Friends,

I promised owls, so that’s exactly what you’re getting.

This is me with Wufka, an Australian Barking Owl. And yes, as the name suggests she might be, she was very vocal (in the cutest of ways). I also got to hang with an Eastern Barn Owl called Nyra.

If you’re into wildlife (and especially if you aren’t!), I can’t more highly recommend doing something like this to get in touch with your local fauna and understand how they live among us.

Speaking of brand (what a brilliant segue), in todays edition we’re hearing from a resident brand and community expert on how People teams can leverage it to improve hiring and culture.

Enjoy ✌️

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

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Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

This edition is based on the latest episode of the FNDN Series podcast, with Lachlan Bradford.

Lachlan Bradford is the Community, Brand and Partnerships manager at Sked Social, where he's responsible for building and engaging a global community of social media professionals. Before SKED, he co-founded the Funny Business podcast and Dream Big Social Club — a community connecting founders and operators through low-key events, private masterclasses, and intentional introductions. He's also built and sold an e-commerce brand, run a social media consultancy, and spent time in recruitment. His background spans hospitality, sport, and startups, and the through-line across all of it is the same: language, personal connection, and community built by hand — not algorithm.

You can tell an employer brand is broken when the careers page reads like it was written by a committee who've never met the team. 

Stock photos. 

A values section that could belong to literally any company in your category. 

A "culture" paragraph that says everything and nothing.

But here's what a real employer brand looks like: an employee on LinkedIn writing "we just dropped this — we're bloody pumped”.

That's brand. 

No campaign, no photoshoot, no agency. Just someone who's proud of where they work and can't help but say so.

So if brand is an output and not a project, what's the input?

I'd argue it's community.

I sat down recently with Lachlan Bradford — content and community manager at Sked Social, Co-Founder of the Funny Business podcast and Dream Big Social Club — and what struck me was how much of what he's learned building customer communities maps directly onto the employer brand challenge that startup People leaders face every day. 

Particularly when comp is tight and you can't just throw money at the problem.

Community creates a moat. It influences hiring efficiency (inbound quality, offer acceptance, time-to-fill), retention (pride and belonging), and comp leverage — because candidates demand less of a "risk premium" when they already trust you. Equity only motivates when people believe the story. And belief is built through transparency, not slide decks.

When you can't outpay, you can out-belong.

Here's the flywheel: 

Let me break down the three building blocks that make this work in practice.

Lachlan told me a story from his hospitality days managing a bar. 

A birthday group had a terrible experience — bad service, plates being dropped on the table, the works. 

They complained. Instead of handing over a voucher and moving on, Lachlan walked over and explained what had happened. 

He told them their server had just received some bad personal news that morning, that it wasn't an excuse but he wanted them to know, and that he'd make sure the rest of their night was taken care of.

Clearly. Humanly. No script, no defensiveness. Just a straight conversation.

That table became regulars and members.

The worst moment built the strongest relationship — because someone showed up as a person, not a process.

This is what trust looks like inside a company, too. 

Lachlan talked about his current role at Sked: flexible calendar, clear expectations, get the job done. "Being treated as an adult," as he put it. And the way he talks about the company because of that treatment? That is employer brand. You can't manufacture it. You can only create the conditions for it.

Lachlan does something at Sked that any People leaders could adopt today — he runs clarity calls. 

One-on-one conversations with every customer, asking simple questions: what's working, what's frustrating, what would you change? 

The consistent reaction, even from unhappy people: "It's so good to actually talk to someone." 

The same approach works internally. 

How can you run clarity calls with employees or candidates? Simple questions. Let people vent. Listen. You'll learn more in those conversations than in any engagement survey, and you'll build trust by showing up and asking.

What you hear in those calls becomes the raw material for changing how your organisation operates. If three out of five people tell you they don't know what "good" looks like in their role, that's not a culture problem — it's a clarity problem. And clarity is something you can codify. Take the patterns and turn them into explicit expectations: how decisions get made, how feedback flows, what autonomy actually means here. 

When a manager can say "I don't care where you work — I care that we hit X by Friday and you flag blockers early," and that line is backed by norms the team helped shape, trust stops being a vibe and starts being a system.

