Making an Impact with Strategy & Marketing with Kerry Perez & Nishan Sivathasan | Ep. 15

Thank you. Yeah, a little bit different being in the hot seat, as they say.

Yeah, sure. So I can't believe that it will be 17 years that I have been with AMN. Wow. A short break at Amazon, which we can talk through because you had a critical role in helping bring me back to AMN. But I think starting with maybe my most recent role, I was a Vice President of Enterprise Strategy, actually reported to you for a fair bit of that. And now also excited to report into our Chief Business Officer, Meredith Le Point. And so they're, as you know, really responsible for looking at the market trends, customer insights, competitor intelligence, to really help to figure out our growth strategy as an enterprise. What was cool about that is I got a great high-level holistic view of all the businesses in our portfolio in a way that I maybe hadn't before. And so being able to sort of combine that with what's going on externally and having kind of a unique perspective of what's going on internally at a high level gave just a great slice of life to kind of connect the dots. So really enjoyed that and still enjoy that as I'm over that as well. Then before that, I was leading our Diligence and Integration Management Office, particularly in the M&A sort of function, so mergers and acquisitions. And that was working everything upstream to helping to identify targets, going through the diligence process, and then all the way through integration with the focus on kind of synergies and value creation. And what I really liked about that role and what I got to know a lot was sort of the deep functionality of a business, you know, and being able to integrate everything from a facilities department to payroll to front office, and really getting to explore at AMN sort of how work gets done and how work flows. So that was a great kind of addition to, I guess, the tool set, if you will. And then before that, I had a lot of roles in marketing, both on the client side as well as the candidate side. And there I got to understand the specific operations of individual business units and also kind of the nuances of each business unit. So at some point I had covered or supported or been a part of marketing strategy for every single one of our, you know, 17 to 25 different brands. So that gave me a really nuanced perspective of how each of these businesses work and what the growth plans were and the various ways we needed to support them from a marketing standpoint. And then my first role at AMN was actually a recruitment specialist. So that is basically taking leads, then calling them and converting into applications. And it was just a great place to kind of cut my teeth and get a perspective into what I loved about AMN and other opportunities that I was able to jump into. So excited now to kind of come full circle and bring the perspective of high level all of our business units, how our actual business functions, and then individual sort of solutions and tie it together to help grow our business.

Yeah, so very excited and grateful, not to be too schmaltzy, but in looking at that sort of evolution, I'm grateful to AMN to be able to have had such a long career here. And maybe touching back on that one piece where I did leave for one second, I went to Amazon and was leading their West Coast team to drive in all their candidates for warehouses and Whole Foods drivers. But you helped to kind of call me and say there's an opportunity here, which I was happy to engage in from that Diligence and Integration Management Office. So I just wanted to first say that I'm really grateful that I've been able to have such a long and varied career here. So back to the question that you actually asked me about Chief Marketing Officer and still maintaining that strategy role, I'm really excited about that because marketing, whether it's traditional or digital, has always been part of being the steward of our customers, customer experience, customer satisfaction, understanding their pain points. And that is just so critical not just to live within marketing, which it doesn't at AMN, but to be very closely to how it connects to our strategy. So if I think about marketing and strategy coming together, there's kind of two components. There is marketing from a customer perspective on the client and the candidate side to support business objectives to help attract and convert and engage our various constituents. But then I think more importantly, there is that knowledge of who our customer is and what they need to help inform what our growth strategy is. Taking a step back, it's one thing to be in a room and to just kind of drum up what you think is going to be best, but if it doesn't serve a customer need, it doesn't matter. So there's that element of it of driving business growth, but really actually what we're here to do, we are a mission-driven organization and we have always been about what do our customers need. And I'm just really excited to kind of draw that even closer together.

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I carry those days as a recruitment specialist and dual head setting with recruiters and really being on the front lines when a strike notice comes, and really carrying that with me of what it actually does take to run the business. So I think in the strategy role where I felt that most acutely is when it came time for the strategy to sort of execution handoff. And it's one thing to kind of come up with a great idea in a room, but then it's another thing to be able to work very closely with the business to say here's how it's going to get done. And by managing our Enterprise Scorecard and really helping to work with businesses to look at objectives and key results and all of the work that goes into creating that, that kept me very close to the business. But I am very excited to get back in a different way, because there's only so much you can do from an influence standpoint within strategy. So very excited to now get back into marketing where there is an opportunity to have more of a role in the execution portion of the strategy as well as driving the strategy. So a lot of time spent with the teams getting to know all the various functions again, what's changed, what's like riding a bike. I'm back home, but they have new handlebars on the bike, and you know what are the unique new problems and challenges that we face and tools that we've created to fix them.

Yeah, that's a great call. So I think from a kind of trend standpoint, from a strategic lens, candidates are looking for a lot of flexibility. You know, we've seen a lot of the gig economy stuff come up, a lot of shift-based, a lot of different hour preferences or day preferences, even setting preferences. So whether they want to work full-time in acute care or maybe they're getting interested in things that are outside of the acute care walls with hospital at home or virtual nursing coming up and telehealth. So that is from maybe from the trend perspective of behaviors of a candidate. As far as it relates to marketing, I think that marketing experience that is really digitally driven and that is within their own control and self-service are things that we see more and more. When you think about creating that candidate experience, you're also competing with what they experience on a day-to-day life. So Uber should work just as well as an app to go get a job. And you've talked about that quite a lot, you know, preferences changing, flexibility is a big need for the workforce today, and I know you previously anticipate more and more of that going forward too.

Right. Well, you hate to just beat the same drum, but there are a lot of the same issues that they were facing a couple years ago that they're still facing today. Of course, cost pressure and thin margins, a myriad of things to tackle to really get to the infrastructure that has made managing labor so difficult. That prioritization becomes a struggle. Therefore, with prioritization and with a bunch of different new solutions coming at them, they might be experiencing a little bit of death by a thousand point solutions. So a lot of movement towards understanding platform plays and how to have the easy button where you can kind of get things in one fell swoop. How do you make things more efficient from an AI standpoint and that last mile decision making, efficiency through actual work as well as even in the hands of a clinician helping to do some diagnostics. Other things, of course, there's movement outside of the hospital walls. Acute care is growing, but at more like a 5 to 6% sort of rate, whereas we're seeing things like ambulatory or hospital at home or even virtual nursing pick up steam a bit more. So what does it look like for them to sort of play in that space as well as make sure that they have the appropriate workforce and labor mix to staff that and make sure they're profitable?

Yeah, I think thinking about their workforce holistically and understanding that there is a right mix of permanent and contingent and flex, and that there are ways to think about that in advance from a talent planning standpoint so they can best be set up to acquire and manage that talent most effectively.

Well, I'm excited about a few things. I kind of already hinted on why I'm excited to leverage all of the learnings that I've been afforded at AMN to help make an impact for our clients, our candidates, our patients, our company. But I'm really excited to work with the great marketing team that we have. I'm maybe three weeks into the role and gotten a chance to speak at a town hall and get some one-on-ones with folks, and it's just a super bright team. They've already done such great work, and I can't wait to move forward with them into this combined strategy and marketing team and really hit it out of the park.