Meet Melissa: Brand Marketing Manager

On this episode, we'll meet Melissa Macfarlane Heidmiller, a Brand Marketing Manager.

We thought she meant brand marketing as in, marketing shoes. She means brand marketing like marketing businesses. It's her job to make sure that organizations look attractive to potential employees.

The industry has only been around since the 80s, and it's been in Canada for maybe 10 years.

Here are a few things we chatted about:

• The miraculous thing that is visiting career counsellors after high school
• Building a career that is a combination of working for others and working for yourself
• The ups and downs of working in a new-to-Canada industry
• How there isn't one thing only that you can do in your career
• Following a common thread in your career; in Melissa's case, her job combines communications, marketing, HR and career counselling to help her support talent management and skill development
• How plenty of employers still don't understand the benefit of being intentional about attracting the right people to their roles and organizations

Transcript

Welcome to The One About Careers with Devin and Sarah Jane. A career podcast for adults involved with teens navigating life after high school. We help you help your teens make informed education and career decisions by providing quality information and resources. Join us for weekly, bite -sized conversations covering various aspects of careers, including insights from professionals and different fields. - New episodes available every week at theoneaboutcareers .com.

- Well, hi there everyone. Welcome back to the One About Careers with Devon and
Sarah Jane. We are continuing our series of chatting with folks in their jobs,
what their career journeys have been like, what they do and don't like, anything we
can possibly find out. And we have another guest joining us this week. Sir Jane,
who are we chatting with this week? Oh, I'm super excited because every week,
you know, I'm always excited. Because we're going to combine some entrepreneurial headspace and marketing and working for someone out all in one shot here with Melissa Macfarlane-Heidmiller, who is currently the brand marketing manager with Procore Technologies. Welcome, Melissa, to the One About Careers. - Thank you very much for having me, ladies. - Thanks for joining us. - This has been more than welcome. So my first question is gonna be like, you know, we're back in kindergarten, what is a and marketing manager? - Well, a brand marketing manager encompasses many things, but I will tell you what my role is. So in my role, my scope is on employer branding. So that's what I will dive into. So employer branding is essentially the way that companies market themselves to a talent audience. So when we think about when we think about when we're job searching and we're out there and we're looking for content about an organization, you're going to go look at the website, you're going to specifically look at their career site, you're going to look them up on LinkedIn, go to Glassdoor, even look at other employees, their profiles, try to get as much information as we can out of them, That's essentially my job is getting that right kind of content that tells the story, one of the employee experience of working somewhere, but also help people understand what are they going to get out of working at an organization? So what, how are they gonna be supported as employees? How, what kind of career development opportunities? What might fill into a say a work -life balance, what kind of commitments are in there, all of those things.
Wow. I know. Can you believe, Devon, we're in a day when the employers are like
marketing themselves to potential employees? What a wild,
wild idea, thinking about how you present yourself as an employer.
You know, it doesn't happen very often. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking
about. It doesn't happen often, happen often, but this is a job I didn't know
existed. That's very cool. Once in a while. You do this long enough, but once in a
while.
So can you take us through it a little bit? Think back to high school days. How
did you get to where you are now? Well, I will tell you that it was not a linear
path.
I bet. Was that before on the on the podcast, Devon? - I think so a little bit, yeah. - When I was in high school, I had no
idea that this would have even been a career option, which in all sincerity in
Canada, this would not have been a career option when I was in high school. But
when I was younger,
my focus had been like after graduating high school, let's say my focus, or sorry,
graduating university, my focus was wanting to work for not for profits. And I'm
like, volunteer, volunteer manager, sponsorship coordinator, that kind of thing.
And it never panned out for me. So I wasn't I lucky that that never worked out.
What did you take at university? I took communication studies. Okay. Yeah.
So that was kind of the dream going in that direction. It's actually in university,
it was through the volunteering that I did with our student alumni association that
pointed me in that direction. So not landing that and then just finding myself in
essentially in admin jobs at different organizations, coming to the realization in my
mid to late 20s that I could use the help of a career counselor. Then I started
looking into that and I was like, this is a really interesting thing to do. Maybe
I could do that. So then I went back to school, I went to Conestoga, did the CDP
