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Wendy Maynard, Strategic Director & Founding Partner of Kinesis, joins the HR for Small Business podcast to discuss how the collaboration of marketing and HR can produce a successful employer brand that impacts talent attraction . She also shares about attracting, retaining, and understanding the Millennial generation.

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Brandon: Welcome everybody! My name is Brandon Laws and this is the HR for Small Business podcast. I have a special guest with me, Wendy Maynard from Kinesis. She is the Strategic Director and Founding Partner of Kinesis and we’re very happy to have her on the show. Welcome!
Wendy: Thank you, Brandon! I’m very excited to be here.
Brandon: Kinesis is a Portland-based company and they are in the business of transforming the brands and marketing strategies of service-centric businesses from the inside out. Today’s topic of employer branding is a very good topic for Wendy to speak on. Let’s get started, if you’re ready Wendy.
Wendy: Absolutely!
Brandon: You recently wrote, and I ran across this on LinkedIn, but you wrote an article titled, “How Can I Attract More of the Right Employees?” In that article you stated that marketing can fill a key role in the sales funnel and recruiting the right-fit employees at the same time. Marketing absolutely fills the pipeline for sales, but what about recruiting employees? That’s an interesting take.
Wendy: Yes, so Kinesis typically works with small to mid-sized businesses that are between 1 and 20 million. I like to think of them a little bit as the forgotten stepchild in the business world. If you go to the marketing books that are out there, there are tons that focus on the Fortune 500, Fortune 100 case studies. There’s also a lot for the DIY, one or two person, ma-and-pa shops. Those actually represent a huge component of the marketplace. The percentage of the small to mid-sized businesses that we work with is not that kinesishigh unless you look at it as an actual number. When you look at it as a discreet number, there’s a huge number of leadership teams who aren’t getting the right advice. And actually, my business partner and I came to the conclusion that marketing is really broken for that population of the folks and businesses that we serve.
One of the things that came to us a lot was, How do we hire right? Or We’re not getting the right talent. Or We’re not getting enough applications. One of the problems is that HR and marketing tend to be siloed. Marketing is not aware of the need for talent in the way that they should be. They don’t have goals, they don’t have metrics to measure success by. And also, HR is not tied into the overarching goals of the company. The strategic objectives are, a lot of times, given metrics that just aren’t really helpful: How many days is a job description sitting on a LinkedIn or other job board? Which really is kind of a meaningless objective when you’re trying to look for the top talent.
So we decided to tackle this head on by creating a methodology for weaving together marketing and HR and looking to attract more of the right fit, top talent employees that are going to accelerate the growth of a company.
Brandon:  I look at my own role as a marketer, and before I was so focused on outbound marketing, but to your point, as HR finds an issue with finding talent. Maybe a job posting has been sitting on LinkedIn for months and can’t find any talent. They started to look into my resources in marketing and asked Hey, can you help us? And when I look at my role now, I swear it’s 30% employer branding activities whereas in previous years that wasn’t the case at all. In your role and business development experience with Kinesis, how did you realize that marketing needed to be involved in this whole employer branding and recruiting area?
Wendy: One of the reasons this even started was that some years back, we were working with clients on more traditional marketing type of activities, and at some point they’d bring up, Hey, do you have any tips on hiring, because this is a real pain point for us. There were a lot of aspects that they were having pain with—everything from recruiting to even getting enough applicants in the door to the questions they were asking to getting them trained to retaining employees and reducing their turnover to building a great culture. There were so many aspects around hiring, we decided there was a real problem within this small to mid-sized business community that we needed to address. And we started to realize that this is actually a marketing function. If you look at an employer brand and if you look at marketing as just building relationships, when you start with an internal customer—that being your employees and occasionally contractors—but if you look at your employee base and you look at bringing in and retaining all A-players and you look at what that can do to your business, through bringing them in through marketing, and then building those relationships so you don’t have as much turnover, and building a great culture, the trajectory at which that accelerates a company’s growth becomes exponential. Once we started to tackle that and once we started to weave the two activities together, the transformation of the client company was nothing short of amazing.
