waga: storytelling drives recruiting | gear up for growth

in the latest episode of gear up for growth, powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, jean caragher, president of capstone marketing, speaks with karen waga, chief marketing officer of wilkinguttenplan cpas & advisors, about the firm’s award-winning recruiting campaign, which resonated deeply with job seekers, employees, and peers across the profession.

more gear up for growth here. | more jean caragher here | get her best-selling handbook, the 90-day marketing plan for cpa firms, here | more 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 videos and podcasts here

waga says the campaign was built entirely on real employee experiences and candid storytelling, leveraging the firm’s flexible, people-first culture. the campaign offered a compelling and authentic view of life at wilkinguttenplan from summer fridays to paternity leave and personal caregiving.

“this campaign was designed to connect emotionally with top talent by reflecting the real experiences of our people,” says waga. “it’s nonfiction storytelling about our employees’ lives and the culture we’re proud of.”

despite having no paid advertising behind it, the campaign generated significant results. one post featuring a new father and his baby led to over 200 click-throughs to the firm’s careers page and 88 social shares, driving engagement across linkedin, instagram, and facebook.

importantly, the campaign was created entirely in-house, using canva and internal resources, proving that effective recruiting doesn’t require a big budget. waga credits its success to close collaboration between the marketing and hr departments and a deep understanding of what makes the firm’s culture stand out.

“whether your firm has 15 people or 150,” waga says, “if you lead with your values and tell true stories, people will notice.”

more highlights:

• karen finds inspiration for the campaign in a tourism ad from southern living magazine, proof that creative ideas can come from unexpected places.
• employees were proud to share the campaign. firm alumni and strategic partners (e.g., bankers, attorneys) responded positively.
• from idea to execution, the campaign came together in about two months.
• the firm plans future campaign “chapters” focused on mentorship, team building, and growth.
• this campaign won an aam-maa award from the association for accounting marketing

more about karen waga

waga, chief marketing officer at wilkinguttenplan, east brunswick, n.j., has been cmo since january 2023 after serving as the firm’s marketing director from march 2018 to january 2023. as cmo, she is responsible for the firm’s marketing strategy, practice development initiatives, communications, public relations, branding, advertising, and social and website development. prior to joining wilkinguttenplan, karen held multiple marketing roles at withumsmith+brown, including strategic markets manager and senior marketing coordinator.

she earned her b.a. in public relations, advertising, and photography from susquehanna university in 2010. her career is focused on leading marketing strategy for accounting and professional services firms, with a track record in branding, growth initiatives, and niche market development. find her at wg cpas or on linkedin.

transcript
(produced by automation. not edited for spelling or grammar.)

jean: right. so tell us what prompted you to create this campaign. was there something particular that happened or timing?

karen: sure. yeah. so first off, like you mentioned, you know, we’re always thinking about talent, you know, recruiting, attracting that top talent. and it’s a limited talent pool, so we always are looking for ways to stand out. so my group, you know, in our monthly marketing departments, i have like a brainstorming session where we just bring ideas to the table from anywhere that we’re seeing and kind of try to come up with different ways to stand out. so in that, i had read, i believe it was “southern living” magazine and there was an ad, love that magazine, but i was reading, i looked at the ads too, and i believe it was for north carolina. it was a tourism ad and it was a big picture of a beach and it just said, you know, “somewhere somebody’s standing in a crowded water park, like, come to north carolina for the real deal.” and that really resonated with me. i love the beach and i was just like, wow, like that was a really cool ad.

so i kind of kept that in my head and i was thinking about, you know, what is wilkinguttenplan’s real deal? what is it that really sets us apart? so i kind of had that in my brain and talking with my team and our real deal, one of the real deals is really our flexibility that we have in our culture. so we kind of wanted to kind of use that spark of an idea to come up with something creative that would resonate with people. we believe that people are looking for authentic content. so we wanted to use our own personal story, employee stories, and then imagery and figure out, you know, what is it that we can kind of showcase that will spark, you know, top talent to even just remember us, even if they’re not looking for a job switch now, but just to have that brand awareness? and you know, i truly believe that working at wg adds to your quality of life. so kind of showcasing that. so that was where it came from.

