Emily Smit

Awesome. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. We're super excited for our conversation today. So welcome to Culture community. And just to tell you a little bit about us before we jump into things. So we are a group of people passionate about being great leaders, intentionally building great cultures and community. And this is a space to learn, develop and grow with one another, connect with each other and be inspired and activated to make a positive change in the world when, where and why we meet. So we meet monthly and we cover topics that help us build better leaders or become better leaders and build better cultures. We are going to meet next month and you're going to have the Perk team present next month. So we're going to be talking about Recognize and Thrive, how prioritizing recognition drives engagement and success in the workplace. So make sure to sign up for that. We'd love to see you all at the next month. We'll talk a little bit about the Perk.

Leah Roe

I'll jump in and talk about the Perk a little bit. So the Perk, in addition to being the engine behind Culture Community, we are also a premier leadership and culture development studio. And our mission here at the Perk is to build the world's best leaders and we do that by focusing on curated leadership and culture development. So we do team workshops, we do team coaching and training and also one on one leadership coaching. And everything that we do is rooted in our clear leadership operating system. So through extensive research and our experience, we have distilled world class leadership down into six key elements and that is having a leadership mindset and five specific behaviors curiosity, listening, expectations yes. And and recognition. And so as Emily just said, next month we're really going to dive into that recognition piece and talk about why it is so important to recognize the people on your team and also how to do it in a way that is genuine and authentic for you, also with recognition. So you can see some stats here. One of the things we were talking about as a team was how can we make it easier to recognize people and how can we do it in a fun way?

Leah Roe

And so we came up with our Perk up Someone's Day program. And so this is something I would really love for all of you to take advantage of in this next month. It is a free program and all you need to do is first think about your team. Think about somebody on your team who is amazing, who's doing something that you think is just awesome and you want to make sure they know about it. You want to recognize them for that. So that's number one. Just pick someone who's amazing on your team. Then you nominate them. It takes about 10 seconds. You can go to this QR code. Someone from my team can also put the link in the chat, but you just tell us who are they and why are they so amazing? What do you want to recognize them for? Then? Each month, we pick one winner and we send them a recognition box. So we tell them who nominated them, why they nominated them, and we send them a box that just perks up their day. It's full of gift cards. It's full of treats. It's worth $500. It's just really fun and special for them.

Leah Roe

And one of the cool things about this program is that you can nominate as many people as you want and they stay in the pool. So, for those of you, thank you so much for nominating so many people this past month, if the person you nominated didn't win, they're still in the pool for next month so they could win in July. So we'll pick our next winner on July 15. So recognize those people, everyone, and I will turn it back over to you, Emily.

Emily Smit

Awesome. So I just want to take a moment to introduce our amazing speaker Justin today. So, Justin Vaco is a speaker and award winning marketer who helps companies identify and communicate their value more clearly. Justin is passionate about helping great companies attract more people to their teams who are a perfect culture fit. He lives in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, with his wife and three kids in their first home, where he's working on a steep learning curve, wrangling the non working appliances and fixing leaky faucets. So, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to leave the faucets alone and join us for culture community. Justin, we're super excited to have you.

Justin Vajko

Thank you for having me. This is great.

Leah Roe

All right, Justin, are you ready? So this is a fireside chat, everyone, meaning I get to just fire questions at Justin for the next, whatever, 45 minutes or so. Also, please put your questions in the chat. I'm also going to ask you all to what's coming up for you. We're going to make this really engaging and make sure you all get the most out of it. So, Justin me to confirm your company. You do employer branding and recruitment marketing, correct?

Justin Vajko

That's right.

Leah Roe

Okay.

Leah Roe

Why is that needed in the world?

Justin Vajko

It's a good question. Let's go look at traditional job hunting or traditional job when you're in HR.

Justin Vajko

You're in a recruiter, the traditional way of things is, Oh, crap. We have an opening. Quick, let's go post a job and hope we get the right candidates to apply that fit our culture, that fit the job requirement, etc. And that's a very reactive way of approaching the whole discipline of finding your next employee. It's a very, Well, I hope it works out type of way to approach that whole discipline. So employer branding and recruitment marketing flips out on its head, and it's like preventive medicine. So you can go to the doctor when you have a pain in your side that's really bad, or you can go to a nutritionist ahead of time and tell you, you should just cut out dairy and you should do these three other things, take these supplements. So you never have that pain in the first place. And that's essentially what employer branding and recruitment marketing are. They're a way to get ahead of the curve so that when you are promoting yourself, you're building reputation in the marketplace with those prospective candidates. So that when the time comes, when you got to go hire, it's not this cold call introduction, Here we are, here you are.

Justin Vajko

You've never heard of us before. We have no idea if we're culture fit for one another. You have a pre existing reputation. And folks can make a much easier decision about whether they're ready to apply for you or not ready to investigate working for you. It makes hiring a lot easier, ultimately.

Leah Roe

What do you love about what you do?

Justin Vajko

I love that I get to really... Well, a couple of things. One, okay, so story time. We did some videos for a client recently. That's most of what we do is videos for employee branding. Storytelling is the best... Video is the best way. I can get into that and all that. But we did a video shoot for a client in Vermont a month ago, and the HR team is the one that really hired us. They don't have a recruiter, they don't have an employer branding team. It's just the HR team and their company. And that's typical for us. And we went to review the videos last Friday for the first time together. They hadn't seen the videos. And the HR team was just all smiles because they were hearing the feedback from their employees that they'd worked with for years that they'd never heard before. And they said, I think the HR director said, This is this is amazing. We hear all the complaints from our team. We never hear the nice things. I just love doing that with our clients where I get to show them all the nice things their employees actually think about them and not just the negative things.

Justin Vajko

So that's one thing that comes to mind right away because it's fresh in my memory is letting these HR teams really see that they are doing good. They're doing great, in fact, and not everything is so negative. It's easy to get burned out in HR because all you get is the negative. And I'll tell my wife after I was like, wouldn't it be nice if we had some organized way to go around and tell each other the nice things we're actually thinking instead of just the negative things in general as human beings, especially for these poor HR teams. So I don't know. If you come up with a program like that, let me know. I'd be the first to sign up because I think a lot of companies need that. But anyways, this was our version of that, and that was very satisfying.

Leah Roe

Well, it's interesting because it reminds me of coaching in the way, part of our job as a coach is to point out where you are making progress. This is really hard right now, but look at what you're doing. You're being so courageous right now. So it's like the job of a coach to point out the fine spots, but also point out the good things that you're blind to. So with recruitment marketing, with employer branding, so big thing is to get it out to the marketplace, like who we are, what we stand for, what our culture is, all of that. I've had a lot of conversations with people lately because we need to get our story out there of who we are, but we also need to be honest about.