Language is the most underrated recruiting tool you have.

Lachlan's view: when your comms sound like your audience talks, the right people self-select in and the wrong people self-select out. 

When Lachlan and his Co-Founder Rob ran their consultancy, they made a deliberate choice: every piece of content — job posts, LinkedIn, internal comms — would sound like them. 

Not polished. Not corporate. Just consistent, personality-driven, and unapologetically casual. 

Their own team would joke around publicly online, riffing on the reality of working at a small consultancy where there's no HR department to escalate to. 

That tone wasn't accidental. And it became a filter.

People who wanted structure and corporate safety saw it and moved on. People who wanted to build, who valued attitude and coachability over credentials, saw it and leaned in. 

It won them contracts with companies like Twitter, and more importantly, it meant that by the time someone reached out — as a candidate or a client — they already knew how to talk to them. 

The language had done the qualifying before the first conversation even started.

Lachlan's framing of this is worth sitting with: the best brands understand their audience's language so well that when someone encounters their content, the reaction is "have they been reading my thoughts?" 

That's the bar. Not clever copy. Not employer brand slogans. Just language that makes the right person feel immediately understood.

So how do you get there? The same way you did with trust — start by listening. 

Go back to your clarity calls. Pay attention to the words your best people use when they describe what they love about working here, and what frustrates them. Look at how your team actually talks in Slack when things go wrong. That's your real voice — not whatever's on the careers page.

Then codify it. 

Create a Voice and Vibe doc: 

One thing to watch: casual doesn't mean careless. "Authentic" can drift into exclusionary or sloppy if you don't define the boundaries. The goal is language that's specific enough to attract and repel, not language that's undisciplined.

Lachlan launched Dream Big Social Club out of his podcast community. 

The model was disarmingly simple: pick a cool coffee shop once a month, have people roll in. No decks. No panels. No agenda. Just introductions — connecting people who wouldn't normally be in each other's world but who he knew would click. 

The best outcome? Attendees started hanging out on their own. The environment created the connections, not a program.

Now translate that to a workplace. 

Your company already has the raw ingredients — people across teams who don't interact enough, new hires who haven't found their footing, alumni who still care. 

The Head of People's job isn't to build a community program. It's to create the environment where community forms on its own, and then get out of the way.

Lachlan's strongest view in our conversation — and one worth echoing — is that automated relationship tools are hollow. 

Slack plugins that prompt you to "recognise a colleague" or birthday bots that send a templated message don't build connection. They perform it. 

Real community comes from personal attention: looking at someone's profile before you message them, genuine curiosity about their work, a DM that makes it obvious you actually took two minutes to read their stuff. 

Lachlan built his entire recruitment strategy around this — not posting, not blasting, but building one-to-one relationships through DMs and showing up consistently. The people who do that stand out precisely because almost nobody else bothers.

Inside a company, this looks like a People leader (or a manager, or a culture captain) doing the same work Lachlan describes — but pointed inward. 

It means personally introducing a new starter to someone in another team they'd get along with. It means a monthly low-key gathering with no agenda and no presentations — just coffee and conversation. It means a small surprise-and-delight budget ($50–$200 a month) spent on personal gestures that show you actually know the person, not swag blasts that show you have a vendor.

The mistake to watch for: this dies when it's one person's side hustle. The fix is to rotate community captains across teams, give each one a tiny budget and a simple play, and make it part of the rhythm rather than a project that gets deprioritised when things get busy.

I’ll reference a previous interview I did with Mews’ CPO, where they actually remunerated these kinds of roles (You Should be Paying Your Culture Builders).

One question worth sitting with: what do you have access to — people, experiences, knowledge, relationships — that no other company your size can offer? 

Lachlan leveraged his podcast network to bring in guests for exclusive workshops and gave away products from sponsors to his community. 

Your version might be an exec who can mentor someone in a different function, an investor who'd do a fireside chat, or simply the fact that your team has solved a problem nobody else in your industry has tackled yet.

That's your community advantage — and it costs almost nothing to activate.

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