(bright music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H. Wayne Wilson.

Thank you, as always, for joining us.

There's a new campaign to attract top talent to Peoria to improve the economic health of the Greater Peoria area, but it's not just to attract new talent, it's to retain talent.

And we're going to discuss that for the next half hour with a panel of four people involved in the process.

Let me introduce first Chris Setti.

Chris is the CEO at the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council.

Chris, as always, thank you for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- [H. Wayne] Joining us also, Misty Dykema.

Misty is the principal at Simantel.

- That's right, thanks for having me.

- And joining us is Laura Cullinan, and Laura is with the Gilmore Foundation, where she is the president.

Thank you.

- That's right, thank you.

- [H. Wayne] And also with the Gilmore Foundation is Doug Oberhelman.

He's the chair of the board, and you probably know that he is the retired CEO at Caterpillar.

Thank you for being with us.

- Thank you.

H. - And let me start with you, Doug.

- [Doug] Sure.

- Because there have been efforts of one type or another to do something similar to what you're trying to accomplish.

Let's see if we can't improve the image of Peoria so that we can get more talent in.

Why is this one different?

Where did this idea come from and why is it different?

- The driver of this was really some work we did at the Gilmore Foundation with local businesses that we kept hearing about workforce shortages.

And every employer in town, and you know it, I know it, wherever you go there's a shortage of people to do things.

But it's particularly acute at the mid-level and up of a lot of, if not all of our companies in the Greater Peoria area.

And what they were telling us is they can't find talent, and it's sometimes difficult to bring 'em to the Midwest and sometimes difficult to bring them to Peoria.

So as we looked into it, we decided, we ought to be able to help them find a way to make it easier for them to do their recruiting.

They know how to recruit for their company, the hospitals, the insurance companies, they know what they need.

They know who their targets are.

They can do that, and they're happy doing that.

But one of them told us, "we don't know how to recruit for Peoria.

"We need help selling the image of Peoria "to potential recruits coming into town."

So we got to thinking about that.

We hired Simantel Group, who we'll talk to in a minute, and decided we can put together a program with the HR leaders in these companies in our area, Greater Peoria area.

But we kept hearing about this image of Peoria, image of Peoria, image of Peoria.

We need help selling that.

And Peoria is a pretty great place, actually.

So we dug into that and we decided we had to link these two together, recruiting, retaining, and then promoting ourselves as best as we could as Peoria and greater Peoria region.

And that's really the impetus of this.

- And the name of the program is Choose Greater Peoria.

- That's right.

- Can you explain a little bit about the effort?

Is it... Because this is the kickoff month, so to speak, of a three-year campaign?

- That's right.

- Gilmore Foundation has promised to be a part of this for three years, and we match what the business community raises up to $700,000 per year.

I wanna go to your question a little bit about why this is different, and that's part of this effort.

This is different because we have at least 15 of the region's largest employers linking arms with the Gilmore Foundation and with the civic organizations, so the Economic Development Council, the Chamber of Commerce, Discover Peoria, this level of collaboration is greater, and the amount of funding is greater.

We're at $1.6 million for our budget this year.

- And Gilmore will continue that pledge for year two and year three, at least.

- That's correct.

For year two and year three.

- Chris, Laura mentioned 15, 20 top businesses in Greater Peoria.

What about those middle-size businesses?

I'm not talking about the mom and pops.

I'm talking about middle-size businesses.

Maybe Natural Fiber Welding is a middle-size business.

- Sure.

I think all businesses can benefit from this.

It's really about giving... And maybe Misty'll talk to this a little bit more about some of the campaign tactics, but it's really about giving a set of messaging and a set of tools to our HR, the people who are recruiting.

We have a great workforce here in Greater Peoria, and there's lots of opportunities for people that are here to get the training they need to take the jobs that are available.

But we know that there are companies that are large and small that are going to need to recruit from outside the region.

And so this is really about giving those tools.

So it's not just the OSFs and the Carls and the Caterpillars, but it is the Natural Fiber Weldings.

It is the Illinois Mutual and Pearl Insurance and G and D, and all these other companies that are great, and they're more mid-sized companies.

And I think they can all benefit from this, because they all have job openings.

Some of them will be filled, and hopefully it would be filled by local people, but some of them are always going to have to get filled from the outside.