Leah Roe

Who we are.

Leah Roe

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because.

Justin Vajko

mhm.

Leah Roe

See a lot of tension of, Well, we want to tell our story to recruit people in, but I don't know if our story is really Brag worthy. I think that's the first thing that comes to me once, Brag worthy.

Justin Vajko

Brag worthy. I love that. Few employer stories are brag, worthy guy, and for anyone listening. No one has an amazing employer story unless you're doing some amazing things and you've got a really solid hand on your culture. It's very tough to do that. So your question is, how do you tell your story while also being authentic about what your weaknesses are? Is that what I hear you saying, Leah? Yeah. That is a tough thing to do. That is a tough thing to do. Because for the main reason I'd say that's tough to do is because let's say you are in a position where your job is to tell the story of yourself as an employer. You're probably not an executive. So what that means is anything you write has to be approved by an executive. And if it has to be approved by an executive, executives aren't always on the same bandwidth, length, length, bandwidth, whatever the word is I'm looking for. You know what I mean? They're not on the same page as you when it comes to being authentic. And often what we mean by authentic is language like, this may not be a good fit for you, or we haven't yet figured it all out yet, but filling whatever we are doing.

Justin Vajko

Language that admits that we don't have it all together necessarily for everyone. And so it can be very tough because a lot of employers paint a picture as a result, that's all sunshine and rainbows. But we all know that's not realistic. There are zero employers. Even if you offer remote work and you have all these this time off and there are zero remote... We're just not perfect. We don't live in a perfect world. So that's impossible. And so we as humans have gotten used to seeing, okay, this is great, but there's probably something they're hiding. However, on the flip side, it's very tough to do. But on the flip side, if you can do that, it comes across as very refreshing. I don't know if you guys have ever seen one of these job posts that admits that this is not what we are, we're not the best at, but it's very refreshing because so few people do it. Yet we all know there's no perfect employer. So rather than try to... This is my philosophy. Rather than try to hide those things, be upfront about it. We have manufacturers that we work with, a lot of manufacturers, and we try to make it clear.

Justin Vajko

This is a tough job. Sometimes you have 12 hours days, you're standing all day. We try to make that clear in our communications upfront. And every job has its negative parts that we just need to be more clear about in the job posting, in the videos, and even including that in some of the videos that we do where we interview folks and we say, Hey, what's the stuff that's not so great about the job? And sometimes including that in the messaging because it's good for people to know that because the worst thing you can do is you can paint a picture of a workplace and then attract somebody there. And all of a sudden there's this major flaw that is a no b lano for them and they're going to leave right away. So you're just shooting yourself in the foot by doing all this work to attract them. And then you're just going to leave. You're going to set up a promise you can't keep, set up an expectation you can't meet, and then they're going to leave anyways.

Leah Roe

Well, that's like smoke and mirrors. One of the worst things you could do is market who you are as a company and make it look all perfect and shiny. And then they come in and they're like, oh, you didn't tell me about any of this stuff. I really love the idea of one of the things I was curious about was do you ever do videos or anything? It's like, tell me the worst part about working here and marketing. Why not?

Justin Vajko

Yeah, it's a good question. We've never asked that question. I should do that. We ask a different way. We should do that. That's a good question. What I do ask, I did a couple of interviews this week with employees. We do this remote interview. We have a remote interview process that we use with some of our clients. Somebody gets on the phone, they're in the production floor and I can just interview them right there. It's pretty neat. One of the questions I asked a couple of them this week was, what's something that would be challenging for somebody working here? Or I think I asked it as, what's something that would make someone not a good fit? They wouldn't like working here. And so those answers are close, but I like the way you put that. What just sucks about working here?

Leah Roe

One of our clients, she was saying, she's like, I'm just so sick of putting out there, this is who we are and everything's so happy. Then people come in and they just get totally burnt out because we work around the clock, whatever. I'm like, what if you just owned it? What if it was just like, You're going to come here and we are going to You are going to burn out. It's going to be a lot, but you're going to learn more in two years than you'll learn 12 years anywhere else. And you'll attract the people that want to do that.

Justin Vajko

There are people. Right. I've heard it called... I'm on LinkedIn a lot. And one of the thing that was very eye opening for me was realizing there's no such thing as a bad culture. There's just a poor culture fit. And what I mean by that is, and what that person meant was, like you just said, there are companies where people do want to work the 60, 80 hour work weeks, and they want to earn a ton of money. And they are rude people, but that's what they want, and that's what the company wants. So you could argue that's a great culture fit for that person. So if you can be real about what you offer and what you don't offer, you're ultimately going to attract the right people to your company. I think that's very powerful if you can own up to it. Again, the problem is a lot of executive teams, they don't want to admit to that. There's this corporate veneer that a lot of companies aren't willing to do. Now, don't get me wrong, there are some companies are willing and able and will do that. But a lot of companies still like, oh, no, we can't say anything negative because they're not...

Justin Vajko

Maybe they have insecurities personally and they're applying it to their business. But that can be a challenge trying to get that realness through the executive approval process.

Leah Roe

I feel like that would be such a good exercise for a team to do is like, let's write the realist Ross.

Justin Vajko

Job description. I love that.

Leah Roe

Let's put it out there of what is actually happening in this role?

Justin Vajko

Let's let it all out. Let's vent it all out.

Leah Roe

And then you can make the choice of like, do we feel comfortable posting this? No? Okay. Then what changes do we want to make to our culture so that we would feel comfortable posting that?

Justin Vajko

Yeah. That's a fun exercise idea. And that's why when you and I, Leah, connected a while back, it was over a year ago, I was excited to connect because you guys promote good culture and get good bad You promote healthy culture for the average human being, right? Not all of us is like a It's.

Leah Roe

All a veneer.

Justin Vajko

Yeah, it's all a veneer. You heard it here, folks. Heard it first, folks. It's all for nothing. No, because of that very concept you just described where if we're going to do our best job, we need to really work with companies that... All we're going to do as an employer branding agency, as a recruitment marketing agency is really pull back the curtain and show what it's really like to work there. Our best work is when we just are as transparent as possible about what the company is all about. And ultimately, it's not on us as to whether the company is successful. It's on their culture. And that's why I was excited to connect with you all that time ago because you do work with companies that are working on that.

Leah Roe

Yeah, helping them define what is the culture that they want to have and then how do we make that happen. When I was VP of People and Culture at HealthB inch, during interviews, it was really important that I would say, Can I tell you the three things that I think are awesome at this company right now? And can I tell you three things that are huge challenges for us? And the feedback I would always get from people who are interviewing was it was really refreshing to hear, say that not everything's perfect. And I would say if everything was perfect here, we probably wouldn't need to hire anyone else. We need you. We need your help to make us better.

