Expanding Your Recruitment Resources
HR professionals who view only direct competitors as their recruiting competition are limiting their horizons and ability to recruit the best talent, experts say. In this article, MedZilla talks with experts about the unexpected companies that may be competing for the same talent you are; why it’s important to know what types of companies you are competing against; and how companies can better identify their recruiting competition.
For Immediate Release
Contact: Michele Groutage
Company: MedZilla,
Inc.
Title: Director of Marketing & Development
Phone:
360-657-5681
Email: e-mail protected from spam bots
URL: http://www.medzilla.com
Expanding Your Recruitment
Resources
Marysville, WA (PRWEB) October 10, 2003-- It seems logical that
your recruiting competition — those tapping into the same job candidate pools as
you are — are your direct competitors. But by limiting their awareness of the
recruiting competition, companies limit their abilities to compete for the best
talent, says Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO of MedZilla.com, a leading
Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR
professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.
“You have to find out not only where else your potential employees can
go to find jobs, but also how that competition is luring talent away,” Dr.
Heasley says.
Limiting your focus only to direct competitors is a
dangerous trap that many human resource professionals fall into, agrees Roger E.
Herman, CEO, the Herman Group, consulting futurists that specializing in
workforce and workplace trends.
Identifying recruiting competitors
simply by looking at similar companies is the least that most organizations do
as they’re trying to benchmark against competitors, says Les McKeown, President
and CEO, Deliver The Promise…, an employee development solutions company.
McKeown recalls working with an organization in the Atlanta area that was
struggling to find good salespeople. After doing a little digging, the company
discovered that their competitors were not the ones that were taking good
salespeople off the market; rather, the local restaurants and entertainment
industry were. These other industries were making more enticing offers, by
hiring salespeople and giving them attractive management
opportunities.
According to McKeown, who wrote the book Retaining Top
Employees (McGraw-Hill), the pharmaceutical industry is less prone to that sort
of leakage because the skill sets are so narrowly defined. But biotech is very
different. The analytical skills that biotech professionals have are highly
transferable. “I’ve seen people with a biotech background go into financial
services,” he says.
It is important to identify your recruiting
competition, McKeown says, because companies need to know what others are
offering to attract talent, and companies can gain knowledge about how to
recruit more effectively by knowing their competition.
Looking beyond
what you can see
The problem is that most HR professionals don’t look
beyond what they can actually see, McKeown says.
Herman, the lead author
of the new book Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People (Oakhill Press),
suggests that HR people approach the challenge of identifying recruiting
competition by first understanding what kind of talent they need to get the job
done today and tomorrow. Once they determine their talent needs, many will find
that those people also work for their competitors, suppliers and customers in
the industry. Some find their ideal candidates might be in a totally different
field.
“One of the things that we’re seeing now are more executives
being recruited to go into fields that are totally different from where they
have been,” Herman says. “That’s because the companies that are doing the
recruiting are saying: We need people with these values, these qualities, these
kinds of attitudes; where do we find them? You don’t necessarily find them in
the same industry.”
Knowing your recruiting competitors expands your
recruiting horizons. “It makes the pool of talent that much bigger,” says Peter
Carley, vice president, human resources, Euro RSCG Healthview, a pharmaceutical
and biotech advertising and communications firm.
Carley suggests breaking
down competition by concentric circles. The first would be direct competitors,
which in Healthview’s case would be other pharmaceutical advertising and
communication companies. The next circle of Healthview’s recruiting competitors
might include pharmaceutical, advertising and communication company clients
looking to market and sell their products. A third circle would be other
advertising and communication companies, who don’t necessarily focus on biotech
and pharmaceutical fields. Additional circles would encompass companies that
represent the marketing and communications services that Healthview offers its
clients.
If you’re hiring for an unskilled position or a non-industry
specific position, your competition is everyone, says Arlene Vernon, president,
HRx Inc., a firm that provides HR consulting and professionals speaking. For
specific technical positions, your competition is most likely limited to your
industry, and the different types of companies within that industry.
Vernon says that large companies should no longer discount small
start-ups when looking at recruiting competition. “There has been a huge trend
for small businesses to offer similar benefits package as large employers
because they’re not just competing with small businesses in their industry,
they’re competing with bigger firms. You used to assume that you’d go to a small
business and not get paid as well and not get the same benefits package. But
that’s not the case anymore,” she says.
Where to look?
One of the
best things to do is watch your own exit trail, conduct exit interviews and ask
former employees where they’re going, McKeown says. If an organization is too
small to get statistically valid information about an exodus of employees, it
might approach competitors about combining data to better understand why certain
people seem to be leaving the field.
According to Michele Groutage,
MedZilla’s director of marketing, employers can simply run job searches on
employment sites based on their available positions. “Your competitors will be
clear from the job ads they are running,” she says. “Likewise, if you search the
resume database, you’ll discover the candidates that your competitors are trying
to recruit.”
# # #
Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/10/prweb84947.htm