One in three households in America do business with Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through more than 10,000 stores and 12,000 ATMs and the Internet (wellsfargo.com and wachovia.com) across North America and internationally.
The company strives to find the best people from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures, give them the knowledge and training they need, allow them to be responsible and accountable for their businesses, and recognize them for outstanding performance.
The man tasked with finding ways to attract the best talent is Aaron Kraljev, Employment Marketing Manager. Recently, Aaron was kind enough to give us an inside look at his unique role at Wells Fargo and share his perspective on the industry and the DirectEmployers Association.
You actually have a marketing department for recruiting?
Yes. I am the Marketing Department. This is a new role for the bank created last October. In the past they have leaned heavily on agencies, external partners, and put project management-type folks, to manage those relationships. They decided that because there’s such a huge marketing aspect, they would actually get a marketing person in this role. The vision is to create a team, but it will take a little bit of time to do that, so for now it’s me. I support 80 lines of business and about 800 recruiting professionals.
Oh wow. That’s a big job! I would say you need a team.
I’m not going to lie, it’s a huge job. No two days are the same – like snowflakes, right? And it definitely keeps you busy.
What was your role prior to the Employment Marketing Manager?
For the last 6 years, I was the Student Segment Manager of the bank – I had a team for that. I managed the initiatives of the segment for anybody ages 17-24, anything that was focused at students for senior high school up through college, and post-grad. We created all the marketing programs, communications and the aspects for that group.
Do you have much background or experience in employment and recruiting, or is it more marketing?
They wanted somebody who knew a lot about marketing. I have some recruiting background, but it wasn’t an in-depth background whatsoever. When I started in October I was pretty much a fresh slate in terms of employment.
That even adds another dimension of challenge! How did you start? What did you start with?
We’ve got a group of senior leaders that by in large represent the HR community, and I sat down with each of them and said, “Alright, let’s talk about your challenges. What are we doing well? What are we doing poorly? What do you want to see? In a perfect world if time and money wasn’t an issue, what would help you meet the human capital needs of your line of business?” They have different audiences, pressure points, hot buttons and things they want to see. In talking to 7 or 8 of those leaders, we were hearing some consistent messages – things that became our guiding crystals. The whole process took probably 6-8 weeks. We locked ourselves in a room for a couple days, decompressed all the notes we had, drew up with these large consistencies that we could find across the organization. We made those our business objectives for the year.
That’s fascinating. Probably was somewhat painful, but it was an exercise, I’m sure, that has helped everybody that went through it.
Absolutely, and now I can see where this needs to be something that happens every 18 months to two years to make sure that what we’re doing is still in line of what their needs are.
I know you said there aren’t two days that are the same; but, if you could kind of pick a typical day, what would that look like?
I’m on Pacific Time and in and of itself, which would not seem like an odd thing. Most of my clients are east coast time, or in some cases, international, so by the time I wake up, I’m already behind 20, 30, 40 emails. That’s fine, but an interesting way to get your day started. Typically we have two or three large enterprise-wide projects going on. Depending on their complexity and what we’re doing, they take up a pretty good chunk of my day. We’re doing calls, involving lines of business partners, talking technology and/or Internet services, talking to external vendors or agencies, what have you, to keep these large projects moving. In between all those things are the volumes of questions that come along. How do I get a desk, where do I get that, can you do this for me, do you know who I could find to do that? I try to handle a lot of these kinds of diagnostic ad-hoc requests or questions as they come in, while also keeping these larger balls in play.
Are you handling requests as mundane as “I want to place an ad on this job board,” or are you doing more strategic types of projects, or all the above?
That’s such a great question. Because there is only one of me, I should be strategic 100% of the time. We work closely with TMP. If I can’t have a team, I’m going to need an agency that I have to lean on. TMP will take requests, such as placing ads. We do a lot of strategic in-take before requests even get to TMP because I have a better idea of what our budget constraints are and what has worked in the past. I get a lot of questions before folks go to TMP, questions that folks just feel more comfortable asking me than somebody who’s an external partner. But TMP has been a good partner and it’s like having an advertising agency off-site that will accept your requests.
