Attracting Talent

Regions’ centralized Talent Acquisition team strives to identify and implement innovative talent solutions that support a diverse, engaged workforce. Our associates are a key element of our success, and we seek to recruit diverse talent who share our values and mission to make life better. We offer performance-driven individuals a place where they can build a career — a place to expect more opportunities.

Connecting Recruitment and Development

We have developed our Emerging Talent Program as a specific pathway to recruiting top talent. This career development program is designed to refine technical knowledge to fit the current and prospective needs of our business, enhance participants’ individual talents, encourage collaboration and networking, and model Regions’ values. Candidates may enter the Emerging Talent Program through either an internship or a full-time, line-of-business-specific development program. Most full-time development program positions will have a one- to two-year rotational aspect.

In addition to this program, we launched Regions’ Workforce Development Programs to support internships, externships, and fellowships.

Building a Diverse Workforce

Regions is committed to hiring candidates with diverse backgrounds and experience. We make a concentrated effort to attract diverse talent through various recruiting initiatives and collaborative efforts. Our Talent Acquisition team partners closely with our DEI COE to execute our strategies to attract diverse talent to Regions.

The DEI COE works closely with community organizations in our footprint to present job readiness programs, mock interview sessions, and resume- building workshops in an effort to support our community while attracting new talent to Regions.

We are aware of the importance of where we advertise open positions with the Company. We have continued our partnership with Direct Employers to post jobs on diversity-focused job boards to attract minority, female, veteran, disabled, and LGBTQ+ talent. In 2020 the DEI COE launched a partnership with the Professional Diversity Network to increase the number of diversity-focused job boards where we post our open positions.

Since 2019, Regions has accepted the HBCU Partnership Challenge. The Challenge cultivates public-private investments in HBCUs with the aim of ensuring their future sustainability, increasing career prospects for their students, and advancing diversity and inclusion within all sectors of employment. By making this public pledge, we are participating in the collective effort to ensure that HBCU students and graduates have equal access to opportunities. With that goal in mind, we have developed an HBCU recruitment strategy focusing on strategic relationships with HBCUs across the Regions footprint.

In the summer of 2019, City of Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin launched Birmingham Promise, an initiative to create new career and college opportunities for students in Birmingham City Schools while simultaneously helping meet the workforce needs of Birmingham’s current and future employers.

In addition to providing students with a clear pathway from high school to a rewarding career, the initiative provides more inclusive prosperity in the Birmingham metropolitan area; the resulting diverse, qualified workforce strengthens employers, which in turn helps fuel long-term economic growth.

Regions was proud to be one of 21 companies in the 2019 pilot program, providing one student with valuable on-site experience over the course of that summer. We also welcomed five students in the spring of 2020, but due to the pandemic, the program was suspended a few weeks into the semester. In 2021 we hosted 10 students through this program. In 2022, Regions will host seven students in a first-in-the-state apprenticeship program.

In addition to our work with community organizations and educational initiatives, Regions is committed to employing U.S. military veterans and active service members who are seeking opportunities in the financial services industry. Regions has publicly stated our support of these efforts through the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve and has issued a separate statement of support through Military.com. We engage with this group of talent through military-focused career programs, fellowships, and on-base recruiting.

We are equally committed to supporting employment for individuals with disabilities. In 2019, we strengthened our relationships with local departments of rehabilitation by hosting a summer work program and updating our regions.com careers page to affirm our commitment to employing people with disabilities.

Deploying New Recruitment Strategies

We are excited about the investment in and potential for new and innovative initiatives to further enhance our talent recruitment process. In 2020, we made a strategic investment in Talent Experience Platform technology, including candidate relationship management functionality used by our Talent Acquisition team. The investment enabled us to completely rebuild our external career site, careers.regions.com, in order to offer a more personalized experience for external candidates. This transformed the talent journey through building, engaging with, and tracking talent pipelines.

