CareerBuilder is proud to be working with MAXIMUS, where finding qualified jobs for qualified candidates is the ultimate goal. We help MAXIMUS find the talent they need to position both clients and candidates for success in today’s workforce. CareerBuilder believes in doing our part to contribute to a stronger economy, and we believe helping companies like Maximus empower employment is the way to get there.

We recently got the opportunity to talk to Mark Andrekovich, chief of human capital for MAXIMUS, on how his organization works to empower employment.

CareerBuilder: When you hear the term Empowering Employment, what does that term mean to you?

Andrekovich: At MAXIMUS, we operate several workforce services projects across the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and we just recently launched a new project in Canada. When we staff these operations, we look for employees who are passionate about helping others. We primarily serve welfare-to-work clients, many of whom have never even held a steady job, much less a sustainable career. Our case managers recognize the barriers faced by workforce services program participants, but they provide encouragement and connect them to resources that will help them obtain a lifestyle of employment.

In our Tax Credit and Employer business line, we help organizations maximize available tax credits through programs that support hiring from targeted populations, including veterans, individuals with disabilities, and long-term welfare recipients. Our MAXOutreach® solution links employers and community-based organizations to help uncover hard-to-reach, tax credit-eligible applicants. So MAXIMUS empowers employment by helping job seekers obtain the right combination of skills and connecting them to job opportunities, while also assisting businesses and other organizations identify new tax-eligible candidates.

CareerBuilder: What areas of your business do you believe are the most important to invest in in today’s market?

Andrekovich: Our investments in people, process and technology have led to our company’s success today and will help drive our growth in the future. Our people support critical public programs – helping low-income families obtain health insurance coverage or supporting them as they transition from welfare into sustainable employment. The work they do requires a level of familiarity with government programs that are constantly evolving, so we make investments in training and re-training programs, as well as the necessary knowledge development needed to execute our business model.

At the same time, we are investing in the processes and technology that make our operations run smoothly. We place a high value on business process management strategies, which we use to operate more efficient government programs. We make regular refreshes to our internal technology systems and look for ways to leverage shared services across the organization.

CareerBuilder: There’s been a lot of discussion lately around “hiring for culture (or attitude) and training for skills.” Is this something you practice at your organization? Why or why not?

Andrekovich: MAXIMUS certainly takes cultural fit into account when we hire new employees. However, we also look at subject matter or technological expertise, depending on the position. The common thread we look for in new hires is the willingness to work hard and a shared commitment to our founding mission of Helping Government Serve the People®.

CareerBuilder: What skills – both technical and soft – do you see most valuable to today’s businesses?

Andrekovich: We look for candidates who have a level of technological expertise relevant to the position, but also the adaptability to learn new technologies and processes. Since we are a service-orientated Company, we seek trustworthy candidates who demonstrate personal pride in their work and a strong work ethic.

CareerBuilder: Where do you see your workforce in five or 10 years in terms of growth?

Andrekovich: MAXIMUS is experiencing growth in all our operations, in the US and abroad, so we definitely anticipate a more global workforce. As governments continue to seek more efficient public programs, we believe we will grow more technology-focused as well. MAXIMUS has experienced steady growth in recent years, so we anticipate this trend will continue in the years to come.

If you are proactively taking steps to drive economic growth in your local community or nationwide, we want to hear about it.

We may contact you about participating in our Empowering Employment series. Visit www.empoweringemployment.com for more information.

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About Mark Andrekovich: Mark Andrekovich serves as the chief of human capital for MAXIMUS and president of the company’s Tax Credit and Employer Services business. Mark leveraged his human capital expertise to introduce innovative I-9, E-Verify and OFCCP Compliance services for hundreds of large and small employers for the Tax Credit and Employer Services business. Mark is an active member of the Human Resource Policy Association and the National Industry Liaison Group, and serves on the Business Advisory Council of Clarion University’s Dana Still School of Business. He is a highly sought after speaker on topics of Human Capital Strategy, OFCCP Compliance and Diversity Recruitment.

Prior to joining MAXIMUS, Mark worked for Banister International, a private human capital and executive search firm in Philadelphia. He has more than 20 years of comprehensive human resources experience with multi-national companies such as General Electric, Nordson Corporation and Cytec Industries. Mark holds a B.S. in business administration from Clarion University and an M.B.A. from Monmouth University.

About MAXIMUS: For nearly 40 years, MAXIMUS has operated under its founding mission of Helping Government Serve the People®. The company delivers administrative solutions for Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, welfare-to- work programs, child support services, as well as specialized consulting services. MAXIMUS offers a single-market focus and a unique understanding of how to deliver high quality, cost-effective solutions tailored for all levels of government.

