Every employee at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, from the clinicians to the people cleaning patient rooms, is expected to give the same answer when asked what they do: "I find cures and save children."
Dana is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where she's spent nearly three decades helping the organization recruit and retain talent against biotech giants and coastal salaries it simply can't match on paper. In this episode, she talks about how St. Jude leans on mission instead, why a campus visit can change a candidate's mind in an instant, and how her team is thinking through AI without losing sight of the people doing the work.
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Connect with Dana: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-bottenfield-5b38541/
Learn more about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital: www.stjude.org
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[00:00:00] Dana Bottenfield: Really, the best answer for me, once someone gets here, if someone asks them, "What do you do at St. Jude?" I want them to say, "I find cures and save children." Because that's what we all do.
[00:00:12] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter. And on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses
Today's Talent All-Star is Dana Bottenfield, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, a globally recognized leader in pediatric research, treatment, and medical innovation.
Before joining St. Jude, Dana began her career as a high school teacher before finding her path into human resources through roles in compensation and HR information systems. As a native Memphian, Dana's connection to St. Jude dates back to ninth grade when she gave a presentation on its founder, Danny Thomas, long before beginning what is now an almost three-decade career with the organization. Dana Bottenfield, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:08] Dana Bottenfield: Thank you, Dave. It's a real pleasure to be here. I appreciate you asking me.
[00:01:12] Dave Travers: Pleasure to have you, and so excited to talk about St. Jude. So you are a leader of a huge organization with an amazing mission that people know, some people know a lot about. Lots of us have heard of St. Jude, but your journey to being the people leader there, um, your journey is different than a lot of people. So you, you started in a more technology-facing role, I think, or, and, and came up through a different part of the organization than many do to lead in HR and people function. Tell us a little bit about that.
How did you get into it, and when did you decide this people thing might really be, might be the path for me?
[00:01:47] Dana Bottenfield: Great question, and like all HR professionals, I think we all fell into it, right? That's probably been a common theme you've heard from other, other interviews. In third grade, I did not say I wanted to grow up to be a head of an HR department.
I am a native Memphian, and so I knew all about St. Jude and, um, actually did a ninth-grade, uh, presentation and speech on Danny Thomas, our founder. So I wanted to be at St. Jude quite possibly was there, but I didn't know in what capacity, and I actually wanted to be a high school teacher like my mom. So ultimately, I taught high school for two weeks and cried every day and said, "Please don't make me go back."
My parents said, "You must have a job," and I got lucky. I got a job at what was left of Holiday Inn, which was also founded in Memphis. I was working in their call center. They like to hire from within my bachelor's degree is in mathematics, and so a job came open in compensation and HR information systems, and they're like, "Oh, okay, math person, logic, computers, comps are math-driven."
And they gave me a shot, and I actually really liked it. My second big girl job was at St. Jude. And I've been here for twenty-nine years since. So really fell into HR, fell into St. Jude at a time when it was in a period of growth, and that gave me a lot of opportunities. I always said yes. You know, "Do you wanna recruit for a while?
We need some help." "Yes, I do." "We need some support with benefits. Will you do it?" "Yes, I will." So that really helped, but I also had great mentors who guided me along the way and often helped me believe that I could do things that I wasn't quite sure I was ready for, including leading the HR department. And the first time my boss talked to me about it, I said, "No, I would be terrible.
Everybody would quit. I don't wanna be the head of the department." And after a year of conversations, I made the leap and have been really, really, really honored and thrilled and challenged every day.
[00:03:59] Dave Travers: Amazing. Okay, I wanna, I wanna get to the, the present-day challenge every day, but, but in that story, there's both the wisdom to say, "Hey, maybe this high school teaching thing isn't for me," and also the willingness to say yes a few times when people offer you something you didn't expect or weren't necessarily looking for, and having the confidence with the help of mentors to take a leap.
So how do you, how do you now advise someone else who sees your path and wants to emulate it in their own way? How do you know when to say, "Ooh, wow, this isn't working for me," and when to say, "I'm gonna try it, like I'm, I'm gonna go for it"? How do you, how do you balance those two things?
[00:04:40] Dana Bottenfield: I'll talk about a couple people who I've spoken with, actually, even recruited to come work in HR who didn't have that background.
So one is a person who now works at International Paper, and she's their, I think, senior vice president for comp and benefits. She was someone I knew at my first job. She was a paralegal. Super smart, but I was like, "You're never gonna get promoted to attorney," right? It has a limited growth potential. Is this really what you wanna do forever?