We developed and launched a formalized Internal Mobility Strategy in 2020 aimed at putting a career roadmap in front of all Regions associates. This builds upon our already strong pipeline of internal talent as evidenced by the fact that more than 35 percent of open requisitions were filled by existing Regions associates in 2021. In January 2022, we completed the final phase of the Talent Experience Platform implementation to include an internal career site for Regions associates, offering a personalized experience similar to that of our external candidates.

Developing Talent

Investing in Our Associates

Regions’ Talent Management Programs strive to empower associates to own their careers and development, broaden access to growth opportunities, and launch programs, technology, and initiatives to develop and deploy talent to fulfill our highest business needs. We offer a range of solutions to help associates find the best roles for each step of their careers, while building talent pipelines to meet the future demands of our business. Regions employs a consistent and continuous approach to talent identification, assessment, and development. We believe our associates are our most critical and valuable asset, and as such, should be invested in every day to maximize their potential. We guide managers in identifying events and actions throughout the year that are appropriate for setting expectations, performing assessments, engaging in impactful conversations, and providing productive feedback.

We commit to preparing our workforce for a rapidly changing environment and understand that reskilling and upskilling are crucial to staying competitive and retaining valued associates. To support this need, Regions implemented Degreed — a customized learning experience platform that provides the tools to measure, build, and communicate skills inside the organization. This tool is designed to empower associates to drive their careers through associate-led personalization of learning plans based on their roles and interests. Degreed provides a wide variety of learning experiences: articles, podcasts, online training, online coursework, and peer-to-peer interactions that create an inclusive, robust learning experience. Degreed was available to approximately 11,500 associates in 2021 and became accessible to all associates in the first quarter of 2022.

Organizationally, Degreed provides the ability to inventory associates’ skills and target development efforts toward specific areas where elevated skills are needed now and in the future. Regions leverages a combination of internally developed Regions-specific learning assets along with content developed and curated by key subject-matter experts throughout the organization.

Additionally, strategic relationships with training vendors such as LinkedIn Learning and Harvard ManageMentor^® offer more learning opportunities across a wide variety of subjects. Recognizing the importance of technology, we engaged Pluralsight and other specialized technology training vendors to provide more than 11,000 on-demand courses that offer intensive learning in application development, IT operations, information security, and technology architecture.

Assessing Skills for Future Business Needs

In late 2019, we embarked upon an initiative to identify the future skills required to effectively execute on our business strategy and develop the learning pathways necessary to upskill our associates. Our approach to accomplish these goals uses the following process:

• Accurately projecting the knowledge and skills we need to develop as an organization.
• Using analysis to align individual associates with the knowledge and skills that they need to be successful.
• Prescribing learning content for associates that targets their individual needs based on skills assessments.
• Monitoring progress and creating accountability at all levels for achieving capability milestones.

The first upskilling initiative was launched with our Application Development team. We began by identifying and defining the current and future knowledge and skill needs for approximately 700 associates. As a result, more than 200 customized learning plans were created.

“It’s Training Tuesday!” is being endorsed by Technology leadership to establish the expectation that associates spend at least 30 minutes learning every Tuesday. The amount of time spent learning has increased more than 300 percent with these associates since “It’s Training Tuesday!” was implemented in 2021. The upskilling initiative has expanded to Operations, Strategy & Innovation, Data & Analytics, and other functional groups within Technology.

Continuing to Value Instructor-Led Learning

The Regions Learning and Development team continues to offer high-value, instructor-led learning experiences that incorporate relevant scenarios to practice desired behaviors to meet customer needs. By using an adaptive approach to learning that is aligned with the Company’s corporate strategies, we can meet current learning and development objectives while anticipating business skills needed in the future. In particular, we invest in critical positions such as application development, consumer banking, emerging talent, business analysts, fraud prevention, diversity, equity and inclusion, and strengths-based development.

During 2021, we used a progression curriculum in our branch network that aligns learning with career paths and advancement through five levels of a single job family. The learning experience is provided online through instructor-led courses and made more relevant by manager reinforcement and practice in experiential opportunities that assess skills development progress.