Leah Roe

And so I.

Leah Roe

Appreciate that about you and the work that you do of like, you're not just... What did you call it? Putting lipstick on the pig?

Justin Vajko

Yeah, putting lipstick on a pig. I love that saying. Everybody gets it right away.

Leah Roe

Okay, Justin, what do you want everyone... We're not even close to being done, but what do you want everyone to walk out of here today knowing? What do you think is an important thing for everyone to know from you today?

Justin Vajko

I'm going to be real, we talked about this last week and I had an answer and I can't remember what it was so it might change today.

Leah Roe

I can remind you what it was, but I love it. Keep going.

Justin Vajko

Yeah. So the number one thing... Oh, this is it. This is it. I want everybody to know, guys, we have a population problem. You may not know it, but we do. The US population grew in 2022 by 0.4 %, 0.3 % of that, three thirds of that was because of immigration. So the US population grew by 0.1 %. So I'm just going to explain. Okay, so population grew. It grew a little bit. But guys, if every company wants to grow, let's say 5 10 %, how do you have a company grow 5 10 %, but have a population only grow 0.1 %? Let's say 0.4 %, because immigrants count to. Let's just say 0.4 %, they don't match. And it's not that every company needs this perfect amount of matching population for it to grow. It's not like we need 10 % here, 10 % here. But you can clearly see the math doesn't add up between a 0.4 % growth population and a 10 % growth. So the biggest thing I want everybody to know is not about my company, it's not about employer branding. It's that literally we all have a problem in the United States.

Justin Vajko

And in fact, in all of the Western world, and in fact, most of the world, even China is coming to a population crisis. And that is we have a population crisis. We're experiencing plateauing and eventually in the next few years decline. And I can show you this chart. I won't, but just picture this. 1950s, we had this massive baby boom. So picture this chart of birth per woman. And in 1950s, after World War II, it's just massive mountain, and then it dips right back down again, 1970, and then it just stays flat and plateaus all the way until today. That's the situation of the Burks we've been experiencing. So everybody says, oh, nobody wants to work anymore. Blah, blah, blah. That's not the case. We have more people working today % wise than we've ever had working. The problem is that we have been riding that wave of baby boomers the last 50, 60 years who have been available and causing this huge rut in the workforce, and now they're all retiring. So in the next 10 years, there will be no more baby boomers. Let's put it this way, very few baby boomers in the workplace.

Justin Vajko

And we're going to be experiencing some very harsh realities for employers who have not been preparing themselves, whether it comes to automation or building their culture so that they become more attractive to that smaller pool of candidates. There's a lot of problems coming up, and employer branding is just one of many solutions to help solve that problem. But we do have a problem. It's the biggest threat on the swap matrix. If you do the swap matrix, it's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, strengths. I recommend you do that. But a lot of employers, they never think... If an executive team ever goes, Oh, what's our biggest threat? They don't think of the declining population yet because it hasn't really... No one's telling them. Nobody realizes that. I don't know why. It's something I've come across in the last three years and really learned about. Before that, the narrative in my brain was we have overpopulation. We have too many people. You ever hear that? Yeah, we've all heard there's overpopulation. That's not the case, guys. The global population is going to start declining here very soon from eight billion down, believe it or not, because we're just having less and less babies.

Justin Vajko

And we have been for 50, 60 years, and it's finally catching up to us. Now, that's the reason why so many people are struggling to hire because every business is trying to grow, but we just don't have the people now because everyone's starting to retire, especially COVID accelerated that was a catalyst for retirement. And so we don't have the same pool of people to pull from and there just aren't going to be as many people available. So it's a really bad situation when businesses want to grow but there aren't enough people to hire. There are solutions to it, but it's the thing that if you're not preparing for it now, you're going to be in a bad spot later on.

Leah Roe

So when you told me that last week, I was like, Maybe. Then literally the next day, I got an article sent to me that is called, they're calling it the forever labor shortage. That's just what it's going to be called now. We're entering the forever labor shortage. And so I love what you're saying of, this is why it's really important that we get clear on what is our culture, making it a competitive advantage, marketing it to get those people in, and also embracing automation, innovation, technology. One of the things that was brought up in this article was that they're seeing it in the hospitality industry that they can't hire enough people. So I don't know if anyone stayed at a hotel recently. You can see they're moving to not doing housekeeping for several days at a time. So they're lowering the number of housekeepers they need to have on staff. Taking away front desk staff, so you just go to your room and you have an app to enter. So people are embracing technology and innovation and automation. However, I'm a big believer that we're always going to need humans. We're always going to need people at our places of work.

Leah Roe

It's important that you, at least from my perspective, that you have a combined effort there of how do we develop our culture and attract the right people and also start to embrace some automation, some technology.

Leah Roe

To.

Leah Roe

Help with the forever labor shortage.

Justin Vajko

It's funny you say that. That's actually one of the things I've talked about is this isn't going away. There's no magical baby boom coming. There's nothing above 2.1 babies per household in the last 60 years. And I think people just aren't aware of that. So that's the big take away I want people to be aware of.

Leah Roe

The other industry I've been talking to a lot is the accounting industry. People are saying so many accountants are retiring, and not a lot of people are choosing that as their profession. So they're seeing a huge shortage right now in the accounting industry.

Justin Vajko

My accountant retired, I was like, What the heck, Greg? You can't retire on me. And they passed me off to Matt and Matt's fine. But yeah, I had that exact experience.

Leah Roe

Matt's not on here.

Justin Vajko

No, Matt's not on here. Matt's great. I love Matt. He's a.

Leah Roe

Great accountant. I'm going to turn the real for Matt. He's okay.

Justin Vajko

But Greg was awesome. I miss Greg.

Leah Roe

I want to open it up to the floor real quick. What's coming up for people? What questions are you having or what are you thinking about as you hear Justin talk about labor shortage, employee branding, marketing? Troy, I see you have your hand raised.

Participant

I think it's really interesting because I've been reading a lot. I work in higher education and colleges and universities want to grow also to be. Able to produce those.Future employees. However, the number of graduating seniors across the country.Has been at a.Steady decline for years. College campuses are not meeting their admission goals because there just are not.Students to go. Even the work industry, I have five. Kids, but I have two teenagers right now.My son son just feels that he can hop from job.To job to job. Oh, this.Is going to pay more, so I'm just going to quit.And go to the next one. And it's.That.Mentality of there's so much.Out there that why do I have to.Settle for what I'm doing? But it's really interesting just to see the number of declining graduate high school.Seniors. Colleges can't.Recruit, therefore, you can't.Produce enough in the workforce. And it's all this trickle effect, right?

