CHRO Marketing Hat for More Impact: With Chelle O'Keefe, Chief People Officer, Platinum Dermatology

CHROPartners

CHRO Marketing Hat for More Impact: With Chelle O'Keefe, Chief People Officer, Platinum Dermatology

26:59

 

Cindy Lu, founder of CHRO Partners and CHRO Mastermind Groups, sits down with Chelle O'Keefe, Chief People Officer, to discuss the critical connection between HR and marketing. Chelle shares her unique journey from marketing into HR and explains why CHROs and Chief People Officers need to think like marketers. They explore how employee experience parallels customer experience, the importance of brand alignment, and key strategies HR leaders can adopt from the marketing world to drive success.

Throughout the discussion, Chelle highlights the use of marketing metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) in HR and how tracking employee engagement, onboarding, and candidate experience can significantly improve company culture. This engaging conversation offers practical tips on how HR professionals can partner with marketing teams, improve employee retention, and strengthen their overall organizational impact.

Key Takeaways:

• The importance of aligning company and employer brands
• How marketing strategies like reducing friction apply to HR
• The role of data and metrics in improving HR practices
• Why CHROs should embrace the "moments that matter" approach

Transcript generated with the help of AI.

Cindy Lu:
Hi there, this is Cindy Lu with CHRO Partners and CHRO Mastermind Groups, and I'm here with Chelle O'Keefe, Chief People Officer, and we're going to have her tell you a little bit about herself as well as her organization in one minute. But today, we're going to talk about why the CHRO also needs to put a marketing hat on and get good friends with the marketing function.

Chelle has a really unique background and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But first, Chelle, I'd love for you to share why you think this topic is so important for CHROs and Chief People Officers.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, as most business leaders think in terms more of clients than they do naturally of employees. And so as we think about the business metrics, you think about client retention, and you think about client growth, and you think about the experience that you're providing to your clients. All of those different components are equally as important for employees, and they're parallel. And so all of the different components and the way that you think about data for your clients and your customers, you can also use that same lens to look at for your employees and your culture.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, let's, I'm going to dig into that a little bit more in a minute. I think having spent time in talent acquisition on the corporate side, having spent time in consulting and sales, I see so many gaps in the HR space where I'm like, "Okay, if we were to put our marketing hat on for a moment, it would solve this problem." And so we're going to jump into that today.
If you've joined us live today, feel free to drop in the line, hello, so that Chelle and I can see who's here. We can only see who's here if you say hello. So please say hello.
Alright, so Chelle, you have a really unique background. A lot of HR folks fall into HR, but they typically come up through the HR function. You actually came up through marketing and communications. I'd love to hear more about that.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, thanks, Cindy. Yeah, I've always been fascinated by human behavior. I actually have a psychology degree. And I came out of school and actually started in talent development. So I did training and development for a really long time. And at some point, I got really connected into sales training, and I was working with chief marketing officers in different companies, helping them grow a sales force. And so you look at different sales models and all of those things, you get to partner really closely with them. And I realized this is just behavior change. Behavior change on the employee side and behavior change on the client side are the same.
And so HR and marketing are really well aligned. And I had the opportunity to work under a couple of chief marketing officers, one in particular, who was doing some really significant culture change. And I really learned from him, and I took some of his ideas to my next company where I actually started as a senior vice president of marketing. Long story, I'll keep it short, but marketing, communications, and change management were all grouped together in a marcom type of a role. And while I didn't have a marketing background, I had plenty of change management and communications experience. And I got to play in the marketing space very specifically. So I had grown up with sales training learning under a chief marketing officer.
And then I got to be in the role and really develop a brand of a company. And then at that same company, I got to transition into HR. And so what was great was I learned all of these different concepts, and then I took them straight into HR and said, "Let's apply all of these concepts to what we're doing here." And it really resulted in massive culture change for that company, which kind of landed me here. So Platinum Dermatology is in the process of building culture, and I'm excited to participate in that work.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, awesome. Chelle, I am like a kid in a candy shop on this topic because so often when there's prior HR priorities or initiatives that don't get approved, I can tie it straight back to the sales process, the marketing piece. When I think about how our employees have been trained by Amazon now, right? Like the kind of user experience we expect, right? With technology, for example...