And this just gives them a set of tools in which to talk about the community somebody will be relocating to.

That made a great point about it's not hard to sell the job.

Sometimes it's hard to sell the community, especially if you don't know how to talk about the community.

And sometimes it's not even hard to sell the community and the job to the person, but to the person's family.

And so these are the tools that really, that are being- - This is really not an advertising campaign at all.

And campaign's kind of a misnomer, because it's really about zeroing in and targeting those individuals that want to find, or that are looking for Peoria, or we're looking for them or companies are looking for them and going after them in a really holistic way that everybody gets their arm around this person in the community and says we want you in town.

And that's about the easiest way I can say it.

- And that sets the stage for you, Misty.

Chris and Doug both have set it up.

So, how do you go about, I mean, you're an advertising agency.

- Sure, absolutely.

- How do you go about developing this so that you can spread the word?

- So, no doubt, certainly there is a portion of this that is advertising.

We will be placing some media, but I think the thing that we're most excited about is the messaging around it.

We did some research into these target audiences that Doug spoke about, and we found that, especially on the other side of COVID, people are reevaluating their work and their life, and life issues ended up being prioritized as the most important.

They wanna live in a place that has affordable living, low commutes, and quality of life.

And so we're putting that at the forefront of our messaging.

And the other thing I think that is different from an advertising campaign is that we're collaborating every single week with these HR leaders.

So we're working with them to say, how have your positions that are open shifted?

How can we enable you?

This toolkit that Chris talked about, we're making sure that works for their websites, the brochures they have to send out.

So we're all speaking the same language as a community.

And maybe the healthcare person who's looking for a job at Unity Point ends up at OSF.

That's okay, we're all in it together.

We're just trying to bring people into our region so that we can fill these critical jobs.

- So Laura, you know that people have come to town and the first thing that happens is they get to the airport, they're looking, well, I'm coming in to see what the job might be like and see what the community might be like.

And I get in and the cab driver, and the cab driver says, "Why are you here?"

Or they get- - A lot worse.

(people laughing) - No, I'm being polite.

(people laughing) Or they get to the hotel, and it was a bad day for the front desk person.

How are you getting the message out at that level?

I mean, it's nice to say to the businesses, but how do you reach out to those people to make sure that there's a positive vibe in Peoria.

- We're partnering with Discover Peoria, and that's one of the main jobs of Discover Peoria.

They're helping us do that.

And I think we're doing this organically.

We're holding trainings, we're holding workshops, we're reaching out.

I met with the Civic Center last week.

We're hitting the ground as hard as we can, individually and as a team.

- [Misty] Absolutely.

The airport, too, right?

- Yeah.

- We're hoping to be more visible in the places where these people live and work.

- I think my vision here, H., is Rochester, Minnesota, which a lot of people go to for checkups and healthcare.

I do.

My wife and I both do and have for a number of years.

And from the time you hit the airport until the time you leave the airport, everybody you talk to is so proud of that community.

The concierge at the hotel, they're friendly, they give you a brochure about what they do, what you can do in town.

And really that's kind of what I'd like to see happen here, ultimately, when we get all done with this in a few years, and certainly Discover Peoria is a key piece of that.

- And Misty, we wanna make sure that people understand this is not going to happen this summer.

- Absolutely not.

This is a long-term effort.

Right now we're planning in two-month cycles so that we can optimize and really use our data to move the money to what's working the best.

So our campaign launched May 1st, we're building a crescendo into the fall, and then in October we will all regroup and really reassess how we wanna move into next year.

- Laura, let's turn to the three phases, and if you could give a little detail about the three phases of this campaign.

- You mean the three pillars?

- The three- - Yeah.

- Pillars is the word we use.

- I guess, yeah.

- Sorry.

- Phases works, too, but it's talent, attraction, and retention.

And then it's related to talent and attraction, positive Peoria branding.

And then there's also an internal positive Peoria component where wanna shine a light on all the great things that we have in this community.

We wanna talk about the great educational opportunities, we wanna talk about the park system.

Things that you might not even know about if you grew up your whole life and and lived here.

So we wanna shine a light on that, have people feel proud about where they live.

- So the quality of life things that Misty had alluded to before?

- Absolutely.

- With Rivermen, Chiefs, et cetera.

