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Special Reports
Recruiting & Training
First Horizon Touts Service Culture
By Bonnie Sinnock
MEMPHIS, TN -- When it comes to a financial services business line like mortgages,
service is a main differentiator and crucial as part of a company's competitive edge, First Horizon National Corp.
here believes.
That's why the company embraces a corporate culture that is designed to be service-oriented
when it comes to its internal employees, so that staff members reflect the goodwill that the company provides them
with in their dealings with customers.
First Horizon recently has been looking to recruit "people who are good producers"
and who ideally already have "approved clientele" so that they can "hit the ground running on the
customer service side," said Sarah Meyerrose, First Horizon's executive vice president for corporate and employee
services.
She said that recently there has been a "competitive market for that talent"
and that the company has been addressing that trend by using internal recruiters and current employees to find
good people. It also has been looking to recruit for back-office positions in the mortgage unit and elsewhere in
the company. It approaches recruiting in this area by working with professional associations and by posting information
and allowing candidates to apply online through its website (www.firsthorizon.com), Ms. Meyerrose said.
First Horizon also may offer among other employee-friendly incentives a scheduling
flexibility that has won it positive recognition from AARP.
Ms. Meyerrose said the company looks for "talent" when recruiting "wherever
we can find it. Age doesn't make a difference." She said the company has a history of calling on its retirees
from time to time for special assignments that might be continual or might be short term. Ms. Meyerrose said the
company also has offered various forms of informal flexibility at individual business units' discretion that can
be attractive to older employees. Full-time employees, for example, may have the option to shift to a "prime
time" schedule of 20 hours a week and still receive benefits, she said. This move is attractive to many people
for various reasons, among these employees who may be headed for retirement and "winding down" their
careers, Ms. Meyerrose said. The company also has allowed employees in certain circumstances to work from home
or during odd hours if they need it to balance their personal and professional lives.
She stressed that the company has no particular program or policy for doing this,
per se, because it has found that formalizing employee flex time and flex schedules keeps them from being effective.
"We leave it to our employees, [our] managers and our teams," she said.
"We're often asked how many people take advantage of this flexibility,"
Ms. Meyerrose said. "We don't track it. We've found that if it becomes too programmatic people kind of stop
taking advantage of it. [So we] work it out at the work unit level. They know better than we do how to get the
work done."
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