(Gov Exec's Tom Shoop interviews John Sepulveda,

CHCO, VA, and Robert Buggs, CHCO, Education.

Picture is from ClearanceJobs.com, one of our

fellow underwriters for the Press Club event.)

On Tuesday, I heard two top Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs) confirm what we have been sharing with our clients as the way ahead in 2012: Even amidst budget issues, agencies and their workforce need to get the story out about their value. In fact, with government employees being slammed as under-worked and over-paid, the present is the best time to show taxpayers the ROI on their taxes and government leaders the ROI they receive from investing in employees. Employees can then genuinely believe their own management finds them worthy of enhancing skills through education and training.

The occasion was a Government Executive leadership briefing at the National Press Club on human capital challenges, co-underwritten by TMP Government. Both John Sepulveda, Assistant Secretary for Administration and CHCO at Veterans Affairs (VA) and Robert Buggs, CHCO at Education, acknowledged that retention and recruitmentneed a boost from branding.  Mr. Sepulveda noted that getting everyone on board for this effort remains challenging as many in government still feel alien to branding. Yet with retirements happening and possibly fewer high quality applicants (see the recent NACE survey), government has to get across the significance of critical work, e.g. reducing homelessness of veterans.

Mr. Buggs mentioned that the two strongest statements of federal branding he knew were President John F. Kennedy's first inaugural address with its call: ""Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" The second was the U. S. Army's "Be All You Can Be" brand, which ran for 21 years and came from legendary N. W. Ayer copywriter Earl Carter. This latter brand was based on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which has influenced the TMP approach to employer value propositions. Maslow saw that once people have satisfied basic physical and psychological needs, they sought higher fulfillment in becoming the person they "were meant to be," e.g. a calling.

In our branding process, we parallel this self-actualization need, with the self-expressive aspect of a value proposition, when a person aligns their personal goals with the agency mission. It follows that the best way to get and keep people is for them to feel genuinely that they are achieving their highest potential while working for your aims. The Kennedy line reinforces that this ideal employee is sufficiently self-actualized to be able to "put service before self."

Of course, enunciating a value proposition is only one step in creating brand salience, i.e. ensuring that job seekers will remember you at the time they apply. Current government employees are extremely influential in shaping attitudes, and, as Mr. Sepuveda said, they have been "punching bags" over the last few years. These employees need to see that they are valued and worthy of investment.

Hence, the CHCOs pointed out the need for training and additional retention measures. The hiring process needs to have its value affirmed, too. At the top end, CHCOs need to assume a strategic advisory role with agency heads to help them understand the staffing demands of incipient programs. On the tactical level, hiring managers had best speed up processing applications and reduce the still unfavorable time-to-hire that loses prospects to the private sector. 

We'll add that both need to be able to articulate who you are, how you benefit the American people, and what you offer your workforce.

First off, Super Bowl ads aren't technically advertising. The traditional role of advertising is "to advert," i.e. to intrude upon someone's intention with a message. With a 111 million attentive audience, many6 of whom prize watching the TV spots as much as the game, the ads aren't intruding at all...unless they try to wham you over the head with a strong sales message. Coleman says that it's like going to the game with your client: Have fun, talk about Manning's incredible pass to Manningham or Brady's almost "Hail Mary" or even Madonna's half-time spectacular, but steer clear of business.

According to Coleman, whose company was Ad Age's Number 1 Small Agency of 2011, "You’re not there to pitch your product, you are there to build a relationship. Your TV spot should be doing the same thing. Spots that focus on building deep brand endearment can use that equity and goodwill throughout out the year. It will make all of your subsequent selling moments more effective. People find ways to justify buying brands they like." (Emphasis supplied)

This latter point underscores what we've been hearing in general lately from field like "behavioral economics" and "neuro-marketing." The "reason why" approach to marketing communications, for better or worse, is being subsumed by emotions. The question then is not rational versus vs. emotional, but which emotional fields are brought into play. For example, in a Washington Post Poll, the Clint Eastwood Chrysler spot, which has been controversial to political and media pundits, nonetheless won over the hearts of eighty-eight (88) percent of the respondents.

