Standing Up a Talent Marketing Team – Scott Ewert

Yeah. So, as Dan mentioned, um what I thought might be helpful is to kind of talk about the how, right? So, um we have heard from a lot of big brands that have all sorts of resources, very mature, you know, talent marketing, employer branding, you know, um functions um at regions. So, a little bit about us real quick. So we are a publicly traded super regional bank. So we have about 20,000 associates. So not small but also certainly not large especially in the financial services space. Um and some of you who live in the southeast probably no regions. Hopefully you've seen our branches um around town on your street corners and maybe you're even a customer of ours. So thank you for that um in advance. But you know in terms of our size you know with 20,000 associates our TA team is roughly 50 and that's including leaders includes talent marketing and of course all of our recruiters. So in terms of our journey I thought it would be helpful to see a quick snapshot and I imagine that this is going to resonate with some of you especially thinking about some of these major milestones. So on the left hand side you'll see kind of a timeline which I'll go through and then on the right hand side you'll see um a uh an image that we created that talks a lot about the competency model. So hopefully some of you guys have heard that and if not maybe that's the only thing that you get out of this but I do want to explain that to you because I do think it is a really great model to kind of judge maturity and also you know how you're thinking about moving along that maturity journey. So, so real quick, um, and again, you'll see I started with the bank back in 2017. When I joined the bank, I started asking a lot of questions about our strategy and employer branding in particular, and quickly learned that nobody here knew what I was talking about. So, um, that may be where some of you are today. Your organization does not understand what the what talent marketing is. They don't know about employer branding. EVP. All they know is marketing to clients. and that's okay if that's where you are. Um, through some hard work and strategy, you can certainly move further along. Um, in 2019 is actually when our glass door partnership started. So, um, one of the first things I noticed when I got here is that region's glass door profile had never been claimed. So, there was stuff happening that we had no control over. We were not shaping the narrative. We were not providing any time of any kind of behindthe-scenes insight into what it was like to work here. it was just an unclaimed profile. And so it didn't take me too long to convince the different people here and groups here that I was happy to take that over, be the admin, and start updating the profile to make sure it was accurate, but then to also start posting some content. Um, again, just whatever I could find that I thought might paint a little bit better picture of what it was actually like to work here. Um, in 2021, we implemented a CRM, which was kind of the turbocharger for where we've ended up here today. Um, but that helped. For those of you that have CRM, you know what I'm talking about. It is really um, you know, the game changer is a lot of people like to speak about. Um, because it does a lot of things to help you understand and take advantage of your different channels. Um, and it's also a great way to pull analytics, which a lot of people and a lot of uh, departments at least in regions always wanted to know what the numbers were doing. And that also helps paint a picture about why it's important to be doing the work. And then in 2024, we actually officially created our talent marketing team. So, you know, we had to go to our HR business partners and we had to explain that this is talent marketing is a real job that exists in the marketplace. uh we were able to point to some of our competitors to say these are some of the banks for us. Everybody always wants to know what your competitors are doing. But of course here are some of the banks that have these departments. They can go out to the market and get comp data and we really went through that process. That was really important because in doing so it really validated the importance of the work. And again, I think some of you are probably in that spot now where, you know, you maybe you've got some people and some uh some influencers within your organization that understand it's important and some that maybe don't. And that's part of the journey as well. when you think about the competency model which I'll talk about here in a second but really being able to say this is a very important work and um when we created this at that time that they were reporting to me and even now very recently we've decided that the work is so important that we're going to carve them out and they do report directly to our head of talent acquisition as a standalone function. So again really excited about where we are today. Um, and of course because of all the work that our talent marketing team has done, we have a fully automated campaign strategy. And I'll get into a little bit more of that here in a second. Um, in terms of the image on the right, so if you haven't heard of this competency

model, it's got four stages. First, you're unconsciously incompetent, which means you have no idea that you're not good at something. Then you move a little bit further to the right and you become consciously incompetent, which means now you know that you're not good at something. Then you move a little bit further along and you become consciously competent, which means you're able to be good at something and you're competent, but it takes a lot of work and you have to think about it. And then eventually you move into being unconsciously competent, which is that you're so good at something, you don't even have to think about it. It's just built into your process. It's built into your just your being, your fiber, you know, just you. Um, and that's where you always want to end up, right? It's just being so good at something you don't even have to think about it. And I wanted to share that with you because I do think if you are starting this journey that's a good model to use is to think about where are we on this? Do people even realize that we don't do this well? Maybe they do and we just need to do better. So I wanted to share that with you all as