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cindy Lu:
Netflix. Our employees are expecting that kind of experience going forward and having to spend time during your day doing administrative tasks, for example, that is just a waste of time versus like how easy it is to buy something on Amazon, I think employees are expecting it. So there's two sides of this that we're going to talk about today.
So hey guys, thanks for joining. Thanks Eric for saying hello, Mark, Deborah. It's good to see you guys. Shawna, Jerry, Austin, Janelle, Nabola, Jesse, I haven't seen you in a while. Terry, Mark, Jennifer, wow. We've got... this must be a pretty popular topic. So good job there, Chelle. Kristen. Yeah. Awesome.
Okay, let's jump into it. I know we talked about employer brand a minute ago, and let's dive into that a little bit more and maybe some examples of what you mean there as well.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, I would ask everyone on the call as you think about, I know employer brand is a hot topic as is the employee experience. And my first question would be, what's your company brand? And what's your client experience that your executive team, your marketing team is aiming for? Those are key inputs as you think about how to develop your employee experience and your employer brand. Because those two things, your company brand and your employer brand, should be really well connected.
Because ultimately they're both messages that you're sending out. And if employees are our customers from an HR perspective, then they're receiving those messages. So connecting those two pieces and really understanding what are we trying to achieve from a company brand standpoint? How do we bring that into the employer brand side so that everything feels harmonious and authentic?

Cindy Lu:
I have to tell you, like, I'm in love with my dentist. Like, the dental office is amazing and you can just tell by the way every single one of their employees treats you that there's amazing leadership there, right? That it's a great place to work. So I can't help myself when my mouth isn't being... I'm like, "So how do you like working here?" And they just, the employees can't say enough about the place, and it totally seeps through. Like, as a consumer, you can tell whether or not a company is treating their employees as well.

Chelle O'Keefe:
I think that's so true. And again, your employees are your walking reflection of your brand. So again, you know, some of us, I think, sometimes struggle with marketing because we don't maybe feel like it's as authentic as it could be. But ultimately, we're trying to create that experience for our employees so that whatever our customers see from the outside is radiated when they come inside, like your dentist example. And so again, making sure that those two pieces sync up. Now, a lot of us are in people businesses, right? Like, I'm in healthcare. I was in other businesses that really relied on the people. And that's really where, I would say, more so than maybe in CPG or products, that's really where your employees are absolutely a reflection of your brand.
So how you treat them is then, therefore, going to be the customer experience and how they treat the customer. And sometimes executives maybe get that a little bit better if you link the two. If you say, "Look, you want a great customer experience, you have to have a great employee experience. You cannot have one without the other," especially in a heavy people business.
Because it doesn't matter what you say, it's like any of us, right? It doesn't matter what we say, it matters what we do. It's the same thing, right? It doesn't matter what we say about our company, it matters what our employees do. And so by providing them a great experience, we can help improve the customer experience.

Cindy Lu:
I was looking at a website for a business that is in agriculture and farming, and there's a lot of activists, right? Who are like animal rights. We have to be very careful. And so it's front and center, about their care for their animals. I wonder what your employees would say. I have no idea, but like, you're going to take such good care of your animals. You also want to make sure that the people who are taking care of those animals are taken care of.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah. Good to see you guys. Thanks for joining, Todd and Deborah. Welcome back. Let's just make this real for a minute and talk about the metrics, and like, I like the data. What are the metrics that marketing pays attention to that perhaps HR could also focus on?

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, starting with talent acquisition, if you think of that as a sales process, and many of you already know this, right? It's a funnel, right? And what is your total population that you're pooling from? And then how do you work them through your sales cycle into close, right? Because close is the hire, where they're excited, you're excited, and the deal is made.
And there are metrics for each of those stages of the pipeline of obviously how many candidates do you get in total? How many qualified? How many get to more of the interview process? And, you and I were talking ahead of time of just and also how many interviews do they have to go through? That's one of the candidate experience metrics we have to pay attention to, because that's a lot.
Cindy said, "When someone's ready to buy, you don't try to run them through 10 more conversations." It's the same sometimes with interviews. I know in HR, we feel that pain where, "No, they don't need to interview with five more people. Can we possibly go ahead and make the offer?" Treating your recruitment just like a sales cycle. And again, I think that we're already there for the most part.

