part of their, their, their KPIs and it's quite a big initiative.
Daria Rudnik (07:47.596)
Yeah, I like it. mean, in my areas of Chief People Officer, we had this marketing HR specialist, someone who was actually, it's not even the specialist, but it's more like kind of a trend of HR people going deep into marketing because we market our company to multiple audiences, to potential candidates, to...
to current employees, because it's always ongoing communication. What is it we're doing? Why the company is this great? And it's always constant reminder, like you're working with your existing customers the same way you need to work with your employees with this constant employer branding. I love that you said it, like, yeah, go ahead.
Daniela Morein Bar (08:33.548)
Let's... No, go ahead, Daria. What would you want to ask?
Daria Rudnik (08:37.614)
I love that you said that it's kind of similar to product marketing. You need to understand the DNA and you need to market what it really is rather than what you think it is. And then people come join and say, wow, that's not what you've been talking about. But I'm curious, like there are multiple audiences for employee branding. You have employees, you have candidates, but again, among candidates, also have engineers and you have marketers and you have HR people and you have customer success people.
And they want different things. so they expect different things from companies. Some people expect stability and safety. Some expect innovation. Some expect great tech stack. How do you help HR leaders figure out, okay, what are my messaging for different kind of audiences while still sticking and keeping the same core DNA?
Daniela Morein Bar (09:32.662)
think that's a really good question Daria. the way that I see it as a marketer is you have, of course you have different positions that you're looking for, which are, I want to say, similar to product features. Let's kind of make the analysis. usually a salesperson, and it becomes even more complicated because the salesperson you were looking for
in the US is not the same kind of salesperson you would be looking for in Australia. Okay, so it even gets even more complicated. usually before, and I want to call each of these a campaign. Okay, because when I go out and say I need to now recruit 10 salespeople in Australia for a brand that nobody knows, except for us, the company, really, I have to create a story. I have to create a story first around
the local region. And secondly, around the kind of person they're looking for, because the salesperson in Australia is different to the salesperson in, also the different competitors. But what we try to create is something we talk to the teams, the local teams, we interview them and we ask them, how is this different from the position in a different technology company?
How is this different? What is it that makes it so different? And it could be that the company is small, that the technology is interesting, and it wouldn't be the same for some division which was much larger. So it's really very unique and we create the job descriptions, we rewrite them, we rewrite the landing pages. All the adverts are different with a focus on that local...
region. So really it's not just like a one time thing. It has constantly creates a modification. And we also see like a lot of global companies, okay, so they were targeting the US, but now they're targeting India. It's a different language. It's a different story. And so everything changes. Even the teams that we film and we do videos on.
Daniela Morein Bar (12:00.042)
are now the team in India. They're no longer, they do not look American, they do not look, they do not seem American. They have to look like the recruitment team and the team that they're gonna be working in. So everything changes. It's very complicated, but it's just like any other product challenge. Okay, when you have an ICP that has a pain point, you write for that pain point. And similar to this, we would write for that...
for the people we're looking for. The assumption is that to find someone or a position, if we're looking for someone that's a really strong candidate, it's usually a passive searcher. They're not looking actively. And when we identify that the candidates that we're looking for are passive searchers, it also takes us to an understanding
that we have to create a funnel, similar to marketing funnel. And that funnel starts with, I mean, the typical funnel would start with employer branding, which is the awareness activity. And that awareness has to be throughout the year. It has to be all the time. It's not for a specific position. Okay? And that creates the awareness of this company's brand.
whether it's Hibob or Teva or Intel or even a smaller startup. Okay. Because you want to be known in general for what your product does and the innovation they create. Okay. And then following that when I'm recruiting for that position, then I have to create trust. So I want that passive searcher to take a look at the brand to see who's working for. Now as a company doing recruitment,
I want to dictate the narrative. I don't want someone looking for a job to come to any assumptions. And so the more information I can give a job searcher, a potential candidate in my social, in my glass door, in my company career section, the better my narrative is controlled. Okay.
Daniela Morein Bar (14:22.752)
And it's not to say that I'm not going to be authentic or that I'm... That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I want the narrative to be held by the company. Okay? So I'm showing the human stories, the people at the company, the way the officers look, the dynamics between the team, the holidays that we celebrate together. What do we eat for lunch? The more information I can give, the better the trust is created.
And then the hiring would have been the conversion in the classic in the classic funnel. But what is happening after conversion in our new 2026 era? That's not enough. The hiring is not the end all of all of this, right? After I'm hiring somebody, I need to start working on retention. And retention
is where that DNA which we talked about in the beginning Daria that has to match.
Daniela Morein Bar (15:29.834)
That's my promise. Right? You promised me a certain DNA in my EVP and that's what you delivered. And that's where the retention comes. If you gave me something else and you promised me something else, then I'm not going to be happy. Right? Just like with any issue. So that's kind of the situation with the retention. And if I'm super happy and I've recruited the right people,
Daria Rudnik (15:31.534)
Mm-hmm.