well. And then along the way we definitely learned some lessons and these are a few of the key lessons that I think you could expect to possibly come across as well. And again, for those of you that already have a mature talent marketing function, you've probably been through some of these as well. Um, the first one though is you may be doing this work by yourself for a while. And that's really when you're further to the left of the competency model. If you're the only person that realizes that something is an issue, you might be doing it by yourself until other people realize and then you can move again into that consciously incompetent model or part of the model because now we all agree that we're not very good at something. Um, also really important is understanding your channel options. So, um, you know, Sully was talking about the importance of email, that's a channel. Maybe you can SMS, you know, maybe you have a CRM, maybe you have Glass Door, maybe you have Indeed. You know, there's a lot of different tools that are out there that are channels that are used by certain types of people. We a lot of us talk about personas. um you know a persona could be an active job seeker versus a passive you know not job seeker but just a passive candidate who's out there. So in order to understand what your strategy options are you really need to understand what the channel options are and that's a great way um again to think about the tools that you have at your disposal and will help you kind of shape your strategy. Uh you need to have buyin to make real progress. Um that's probably a little bit of a no-brainer. Um, but the your ability to influence people who have influence is really important. That's really just a change management strategy and less about, you know, talent marketing in particular. Um, but you're going to need friends in high places that can help remove obstacles and friction for you as you move along your journey. So, um, you know, again, maybe that's your Marcom team, maybe that's senior leadership, maybe that's your CHRO, maybe it's your CMO. Just understanding who you need to influence in order to get the buyin that you need to move further along that maturity model um is a really critical piece of all that because without it, you're going to have a really tough time um really making any progress at all. Uh, and I also really learned a lot from connecting with our Marcom team. So, marketing communications. Um, they're already doing this work. They're just doing it for customers and they have the tools, they have the resources, they have the expertise to help you early in your journey to create the content that you need. Do you need day in the life videos? Do you need hero images for your career site? Do you need uh employee testimonials? If you can come up with the concepts and why those are important, then you can go to your Marcom team and say, "Hey, um, I know you are doing these things for our customers. I have an idea. What if we did some of these things, but for candidates? Could you help me with that? Could you give me some feedback? Help me think through um, you know, what might go wrong? What are some blind spots that I'm not aware of? " But go to them and ask for their help because they do have they have some of the strategies as well. But they will understand what you're talking about. And this is what we've always said. Our talent marketing team does for candidates what our corporate customers. And that's a really easy way to kind of distill it down to be able to talk to people that aren't in TA. You know, people that are on this call, you guys get it, but you might be talking to people who have no idea what you're talking about. And so to be able to go to Markcom and get some of those proof of concept um ideas and things kind of moving forward um is a great lesson that we learned um and learned quite a bit from. And then again definitely a no-brainer. A CRM can be your best friend. I mean we did a lot of what we did early on um without sending messages, which kind of sounds crazy, but we didn't have a way to send messages uh emails or SMS in a big way in a programmatic way until we had a CRM. And so um but again that was

further along our maturity model. That was where we were you know really in that we were consciously confident. We had a proof of concept. We had the Markcom partnership. We just really needed the tool. And so when we launched our or implemented our CRM that was a massive catalyst for us to be able to kind of take this all you know to that next level. And then you know this slide here this is the last slide of the deck because I wanted to just really kind of focus in on this. These are actual tips that uh that myself and our team really think could help organizations like Dan mentioned that maybe don't have you don't have a talent marketing team yet. Sorry. So the um the the first question to kind of ask yourself and I've mentioned this before is what level of awareness does your organization have of talent market? Again go back to that competency model. Where are we as an organization? Do we even know what it is? If so, can we point to other competitors or companies who do it well? Um, that's that bringing everybody to the table to understand what do we do? How does this work? You just need to be able to understand where you are in that competency model. And then again, what is your strategy? Even if you don't have an ability to execute the strategy, create one because that's going to be your that's your business case. Um, that's your proof of concept. That's how you can be able to track some ROI to a lot of this, but develop a strategy. And for us, the first thing we really needed to understand is who are the different personas that we're trying to consider. Um, who are uh those people? What are their behaviors? What are they looking for? What resonates? Um but you different personas require different messages and different um different strategies and understanding how to work and attract each different persona um and then convert them into candidates and applicants eventually. Um but it's really important to understand the personas and then again how will you communicate with them? That goes back to the channels. are you going to um you know be sending SMS messages to people who just applied, right? They're, you know, they're they're really interested in working for you. Maybe they applied from their phone. We