Investing in Your Brand & People

May 9, 2019

I’ve been hearing the phrase, “The war for talent is over and talent won” a lot lately. Maybe that’s the case for some, but not at Superior Bowen.  I’ll admit, hiring these days is more of a sales process rather than a recruitment process. One of the biggest misconceptions that I have seen during my career is that “Hiring is HR’s problem.” HR does play a big role in the process, but it’s a team effort to attract top talent who want to work for your company. How are we doing this at Superior Bowen? By investing in our Brand and our People.

By adding a VP of Business Development (Brian Johanning) and VP of Marketing (Melanie Roben-Osterhaus) in 2018, we quickly learned that Superior Bowen’s brand positioning is an important piece of our strategic plan. We needed to add social media accounts to communicate to people. LinkedIn became a popular way for us to let people know about our open positions and Facebook has been a great way to get the message out about all the great work our people were doing. Our marketing department found ways to get us connected both inside and outside of the organization by producing a quarterly newsletter, featuring our employees on social media, and utilizing drone footage to highlight our projects. Our business development team enhanced our brand awareness by making connections all over the city, getting involved with organizations who support the growth of Kansas City, and continued to build onto the solid reputation that this family owned and operated business has established.

Superior Bowen also invested in an HR department in 2018. One of the main reasons that I was excited to join the team was the humility that I saw from our CEO, Trey Bowen, and his people first philosophy.

Trey was working on building a stronger culture and felt that by adding an HR department we could make this happen. But we know we must do HR differently. We must listen more than we speak, recognize and reward, and build trusting relationships. We need to further invest in our people.

We must do HR differently. We need to further invest in our people.

Our nimble team took on big challenges, like enhancing our recruitment efforts. We started talking to high schools, colleges, and job seekers on the benefits of joining our company and how we put our people first. Our employees became walking advertisements, helping to spread the message on social media and in the community that we were hiring. We implemented a new HRIS, BirdDog HR, that would help us reach more job seekers through their large social networking platform and create a pipeline for future positions. BirdDog HR has also become instrumental in our training and development initiatives, succession planning and performance reviews — all intrical ways that we further invest in our workforce.

A big team effort for big time results.

Our marketing, business development and human resources teams are working well together to build our brand and highlight our people first philosophy. We’ve seen our social media following continue to climb as we work hard to showcase our brand by promoting our people and projects. We’ve also shown that by investing in our brand and people, the amount of employee referrals has increased, and the war for talent isn’t such a battle.