Season 1, Episode 6: Vice President, National Development, Mike Gatta

Tune into our newest episode of our agency podcast, Coffee and Tea with SCG, where we pour a cup of conversation with Vice President, National Development Mike Gatta from our Recruitment Marketing division!

Give a listen as he takes us on an informative conversation about the difference between recruitment marketing and advertising, the evolution of social media in this industry, and more! 

Transcript

Tom Marguccio 0:00

Welcome to Coffee and Tea with SCG, a podcast from the industry experts at SCG Advertising and PR. We are a full-service woman-owned agency that offers advertising, public relations, recruitment, marketing, and association management. In this season, we'll be chatting with some members of our team about their specialties. So grab your coffee and your tea, and let's brew up a good conversation.

Lupe Dragon 0:24

Welcome back to the Coffee and Tea with SCG podcast. I'm your host, Lupe Dragon, and today I'm here with Mike Gatta, Vice President of National Development. How are you doing, Mike?

Mike Gatta 0:35

Good. How are you, Lupe?

Lupe Dragon 0:36

I'm doing great. I'm glad to have you here. First question that we ask everybody on the podcast is coffee or tea?

Mike Gatta 0:44

I'm gonna have to tell you a story about this, but I'll make it quickly.

Lupe Dragon 0:47

Oh my goodness.

Mike Gatta 0:47

I haven't had a cup of coffee since 1988. It was my senior year in college. And of course, you know, when you're in college, you drink a lot of coffee. And it was after a chemistry exam, and I had a really bad reaction. I don't know why.

Lupe Dragon 1:00

Oh no.

Mike Gatta 1:00

I don't know if it was the stress of the exam, if it was the stress of being a senior, or it was the coffee. But that was it. That was the last time I actually had a cup of coffee. And being first generation, second generation Italian, that doesn't go over well in my family most days. So I'm definitely a tea man and it's usually iced tea.

Lupe Dragon 1:16

I really love tea too. You know, I became more of a tea drinker just because I have anxiety, and when I drink too much caffeine, I'm like on a roller coaster. Yeah, it makes it worse. In high school, I remember drinking like three cups of coffee a day and being like, oh my god, I'm so anxious. I wonder why. The coffee. I should not have been drinking that much coffee when I was 16.

Mike Gatta 1:39

So did you quit the coffee now?

Lupe Dragon 1:41

Not completely. I will drink coffee maybe like once or twice a month, like caffeinated. I'm more of a decaf girl, and my mom will make fun of me for that because she's like, What's the point of drinking? I'm like, well, because it tastes good. I drink it for the taste. I don't even drink it because it makes me wake up. But today I did have a little bit of Starbucks, so that helped.

Mike Gatta 1:59

That was for the two-hour drive down here, right?

Lupe Dragon 2:01

On it. Well, that was like an hour and a half. It wasn't that bad.

Mike Gatta 2:03

Not bad.

Lupe Dragon 2:04

All right. Let's get into it. What is recruitment marketing?

Mike Gatta 2:08

Recruitment marketing, and these terms, they're interchangeable. Recruitment marketing, recruitment advertising, and we'll get into that in the next question. But recruitment marketing is the bigger picture of a company putting out there why it's a wonderful thing to work for them, right? So recruitment marketing could include an employer brand. It could include employer retention. It could include the benefits of why you want to work here as compared to a competitor. So that's its bigger picture of, you know, we're hiring, and here is why you want to work for us, not just in the specific position or the specific department, but for us as a company, whether it's a local company, whether it's a national company or a global company. Everybody has a story to tell. And recruitment marketing is telling that story to potential applicants.

Lupe Dragon 2:47

Awesome. And what is the difference between recruitment marketing and recruitment advertising?

Mike Gatta 2:54

When I was growing up in this business uh in the 1990s, there was there were there was not a term called recruitment marketing. It was just recruitment advertising, right? So from my perspective, recruitment advertising is the help-wanted ad. It's the specific job for a specific position for a certain company with specific criteria. You know, so you're a hospital, you're looking for a nurse. To me, that's recruitment advertising. Marketing came in later when the competition became fierce. Uh, you know, we we would place ads in newspapers and companies would get hundreds of resumes, and most of them were qualified. Again, I'm aging myself here, but I'm talking about the early 90s, you know, from 91 to 94, 95. And then things started to change, especially in healthcare, and we can talk a little bit about that later, healthcare, education, transportation, where we're seeing shortages. So the marketing effort of branding a company, like you would brand a product or a sneaker or you know, something like that, that became more of a concept. So to me, recruitment advertising is the help-wanted ad, is that ad that gets you in the door or to apply for that job. And the marketing is the bigger picture of why do you want to work for this specific company?

