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Mark Mathis: I'm Mark Mathis and I'm with Bryan Ernest.

And we're going to do some recruitment today. Bryan, I know you just got back from a health care conference. What was one of the hottest topics at that conference?

Bryan Earnest: Yeah, thanks Mark. It was just great to be at a conference again and be among people. And, you know, I was expecting a lot of conversation about COVID of course, vaccines, the changing landscape of healthcare, which healthcare seems to be changing by the minute and technology. But one thing I was really surprised is a lot of emphasis on the shortage of nurses and other healthcare workers, and a lot of concern of marketers saying we're focusing a lot of our attention on recruitment and we're finding that with some of our other businesses too.

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I just read, that the top issue for HR departments is recruitment, followed by retention, but recruitment was the key. And at Amperage, I know we're doing a lot more recruitment campaigns for all kinds of organizations. So I think we've got a hot topic to delve into today. So let's get started and talk a little recruitment.

I just wanted to start this by talking about what recruitment is not. I know that's not always the best way, but sometimes it let's get this out of the way, so we don't have to discuss it again. Let's just start with this, $15 per hour banner outside your organization is not recruitment. That's negotiating. You're negotiating price. You've already gone to price.

Bryan Earnest: Yes.

Mark Mathis: I don't think any of those banners help. It's kind of viewing the process strictly from a transactional lens. So, I think today, people are looking for more out of their jobs and out of their careers. And I think that's caused some of the shortage in some areas and for a lot of organizations, I think they believe that help wanted is their marketing story. It's like we've taken our old newspaper classified strategies and apply them to recruitment today. So, my belief, I think yours too, Bryan, is that now hiring is not messaging. It's just a cry for help or in this case, it's a cry for help wanted. So, I think we need to be more strategic and more thoughtful about our recruitment messaging.

The journey map that used to work for potential employees is, you got to throw it out the window and really rethink it and update it to meet today's applicants, because it's pure marketing to me, recruitment is.

Bryan Earnest: You know, Mark, that gives me a thought. Before go further, we work a lot with colleges, right? And colleges for years, knowing they are competing for students and so focus on their benefits, getting their story down. Who are they? And students make a choice. You know, I think the thing that HR departments have been I always had the luxury that well employees are going to come to us. Right. They have to sell themselves to us. And I think businesses need to think about, no, you've got to do some selling of your business to potential employees. And that's a very different place for many organizations to be. We have to think a lot more like colleges, right. Of saying, why would I, as a 17 year old, want to come and be a part of that culture, that organization, live on that campus, be a part of that, associate with those people. And so it's a mindset shift for sure, for a lot of organizations to say you can't just put up a help wanted, or post a $15 an hour sign and say, yup, they're just going to come show up.

Mark Mathis: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the shift in healthcare, when a lot of organizations would put up in their clinics, accepting new patients.

Bryan Earnest: Oh yeah.

Mark Mathis: As opposed to welcoming new patients, you know, it's like, nope, you put in an application, we'll accept you. You know, are competing and if you're competing, you better have a good game plan going into it. So tell me a little bit more about that the conference and what you heard and how the shift from COVID to recruitment, is going in that industry.

Bryan Earnest: Let's be honest though. I think they were just tired of talking about COVID so it was kind of the new, the new thing. And I think the issue of recruitment and the need to attract workforce is just a big issue for the healthcare industry. I got to see a hospital CEO last night at a dinner and talked to her for a little bit, and it's a huge issue. What they're paying for hourly rate. How they're recruiting from around the country. It's a big, big challenge. And so it's getting them to think about recruitment a lot differently. You know, Mark, we did a recent survey for one of our clients, of local business people, within a region, asking what they wanted their local economic development organization to focus on.

And what came back overwhelmingly was talent, talent, and talent. Attract it, help with recruitment, help with retention. These are just huge issues for businesses. And you know, I'm glad we're diving into this topic today because we're finding that the marketing department and the HR department, now it's like the Hatfields and McCoys, they now need to be friends.