“Create an environment of respectful but robust debate and allow people to disagree.”

In the following interview for CareerBuilder’s Leadership Series, Coinstar, Inc. President and COO Gregg Kaplan talks leadership, philosophy, and leadership philosophies.

What is your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on your daily business?
Hire great people and then get out of the way. Really ambitious, talented people will always be way out in front of you as a manager if you give them plenty of room to succeed. Some of the best innovations at Coinstar and Redbox have come from employees who were passionate about an idea and given the freedom to pursue it. I consider my best contribution to be finding the right people and creating the right motivation, and then being available to them as a resource, not as a boss.

How do you engage with and relate to your employees?
It is very important to get to know employees on a personal level to understand not only their professional goals, but also what is important to them outside of work. It is difficult in a large company to have one-on-one relationships with all employees, but I find doing brown bag lunches and skip level meetings pay back immensely. It is great to know the people who are working hard every day for your success and let them know who you are as a person, not just a figurehead.

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
Good ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere: Be open and listen; be clear and decisive; admit mistakes quickly and learn from them; and hire good, talented people.

How do you define Coinstar’s culture? As a leader, what is your impact on the culture?
Our culture is fun, informal, and non-hierarchical, but serious about hitting our objectives. This may sound like it is in conflict but it isn’t. We show up to work in the summer in shorts and flip-flops, but in the same day will have a serious meeting with significant debate and discussion. In fact, just recently on Halloween I found myself in a viking helmet engaged in debate with a race car driver and a butterfly! As a leader it is my job to simultaneously demonstrate fun and informality, but also hold us to a standard of thoroughness, thoughtfulness, and rigor.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with a responsibility for the organization’s people. How do you make your overall talent strategy a priority?
At Coinstar, we make a tremendous effort to qualify the right people before asking them to join our team. For example, when making a hiring decision, we often involve upwards of six people in interviewing, and we look for a person we think would fit our values and culture as much as we look for talent – in fact, we grade people during the interview process on fit with values and culture. Also, we often ask employees to go through case study interviews, presentations, and a variety of realistic work settings before we determine that they are the right person for the job. That emphasis on values, culture, and demonstrating performance truly lives across departments and is not merely an HR mandate.

How do you rally the team and reinforce your employment brand?
We make sure we take time to have fun, which is a key characteristic of our culture. Whether it is hosting quarterly meetings at movie theaters with popcorn served, or having free lunch in the kitchen, we want to continue the fun.

What do you consider the most important decision you ever had to make as a leader?
Early in Redbox’s history, we had experimented with lots of kiosk providers. None of them met our internal standards for quality. In 2005, we were set to do our first major roll-out, and several months prior to launch, we decided we had to be in control of our own destiny and own the software and hardware of our future kiosks. We made the decision to drop our existing kiosk provider and buy a small company who had just started producing a scalable kiosk for us. Three months later, we began rolling out these new kiosks, which at first had quality issues, but with a lot of around the clock work, we fixed them and that is the machine you recognize today as the Redbox kiosk. Had we not made this risky decision in midstream, I am sure we wouldn’t be here today.

What was the best hiring decision you ever made?
There are so many it is difficult to cite just one. Every time I pick someone with great values who is smarter than I am I consider that a great decision!

What advice would you share with your peers through this piece?
Create an environment of respectful but robust debate and allow people to disagree. Anyone in the organization, regardless of their role, should be able to share a strong argument and make their point. The truth and a well-supported argument should always win out over politics and hierarchy.

ABOUT GREGG KAPLAN: As President and Chief Operating Officer of Coinstar, Inc. Gregg Kaplan oversees: Redbox, America’s destination for movie and game rentals, and the innovation and strategy team responsible for creating and identifying new automated retail solutions for Coinstar. Prior to joining Coinstar as COO, Kaplan was the Chief Executive Officer of Redbox Automated Retail LLC, where he brought Redbox from incubation within McDonald’s Ventures LLC to a disruptive player in the movie rental industry. A founder of Redbox, Kaplan worked in the Strategy and Business Development Group of McDonald’s Corporation, where helped McDonald’s create and build new businesses. Before joining McDonald’s Corporation, Kaplan held roles at divine interVentures and Streamline. Before Streamline, Kaplan was an investment banker at Furman Selz. Kaplan has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.

ABOUT COINSTAR, INC: Coinstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSTR) is a leading provider of automated retail solutions offering convenient services that make life easier for consumers and drive incremental traffic and revenue for retailers. The company’s core automated retail businesses include the well-known Redbox® self-service DVD and video game rental and Coinstar® self-service coin-counting brands. The company has approximately 34,400 DVD kiosks and 19,500 coin-counting kiosks in supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchants, financial institutions, convenience stores, and restaurants. For more information, visit www.coinstarinc.com.

