TEAM LEWIS, a global marketing agency, is retiring the resume for candidates. The initiative is one of many aimed at opening doors to career changers and non-degree holders. It will offer job seekers the opportunity to choose a career based on what they want to be and how they want to change the world.
"In a world that is relentlessly digital, video-first and unbound from convention, we have to recognize that the unique combination of talent and aspiration we're looking for can and does come from anywhere and everywhere," says Hillary Werronen, SVP US Operations of TEAM LEWIS. "We're looking for passion, curiosity and the desire to push boundaries and rail against the status quo. Our TEAM can teach the skills to some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. Together, we'll build the future of marketing."
Seasoned and aspiring marketers alike will be able to visit teamlewis.com/ER and in one word describe who they want to be. A designer, a thinker, a leader. After providing a link to their LinkedIn page, TEAM LEWIS will reach out to discuss their goals and which of the 100+ global opportunities might be a fit.
The company has over 500 staff across 24 offices throughout Asia, Europe and North America.
I asked Hillary Werronen to join me over Zoom to tell us more about this interesting talent attraction tactic.
Were you seeing that what you were previously doing to attract talent wasn’t working?
I think it was working, but it wasn't working as quickly as we needed it to. So the hypothesis was just that a lot is happening in the industry right now, and many of our clients are in the tech space and tech is one of the industries that's been hit hardest by the great resignation that folks are talking about right now. So we needed to hire quickly to be able to meet the needs that we had as an organization, both retaining our talent and also recruiting additional talent, and our hypothesis was just that people were looking for a change right now and there are only so many things in your life that you can change.
You can change your relationships, you can change where you live, you can change where you work, and oftentimes changing where you work is the thing that people do because it's the easiest. And that hypothesis also is that people were considering their priorities in life and kind of who they wanted to be, what they wanted to do to make a difference in the world outside of kind of just their job.
And so, we wanted to open up our opportunities to people from many different walks of life and just break down barriers as much as possible so that we had a huge diversity of candidates to be able to reach that we hadn't potentially reached in the past with our typical recruitment efforts and methods.
Did you have an ATS in place before all this?
We do, yes, and we've continued to use an ATS as well (BambooHR). We've actually been going through a migration of some of our platforms to find ones that work the best for us. But I think, for this initiative, it was more about the awareness of our company because it's a busy space and it's a loud space.
And so certainly, depending on our ATS in the background, we still need to use that for tracking purposes, but we wanted to make the entry point as easy as possible and just make ourselves available, and have more of an open-ended, kind of human conversation with people, so that it wasn't just, "here's a job description. Do you fit the bullets that are on this page?"
And then having people present, kind of a printed or a written long form resume, it's more having a conversation about what types of things they want to do, and then potentially matching a job opportunity that could work for them. Or in some cases, even creating a new job opportunity, that works for them in their experience.
How long has it been live at this point?
Actually just a week at this point. But yeah, it is brand new and something that we've been talking about for a long time, and as you mentioned, also retiring the resume is an idea that's been out there. Well, I should say that you've probably seen companies announcing that the resume is dead is something that we've seen, but I don't know if many companies have been bold enough to actually make that move, to retire the resume from the initial parts of the process. And so, that's what we're doing and I think we've had some pretty good successes so far. We-
Yeah, what's with the response so far from the candidates. I mean, have you heard from them?
Yeah, we definitely have heard from candidates. One of the ways that we're making it easy is just allow people to share their LinkedIn profile with us, but we've been reaching out to everybody that responds to us and provides their information, at least shows some interest. So that's certainly been an endeavor for our engagement team, to reach out to every single person to talk about what the next steps might be for them.
Describe for me the page, walk me through it and tell me exactly what happens from the time a job-seeker hits this, to the time they submit their LinkedIn URL.
We designed this to be as simple as possible. Again, just trying to break down barriers and allow people to express themselves. So what we're seeing now for the listeners is it's a white landing page and then black type that says, "what type of er do you want to be?" And then there's a form fill box where they can type in whether they want to be a cheerleader or, I'm reading off, choreographer, believer, adventurer, anything that kind of ends in ER. Once they do that, it serves up. If you want to go ahead and type one in, maybe a podcast or some. Well, I'm not sure if podcaster is one we have in our database.
It serves up a fun gif, who are we seeing there? It's an SNL included gif that we have down in the bottom. But if you click on let us know, it'll just give you a form that asks you for your name and your LinkedIn URL, and then we can reach out to people for that.
So I submit this and where does it go?
It gathers into a database that we've designed on the backend and generates an email to our whole careers team. And then the careers team divvies up based on region and, mostly based on region as the first, and we take a look and then we are reaching out to people based on that information that they provide.
There's also a, “or view open vacancies” link. I imagine that goes to your ATS?
It does go to our all opportunities page, so you can learn a little bit more about careers at Team Lewis and what's available. It's interesting, even in just the first week's worth of data that we've gotten from this, that more people are interested in putting in their information and hearing from us, than they are actually following through and looking at every single one of the job opportunities.
And it's been pretty overwhelming results for that.
Could you share a number, in terms of how many people have filled that in so far?
I think it's in the hundreds at this point of people who have filled it in, and we've done a little bit of a soft launch of this, but we have, kind of a whole sheet, full of people that have reached out to us and who we're going to meet and then reaching out to them. But I think in terms of filling in the form versus looking at job opportunities, it's probably only five percent of people that click through to the job opportunities.
Can you maybe just walk me through how that came about, sort of the year, the ideation of that?
We spend some time as a team, some folks from marketing and our engagement team, new biz leads from all over the place, the creative team to put together. And that's not an all-inclusive list, I believe you can kind of put in whatever you want and if it doesn't recognize your ER, it'll give you a suggestion or ask you to try again. But we put a lot of thought into what types of ERs people might put in, and kind of build that database on a crowdsourcing exercise on our part.
How will you measure success?
Well, I come from a marketing background. So, of course we have some of the metrics in terms of what the actual cost is of bringing new applicants to us that we have not talked to before. But I think the long-term success is going to be the success of those individuals once they actually are in the door and part of the Team Louis group. We've seen already at Team Lewis that we have a fairly diverse group of individuals, and some of the team members that are the most impactful and most influential here, are ones that don't necessarily have degrees or come from different backgrounds.
So we're excited to see these actual new people, and new faces, and new backgrounds, and I think the impact that they'll have will be the success that we ultimately see from the program. So it's a bit of a slow burn, it's not something that we'll see a success in overnight, it'll be something that takes a while. But we intend to continue on this path and see how it goes, so.
I mean, we were a global marketing agency but creativity is at the core of us, and this has been a really great example and really fun to work on internally as well. It's that marriage of marketing, and recruiting is marketing, and also just letting the creative shine through as well. There was a lot of thought that went into this and we hope that it's something that shows kind of who we are as an agency, and the fact that we are doing things differently in a number of different ways.