Marketing is always a core need of a business...but I keep hearing from business owners about an equally unfulfilled need...that of finding and hiring quality professionals and
employees. And it covers everything from finding highly qualified architects to staff people. This was driven home by a recent article I found in the Wall Street Journal
entitled, “Projecting a Shortage, Engineers Step up Recruiting
Efforts”. (The last line of the article is by an economist of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, who says that the “shortage isn’t new” and
that, “the problem goes back 50 years to Sputnick.”)
Some business owners even rank finding qualified employees as more important than finding qualified business! That is, they're at capacity and can't grow because they can't find a good team to serve more business. They're turning to the “big boards” such as Monster and Career Builder which create an overwhelming number of unqualified candidates. And recruiters aren't helping either as they tend to fight over the folks who are already employed. So companies are looking for proactive ways of finding good candidates.
I have to believe that a proactive marketing effort would fill this unmet need. I'm talking about running a marketing campaign for candidates as you would for prospects. This might include another web page or series of pages from the link “Looking for a Great Team?” (or something to that effect) on the home page, adding an autoresponder, and creating direct mail campaigns to qualified candidates.
In my previous life as a sales manager, I had the task of finding talent that included developing competencies, writing ads and developing behavioral-based interview questions. These simply mirror the processes of developing an ideal client profile, writing ads and developing sales scripts…all marketing activities.
What are your thoughts and experiences on this topic?
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