And she took a step back, a pay cut, to come work in HR at St. Jude. And, you know, she did a great job here. She spent, like, five years at St. Jude and then took an opportunity with International Paper and has been there for a twenty-plus-year career. And this was a person who was a friend and a colleague, right?
But sometimes it's just talking to people and saying, you know, especially within HR, you learn it on the job. You need resilience, you need to be able to problem-solve, you've got to be a relationship builder, but you don't have to be an HR professional. We'll teach you that, right? And so I think within any organization, a great operations experience is a great way to then go transition into human resources.
So we have, for example, one of our recruiters was a former postdoc at St. Jude, and she decided maybe being a faculty position somewhere is not what I want. She's an outstanding research recruiter, right? She knows what it's like to work in the labs here, and she can really translate that into the recruitment, into helping those candidates see what that experience is like.
[00:06:23] Dave Travers: Awesome. Okay. So now let's talk about managing the people and the talent to recruit the people at a mission-driven organization. So you're a nonprofit. A lot of people have heard of you. You have this amazing mission. Anytime anybody hears the story of a St. Jude patient who had a great outcome, it's incredible.
And at the same time, you're in this talent market where you're competing against biotech companies who are, you know, offering huge stock option packages and other, you know, different sort of value propositions to highly, um, sought-after people. How do you think about that? How do you use your mission as a tool, and how do you combat people, uh, for talent who are, you know, using other tools that you don't have by the nature of your organization?
[00:07:08] Dana Bottenfield: That's a great question because especially with some of our high-level clinicians and our faculty and a lot of our researchers, they envision their life on the coast, right? That's where a lot of our competition is: California and Boston, New York, and they didn't really envision their life being in Memphis, Tennessee.
So our mission is so important to what we do. We certainly leverage that and really our entire culture that gets into our legacy, uh, the legacy of Danny Thomas and Dr. Pinkle, how our values and culture principles play into that, and then those sort of shared traditions. And so we, we lean into that while we are recruiting, sort of saying one of the things our CEO loves to say is, "If not St. Jude, then who?"
We get to work on truly amazing things that have an impact in a way that you will not have at other organizations, especially at a for-profit, right? As a clinician or a clinical team, you're doing what's best with the patient. It isn't about whether or not you can bill insurance. As a researcher, you're getting to forge relationships with clinicians, do translational work that you will not get to do anywhere else.
And that is certainly critical to our mission, but that is certainly part of our selling point of how we get people to come here. And almost unilaterally is if you can get a little bit of hook, and then we can bring them to campus, it's coming to campus that they come and go, "Wait a minute. I didn't get it. I get it now." Right? Because the mission is palpable, but also the amazing work you get to be part of is just present everywhere.
[00:09:05] Dave Travers: And is that equally true for people in healthcare or people on the business side as well? Like, when you're competing against for talent that's outside, may not have heard of St. Jude or know the difference between that and other big names they've heard of in the medical field, how do you, how do you penetrate through to somebody who's bringing skills from outside the medical world?
[00:09:23] Dana Bottenfield: On the administration side, we're more likely to recruit locally or regionally, right? So we have strong brand recognition, but we certainly still recruit top-level administrative, uh, talent from other academic medical centers.
But it's, it's really the same thing. It's like how, you know, FedEx is a great organization, and it is-- you know, without them, we don't get our medications delivered, right? They play critical points. They're enormous fundraiser for St. Jude. We still have to have all the other competitive pieces, right? We gotta have a strong benefits package, a strong pay package.
You've gotta be able to grow your career. People have to see what the opportunities are here to connect their work to the mission, right? But at the end of the day, if we can get you on campus and you can see the people and see the patients which they are walking around on campus, you see those families, you see kids being pulled in a little red wagon, it just starts to mean something different.
And I don't care if you're in administration, you're in environmental services, you're in whatever part of the organization, it matters. And really the best answer for me once someone gets here, if someone asks them, "What do you do at St. Jude?" I want them to say, "I find cures and save children," because that's what we all do.
[00:10:48] Dave Travers: Okay. So now generalize that for me. If I'm an up-and-coming people leader and talent leader who has part of some organization, for-profit or nonprofit, with an amazing mission, you know, how do you, from all you've learned and all you have done at St. Jude, how do you generalize that into a strategy? If I have an amazing-- whether it's in the medical field or elsewhere, if I need to go down the path of utilizing our mission to train and retain and attract even better people, where would I start?
