Gemma Goode | making work meaningful stories.
Gemma Goode, UK, global strategy lead — Talent Marketing
My daughters are seven and four, and during a recent conversation they started telling me what they want to be when they grow up. My eldest hopes to be a fashion designer, living in New York City and, thanks to a “fab-u-lous” series of Strictly Come Dancing (a popular TV show in the UK), my youngest wants to be a ballroom dancer. Neither announcement was particularly surprising as my girls have shown a flair for creativity and a love of the arts from an early age — they have a marketer for a mother and a graphic designer for a father. But, it got me thinking about my own career aspirations when I was their age.
cracking challenges to help people find opportunities
Funnily enough, I didn’t dream of becoming a talent marketer. I wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to help people, hunt for clues, solve crimes and catch criminals. And while I’m not exactly putting anyone behind bars in my role as global strategy lead within Randstad Sourceright’s Talent Marketing team, I do get to use my problem-solving skills to crack difficult talent attraction challenges. I also get to help people find exciting new opportunities at some of the world’s most innovative organizations.
The role of talent marketing at Randstad Sourceright is to strategically support our clients and operations teams to increase direct hiring effectiveness through creative employer branding, recruitment marketing and talent experience. We offer an end-to-end creative and digital talent marketing service to effectively attract and engage contingent or permanent talent. We do this by leveraging data and market insights to define target audiences, develop targeted attraction campaigns and create client-branded advertising assets that align to the clients’ employer brands and employee value propositions (EVP).
My role specifically is to work in close collaboration with our team of client partners in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region, helping them to define and plan their client strategies. I also do this with the support of our creative team and subject matter experts in performance marketing, data, email marketing and digital. We’re a close-knit collaborative bunch.
As a creative thinker and a natural problem solver, what I love most about my role is being given a complex recruitment challenge and digging deep to find solutions. I love researching and learning about different audiences, roles, cultures, businesses and industries. I get to put myself in the shoes of a wide variety of individuals and discover things about the world and the motivations of others that ordinarily I wouldn’t.
All too often organizations focus on what they want and need from candidates and neglect to tell candidates what they offer in return. I thoroughly enjoy representing the candidate and helping our clients tell a more compelling story so they stand out from the crowd.
a blessing in disguise
I joined Randstad Sourceright in September 2020 as one of the first client partners in Europe. It was the midst of the pandemic and I’d just been made redundant from an in-house role at a digital healthcare start-up that I wasn’t ready to leave. After a couple of scary weeks of job hunting, I found the talent marketing opportunity at Randstad Sourceright and, two years and two promotions later, that redundancy feels like a blessing in disguise.
In hindsight, my in-house experience was quite lonely. I had no team, no budget and no one to share ideas with. In contrast, at Randstad Sourceright, I’m surrounded by a team of wonderful, intelligent and passionate talent marketing professionals that I’m learning from and growing with everyday. As a team we have an exciting opportunity to shape Randstad’s talent marketing offerings and to make a genuine difference to our colleagues and clients.
What I get at Randstad Sourceright, versus working in a talent marketing agency, is greater exposure to the end-to-end talent journey. Thanks to a close partnership with recruiters and sourcers, we’re not only able to influence the top of the funnel, but we also get to look at opportunities to improve the application, interviewing and onboarding process by ensuring candidate-focused communications are used throughout the candidate’s journey.
never missing my girls growing up
Outside of work, I spend a lot of time with my aspiring fashion designer and budding dancer. Weekends are spent juggling clubs, kids parties, family lunches and trips to zoos, farms and exhibitions in London. It’s a lot of chaotic fun.
But working at Randstad Sourceright has meant that family life isn’t just restricted to weekends. Thanks to remote working, I get the opportunity to take my girls to school every day and attend their celebration assemblies, nativities, concerts and sports days. Seeing their faces when they spot me in the crowd is the best feeling in the world.
And while you won’t be calling me “Detective Goode” any time soon, I haven’t lost my interest in fighting crime. In the evenings I love snuggling up on the sofa to watch a true crime documentary or murder mystery drama series. The only criminals I’m going after in my day job are those that use job descriptions in place of job adverts. You have been warned!