jean: and what a great example of generating an idea outside of the accounting firm, you know, or the profession. it was obviously, you know, casual reading for you. and it just struck a tone, right? yeah, see, sometimes it’s not rocket science, right? sometimes things just come right in front of us and we just have to be able to recognize it.

karen: exactly. i always tell my team, just look at everything around you and no idea is too crazy. the more that we can just share what we’re attracted to and what resonates with us, that’s what we’re looking for in other people. and i think it’s just, we also have authentic content and, you know, we’re always looking at stuff. you’re seeing a million ads all the time and kind of what makes you stop scrolling or what kind of sits well with you. so that’s kind of we all agree that something like this would be very successful.

jean: right. now, i think you’ve already spoken to this a little bit, but when you were creating this campaign, what goals were you setting for it? what did you want to accomplish?

karen: so number one, and i think it was the same goal as hr, but attracting that top talent, even if it’s just having people connect emotionally with our brand and remembering it down the line. obviously, boosting our overall brand awareness and then staying authentic to who we are at wg. and i think that setting those goals was a really great foundation. and we even saw like other strategic partners like bankers or attorneys were also commenting on our recruiting post being like, “this is great.” so it was nice to see that also resonated with people outside of our profession as well.

jean: right. when you talk about being authentic and being true to like the culture, the values at your firm, that is so important because it goes to the brand, right? and, you know, i’ve been part of, you know, many different branding initiatives for firms. it needs to be who the firm truly is and who the people within the firm are. it can’t be things that you’re dreaming up or would want to be someday because this could be the greatest campaign, right, and if somebody walks in the door and it hits them, like, where’s the flexibility? you know, where’s all the camaraderie and all these other things that you’re using to describe life at wilkinguttenplan?

karen: definitely. i never want to, kind of, sell something that’s not true. i wouldn’t say it’s like nonfiction storytelling where it’s like we have stories from our own people and, you know, even my own reputation on the brand, i would never want to put something out there and then somebody come be like, “wait, what happened?” like you mentioned. and i think it also is little seeds that were planted in my brain and also my own personal experience here. but i remember also being in a leadership retreat and we had somebody who was with us, i think it was his first retreat on a manager level, and we were talking about different things. and he even said, like, “this is the real deal.” like, you hear it a lot from different companies. and then when he came, he felt that culture and that flexibility and the trust that we have. so like, that also was in my mind. so it wasn’t just like, okay, we’re marketing or we’re collaborating with hr and we’re thinking up these things, but it is true. so it feels even better when we post it. and i think also you can tell in the engagement that we got from our own employees, when they resonated with one of them, they were all sharing and taking that pride in being able to showcase the firm where they work. so that was really awesome to also see.

jean: that is wonderful. so who was part of your team? who was involved?

karen: so it was my direct marketing team. and then also we collaborate really well with our hr department. so we’re lucky to have a great team there who also gets energized about, you know, campaign and different ideas that we come to the table with. so we kind of worked with them and then just thought about, you know, all the different stories that we’ve all heard throughout the firm. so then that kind of helped us with our imagery and our posts.

jean: right. i’m very happy to hear that because i’m sure you’re aware too, the number of internal marketers at cpa firms who aren’t collaborating with hr or who may want to collaborate with hr, maybe hr is not too excited about it, so the fact that the two departments worked together was awesome.

karen: yes. yeah. we collaborate a lot across so many different things. and it’s been just so great that our two departments are able to because it helps us externally recruit, also helps us internally being able to give the best. you’re doing a lot of internal marketing to your own employees as well. so yeah, they’re a great group.