Daniela Morein Bar (15:59.798)
they are going to be my ambassadors. They're going to be the ones who bring me my second level of recruits. So when that cycle starts moving itself, that's when we see the gold. Then we know we've done something right. Because a colleague will recommend a position to a friend because they think it's a really good company that they believe in. And so that's just an explanation of like...
How do you recruit for a certain position? I'm kind of like the problem is usually occurs when management says, okay, we just need an R &D team. We just need an R &D engineer. It's not what you need, okay? It's just, it becomes critical when companies need to start developing products really fast and they can't do it.
And so this becomes a business critical issue, which has to be solved. And it's not about finding one person because that one person isn't enough to bring in the full recruitment that you need. so creating that awareness funnel that solves a lot of issues that is supposed to create the interest, the action, the match, the retention, and that cycle has to move itself into forward. But it's a very important.
business aspect. It's not a nice to have. It's not a branding activity.
Daria Rudnik (17:33.241)
Well, that's a great language you're choosing again, helping HR advocate for the need to do that because I've heard that a lot. We don't need that. We have a culture and it speaks for itself. Lots of people want to work with us because we are number one company in the market and things like that. I like that when you create this awareness, when you need to change something and when you need some people first, you can do that. You can quickly find them. You don't need to
persuade them. You don't need to tell them who you are. I remember I was working with a company and they kind of shifted from hardware engineering to software engineering. And I mean, it was impossible to find software engineers because why are you calling me your hardware company? What are doing here? So kind of building this awareness beforehand, before you need that change, building like for what you want to be is a strategic step. Yeah, absolutely.
Daniela Morein Bar (18:30.366)
Right, it's like any pipeline, right? If you have a product, you're not just going to look for one buyer. You need a pipeline. You need a few meetings. You need to know that your sales is meeting with four decision makers a week, right? Because that's the milestone of understanding, I'll get four. How many sales a month do I want? And that's the same thing with recruitment. You continuously need to know, okay, we're interviewing. We have a certain amount of impressions on our website.
And these things can be measured because you can measure how many people come to your website. You can measure how many people engage with your social. You can measure your campaigns, your submissions, and all of these indications are giving you really a health score of how healthy your employer brand is. And it's the same in all of this. And I think that you're right, Daria, when you say it's not a, you know, the...
And when the shifts come and the shifts do have to come because the business changes, it is so much easier once you have the awareness and you have a brand to make the shift.
Daria Rudnik (19:39.395)
I'm curious, like you worked with startups and scale-ups and enterprises. What's the difference in employee branding for all of those different companies?
Daniela Morein Bar (19:49.228)
I think that, so for startups, there's a lot of like opportunistic activity, meaning we can do with the minimum activity and there's not a lot of investment in the infrastructure. There's more, you know, we have this position or, but when they're doing like hyper recruitment,
then things start to shake up a little. And what we've noticed is...
It's not easy. Hyper recruitment is not an easy activity and it doesn't always work like it was planned because a lot of the people who were in the company before are being moved and they're being shifted. There's a lot of recruitment in different regions. It's a big challenge and you really need, I believe, a partner who will be flexible enough.
listening to you, changing as you go to move fast. And what we see in startups that they don't always have the infrastructure. They don't have the talent acquisition, the recruitment market. And so they really need a partner. It could be an agency like ourselves. It could be a freelancer. It could be a consultant in order to move things faster. Because what they're doing on the daily
activities, they're doing recruitment, but they're not thinking strategically long term. They're not doing planning long term. So that's what we see with the smaller startups. On the other hand, they can do a lot of exciting things. They don't have to go through legal. They can be bold. They can shake up the whole system, the whole ecosystem. And so it's really fun for us as marketeers to work with those smaller companies.
Daniela Morein Bar (21:55.306)
When it comes to enterprise, there's a lot of, let's say, different departments. There's also like different stakeholders. Sometimes we have to go through legal. Also, there are different budgets. There's the global, there's the local. There's a lot of different pieces there. However, if you're innovative enough, you can do, because I've got bigger budgets,
can do a lot of amazing stuff. Sometimes you use the personal profiles of the team. It is very different, but I think that every company has its flavor. And you just have to find the flavor that suits the company. And we've done really some fun stuff for enterprise and for startups.
We do like playlist choices and we do AI videos and all kinds of like really fun stuff. I think it's all about being creative.
Daria Rudnik (23:02.142)
I like to just talk about infrastructure. Again, when we come from moving from startup to scale up and kind of fast growing companies, we often see that like ourselves, okay, here are all of those people. What are we going to do with them? There's no structure. There is no clear process. We kind of need to build the bicycle while we're riding it. Having a partner helping you do that, being flexible enough is really helpful.
But I was wondering, with AI, you can do anything. So can you do that at home? mean, do you need an external employer branding agency? Can you do that all at home? Just ask ChatGPT, give me five messaging points for my audience.