They need to do some greater collaboration and we're seeing some of our organizations that we're working with doing some pretty creative things to, I think really enhance their opportunity to do recruitment better. So, we're gonna kind of look at this from a 360 degree perspective as we always do. As you think about HR and PR how do they need to work together, Mark?

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I think that probably doesn't happen in a lot of organizations because you've got those nice siloes and HR does their thing, PR works on this. But if you are thinking in that kind of holistic approach, you really need to add marketing and HR and PR to the mix and they all need to be working together. And that probably doesn't happen a lot just because people get busy, things happen. They seem to have different goals, but this is really a marketing issue. You need to have a good plan put together and that's gonna be both departments, three departments working together. I just think of an HR department that is all of a sudden going well, I need to run some digital ads.

How do I do that? I've got to put a social media plan to gether. We don't typically do that. We're so busy with our other issues that we really can't think of that part. And how are you going to know the assets that are in the organization from video to messenging, optimizing it for recruitment. I'm pretty sure that your sales video may not work for your recruitment video.

Those people are looking for a different messaging. It really makes me think about brand altogether. And that's probably a bigger issue. We'll have to talk about it a little bit later in this, but I think that collaboration's the first part. If you're not collaborating between PR, marketing and HR, you're just not going to be successful. So you've got to update the key messages. You've got to bring HR in. You've got to think about everything from forms to all the things you take for granted, mission statements, purpose statements, vision statements, forms, the stuff you put in that about us section of your website's gotta be critical.

Branding's at many tentacles and it needs to reach and it needs to embrace HR in a way that it never has done before. So, I just broached a little bit on websites and that, that's a huge issue. And I think, Bryan, what are you seeing in that, that area? Do you think should be done?

Bryan Earnest: It's interesting what you said, you have to have a similar kind of marketing strategic plan around recruitment, the same as you would of recruitment of customers. Right? It's a similar sales process. And so quite often in that sales process, we always say it starts with the website. It's where we're ultimately going to drive people to engage with your organization. First and foremost, is the website welcoming and inviting to a potential employee? What do they immediately take away from your website about your organization and you said it a few minutes ago, your mission, vision, values, all of those things; is that in alignment with who they are as a person? It's just like, access from a sales don't make the sale hard for me. Right. You want that Amazon-like experience? So is it easy for me to get to an application? Is it easy for me to fill out a form and get that to the right HR person. Do I get an immediate response from your organization? Do I get appropriate follow-up? But I think also there's gotta be content there that is really engaging with today's potential employee. Are there videos? We'll talk about video in a minute, but videos that are really targeted to a potential employee. Is that engaging?

Does it feel like, if I were to visit that website, go, that's a place that wants me to work there and maybe it's its own website, that is targeted to careers with that organization, not just a piece or a parcel of your company website, but maybe it has to be its own job site that really focuses on that recruitment. And you can do a lot of tracking and do a lot of other things. Kind of leads me to then how do we drive people there? And we are seeing a lot of organizations shift their budget from advertising of products and services to recruitment, and it starts with digital and we're using it all, Mark. It's from search, display, social; the interesting part and I think a lot of marketing directors need to dive into this and help their counterparts in HR, is there are a lot of federal laws around using digital advertising with regards to recruitment. You can't limit audiences based on gender, ages, parental status, marital status, or even zip code.

Mark Mathis: All the things you'd want to put in.

Bryan Earnest: You can do retargeting. Yeah, all the things you'd want to do. But you can use some geographic targeting, but you can't use zip codes. So, there's just a lot of interesting nuances to recruitment advertising through digital platforms like Google and Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. So, you really have to dive into it and learn the nuances or work with a partner that can help you with that. You can do really cool audience targeting though. And by interest and audience profiling, that kind of stuff can be really helpful. We did a campaign recruiting drivers for truck driving company.