What key factors would you contribute the success of Wells Fargo’s recruiting?
We’ve done a lot of research the last 7-8 months. I think working when we have 280,000 team members, and at any given time have 9,000-10,000 open jobs in a month, by our sheer volume we’re going to have a certain amount of success. We have a lot of folks that apply for our jobs and I think by and large that’s because we’ve been around over 150 years. Wells Fargo has a reputation for taking good care of the team members, being involved in the communities we serve, having good benefits, and those sorts of things. I think those are all very appealing to perspective job seekers. But, I think those are easy things. We want to better understand why weren’t people applying. What are we putting out there is that people are detrimental to our employment brand. We’ve been trying to learn as much as we can about that over the past 6-7 months. What did we learn is probably your next question, right?
Exactly!
I think the reason why this role was even created was in the past we had project managers managing our employment brand, and they’ve done a great job, essentially they do a great job of developing programs and getting things out there; but, from a branding perspective, are we telling as good of a story as we can? I think as an organization we just re-branded ourselves mid-last year and that whole process gave us a great opportunity to re-brand ourselves as an employer as well. By speaking more about what jobs mean in a very clear way, what our expectations are, and what the day in the life look like. In a very succinct manner, I think if you looked at our job descriptions from two years ago, they were just volumes and volumes, and volumes of copy not really saying anything. If I were a job seeker, I probably would have given up after the second paragraph. Trying to tell our story in a very concise manner in a way that’s more consistent with our brand; use our logo, our brand – in which, we have a lot of equity in –in a more consistent fashion, and telling a better story about who we are. These are all of the things we’re starting to take on now as time goes on, and really looking in a more critical way of what we’re putting out there in our recruiting materials.
I commend you. As someone who’s been in the recruitment industry for about 15 years now, and for the past four years here at the Association working more on a strategic level with these big brands, sometimes it really amazes me when I look at the job descriptions and see what you’re talking about. From companies that have spent millions and millions of dollars around their brand and their marketing to consumers, but haven’t taken that time to do it for job seekers and for their own employees and candidates. It just amazes me to think that they’re missing out on such an opportunity because a lot of their job seekers are their consumers as well. One thing that I have really come to understand and realize is that recruiting is marketing. You’re selling your marketing and need to take into account a lot of the different aspects of marketing when you’re recruiting because you are trying to sell your company to a candidate and you don’t want to attract the wrong kind of candidate.
Exactly. And I think there’s this notion of less is more. You and I understand that, but I think if you’re talking to a hiring manager, who’s excited about this opening and wants exactly the right fit, and wants this person to know every single thing there is to know about the job, and getting that in 8 sentences, that’s where the challenge begins. While we’ve identified where we need to go, we’ve got a ways to get there. We’ve got a huge education piece, I think with us internally too. Talk to our internal stakeholders and help them understand that if they really want the best candidates for this job, less is more. We need to say less without leaving out pertinent details while making sure we’re wrapping it in such a way that job seekers don’t get bored or get what we call job description fatigue where they’re just done and move on to the next thing.
Very well put. Speaking of being on the cutting edge and awareness, what trends and new types of technologies are you seeing in today’s recruiting environment?
I think one of the reasons this job is probably a natural fit, is because what I’ve done in the past – our involvement with emerging ways of marketing to the student arena and now looking to do that to job seekers. The company wanted to take some of the things we learned on the product side that they thought, at the time, were cutting edge. Everybody talks about social media now. Some people do it very, very well. Other people don’t. We are developing and looking at getting ourselves branded, getting our jobs out, and getting in front of folks in the social media space. I won’t speak for anybody else, but I think as an organization we’ve been very print-dependent on how we get our jobs in front of job seekers. To most folks, that may come as a surprise. We’re a large company and very technologically savvy, but in terms of employment we have done a lot of print. We’re going through the process of evolving from a print-centric to a more digital marketing strategy. I think that our social media program is a part of that.
