What DelightRoom Started Focusing On to Attract Top Talent
Our Experience Running OO for 2 Years
What do candidates who apply to DelightRoom say most often? 🤔
“I’ve heard of Alarmy, but I didn't know about DelightRoom.”
“I first found out about you through the job posting, but after looking into it more, it was so appealing that I applied.”
Just about two years ago, we actually heard these phrases a lot in interviews. People knew Alarmy but didn't know DelightRoom, or surprisingly many hadn't even heard of Alarmy before.
Alarmy had already spread through word of mouth as a reliable wake-up service, bringing in a massive organic user base, so we didn't actively do marketing or PR. And since 85% of our users are overseas, we hadn't really been active in promoting Alarmy or DelightRoom domestically.
But!
As our service and company continued to grow, we wanted to bring in top talent who fit DelightRoom. To do that, we felt the need to spread the word that our company and service are growing fast, and it's a place where great talent can work together to create synergy🔥.🔥
After all, for the great talent hiding here and there to come to DelightRoom, they first need to know that an attractive company called DelightRoom even exists.
There are many ways to spread the word, but we decided that PR was the most suitable way to credibly convey the various appealing aspects of DelightRoom—like our product, business achievements, and organizational culture—to a large audience.
So we decided to dive deep into PR.💪
At first, our CEO Jay and the P&C team got together to sync on what PR we wanted to do, why we were doing it, and what we wanted to promote at DelightRoom, and then we wrote the articles ourselves. We had our drafts polished by an editing service to make them suitable for publication, and then distributed them through a release platform.
The process of getting our self-written articles published was interesting and taught us a lot, but we wanted to push the diverse PR materials that DelightRoom and Alarmy already had to influential media outlets faster and with better quality. So, we enlisted the help of a PR agency with great industry networks and expertise. Matching the rapid growth pace of DelightRoom and Alarmy, we've now been actively running PR for about two years, diversifying our topics, formats, and interviewees.
Looking back over the past two years, I can definitely feel that the brand awareness of Alarmy and DelightRoom has grown in various directions compared to before. Especially, it's so great that the number of people who reach out to DelightRoom first for coverage and interviews, saying they want to hear the story of DelightRoom and Alarmy, has increased significantly🔥(Woohoo!)
Thanks to all this hard PR work, we've already had about 470 articles published in 2 years! Let me introduce some of the most important PR news covered year by year!🙌
Year 2021
- Alarmy's global achievements, which weren't widely known
- News on investments, research agreements, and awards showing DelightRoom's solid business model and technology
Year 2022
- Diversified categories from pure achievement-based news to business / product / culture
- Diversified formats including CEO interviews, member contributions, and annual reports
Year 2023
- Diversified interviewees (shifting from mainly CEO interviews to interviews with Delighters who are experts in their fields)
- Continuous growth news (Moneywalk investment / New sleep tracking feature launch)
- Remarkable achievements in culture too — ranked #1 on Jobplanet
Looking at it year by year like this, you can see how much more colorful our topics have become as the company and service grew.🤩
Besides the major yearly news introduced above, you can check out all kinds of stories, including the latest updates, directly through the link below!
So, how do we know if PR was actually effective? 🧐
To see if marketing was effective, you can look at the click-through rates and conversion rates of marketing content. But can you tell the effectiveness of PR through comments or views on news articles,,,!
Unfortunately, media outlets rarely provide public engagement metrics like views or shares, and unless the news content is extremely provocative, readers rarely leave reactions like likes or comments as they do on social media.
Still, we have to check the impact to learn and improve! ✅ Here's how DelightRoom measures the effectiveness of PR.
1. Whether it's featured in the Naver News section or on the main page of each media outlet
2. Naver keyword search volume graphs
3. Reviews of the articles left in industry communities or blogs
+ Stories from candidates, external acquaintances, and internal members
Since over 90% of news readers in Korea use Naver, we always make sure to check the Naver keyword search volume corresponding to our article publication dates.
If you look at the graph above, the frequency of spikes in search volume increased noticeably from 2022, and you can see the search volume goes up exactly when an article is published. Also, previously, the search volume for 'Alarmy' always outpaced 'DelightRoom', but since 2022, when we partnered with a PR agency and started active PR efforts, the graphs have been tracking quite similarly. This means DelightRoom is now being searched just as much as Alarmy, right? 🤩
Based on the graph above, we picked out the articles that had the biggest impact among those published by DelightRoom so far.
- The Korean app service changing the mornings of 4.5 million people worldwide
- An article revealing Alarmy's ambition to expand its service scope into a wellness app under the 'next-generation unicorn' category
- The startup generating tens of billions of won in revenue without taking a single penny of investment
- An article introducing us as the Netflix of Korea
…and so on. These were articles on various topics, published in major media outlets, with compelling content that anyone would be curious about. (Super proud 😏)
But above all, since the main reason we are focusing on PR is to bring in top talent who are a great fit for DelightRoom, we are really feeling the employer branding effects through our candidates.
Whether it's through first-impression surveys or during the interview process, candidates often tell us that they learned about DelightRoom through articles, and that they applied because they were intrigued by DelightRoom's mission and vision as described in those articles.
And compared to before we started our PR and branding activities, the number of applicants jumped more than sixfold, from the 200s in Q1 of 2022 to the 1200s in Q4 of 2023. This also led to successful hiring, growing our team size by about 1.5 times, from under 20 people to around 30! 👨👩👧👦
Of course, many factors influence a candidate's journey from recognizing a company to actually applying, but comparing the before and after of our PR activities made it clear that getting exposed through objectively written articles from a third-party perspective, based on facts, builds massive trust and impact.️🙋♀️
There was another impact as well, which was internal branding.
Every quarter, DelightRoom conducts a survey where all members review their satisfaction with themselves, their team, and the company across multiple categories. Thankfully, most categories received high scores, but the score for the 'branding' category was always lower compared to others. It meant that they were happy working at a great company, but secretly felt bummed out about the low brand awareness. 🥹
So!
Every time a PR piece came out, we consistently shared it with the members and excitedly spread the good news. 💪
We are growing well, and this many people are recognizing it! As a result, the satisfaction score for branding steadily went up. A score that was 2.9 out of 5 in the Q2 2021 review hit 4.6 last quarter 🥹(Tearing up) Plus, you can really feel the branding effect in real life! Delighters told us how happy they are to hear so many good things about Alarmy and DelightRoom from their friends and acquaintances these days! (((P&C team feeling incredibly proud)))
Going forward, we plan to actively use PR to share DelightRoom's various news and growth journey, both to attract top talent who align with our core values and to let our internal members know that we are growing well, so please keep an eye out for us! 🥰 🙌