Agency for the spot was Portland, OREGON Wieden + Kennedy, who also did the Polar Bear sports fan for Coca Cola.

Part of the charm in those days was how unexpected this black-and-white spot was amidst all the repetitive beer commercials and dazzling duels to out do. Yet popping a commercial on game day also entailed risk of  not being seen.

Well times have changed, and out-dueling today means out-buzzing. That makes sense: when your spending that much money, you don't want to be missed when attention wanders during the timeouts in the third quarter.  Hence we have had Ferris Bueller revving us up virally for Honda (not much of a teaser when you find out the client, eh?). And then there's John Stamos in Dannon's venture into the Super Bowl with Oikos:

The bigger change is that when Monster ventured forth in 1999, the dot coms were just taking over the Super Bowl (and for some it was a short-lived victory). Now television and online are fully intertwined. In an interview with Media Life magazine, Michael Pavone, president and chief executive officer at the Harrisburg, Pa. agency Pavone, which does the post-game commercial rating site SpotBowl, explained how the trend has shifted to pre-game buzz.

Dr. Summers' essay is based on a keynote address that he gave last September at the New York Times Schools for Tomorrow conference.

According to Powers, while Benjamin and Broadridge have been honored for diversity efforts, Benjamin "consistently deflects any personal credit for their accomplishments." Instead she told Powers, "I develop people and the culture to support the accomplishment of business goals." And she adds,"But I don't do it alone; my approach is to partner and collaborate. It is very important to me that my team gets the recognition. Without them and their collective intelligence, the breadth and reach of my contribution would be limited. Hence my biggest reward is to attribute the success to my team, even if I am the accountable leader."

That's no small feat. Getting such team versus personal recognition has been one of the long-term obstacles to achieving genuine, lasting approaches to quality improvement.

In the article, compensation expert Howard Rishercomments that much more is needed to turn the federal brand around:  "The Marines understand branding. It's more than PR - and it's certainly not defensive. The question is, why would someone find a career with [an agency] an exciting prospect? Each federal agency needs to develop a 'rocket to the moon' answer." Of course, agency's that don't have NASA's mammoth achievement wonder if they have such an answer.

My experience has been that they do. Our clients government agencies respond well to Mr. Risher's approach, i.e. finding what ad man Leo Burnett called inherent drama: discovering what most moves or excites your audience about what you're selling. Burnett's Chicago agency (where I worked in the 1970s)  translated those emotional attributes into compelling archetypal images like the Jolly Green Giant, who expresses the bounty of the earth.  The CNBC Titan Series, aired this past summer. honors Burnett along with leaders like Steve Jobs and Jack Welch. The program is available for instant download on Amazon.

• one, frame an accurate and compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP) for your agency, and
• two, bring this EVP forward consistently and prominently at every “touch point” with potential recruits - in your print and online materials, in your social media outreach, and in your event activities.

When I say this I don’t mean incessantly trotting out an itemized “logical” statement of the points of value that your team members get out of working at your agency [although formulating this framework is a highly useful background step]. What I do mean is making certain that you convey what it’s like to work at your agency in a style that engages the immediate attention of potential recruits, and speaks to them in familiar and comfortable ways.

One way you can do this is by stressing the appealing aspects of concrete, on-the-job reality at your agency. I’m suggesting three approaches that will help you inject a dose of authenticity and immediacy into how you portray your EVP or employer brand. The good news is that all these approaches are “media-agnostic”, i.e., they can be implemented in print, video, online, social media, and event-oriented form. The (maybe) not-so-good news is that they require some creative effort and production elbow grease.

Portray agency workplaces realistically and visually. Serious candidates want to get an authentic feel for working with you. So don’t hesitate to make liberal use of photos of your workplace environments. That’s not to say you shouldn’t consciously set up these shots in ways that underscore the variety of work settings and the attractive attributes of your EVP; just don’t let them look too staged and cheesy. Include people at work (and not lined up like the yearbook shot of your high school chess club). If, like many agency websites, you stick to a sterile verbal presentation, without realistic visuals, you’re missing an opportunity to engage candidates in an authentic and direct way, free of off-putting, if subtle, pretensions of authority. If this purely verbal web approach is agency-mandated, you should consider using other media to capture the real-world spirit of your workplace environments.       