Chelle O'Keefe:
The other one I really love is there's a customer experience metric that's pretty popular. It's called net promoter score. And it's based on a question that basically says, "How likely are you to recommend our product, service?" All of those things. You've probably taken that survey after you've interacted with a company, and that's the net promoter question. How likely are you to recommend?
Because obviously, if you're going to recommend something, then A, you're going to continue to use that product or service. And B, that's how companies grow their business, right? It's organic growth for the company. So using that same question with your employees is really important because how many of us rely on employee referrals? But also, it's a measure of retention. If you're likely to recommend your company as an employer, you're more likely to stay as well. And so tying those two together, I think it's really important. Customer experience surveys, net promoter score with employee surveys.

Cindy Lu:
Okay. If you're listening and you would promote this live to somebody else in your network, feel free to type in "NPS" into the chat, or you can tag somebody right now who should be watching.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. One of the things we used to try to do is during orientation week, make sure that's an amazing experience. Actually, Eric and I used to work together, and he's amazing at getting an amazing experience for employees as they're onboarding, but also then asking them for referrals, right? So they're finally amazing as well.

Cindy Lu:
How you see the life cycle of employee surveys, right? If you do new hire surveys, they're amazing and really positive. You do annual employee surveys or more regular, they're mixed. You do exit surveys, and people are negative, right? This is a funny gamut that runs that way.
But the other thing—your point about onboarding—the other thing that marketers really focus on is something called moments that matter. You mentioned Amazon a little bit earlier, and that employees have. They're used to that model or they're used to that interaction.
I've read articles about how Amazon really focused on checkout, and that's even why they added the "buy now" button because they knew that was a huge moment that mattered for customers. If they could make checkout easier... And HR, sometimes we try to boil the ocean and make everything amazing, and you just can't, you don't have the time or the staff.
And so it's really, what are the moments that matter in the employee life cycle, and how do you make those two or three just really stand out?

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah. Like I think about perhaps the pages and pages an applicant might need to fill out, in order to find... what if it's a passive candidate and they're like, "I'm not even looking for a job, and you're going to make me jump through these hoops? Not happening." So less friction. So that's something we talk a lot about in marketing is less friction.
So as an example, for our BigHR event, you have to apply, right? But the only thing they ask for is your full name and your email address. We don't ask for a title. We'll go look that up on our own because we don't want there to be more friction in the process. And so think about your amazing candidates that you're trying to go after that aren't looking for a job. Are they going to really jump in those hoops? How many people are you missing at that stage of the pipeline?

Cindy Lu:
Totally. And the only reason why we're missing them is because we're trying to serve ourselves, right? Because we would like more data, right? To make sure that, we don't get... again, thinking about that funnel, we don't get garbage in the top. At the same time, it does your point and make us miss out on maybe some others that would be standout.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah. That's why search firms still make a lot of money.

