How Wells Fargo Built An Award-Winning Veterans Hiring Program

A leading financial institution with assets just under $2 trillion and a global workforce of 238,000 employees, Wells Fargo wanted to create a unified talent landscape, with cutting-edge Human Resource technologies that improve the candidate and employee experience. 

In a presentation at Workday Rising North America, Art Lokerson – the product director overseeing Talent Acquisition, Onboarding, and Contingent Labor at Wells Fargo – delved into the financial institution’s innovative approach to talent. Art talked about a talent ecosystem where they could identify skills, early talent, and underrepresented talent, in order to develop the “next wave” of Wells Fargo employees.

“Our candidates are expecting a customer grade experience every time we have an interaction. They expect our ATS to be as dynamic as our ATMs.” – Art Lokerson 

Wells Fargo has 4 programs supporting its veteran hiring efforts, from 8-week internships and 2-year placements, to partnerships and initiatives that get veterans and military spouses into full-time roles.

They had been struggling from a data perspective: talent data was spread out across multiple systems and locations. Wells Fargo needed a way to gain new operational efficiencies, create a unified data ecosystem to better manage talent data, and ensure that they could engage and support veterans as they transitioned to the next phase of their lives.

Wells Fargo Military Talent Programs: An Overview

In 2024, Wells Fargo won the Beamie Award for Workplace DE&I, in recognition of its highly successful commitment to its veterans program – which is a shining example of how Beamery can be used to power innovative talent attraction programs that boost diversity.   

“Traditional talent pools are not as robust as historically we would go after. And so the opportunity for underrepresented populations to come into the Wells Fargo company is astounding.” – Art Lokerson  

Wells Fargo’s commitment to veterans translates into four comprehensive programs:

1. The Veterans Employment Transition (VET) program, an 8-week internship designed to facilitate a seamless transition into the corporate world, often leading to full-time roles. 

2. The Homefront Heroes Hiring (HHH) program, designed to addresses military spouse un/under employment in this underserved segment of the U.S. population. It is focused on attracting and directly hiring spouses of actively serving military personnel into mid to high-level remote, hybrid/portable, and in-office career opportunities. Spouses get to learn about the different lines of business at Wells Fargo and ultimately land a job in one of their supporting lines of business.

3. The Julie Scammahorn National Military Apprenticeship Program, a registered Department of Labor apprentice program that results in skills certification for applicants who do not initially meet required qualifications for the non-apprentice equivalent for professional level roles. It’s a 1- or 2-year placement where people typically start in branch roles, and can work up to branch managers.

4. Boots to Banking, a one-of-a-kind program designed to attract and hire military talent into both hourly and salary opportunities through military-specific, localized hiring events.

Empowering Veteran Hiring Through Technology

One of the core pillars of the Wells Fargo veteran programs is the use of advanced technology.

Thanks to an integrated talent marketing and nurturing activity across landing pages, talent communities, campaigns and events, Wells Fargo is able to reach, advise, and support transitioning veterans to the next phase of their lives, with relative ease, for all of these programs.

The combined power of Beamery and Workday has revolutionized how Wells Fargo identifies and engages with veterans and military spouses, as well as more broadly improving the experience for candidates, TA teams and Hiring Managers. 

Efficient Talent Data Gathering

Beamery significantly streamlines the (often cumbersome) process of collecting accurate and timely information from job seekers and applicants.

With Beamery, Wells Fargo has been able to identify tens of thousands of veterans and military spouses from external partnerships. 

To achieve this, the Military Talent Strategic Sourcing Team (MTSS) first created “Custom Fields” within the system, in order to accurately capture the relevant information from potential candidates. Wells Fargo can now easily and quickly see what a candidate is interested in, what their professional experience is, where they are located, their military status, and more. 

They then created custom Convert Flows, a Beamery feature which puts candidates automatically into relevant Talent Pools. These bespoke forms are integrated in the Wells Fargo company websites, and all events and external communications.  

This has led to an increase in military job seeker flow by 700% from 2020 (pre-Beamery) to 2024 (after adoption).  