- Absolutely.

- Sure.

- There's a website, choosegreaterpeoria.org, where we have live, work, and play content that we've worked with the civic orgs to aggregate.

So anybody who's interested can go out there and learn more about all of those things.

- I think that, I was just thinking general.

There's so much information anymore, and I don't know that that many people, I didn't know anything about Peoria till I met, until I met a girl from Peoria.

I was from Los Angeles, and I didn't know anything about, this was not quite pre-internet, but pre-social media.

And I think that it's always important for a community to have a presence that's out there and to have a positive message and to be assertive about that.

I think there's a lot of things for us to be proud of in our community.

And I think that people will discount a place like Peoria because it feels too small, or they've never heard of it before, but they've heard of Chicago or Boston or Miami.

And I think we have some really tremendous assets that we can show off here, that I think people who grew up here or who lived here for a long time just don't even recognize, 'cause it's just a matter of perspective.

So the amount of natural resources that we have from, and I know Doug is a big hunter, but from kayaking and paddling to mountain biking, really great golf courses, we have such really great outdoor amenities here that I just don't think people- - All within 15 minutes.

- All within 15 Minutes.

And the variety of life that you can choose, in our community, and like said, I'm from Los Angeles, so the commutes here are nothing, obviously, in comparison to Los Angeles, but I think that's, and what Misty is talking about, when they did some of their research around these executives and middle-level folks that are maybe looking at a career change, these are the things that are important to them.

It's not so much all of the, having 100 Michelin star rated restaurants in a community, 'cause you're really only ever gonna be able to go to a few anyways.

But is that quality of life that you're living when you're not at work?

And what you have to do and how much time is yours?

- You bring up a good point, Chris, and that's transportation, because it's so much easier to get around.

And while there may be an equivalent in Los Angeles area for Wildlife Prairie Park, for instance, you can't get there- (indistinct) (people laughing) And it's real easy to get to Wildlife Prairie Park.

Or Emiquon, it's 45 minutes away, and if no one's ever been to Emiquon, they need to go to Emiquon.

- It's the everglades of the Midwest.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

We interrupted you Laura, with the pillars.

Go ahead.

- No, that's all right.

Well that was it.

It's talent attraction, retention, and internal positive Peoria branding message, and then an external positive Peoria branding message.

And one thing we learned throughout this whole process, which I have found fascinating, I guess I knew it in my, in the back of my mind, but the people that have moved here from other places are the biggest cheerleaders for the region.

They love it here.

They've lived in LA, they've lived in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, and said, you know what, this is a lot better community.

I can get involved easier here.

I can do anything I wanna do within 15 minutes.

So that's been a really positive thing that we've discovered.

- Yeah, I'll just add to that, because as part of this process, I've noticed more young people in their 20s and 30s in the community that are diehard Peoria fans.

And I didn't know 'em, I don't know 'em at all.

But that's what we're after, those kinda things.

And I've been really impressed with that.

- Well, that brings up the question of retention, Chris, because we've more or less been talking about, well how do you come into the airport or come to the hotel, and it's their first time here, but people that are here, and they're in a job and they're moving up within their organization.

How do you keep 'em here?

- Well, I mean, I think that...

I think, first of all, just sharing with them the same perspective of what they have here versus what they would get somewhere else, right?

Affordability is a real thing, and we are one of the most affordable housing markets in America.

Whenever I say that I wanna make point out, we're not the cheapest housing market in America.

Affordability is the ratio between what you earn and what you've spend.

And so we have relatively high salaries, on average, and relatively low housing prices.

So the people that are here, we need to continue to give them opportunities as well.

I think it's important to note that this campaign is really about, is a talent attraction campaign.

There's lots of other great campaigns.

You can't be everything to everyone.

And there are other organizations and other efforts to how do we improve the talent that lives here?

So, Illinois Central College has done a really great job over the last few years with programs like the Good Jobs Challenge, which is their IT workforce accelerator.

What's called the Illinois Workforce Equity Initiative, which is really targeting people from low income and diverse backgrounds to take high earning jobs and be trained.

There's all these other things that are in place, which I think is actually also important for talent attraction, because the conversation that we have and what we're really exposing people to is not only to Peoria and all the great things about it, but also the workforce development system that's here.