jean: right. right. i just don’t understand because it just seems like such a natural to me, you know, for marketers and hr professionals to be collaborating.

karen: some of my favorite groups that i’m in, i’ve heard like when people are saying, “oh, you’re working with hr,” they scratch their head like, “i don’t think that would ever happen.” i’m like, “oh, that’s when a lot of the magic happens.”

jean: right. right. so we’ve talked a lot about this imagery. and can you tell us a bit more about the narrative of the stories? you’ve mentioned that…have these come from actual team members? i know that we’ve got one. we’re going to show the images as well. but i saw the picture of the baby and i know that baby belongs to a wilkinguttenplan employee. but like the trip and the other things you focused on, did they come from real people or were they more like things team members had in common?

karen: yeah, so i think some of them really do. i think that all of them…some of them were kind of marketing and saying this would work. but we know of other stories where [inaudible 00:09:22] the trip, we’ve had so many people. i know somebody just even started working in europe for like a month. and like, that was an experience. and we tie it into some of our other stuff that we do. but from being with the firm for close to a decade, i’ve gone through many phases of life. and so we were also thinking, like, what would apply to all of our employees too? but like at one point, i had a dog who needed radiation that was, like, weekly every morning, and i was able to do that. i’ve been where i’ve had some doctor appointments that were very important. now i have a 1-year-old son. so having that flexibility and stuff. so it was really driven by some of our stories within collaboration with knowing specific stories. and then one of them would be, you know, enjoying your friday off in the summer with friends, because that is one of our policies where we do summer fridays. so it was a little bit of a combination of all of it. but they were all true experiences from wg employees overall.

jean: awesome. so i am going to share my screen. so let’s think positive here for this to pop up. yeah, but here we go. so for those of you listening, obviously, you can’t see the images. but if you watch the video recording, it’ll be worth your while, because as i mentioned before we started rolling, karen, the images i just love.

karen: thank you.

jean: very…oh, i’m not even thinking of the right words, but the visuals and the way that they help tell the story and go with your headlines is terrific. can you speak to us a little about the approach you took in selecting the images?

karen: sure. so we wanted imagery that kind of allowed the words that were kept short to kind of speak to it. so when you see it together, it kind of isn’t like you’re seeing the image than having to read it and kind of be a combo. so you’re invited to kind of have your own emotions when you’re seeing it. and we wanted to make sure that when you’re looking at the images, we’re inviting people to experience our culture before they’re even applying to the job or taking that step. so we wanted…you know, baby, oh, my gosh, best photo ever that we’ve had submitted from an employee. but took even, you know, the picture of the dog in the car, like you just had some motion with it and you can kind of just like feel yourself step into those images. so that’s what, kind of, we went for. we were very thoughtful in what we picked. so we had a lot of different versions before we got to where we were.

jean: right. and i love it too that…you know, because another thing. oh, gosh, when you’re talking about branding accounting firms or professional services firms, when they pick pictures of all fake people, which you’ve done here, but you’re not showing their faces, they’re not head-on posing, you know, as your real people, they’re sideways. you’ve got them from the back, from the overhead, just different ways of those images. everybody knows the white-haired istock guy, you know, because…

karen: for sure.

jean: right?

karen: yeah.

jean: how many times do you see him?

karen: exactly. you can tell. so that’s why we wanted to kind of say, is this stock? is this somebody who just took a really good iphone photo or an android phone? so the way that we also did it was you’re far enough away that maybe you could almost see yourself in that photo too. so we’re not really giving a face to the person so that you can almost step in and be like, hey, that could be me on the beach on a friday with a friend. so that you’re not really seeing the person,

jean: too. right. no, that’s wonderful. okay, so let me stop sharing this and get back to my question. so people are listening and watching and they know that’s great, and the pictures are great, and i love the headlines, and i love the whole idea of it. and for me, you’re not saying join us because we have competitive salaries or that this is what you’re going to be doing. and i hate to be cliche, but it’s the why of why people should come work for your firm. because these are almost like the extras that you get in addition to the work experience and other things that they would get from being a team member at your firm.