Smarter Candidate Sourcing

The use of Convert Flows has also increased the quality of the Beamery Profiles, and allows Wells Fargo recruiters to easily find and communicate with top talent. They can use Beamery as a sourcing tool: as part of their methodology for finding ideal candidates. 

With candidate profiles that are so robust and full of (self-reported) information about an individual, the Sourcing team can quickly and accurately determine a candidate’s interest, their skill level, and their years of experience – and that can really help cut down on the time it takes to find and source great talent.

“We’ve seen such great return on investment for this product. These tools have been a game changer really for helping our military folk find roles at Wells Fargo that best fit them.” – Cameron Crossley, Data Analyst, Military Talent & Strategic Sourcing, Wells Fargo

Tracking Impact and Ensuring Consistency

Wells Fargo’s military recruiting team partners with 65+ external organizations annually and uses Beamery to support hundreds of virtual and in-person military-related events: from webinars, to direct meetings with different veteran service organizations. 

The ability to track Return on Investment (ROI) for these events and monitor each step of the application process – from initial application to successful hiring – has been a game-changer.  

The team creates a unique “Event” in Beamery for each activity they do, utilizes the Event check-in Flow to capture attendee information, and creates a QR code that is displayed for job seekers to scan and join the Talent Community at in-person events.  

This has increased the ROI from in-person events by 300% year over year.  

They also designed a process that provides each external organization with a referral link that is used to track ROI for their events. Multiple organizations have shared that Wells Fargo is their only partner that is able to provide this type of granular data with accuracy.

“We can track how many people sign up for an event, how many people attended an event, how many people applied to jobs after going to an event. So it’s given us a really dynamic way to see return on investment for any of our candidate focused events.” – Cameron Crossley

Personalized Candidate Nurturing

The team at Wells Fargo is using Recipes (automations) within Beamery to ensure relevant content is shared with people who enter the Talent Pool, for example – and they have set up automated Campaigns to nurture leads and keep them warm. 

“We’re seeing a great return on investment from our candidates’ perspectives,” said Cameron Crossley. “Beforehand, we had really long queue times to respond to candidates, because our responses were very manual. Now we can use Recipes and automations to respond to candidates really quickly; to get them the information that they need about coming roles, opportunities, webinars.” 

“This has really helped us in keeping the candidates interested, keeping the leads warm, and ultimately finding military talent a seat at Wells Fargo.” 

Efficiency across Wells Fargo Talent teams

The team’s approach to creating and managing Campaigns for the military team, and the way they can identify and put unique groups of job seekers into Pools effortlessly, has now also been adopted by the wider enterprise.  

Using Beamery Convert Flows, Recipes, Campaigns and Pools, another Wells Fargo recruiting team was able to transform their communication workflows. 

Before, the team would get around 1700 direct communications from candidates – from webinars and events – to an email inbox every month. 20 hours per month were spent on responding to candidates.

Now, talent goes directly into specific Pools based on their interests, and the team is able to triage candidates and send them relevant content, events or opportunities. 

The result has been a reduction in Outlook mailbox process time of 60%, and a reduction of 80% in the number of redundant emails sent back and forth with job seekers. 

They have seen an improved job seeker experience, and 100% profile completion and consent rate for all new profiles added to Beamery.

Enhanced Collaboration with Workday

Integration with Workday has eliminated duplicative work, enabling the team to focus more on engaging with candidates and less on administrative tasks.

Deploying automated messaging after events has allowed Wells Fargo to communicate with over 10,000 job seekers effortlessly, resulting in improved candidate experience.  

“I'm able to use Beamery in conjunction with Workday to really put both of those pieces together to get an accurate understanding of where the military talent is, how can we seek that out better by using our Beamery profiles, and providing results back to our organizations of how our efforts are actually ending up.” – Cameron Crossley 

Hear more from Wells Fargo’s Art Lokerson in this Talent Blueprint podcast episode.

Watch their Beamie Award video, and read the short Customer Success Story here.