S4 E92 | Branding Recruitment Marketing Meeting Recap

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Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:21
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of CareerXroads podcast. In this episode, we’re doing a recap of our second branding and marketing meeting for 2021. So we’re pretty excited about that the time just flew by. And it went really, really fast. So in the spirit of just jumping right in and kind of talking about what we learned and what we shared about, I want to just kick off with our two guests, and have them introduce themselves. So Jesse, if you want to tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do over at Advocate Aurora.

Jessica Summerfield, Advocate Aurora Health 0:54
Yes, so my name is Jesse Summerfield, and I am recruitment marketing specialist at Advocate Aurora Health. So we’re a 26 hospital system based in Wisconsin, and Illinois. And I oversee all things kind of employment brand recruitment, marketing, mostly for our staff level recruiting, but that also do support leadership, recruiting, and a little bit of clinician recruiting as needed.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:20
Nice. Thanks for being on. Welcome to the show. And Thaya you’re at Lockheed Martin, but tell us a little bit about what you do. Over at LMC.

Thaya Lupo, Lockheed Martin 1:28
Yes. So they are and I work at Lockheed Martin, specifically in the business area of missiles and fire control. MSC for short. Which I know Chris, you’re always excited about because it’s like everybody’s childhood dream to, you know, watch things blow up.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:28
Or just have the word missile in your job title, just like I might change mine to missile and fire control at career crossroads.

Thaya Lupo, Lockheed Martin 1:57
So I am the recruitment marketing strategist for this empire control. And I primarily am focused on our ex-pro attraction strategies. We have another another teammate who focuses on early career. And, you know, our big focus, of course, like everybody has has been on on diversity hiring and you know, even just specifically just trying to attract during this crazy time of COVID.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:27
Yeah, well, thanks. And welcome to the show. Glad to have you on the podcast first time for you. So we had an interesting session today, it was two hours we did two show and tell some two very large organizations that have done some really great stuff from a branding and delivery standpoint. And then we did a little bit of an exercise and each of those focused on internal attraction, and marketing and external attraction and marketing with some undertones of focus being around DE&I and this big wave of attrition and challenge of attraction that we see so swelling in front of us. So let me ask with with all of the stuff that we covered in a very rapid two hours. Jesse, was, was there a big takeaway, or an aha moment for you that you that you’d want to share with the industry people should be aware of?

Jessica Summerfield, Advocate Aurora Health 3:18
Well, one thing that I’ve been thinking about that answers your question, but also it doesn’t, but I just wanted to put this plug in is, we talked a lot about burnout, I was part of the retention group and the attrition group. And because we work in health care, like it’s been especially bad, I think, just we’ve just been so busy, even from a recruiting perspective, and you’re trying to hire for all these different areas, and I myself have been feeling burned out and coming to this session, even just for two hours, like helps to refresh a little bit, you know, getting away from the doldrums of like creating flyers and Facebook posts and talking with other industry professionals and kind of feeling recognized in that it’s helpful. So thank you for that. But I think you know, in talking about burnout the and, and how to kind of combat some of this attrition, if that we’ve came up with some pretty unique ideas. And some of them were, you know, things that people are already doing. Like in our organization, we’re doing like care packages for frontline nurses that are, you know, the chapstick in the healthy snack type stuff just to say like, we recognize you and here’s a little something. But then my favorite idea was having, like giving people an option of either a retention bonus in dollars or in time of sabbatical. And I thought that was could be kind of innovative to give people that that option because some people need and or want the money and some people need and or want the time like I would prefer the time right now. So being able to offer something like that, I think would be really cool.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:50
Yeah, we’re the chapstick they may need and or want the chapstick,

Jessica Summerfield, Advocate Aurora Health 4:53
Right

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:54
It’s very it’s a real it’s a real thing. I love that said Thalia How about yourself any any big takeaways or something you’d want to share?

