Cutting through that level of noise is the challenge that faces all publicists (whether professional or an entrepreneur who dreams of having a professional). There are a variety of ways to attack the problem.

Sending large volumes of tailored emails is the approach taken by both Monster and Recruitsoft and a newcomer called HR.com. The underlying premise is to try to ship enough propaganda so that not all of it can be thrown away. It works to a degree.

Polished networking, practiced by folks like BrassRing, hire.com and RecruitUSA is another alternative. Building warm relationships with key analysts and pundits is a high maintenance approach, but it serves the proponents well. These companies go out of their way to create an enduring buzz.

Another approach is one we favor. Doing the journalists job involves writing a press release, chock full of facts and figures that barely mentions your company. The goal, instead, is to give the journalist a day off. We wish we saw more of these.

And then, there is the old fashioned "brown-nosing" approach. Cleverly done, the method is not only inoffensive it bears fruit. Here's a great example that is so good that it rose to the top of our inbasket:

First let me thank you for your thought-provoking articles. They are a constant source of healthy debate in our organization.

I'd like to share with you a report I produced for sales executives while I headed recruiting for MCI's Business Markets division in the mid-1990s.

The COOL Report (Cost Of Opportunity Lost) addressed opportunity cost and was much more relevant to my client-executives than any cost per hire data the HR folks repeatedly tried to quantify.

The COOL Report was built as a simple equation tied to our requisition report and was sent monthly to all sales VPs and above. The COOL Report utilized req aging data times the daily quota for sales reps to produce an "in your face" realization among our sales executives that to make their numbers they had to ensure hiring (and hiring well) was a top priority. A typical example might be that a National Account Manager carried a new revenue quota of $50,000/month. Divided by 31 days, that NAM was responsible for $1613 in revenue per day. If a NAM req was open 40 days, the revenue it cost the sales organization was $64,520.

The numbers expressed in the COOL Report were startling. It was not unusual for us to have several hundred open reqs at a time. We literally were losing millions of dollars per month and this report allowed everyone to know it.

When I first began producing the COOL Report, my fellow HR managers told me I was crazy to produce a report that showed that my organization was responsible for the company losing so much money. My take was the opposite. I believed I needed the sales executives to realize the size of the issue and take a business-like approach to recruiting for the first time. Luckily for me, my lead client-executive, Rick Ellenberger (now CEO of Broadwing Communications), was very receptive to the report and its implications and was a great supporter in helping me get the resources to build my recruiting organization to an appropriate level.

Since leaving MCI in early 1999, my team and I have been acting to a large extent as a "single belly button" for our clients and assisting them with recruiting strategies and navigating the e-recruiting maze. We appreciate your insights and join you in evangelizing better ways to approach recruiting.

As a result, we took a solid look at CRSEdge. It just may be the prototype for a single belly button service.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

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© 2013 interbiznet.
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Materials written
by John Sumser
© TwoColorHat.
All Rights Reserved.

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