program and landed at Northern Lights where I worked as a career coach.
And then from there, where did I go from there? Oh, I left to a small tech
startup in a marketing role for about a year. And from there, I moved to another
tech startup, an HR tech startup called Qualify, where they focused on top of funnel
recruiting for our companies, so trying to draw in talent and get them warm and
excited to eventually get them into applicants. And then from there, I set up my
own practice as a career coach, did that for a couple of years, and then my
childhood best friend, lo and behold, came to me for career coaching. And in that
experience, she determined that she wanted to be a social media manager. And I was
like, that's the coolest thing in the world. So she was looking at self -employment.
And as we were getting excited about what she could do, I started to see an
opportunity where we could work together, do small business branding. She would focus
on their social media strategies. I would focus on the branding, so leveraging a lot
of those career counseling skills of being able to work with a small business,
helping them identify their value prop, how do they position themselves, how do they
talk to that audience.
So we ran that business for a while and then COVID happened and everything exploded,
and I didn't want to be self -employed anymore. So then at that point, I started
looking for a new opportunity with an organization. I had heard about employer
branding probably back around 2016 -ish,
so that was when I was working at for Qualify. My colleague there,
she had an employer branding background.
So, I was like, "Ooh, maybe I'll see if this is more popular in Canada," and it
was kind of popular, but not too much. So, I started doing a lot of networking,
and through those networking opportunities, I found this role that I have now at
ProCorp, and that's how I landed here.
Super cool. I love the,
you know, one of the things you said, Melissa, which not a lot of people have said
in Canada this was not an option for me and that in fact when you graduated
university what you're doing now wasn't I'm not even sure that the
the role that you have now even existed in other countries. So employer branding,
it was born, sorry, it was born I think in the UK, if not in Europe,
definitely in the UK. I think in the 80s and it gained a lot of traction over
there and it took quite some time for it to shift over to the States and then it
just very slowly started to trickle up here and it is probably,
I'm going to guess probably the 2010s, maybe before we started to see those roles
here. And even still, when I look at our job market here for opportunities, there's
not a ton. Not a ton in our field.
- What would you say, what do you
like and what do you like about brand marketing?
What I like, one, I like the, I like the connection that I still have with being
able to make an impact on talent with their career decisions. That's kind of the,
when I look at, you know, the choices I've made, that's always been the thing that
has sparked my interest is that challenge of, let's just say, the labor market.
I love the creativity aspect of it. I'm a very creative person, so I love that I
get to do writing. I like that I get to make some various creative assets.
I love that I get to be part of bigger conversations with various teams and build
the relationships with our recruiting team, but then with our sales team and with
our with our culture and community teams, etc.
But then I also love that I get to see the tangible results of the work that I'm
doing. So I can directly say, oh, the work that I did in in in the first quarter
of the year, I can see that it was impactful because we have an uptick of a
certain kind of candidate profile coming to our career site or saying that, oh,
this pilot that we did, we were able to, we were able to fill X number of roles
faster than what we did the previous time or something like that. After dislike,
honestly, there's not really too much that I would say that I dislike about the
work that I do.
I think that what I would say is more of a more of a general statement for what
I see with colleagues in my industry, and that is that we don't have a ton of
resources on our teams. Typically, there are teams of one, maybe two unless it's a
giant organization, but just having limited resources. So it means that you might
have, here's the goals of everything that you want to do and be able to help here
and be able to help here. But when you're a one or two person team, you don't
really get to do all the things that you really want to be able to do.
- Yeah, I'm curious more because of kind of your history of how this is, of kind
of how you've traveled through your career. When you think back to sort of your
days in that career coaching capacity. And now you're kind of, you've almost shifted
to the other side of like helping employers present themselves appropriately. Do you
see an actual shift in mindset in how employers recognize the connection between how
they present themselves and sort of the quality of the person that they get? I
would say it depends on the organization. Right, there's some organizations and teams
that get it, they totally understand like, oh, if we really tap into the candidates
motivator for employment for a career shift or further growth and development.
And we're able to market the impact of the work that we do,
then that will help to get us the right candidate. There's a lot of people that