Brandon: You mentioned earlier that marketing and HR—very separate functions that operated in different silos for the purposes of attracting talent in the organization. How did you figure out ways in your role at Kinesis to get marketing and HR to work together, and what are some ways that they can?
Wendy: We always start with our clients by shoring up their mission, vision, and values, so that they have more clarity as to who they are—what their brand is, their mission and values—and then what their vision is for the company and where they want to go.
Once they’re clear on that, it makes everything else a lot easier, including their hiring. The next step is really to get marketing and HR together to talk about the ideal fit for each position that they’re hiring for and to take a real hard look at whether or not they have A or B or possibly even C-players in a role. If they have B and C players, and this is often a really hard task for HR and leadership to deal with, but they’ll need to either transition that person to what Jim Collins calls “the right seat on the bus,” or possibly even off the bus altogether. There have been plenty of studies done, and “bad apples” are what they’re called. A bad apple can really spoil the whole bunch. An unmotivated and, at worst, actively wendydisengaged employee who is a C player and will sabotage teams will drag down the performance of even your best player.
Getting those folks out of there and really looking at the job description and making sure that you’re attracting people who are in alignment with your mission and values is key. Talking to HR and talking to marketing to make sure there’s an alignment in what you’re putting out there on your career page and other outreach, so you’re bringing people into an environment where they have an amazing team to work with is really what’s going to attract them. The thing about A-players that’s so crucial for leadership to realize is that they’re not unemployed. They’re not out there looking for jobs unless they had something catastrophic happen to their company. Typically they’re employed, and they’re probably fairly happy in their position, because they are so motivated, so driven, so productive that they’re going to be in a position that is fulfilling to them. The only way to pull them over to your organization is really through marketing.
Brandon: A lot of this, in my mind, has to do with culture. You mentioned the purpose, the values, the mission. That on paper is one thing, but unless you really integrate those values within the company and the culture, it’s kind of hard to market that, isn’t it? Otherwise, how are you going to pull them away if it’s stated but not actually practiced.
Wendy: Well I think that’s where the employer brand really comes into play. In the blog post that you saw, we referenced a company that is a commercial HVAC provider, Reitmeier, who are located in Portland as well. One of the problems they were facing is that there’s a decreasing number of folks in skilled trades, and this is for a variety of reasons. It’s because Boomers are retiring, there’s simply less of a population in the Generation X cohort—there were just less people born during that time, and there are fewer opportunities for people to train. Vocational tech schools are closing down, training programs at community colleges are closing down, and specialized trainings are closing down. There’s simply less of the new folks coming into the skilled trade. There’s also fewer people available in the job market because of the smaller population of Generation X
and the Boomers exiting.
One of the things we did was we decided was to create a long term sustainable solution and create an entire university of our own, where we attract the Millennial population, we attract folks right out of high school, and we grow them up ourselves. The really interesting thing about doing this is that their techs really got excited about the idea of it, their vendors started to find out about it, their clients started to talk about it—and this is all through promotion on the blog and just being out in the community. And so interestingly enough, they not only completely lowered their turnover, which is a problem in the industry as a whole, but they started attracting those Millennials, but then, because of the employer brand that they built and the reputation they started to get in the Portland area—and actually Portland and beyond, they’re attracting people from a geographic distance to want to move to Portland and who are looking at them as a place to work—but what happened is that they’re also getting the mid-level and senior-level techs, which we didn’t know would happen. That was a very happy result of what we were doing to market to the Millennial population and the high school graduates.
Brandon: And that’s the interesting thing about marketing and getting this employer brand thing in the marketing hands is that marketing scales. You mentioned that the talent you were getting was not just constrained by your geographic region, but now you’re starting to get talent across other states, and it’s because of the employer brand probably, and the way you’re marketing.
