Coworkers

Coworking with Georgia Smith

She’s Manager of Recruitment Marketing and Employer Brand at Delta
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· 4 min read

On Wednesdays, we schedule our weekly 1:1 with HR Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Georgia Smith is manager of recruitment marketing and employer brand at Delta Air Lines, where she’s worked since 2019. In our recent conversation over phone and email, Smith discussed the importance of recruitment marketing and employer brand, and how she sees the HR industry changing and expanding.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? My team builds the bridge between HR and marketing. When you look at the talent acquisition funnel, we are at the top in the awareness, consideration, and interest piece. We attract candidates to Delta and then pass them off to our recruiters to hire them and then they are passed to HR to retain them. We’re [at] the front of the candidate life cycle.

What does a typical day look like for you? Our team—[employer brand and recruitment marketing]—supports every division, so we support the marketing for pilot hiring, all the way to our ramp-agent hiring, and even our corporate roles.

So my day-to-day is really spent working with our talent acquisition leadership team on understanding what they’ve been asked by their business partners to deliver for them, whether that’s the deficits that they need to fill per station, the brand awareness that needs to be built in a market that we’re growing into, or even just keeping the brand awareness going through markets that we’re establishing. So my day-to-day a lot of cross-collaboration and a lot of partnership.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked? We used to be more behind the scenes, with our recruiting/TA partners being at the forefront of the conversations with our business partners. With the competitive landscape of today’s talent marketplace, having recruitment marketers as part of conversations from the beginning of hiring has led to a greater understanding of our work and the impact we have on the holistic recruitment and HR processes.

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What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? Recruitment marketing will not solve for every deficit in today’s job market. People are looking for more than just a job. They want to join a company that offers more than just a paycheck, and an organization’s total rewards package plays a critical role in that.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job? Connecting people to their potential. I joined Delta because I could see the opportunity that existed here, and I have experienced more growth in the past three years than I ever imagined. I know that by connecting people to our opportunities and by featuring success stories of our employees, I have the ability to impact someone on their career path and celebrate those that are knocking it out of the park at Delta.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why? The rise of recruitment marketing and employer brand (RM/EB). Companies are recognizing that to attract talent in today’s market, they need to tell their story. Every time I see a new RM/EB job opening, I think of more friends and connections that I can learn from in this industry.

Are there any HR tools that are impacting how you work? My favorite tool that we offer at Delta is called Workplace by [Meta]. We call it Sky Hubs internally, but it’s our internal social media channel, [and it] operates very similarly to Facebook. We’ve got different groups that you can join. It’s been in place for a couple of years now, but we really saw it skyrocket through Covid. We started hosting company-wide town halls in that channel, led by our CEO. So being a global company, yet having a centralized location for all of our employees to interact and engage with each other, is huge.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Coworking? Click here to introduce yourself.

Quick-to-read HR news & insights

From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.