Lupe Dragon 3:55

And really saying, like, I want you if you have like these skill sets, I want you because you do this. Exactly. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Makes sense. How do you leverage social media for recruitment marketing and which platforms would you say are the best to reach the candidates?

Mike Gatta 4:12

We started with social media probably on the recruitment side long before other companies in our field or in our industry were doing it, right? Facebook came about 2005, maybe four, five, six. So it was probably around 2007 when me, Regina, some of the people on my staff here in the Philadelphia office at the time started to notice that, hey, this could be a way to get a message out to potential applicants, right? At the time, we had a client called Wawa, which is a convenience store branding. I love Wawa. Everybody loves Wawa. If you're in New Jersey or Philadelphia, you know Wawa, you've been there, right? That was one of our one of our customers, and they were always looking for store managers, they're always looking for cashiers, they're looking for retail people, assistant store managers, because it's a good, it was a good career path for people. And uh we were doing all the traditional things at the time. There were a couple of job boards, mostly newspapers, niche magazines, those types of things. Posters in the store, hey, come work here tomorrow, make X amount of dollars, get three weeks' vacation, those kinds of things. When Facebook came out, because of the audience they were looking at, they were looking at young people to fill these roles. We had a discussion internally, and even we brought our kids into it too. Hey, you know, what do you guys think about? Yeah, it'd be great to see a help-wanted ad or an ad on Facebook about this very early in the system.

Lupe Dragon 5:17

The research group.

Mike Gatta 5:19

Exactly, right? People of a certain age group that were trying to target, right? And again, back then it wasn't quite as easy to get some demographic information or geographic information as it is now with Google and everything like that. There was stuff out there, but it wasn't quite as prevalent as it is now. So we actually went to the president of Wawa and we developed, we opened up a Facebook profile for him. Then we sat down with the president and the board of directors and the HR people and we showed him on a laptop computer at the time. This is what Facebook is. We set up a profile for you. Now we're gonna put a job ad on your profile so that everybody who's friends with you will be able to see that ad. And he said, I don't understand it, I'm afraid of it. And then he said, What does it cost? I said, It doesn't cost anything.

Lupe Dragon 6:01

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Mike Gatta 6:03

So they they went for it. And that was sort of our foray into social media. So to get back to your to your question, we leveraged social media to hit specific audiences, sort of like we did back then. We knew there were younger people that weren't looking in the newspapers as much anymore. There was monster and there was career builder, but social media became a trend for that audience. So we thought, hey, let's leverage that to hit our specific audience. And that's what we do today. Same thing. Facebook is definitely still one of our primary platforms.

Lupe Dragon 6:31

Now there's LinkedIn too.

Mike Gatta 6:33

Instagram goes along with Facebook, so there's always like that Facebook, Instagram connection. LinkedIn, I don't know if I classify LinkedIn, social media. And again, maybe because that came sort of before social media came out. True, true. Um, to me, it was a professional networking site, right? So we were we were leveraging LinkedIn before Facebook and Instagram and everything else came along. So that's how we leverage social media, whether it's LinkedIn, even Indeed, if you want to think of it in a certain way. Glassdoor, those types of things. We leverage it to get the message where the audience is. So once we know who your audience is, what skill sets you're trying to attract, we'll look at the social media platforms and then we'll target those specific people on the social media platforms. Did I answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. I mean on a tangent.

Lupe Dragon 7:16

I think it's such like a loaded topic because social media is ever changing and we have so many platforms that are now coming across. Now we're hearing about threads and blue sky. Yep. You know, now we have TikTok. Now we have we don't know what's gonna happen. I mean, like back in the day, we also had Vine.

Mike Gatta 7:34

I don't know if anybody was using that for advertising, but I learned from my nine-year-old daughter at the time what Vine was. And we tried, we looked at it a little bit, it just we couldn't get any of our clients to bite on it, and I didn't know how to monetize it.

