How The Muse Helped VMware Carbon Black Scale Their Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Carbon Black is now part of VMware. Founded in 2002, VMware Carbon Black is a leading endpoint security company dedicated to protecting the world from cyberattacks. They serve over 5,600 customers globally.

The Challenge

VMware Carbon Black had goals to improve their diversity and inclusion initiatives and also planned to start building new hiring markets outside of the Boston area. But their recruitment marketing strategy was missing a core component: fresh and informative employer brand content that supported these specific talent acquisition goals.

Without content that showcased unique aspects of VMware Carbon Black’s culture and values—like their various employee resource groups and commitment to D&I—it was challenging to broaden their company brand awareness and reach new candidates.

“It made our story and promises fall flat. We wanted candidates to trust us. To see us for us. We knew stock photos couldn’t truly showcase our people, our office, and our culture. That’s why we needed The Muse to help us create more content.”

— Ashley Perez, Senior Talent Brand Ambassador at VMware Carbon Black

The Objective

VMware Carbon Black partnered with The Muse with three main objectives in mind: 

  • Capture new photo and video content to showcase the team culture and core values at VMware Carbon Black.
  • Identify employee brand advocates across all of their office locations—including remote workers—to support recruitment marketing campaigns.
  • Establish brand awareness in new markets and gain credibility among candidates who might not be considering the cybersecurity or tech space for their next career move.

“We were looking to leverage a community that trusted The Muse to help us promote who we are and why we’re a good employer.”

— Ashley Perez

How VMware Carbon Black Leverages The Muse

Company Culture and Employee Experience Video Content
In addition to capturing four unique employee video testimonials, VMware Carbon Black created two Feature Videos with The Muse to help showcase their core values and team culture. One video focuses entirely on VMware Carbon Black’s specialized employee resource groups, providing candidates with real examples of how the company supports diversity and inclusion at work.

VMware Carbon Black uses their Muse video content across their various recruiting channels including their careers site, social media, third-party job sites, paid advertising, and recruiting campaigns, to engage candidates at multiple key touchpoints.

Identifying Trusted Employee Advocates for Recruiting Campaigns
VMware Carbon Black used BrandBuilder, The Muse’s story capture tool, to collect validated employee testimonials that their talent team could use in recruitment marketing campaigns to help educate candidates about the employee experience. Employees are given the option to mark themselves as company advocates within the tool itself, making it easy to identify people who were willing to participate in these campaigns.

“This saved me a lot of time trying to find people who were both fitting and open to doing this. We could slice and dice the data by gender, location, role, and more, so if I had a specific campaign in mind, I could go directly to the right people and get their feedback and stories to share with our audience for that campaign.”

— Ashley Perez

Driving Brand Awareness in Key Markets
VMware Carbon Black leverages The Muse’s geo-specific hiring articles to help drive brand awareness in their key hiring markets. As one example, to help promote career opportunities in their Boulder, CO office location, VMware Carbon Black was featured in a roundup of companies hiring in the Denver Metropolitan Area.

Job Scraping and Conversion Tracking
The Muse platform is able to sync with VMware’s Workday ATS to aggregate all of their live job postings and automatically pull them into the Job’s section of VMware Carbon Black’s company profile. This makes it easy for the company to get their open positions in front of candidates without needing someone to actively manage the listings.

VMware Carbon Black also relies on The Muse’s Insights dashboard to keep track of profile views, impressions, interactions, total job views, apply clicks, and applications.

The Results

“The Muse is one-stop-shop for all of our content needs, providing us with a ton of high-quality, usable content I can leverage in a number of ways.”

Ashley Perez

Since partnering with The Muse, VMware Carbon Black has been able to scale its recruitment marketing efforts and produce targeted hiring campaigns leveraging their Muse video content and BrandBuilder insights.

VMware Carbon Black used their employee testimonial videos, company culture videos, and diversity and inclusion content to build out their #SecureWomen campaign, a three-month-long integrated marketing campaign aiming to celebrate and recruit women in technology.

About 69% of VMware Carbon Black employees who went through The Muse’s BrandBuilder tool elected to be brand advocates. The talent team has since tapped these advocates to:

  • Write blog posts highlighting their unique employee experience or career path at VMware Carbon Black
  • Contribute their stories to powerful initiatives like #SecureWomen
  • Participate in photoshoots when capturing visual assets for marketing campaigns
  • Host the VMware Carbon Black booth at regional hiring events