Thaya Lupo, Lockheed Martin 5:05
I thought, you know, the the sort of interesting approach one of our speakers that talked about doing events, but holding them so they’re more targeted, and, you know, focused on around a certain topic and not shoving down your throat jobs, jobs jobs, which I think a lot of us tend to do right now, because there’s such a desperate need for for butts in seats, you know, if you will. So I think taking that unique approach where you pick a topic, and then you have, you know, speakers that are experts around that, talking about that, and making it more of like, like the forum that we had, you know, where people are getting to communicate with one another, you know, have some fun. And it’s not so much about filling those roles, but then coming back after that hiring event, not really being a hiring event, but talking about your jobs, I thought was a fantastic approach.

Jessica Summerfield, Advocate Aurora Health 6:08
One group said that they took the words recruiting and talent acquisition, you know, off of everything. So that’s it really was meant to be more of like a networking and a long play as well, because it wasn’t just about like, who can we hire right now. But like, okay, this is great. Like, we got a couple hires out of a boat, we also have all of these people that will continue to talk to you for years, you know, how much I think especially on those, like higher level leadership and professional rules is super important.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:34
Yeah, and I think there’s an interesting, there’s always been an interest, I think, over the last five or six years within talent acquisition from a marketing branding perspective to create these communities. And I’m using air quotes, if you’re on your treadmill listening at all, these communities, and they’re not really communities, they typically are mailing lists, right, there’s no real interaction that goes on. It’s sign up for job alerts is what it is, and we’ve slapped the word community on it. But for those of us who take the word community very seriously, we know that that’s, that’s supposed to be a two way street, some dialogue, some two way conversations are taking place. It’s been really interesting in the last year, so to see folks like yourselves that are in those marketing and branding seats, try to incorporate real community somehow, real conversation somehow. So getting beyond the mailing list and doing these open sessions, where the director of marketing or the head of marketing or the CEO even sits in and maybe even hangs out a little while, I think that was one of the stories that got shared is like, well, he said, he just give us 15 minutes, but he stayed on for the whole thing, including the recap, he was so engaged. I think that’s pretty powerful. Yeah, there’s another thing that it was sort of occurred to me, I noticed on one of the rooms, so we broke, we broke into two separate sides. And we said, come up with an internal strategy come up with an external strategy. And one of the rooms that was focused on external that I kept popping back into what was fascinating to me is what they were, what they ultimately were starting landing at is that it’s not that we have to build new stuff. From an external attraction standpoint, what we have to do is showcase the internal strategy to the externals. So we spend all this time at that organization leaning in and making our employees feel like they belong, so that they won’t, they won’t want to leave, they want to stay in the family. What we should be doing externally is not trying to replicate that, but instead showcase that and kind of create a sense of FOMO, if you will, right that, Oh, my God, you want to get up in here and just get some love and like we give to our employees, right, you want to feel the same way that you belong and be part of the family. Look what you’re missing.

Jessica Summerfield, Advocate Aurora Health 8:34
I was in an internal focus group. But we talked about that, too, that, you know, if we have this great internal campaign that’s going to trickle out and that people are going to talk about what a great place they were, you know, whether we asked them to or not, you know, that’s going to start to leak out and that will improve. Hopefully, candidate flow and candidate quality, I think.

Thaya Lupo, Lockheed Martin 8:54
Yeah, we kind of touched on that as well. We talked about, you know, using that campaign to really promote through referral programs and amping up those you know, because people are going to refer in those that look like themselves. So you know, if you target your diversity population within your company, for referrals, they’ll refer those that you know, are within their, their circles outside of the company.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:21
That is an excellent point, combat that typical challenge and work that to your advantage. I love it. Jesse, Thaya thank you so much for hanging out for us a little bit are with us for a little bit and jumping on the podcast and talking about the recap, I think it’s super helpful for your peers or colleagues who don’t necessarily get to attend and for those who kind of wonder what goes on secretly behind the meetings. We’re gonna say thank you with a big virtual podcast coin. So you’re going to get a CXR challenge coin show up and that’s of course gonna launch you up the leaderboards but we really appreciate you jumping on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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