Wendy: Yes, that’s absolutely right. One of the things that’s happening now is, people who are thinking about moving to Portland and are already in the commercial HVAC sector are now doing searches, and what they find is, because we’ve built an employer brand and have shaped their website to reflect their culture, to reflect their values and mission, to showcase Reitmeier University. We have blog articles on it now, we have testimonials from people who have gone through the curriculum—there are all these pieces that are supportive of what they’re doing, so that when someone goes to their website from doing a Google search, like “Portland HVAC jobs,” they find this website that is so completely differentiated from anything that any other competitors are doing, that they find it quite remarkable and they’re very attracted to apply there, to learn more about what that culture has to offer them. What’s happened, which is really exciting, is that the HR head now has moved from a position of feeling like, Where can I find these people? To, I have so many applicants, I can cherry pick the people who are the right fit for our culture. So it starts to have this snowball effect: you get great people, then you become selective, so that in the people you bring on, you’re continuing that A-player mentality and you continue to grow that culture. So it just snowballs and becomes more and more amazing over time.
Brandon: I read this book a few years back called Tribes by Seth Godin—you’re probably familiar with Seth Godin, he has a lot of great marketing content.
Wendy: I am!
Brandon Laws-11Brandon: I love that book because it really talks about building that following and you almost want people lining up to come work for you and to buy your products and services
as well, but I thought that book was a good example, and really enlightening just in terms of, How do you build a tribe? Well, you need common language and you need a culture and you need all of these things so you can kind of build evangelists for your brand. That could be people buying stuff from you or it could be people working for you. I think that’s really where that employer brand comes into play.
Wendy: I agree with you, and I think that’s an interesting point that you bring up, because I think the other piece, and again I don’t know if I’d exactly call it an accident, but it’s a little bit of a happy result that is maybe to the side of what you were expecting when you created that employer brand. But as you get out there and market to talent, clients also hear about it, prospects also hear about it, and they appreciate the care and the determination and the commitment that you’re showing to their people. That also helps differentiate you to your prospects and to your clients, so offshoot of that is that it actually enhances your marketing in a whole different direction than you originally intended.
Brandon: In your article, you put a stat down, and I hadn’t previously heard this at all, but you mention that 50% of the workforce by 2020 are going to be Millennials. Now tell me, maybe just predict, if employers aren’t marketing and building an employer brand that’s going to be tailored to these Millennials, what do you think is going to happen to them?
Wendy: So the whole Millennial and the Millennial hiring has been a really interesting exploration for me over the last 5-6 years when I started to think about that cohort more. And so, one of the problems, and I’ll answer your question in a moment, but one of the most interesting problems I see is that, and I hate to pick on the Boomer generation but I’m going to have to for a moment, is that they’re scratching their head and saying, This Millennial group, they’re weird, they’re hard to work with, they’re different. There are tons of articles written that are really disparaging. And I guess I should say, as a Generation X-er, I shouldn’t be surprised, because when I was in college the same thing was happening. Maybe it’s just a thing that happens from the former generation. I saw something totally different, and what I saw was that the Millennials, when you shape a business to work with them, and I will readily admit that it is a completely different approach than the former cohorts of workers have needed, but if you can shape your culture to mentor them and to grow them up right within the career, you will have a competitive advantage. And those companies who are still resisting and are still looking to do things the way that they’ve always done, it’s my firm belief that they’re going to fall by the wayside.
Brandon: Yes, it seems like they’d just be trying to fight for talent, and they can’t get it because they’re not speaking to the talent that’s actually out there.
Wendy: That’s right.
Brandon: So, in your experience, what have you seen work? Getting to the employer branding tactics that actually do work, and you don’t have to give away all of your ideas, but maybe just give listeners a sense of what you’ve seen work and what they should be focused on.