How do I get that ball rolling down the hill on that journey you, you're so far down?
[00:11:26] Dana Bottenfield: I actually think if, if you don't already know it, you need to start talking to your people. Why do you work here? What is it about working here that matters to you? What is it about that what we do? And, um, I will take a story that is not a St. Jude story.
I saw at one point the leader of GoDaddy.com do a presentation, and they were transitioning from the really terrible commercials that they had that were really sexist and I think in bad taste. I didn't even know what they did. I remembered them because I'm like, "Ugh."] And they got a new leader in, and he came up with, I think their mission and their recruitment was around h- we have a, you know, kickass manifesto, I think, or something of that nature.
And he was talking about how what they do, which was, I know it ends up being about what's your URL, right? For your company. But how they turned that into something that was inspiring to their people about you are helping small businesses; you're helping people build their own dreams, make them a reality.
They're hiring other people in their communities, right? What is it that they did that made a difference in the world? And they, they were able to use that to then hire, to recreate their workforce and recreate their image. And I think that matters. And if they could do it, you can do it too, right? You can find what is important about what you do.
So again, FedEx, they help the world work, period, right? That's extremely important, and whether it's delivering that package you need because your kid is sick and you need a medication, or because you've got a party in three days and you need the decorations, it doesn't matter, right? You can find the way in which your company adds value to the world, and that's what you need to be selling to your employees.
[00:13:26] Dave Travers: Amazing. And, and even more amazing is that gentleman you were talking about who took over from the founder at, at GoDaddy, his name is Blake Irving. He's a mentor of mine. He's also on the board of ZipRecruiter. He's a great guy, and he's been a previous guest on this podcast. So, uh, amazing story, and you're so right about him and about that, um, that strategy.
Okay. We live in this world that is changing all the time with technology. You have your mission, which is an anchor and a North Star, and you have this incredible founding story and everything, um, about what you do. But at the same time, you are an incredible technology organization. You are constantly, as you talked about in your recruiting and retention story, you are constantly translating the latest and greatest technology into clinical practice among doing participating in research, all those other things.
In the people world, the big topic, as well as in the medical world, is AI. But there's all this technology you could be using and adopting. There's so much noise out there about what you could be doing. How do you decide? How do you prioritize? What are you gonna do next? There's so many different directions you could go.
How do you think about what are the next things we need to do, and where are we gonna use technology, and where are we gonna use the people that we have on our team, and balance those things out?
[00:14:44] Dana Bottenfield: That is a great question, and that's a tough one because the reality is a lot of the ways we use technology is I'm really not a driver of that, right?
Our scientists, like, so we have an entire team, uh, dedicated to data science. Um, my job is to support Madan Babu in helping his vision come to light, but he's way better at understanding the technology and maybe what's the next thing and how St. Jude might leverage it, or working collaboratively with other faculty or researchers or clinicians and actually developing the technology, and we certainly do that as well.
We, we have built things. We have used things. I mean, AI has been on our radar forever, right? In a chemical biology lab, they've been using robots since I started working here. So that part I need to leave to the people who are best at it. What I need to be there is helping them solve their workforce challenges around it.
So to use a recent example, computational biology is a department here. They have their researchers, but then they've got what you would consider sort of the IT guys, right? The engineers, um, and they all have a definite understanding of the science. But they reached out to me going, "Claude Code is really getting to a point where it's writing code that we can use."
And so I'm sitting there talking to them, and I'm like: Okay, let's talk about what does that mean for your team? And they're like: Well, we have more work to do than we could do in five years, right? What it means is we've improved our productivity, right? And so we start talking about, do you have to use Claude Code?
What if you have an ethical sort of worry about sort of the power that that requires and the impact on the Earth? You know, how are we gonna work through that? What is the cost of using Claude Code, right? It's not free. How do we use it for the most right purpose? And what are things then that Claude Code might do?
Like, I know when we talk, they're like, well, you know, the team loves doing the creative work of the engineering side, right? They hate doing the documentation. That's the areas too, is like how do we take that off your people so they're spending their time doing the value-add work that AI can't do?
So that's really how we see ourselves having value within HR, is kind of helping our leaders think through those things. And at the end of the day, I don't really see it as much of a sort of we're going to reduce our workforce. We may not have to grow as fast, but I do think it means our productivity is going to increase, right?
And that we should be able to do more with the same number of people if we're using it wisely.
[00:17:38] Dave Travers: I love that. And so now apply that to HR tools in particular. Like, you know, how do you think about where you're using and where you're adding new modules of existing tools or adding a new tool to your immense HR technology infrastructure?