Daniela Morein Bar (23:54.495)
Look, it all depends on the driver. What I mean to say is, and I do believe this, the output that you get from your Gemini, from your Claude or whatever, is measured by the person who receives it.
And if the person who receives it really understands the direction the car is supposed to drive, then perfect. Okay, do it yourself. However, recruitment marketing and employer branding is a very complicated delivery service, which makes it more interesting for us.
It doesn't mean that every element needs to be done by an expert. But let's say the infrastructure, the DNA interviews, everything fitting, that I think needs a really good driver. want to say a driver. Of course, afterwards, the implementation, the activation, that can be simplified if you have a really good map or a really good plan.
That can be based on what we did in the beginning. But of course we have to and we always do use AI to help us write, to help us create images, for example paid advertising campaigns. It hasn't yet been AI implemented, but we do use it for testing copy, for creating more images, for creating all different kinds of versions of
Adverts and then the best advert if we were creating I don't know 10 adverts per campaign Before I know we can create 20 So we are using the AI it's making us better professionals Again it has to be based on like the initial I don't believe the AI Will replace the creativity? That a human brings
Daniela Morein Bar (26:09.014)
But it can help, The AI can check, can edit, we should all be using that. We are using that in our agency, but it's not the end all and the be all of everything. There still needs to be a drive.
Daria Rudnik (26:24.406)
Yeah, I agree. You need an expert on the other side to actually analyze if this is good, is it worth actually using some AI slop that we often see around us online. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Daniela. It was an amazing conversation. We talked about the recruitment funnel, about building awareness and trust and then conversion and retention because without well-defined DNA,
Daniela Morein Bar (26:35.467)
Yeah.
Daria Rudnik (26:51.838)
You will not be able, you might be able to attract people, but you will not be able to retain them. They will come and see, okay, that's something, that's not what's been promised and they will leave. I'd like to ask you some kind of personal rapid fire questions. Are you ready for that? Okay, here we go. Are you a tea person or a coffee person?
Daniela Morein Bar (27:07.636)
Yes, let's go Daria.
Daniela Morein Bar (27:12.694)
Coffee, of course coffee.
Daria Rudnik (27:15.98)
Dogs or cats?
Daniela Morein Bar (27:17.932)
So hooks.
Daria Rudnik (27:20.686)
Would you rather take a message or a phone call?
Daniela Morein Bar (27:26.389)
message.
Daria Rudnik (27:27.438)
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
Daniela Morein Bar (27:33.484)
I wanted to be a doctor.
Daria Rudnik (27:38.572)
And what's one rule that you've broken, but don't regret?
Daniela Morein Bar (27:45.676)
this one I have to think about.
Wow.
Daniela Morein Bar (28:00.492)
think I break a lot of rules and prefer to say sorry. I'm breaking a lot of rules at home as well. Like I buy the wrong stuff and sometimes on purpose and I know that everyone gets upset with me.
Daria Rudnik (28:17.839)
Great. Well, thank you so much, Daniel. It was a really inspiring conversation. I'm sure it was helpful for our listeners to want to learn more about employer branding and how to build recruitment marketing. If they want to find out more about you, how people can find you and reach out.
Daniela Morein Bar (28:34.668)
Sure, first of all, you can reach out to me on my LinkedIn, danielamorrainebar, and also on our company website where we have information about recruitment marketing. We also have a podcast which I host. Our website is inspiredmarketing.co.il and we have a newsletter, so feel free to sign up and stay in touch.
Daria Rudnik (29:02.477)
Yeah, we'll have all the links to those resources and the notes to this podcast, to this episode. Anything else you want to share with the audience?
Daniela Morein Bar (29:12.884)
Yeah, I want to say that I think we talked about a lot of things Daria. I think it's really important for companies to be proactive and control the narrative. I think that's what all of this is about is I want my potential candidates to know and see as much as possible. And I don't want them to look any other place. And that's the information I'm going to give them.
And if companies don't give out that information, those potential candidates will find what they want and make their own decisions. And that's what I think that that is a really important point that a lot of lot of companies that aren't sharing are not seeing the repercussions of not sharing enough. So that is something that I really want to put out there. That's an important part.
And also I want to say that if you're just about to go into this world of marketing and how do you market your employer brand and for potential candidates, start with small steps. I think that's a really important point. Start with small steps and keep testing. Keep testing. The digital world is wonderful.
in the fact that you can put out information and see what works and then put out information and see what works and don't be afraid to fail. I think that's really important.
Daria Rudnik (30:47.673)
Thanks. It's a great message. Go out there, hold your narrative and try, do some small steps, see the results and then eventually you'll get what you want. Thank you so much, Daniel. And to everyone listening to us, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please leave us a positive review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for the next episodes. Bye.
Daniela Morein Bar (30:59.946)
Exactly.
Daniela Morein Bar (31:13.014)
Thank you, Daria. Bye, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Bye bye.