Justin Vajko

Yeah. There's a lot of effects on society. The only time I think this has ever happened in history, I think, is the decline of the Roman Empire in the thousands or whatever it was. And so there's very little that we can go and be like, Oh, this is what happens when less people are born. All I can tell you is it's not good. It's probably not going to be very good. Ai, automation can only take us so far. Really, we're going to be in a pinch for a long time. So it's a sobering point, but I want you guys to be aware. That's the number one reason why it's worth looking into these kinds of solutions ahead of time.

Leah Roe

What else is coming up for people?

Justin Vajko

I feel like the audience is just like, oh, man. Right now. Oh, this is such a bummer. I was just in.

Participant

Front of the problem because my partner and I are not having kids. So I'm like, no better time than child free.

Justin Vajko

Yeah. Hey, that's all right. We got you. We have four kids. So if it's 2.1 babies, you need 2.1 babies per household to maintain, and we've been under that. So if we got four, we just need one more, and we'll be over that for you. We got you.

Leah Roe

So, Justin, I'm curious, who is somebody that you see doing employer branding, recruitment marketing really well? What's the company that we could look at? And what are they doing that you think they should do?

Justin Vajko

The one company comes to mind is JMP. Their company... I'm going to sneeze. One second. No, you're not. No, it's not. The one company comes to mind is JMP. So their company based out of Eau Claire. I'm from Chippewa Falls, I lived in Eau Claire for 15 years. They are a software company. They basically create this software that allows you to remotely manage all your Apple devices. A lot of school districts use it. A lot of big organizations use it to manage all their Apple devices. And so not a very terribly interesting product, but they've done a very good job with their culture, identifying the people they're trying to hire and really making it clear through their messaging what they're about, interviewing their people, asking their people what it's like to work there and really doubling down on their culture. That's a massive strength they've done. I've just always admired what they do because they don't just do a good job with their culture, they also do a good job of communicating it. I say that because I know their employer branding manager. She and I meet almost monthly. I really have always admired what they do there. There are a lot of other companies that are doing a good job. I'd argue our clients are because they don't necessarily have a great culture, but they are doing a good job of communicating what they're all about accurately. Now, at least I hope we are. I hope we're communicating that accurately. So JMP is a good one.

Leah Roe

Justin, I'm curious, and this might be a very simplified version, but is what I'm hearing you say, if I wanted to get better at employer branding, proof of marketing, step one, have the great culture. Step two, tell the story of the great culture. And step three is you're going to pull people in.

Justin Vajko

Yeah, it's that simple. It is that simple, guys.

Leah Roe

So have a great culture, tell the stories of the culture, pull people in through those stories.

Justin Vajko

It also works if you don't have a great culture, but you know what your culture is and you tell an accurate story of what the culture is, and then you pull in those people that want that culture, even if it's not a great culture. So it works at any culture level as long as you're accurate and honest.

Leah Roe

Okay. So what if you're not? Go for it. Oh, I was just going to say, Diana had her hand raised, so I just wanted to see if she had something based on what the conversation was right now or previously. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Justin Vajko

No, it's fine.

Participant

No, keep going on this train of thought. Come back to me later. Okay. I want to hear what you have to say about average culture attracting average talent. This sounds very compelling.

Justin Vajko

Yeah, 90 % of companies.

Leah Roe

Okay. So, Justin, then what if... Okay, so you can tell your accurate story and pulling those people. So what are your thoughts then on not telling an accurate story, on knowing your culture is subpar and telling a...

Justin Vajko

Yeah. There's always going to be executives that want that. There's some a bias. I thought I knew what it was called at one point. I forgot it. If anybody knows that bias, that basically is you're turning a blind eye to reality. I don't know if it's a bias or some other mental framework. There's got to be a name for it. But we all have done that, right? Whether it's us individually like, oh, I'm a great person. Then you ask a spouse, are they a great person? Well, that thinking. We all do that. We all want to protect ourselves or protect the image of our companies. That's always going to happen. And I think I'm losing my train of thought, but what was the question again?

Leah Roe

I don't know. I'm going to keep going. Diana, why don't you?

Justin Vajko

Okay.

Participant

So I think what you guys are getting at right now is the idea of humility. To be humble and where you're at is important. Not my question, but I just like this train of thought. My question is, it's Pride Month, which people have started joking as corporate approval of Gay People Month. There's this trendiness to Black History Month. Women's Month and all this stuff. So I guess my question to you is, do you see companies falling into these pitfalls or these monthly? Absolutely. And how do you avoid that? How do you incorporate all of it in your story all the time, but not becoming part of the corporate approval month?

Justin Vajko

Yeah, it's funny you say that. That is such a true thing. So I'm in a mastermind with a bunch of other people every month. We lead a mastermind for folks in employer branding and recruitment marketing. And a reason a lot of companies do that is because they're trying to jump on a bandwagon of like, oh, if we don't do that, then we'll come across poorly. The problem is they're doing it because it's the standard everyone expects, not because it's actually true who they are. And there's not much you can do about that. Like, as an individual, I talk to these employer branders, it's usually one person within these massive companies. This is such a new discipline, employer branding. Sometimes it'd be one person for a company of 5,000, 10,000 people, one person. And their job is to vet the job description and add language to the website and conduct the interviews. And then they're tossed around by whatever whims are of the company in terms of what they want to do. And somebody executive has an idea, let's change our logo to make it multi colored for Pride Month. And this one person and usually not an executive. Employer branding is not something a lot of companies have really owned yet. There are a few. There's a handful that are really doing a good job. You mentioned JMP. But it's a very silly thing. We see through a lot of it. It's just a white washing. It's like a white washing exercise. A lot of employer branding is a white washing exercise. It's not actually doing what it's supposed to do, which is building the reputation of what you're actually like. But it's such a new discipline. We're going to see a lot of examples of what not to do. And you probably guys, you probably all have seen examples of the wrong type of employer, I say wrong but inaccurate employer branding, just like we do in buying stuff. When you buy something, branding, marketing, how often have you been let down by an expectation? I bought what I thought was going to be a great product based on its reputation, its brand, turned out it let me down, or the customer service wasn't that great. We've all done that with products. The same thing is going to happen with jobs. And it's almost like we need another term for employer branding just to give it maybe authentic employer branding or realness.I don't know.

Leah Roe

Is it really like a self awareness activity, like getting clear on who we are? Also, I think a little bit of like, who do we want to be, but also telling the story of who we are now and can you tell the story of, and this is where we want to get to?

Justin Vajko

You can.

Leah Roe

We're not there yet, but we are working towards it.