Lupe Dragon 7:46

It's it's kind of hard to monetize a six-second video. Yes. That was really tough. Whereas TikTok, you could do like a minute long, now you could do three minutes, YouTube. Now there's YouTube shorts. Um, what I'm trying to say is social media is evergreen in the way that it is constantly changing, whether it's for PR or recruitment marketing, it's going all over the place. Sometimes I have a hard time trying to keep up with it also, and I'm the one that's in it the most because of my my age group, because we've just been in it for so long. Exactly. So, as I like to say, um, my sister has two iPad kids. Right. They grew up all already just like knowing how to do things on the iPad, whereas we kind of learned and it kind of went there. So a lot of stuff. Exactly. How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?

Mike Gatta 8:37

The crucial point of effectiveness and delivering for a client is a qualified applicant and a hire, right? That's really the golden egg of what we do. When a client gets and they spend money with me and we're placing some ads or we're doing recruitment marketing or branding or awareness, when they get that ideal person and they hire them, that is the golden egg of success. Very elusive, right? It's hard to find. And it's hard to get that data because, as you mentioned, there's so many platforms out there. There's so many different things that we're doing. They're getting so many different applications. So again, getting that hire is really how we measure success. And then the second level of success is how many views and how many clicks, and then how many applications, completed applications, can I get you? I can't guarantee a hire, but for a certain amount of dollars on certain platforms, I can get you X amount of clicks, X amount of views, X amount of applications from what we hope are qualified applicants. So there's a little bit of a gray area to the answer to that question. Love to get that applicant. Not always easy to measure that and track that.

Lupe Dragon 9:40

Just out of curiosity, what's like the most amount of applicants that you've gotten for someone? Do you happen to know that number?

Mike Gatta 9:48

Such a tough one. No, I I honestly don't. Probably in the retail days. We did a lot of stuff with um retail companies. I think we we mentioned that on our one of our sales calls, Aldi, and we did giant uh foods and we did Weiss Markets. And I remember being in some of those meetings uh where we would there's so many different outlets to place as, which including print at the time, uh indeed had come along Monster Career with her. And I remember one of the recruiters said to me that he had almost 2,000 applicants within the first three days. That's amazing for a store position, you know, whether it was. It's a good problem to have, yeah. Exactly. So again, this is this is many years ago, and the labor market has changed since then. So um it's hard to say. They we don't get that kind of data usually from our clients, it would be more an anecdotal or a conversation that we've had with somebody. But yeah, I remember saying that and like, wow, good luck. You're gonna be busy.

Lupe Dragon 10:37

Good luck, you're gonna have to sift through all those applications later.

Mike Gatta 10:40

Exactly.

Lupe Dragon 10:41

What would you say are the biggest challenges you face?

Mike Gatta 10:45

Today, um I think it's educating the client on the labor market. And I you've seen the news, you see what's going on out there over the last few years, right? It's taken healthcare too long to understand that there is a severe labor shortage, especially in the nursing and the physician.

Lupe Dragon 11:00

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mike Gatta 11:02

Been talking about it for a long time. We're we're living it now. Transportation, we mentioned education, IT, engineering.

Lupe Dragon 11:09

The teacher shortage is it's real. It's real.

Mike Gatta 11:12

It's real, right? And we've been working with some of our clients for some clients we've had for 10, 15 years, and we talked to them then about saying, hey guys, you know, this we see these these trends in labor, and this is coming down the road. Let's start some no, we'll wait till next year.

Lupe Dragon 11:26

No, not now.

Mike Gatta 11:27

Don't affect us, you know, we'll do it next year. Um until it does. And it is, and we're living it now. And I think that's gonna be our biggest challenge. That's where you come in to really be like, hey, I have a solution for your problem.

Lupe Dragon 11:39

Exactly. And it's different for every company, it's different for every industry. Um, but we do have ideas. But you have to start now. Yes. And it has to be a plan for not who am I gonna get in the door in 30 days, who am I gonna get in the door four or five years from now? Absolutely. How am I gonna get that message to that audience so that they want to work for me? The retention rate is important because of course you want people that are gonna, you know, like you said, like stay there for a very long time, especially when it comes to teachers, because you know, they're they're thinking of the longevity also of the career that they're going to have. And if they want to stay in that area, you also have to think about like all the other things that come with their personal things while thinking about like, am I gonna stay here? Being able to market that to the correct crowd is um very tough. It is, you know.

Mike Gatta 12:23

And it's getting harder. And you know, from a labor market perspective and from an employer perspective, it's gonna be tough. And there's gonna be a lot of challenges. From a recruitment advertising professional, it's a great opportunity. Absolutely. So that's how we're looking at it, and that's how we position ourselves.