karen: yeah, that’s exactly it. and i think that, you know, at wg, leadership and the firm, like, we see the person as a whole. and work is a very important part of your life, but then you’re also a person that has so many other things that are important in your life. and i think it’s really special at our firm where leadership honestly recognizes that so much and overly…not overly communicates it, but it’s not where it’s not authentic. but like, i know that my boss is like, “hey, you’re taking a really nice vacation. make sure you disconnect.” or like, i never have to question i’m taking my son to physical therapy every week. i never have to question, like, do i feel bad about being able to do that? and then when i’m there for that hour being fully present where, you know, me as the employee, i’m communicating with my team, we share our calendars. they know where i am, but they also respect that, like, okay, that’s time that karen needs. and it’s really, really special to not have to feel that guilt for doing things that are also important in your life. so i think it’s something we have that’s really special.

jean: i couldn’t agree with you more with everything you just said. so let’s take a look at some of the metrics from this campaign, because we’ve talked about, you know, it’s effective, it’s sharing great information, it’s visual, it’s gotten interaction. so i know that you have specific metrics that you submitted with your submission that you’re willing to share with us.

karen: yeah, for sure. i think there was one…i think it was the picture of the baby that you actually just showed. this was a completely unpaid advertising campaign. we wanted to kind of just see, you know, how could we authentically put it out there and, you know, not pay for it to get in front of eyeballs, but see how, you know, our network could kind of spread this thing. and the one picture speaking to paternity leave, i believe it was we had 205 or 210 click-throughs to that job post. we had 88 people share it and a good conversation was happening online. so that was really awesome to see. and we had high engagement with this. so overall, we were surprised because, you know, it is a different campaign than you would see from your typical accounting firm to see how that resonated really well.

jean: right. right. now, you were posting these on linkedin, instagram, and facebook, but predominantly linkedin. is that fair to say?

karen: yes, we kind of see that a lot of professionals kind of looking for jobs, for us, is mainly on linkedin over the others. but since we did feel like it was a culture piece, we wanted to share it on the other platforms as well.

jean: now, you mentioned that your team members, you know, the firm’s employees, were proud of the campaign and we’re sharing it. any other type of feedback that you received from your internal folks?

karen: yeah, actually had a lot of emails come through and even our managing shareholder emeritus, ed guttenplan had reached out and was like, “i love seeing these. these are so great.” like, so it was people who, you know, have gone into other stages of their lives and still kind of coming back being like, “this is great.” and it’s just, you can tell that people resonated with it internally, which is exactly what we want because we’re trying to tell those true stories. and just for me, it always hits when your colleagues love it just as much as people externally too.

jean: right. how long did it take for you to put it together? once you came up with the idea, like you were reading your magazine, and how long did that take?

karen: so magazine, i kind of had that seed and brought it to my team and kind of just planted it and said, “let’s all think about it.” and then a month later, we came back and came up with this idea just because i wanted to do it and execute it in the right way. so we kind of just took a little bit of time to kind of all think of different angles. we came together and said like, this will be it. even just the template where it says, “work at wg,” with our branding, that would be consistent and not trying to do too much or put our logo on the imagery and have a clean format. so after that, i want to say there were so many stories that we knew of. it was easy to create the content. it was more just making sure we found the right imagery or we had submitted photos we had to go through and pull out. so from a month of brainstorming, i want to say the entire campaign was probably done within the next month. i was also going out on maternity leave, so it was a priority to kind of make sure my team was set for while i was out. so but it was a fun campaign that kind of just easily flowed from all of us.

jean: right. what was the biggest obstacle you confronted? i mean, to me, it sounds like it went pretty smoothly, but i mean, were there any obstacles?

