Vol 14. Insights from Duolingo’s Global Head of Talent Brand

Meet Jocelyn S. Lai

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their careers, insights, and accomplishments.

This week, that marketing leader is Jocelyn S. Lai, Global Head of Talent Brand at Duolingo. Jocelyn sits in the unique position as a talent brand marketer. Her career started off in marketing, pivoted to talent acquisition, but she’s managed to keep her feet firmly planted in both worlds. 

Here are the need-to-knows about Jocelyn:

• She’s played critical roles in opening offices, rebranding, restructuring, and taking a company public.

• She’s a regular public speaker and has been recognized by the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, The Wall Street Journal, and SXSW for her achievements.

• She was named No. 2 in Talentful’s 2022 Top 50 Talent Leaders in Tech, named one of the top 100 Talent Acquisition Leaders in Tech by HIGHER in 2023, and was named Technical.ly’s Pittsburgh Culture Builder of the Year in 2021. 

Marketing meets recruiting 

Jocelyn studied advertising in undergrad and always saw herself as a marketer—sometimes the audience just happens to be talent. She got her start at a media agency but within a year and a half, the 2008 financial crisis hit and upended that opportunity. 

From there, Jocelyn found herself on the client side at a time when e-commerce was brand new. She was brought on to help build out e-commerce as a revenue stream for JCPenney, jcp.com. However, the client side moved a bit too slowly for her liking. That helped prompt Jocelyn’s first foray into talent. 

“One of my goals was to eventually teach at a university and to do that, you typically need at least a master’s degree. So I decided to go to grad school and at the same time, I started a full-time job as a recruiter at an agency.”

Jocelyn was brought on to hire people that could build out the agency’s digital analytics and digital production teams. “The reason they hired me was because I did those jobs at JCPenney and knew what to look for in candidates. So my first entry point into recruiting was actually because I understood the marketing craft and could identify those people. That’s always been my secret sauce as a recruiter.

Jocelyn said she chose recruiting because of the opportunity to build a vision. “What I also found is that meeting with so many people and hearing so many different perspectives actually enriched my own understanding of where the market is headed. I always say business development, PR, and talent acquisition teams are constantly talking to their competitors so they have the most valuable intelligence on what types of capabilities are being built.”

Inflection points

From there, Jocelyn was intentional about joining organizations at points of change. “I love building new things and helping companies go into the next era.”

That meant rebranding a TV-centric ad agency to be more digital. Later at R/GA, that meant helping them open up an LA office, and later heading up talent acquisition in the Asia Pacific region. As head of APAC, Jocelyn opened an office in Shanghai, restructured an office in Singapore, and grew an office in Sydney. 

Droga5 eventually came knocking about an opportunity to build out their talent acquisition department. As a builder, Jocelyn seized the chance. “It was the first time I actually built a function from the ground up. I had so much fun with it.”

Then a life change spurred some big questions. “For the first time ever, I did something that wasn’t for my career—I got married. And I had a kind of identity crisis. I moved from New York to Pittsburgh, I quit my job at Droga, I had no friends nearby. It was a very humbling, pivotal moment for me. I had worked so hard to move so quickly through my career but when that goes away, I just started asking, ‘Who are you?’”

That moment led Jocelyn to start her own consulting, something she’d always wanted to do. But in trying it out, she learned it wasn’t a fit for her. “It might change in the future but I didn’t like it at the moment because ultimately, I had to chase money. And I’m someone who chases ideas and dreams more than money.”

Building to go public 

Jocelyn found a dream to chase at Duolingo: they wanted to make education available to everyone around the world and they wanted to go public. She joined Duolingo when headcount was around 100 (for context, they’re at 850 people now) and they didn’t have a talent department. 

“It was not an everyday opportunity. Joining Duolingo was really when I pivoted to Talent Brand. I’m very grateful to our CEO and board because they’re completely supportive of making Talent Brand a standalone function. The logic is, if we’re looking to hire the world’s best talent, we have to be known for that. And if we’re known for that, it should make it easier for recruiters to do their job.”

Jocelyn said her role is unique and exciting because there aren’t many marketers that have dug into what makes talent tick.

Jocelyn said transparency is a critical part of her approach to Talent Brand. “The more we own our identity, the clearer it is to our audience (talent included). I see a lot of brands struggle with the fear of taking a stance. But by not taking a stance, the company actually becomes just like every single other company.”

So what does being transparent look like? One example is the stance Duolingo took on remaining in Pittsburgh. Jocelyn said the company got a lot of press inquiry about whether they would open an office in San Francisco so the company made one post on LinkedIn about their stance. And it spurred quite a few PR articles. 

“Is hiring people to join Pittsburgh harder? Absolutely. But we think it’s the right thing to do. Some people hate that, some people love it. It’s like dating—you gotta find out who loves you.”

A standout campaign

Jocelyn recalled the first time she was able to test whether Talent Brand would actually work. She was at Droga5 helping launch their internship program. 

“Instead of doing the typical application round—going through thousands of applications and portfolios—we decided to hold an Instagram competition. We had a brief, people submitted their content via Instagram, and we looked at those pieces of content to decide who to hire.”

As part of this initiative, Jocelyn said the team branded the entire internship program, calling it “Apply Yourself.” They approached it in a humorous way, creating a fake infomercial and swag for the interns.

“It was really fun and I’m quite proud of that. I don’t think there are many internship programs that take a marketing lens.”

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Advice and takeaways

1) Figure out your team’s brand. 

Jocelyn advised that the most efficient, long-term way for marketers to hire their own teams is to figure out the answer to this question: What’s the brand of the team you want to hire? “Express that and it will attract the right people. This will be quicker than trying to go out, find the right people, and tell your story one-on-one.”

Consider building your team like you’re building a brand. Identify what qualities and values are needed to align with that brand. Put it in the job description so the right people are drawn in at the outset.

2) Don’t be so risk-averse that you lose creativity. 

Jocelyn noticed since the pandemic, when many marketing orgs were reduced, there’s a lot of fear when it comes to marketing. And that fear is making many teams operate with less risk. “The number one question I get from candidates is, ‘What does your brand bible or marketing playbook look like?’ But we don’t have that defined because we’re evolving the brand day-by-day. And the moment we have a playbook, we’re sticking by those rules.”

Make sure you and your team aren’t operating so strictly to a playbook that you lose creativity. Iteration supports relevancy so consider whether your brand needs to shift focus more on evolution than following playbook rules.

3) Use your imagination (and make sure your team does too).

Jocelyn said she’s concerned that imagination is lost. “Creativity is how you can connect the dots in a way to make something. Imagination is how you can come up with something from a blank slate. And I’m seeing fewer marketers be able to do that because there’s fear.”

Take a page from Jocelyn’s book and encourage your team to, “think like a child and pretend everything’s possible.” It can give space for imagination, which can then unlock new levels of creativity. 

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