HiBob uses Determ for measuring and reporting on the value of PR efforts

Conversation with

Natalie Homer, Director of Public Relations
Company type

HR Software
Location

Israel
Best impact

Custom charts & reports, tags, metrics

HiBob, a scale-up disruptor that’s been around since 2015, is an HR software (better known as bob) that powers productivity, engagement and retention. Unlike other HCMs that are designed for HR professionals, bob is an HCM for everyone working at a company: employees, managers, and the entire specialized people organization. Originally from Israel, HiBob is now spread across the globe with operations in Israel, New York, Amsterdam, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom, and a center of excellence in Portugal. Their impressive growth in the last three years from 10 million ARR to 100 million ARR proves how essential HiBob is to HR professionals and how vital HR teams are to their companies in challenging times.

HiBob has been Determ’s client for almost a year now, and to mark the first year of successful collaboration, we talked to Natalie Homer, Director of Public Relations. Natalie shared many excellent insights into how she uses Determ and what value the solution provides her. As a Director of Public Relations, Natalie’s responsibilities range from designing and creating a global PR strategy, strategic advice, and content development to reporting and administration.

Challenge

When Natalie started working for HiBob, she searched for a media monitoring solution from day one. Primarily, she needed such a solution to help her with her biggest challenge which is proving the impact of PR efforts because it’s tough to justify the cost of PR.

The solution needed to fit into their dedicated budget, but also had to check some other requirements, such as good coverage and social media, insights into trends, etc. According to Natalie:

“Determ delivered on all of those fronts, and it ticked all the boxes. I mean, even the crudest one, which was the cost one.”

Solution

When Natalie found the solution to her main challenge in Determ, she quickly realized that the platform was a perfect match for her.

“What information can I get from the platform that allows me to show the real value of PR in a language that C-Suite actually value? So you give me the raw data; with that, I can create monthly reports that do exactly that.”

She uses the platform a few times a week, with more heavy usage at the beginning of each month when she has to report on the previous.

Natalie especially finds benefits in various data points or metrics that she can find in Determ because, as she says, reach in itself isn’t enough. That’s why she uses multiple metrics, in addition to reach, such as virality, influence score, the share of voice, etc. Interestingly, Natalie mentioned that using Determ made her look at reporting differently. A significant change happened when she realized she could create different tags to tag mentions and later create custom charts based only on those she tagged. That helped her add richness and layers to her reports.

She mentioned an example where they could have only three pieces of coverage for one story and 25 pieces of coverage for another. When asked why one story performed poorly, through Determ’s reports, she could easily prove that, in fact, the story with three pieces of coverage performed better because these three stories were published on influential media outlets.

Knowing how to create various charts and reports gave her confidence to report these insights to her superiors because, at every moment, she could thoroughly explain what a specific graph meant, why it was important, and why she chose to include a particular metric.

When it comes to editorially placed mentions and organic mentions, she likes to monitor those separately.

“I like to separate those two as well because it does show the other side of how to evaluate. What PR brings and what you wouldn't have if you didn't have agencies on the ground.”

Another thing that proved quite valuable is Determ’s ability to monitor languages beyond English. In her case, she also monitors mentions in Israeli and German which help her track mentions in these media outlets. As she says, “one size fits all” is not always true.

When asked what the best part of her experience with Determ is, Natalie pointed out her experience with her dedicated Customer Success Manager, Tea. She described Tea as incredibly patient, helpful, and reliable, which made her experience with Determ very pleasant.

“You could have the best tool in the world, but if you have an account manager that just isn't there for you, it impacts a little bit your experience of using it. So it has to be your executive team, your consultants. They're the best thing about Determ.”

Impact

One of the most significant impacts Determ had on Natalie’s work is that she was able to present the PR efforts and value to her, at the time, new COO. She credits data that she gathered and analyzed through Determ for the presentation’s success.

“I was able to say – this is information for you to take away as a business. I'm not going to tell you whether you need or don't need PR, but let me just show you what PR does. Well, they didn't get rid of PR, so, you know, I think it saved that function.”

Natalie can’t imagine doing all the work Determ does for her manually. The solution saves her from multiple days of work and effort just researching who published what and knowing the circulation of each publication. Also, without Determ, she wouldn’t be as confident in her data as she is now.

“Sometimes I do Google searches on press coverage, and the story I've seen in Determ hasn't appeared on my Google feed. So it would take hours. I would have no confidence in the robustness of my data. But you know, I spend no more than two or three hours a month now, including the data cleansing, to generate reports that would otherwise take me… What days? Just days. I don't even want to think about it …”

Speaking of saving time, Natalie was also delighted with Synthia, AI assistant – Determ’s newest addition.

“I’ve taken to providing an overview of what topics have generally made the news in any given month as a foreword to my reports I look at all the coverage, what's been written about, and I do a little summary. This would take up to an hour … Well, Synthia does it for me. Synthia summarizes exactly what was written about that month in less than a minute, so it's brilliant.”

Since Natalie has been actively using Determ for almost a year now, we wanted to know her thoughts on the cost/benefit ratio the solution provides. She said:

“I think it's incredibly good value. Incredibly good value. Honestly, it's unbelievable what you do provide. For what the platform does, I'm sure there's so much more to learn, but I do believe that I'm actually using, I would say, a good 80% of what I know the platform can do.”

When asked what advice she would give to users who are testing out Determ but are not sure whether they should purchase a subscription yet, Natalie responded:

“I think they should be brave because you might think you know what you want to report on, but there's probably a lot more that you didn't realize you could do. So be brave, be open-minded, and stick with it, and you will exponentially benefit from what you used to produce to what you can now produce. So stick with the learning curve because it will pay off in the end.”

Natalie is also happy to recommend Determ to the people she knows and gives the platform high grades. She explained her view on this through two lenses – whether the person works in a massive company with over 1000 employees or a company with less than 1000 employees.

“If you are in a smaller enterprise up to about a thousand people, I would absolutely give Determ 10 outta 10, don't waste your money elsewhere. Use that money to get more retainer hours if you're going to go down that sort of route. And also understand that in having to take the journey, to learn how to use this you will become a better reporter. For massive enterprises that get tonnes of coverage, I'd say it's 8 out of 10 because you've got to do a bit of the legwork in terms of things like data cleansing.”

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