Justin Vajko

There's that tension. Every good employer brander knows there's a tension between who we are now and who we want to be. The problem is most people always want to close their eyes to who we are now and just think about who we want to be. I'm a little skeptical this way. I'm an employer brander, but I'm a very bad one because I don't do any of the... So I talked to other employer branders. Yeah, we have aspirational... That's the word they use, aspirational dreams of being X, Y, Z, but they really aren't. The classic example is like, Oh, we got to get a picture of everybody. Wait, there's no black person. Oh, we got Fred. Fred's our one black person. Let's get him in the photo so that we can show that we're diverse. But it's like, Fred's feeling like, Well, what the heck? This isn't real about us. I'm the only guy here. So there's a lot of that kind of like, let's just do it because it's the right... Because it's like, we don't want to come across the wrong way. But you got to be... That was a comment. That was actually a real story. I talked with somebody a while back who was saying, What do we do? Our leadership wants to attract more African Americans, but we only have two. And how do we do that? And the moral of the story was, you just got to be real like, hey, we're trying to do this. We're not there yet. Just use that language. But the truth is companies are just having a hard time doing that. Unless you're a small company and you can choose to... You've got a tight knit executive team or one executive and you can convince them. Authenticity is the way to really attract and retain the best people. Most people aren't aware of the power of authenticity.

Leah Roe

Okay. If everyone on this call gets off the call and is like, you know what? I want to go. I want us as a company to be better at employee branding, better at recruitment marketing. What are the three things that people on this call can or should go and do?

Justin Vajko

There are certain tactics you can use to really improve your reputation, to get it to where it actually should be. But really, the best thing is to determine the appetite for authenticity within your company. Determine the appetite for authenticity within your company. And you probably know that actually, with me just saying that, you probably have a gut instinct of knowing how authentic you can be as a company. Because that's probably dictated by your culture and you're living in your culture every day. So that's the first thing, figure out how authentic you can be and then try to push those boundaries of authenticity. Those go hand in hand, like figure out how authentic do we feel we can be and then how far can we push that boundary before we're slapped on the hand by my leadership and told, No, we can't be that authentic. We can't be that real with our audience. But ultimately that's going to be the best thing. That being said. There are some tactics. The other two things would be if you're going to be out and trying to build your reputation as an employer, a very practical thing you can do is just look at your reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor. And a lot of employers who have great big HR teams but don't have any recruiters or any employer branders, they're very unaware of how their online reputation is preceding them. So if you go to your page right now on Indeed, you go to type in Indeed. Com, go to Google. I always like doing it this way. Go to Google, type in Indeed. Com, put a space, put the name of your company. It'll take you right to the company page when you can see your rating, your star rating. More often than not, that star rating is lower than what it should be. Sometimes it's accurate, but often it's lower than what it should be. And the reason for that is because as human beings, we are more likely to leave a bad review than a good review. Going back to that example with the HR team I gave, they're only hearing the complaints and never hearing the positives.And it's very hard to leave a review on Indeed. If you've ever tried it, it's like three pages of information they ask you, like, what's your social security number and who's your Daddy and who's you work for? I'm just kidding, they don't do that. But it's like all the ridiculous questions. And so if you're really mad, you're going to do it. If you're like, I'm having an okay experience, you're going to be like, I ain't got time for this. So looking at your indeed reviews and really putting together a strategy for improving those is the number two thing I recommend because that's a really quick win. And that's quick. It's not quick per se because it takes a while to get to that. You really have to have a... There's some layers to the strategy of how to do this. This is something we do as a company. But that's something you can do to improve your reviews. And again, whenever I tell this to people, it's not like improving your reviews to look amazing. It's to get them where you think they should be. If you're a three out of five star company and you have three out of five stars on your reviews, leave it alone. Don't do what I'm telling you. But if you have two out of five and you're like, really should be a three or four, then go ahead. But obviously that's all subjective. With great knowledge comes great responsibility. Now you know. So that's the number two thing. And the number three thing is start communicating your culture as often as you can now because this hiring problem is now going away. And again, a lot of people are getting caught with their pants down about this problem. And we're still using reactive solutions to the hiring problem. Oh, we can't find the right person. Let's hire recruiter. And then $20,000 later, you got one person hired instead of spending $20,000 on doing some video and doing some social media presence and talking to your people and putting together your pitch for why she's been working on your website. And then doesn't that sound a lot better to have a really comprehensive, accurate view of a company before somebody applies for 20,000 versus hiring one middle manager for 20,000? But that's the solution we all jump to is like, oh, let's go find a recruiter. Let's hire a couple of people for a lot of money. Instead, I'd argue, put that money into employer branding activities, which translates to put that money into accurately telling your story ahead of time activities. And then you're going to find a lot more... It's a lot easier to hire people.

Leah Roe

So to sum up, the three things we could go and do. Number one, determine the appetite for authenticity at our companies and push the boundaries to make sure we're authentically telling those stories of who we actually are. Looking at Indeed in Glass Door, looking at our ratings and trying to do some things there. And then the third thing is communicating culture. Even if we're not hiring right now, start communicating culture, telling those stories accurately, telling those stories so that when we're in the position of needing to hire, we have a presence. People know who we are. They know what we're about, and we're going to attract in those people who are aligned with where we're going.

Justin Vajko

Fun fact, you actually improve... If you're a B2B business. So if anyone's listening to their B2B insurance or whatever like that, by telling your employee stories, you're actually going to improve your B2B sales cycles because more and more and more as human beings, as newer generations enter the workplace, it's not this corporate to corporate. B2b isn't corporate to corporate, it's person to person. And so if people can see the stories of the people having a good time behind the scenes who are the ones working on their spreadsheets behind the scenes, they're more likely to choose you as an option when it comes to a sale. So it's actually a two for one when you work in employer branding, especially for B2B, because you can actually, your marketing team can use it. Now, the danger is when I say some of this stuff, a lot of people think, Oh, I need to work with marketing to do this. You can, and they will help you. But the problem is marketing has never been trained in employer branding. And ultimately, it's not about training because marketers often can pick up on how to do this well. The problem is focus. So if you think I'm going to go to my marketing team and get their help, they will help you for a short amount of time. And then it'll go and then why? Because their focus is on sales, not on people, not on the hiring needs. It's a completely different focus. It's similar but different. And so you're only going to get their support as long as they're interested. And that's where having an agency partner like us or hiring an internal employer branding person dedicated to this purpose is important. Don't put it on the HR team. The HR team is already burned out. Ninety % of HR folks already burned out. This is not one more thing they need to do. And they've never been trained. They don't know how. They're not marketers. Look at the average job description. Tell me if that's a really good example of copywriting. It's not. So you really need some outside help. So yeah, those are the three points. You sum that up really nicely, Leah.