Because you might have somebody who's coming to be a doctor or coming to work at Caterpillar, or in another large company, but they might have a spouse, they might have children, they might have working-age children.

They need to understand that we have an education system that works for them, that we have this really great community college, that we have all, we have Bradley University and Eureka College, and that it's in Peoria that you can, you can go from kindergarten to med school and never leave south of War Memorial Drive.

And you could do all of that without ever leaving.

That's a message that's both, for people that are inside the city already and people we're trying to bring here.

- May I add to your list before we get to Doug?

- Yeah, sure.

- WTVP.

- Yeah, that's right.

- Absolutely right.

- You go to Rockford.

Do they have a public television station?

- That's a great point.

- No, they don't.

Do towns of this size have a public television station that does the type of documentaries we do locally and talk shows?

- Exactly right.

- But I'm sorry that was patting ourselves- - Well, no, I was just gonna throw in here that one of the...

I've never had children of my own, so I didn't experience child life rearing here in Peoria.

So I didn't really, I took it all for granted, I guess.

But one of the things I've learned through this is the real gem we have in District 150, and you talk to the President at Bradley University you talk to the athletic director at the university, you talk to just about anybody that's raised children elsewhere and come here, they love District 150, and specifically some of the really high end schools they have.

And I did not know that.

I did know about ICC, because I've been a big fan of ICC for a long time.

But this was really a revelation, and we've gotta tell that story.

Somebody has to tell that story.

- And we are.

So in addition to- - And we are.

- Live, work and play, we have a learn greater message, and this idea of be greater in Peoria.

So the CEOs that are involved in this are excited to say to their organizations, as we grow talent through the pipeline, this is more opportunity for you, and we want to leverage resources to pour into you.

- This is a cooperative effort?

- Yes.

- Mm-hm.

- How are you going about bringing, making sure that everybody is together with a similar message?

- Yes.

I'll take a running head start on that.

- Yeah, do.

You're doin'- (indistinct) - We can go around the table on that one.

- No, that's a good one.

- I think I mentioned, so this month we are pulling all the existing stakeholder businesses together, including the CEO, the HR, and the marketing folks.

Next month we will be pulling together a community meeting again to make sure that we're very inclusive in our messaging.

We wanna hear everybody's ideas and bring those to the forefront.

But then beyond that, sometimes just coffee meetings or reaching out.

I know Laura, a lot of the starting point of this is just the impetus of sort of connecting dots of individuals who wanna get involved.

And that's something we're trying to stay on top of every day that goes by.

- Laura, we're gonna go around the table on this one.

Because if a portion of this falters, then the message isn't complete.

So how do you make sure that all aspects of all three pillars and everybody's on the same page?

- I think that is where the collaboration piece comes in.

That's why we're partnering with the EDC and the Chamber and Discover Peoria and Morton Chamber and East Peoria Chamber and the mayor of East Peoria and the mayor of Peoria.

We're pulling in all the right stakeholders and we're maintaining connections and conversations with them every step of the way.

- Chris, Laura brings up a good point in terms of you're the CEO of the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council.

So how do you make sure that Pekin is in step with this, et cetera?

- You know, I think that's a great point.

We actually started kind of a nascent talent attraction campaign, and it was a collection of the chamber, all of the chambers, all of our regional chambers.

The Peoria Pekin, Discover Peoria, my organization, that we call GP 2030, that this I like to think of as the evolution of that effort.

But the good news is we already kind of were working together.

So the civic orgs, we now have just kind of branded ourselves as a way of differentiating ourselves from the business community or the nonprofit sector, is really working really well together.

'Cause we had already started working together on this.

So we've just kind of latched on with the Gilmore Foundation and the business community.

And I think that that's, I think that there are great things to do in Pekin.

There are great things to do in Washington and in Morton, and they're all part of this community.

And I think that just like when we talk about business attraction, our job is to get people interested in the Peoria area, and then it's up to the communities to land the business.

But who's got the right facility?

Who's got the right infrastructure, the right tax incentive, whatever that might be.

And I think each of our communities is gonna have to do the same thing.

There's a different quality of life in Morton than there is in Pekin, than there is in Peoria.

And there's different reasons that...

There's a reason I chose to live in Peoria 20 years ago.

And there's different reasons that Doug lives out in the Edwards area.