have that data as well. You know, are you going to hit them quickly with a thanks for applying, you know, check out this, you know, our talent community. Um or are you going to be sending out mass email campaigns, which we do very effectively here, again, with the help of our CRM. But again, per persona, what's the channel that you want to use? Um, I think, you know, for number three, who do you need to influence to create the buyin? You I mentioned this a couple minutes ago, you know, is it your marcom? Is it your legal team? You know, is it your senior leadership? You know, or is it even compliance? And for those of us that are in highly regulated organizations, um we have to deal with compliance a lot. You know, you're going to have optouts. all these different um these different components of your messaging to make sure that you're compliant with the rules and the regulations that are required by your regulatory body. Again, what's in it for them, you know? So, a quick story. um we had been in the in I guess the early parts of an acquisition and we had heard I wasn't in the meetings obviously but we had heard that the investment bankers were actually bringing up glass door data to compare the culture of one company to our company um and that got our CHRO's attention and then he said hey Scott you've been talking about glass door tell me more because this is now showing in places that we hadn't expected you know then it started to pop up on institutional inst tester calls and these things are out there and if you can get ahead of it and you can shape again the message um that can really help you in ways you would have never expected. So again think about that as well in terms of what's in it for them. Um and again competitor examples for us you know it was that was really effective you know for us to be able to show our glass door scores compared to all of our competitors and to get that in front of leadership that started you know that started some conversations and that's really what we needed. We just needed to get our foot in the door. We needed for people to understand that these things are happening out there whether we like it or not. We had the data how many people are coming to your profile page per month. We could see all of those analytics, but that's really what got people's attention is to be able to show competitive data. Um, and with something like glass door or indeed now that has company profiles and ratings that's available to everybody. And so I think to be able to show that um as being publicly available data really helped us with our proof of concept. Um, and then thinking about resources. Um, again, it's kind of similar to the channel conversation, but you know, what does your tech stack look like? Um, you know, do you have a CRM? Are you looking at a CRM? Have you started to think about what CRM vendors are out there? Um, how are you going to evaluate the vendors? Um, you know, really it's a lot of that kind of work in terms of

understanding what the technology is that's out there. I know a lot of you on this call are big into technology. Um, you know, again, I'll I'll add AI as another SIP word, but um, you know, you really need to understand what technology is available to you and if you don't have the tech that you need, you need to do the research to go evaluate what you would like to bring on. Um, and again, some of the, you know, understanding existing vendor partners. So, I mentioned this more of like a gap analysis. So, when you think about what Glass Door does, you really can't do a lot of messaging, right? that's really more about just you're trying to influence how people feel about things or feel about your company, but there's not a lot of messaging that you can do there. So, that's not a great solution for sending out campaigns. Um, you know, then maybe you think about what you can do through Microsoft Outlook, right? You can't send, you know, all these emails to candidates if you don't have their email addresses in your system and then you've got to bring it in from someplace else. So a lot of that you can really evaluate by thinking about what your technology vendors what their capabilities are today. And then when you think about going to market to try to bring another solution, that's where you can look at the gaps that exist and really try to fill some of those in. Um and then the last one uh is headcount, right? So again, depending on the size of your company, um you may or may not have headcount available to deck against this work. Um and I'll tell you, we did not for a very long time. And so we kind of joke around, we bootstrapped it and we all had our side hustles of creating, you know, a lot of this content, sending out email campaigns when our jobs were not technically talent marketing. Um, and over time, what we were able to do is actually reskill and upskill associates we already had as part of our talent acquisition organization, but they were doing work that we were able to automate using technology. So, for instance, interview scheduling. You know, we had a team of folks that were um that were doing interview scheduling full-time. And over time, we realized that we had a vendor and um that we were working with, our CRM vendor, who has a tool that could do that for us. And so again to create the headcount that we needed to move this forward from a talent marketing perspective to create that team, we really needed to understand what that capability was so that we could take that work off of those people and then give them this new work. And um and it took a little bit of time to get all that into place, but when it happened, we were ready to jump into action. We had our strategy in place. We had our vendors in place. We really just needed the people. And um and so back, as I mentioned, back in 2024, we created that team and we knew exactly what to do with them. And um since then, it's just been an incredible opportunity, you know, to look again for um for automation from a campaign perspective, you know, again, hyperpersonalized content per persona. Um and we've just really had um a lot of success, you know, recently because of all the work that we did leading up to really 2024 and then what we've done ever since. So, um, yeah. So, this is, uh, this is the last slide of the deck and, um, happy to answer any questions. Uh, but again, hopefully you guys will get at least a little something out of