Globally headquartered companies in Lexington have teamed up with the city to promote the benefits of a Bluegrass address to their highly sought executive job prospects. The first result of the coordinated effort, an executive recruitment video leveraging Lexington as a vibrant and diverse city well-suited for professionals and their families, is now available online at vimeo.com/302892787.
The initiative began earlier this year, when Valvoline executives started looking for new ideas to improve their company’s success ratio in the recruitment of top-notch talent from out of state, said Brad Patrick, Valvoline’s chief people and communications officer. Some job candidates were closing the door prematurely, the team determined, because of preconceived negative notions about life in Kentucky.
Lexington’s quality of life is not a hard sell, if Valvoline’s recruiting message can break through any misguided small-town-Kentucky assumptions, said Patrick, a recent Bluegrass returnee himself. When Patrick’s former employer, Tempur Sealy International, Inc., made the commitment to reinvest itself in Lexington with its new headquarters, some recruiting agencies said the company couldn’t convince top-level talent in the industry to relocate to Kentucky. Patrick dismissed that notion, he said — and the agencies who held it.
“With the exciting opportunities at Valvoline, the challenge is the same,” Patrick said of his current mission to draw the best in the industry to work at Valvoline’s new global headquarters, which opened in Lexington last year. “When we tell our story, we find people are very interested.”
And that aim to attract the best new hires with a better Lexington message wasn’t just a priority for Valvoline. “When we started having these discussions, we realized this was a challenge not only for Valvoline but also for many other companies based here in Lexington,” said Amanda Plakosh, who works in organizational development at Valvoline.
Plakosh reached out to Lexington’s chief development officer, Kevin Atkins, whom she had developed a rapport with when both participated in the Leadership Kentucky program in 2015. Atkins and Elodie Dickinson, the city’s workforce development manager, met with Valvoline officials in February to discuss the best ways to tackle the issue, and soon they were adding more locally based companies to the conversation.
Dickinson assembled an informal roundtable of marketing and human resources professionals from large Lexington-headquartered firms with similar executive recruitment challenges, including Lexmark, Alltech, Clark Material Handling, A&W, Gray Construction, Link-Belt, Big Ass Fans, Tempur Sealy and Florida Tile, along with representatives from the University of Kentucky, Commerce Lexington and VisitLEX. The first order of business for the group was the development of a unified but versatile video recruitment message to introduce executive prospects to life in Lexington.
Sherry Myers, human resources manager at Clark Material Handling, said the roundtable was a welcome opportunity, not just to address her own company’s recruitment needs but also to share knowledge and work cooperatively with marketing and HR professionals across Lexington’s corporate community.
“At Clark, we look for every opportunity that we can to hire the best talent that we can, and when we first mention Lexington, Kentucky, we don’t get a lot of excitement.” — Sherry Myers, Clark Material Handling human resources manager
“At Clark, we look for every opportunity that we can to hire the best talent that we can, and when we first mention Lexington, Kentucky, we don’t get a lot of excitement,” Myers said.
Clark had previously developed its own recruitment video, featured on the company’s website, Myers said. Recognizing the value of a unified branding message for Lexington businesses, Clark’s leadership team contributed the time of the company’s corporate videographer, Paul Bernstein of Lexscape Productions, to craft a new three-and-a-half-minute spot on behalf of the city and its larger corporate community. Additional corporate donations covered the remainder of the video’s expense, with minimal investment from the city, Atkins said.
The video highlights not only the city’s tried-and-true heritage of horses, bourbon and basketball, but also its multiple globally headquartered corporations, the quality of its local educational system, its arts and entertainment scene, and its celebration of cultural diversity. The city’s competitive rankings on multiple quality of life metrics are noted throughout the presentation, to drive home Lexington’s overall affordability, safety and similar advantages.
The video also includes testimonials from recently relocated local executives from across the country and the globe. The featured professionals are identified by their job titles but not their company names, in the interest of making the video an adaptable recruitment tool representative of any local business, Atkins added.
For Jacob Bandy, who joined Clark this year as national marketing manager, finding an educated community of family-oriented young professionals like himself was a key element in his decision to make the move to Lexington. Bandy, who is featured in one of the video’s testimonials, said the high levels of education and the number of corporate headquarters based in Lexington can be a surprising discovery for those unfamiliar with the city.
“For me, it’s a big city with a small-town feel,” said Bandy, who relocated from Chicago with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. “It has everything you need to be comfortable and thrive; you just don’t have five of everything here.”
Making sure that Lexington offered a strong educational system for his soon-to-be-school-age daughter and career options for his wife was paramount, Bandy said.
Indeed, companies and communities that are successful in recruiting today’s best qualified talent recognize relocation is a family decision, Patrick said. Identifying what’s important to the family and keying them in to those like-minded enthusiasts on the local scene can help them to better understand how they can belong here, he said.
Job opportunities that are available locally for the job candidate’s spouse or partner often factor heavily into the decision, Patrick added. While Commerce Lexington and existing business connections already help local companies flush out potential jobs for relocating spouses, the roundtable is opening new avenues of communication for cross-pollinating that local talent pool to everyone’s benefit, participants said.
With the recruitment video now complete, the roundtable group plans to continue its regular meetings, Dickinson said. Committees have been formed to address multiple recruitment-focused topics of interest to the participating companies, including possible shared executive training opportunities, talent retention and networking options for local newcomers, and benchmarking of local best practices for workforce hiring.
Overall, the corporate partners’ cooperative contributions have been positive signs of the commitment that Lexington’s larger companies have to Lexington and its long-term economic prosperity, Atkins added.
“The companies are very engaged in this. They all see that it is mutually beneficial, and it’s proof that they want to grow here,” Atkins said. “They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t love this community as well.”