Cindy Lu:
That's right. For sure.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Okay. So some of the metrics. There was one other one I think is worth mentioning, and that is you had talked about opening emails and actually reading them, right? So that's something we pay attention to—who's actually opening our emails? How do we adjust our headlines? How do we adjust our copy? And typically, I don't see HR folks tracking those kinds of metrics. And yeah, voice is so important.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, it's click rate, right? Marketers look at click rate and throughput when it comes to how many emails were sent out versus how many were opened. And I think especially on those really important positions, we obviously don't need to do that for all of the positions, but for some of the positions, and I know some ATSs now incorporate that into their technology, because again, obviously, recruiting is such a sales process, that all of those metrics are really applicable.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, definitely. I think it also moves—if you think about it—throughout the whole talent life cycle, there's many opportunities to look at what marketing does and pull it into HR. Tell me a little bit about how you've built relationships with the CMOs in your organizations and how that's benefited you.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, I think again, once I learned some of the initial tools around sales models and those types of things, it was really easy to speak the language. And I think you can really connect with your marketing partners on messaging. I love conversations about words. I think words matter.
I think sometimes in HR, we get a little too technical and we forget that we're communicating to really to our employees, which means we need to communicate like humans and not just communicate processes. And the more you can go to your marketing team and again, in a really authentic way partner with them and celebrate the skills that they have in making things look better.
And we just combined five employee handbooks into one. And the thing I'm probably most proud of is the new look. And as funny as that sounds, even the new look of a handbook is communicating culture to employees. And sometimes we just think, "You know what? I'm just going to slap this together and throw our logo on the front and load it into the HRS, and we're done here."
But using marketing to even make something like an employee handbook look appealing and match our company brand standards matters. Those different things really matter to helping shape culture, helping shape how people feel. Because I think sometimes we lose that idea that the way things look goes a long way for people.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s keep going down that path. I’m not the employee side, but on the executive side, right? So often we hear about HR priorities and talent priorities getting pushed to the back burner. And it can be challenging because we see how badly the organization and the employees need these priorities. And so what advice do you have for the CHROs on how to leverage marketing to get more projects approved or—it’s a weight game.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, I think there's lots of pieces there. One is, again, using your marketing hat. Any executive that's going to approve your proposal is a customer to you, right? And so how do you approach that person and understand what they need and what they're interested in? And how do you connect that to your proposal? Not in a manipulative way, but are there triggers for them, right?
As we all buy with emotion. So even in a company that is making decisions about priorities based on capital, based on timing, all of those things. All of your executives are emotional. How do you hook into their emotions and show them that by supporting your proposal, it gets them their objective? So that's a sales piece there. And then the second piece is just knowing your sales cycle. So again, any of us that have been in that process know that sometimes a sales cycle is really short, and you get agreement, and you get to move on. And sometimes, you know what, it gets pushed down the road. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. And it doesn’t mean that given different circumstances, it won’t be a go. And so I think sometimes it is a waiting game, just like we all know. We’ve all pushed off major purchases, and then the timing was right. So there is a timing element in addition.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We just tell our salespeople that there's an acronym for qualifying or closing, whether it's candidates or customers, and it's called the "Dutchman." Eric’s going to laugh at me here, but the "T" stands for timing, right? And "N" stands for need. How badly do they need this? What are the consequences if it doesn't happen?
So just having those types of common coaching conversations, I think with your teams that are proposing these things, especially the center of excellence leaders, right? They're so excited about proposing some of these areas, but learning how to sell it to the leaders is critical. Jury has a question: "Can you share the cover of your employee handbook? I'd be fascinated to see it."

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, I’m happy to. It’s not unique. It’s unique to us only because it’s just branded and really reflects our company. So it’s nothing special to probably anyone else, but it’s a reflection of what we’re trying to bring forward in our culture. So I’m even happy to share it; it’s going to be pretty specific.

Cindy Lu:
Okay. Any questions from the audience? Feel free to drop those into the chat. Otherwise, Shelly, what advice might you have for a CEO that has a CHRO or a Chief People Officer that maybe they think could benefit from paying more attention to the marketing side of their brain?

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, I think having a CEO sit down with a CHRO—all CEOs are focused on customers in one way or another, right? And they might define their customer groups really differently, but how can that CEO walk that CHRO through what they think about in relationship to customer metrics?
So that then that CHRO can tie that to employee initiatives and employee metrics and create a connection there. Because I think sometimes we do get excited about our own initiatives and maybe ignore some of the other pieces that are happening in the organization. And the more we know about the business initiatives and the way the CEO is thinking about clients and client retention and client experience, we can then also serve to educate him or her on how that's correlated to the employee experience, but also helps us think more in those terms.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, that’s so important. I think there's the compliance side of HR, which doesn’t need a lot of selling because they have to do it right to make sure we keep the organization safe, and it doesn’t take a lot of selling skills. But then there’s the—honestly—a lot of the talent management side, which is the value-added piece that can help drive revenue, increase margins.
And those are the things that are sometimes considered nice to have and take a little bit more selling and marketing to get those through. So I think that's awesome advice.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, the one thing I would say—two things about that: one is, I've been fortunate enough, and again, it sometimes can depend on industry, but I've been fortunate to work in industries where client experience and retention was very closely linked to employee experience and retention because of that connection between those two.
And when those two metrics are so closely linked, when you lose a physician that has a really strong patient base, when you lose a customer support executive that has an entire book of business—if you can link those two in your CEO’s brain, that will help you with your employee initiatives.
Linking those two together, they care—my experience is they care a lot about the customer experience and the customer retention because of the revenue that’s generated there. But having them take one step backwards and realize how much that’s influenced by the employee experience is the money. That’s where we get an opportunity to really push our initiative.

