Case Study - Employer Branding
A winning product requires a winning team - growing Oura's global awareness as an employer
Finders Seekers x Oura
The aim was to co-create a global employer brand strategy that would communicate Oura’s mission as an employer. With the goal of empowering people to take control of their health through wearable tech, Oura wants to reach people who crave a career with a positive impact. Oura is for people who get excited about sharing a purpose.
Together, we want to communicate our joint mission: how a winning product requires a winning team.
Results
96.6% uplift in career site views
during collaboration (June 2021- August 2022)
Over 90k unique page visitors
to Oura’s global careers page (June 2021- August 2022)
Grew Oura’s Tech Community
in Finland from 0 to 200 members
Kickstarted an employee ambassador group
with 33 employees
Meet the client
EB strategy to diversify local talent acquisition
Oura is a healthtech company with its roots in Finland but a global outlook, with offices dotted around the world, and over 400 employees globally. The distinctive Oura wearable has become a symbol for an empowered ‘take control’ attitude to consumer health and wellness.
As an employer, Oura invests heavily in its people, nurturing a sense of belonging – enabling people to carve out a balanced and personalized career journey.
Challenge
In order to communicate the brand’s growing hiring needs in Finland, Oura was looking for employer brand content creation support.
Oura’s talent strategy had already brought in great results, but in order to maximize its potential, Oura needed consistent employer branding to solidify its reputation as a tech employer.
“Working with Finders Seekers was about finding new opportunities” – Ginny Cheng, Global Head of Talent at Oura.
Oura’s employer brand reputation was chiefly led by their excellent product which meant that key talent segments were not yet fully aware of Oura’s strengths as an employer. In order to bridge this gap, Oura needed messaging to highlight how Oura gives people the chance to have purpose-filled, meaningful careers that intersect with cutting-edge research.
As with all Finders Seekers employer branding collaborations, we used data to inform our employer brand strategy and create a foundation that would work globally – initially piloting schemes in Finland, getting benchmark data, and scaling out from there.
When the collaboration first started in June 2021, the Finders Seekers’s EB team came on board to co-create Oura’s first-ever employer brand strategy. The premise was to first find any low-hanging fruit, and then build up a more robust 2022 strategy from there.
Content creation was the first step in establishing the partnership – starting with a collection of team and employee blogs and paid social media campaigns.
But almost straight away, we started looking ahead to how much more we could achieve together: organizing events, creating global social media campaigns, facilitating EVP (Employer Value Proposition) and talent persona workshops, creating dedicated employer branding budgets and allocating EB resources for the future. Here is what happened when we did just that!
Solution
“We could not boil the ocean, but we were consistent in identifying opportunities.” – Ginny Cheng, Oura
As Ginny said it best “we couldn’t boil the ocean” with this one, so instead we focused on strategic projects.
We started with employer brand content creation and social media campaigns in 2021 – building out the strategy for 2022, eventually mixing in more elements such as defining Oura’s EVP through co-creation workshops with employees, events etc.
Our key strategic pillars were:
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Research and Strategy Planning: Employer branding roadmap, EVP workshop & localization, & talent persona creation
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Marketing and Communications: Social media strategy, content creation & paid social media campaigns and organic social media posts, employer branding photoshoot
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Brand Activation: Events / Tech meet-ups
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Employee Engagement: Oura ambassador program
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Data, Measurement and Visualization: Web & social media analytics, employer branding data dashboard creation
Some of the initiatives were first piloted in Finland, with an eventual shift towards a global employer brand strategy encompassing Central Europe, the US, and Canada. In the US, as well as highlighting Oura as an attractive employer, we targeted key tech hubs such as San Francisco, Austin, and New York.
We hosted meet-ups in Helsinki and Oulu to engage the local tech community, and in the process conceived the meet-up concept as a part of the EB strategy.
