Catharine Neilson
Senior Manager, Employer BrandZillow
As Senior Manager of Employer Brand at Zillow, Cat is responsible for building, protecting and managing the company’s reputation as a great place to work to help attract, develop and retain top talent. This work includes developing Zillow’s employer of choice messaging platform and bringing it to life across a variety of internal and external paid, owned and earned media channels.
Cat joined Zillow in 2015, bringing nearly 12 years of corporate, strategic brand and agency consumer communications experience spanning multiple sectors. In her initial role at Zillow, Cat managed all consumer communications for the Zillow, HotPads and RealEstate.com brands and was responsible for developing integrated and consistent objectives and messaging across data, tech and lifestyle public relations programs. In 2020, she raised her hand to help build the employer brand function at Zillow which sits with the Corporate Relations function. Prior to joining Zillow, she held a vice president position at Cohn & Wolfe where she led strategic media relations for top accounts in the agency’s global pharmaceutical and CPG businesses.
Catharine Neilson’s Session(s):
10:30 a.m. —
Talent brand and marketing professionals are often unsure how to approach the E (earned) in the Paid/Earned/Social/Owned ecosystem. Recruitment marketing has become somewhat synonymous with paid social media, but there’s also more to life than tweets and tocks. Through my career pivot from strategic media relations to employer branding, I’ve learned first-hand the valuable ways talent marketing and PR can work in tandem to drive media coverage that captures the attention of candidates, improves brand perception and preference, and drives application traffic.
Working with your PR team or agency to pitch reporters can be intimidating, but you don’t have to be an expert in communications to land an epic earned media story. From this session, you’ll walk away with a handful of tips on how to approach your own communications team with workplace pitch ideas for journalists and strategies you can use to seed your employer brand messaging in print, online or broadcast media.