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Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal • March 3-March 9, 2003
Be Aware of Your Audience When Looking for Help
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By Kevin Flemming, CSP
Kevin Flemming is president of Integrity Personnel, Inc., a Lehigh Valley-based staffing and recruiting firm. He writes about staffing issues for small and medium-sized employers. His column, "Talent Search," appears in the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal every third week of the month.
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I got a bit of a chuckle one Sunday as I reviewed the employment section of the classifieds in a local newspaper. Part of my routine is to verify that the ads my company buys are printed accurately and on schedule.
As I quickly scanned the columns, my eyes encountered a word that just didn’t seem right. In the half second it took to register the anomaly in my brain and retrace my path to find the ad in question, I was astounded to read a little posting with the heading “Attorney”. This was not a fancy display ad of the type run by Fortune 500 companies. It was a very basic, in-column ad (without graphics) that looked similar to postings that announce maintenance and cashier jobs. Yet this was listing an opening for an attorney in a well-established, corporate law firm.
Physicians Don’t Respond to Classifieds
This little classified ad is symptomatic of a deficiency shared by many professional services firms: the lack of a recruiting network. Although classified advertising is effective for soliciting large numbers of job seekers, it is a very weak method for recruiting professional candidates such as attorneys, accountants, physicians and experienced executives. Could you picture an orthopedic surgeon perusing the Sunday classifieds for his next job? The fact is, he doesn’t. Nor do attorneys and accountants.
Professionals looking to make career moves approach their job search in the same way they perform their work. They study, plan and execute in a well-structured manner in order to achieve the best result. Responding to newspaper ads is not a natural act for most of these people.
The labor market is reflective of our nation’s entire population. Millions of individuals with varied education, backgrounds and desires circulate through the mountains of regional newspapers and Internet job boards in search of their next job. This is not a friendly environment for the firm in search of a specific professional because there are too many traditional employers making all of the noise.
Use Your Unique Knowledge to Recruit Successfully
The key to identifying and connecting with professionals is to be where they are. This is an advantage that many professional services firms fail to exploit. Here are four tactics for leveraging your firm’s recruiting advantages:
- Current professionals are the best source for future employees. In other words, everybody is a recruiter. People who make their living in the professions are members of a select group and are accustomed to working with individuals whom they perceive as equals in their field. For the same reason that a surgeon won’t respond to a newspaper ad, he will be open to a personal solicitation from another physician.
- Membership has its privileges. Nearly all professional services companies hold membership in at least one industry/trade association. Regardless of whether the principles are active participants in the group, membership allows them to connect with other members easily and frequently. Using these networks to recruit new professionals is an activity that yields a high return.
- Target your advertising. It’s fine for a firm to advertise an open professional position as long it reaches the target market. Rather than run general classifieds in newspapers, run an ad in a trade journal or newsletter published by an association. This is usually less expensive than traditional classified advertising and ensures that the people reading it are in the same profession that your firm requires.
- Understand that time works differently for professional candidates. Traditionally, the shorter span of time between recruiting & hiring, the greater the advantage for the employer. The word “talent race” is a literal definition in today’s job market. However, professionals require more time to change than traditional job seekers. Because changing jobs can have large future impact for these individuals, they need more time to consider a career move. Professional services companies are run by people who understand this. If a firm is competing for talent with a traditional employer, this knowledge gives it the advantage.
There are many other recruiting sources available to the professional services firm such as schools, competitors and seminar venues. The thing to remember is to use those sources that are most unique to the profession, rather than trying to adapt traditional methods of recruiting. In other words, firms should be thinking inside their box to recruit professionals successfully.
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