HR as a media darling

How to get this critical department working overtime for your business

By Pam Withers

Human resources and marketing people typically have a vague handle on what each other do. Occasionally they have lunch together. When their firm places in an “employer of choice” list, they may even collaborate to leverage and celebrate that success. But HR as a media darling? It’s not typically a comfortable fit.

Then again, there are people like Matthew Handford, VP of HR at Crystal Decisions in Vancouver, a $403 million business intelligence firm with 25 offices and 1,800 employees worldwide. Having seen the spike in crème de la crème applicants following each employer-of-choice award, he boldly went where few HR directors have gone before: he not only ensured that each and every HR staff member was media trained, he also promoted one to a media liaison position, assigned to work closely with marketing.

Handford is just one example of an HR professional who recognizes that job seekers, and therefore the media, have a growing interest in HR policies, and that leveraging that interest can achieve three things at once:

• Give the company an edge in recruiting top talent, especially young people.
• Reinforce employee notions of having landed at a great company (i.e., lift retention and productivity and convert happy employees into informal recruiters).
• Fulfill HR’s growing mandate to proactively sculpt corporate culture, so that people both inside and out have a clear understanding of who will best fit that organization.

A few decades ago, job candidates could easily determine what a company did, but not what it was like as an employer. Today, applicants actively seek out such information, and an explosion of “best employer” surveys serves it up to them on a silver platter. The greater demands on workers’ lives (leading to a desire to work for a company that pays more than lip service to a work/life balance), the fact that less hierarchy means fewer promotions to be had (leading to a desire for training and opportunities for lateral moves), past experience in being downsized and recent demographic trends that put them in the driver’s seat all give job seekers plenty of incentive to ferret out exactly what a company is like to work for.

This can come right down to checking whether the firm offers a yoga and meditation room, says Peter Frost, UBC professor of organizational behavior and author of Toxic Emotions at Work. “People are taking themselves as an investment more seriously.”

This, combined with Enron-like issues of accountability, is increasing media scrutiny of companies’ HR policies. “The number of calls from media concerning HR issues have doubled over the last few years,” says David Berrington, incoming president of British Columbia’s HR Management Association.

Responding with savvy to such newfound attention is key to elbowing out competitors in the talent chase. “You have to establish your brand, internally and externally. Spend time determining what you have to offer people, and you ultimately save on recruiting costs and efforts,” Berrington says. As a sign of the times, he points to a recent newspaper ad recruiting a vice-president of HR that read, “Help us make the Top 50 Employers list.”

Richard Yerema, author of Canada’s Top 100 Employers, an annual that started in 2001, says accounting firms are one of the most competitive categories. “They’re all very, very good employers, so it’s a hard category to sift through and find some distinctions.”

Before Crystal Decisions won three great-employer accolades in one year, the firm rarely went beyond sending out a press release and posting some photocopies of the award on the office’s walls. Since Claire Adams was named Talent Brand Manager in 2002, however, here are just a few of the ways Crystal has created an HR/marketing synergy:

• Ensured lots of buzz and media coverage surrounding recruiting events. When Crystal gave away a mountain bike valued at main,400 at one such event, the firm enjoyed publicity that garnered quality applications.
• Showed employees they care and used it to their advantage. Following a recent employer-of-choice designation, Crystal employees found cards on their desks that included reprints of the announcement along with a $5 gift certificate for coffee and the message, “Thanks for helping to build a great company. Take a friend out for coffee on us and tell them about Crystal and why it’s a great place to work.”
• Created a presence — an image and personality — beyond the company. For instance, Crystal offers ongoing sponsorship of a mountain bike team, whose members visit the firm to speak to employees about passion, drive and career development, and offer mountain biking tips to interested employees. The sponsorship “gives us an image and personality in the hiring market, gets us known,” says Handford. “At Crystal, we have a certain aura: young, vibrant, exciting.” Recent sponsorship of a mountain biking event allowed Crystal employees, their family and friends to hang out at a designated tent, from which the recruiting team circulated among spectators, conducting surveys measuring awareness of the Crystal name and of the fact that Crystal is on a hiring spree.

“My voicemail box fills up after we do an event with messages from interested candidates,” Adams says. “We’re tracking the number of applicants and hires that we have made who identified the Rocky Mountain sponsorship as their source.”

How else does HR, formerly shy and private, meet, greet and attract the press? Here are five more tips we’ve gathered:

1. After winning an employer-of-choice mention, use the award mention and survey company’s logo on everything from letters to your Web site.
2. Encourage public speaking training among staff members, and coordinate press releases with their speaking engagements.
3. Grant an interested staff member a sabbatical to write a book and/or articles that reinforce his or her expertise (incidentally also leveraging the company’s brand and resulting in a deluge of publicity and speaking opportunities).
4. Allot staff time to leave footprints on Internet discussion groups about workplace topics, as journalists often scan these.
5. Allot staff time to write letters to the editor on workplace topics, and attend industry seminars or networking opportunities. At the latter, encourage them to ask questions or spearhead discussions (identifying themselves and the company name in so doing).

For other useful positive-networking tips, I recommend checking out The Frog and Prince: Secrets of Positive Networking by Darcy Rezac.

Barbara Moses, an author and Globe and Mail columnist on HR issues, says that while media interest in HR issues has been growing for some time, she’s only seen companies moving to leverage that for the past four years. “The new worker is looking for life-friendly organizations that give them stretch assignments,” she says. “I’m getting record numbers of emails from people saying ‘how do I find a great company?’”

If, in the end, they find them through the media, it’s the HR departments that have become media savvy that will elbow their way to the front of the preferred employer line.

Pam Withers (www.pamwithers.com) writes, edits and helps clients publish books on human resources topics. She also speaks on how to deal with the media.

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