karen: yeah, so it went pretty smoothly. the one thing i could say is just coming up with ideas. we saw that there were other examples of other stories that we could share that spoke to culture flexibility. so we kind of looked at how do we then make this organized? so we kind of came up with different chapters where chapter 1, you know, we’re seeing the whole person and the other things outside of work that fuel people to kind of join an organization and have a great quality of life. so then we kind of said maybe chapter 2 will be more of a focus on our core values and speaking to our culture of like, how do we do mentorship or team building? and, you know, we’re fully remote, yet all of our groups still have team building. we have four annual in-person social events a year, like we’re doing things a little bit different. and then how do we speak to your professional growth and how we set ourselves apart maybe in that way? so we had little stories and we’re like, oh, we could throw that in, but then that doesn’t make sense. so it was kind of trying to figure out how to organize, but…

jean: okay. okay. so do you think…like, so do you see expanding this campaign with different stories?

karen: yeah, definitely. so i think we’ll kind of go into that next chapter. we still want to emotionally resonate with people. and just seeing how well this did, we always kind of say like, okay, this was great. how do we continue this? and we recently just launched, it’s an instagram trend called, like, “this and…” and like, an example that i see a lot is like a picture of the beach and it’ll be like, “this and a margarita.” and i’m like, “oh, that looks great.” so we tried to kind of take this same flow and apply it to a different application and more on instagram. we are sharing them on linkedin now too. we just launched them. but this campaign is fully…every single image is from an employee. and the fun thing is we actually put out a survey to staff and we said, “hey, we’re looking to do this. here’s an example like i just shared. if you have any examples that you’d like to show and if you have any imagery, like, please send to us.”

and we were able to create our entire campaign based off of photos that weren’t taken on purpose. like, it was just employees were taking photos of their life and had stuff to share and then their experience. so now we have we just posted our second carousel on instagram of “this and…” and it’s all employee stories. so one that i submitted was, “this and a flexible schedule,” and it was my son at his physical therapy. so he’s in the background and it’s just fun because everyone’s submitting and energized about it. so we’re trying to continue that to attract talent, to really understand that working here is about people first and that just we’re all purpose-driven and we know the work that we have to do. but it’s just trying to stay authentic to who we are, i think.

jean: right. right. so how many team members are with the firm?

karen: so we have over 150 employees. i know our recruiting team is always actively recruiting. i’m actually adding somebody to my team right now. so the number i think is a little bit over 150. and then right now i have two people on my team.

jean: okay, so i know that there are folks listening or watching that are with smaller firms. they don’t have 150 people. you know, they might have under 100, or 50, or 20, whatever it is. but i think it would be fair to say that this concept can be translated to firms of any size, because i believe your submission stated that budget-wise, it was really the time of your team and canva.

karen: yeah, we honestly just were like, let’s just easily pop us into a little social. there’s just like a blank canvas. we had images that we had. so we pulled it together and no cost besides our time. yeah. definitely very manageable for smaller firms. and i think that even for our firm at our size, i joined the firm over seven years ago and we were much smaller then. and for us, it’s how do you keep that culture the same and authentic? so i think that any size firm, i think, should be able to apply.

jean: right. and i like when that happens because i know that there are folks saying, “oh, well, they have more…they’ve got a lot of resources. they have a lot of people. they have a lot of…” which is true, but that doesn’t mean that professionals at a smaller firm couldn’t execute something similar because, as we started off, you know, recruiting and retention is critical these days. so being able to create a campaign like this at very low cost and having the impact that it’s had for you is fantastic.

karen: thank you. yeah. i think it’s definitely very doable. and always just think, like, what is your value add? just like you tell the accountants for clients and stuff, but what is our value add to the employee or to who you’re trying to attract? so maybe there’s something that helps your firm stand out and then, kind of, using storytelling to get that message across.

jean: right. i think that’s a great spot for us to end. karen, we really appreciate you just, you know, sharing all of this information, you know, and this creativity.

karen: thank you.