Checking In February 17th, 2021 Webinar:

IT Talent Acquisition: Trends & Applications Across Local Governments

Vendorship Inc. was pleased to welcome February’s featured Checking In webinar panelists who shared their deeply diverse perspectives in modern governmental and private-public sector human resources and talent acquisition practices.

Information Technology’s role in governmental operations is rapidly expanding as the global pandemic continues to create workforce and workplace challenges. But sourcing and retaining top IT talent to navigate these uncharted waters has become increasingly scarce as demand is exponentially outpacing supply in both public and private sectors.

From a major county government in southern Oregon straddling the Pacific Ocean, to a historic western Tennessee municipality positioned along the fabled Mississippi River and home to National Civil Rights Museum, to deep in the heart of south central Texas, your Vendorship Inc. team, with panelists whose communities they represented spanned the nation, delivered one of the most broadly-reaching and timely topics in its webinar series to date.

Our panelists included:

Laura (Luther) Vinson  | Talent Acquisition Strategist, Lane County (Oregon)

Laura’s current role with Lane County, Oregon (Eugene) government places her on the front lines of governmental human resources best practices, recruiting processes, and talent acquisition strategies.

She’s an accomplished results-oriented HR professional with 19 years of HR, recruiting, diversity, and inclusion experience, dedicated to strategic business planning and development, relationship management, and community development/relations.

Alex Smith |  Chief Human Resources Officer, City of Memphis.

Alex is the visionary and architect behind the city’s talent management, training, employee relations, employee engagement, compensation, benefits, Total Rewards and diversity initiatives. She is also the “Chief Change Officer,” focused on evolving the City of Memphis’s culture to enable Mayor Jim Strickland’s mission of “improving the quality of life for all Memphians, every day.”

Under Alex’s guidance and focus on innovation, collaboration, accountability, and service, she is helping position the City of Memphis as a model for a Twenty-First Century city. One example of Alex’s success includes driving the implementation of Oracle HCM making City of Memphis the first public sector in the country to launch the largest HR cloud-based technology.

Angela Peña-Ward | Managing partner, San Antonio-based 5 Wards Group LLC.

Angela serves as managing partner of San Antonio-based 5 Wards Group LLC.

She’s a recognized sales leader and team-builder empowering clients to quickly scale with supplemental talent; from Fortune 500 to start-ups, both public and private sectors, Angela consistently fosters alliances and staffing strategies for clients to achieve limitless growth.

Whether creating a team by recruiting ideal candidates, or enrolling partners to execute on a common goal, her team at 5 Wards Group provides staffing and recruiting services that address the gaps and seize opportunities to exceed growth objectives; an underpinning of 5 Wards’s “people first, technology second” mission statement.

Angela and 5 Wards Group are as well MBE/WBE/SBE/DBE/WOSB and HUB-certified in her home state of Texas.

Topics of discussion included:

• Describe the importance of getting the right talent to your organization?

• How has COVID impacted your organization and its workforce?

• Model recruitment examples in local government?

• What roles have IT talent acquisition firms played in public-private partnerships?

• Retaining talent in the public sector.

Key takeaways:

• Local governments are competing with private enterprise compensation and workplace perks with those of their own — including City of Memphis Total Rewards and diversity initiatives.

• Aging talent pools have challenged public service agency human resources and recruiting managers to develop more flexible remote working solutions to attract younger potential candidates. • Cloud-based HR solutions have provided dramatic efficiencies in government hiring processes.

• Social media has proven a beneficial tool for local governments to identify and target potential employment candidates while espousing the benefits of their respective entities.