Leah Roe

One thing I want to put out there for everyone is I don't want people to leave us call being like, our culture, we need to work on our culture a ton before we can even talk to someone like Justin or before we can even think about employer branding. Because without knowing everyone's culture in here, I can tell you, your culture is not as bad as you think it is.

Justin Vajko

It's not, yeah.

Leah Roe

I was at a workshop recently with a client, and beforehand, the stakeholders have been like, We just need so much help. Our culture is so bad. We're doing nothing, blah, blah. And being in there and just facilitating conversations, asking questions. My whole job is leadership and culture development. And me pointing out, You all are doing stay interviews? That's amazing. What are you doing with that information? Or like, Oh, you're doing this? That's really unique. Not everyone is doing that. That's really significant and here's why. So it can be really helpful to work with an objective partner, too, so that we can point out those things that are really positive about your culture that you might not realize you're doing. Like, oh, yeah, we are doing a lot. So I just want to put that out there, too.

Justin Vajko

That's a good point.

Leah Roe

Don't think you have to do all this work to your culture before you can even bring in someone like Justin. It can be really helpful to have someone like Justin or someone like us come in and point out what you're already doing. That's amazing. And help you see, okay, this is where... Let's focus our efforts over here. This is where we can do some work.

Justin Vajko

Yeah, you make a good point, Leah. I think a lot of times we're really hard on ourselves. I'm pretty sure because I've given a lot of these talks, not these... I like this, this is conversational, but I've given a lot of talks where I educate my audience and I talk a lot of teams, and I've rarely gotten leads from the talks. And I think it's because I've talked about having a great culture, and everyone in the audience is like, Oh, well, I guess we'll just have to work on our culture. And in five years, we'll come to Justin. And I think that's a really good qualifier you put in there, Leah. A lot of companies are doing things better than we think. And it's not that you need a great culture, it's just you need to be accurate about your culture. We put in a bid for a company that they have terrible retention. They're a manufacturing plant nationwide, and I'm pretty sure they have a terrible culture. But the reason why we're putting a bid to work with them is because I know if we help them tell their story and tell them both sides, what's good, what's bad, that'll help them. There will be people that go into that job knowing what they're getting into, and they're not going to have the wool pulled over their eyes and be like, Oh, I thought I was working for this great company with all these wonderful things. Now it's a manufacturing job. It's tough. There's 12 hours shifts, rotating schedule. Talk about that.

Leah Roe

Well, you said too, the accuracy, the humanness, I think is just so refreshing. It reminds me of many years ago, Dan and I were on vacation and we went to this bar because they had a sign up front that said, Come in and try the worst gin and tonic some girl on Yelp ever had.

Justin Vajko

Yes.

Leah Roe

And then they had a little asterisk and they're like, We promise we've improved our recipe since. I was like, I just like, that's my type of bar. They've embraced the negative feedback. They've had some fun with it and they're improving.

Justin Vajko

That's. Fantastic. They were super honest.

Leah Roe

They just put it out there. And that's why you chose them. Guys, what an amazing distinction to have. If you can be super honest.That's an amazing distinction. I need to go in there and I need to have a gin and tonic. It has to happen ASAP.

Justin Vajko

Love it.

Leah Roe

What's coming up for people right now in the audience? Anything, any questions you have for Justin or any thoughts or ideas being sparked? There was one question in the chat, Leah, that if there was a way to get links to some of the branding videos, Justin, that you have created so people could check those out. I'm sure we can send it out afterwards. Or if you have the link handy, we can put it in the chat. But that was a question or request.

Justin Vajko

Yeah, right there in the chat. Just put it in there. We have two websites. That's our recruiting marketing website. You can see examples of videos there.

Leah Roe

I have a question for audience members. What is something that you all are doing at your companies right now for employer branding or recruitment marketing? What's something that you all are doing that you think is awesome? Something that I did at one of my last jobs that I really liked, and this speaks a little bit to what you were talking about.

Participant

Leah, and the accounting. Profession is I did a day in the life. So people had an idea. I mean, I think a lot of. People think accounting. Is boring, and it's not necessarily, depending on what you do. I think there's... And people. Have different perceptions of it.So I did a. Lot of different social media with. Here's a day. In the life. You're traveling, going on site to a customer. Taking them out to lunch, different. Things like that.So that was. Something that I like to highlight is what people actually did during the day.

Justin Vajko

Wonderful idea. Day in the life. It's a good video staple of employer branding. It's very especially it's helpful a lot for industries that are not well known or industries that like you, we assume we think we know what it's like. Oh, an accountant, they sit at a desk all day, they have big glasses and there's paperwork on the desk and they're just buried in their books. Your video will help to dispel that myth and really get people interested in something because of it.

Participant

I have another comment. So at my last job, we did a recruiting video like this and it made a huge difference. We went from 50 % acceptance to 95 % acceptance of offers. So I totally see the value in what you're doing. And I thought about this as a solopreneur who hopes to make my first hire at some point soon. How do I talk about culture if I'm a culture of one? I guess that's the question that's coming up for me right now is, do I talk about the culture I want to have? The date of life is me walking to my basement right now.

Justin Vajko

Hey, Diana, let's brainstorm right now. That would be an amazingly silly but amazing video of like, there's the culture and you do all the shots, but it's just you.

Leah Roe

You go to high five and you're like, Oh.

Justin Vajko

There's no one here. That's why we need you.

Participant

Now I'm sitting on my fire escape alone. Let's do this video. It'd be.

Justin Vajko

So good. It would be so good, Diana. Please do it. Because you just need your phone. You just need your phone. Just do it and just do a bunch of shots. And then the transition is, That's why we need you. I'm trying to build a company like this. You can talk about what you're trying to build. That's fine. That's totally fine. Because you know it's just you.

Leah Roe

More than one person. Oh, my God. Taylor is going to kill me when I tell him I want to do this. He's going to have to be the camera man. I love it. So good.

Justin Vajko

I want to see that, Diana, when you do it, please send it to me. Please send it to me. I'm excited for you.

Participant

I got your website, so we'll connect.

Justin Vajko

What else? What about that humor in videos? Some employers, you can do humor. Some employers, you can't. Depends on the company.

Participant

Well, I work in conflict, so I feel like I have to do humor. People won't talk to me. There's no humor allowed in the park, so we would be very much that. serious stuff over there. Zach, were you going to say something?

