Case Miro
From interim employer branding team leadership to strategic collaboration
Finders Seekers x Miro
Finders Seekers started working with Miro during a transitional phase in Miro’s EB journey, and after initially helping Miro with senior interim support, the EB Finders Seekers team took on a more strategic role.
Results
Built a global and thriving employer branding team
200+ Miro employees engaged on EB activities
100+ global employer branding campaigns
39% uplift in career page views from 2021
Miro is an online workspace for innovation. Miro wants to empower teams to create the next big thing. Their commitment to collaboration also extends to their employer brand: people at Miro are encouraged to grow and explore together. Co-headquartered in Amsterdam and
San Francisco, Miro has hubs across the world.
Meet Miro 👋
Baseline
Over the years, Miro had been testing and iterating different EB approaches, attracting talent to their local engineering hubs. Having grown quickly, before and especially during the pandemic, the Miro EB team was ready to move from a localized to a global strategy.
Vivi Brooke, Head of Employer Branding Services at Finders Seekers, brings into focus how it all began: “We are true Miro fans and met the Miro team at Slush in 2021. Shortly after, Miro was looking for a hands-on EB partner, someone who could provide the entire EB palette: not only guide the team, but also execute. We clicked immediately and had a very similar vision.
During this pivotal six month phase of Miro’s EB journey, Finders Seekers EB team was able to act as head of EB and steer Miro’s EB strategy, helping Miro with senior interim support.
Tatjana Obenaus
Global Head of Employer Brand, Miro
"I have worked with many agencies during my career, I’ve never seen such a warm and empathetic approach. The ways in which they worked enabled the Miro EB team to grow. Finders Seekers helped the team to have a more efficient structure in place and helped them maintain their momentum.”
Solution
Miro’s Employer Brand Specialist emphasizes how the Finders Seekers EB team really stepped in and helped them prioritize across the board: “Finders Seekers brought in more focus and helped us with different initiatives so we could start operating and thinking as a global EB team. Our content focus became a lot broader, whereas before it has been hyperfocused on engineering. Now with Finders Seekers on board, we were talking about different employee resource groups (ERGs) at Miro, using the as an opportunity to highlight different elements of life at Miro.”
Minea Leva, Employer Branding Specialist & Partner at Finders Seekers, describes the content strategy in more detail: “There was the Life at Miro blog, for which we wrote six blogs, and helped with another four – writing articles highlighting Miro life, detailing Miro’s feedback culture and creating ERG spotlights e.g. MiroQueers, for example. We also worked together on the overall concept, mapping out categories, and creating a strategy for these key EB pieces. These were the first EB content pieces done at Miro – we piloted their people story concept”.
This is where deep collaboration came to the fore. Vivi: “We knew that the levels of coworking and the face time we had as a team was crucial to this collaboration. We had lots of coaching sessions with team members, often spending 2-3 hours a day together, essentially building a remote extended EB team. Throughout our collaboration, five Finders Seekers EB Growth Team members were part of the collaboration with Miro’s EB team. This was really a story of two teams coming together – it really felt like we were part of their team, and vice versa.”
Working on the collaboration from the Finders Seekers side alongside Vivi and Minea were Phuong Tran, Employer Branding Growth Marketing Specialist, Karelle Bélanger, Employer Branding Specialist, and Petra Erkkilä, COO & Employer Branding Strategist.
Minea remembers how extensive the EB palette they were painting with was: “we had lots of ongoing campaigns and projects, such as EVP development, the employee ambassador program, talent persona mapping, content production kick-off, all whilst running EB campaigns all over the world. So, we had to keep things very aligned with clear projects and goals – different EB Growth Specialists from the Finders Seekers side worked on, and simultaneously ran, various projects. For example, the Miro EB team had created foundational EB campaigns, so we started an analysis process to go through all of them. I ended up eventually taking ownership of all Miro’s EB campaigns. We did video campaigns, recruitment marketing campaigns, EVP campaigns, employee story promotion, as well as campaigns with a really global reach – it was inspiring to work with local recruitment leads in places such as Australia, and simultaneously run global campaigns in the USA, Singapore, Sydney, Armenia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Brazil”.