And, you think about the interests and hobbies of somebody who's a truck driver. You may have greater luck getting to that potential recruit. You know, I was talking to the manager of our digital media area and she was saying, you know, what, what ads work best and what Google keeps telling her are, share real life experiences of your employees. What's it like there, what are the benefits, culture, flexible work, time schedules, even volunteerism. Those are the kinds of things that, especially like Gen Z, the youngest audience, that's the stuff they're looking for as they're coming out of college, that's what they're looking for. And those are the things they're clicking on. So a lot of good lessons learned, I think, from a good digital approach to recruitment.

Mark Mathis: From some of the things you were saying, Bryan, it just seems like we used to have the strategy of the customer is number one. Right. And then everything else falls below that. And I think now we've need to reassess that and its customers are number one and employees are number one. And that includes potential employees because without both of those, you can't ever deliver on the customer is number one, you can't deliver on that promise of great service or great products. So you've got to have that in there. And I really liked the idea of maybe even a separate site or a landing page or a micro-site of some kind that would speak directly to potential employees, because then you don't have to get into all the other stuff.

You can really focus on messages that would relate directly with that audience and connect them in the right way. It just seems like taking a new look at this and really diving into what do people want when they're trying to find a new career, a new job or, even change within their own. They have a lot different questions than what you're probably putting on your website today about products and services.

Bryan Earnest: I think you're right on Mark. I like that kind of that dual thinking around customer and employee, and if you have that combination, right, you're set up to be a successful organization. You mentioned video earlier. I mentioned video earlier. Obviously it's a really engaging way to connect with potential employees. Talk a little bit about what your approach might be from a video perspective and does that play a part in the search process at all? And what's the value of video?

Mark Mathis: Video is everything in recruitment right now. My daughter just went through a series of interviews. They were all done online. It's video, right? You're on a screen, you got a camera, you've got a microphone, you've got a background, you've got lighting, it's all video. So you've got to start with that process. And then you've got to go through to messaging. And I think you just said it, Bryan, real life experiences. You've got to have them and perspective employees are no different than customers. They want to see more. They want to hear more. They want to have a nice story, but they also want to be able to get a look inside of maybe how the organization operates.

And it's more than just some of the simple images that we might put from iStock or, any kind of a generic stock footage. People love video. We know that, but we also know that it's, it's gotta be relevant and it's gotta be relevant in the first few seconds, to keep them engaged.

You can't just say you have a good culture. You've got to show that culture. And it's not just a bunch of people smiling and waving at the camera. It's engagement. It's action, it's activity. And it's not two guys playing ping pong. That's not culture. I mean, show how that fits, how that improves people is great.

You got it. but what's it mean what's the why behind it? Why is there a ping pong table in the middle of the room. How does that help? I really liked the idea of employees speaking to employees. So if you're interested in doing a job, you want to hear from the people that do that job now. It's great to have your CEO have a video from your CEO, nothing wrong with that, but if only your CEO is talking, you're really not resonating with people that aren't going to be a CEO someday. They just want to be a simple line cook. I don't know if the CEO can connect, but maybe another cook would say, hey, I love my job. I love what I do. I love it when I go home, I feel really satisfied. And I'm paid well. That would go a lot farther than maybe just the CEO, trying to talk about how great the organization again.

So, to me that fundamentals are the same. You've got to optimize your videos for recruitment. They've gotta be effective. You can't take for granted that it's a recruitment video. I've seen a lot of really bad recruitment videos. I'm sorry, folks. They're just bad. Because they are taken for granted or they're just not the priority is just not put on it. Didn't have to be in the past. Now, it does. One last thing I might say, Bryan, is that I think more and more people as they're doing these, as you're doing video or you're thinking about video; you've just got to really think it through, especially in that interview, virtual interview, what's your background look like for your company?

What's the lighting look like? How's it sound? Do you get a microphone just for that person? Or are they just going to use their laptop when they do the interview? Is does it say something about your organization, how you're set up even there to talk to your employees? I just don't think you can take anything for granted because they're looking for the subtle differences.

They know lots of companies are doing good jobs, but what were the little subtle things that moved them? You know, I saw a culture expressed in a different way or, everyone had their dog there, there wasn't just one dog walking through the video that day. Right. It's it's integrated into the organization.