It goes without saying that transcreation and localization were baked into the collaboration from day one. The Finders Seekers EB team’s tech industry and international know-how was essential in successfully building strategy based on a thorough understanding of different talent communities and the messaging that would appeal to them.
Visual imagery of Oura as an employer was something else that we worked on and refined together: finding the right brand visuals and messages for the right markets.
Strategy
10+ multi-ad
local and global paid social media campaigns
2 EVP workshops (Europe & U.S.)
Talent persona development
within employee focus groups and internal interviews
12+ career and team stories
during Autumn 2021 - Spring 2022
Global tech meetup
strategy creation and 2 in-person meet-ups for the tech talent audience in Finland
Employee ambassador program
strategy, kickoff, global trainings and pilot program
Thought leadership training session
in Europe and North America
We got set up with the right talent brand infrastructure from day one by working in an agile way across Oura’s in-house teams and the Finders Seekers EB consultants (Vivi, Minea, Jarkko, and Karelle).
One central pillar of the strategy was boosting employer image through the Oura career page and its content. The brand and marketing team’s investment into Oura’s website meant we had a great asset we could leverage for EB, and we were tasked with increasing the visibility of the careers pages in relation to the rest of the site architecture. Robust website visitor numbers put us in a great position when it came to directing career messaging.
Employer brand content production started off as a big strategic focus, and it remained central as the collaboration deepened. We invested heavily on LinkedIn as a storytelling channel, sharing inspirational content about different people’s and team stories at Oura. The key here was to highlight Oura as an employer who prioritized wellness and empowerment, while showcasing the complex challenges teams and individual talent got to work with on a daily basis and the impact that their work had on Oura’s product and customer experience.
Our co-created EVP campaigns focused on the idea that working at Oura is about harnessing your inner potential and investing in your career and your health, playfully asking people to “invest in your health as you would in your career”.
As Ginny herself puts it, working at Oura means “working for a company that millions of people see the value of”. The messaging used in campaigns mirrored real-life experiences of people working at Oura. For Ginny, who has talent branding in her DNA by now, joining Oura was about joining an organization that really reflected her values. We ensured that any campaign messaging reflected the real Oura life that Ginny and others shared.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and the team at Finders Seekers were integral in creating a solid employer branding measurement framework in which the Oura in-house team could operate and track performance. We created data dashboards and set benchmarks for our activities: employer brand dashboards helped us track key metrics and KPIs – which are essential to help direct and inform budget and strategy.
Impact
“One of our goals is that our employees become our best ambassadors.” – Ginny Cheng, Oura.
Employer branding goes beyond “jargon” at Oura – it’s about empowering people who work at Oura to “become authentic thought-leaders, to share their every-day, and articulate what they enjoy about working at Oura”, explains Ginny.
Sharing these stories through content creation was cohesive thanks to a deep sense of working together as a team: Oura as part of Finders Seekers, and vice versa. Having a co-created Miro board and integrating employer branding content into the shared content calendar fostered transparency.
Working together with in-house teams allowed us to put a lot of power behind our actions: whether it was creating EB data dashboards to see our EB results in real time, or creating new joiner copy with the Comms team for employees to share on LinkedIn, we were able to leverage the wider team to maximize impact.
For example, collaborating closely with the brand and marketing team to create a positive uplift on career site views meant that we increased the relative importance of the career site by ≈97% in total.
Whether it’s the career site or beyond, the key to maximizing data is to know what to measure, gather the data in one place, visualize it to an understandable form, and create benchmarks for your activities. Aiming towards joint goals (and smashing our targets) helped us keep the collaboration on-track.
Collaborating closely with the brand and marketing team to create a positive uplift on career site views meant that we increased the relative importance of the career site by ≈97% in total.
Vivi dives into the details of the importance of data-driven employer branding:
“In the first 6 months you need to create an EB measurement framework: what can you realistically track, what do we need to focus on. In terms of EB maturity, if you are in the beginning of your employer brand journey, you may need to just start with measuring and benchmarking. In a more advanced EB maturity level and data-driven company, you can optimize things on a more granular or detail level, depending on how well data points can be leveraged and combined.”