Cindy Lu:
I always like to say the top of your pipeline—your talent acquisition function—is the top of your sales pipeline. All right, we've got eight more minutes. I’ve got some questions here. Eric Mraz says, “Hi, Shelly. I think most HR and talent acquisition partners understand the importance of moments that matter in the candidate and employee life cycle. But how have you helped hiring managers—regardless of level—understand the critical importance of talent acquisition, creating those moments before the candidate is hired?”

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah. Sometimes I think it takes the results of new hire surveys. So again, if I think about my managers thinking in terms of data, can I show new hire surveys where maybe some groups had a more positive onboarding experience than others?
And I've got data to show what that difference feels like. And then maybe over time, I even have some data that shows higher retention scores from those experiences. And sometimes you have to take managers back to their first day, which can be a long time to maybe remember the idea of what did it feel like when you were new? And when you didn’t feel included or maybe a part of an organization, how can you make sure that person feels included and connected on the first day?

Cindy Lu:
Eric, I think also maybe it’s like the connections, right? On LinkedIn or if there’s opportunities to measure how often you're emailing the candidates and not asking them for something. So we talked about this—Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Jab, hook, which is give and then ask. Also, maybe there is at some point talent acquisition or employment branding has an opportunity to give information and just content to your candidates who are in your database without asking them to apply.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah.

Cindy Lu:
All right. Thanks for the question, Eric. Okay, Becky Woodward Cole: “Have you analyzed your employee culture in line with business Voice of the Customer (NPS) to get an inside-out view of the team serving customers? What did you see?”

Chelle O'Keefe:
So far, I’ve got to make sure I understand that question because I actually realized I answered Eric’s question more from an onboarding perspective than a pre-hire. So forgive me on that one. But did I link employee results with customer results to get a sense of the two?
What we did—just verbalizing that out loud—what we did in our organization and actually now in multiple organizations is we work with Power BI, which is a data intelligence place for all different metrics. And what we had were different areas where you could see your customer experience scores, retention rates based on location, increasing growth, different customer metrics.
And then we also in the same kind of portal had employee experience. And so you could tie the locations together and—no big surprise—was that when you had lower employee experience and higher turnover, you could see that lower customer experience and higher turnover rate for them as well.
And being able to link those two again really gave us momentum to get our initiatives approved because when you can see that clear link between those two pieces and in a location or in a team, then you've got great data that business leaders want to listen to when it comes to approving employee initiatives.

Cindy Lu:
Awesome. Shelly, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and information. I think this is a topic that I could talk to you about for hours and really dig into all the metrics that HR folks could be measuring. But hey, feel free to connect with Shelly on LinkedIn. She’s also got great content and great posts. I’m sure that’s helped you attract employees as well.

Chelle O'Keefe:
Yeah, but that would be my last thing I would say is just don't be shy to market yourself. I think sometimes in HR, we get a little nervous about that because sometimes we see marketing as inauthentic, or our work should speak for itself. But don't forget again, people make decisions based on aesthetics, based on what they see. And don't be afraid to market yourself.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah, yeah. But I love reading your posts. I’m always like, "Okay, Shelly’s vetted this. I should read this." And so there’s some really good things. So make sure you follow Shelly. And we’ll actually see you guys back next week live for another session. So thanks, Shelly, for joining us today!