Let representative team members make your case for you.  Don’t forget that candidates respond at a deeper, more personal level when they see and hear people like themselves describing their jobs, their working experiences, and the underlying cultures of their agencies. Personalized visual and video testimonials, sidebars, blurbs, case studies and so on add more real-world zing to the underlying attributes of your EVP.  Paragraphs of factual but unevocative prose about mission, teamwork, work-life balance, variety of assignments, and prospects for advancement just can’t carry this off as well.  Again, if agency Web standards make these resonant first-person approaches difficult, consider social media and YouTube as your creative platforms for this tonal outreach.

Don’t presume that an authentic portrayal precludes inspiration and emotion. Agencies attempting to depict their respective EVPs in recruiting engagement media frequently stray into one of two less effective habits: they either attempt to convey the higher values of their mission and the dedicated spirit of their agency teams in purely verbal terms, or they restrict their visual/video employee testimonials to facts alone, with no emotional or inspirational coloration. The former approach can veer into the forced and stilted; the latter into the sterile, stiff, and formulaic. The most engaging solution: let your visuals subtly convey higher values and your employees speak directly from the heart. It will pay off in recruit response.

Saturday, I attended Houston's Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, where I found myself not only in the presence of the titular sponsor but some 77 other official brands, from standbys like McDonald's, Nordstrom, and Exxon Mobil to national and local organizations like the U. S. Army and the Houston Ballet. With 68,000-plus in attendance (the largest among 2011 bowls played to that date) and an ESPN viewership, the venue exuded the kind of success that's a draw for sponsors. But favorable bowl sponsorships might have even more value in today's cognitively cluttered environment. America's bowl tradition, presently consisting of 35 games, confers educational, civic, and philanthropic mental associations on the institutions involved. Indeed, some bowls are so embedded in the fabric of their host cities that their proponents have reasonably defended the NCAA's current "FBS structure" against a centralized "championship tournament model" that prevails among the smaller college teams.

In a cognitively cluttered environment, corporate bowl sponsorships offer a relatively straightforward way to associate a brand with a positive event, furthering brand salience, i.e. the propensity to come to mind or be noticed in a buying situation. The employer brand equivalent would be for a prospective candidate to remember you at the time of forming their consideration set of potential employers.

But what does Meineke gain in salience from sponsoring a college bowl game? They are a solid brand in the automobile franchise aftermarket as evidenced by the fact that a few weeks ago New York equity firm Harvest Partners became a primary owner. As people hold onto cars longer and find it more difficult to maintain computer-based vehicles, Meineke seems to have a strong market case. In fact, some 92 percent of people in the U.S. recognize the Meineke brand name. One might wonder if Meineke might spend more time trying to pull customers away from competitors with their differentiating positioning that emphasizes consumer choice and financial benefits or their loyalty program, the Car Care Club.

The answer is that when thousands of messages press upon us each day, mental accessibility and availability assume greater importance. While persuasive content can be of help in making decisions, when we need to get an oil change, the chances are that we aren't going to overly scrutinize our options. However, when we think we need to "take the car in," known availability is essential. A bowl title sponsorship allows an organization multiple opportunities to keep the name front and center. Positive associations and brand attributes, rather than passionate loyalty, can lead us to Meineke. And people tend to be more "fanatic" about sports than brands. (At a Ted X conference, Byron Sharp has shown this matter to be true even for the so-called leaders in brand loyalty like Harley and Apple.)

Prior to becoming a sponsor of the Texas Bowl last April, Meineke had sponsored a bowl game in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ken Walker, Meineke Chairman and CEO, was well familiar with what  bowls do for business: "For the past six years the Meineke brand has benefited tremendously from its sponsorship of a College Football Bowl, and we are delighted to continue this tradition by returning to our roots in Houston, Texas [where Meineke began thirty-nine years ago]. It excites our Franchisees and it heightens Meineke’s awareness among the passionate and loyal fans of College Football across the country.” Notice where the passion and fandom are naturally going.

For more information on how bowl game sponsorships can cast a national spotlight on brands, check out thisarticle on BigLeadSports. 