Lupe Dragon 12:38

We have to take the opportunities while we can. Absolutely. What are some current trends that companies should be paying attention to in 2024 and beyond?

Mike Gatta 12:48

Um, obviously the big things now are ChatGPT, and AI. AI, right? They're the big things. But we tell them too, it's part of a marketing strategy. So don't give up on the basics, too. There's certain things that you need to do. Absolutely. You need to have an Indeed program, you need to have a LinkedIn program, you want to be on Glassdoor, you want to be responding to your employees and your applicants and getting that message of that, hey, this is a great place to work. You want your employees to do that. But they have to embrace the new tools. And we're not quite sure where that's gonna go from a recruitment, marketing, or advertising standpoint. Uh but I think uh Sean, one of our colleagues said it on the call yesterday. It's not it's not the companies who to use AI to recruit, it's the companies who understand how to use AI in their recruitment marketing research, in their efforts, and the things behind the scenes who will be able to succeed or be above some of their competitors.

Lupe Dragon 13:41

Absolutely. I think when we started to learn about AI, I think all of us were adverse to it just because again, a lot of us can be covered. It's very scary because you don't know what's gonna happen, and then this robot just automatically knows what you what you need or maybe want or want to learn about.

Mike Gatta 13:58

Exactly.

Lupe Dragon 13:59

But it's an advantage for us to take because it'll make us more effective in the work that we do, it'll make things faster, easier, smarter. Like Mike C likes to say, it's like taking the Rubik's Cube and putting it on the table and playing with it, and it's right in front of you. It's right there. I don't have to like annoy you to ask a question. Right. I mean, I could come to you to confirm it because obviously AI's still learning things, but again, just trying to get the bigger picture that we want to use this to make us better at what we do.

Mike Gatta 14:32

Exactly.

Lupe Dragon 14:33

Which I think is amazing.

Mike Gatta 14:34

And I think you hit a good point too, right? It's confirming. So AI is wonderful, it's still in its infancy, and the information that we're getting and how it does things is not always the best, it's not always as accurate as as it will be, I think, in the future. So it's using our knowledge and our expertise and our industry experience to confirming what we use AI or ChatGPT for and saying, yes, this is relevant, this is a trend. We see this not just through the technology, but in real life too.

Lupe Dragon 15:01

Absolutely. And I'll leave you with one last question. If you could give one piece of advice to employers looking to improve their recruitment marketing efforts, what would it be?

Mike Gatta 15:11

Um, it kind of goes back to everything we talked about, right? Embrace technology, use technology, don't give up on some things that were tried and true. Embrace AI to whatever extent you have the knowledge in your company has the resources to do that. The biggest thing that I can say, and we talk about this every time, is don't lose the human touch.

Lupe Dragon 15:29

Absolutely.

Mike Gatta 15:30

And we're seeing that. We're seeing that with a lot of mid-sized companies who are just relying on the technology to do everything, and the best employees won't put up with that. They'll walk away. And even the best candidates will walk away. The phone call, uh a written letter, uh getting back to someone after they apply for a job. I mean, how many how many jobs you've applied for, how many resumes you sent out and you never hear anything from anybody?

Lupe Dragon 15:52

So many, and you guys were one the only ones that get back to me. There you go, right out of college, which is like the hardest time to find a job because they're like this newbie, what can she do? And like, yeah, sending out a lot of applications.

Mike Gatta 16:06

So human touch. Do not get rid of the human touch. And that's hard for us. It's a challenge for us as an agency to can convince companies of this. It's hard for the companies to stay in that because it's just easier to do it the other way. And then going back to what we talked about earlier, too, embrace, understand, and look at the labor market and what's happening. Look at the trends.

Lupe Dragon 16:27

Agreed.

Mike Gatta 16:27

Don't think short term, think long term. And what can you do as an agency or as a company or as an industry to start to buck those trends so that we don't have a shortage of nurses and doctors and truck drivers and teachers and engineers.

Lupe Dragon 16:42

Important things we need.

Mike Gatta 16:43

We're there.

Lupe Dragon 16:43

All right. Well, thank you for coming on to the podcast, Mike.

Mike Gatta 16:46

Thank you for coming down and doing this. I appreciate it.

Lupe Dragon 16:49

Thank you. And we'll see you guys soon.

Tom Marguccio 16:55

Don't forget to subscribe whenever you listen to your podcast so you never miss an episode. And leave us a review. Until next time, keep those mugs filled and those ideas flowing.