How do you decide what you're gonna layer on and which, you know, when there's so much existing technology, you have to be very thoughtful about when to add what, where, and in what order. How do you do that?
[00:18:06] Dana Bottenfield: That is a great question. So I'm very fortunate again to have a forward-thinking organization when it comes to AI.
So we already have an AI council. I'm part of that. There's one that is focused on clinical realm and use of AI in the clinical areas. There's one that's- well, research has a data sciences team, so that really is their council. And then we have an administrative one. And so if we're going to use AI, the first thing we have to do is go before that council.
We have to talk about what the purpose of using this is, what are the risks, where is the human in the loop, um, what is our pilot, right? You can't just go do it. And then the last but not least, what's the cost and the ROI? And so HR would be no different than anybody else. So whether it's using Workday, which is our product, and we want to use something in AI, we're still gonna have to bring that before that council and talk through all of those things so that we're getting sort of a unified look.
Because one of the things that even being on that council we don't want is, whether it's HR or any team, is that we're just using the shiny thing, and it's a technology in search of a problem. And we've even told people, "Why are you going with this company using this AI? We already have something that will do this.
We don't need to purchase something new. Let's use the products we've already invested in." But specifically within HR, we have two areas of focus at the moment. The first thing is really getting repetitive work off our plate. So we are really working, and we are, you know, I wish we were further along. It's hard.
It's a journey, but really getting our hub page and our SharePoint sites that it's got, uh, you know, the way I think of it is a nice little box around it that AI can hit and that are repetitive questions. What's my group health number? What's our COBRA rate? I need a letter of verification for a loan.
Those things that AI would be great to do that work for us and take that tier-one work off of my team so that they're out there doing, solving tougher problems, giving people that self-service. We're twenty four/seven, right? That they can get that answer at any time. So what we're really starting with is sort of taking the repetitive work off the plate so that the teams that, that do that work today can do more value-add, improve their skill set, have a longer career at St. Jude, right?
That they're getting to do more interesting work that's growing their own career, and whether it's, um, maybe I get to dip my toe in recruitment or whatever, right? Just like me. And then the second piece is again, just institutionally improving our productivity. So I use AI every day. I use, we're Copilot Three Sixty Five shop, but I use it.
I mean, my favorite absolute thing to do is take notes in a Word document, super easy, load it up into it and say, "Build me a PowerPoint. Here's our brand standards, and I'm looking for an executive PowerPoint, or I'm looking for, you know, an educational PowerPoint. I'm trying to inform people about X or Y."
And it's gonna build that for me, and it's working in the background, and I can be doing something else. And instead of taking me half a day, I get those PowerPoint slides at a really good point by spending about five to ten minutes of my time, kind of keep training it, redirecting it, do it this way, change this, change that layout, right?
So those are really the two places within HR that we're using AI today, other than through our partners like ServiceNow and Workday and those. We have teams that go across departments, right? That are the core teams for those products. And so that's also a collaborative process that, but again, it would still go before our AI council, make sure we're thinking about it, evaluating the risk, and making sure that ROI is there.
[00:22:16] Dave Travers: I think that the notion of an AI council is really smart on so many different levels. So one is like, you know, setting policies that are thoughtful across the whole organization, sharing learnings, not having different departments with totally different attitudes or policies and things like that.
There's so much to be said for that. One of the interesting things about that is it calls on executives who are gonna go before a council like that, or people on your team, to be prepared to go in front of a cross-functional group and talk about the business case to the finance person, talk about what it means for the brand and what people will think about it to the marketing person, talk to the lawyer about how it's gonna be compliant, et cetera.
How do you train, how do you develop someone on your team to be ready to go forward in cross-functional situations like that and talk about a business problem that the HR team has?
[00:23:06] Dana Bottenfield: Well, with the AI council, we're very fortunate to have a template, so we already have something. So from a governance standpoint, we've already put that out there, and we have our analytics team also actually helps people put those decks together so that they're kind of, we're getting things as the council participants in the same sort of way every time.
And then they actually do have to come back and present what the results were of their pilot and whether or not they're gonna go forward. Outside of that, it's really, you know, you always want your next layer down and your next layer down, so not just me, Dana, but the people who report to me. When you've got someone, I am thinking right now of someone that actually, um, needed to go before a council.
It's a collaborative project we're moving to Visier. I'm not sure if you're familiar. Sure about getting our data out there to the right people. So our head of our HR analytics team needed to get it over, the project over the goal line, right? So the first thing is he came to me, and he did the presentation, and I said, "Here's some people I would go talk to.