Although we try to remind our government clients that security alone does not a strong government brand make, the USA Today articles show that security figured importantly in Federal decision-making:

• Holding onto jobs tightens. The rate of quitting has fallen 29% since 2007. Ordinary retirements are down 11%. Early retirements are down two-thirds. Disability departures have dropped one-third.
• Layoffs decrease.Under the Obama administration, layoffs from reorganizations have dropped by two-thirds to fewer than 300 a year in the 2.1 million person workforce. Workers are 13 times more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off from the federal government.

As expected, the USA Today articles have provoked heated on-line exchanges, which implicitly revolve around the role of government. With many citizens outraged over what they see as a bloated, unresponsive Behemoth, the Federal government and its agencies have the opportunity to reconsider and redefine its value proposition. For our perspective about what we can learn in this regard from 2011, please see our article, "The Year that Almost Wasn't."

Recently I sent out a very simple 4-question survey to 20 recruiters that I know from around the country. Simple, quick and good information for this article! Responses came in from the West, Midwest, South, Southeast and the Northeast. Although straw poll results certainly aren’t statistically valid, the results definitely yielded some promising answers and hope for the new graduates of the future.

The first question I asked was, “Regarding your New Graduate RN hiring plans for 2012, will you see an increase, same amount or decrease in the number of new graduates hired?”  Luckily, there were zero responses that reported a decrease. 67% reported the same plans for 2012 while 33% reported a definite increase in new grad hiring.

The second straw poll question asked if new graduate training programs would be available in 2012.  While 80% said definitely yes, the other 20% reported that they will hire new graduates but don’t have a formalized new graduate program. These organizations offer the training on an “as needed” basis.

Question #3 requested information about, “How many RN new graduate programs will you offer in 2012? One, two or 3 or more?”  47% reported they would be offering 3 or more new grad programs with one respondent reporting 8 for 2012. 27% reported 2 programs per year, 13% only 1 and 13% on an “as needed” basis.

The last question asked the respondents to estimate the number of new graduate RNs they plan to hire in 2012. A total of 14 respondents were able to report an actual number (the rest were not sure) and those numbers ranged from a low of 20 to a high of 400+. In just these 14 facilities that were able to share a new grad number, they reported a total of 1617 new graduate jobs for 2012.

In order to have a frame of reference on RN new graduates in the United States, the 2010 Annual Report from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing reports some interesting figures. In FY10, there were 140,610 first time, U.S. educated new graduates that took the NCLEX-RN examination while 123,112 (or 87.6%) passed. This new graduate total is broken down further with BSN graduates totaling 55,081 testing and a pass rate of 88.9%, 81,665 ADNs with a 86.6% pass rate and 3,756 diploma grads boasting an 89.6% pass rate.

Although the straw poll numbers reported some decent information and trending for the future, in the meantime, one only needs to read the nursing blogs and articles to really understand the new graduate frustration. Mentions of no return phone calls, dead space, black holes and one reporting having sent over 100 applications, which yielded her one interview.

Diane Mancino, the Executive Director of NSNA, reported 2010 findings in an article titled, “Invest Now to Keep the Pipeline Primed.” New graduates reported such issues as hiring freezes, organizations wanting only experienced RNs, discontinuing new grad training programs, use of travelers and older RNs not retiring as just a few of the reported issues that the new graduate experiences. In an August 2010 questionnaire, the NSNA new graduate members were asked if they had accepted an RN position. 54% reported yes while 46% reported no. Even though some of the new graduates that were still not employed had not tried to find a job yet (6%), were waiting until they passed NCLEX (13%) or were having difficulty finding a job in the specialty they wanted (18%), the remainder – 63% - stated that there just weren’t any jobs for new graduates in their area.

HR professionals can truly make a difference to this group of new graduate professionals. Although everyone understands time constraints, the recruiters that take the time to call people back and offer support and suggestions are the recruiters that will win in the future. New graduates remember the company whose recruiters treated them well during a down economy and the loyalty to your organization can be nourished during this time.  You make a difference to this group of new professionals that are doing the best they can to land their first professional job. Times are changing but not fast enough for this group.