EVP and talent persona analysis was another important part of fleshing out the Oura employer brand. We created talent personas for a wide range of roles, including Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Embedded Engineer, and a B2B role.
By launching the tech meet-up event initiative at Oura, we successfully created a brand new talent engagement channel. It all goes towards presenting a positive employer image.
At Oura, everything was organized around the central idea of consistency in what we are doing: gathering data from several campaigns to establish a benchmark over social media and the career page, then optimizing on a more granular level and combining this data when possible with talent acquisition data.
Why we love working with Oura
It was paramount to stay true to Oura’s people-first attitude as a tech company. In fact, everyone at Oura was keen to share “why this is a mission and purpose worth joining” Vivi explains, showing just how much internal drive facilitated the collaboration.
From the Finders Seekers point of view, working with Oura aligned with our mission to “build winning teams by creating and finding better and more inclusive working homes for people”, Vivi summarizes.
Finders Seekers wants to align with companies like Oura who have a positive purpose and mission, as Vivi outlines:
“The goal Oura has to empower people to take care of themselves is really inspiring. As an EB professional, it is fulfilling to share that mission while simultaneously helping people on an exciting career journey. Oura aligns with our Finders Seekers mindset and mission: a holistic approach to work and life.
In fact, most of our EB team are early adopters of the product, and working with Oura is also part of the Finders Seekers mission of putting Finland on the map in the tech world.
This is so much more meaningful than just selling a consumer product: working with Oura means working with cutting-edge healthtech research. As a team, we get to work with a cool growth company who have an inspiring mission we can all get behind and believe in.
Working with a company like Oura where our values align makes the collaboration process a lot smoother.”
On a personal level, Vivi also really appreciates Oura’s focus on reproductive health and other under-researched fields.
Ginny and her team at Oura appreciated working with an experienced employer branding partner, getting access to a range of expertise and toolsets. Working with an agency brought on valuable support and helped scale internal resources, whether that was launching campaigns, or facilitating multiple workshops and putting on thought leadership training sessions for employees.
EB work done well takes time: it requires a lot of work, including internal education. It is important to be patient – though stakeholders often want to see data or the impact of EB actions and activities immediately – it takes time to see big results. The Finders Seekers EB team were good at facilitating growth: gathering data and getting results, but also getting people on board and advising them on timelines.
In the tech world, EB is absolutely essential in order to stand out, and having a robust employer brand partnership keeps you consistent and ensures you don’t fall behind the competition.
Client's perspective: working with Finders Seekers
One thing that was mutual across the collaboration? Authenticity. Authenticity in the work that was being done, in the employer brand, and in the mutual alignment of values.
Ginny summarizes: “Foundationally, it was a very healthy relationship. I had a great relationship with the team: they were able to be flexible and accommodating, and that is what an in-house team really needs.”
“Flexibility on the agency side was definitely appreciated, Finders Seekers did a great job of accommodating us in terms of time zones etc. I also appreciated the dexterity in terms of advising what would work in Finland vs what would work in the US”, Ginny continues.
Ginny felt that the Finders Seekers EB team were available and engaged, always open to sharing ideas over weeklies or on the shared Slack channel. And from the Finders Seeker’s side, Vivi and her team appreciated the transparency and open access to people they needed to make their strategy a reality.
There was a real sense of learning from each other, sharing knowledge on both sides of the partnership – being on a global EB team together – truly feeling part of the same team.
“There was a sense that people were keen to help and willing to share ‘why Oura’” – making getting the mission and purpose out into the world so much easier, Vivi concludes.
Possible future collaborations include a global EVP campaign, and for Oura right now it’s time to “focus on what is most important” as Ginny stresses.
“I never hesitate to refer people to the Finders Seekers’s EB team, in fact, I have already praised what you do to many, as what you do is so important!” Ginny sums up.