They've presented to this council. Go back and talk to them, come back to me." He did that. He came back to me, and then I said, "You've still got, you know, nine slides. They don't have nine slides of time. Let's start talking about, you know, what are you really trying to do?" We actually reframed it. I'm like: "Don't come in like, 'I need your permission.'
We've already approved this project. It got vetted. You've done the competitive bid. Go in here and say, 'Come into that project or come into that meeting with, I'm here to inform you in a nice way," right? "But here are the decisions they made. We went through a regimented process. Here's how we came to the decision, and we're here to let you know what the timeline is and address any concerns that you might have, and also talk to you.
If you've got it, you can have all these other details in an appendix, right, if a question comes up." And he did that, and ultimately it went smoothly. And a number of people afterwards came to him and said, "Oh, that was a great presentation. You did this, and this and this, and we really liked it. I want your slides 'cause I wanna do that when I have to come before the team," right?
So sometimes it's just you have to give your people your time, but it's also then now he can do that with his team, right? He's starting to get that picture, and that you're, you're sharing that knowledge, you're building their skills, and they're sharing their knowledge and building skills on their own teams.
[00:25:37] Dave Travers: I think that is so wise, and taking the time, just, just the, sometimes the meeting is the message of taking the time to say, "It's really important you understand what's happening," and being honest and upfront. "I'm not asking for your permission. We're past that already. I'm telling you what is happening."
And that is very respectful ultimately to somebody's time by not pretending, um, that's the case. I love that. I love that advice. Okay. We always end these episodes with what we call the lightning round. So I want you to imagine this scenario because you've only got sixty seconds or so because you're, you know, making a cup of coffee and the CEO walks up next to you, which is a scenario that you m- you may have, uh, faced so many times before.
And the CEO's like: "You know, hey, Dana, the thing I've been thinking about is how should we measure the effectiveness of our HR function? Like, if we were to say, 'How'd we do in twenty twenty-six, and how well are we gonna do in twenty twenty-seven?' what are the, the metrics or what's the measurement philosophy we should even think about for that?"
[00:26:39] Dana Bottenfield: Well, I don't wanna give the standard HR metrics, right? 'Cause th-those are super important, right? Quality of hire, turnover, time to fill, you know, market data on your compensation and benefits packages. Those are all extremely important, and those aren't gonna go away. But trying to think of something more interesting to talk about, I would really like, um, and I've been doing my own sort of research on it, but that we've really got a good metric that is measuring the ROI of AI, right?
Because there is a cost to it, and it is the cost of, you know, all the tokens that you're being charged, but it's also the infrastructure, right? The license, the people behind the scenes that are making it work, and we need to make sure we're spending those dollars on the thing that give us the most value add from a productivity standpoint, right?
So what is it that we're saving? What labor is getting saved? What is the increase in productivity of removing that work, right? And hopefully, what's the higher-level work that's getting done? And so all of those things have got to be in that metric, and I don't know what that magic formula is yet, but it's something we're certainly noodling on because it's more than just using AI because it's cool or it does something, right?
There's still a cost to doing that. And then probably the other metric that is not a standard and really goes to the stickiness of our culture is really maybe coming back to what I said at the beginning of this, earlier in the session, is that I really would love to be able to have every single employee when they're asked, "What is it that you do at St. Jude?"
And they come back, and they say, "I find cures, and I save children." Because that is what we are all here to do, and we really want every single employee, no matter what their job, is that they have sort of absorbed that mission and how they contribute to it. And if you work in environmental services, you're doing life-saving work, right?
Germs, dust, those things kill our patients. They make their recoveries harder. It is important work. If you are working in food services, you are preparing food that nourishes their bodies, and sometimes it's just that they need calories, right? Making sure that all of our employees know how they contribute to the mission and that we have a good measure for that, and it's not quite an engagement survey, and so I haven't found my, my perfect metric there either.
[00:29:18] Dave Travers: Love it. So smart. Dana, first of all, most importantly, thank you for finding cures and saving children. Secondarily, thank you for taking the time to share all your wisdom with us today. It is so clear why you're a talent All-Star. Thanks so much for coming on today.
[00:29:33] Dana Bottenfield: Thank you so much, Dave. It's been a real pleasure, and I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity.
[00:29:43] Dave Travers: That's Dana Bottenfield. She's the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube as well, on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email to talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. See you right back here next time.