Wendy: I think some of the key things that make a big difference is that the Millennials who are looking for work, they’re willing to be committed, loyal, productive, and everything else you could want in a worker, but what they want is to see that the company cares about them. So they’re really looking for a great culture, and they’re looking for collaboration. We’re actually in the process of doing interviews for our company. We’re bringing on a few new positions, and that’s one of the things I hear the most is the term
collaboration. And that’s one of the things that they are attracted to from our company, at least from what they can see on our website. They say over and over again, It seems like you all are a really collaborative team. That’s really attractive to them. The teamwork, the culture, the opportunity for growth, and once they’re onboarded, they really want
ongoing mentorship, growth opportunities, and I think the big difference that Boomers and to a certain extent Generation X-ers, although that cohort has an easier time bridging both generations, but what the shift has to be is that when they’re working with the Millennial cohort, they have to have a lot more feedback and ongoing meetings with these individuals. Team meetings, one-on-one meetings, leadership, ongoing feedback—it’s way more of a high-touch group. If you read anything about the way these individuals have been parented, you’ll see that that’s just the way they’ve learned to interact with the world, both from parenting and also just from being a generation that has grown up with smartphones and the Internet and social media. They’re used to having ongoing communication and instantaneous feedback from the people in their lives, even if it’s digital. So I think the key is really to shift the way that you work with them so that you’re giving them ongoing feedback and time.

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The Kinesis, Inc. Team


Brandon: You’re really talking about developing that authentic culture so that really is the foundation for the brand. But what about on the external side? I mean, I’ve seen companies do some very unique things: culture videos, website pictures to show their culture off. What have you done for some of your clients?
Wendy: Yeah, I think that’s a really important piece. The first step that we do with our clients is really just to tackle the base level, which is their job descriptions. So one of the things we do with our clients is say, Let’s weave your mission and your values and your vision into your job descriptions. Let’s include a letter from the CEO. When you onboard your folks, let’s have a CEO start off by talking to them. A lot of people say that that sounds like a lot of time. But the amount of time an A-player who’s committed and will stay with your company for a long time, what that person can bring, you can’t tell me that that investment of a half an hour or sixty minutes from the CEO isn’t worth it. That is so impactful for a person to have them evangelize your vision and values when you’re first onboarded.
So that’s really the first piece—a good hard look at your job descriptions, how you’re hiring and asking questions, and then how you’re onboarding and retaining those folks. So I’d really look at that as a continuum. The next level is really looking at your marketing and getting materials. You really want to have a website that appeals to Millennials. You want to have an up to date, responsive website, because remember—these are people who are up on the latest technology. They are expecting you to have a website design that responds to their mobile devices. They want to see your culture, they want to read about it. You can take it to the next level by starting to showcase work space, to show pictures of happy employees, to put testimonials from your people, and really the next level is starting to get more digital.
The easiest next place to go, which is actually an interesting shift, is to use Facebook as a recruiting platform and culture showcase. I started out scratching my head for a long time about Facebook. It really is not a great marketing venue, and a lot of marketers just touted for a long time that any social media was just the holy grail of reaching people.
Brandon: Yeah. I was not one of those people, I’ll tell you that!
Wendy: But Facebook, and even Instagram if you have the right kind of ongoing photography, can be an amazing way to showcase your culture. You have an opportunity to use that and to pull it back into your website. The next level is really having a recruiting video, and then if you really enjoy the digital and video aspect of it, you can do multiple videos of different employees and departments and so on. I think that that’s really the stepping stones, but you can take it as far as you want. But incorporating all of those types of digital assets into a cohesive body of marketing where you’re attracting people is going to make your HR folks so happy when you’re bringing in these great people. Because you’ve done your marketing right and you have an employer brand that’s attracting those folks. And I think that’s a key word, attracting. You have to think of it that way. You’re building relationships with them digitally.
Brandon: Wendy, this has been a really fun and enlightening conversation! I wanted to give you an opportunity to share with listeners either some links or resources or really just anything else they should know before I cut you loose, since we’re getting short on time.
Wendy: Sure! If anyone wants to take a look at our company, we’re KinesisInc.com. The blog you’re referencing is on our website blog, and there are a bunch of articles there that I think might be helpful.
Brandon: Wendy Maynard, thank you for being on the podcast, I appreciate it!
Wendy: You are so welcome, my pleasure. Thanks for having me!