Events were also key to EB success as Vivi highlights: “The events strategy was crucial. We used our global event production knowledge to coach and facilitate event success from an EB perspective, ideating what could work for this specific talent audience”. Linn especially praised Vivi for her support with event management: “we attended four conferences as exhibitors from April 1st to June 15th 2022. I had not attended a conference as an exhibitor before, so it was amazing to pick Vivi’s brain on how to get the max value out of the event. Vivi helped us think about all the different steps. Afterwards, I received a lot of good feedback from participants – they all felt like they knew what was expected from them at all times”.
On the data side there was a really fundamental need to set the EB data baseline, so Finders Seekers and Miro created the first EB KPIs and dashboards to feed into an EB measurement framework.
Vivi explains how the EVP also fitted into it all, “we were tasked with validating the EVP in the spring of 2022. This included an internal and external testing phase with social media campaigns, investigating how key messages were resonating with key talent segments – feedback which we then fed into the new careers page. The biggest project we had under construction in the fall of 2022 was the renewed careers page”.
Strategy
When Tatjana, Miro’s new Head of Employer Brand joined in July 2022, she felt confident in the EB strategy that Finders Seekers had been following: “the Miro team had done a fantastic job of creating a solid EB foundation with Finders Seekers. Finders Seekers had a massive impact on the team, and when I joined I found a great variety of ongoing projects”.
Vivi details how “meeting with Tatjana allowed us to get on the same page from day one. We wanted to build a transparent relationship, ensuring they had all the information needed to succeed. “We handed over a huge co-created talent brand board to show how we had tackled different areas. The handover process was done to enable the Finders Seekers EB team to function as a support system for Tatjana”.
Vivi was proud of how the Finders Seekers EB team had been able “to do a versatile partnership, moving from us really driving the work to being a strategic partner. Our purpose is to be as transparent as possible, so that when things change, the internal team can do their own thing, and we stay on as support. We wanted to really support Miro in leveraging and leveling up their own EB maturity”.
Tatjana had some great foundations to start from that helped her steer Miro’s EB strategy: “We began to shift our focus towards a more sophisticated content strategy. Digital content plays a crucial role across the entire candidate journey.
Additionally we are constantly looking at our brand positioning in the market, developing candidate personas and finding ways to attract them in engaging ways. We have been developing a unique careers narrative that evolved from our original EVP. A creative and aspirational concept that helps to differentiate us from our competitors.
As part of the more involved content distribution strategy, Finders Seekers helped revamp Miro’s EB Instagram strategy. Phuong enjoyed working on the strategy: “we helped define the goals and metrics for IG, ideated content concepts, shared best practices, and created a roadmap on how to execute and implement the strategy, complete with content pillars and themes. We drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, including content formats from TikTok”.
Talent persona development
with employee focus groups and internal interviews
Research and Strategy Planning
Employer branding roadmap, EVP validation and testing (internal & external)
Marketing and Communications
EB content production, creation of people story concept
Brand Activation
Events / Conferences / Tech meet-ups and EB Instagram & social strategy
Data, Measurement and Visualization
Employer branding KPI benchmarking, Employer branding data dashboard creatio
Careers page renewal
Co-creating a website
content strategy
Global multichannel EB campaigns
Campaign strategy, analysis
& execution
Building & uniting a global Employer Branding team
Impact
“Over the course of the collaboration we interacted with over 200 Miro employees from different teams and departments. It was great to work collectively and so widely across Miro – it was a deep collaboration with a committed involvement from our entire EB team”, Vivi explains.
Vivi feels that the partnership is a great example of how the Finders Seekers EB team were able to “support a global company during times of change and support a team through an essential transformation”.
The team notes that running the EB campaigns was also a big value-add from Finders Seekers. With limited resources on the team, Minea was able to step in and – take the campaigns over, everything across Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.”
Finders Seekers were also able to help the Miro team leverage data better. Data dashboards gave the team concrete goals to work towards and information they could leverage for content production. They were able to see things like where people come to the website from, and how we could engage them. The previous version of the careers page was simple and people did not spend a lot of time on the website. This data was an eye-opener for the team, showing them they needed more content to engage the talent audience – leading to the development of a more robust careers site.