And other people choose other communities.

And that's what's really beautiful about this region is that no matter what you choose, you're 15 minutes away from everything you didn't choose.

- And similarly, Doug, it doesn't make much difference to the Greater Peoria area if the talent attraction is for a company in Morton or Precision Planting, maybe.

- No, not at all.

- And we're trying to grow the pie, basically.

It doesn't matter where the piece is in the pie at all.

But I'm gonna come back to a point that Chris made and others made that we can't do this alone.

We are trying to be very small in our group, our executive group, which is about a dozen people, of leaders in the business community.

And we're counting on Chris's group and Discover Peoria and the Chamber to really help us with the masses of collaboration that we're gonna have to need, because they've already got those contacts.

They know who that is.

And they've all signed on with us.

And I'm pretty optimistic we can get that done.

- I think it's important to also note that this is an initiative of the business community, or at least the business and the philanthropic community.

But Bob Gilmore was a businessman, and I think that's important.

This isn't a government initiative.

There's no public funding that's involved in the $1.6 million that Laura had mentioned earlier.

And I think that's really important.

This is the business community trying to address a need that the business community sees as something that needs to be addressed.

And I think that's really important to note.

A lot of folks will not complain or will kind of shrug their shoulders, say, oh, it's just another government initiative.

It's not a government initiative.

This is the business community putting their money up, say this is important to us to help solve.

It's the business community also telling the region, we love this place, we're proud of it, we wanna help you see this.

I think it's incredible that these business leaders are spending time, treasure, and talent to work on Peoria.

I don't think that happens in other communities.

- Exactly right, Laura.

We have, I'm gonna say, a dozen CEOs that attend just about every meeting, and that's very different from in the past.

So this is a dedicated group, recognizing we need to do something and do something fast and putting their money where their mouth is, like Laura said.

- And as we mentioned earlier, this is at least a three-year project, but Doug, how do you measure success?

And I don't mean, well we got Sam to come into this company, and we retained Alice in this company.

How do you measure success on a project this comprehensive?

- Yeah, and I'll let Misty talk specifically about some of those items, because we will measure who we're getting, where we're getting them from, who's hitting the mouse button where, so we know the area to target.

But for me, if in three years' time the system is working so that the HR leaders and the CEOs of our group say, "Yeah, you know, "we've had some really good finds "because of the help you've provided, "because of the connection to the Peoria, "the Peoria connection," I'll feel pretty good.

I don't have a grand lofty vision here.

We need to help them.

And we only have to be as competitive as our worst neighbors.

And I won't say who that is, but we're not competing with LA.

We're not competing with Seattle.

We're not competing with New York.

We're competing with mid-size Midwest cities, and we have a lot to offer here.

- And to you Misty, in regard to measuring success, and I know ad agencies have a tendency to say, well we- - Sure, sure.

- There are- - Yeah, and I won't bore you with all the detailed KPIs, but to Doug's point, we do have a funnel of how many people we have to bring in to see our message and then how many seats we have to fill at the bottom.

But I actually agree with what Doug said, three years from now, if we've built an operating model of the business community working well together with the civic orgs and setting priorities for our region, think about what's possible, even beyond talent attraction.

So while that's our primary focus right now, and we're trying to stay very narrowly focused on that, just building up a system for our community that helps Illinois build an economic engine is kind of exciting way to think about this.

- We have had some initial thought lately here as we've launched now, and we're kind of moving along, that this business group has come together so nicely that maybe we could put forth some suggestions on other things, and we'll, you'll likely see that happen down the road here.

- So the evolution of Choose Greater Peoria could be in the offing.

- It could be.

- And with that, we are out of time.

Let me say thank you to Laura Cullinan, who is with Gilmore Foundation; and Chris Setti, who's with the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council.

Thank you both for being on- - Thank you.

- "At Issue."

- Thank you.

- And to Doug Oberhelman, who is the chair of the Gilmore Foundation; and Misty Dykema, a partner at the ad agency, Simantel.

Thank you all for being with us on "At Issue."

- Thank you.

- And we thank you for joining us in the conversation.

Continue the conversation at home and look for the campaign.

We'll see you next time on another edition of "At Issue."

(bright music) (bright music) (bright music) (bright music) (gentle music) (bright music)