Marketing/HR Rotation

The Marketing/HR Rotation was a fun way for us to explore an essential part of Parkside that we are not exposed to in our traditional Economics and Finance courses. The rotation was mentored by the Director of Marketing, Leigh Ann Gruenewald, and the Director of HR, Meredith Osborn. Marketing at Parkside has two components; client facing and employee facing.

Our project was to research and analyze the marketing tools used by our competitors to recruit prospective employees. This was a great way to incorporate the two departments, Marketing and HR, into one project.  After diving into our competitors’ websites and social media pages, we took a deeper look into the culture at Parkside and various other banks to learn how culture can impact employee retention. We focused on three specific areas when considering culture and retention; women in finance, generational difference and the rising talent gap in the financial services industry.

Financial services has been a male dominated industry for its entire history, although that is beginning to change. Parkside is unique in that they already have a number of women in leadership positions. We found new ways to highlight women at Parkside, such as sharing their stories on social media and internally. Sharing with the greater community how women at Parkside are valued is a great way to attract more prospective female applicants to the company.

At Parkside there are four generations of employees, ranging between Gen Z all the way to Baby Boomers. Culturally, you may assume these generational differences cause a divide in the office but it is quite the contrary. Here at Parkside, our differences bring varying perspectives and experiences to the table that create a unique comradery.

The financial services industry is facing the challenge of a talent gap caused by increasing developments in technology and a divide between employees with soft and technical skills. From our research, we developed three ideas to help close the talent gap which included a mentoring program, revamping the current training program and developing side projects to help keep employees engaged outside of their standard job functions.

Overall, this project helped us develop our lenses for navigating our future careers. Although marketing is not any of our academic backgrounds, we were able to contribute fresh ideas to Leigh Ann and Meredith on how to better market the company to potential employees while also learning about what we value in future employers.