“It’s so important to be able to go home at the end of the day and say, ‘What I did today was meaningful.’”

In the following interview, Bridget-ann Hart, R.PH., President and Chief Operating Officer of Kinney Drugs, Inc. discusses among other things, the undeniable link between employee satisfaction and customer loyalty, the importance of striving for 100 percent effort 100 percent of the time, and why ‘close enough’ just doesn’t cut it.

What is your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on the daily business of Kinney?
As an employee-owned organization, our culture has always been centered on the people. That’s not to say that we underestimate the impact of financial performance; in business, that’s how you measure your success. Yet you never want to lose sight of the fact that it is the people who will ultimately drive that performance. Our success is dependent on our employees’ commitment to doing their very best.

How do you engage and relate to your employees?
Our company has very open communication. For example, a couple of weeks ago we received a letter from one our supervising pharmacists who brought forward a concern about our delivery program. That prompted us to take a look at that program not only within that one store, but within the entire organization and make some changes that would benefit the company and our customers as well. We also make a concerted effort for our administrative team to be out in the stores as much as they can, where some of our best input originates.

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
When I was in pharmacy school, a professor once made the comment, “There’s no such thing as ‘close enough’ in pharmacy. It has to be a hundred percent perfect.” That’s something that can be translated into the business environment as well. Within our organization, we’re continuously trying to find ways to raise the hurdle and challenge ourselves to create a continual improvement process. If you settle for less in the work you do, you’re likely going to have to settle for less in your career as well. And when your organization is centered on trying to do the best for your customer, you really can’t settle for less.

How do your people affect your business, particularly as it relates to client services?
The real important work is done by the people in our stores who interact with customers, and the support departments that help support those interactions. It may say ‘Kinney’ over the door, but when our shoppers are going into the store, they’re going to visit their pharmacist or their cashier. We believe that personal relationship has an important impact on why our customers are so loyal to Kinney.

How do you define Kinney’s culture?
That’s easy….our employees have the spirit of ownership and passion for the job they perform. It’s that passion for what they do, and how they can better serve their customers, that has them focusing on how things can be improved. Each one of our employee owners is clearly the expert on their job, and they are closest to where the strengths and weaknesses are. It’s through their emphasis on finding new and improved ways to serve our customers that we continue to improve. While everyone has an opportunity to provide a lot of input in our organization, the best input they can provide is centered in their own areas of responsibility.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with a responsibility for the organization’s people. How do you make your overall talent strategy a priority, and what role do you play in driving that talent strategy?
Human Resources certainly play an active role in the implementation of our talent strategy, yet every member of the management team shares in that responsibility. Making sure we have “the right person, in the right job, at the right time,” a phrase we use throughout the organization is our continual challenge. We’re proud to say that we’ve been around since 1903, and that we have a very strong culture. While we enjoy the sense of pride that comes with such a strong heritage, we also have to make sure that pride doesn’t prevent us from acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers. To support that understanding, we continually are balancing expertise that has been developed from within, with talent and skills that have been gathered in different environments.

What advice would you share with your executive peers through this piece?
I would encourage everyone to be passionate about their career and what they do on a daily basis. So much of our lives are committed to our work that it’s important to take pleasure and personal satisfaction in what you do. It’s so important to be able to go home at the end of the day and say, “What I did today was meaningful,” and to see that it had some sort of a positive impact – on the organization, the community, the society at large, or even just on one employee’s life. Passion is what drives excellence, and excellence is a noble endeavor that drives success.

ABOUT BRIDGET_ANN HART, R.PH.: As president and chief operating officer of Kinney Drugs, Inc., Bridget-ann Hart, R.Ph. provides strategic direction and management of merchandising, human resources, loss prevention and operations of 91 retail stores with 2,900-plus employees and annual net sales of more than $780 million. Ms. Hart started her career in 1980 as a Kinney Drugs staff pharmacist before moving on to various leadership positions within the company. Since moving into her current role in 2006, she has helped grow the company into the fourth largest drug retail chain in the country. Under her leadership, Kinney Drugs has added many new pharmacy programs, educational clinics and free screenings to improve the accessibility and affordability of health care for people in the communities they serve. Today, Ms. Hart serves on the Kinney Drugs Board of Directors, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Services Board of Trustees, among other community organizations. Ms. Hart holds a bachelor’s degree from the Albany College of Pharmacy and is a graduate of the NACDS Executive and Finance for Executives programs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School.