In terms of engaging talent in an impactful way, Miro particularly wanted to highlight diversity and the different voices in their community. In Yerevan – a recently established hub in Armenia – they wanted to establish themselves as a permanent employer. EB ads were a good asset here, helping them highlight all the diversity of voices at Miro. For the team, it was important to show how diverse Miro really is, showing how different cultures and backgrounds are celebrated at Miro.
The Finders Seekers super power is helping EB teams grow by investing time in their development. They are good at enabling, empowering and providing new perspectives to their clients.
Tatjana remembers her first impressions of Finders Seekers when she stepped in to lead the team: “Finders Seekers had stepped into the game as interim leaders. The ways in which they worked enabled the Miro team to grow. They truly were a unified team. Finders Seekers helped the Miro EB team to have a more efficient structure in place and helped them maintain their momentum. On a project-level they supported with tracking the progress and ensuring things were moving on. They were one of those forces that kept everything going.
The Finders Seekers super power is helping EB teams grow by investing time in their development. They are good at enabling, empowering and providing new perspectives to their clients.
When I joined Miro, our partnership obviously evolved, moving to a more strategic partnership. We collaborated on high-impact projects, like our careers site content development and launch. Vivi had a strong strategic approach and helped us determine what content to prioritize.
Now, after a few months working together, we have launched the MVP version of our renewed careers site. Our new careers page has a strong content layer in line with our new Employer Brand identity with more snackable content pieces showing the Miro company life in engaging ways”.
Why we love working with Miro?
To start off with – we are huge Miro fans! Miro was a dream company to work with in many ways, as we have been using Miro as an EB tool for a long time.
Why is Miro the perfect EB tool for us? Personally for me, but also for Finders Seekers, radical transparency is a core value. We believe in working openly, and Miro is a great tool for enabling transparency. When we work with our clients using Miro boards, they see things that are not always finished. This means we are not working in a black box, but facilitating co-creation. We also love Miro because it’s a visual tool, and storytelling and visuality are so important for EB. Miro is also great for workshops and facilitation, especially when running remote sessions globally”.
Minea praises Miro’s ability to manage “multiple projects at the same time across different EB channels, such as content, campaigns, events, dashboard etc. Miro helps you visualize the bigger picture and keeps everything to do with the project in one central, visual place”.
Vivi also acknowledges the importance of the collaboration, “we learned a lot from such a robust EB partnership; Miro was definitely not starting from 0 when it came to EB – they had a really good foundation. In fact, using our own EB maturity matrix they probably were at quite a magnetic level already, it was more about solidifying their ways of working. As a big fan of the product it was great to see that they shared our transparent values. There was an immediate sense of trust and a lot of mutual back and forth. We also learned a lot about how Mironeers use and design Miro, which was fascinating!”
Phuong appreciated how “you don’t often get to see the behind the scenes of a tool you use and a company you admire, so it was great to see what life inside Miro is like and how they really live their values.” Minea also appreciated how “Miro was always open to help with bottlenecks. There was a great collaborative speed, and people were genuinely really interested in learning more about EB and open to new ideas”.
Vivi Brooke
Head of Employer Branding, Finders Seekers
"Throughout our collaboration, five Finders Seekers EB Growth Team members were part of the collaboration with Miro’s EB team. This was really a story of two teams coming together – it really felt like we were part of their team, and vice versa.”
What Miro thought about working with us?
“Finders Seekers really stepped up as a leader when we needed guidance,” says Miro’s Employer Branding Content Specialist. “We were always a team, we discussed everything. The great culture inside their team matched ours at Miro. They do things in the same style that we do things at Miro: develop a hypothesis, test it out, see what works. It was great to work with the Finders Seekers EB team as leaders and team mates. In fact, it did not feel like we were working with an agency at all, it just felt like we had a bigger team.”
Tatjana adds that even though she has “worked with many agencies during my career, I’ve never seen such a warm and empathetic approach before. Agencies often try to hide their magic to make you more dependent on them, but Finders Seekers were refreshingly transparent. I think Finders Seekers have a bright future in the EB space and they can help you take your Employer Brand to the next level”.
