GradSimple Industry Insiders: Matt Eyre

Disclaimer: The views expressed by our interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GradSimple. We only edit these responses for clarity. All opinions remain those of the interviewee.

• Role: Talent Brand and Marketing Manager, Avalara

What do you do for a living?

My role at Avalara covers all of its recruitment marketing. That includes making sure the careers site looks and feels the way we want, building talent-brand stories for hiring managers and teams, and looking at how we show up on third-party recruiting portals such as LinkedIn or Glassdoor. More recently, I’ve also been figuring out how the recruiting team can use AI and how we can build AI tools that benefit recruiters, recruitment marketers, and my team.

I’m kind of a one-man band. I work with the recruiting team rather than sitting on the marketing team, which is fun because it helps me stay close to the work and to hiring.

How did you get your start at Electronic Arts and move into marketing?

In my last couple of years at high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t really know what being a grown-up meant. At that point, there wasn’t great careers advice. There was one careers adviser at my school, and people didn’t really do internships where I grew up in the UK. You went to high school, got your grades, went to university, and then got a job. I never had the first idea about what to do.

While I was at university, one of my roommates threw me a newspaper. This is how long ago it was. In the newspaper was an advert for Electronic Arts, which was hiring video game testers. My roommate recognized the EA logo from the box because I played FIFA. My university wasn’t far from Electronic Arts’ then-fledgling, pretty small UK office. It was coming to the end of the school year, so I thought I might see if I could get a summer job doing video game customer service.

I went to the interview. I’d never been to a job interview before. I’d had summer jobs, mostly working in a warehouse or whatever, but that was it. I wound up working at Electronic Arts for about six years. I started on the customer service team. Around that time, they began localizing video games for the first time and translating them into different languages. We had customer service agents all over Europe, so they needed someone to coordinate a language-testing facility they were building. I was about 20 or 21, and I said, “Sure, I’ll do that. No problem.”

After a year or two, they asked what I wanted to do next. I had options in the business. Did I want to work in game production or development, sales or marketing, or customer service leadership? Development didn’t appeal to me because I’m not technical, and I felt like I’d had my fill of customer service. I was really interested in how marketing worked and how to sell and market video games to people. It seemed like an interesting career and a cool team to be part of. Most of all, it meant working with games and game developers.

I switched into marketing, which was the start of my brand marketing career. Arguably, I still do brand marketing today. That’s how I got into the field—more luck than judgment.

What did you learn about the kind of marketing work you enjoyed?

I did a couple of other marketing roles. I went to work for Universal Pictures for a while after getting laid off from EA. Even in the 1990s, people were getting laid off in tech jobs. I hated the job at Universal. It was very sales-adjacent and far from the creators.

By then, I had realized what I liked about brand and product marketing. I liked sitting with incredibly gifted people who were creating and building things, and being the voice of the audience or customer. I wanted to help them understand how to take the game they had worked so hard on and poured their souls into, get it into stores, and help people find it. At Universal, I was just working with the sales team and shunting boxes out to retail. It felt a million miles from what I wanted to do.

I went back to video games and worked for Sega for nine years. I joined because a developer I knew had decided to work with Sega and be published by them. They made a very European-centric game called Football Manager. It’s popular in the UK and Europe, less so in the United States. You’re the general manager; there’s no joystick or running around on the pitch. It’s a management and data-heavy, almost spreadsheet-like game. I fell in love with it the first time I played it and wanted to work on it.

What brought you to the United States?

Sega is what brought me to the United States. It was supposed to be a six-month secondment to work on a different range of games. I’d been promoted a couple of times and was running a team by then. That six-month assignment took about two years because no video game ever launches on time.

How did you discover employer branding?

The bank gave me a tech-branding job and insight into doing something service-driven rather than product-driven. I also did a couple of people projects there—recruitment marketing and internal communications stories—and loved them. I got that passion back. A lot of the bank work was about brand architecture for a family of financial services, and it felt a bit like Universal Pictures. I wanted to work with people or creators. I wanted stories to tell, and I wanted to help people take those stories to potential customers.

That work led me into employer branding. A friend at Intercom told me they wanted a brand marketer to market the company to candidates rather than its products to customers. I thought, “Yes, this sounds like me.” I could get passionate about talking to people about their careers, what they do, why that is relevant to candidates, and why someone should want to work there.

Intercom hired me, and I did that for about two and a half years. Then came tech layoffs and COVID, and I eventually left and wound up at Avalara. It’ll be four years there in November.

What is employer branding, and why do companies need it?

I have opinions about this, but no one died and made me an expert. There are people who have been doing it much longer than I have.

As a field, employer branding is still pretty nascent. I don’t remember it being much of a thing when I left Sega around 2012. You can find people whose resumes say they’ve been doing it longer than that, which is fine, but I think it grew out of hiring becoming a candidate’s market.