ABOUT KINNEY DRUGS, INC: Kinney Drugs is a leading community pharmacy and retail business. Founded in 1903 by Burt Orrin Kinney, the organization has grown into an employee-owned company with a network of 91 pharmacies in central and northern New York and Vermont. Many are freestanding units offering drive-through pharmacy services, free prescription delivery and online and telephone refill services. All locations offer a full line of healthcare, personal care and beauty care products, cosmetics, convenience food and beverages as well as digital photo processing services and greeting cards. Kinney Drugs operates its own distribution warehouse to service its retail locations.

The one change you need to make to get a better quality of candidates may just be your mindset.

If you really want to know what it takes to recruit today’s best candidates and stay competitive in the market for top talent, it’s time to stop thinking of yourself as a recruiter and start thinking of yourself as a marketer.

Why? Because essentially, as a recruiter, your goal is no different than that of a marketer’s: to convince others to invest in a certain product or service. When it comes to recruitment, your company is the product you want job seekers to purchase.

Marketing to Job Seekers
All job seekers are consumers; therefore, the way they decide which jobs to apply to and which companies to work for mirrors the way consumers today make purchasing decisions. With increasing frequency, they base their decisions on research and peer recommendations gathered from websites, social networks and various emerging media.

Once you understand that your employment brand is your product and job seekers are your consumers, you can create your strategy around that. Start thinking like a marketer using the following steps:

1. Consider your audience as you create your selling point. There’s a reason CareerBuilder has put 15 years’ worth of time and resources into tracking and analyzing job seeker behavior. It’s the same reason marketers invest in focus groups and customer feedback surveys. Consumers make the call on what the latest trends are, not marketers. Marketers simply follow their leads. Likewise, as a recruiter, you have to understand how and where your candidates are searching for jobs and what they want from prospective employers. From there, you can create your selling point: a message that compels job seekers to want to learn more about your company, what benefits they gain when they come to work for you and what incentives they get for staying loyal to you.
2. Embrace emerging media. The most successful marketers recognize the power of emerging media. Emerging media are the various communication channels – such as social media, the mobile web and online video – that have surfaced in the last few years, but are yet to be considered mainstream. The rate at which users are embracing these channels, however, is unprecedented, underscoring an incredible opportunity for employers to reach job seekers at a faster rate, on a wider scale and on a more engaging level than ever before. But it’s not just consumers who are utilizing these technologies; increasingly, job seekers are utilizing these emerging media to research jobs and prospective employers.
3. Appeal to your audience’s emotions. Marketers strive to connect with consumers on an emotional level in order to earn their trust, business and loyalty. Employers can do the same with potential employees. Establishing an emotional connection with job seekers may sound like an unconventional recruiting tactic, but today’s job seeker experience has changed vastly over the last few years, and it requires a different approach to the recruitment process. Recruitment videos are one of the best ways to connect with job seekers on an emotional level, particularly when it comes to employee testimonials. Up-close-and-personal stories from real life employees captured on video provide a more personal experience for candidates, who get to witness what it’s actually like to be a part of something that’s bigger than them.
4. Allow your audience to take your product for a test drive. Creating an online recruitment video for job seekers is also like giving out a free sample of your product.  By seeing a tour of the facility, “meeting” the leadership team or watching employees as they go through their day and discuss their experiences, candidates get to see before they buy – in a more engaging and realistic way than flat copy in a job posting could ever provide.
5. Make their purchasing experience easy. Today’s consumers are used to “one click” features on sites like Amazon.com, which enable them to make their purchase almost immediately. While a job application might necessitate a few more steps, your online application process should still be as user-friendly as possible. The more hoops candidates have to jump through to apply for your positions, the less likely they are to complete the process. It’s also worth noting that retail companies always send post-purchase emails enabling them to review their orders and get updates on the statuses. Give candidates the same treatment: They’ll appreciate knowing their application didn’t just disappear into a black hole and it will save you the trouble of fielding calls and emails calls from confused and frustrated applicants.

Above all, the one thing you need to know about the marketer mindset is that consumer is king. When it comes to the most effective way to market your positions, it’s not about what you think you should be doing; it’s about what your target audience is doing. If you don’t know what your target audience wants – how they want to receive information and interact – you can’t put a strategy around it.

Understand your audience, and the efforts you make to recruit them will be that much more effective.

Jamie Womack is Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding at CareerBuilder, LLC, where she directs the development of strategic marketing for the corporate marketing team and focuses on the recruitment needs of employers of all sizes.

Exclusive webcast: Join Jamie Womack and CareerBuilder Area Vice President Andrew Streiter on Tuesday, September 27 for Going Social: How to Leverage Social Media In Your Recruitment Strategy, wherein they discuss the best ways to leverage emerging media to strengthen your employment brand and find the best talent for your organization. Learn more or register at www.careerbuilder.com/GoingSocial