So just making sure that every part of the video process is really thoroughly thought through. And putting the same kind of quality into a recruitment video needs to be, paramount. Any other video that you might do, you've really got to dress it up and think about it. It's probably good for retention too, think about getting your employees to say great things about the organization. There's a lot of research around that that's from psychologists that, that actually makes people believe more in, in their understanding about the organization, if they talk positively about it or, or express how they really feel, in that kind of format.

So I just think it would be a real win, win, win all the way around to invest the time and the money of course, into doing some great video around that. So, that's just another component. That's not really, I mean, video's not the plan and video's not really the overall messaging. To me, just, even when you, started talking about that marketing conference, just thinking about this from how important brand is now.

Talk about that a little bit, Bryan, in the larger sense and the holistic approach that we're discussing.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. I think we've been kind of talking about it from the kickoff of this whole podcast, Mark. You know, everything kind of ties back to brand and the alignment. And I think the silo that HR has probably quite often been in, and then you have marketing and communications and other parts of an organization. And, and they're not always fully integrated. Right. They feel like they have a different mission. They have a different objective. And so, there's not great alignment. We've seen that in many organizations is even the brand that the HR department is pushing forward isn't quite in alignment with the brand story that the organization is sharing overall.

So, you know, it does go back to just those is it the same story? Is it the same values, the same mission being portrayed? We even have one organization Mark that we work with. Their primary color for all of their branding and everything is blue, but the HR department decided that their logo is green. Going what? So that's part of the identity disconnect. The experience should be the same, the feel, the vibe that a customer would have about your organization should be a similar. There should be alignment there. Just operationally, making it easy for an applicant to access your organization to get connected.

And certainly, you mentioned culture. I would say the biggest thing that we see a swing and a miss from organizations is just not the alignment of brand and recruitment, somehow it's a different message, somehow that it's a different story being told. And I think, when there is that alignment, I think that's when you have great success and I love what you said about sharing that purpose.

I can just share with you Mark, over the last, probably four to six months, I've done a lot of interviews of new ampers coming on board. And so many people, have asked you think they're going to ask questions about their benefits and compensation and work day schedule and what kind of office will, you know, all those kinds of things?

No, they're all asking about culture and purpose and why do we do what we do? And we've had people come to our organization leaving others because we do a well-defined purpose. It's right there, front and center on our website. You can find it. It's in our communication that people will understand who we are, what we do, why we do it and who we do it for. And they're drawn to that. And, that's really about that understanding the brand of the organization that you're going to go work for and, they have to be in alignment.

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And the branding goes so much deeper than people would like to think sometimes. It crosses so many different areas that if your brand is a little out of sync in the HR area, your employees really are started on the wrong track. They're not going to catch it maybe in orientation. They're going to say, well wait, I was told this then wait, this doesn't fit, but that's the other problem with those banners.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah.

Mark Mathis: Now offering $20 an hour, it tells you nothing about the culture, who you are. Now hiring could be a problem. So I've seen so many different ways organizations are using media now. I mean, it's been bus, bench boards have got now hiring sides, giant billboards. I mean, people are spending a large amount of money trying to recruit people. And I applaud the activity around that recruitment, but you really need to be careful about placement, messaging and branding because I saw a great example of this the other day, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was a sign on a restaurant's front door and in facing customers as they walked in. And it said, cook wanted, and I just thought, man, this dining experience is going to be fantastic.

They need a cook. Maybe I should apply right now and go in and help them cook my meal. So I think all the messaging matters. The easy answers are not always the best in this kind of case. I know it matters to your audience what you're saying and how you say it. So I'd say take great care in your recruitment, take great care in you're trying to retain people. Your future really does depend on it. So with that, that's today's episode of the Amped Up podcast. If you like the insights that you heard or you're interested in the Amperage, please visit us at amperagemarketing.com.

And if you get a chance, would you please rate and review us highly, if you can? We would certainly appreciate any feedback you can offer. And that's it on recruitment. For Bryan Ernest and me, Mark Mathis, thank you for listening. And we'll move your needle.