are still kind of stuck in an older mentality where it's like, oh, but if we just
post a job, it's fine, we'll get who we need. You're like, eh, you know, that's
not really, it's not going to work that way anymore. Do you tend to
change your language based on sort of, I'm thinking just generationally,
frankly, that language might be different across generations.
And so if you're looking at positions that you think might be filled by individuals
who are recent graduates, would your language be different than positions that might
be filled by someone who's been out in the work world for a couple of years and
looking at something different? Yeah. I mean, that's not a big change in generation,
but.
- It's, yes, short answer, yes, because it should come back to marketing to that
individual persona and understanding what's important to them. 'Cause when we think of
that new grad, what's important to them is different than what's important to the 45
-year -old lady. - Yeah. - Right? So you have to be able to speak to the differences
while still making sure that you have that employer brand foundation of what the
company is about and what they're gonna get, right? So even if we break it down
to, you know, if you're marketing to a sales professional versus to the finance
professional, the things that you're gonna just say to the sales person is completely
different than what you're gonna sell to the finance person.
- True. So knowing what you know now, what advice, would you give your teenage self?
I would tell myself that there is no there is no one thing out there that you're
meant to do. careers are just they're like a messy map and just have fun with it.
I mean, I've had the fortunate experience of being able to,
being able to see I am passionate about careers and people and helping make those
connections. I'm fortunate that I've been able to find that spark and find multiple
different pathways for myself that satisfy that spark. But that's not going to be
the case for everyone, right? So if you're, so you know, if I was 15, you know,
at the time I was like, I really wanted to do what's called A &R for the music
industry, so artist and repertoire. So I wanted to go out and find the musicians
and nurture them and get them signed up with the label.
That was like, that was the dream. And I was like, oh, you know, I got to
university and then that changed. But that, that idea of, you know,
it's okay. It's okay that what I wanted then doesn't make sense for me now. I
remember once I had my, you know, throughout my thirties, I really wanted to work
in a post -secondary career center. And I finally got the job interview. And after
the job interview, I was like, oh, holy smokes. This isn't what I want anymore. So,
you know, I called them up and I said, thanks for the opportunity, but no thanks.
I was like, I couldn't believe that I did that, but just that notion of, you know,
careers are messy, things change, your life changed, just go with the flow. Go with
the flow. If you can find something to feed your spark, that's great. Yeah,
I love that, Melissa, because you know, so many of us have some job that we put
on the shiny pedestal, and we're like, that's the job. And one of my favorite
things about, There's a software platform called Kerr Cruising, and you can go into
it and look at interviews with usually a man and a woman who do the job, and it
talks about what they don't like about the job, which is one of the reasons we ask
that question, because sometimes what people don't like about the job is the be all
and end all of that job. And so I just love, you know, we have these grandiose
ideas and glamorous ideas about how a job is and that's not always actually true.
You know, I was talking to one young individual and they were working in the
kitchen doing really well and really enjoying the cooking. I'm like, "So, you want
to be a chef?" "Hell no !" was the response because they're like, "I have seen that
life. And I know what that takes to even make like,
we're talking what at that time would have been called sort of a middle of the
road salary, we're not talking about, you know, someone who's made who's what we
would term made it big, just direct the hours, the missed family holidays,
the it was just And so it was great because they knew they loved that experience,
they loved that process and career in it was not for them.
So it's super cool that you identified that and you know you went after it and
then went oh, nope, No, it's not gonna be what I thought which is great.
I love when it's one of the things. I also say to people Great love when you
figure out you don't want something because now it's off the table and you can go
pursue something else So and even better that you figured it out at the interview
It's not like you've been in the job for six months and you were like, oh, oh,
this was a big mistake Yeah, no at the interviewer like hmm. Yep. This isn't it.
That's it. I mean the sooner you find out the better really - The interview did its
job. - Yeah, he did. - Is the job of the interview. - Yeah, that's right. - That's
the point. - Could this be a good fit? - Yeah.
- So thank you for that. Appreciate that. And we hope you stay tuned for the next
episode of the One About Careers, when we'll interview another fascinating human doing a fascinating real job.

Thanks for listening to the One About Careers podcast. You can catch up with past
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