Participant

Yeah, I was. It's completely unrelated. Well, it's not unrelated, but I think everybody on this call has heard me talk in the past. We're a pretty fast growing company. We've tripled in size in three years. Our administrative function, our headquarters are here in Portage. We're a college restaurant group of guys. We have 92 locations. We do all the administrative work out of our headquarters here in Portage. Rita has joined the call this month. She's our accounting manager, does an amazing job of keeping our accounting team on point, on task, just does an amazing job for us. One of the things that we have, I feel we have a good culture. I think we can speak to that as well. One of the things I think we, her and I have tried to do is really establish the culture and announce what we are because we've had, again, we've gone from... There were five employees in this office four years ago. Now there's 41. But we're trying to create that culture. The disconnect for me is... Not the disconnect for me, but I think the disconnect in this conversation has been, we know what our culture is, we know where we want to go, we tell people that in the interview process. What we don't do a good job of, I think, is the stragglers, the ones that were dragging behind that have their heels dug in the sand, that don't want to come along with that culture. And I think that's a whole different... It could be the next month's Perker, two months down the down the way culture community is. How do you get those people to come along with you? And we've done... Reid and I have done a lot of coaching with a few of our employees. We've let a few go, and we've tried to hire to have those folks fit our culture. But I think that's one piece, too, that could be an add on to this topic in a few months is how do you drive that culture?

Leah Roe

Yeah. What? How to get the stragglers on board.

Leah Roe

Yeah. I'm curious, Zak, do you know what's holding them back from jumping on board?

Participant

Yeah, I don't know. I think part of it is I've been here for a year and a half and what does this guy know? He's been in here for a year and a half. He wants to change everything. Well, it really hasn't been changing everything. It's just been establishing stuff. And there's probably a little bit of who does he think he is? And that's probably painting those folks with a broad brush, right? But I think there's just some legacy stuff, like, we didn't do it that way before. Our owners don't really have the same view, if you will. Maybe they think that, although the owners do have the same view I do and Rita does, where we want to go with our culture. But I think it's just laziness and probably wanting us to call their bluff, if you will. Is that fair? I'm talking loud. I'm not really sure I'm making sense, but I do think there are some people that come into work every day that really don't care what I think and really don't want to change the way they do things to what the new standard is or the new culture is. We coach them, we tell them why we're doing what we're doing, and then we get on board. And if you don't, there's the door thing.

Leah Roe

What's important to you about these people getting on board?

Participant

Well, continuity, I think first and foremost. Everybody's on the same page, driving towards the same goals and the same ideals, if you will. Ideal is probably is the wrong term. But I would go back to continuity. We all need to be on the same page. We need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. We're a fast growing company. We're trying to get procedures, policies, things in place to make sure that we can accommodate growth without necessarily adding a butt and a seed. Trying to make them be more efficient with technology, and I don't want to be generational here, but some of our folks that maybe have their heels dug in are a little older than the other ones. Don't embrace technology, don't embrace efficiencies.

Leah Roe

Has anyone on this call ever had an issue like that or had to deal with getting people on the team to become aligned with the new direction, the new way of doing things?

Participant

I'l just say that I worked at companies that clearly had a new guard and an old guard, and it was I don't have a solution how. To get everyone on the same page, but. We could. Feel it. There were two different cultures at one time. And the people who worked there for 20 plus years did one. Thing, and the people who worked there for three years did another. It was. Definitely. Counter intuitive and hard.

Leah Roe

I think also some of it is, and I can't speak to it really until I would dive in deeper. But with teams that we work with, there are different... Some people embrace change much quicker and our growth mindset. Yes. And there are other people who are much more resistant to change. And some of that is just personality type. And it's good. You want people on your team who are a little bit more resistant to change. Maybe not like, I refuse to change it all. But for example, on our team, I'm like, oh, let's do this. Let's do this. We got this feedback. Let's change everything. And Steph and Dan are really good at being like, hold on a second. Before we blow up that workshop and do it completely differently because we got one piece of feedback out of the 50 people, let's take a step back and look at it. So I'm appreciative that they're more resistant to change because it makes me slow down and make sure we're doing things the right way. So I do think for some people it is just a personality type that they're more resistant change. It's not necessarily a bad thing. There's also a possibility where it's like, we work with some teams where there's like a jadedness where they've been told all these things are going... They've been told for years, like, we're changing this, now we're changing this, we're changing this. And nothing ever really changes. It's like new management comes in every three years and says they're going to change everything and nothing ever really changes. So they just like wait it out. So I don't know what the exact situation is for your team, but it could be a mixture of some of those things. Also, if it is an older generation, if they're close to retirement, they might be like, I'm not going to change all the ways that I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm just going to keep doing this the way I've been doing it for the past 20 plus years, for a few more years, and ride off into the sunset of retirement, not death, just so everyone knows that. So it could be a multiple different things, but I'd love to connect offline and learn a little bit more because.

Participant

Well, yeah, I'd appreciate that too, Leanne. I realized that I did it snobbed you on our happy hour last week. I apologize for that. I had a calendar mess up, but we'll get that rescheduled.

Leah Roe

I don't mind when people cancel on me, but when it's a happy hour meeting, it's really legitimately killing us.

Participant

Dan can tell you that I rarely have to cancel a happy hour meeting. So that was truly a mistake on my part.

Participant

That's a Monumental moment in Zak's life.

Participant

It is. I apologize. I probably took this in a whole different direction. I didn't mean to, but that was just one of the things that was coming to my head is how we're going to how we continue to get those people on board with our culture. Beautiful. Yeah. And I realized that's the whole thing here in the culture community. I just haven't been a part of it that long. That's all.

Leah Roe

No, you did great. Okay, we have how many minutes left? Five minutes or 10 minutes? You have 10. Great. So, Justin, I want to pull up this slide and I want you... Can everyone see this? Can everyone see it? Yes, you're good. Great. So in getting connected with Justin, Justin, can you talk about your complimentary audit of your online reference? Because I think that this is the most amazing thing and everyone on this call should take advantage of this. When you told me he does this for free, I was like, Are you kidding me? This is amazing.

Justin Vajko

So you want to talk about it? You bet. So we do this audit. Do you want me to share? I could share what a screen share on my side of what it looks like. I always find showing is better than telling.

Leah Roe

Can somebody from my team put in the chat where everyone can sign up? Yes, I'm on it. Thanks, Steph. Okay.