You still see that dynamic today in some areas. If you’re an engineering manager, engineering director, or principal engineer, you don’t necessarily go on LinkedIn to look for a job because hundreds of people are already asking you to work for them. That’s a candidate’s market: you get to choose where you want to go and what you want to do.

Startups face this problem in a particularly clear way. Tiny companies spring up, sometimes without even saying what they’re working on, but they still need engineering talent. They have to attract people from companies that are probably much bigger. Those candidates are highly paid and successful by almost any metric. If you need a principal engineer, what are you going to say to persuade that person?

Not all chief executives are great at the pitch. Some are very technical and can explain the problem, but they can’t necessarily explain why their company is great. You meet people and think, “You’re a genius, and listening to you talk about what you’re building is incredible, but I’m not sure I want to put you in front of the people I’m trying to attract. You pitch the issue rather than the business.”

Employer branding is essentially an offshoot of marketing. Companies build awareness of their products through marketing; they build awareness among candidates in the same way.

How can employer branding look different from one company to another?

Avalara and Amazon illustrate how varied the work can be. Avalara isn’t a consumer brand, so relatively few people have heard of it, but it has a great story to tell. That’s what appealed to me. I wanted to put that story in front of people, and we have hired successfully.

Amazon also has employer-branding professionals, even though nearly everyone in the country has heard of the company. It faces different challenges, including reputational issues and difficulty hiring for some broader technical and warehouse roles. The goal for someone like me is to tell candidates what it’s like to work at the company. An employer-branding professional at Amazon and I may have the same title, but we have very different roles.

What does a typical day in employer branding look like?

The easiest way to think about my role is that anywhere there is an interface between Avalara and a candidate, I’m considering how to make it work as effectively as possible. We need to tell people what it’s like to work here. I have to work out how to tell that story, where people are looking for the information, and how to make sure the information they find is relevant.

At any given time, I might be working on a redesign or redevelopment of our careers site, which is the number one place for an employer brand. Our site is solid, but I want to make it better, so we’re working on a plan for that now.

I also do a lot of talent-brand work. A candidate can visit Glassdoor or our careers site to see what the company wants to say about itself, but a more compelling way to learn what it’s like to work somewhere is to hear directly from someone who already does. That’s talent branding: letting our talent speak for us.

We hire for many engineering and go-to-market roles. As much as I wish I spoke fluent engineer, I definitely don’t. I’ve never been one. I want to give our engineers a platform because they do incredible work, and the scale of our technology is impressive. I can’t explain that to another engineer as effectively as our engineers can.

We’ve run talent-brand programs where we interview engineers and ask them to answer eight questions in four minutes. Then we distribute that content through LinkedIn. Engineers know other engineers, so when our people post those stories, it helps us reach the kinds of candidates we want.

Constructing a campaign like that is my job. Executing the content is my job. Looking at the metrics, seeing whether the content drives applications, interest, or careers-site visits, and reporting the results to the people I work for—that’s also me.

I might be writing a marketing strategy document that explains the problem we’re trying to solve, the audience we’re trying to reach, the strategy for reaching them, and the tactics we’ll use. Then I’ll spend time executing each of those steps. If the strategy for reaching engineers is to have 10 of our engineers tell stories that we can publish as a sequence, I’ll work out how to do that.

How do you help recruiters and other teams tell a company’s story?

Recruiters also need stories they can tell when pitching roles. Some positions are familiar; most recruiters have hired for sales or engineering roles. Then a new role comes out of nowhere and everyone asks, “What even is this?” Some of our tax and compliance roles require very specific knowledge, and the recruiter may not be an expert in what the position does. We might need to create a pitch or talk track to help them, so I’ll work with them to produce it.

Anything that helps candidates understand our open roles or the company they may join is connected to my work in some way. I don’t do all of it alone. Sometimes I work with the communications or graphic design teams. If we’re thinking about running ads on LinkedIn, I’ll brief the creative team and work with them to develop the materials. At other times, I’ll collaborate with the internal communications team to take messages created for employees and make them relevant, engaging, and legally approved for external audiences.

What keeps employer branding interesting for you?

The field gives me many of the things I want in a job. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to brand a company. I listen to hiring managers, leaders, and recruiters explain the problems they’re having, then think about how to translate those problems into language that will resonate with candidates and how to put that message where candidates will see it.

At the end of the day, it’s marketing. It is similar to the work I’ve done throughout my career. The difference is that I’m no longer spending half my time selling and planning, as I did in my last games-industry jobs. I’m thinking about marketing problems, how to solve them, and how to get the result in front of candidates or customers. That has always been the most fun part for me.

It’s a broad remit. No two days are the same, which is part of why I get a kick out of the job.

The simplest comparison is brand management. I’ve been a brand manager for games companies, a movie company, a bank, and a couple of tech companies. The brand you’re managing and deploying is different, but fundamentally, it’s the same core work I’ve done throughout my career.

Connect with Matt:

• LinkedIn: @MattEyre