Justin Vajko

So if you guys want me to take a look at what you're doing with your employer branding, go to that link and request an audit, and it goes straight to me. And then we'll set up a time to look at what you're doing. And when we set up that time, I'll then get to work ahead of time, and I will go over your online reputation with you. And this will help you to see what could be holding you back from your potential. So this is one audit I did for a manufacturer in Michigan, 100 employees. And so what I do is I do a few things. So for example, look at your job ads. I'll pick a random job ad I can find, and then I'll go through a few factors. Is it attention grabbing? Give you letter grades? And these are all based off of my gut. This is not scientific. So you could always take this with a grain of salt. I always say take it with a grain of salt. This is our method. So we'll look at is the job ad itself. This is what we call a job description. Is it attention grabbing? That's pretty normal. Pay range included? Yes, A, great job. Personality? Not much personality. Clarity? Yes. What's involved in the job? It's very clear. Conciseness? A, conciseness is important. There's a bunch of things to look at. Then what we recommend is right here. You can do this audit. I'll give you my recommendations. You can take this and run with it or hire us if you want to get help with it. We also look at things like job desirability. Just because you have all these things, let's say they're all A's, doesn't necessarily mean your job is desirable. And you might already know that like, manufacturing gets a bad rap for having non desirable jobs. But look at things like that. I'll look at all my notes across every factor I know of from years of doing this, look at pay, benefits, product, performance. Not all these are going to be relevant for every company because not every company, for example, status. Is there a status change with your job? Are you going from retail to nursing? Oh, yeah. Status change. I'm in health care now. Not every job is going to be relevant for that. So we look at job desirability. We then look at your career website and then any notes I have and then what we recommend. I actually apply to one of your jobs. I fake apply to one of your jobs. I actually do apply and I'll let you know, hey, this is a test. Please don't hire me. I'll put all my notes in there. It's a really good way. This is a really good way, by the way, if you ever were like, I wish we could improve our candidate flow, go apply to one of your jobs. Does it take under five minutes? Because if it doesn't, that's why. There's a huge drop off rate for any job application that takes more than five minutes. You can always qualify people in other ways. You don't need to qualify them in one giant job application. So I do this for you and give you some of my thoughts there. And then your EVP, this is a fancy way to say, what's your pitch? Why should somebody work there? And so we look at if you have one, if you do, we'll look at... So this employer, they did have a version of an EVP. And then what we recommend here as well to improve that and make it more clear. Then we look at what you're doing on social media. For this employer, they have LinkedIn, but the link from the website was broken, a very common thing. A lot of websites, they have broken links, which means if somebody's on your website, you got them on your website, guess what? They're not going any further. They're not going to see any of your content. So that's an easy one to fix. Facebook, look at that. Instagram, wherever you are. And we also look at your Indeed & Glass door reviews for this employer, we could see, okay, you've got a pretty middling rating here. And then 2.8 out of 5. And I would say they probably deserve to be a 4 or a high 3 or a low 4. Based off of my limited experience working with them, we did a video shoot with them last November. We got to interview their CEO, very humble man, and realized, okay, they got a good thing going. So this is a classic example of like, the reviews don't match the reality of the employer. So that's why we helped them get the reviews up. And then the same thing with Glassdoor here. So you can see the Glassdoor ratings a little better, but we look at all that for you. And that is the free audit we do. And I think the call we do is like 30 minutes to an hour. I forget exactly. Free.

Leah Roe

That is free. That's wild. Everyone should be signing up right now. It's amazing. Okay, to end this today in true coaching fashion, I can't just let everyone leave without making a commitment. So I want you to take from our conversation today, what is something that you learned? What is something that you want to take and put into action going forward to make your life better, to make your leadership better, to make your team better, the culture better, what is something you want to put into action? Take a moment to think about that. And then I'm just going to randomly call on people. I'm just kidding. Don't drop off. I am going to call on Steph. Steph, why don't you share first? What's something... She knew it was going to happen. What is something that you want to take from today and put into action?

Participant

Yes. I didn't know that you were going to ask me, Leah. What is one thing? I think something that was coming up based on, Justin, what you were just sharing is we're really good at our personal LinkedIn or being able to tell stories for ourselves through meetings or emails or on that personal LinkedIn.But I know that it's a focus of us of focusing on our Perk LinkedIn to be able to tell the story there. But just making sure that there's the authenticity and really our brand is coming through it and the energy is there. And so that was just something that was top of mind for me is like, does my page have that? Where we talk about what I do and who I am, does the Perk page have that? Just the authenticity portion, I think, is really huge and something that you can feel when you're even reading a LinkedIn page. So that's something that was top of mind for me that I would love to dive into more.

Leah Roe

Amazing. Who else wants to share their commitment?

Participant

I will. Yeah. Zach brought up a really good point of the people who aren't on board with the cultural values of going in a newer direction. We're still creating our brand and our culture here at Chamber's Theory. I know I want to connect with the folks who I'm feeling resistance from with the culture and just connecting with them one on one because they might have a different idea of how we can highlight them. So I think that's what I'm going to commit to in the next week.

Leah Roe

Love it. Great commitment. How about one more? It could be multiple more, more than one person wants to talk.

Participant

I onboarded a new. Team member in May, and she made a comment to me the other day that. Really stood out about how. She appreciated the one on ones with different members of our team. But it was always for a work purpose. It was. I'm going to meet with this person and go over our brand. Guidelines, or I'm going to meet with this person and. They're going to show me how our CRM works. And so. She said it was.Nice to have that opportunity to connect with. Them, but she didn't really feel like it was a good way to. Get to know them. And so I think I've been brainstorming on it. But one of the things that came up was getting buy in from the team. And so I think I'm going to ask her what that should look like. Should that... I have ideas of what I think it should look like or how we can do that. Our team is. Even though we work at a university, my team is fairly remote still. Then we're on ground one day a week and it's one person in. The office at a time. So we don't get to see each other face to face too frequently. But I think it's all well and good for me to determine what would be a good way to get to know people. But it would be more beneficial to hear from. Somebody who was just on. Boarded of like, what does she feel like would have been a better way to do it? And how can we get her buy in? So that as we. Continue to nurture her into. The onboarding of the company. We've got the buy in from her and then she can also help. Contribute. To the future onboarding of new employees.

Leah Roe

Yeah, love that. Amazing. Okay, one minute. Justin, what do you want to leave everyone with? What is your wish for everyone on this call?

Justin Vajko

My wish for everyone is that you have five star indeed ratings and may you all communicate clearly in all of your jobs. I wish I could sprinkle that upon you. Yeah, there you go. Just feel free to get an outside perspective with me if you're like, Yeah, we could use an outside perspective of how we're doing with our job stuff. And if you know of... If you have an executive that's complaining about the job market, tell them, I know a guy who can tell you it's not that people are being lazy, let him educate you. A big part of what I do is education. I talked about first point in the beginning, it's the last point at the end. This is a problem not going away anytime soon. So what are you doing as an employer to fix it? Because it's really in our hands to fix it. It's not in society to give us more people. It's not happening. So what can we do as companies, as individuals actually, to solve this problem? And really, I'd be happy to educate your leadership team if you want to include me in that conversation.

Leah Roe

Awesome. Thank you, Justin. Thank you so much for joining us and for letting me just buy your questions at you. I learned a ton and I hope everyone else did as well. And yeah, thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of your day and we'll see you next month where we'll talk about recognition and how to recognize your people.

Leah Roe

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye.