Recruiting Creatives

As the school year winds down and graduates head out into the world it's a good time to reflect on your recruiting practices (though it's a little late for THIS year's crowd...mostly). How do you plan to bring new Creatives into your company? Obviously, you need employees, fresh ones and maybe some experienced ones to replace the folks you lose. Deciding WHO you want to recruit is a discussion for another time, but once you've figured that out, do you know how you're going to bring them in? the ideas below may be too involved for, say, a 4-person firm that doesn't really need a lot of people, but even they want to take advantage of talent that comes along. So there may be some good food for thought for everyone.

One thing you need to do is find a good way to get your message out. As you search for people with technical skills you'll want to look at schools where you can recruit, and not just colleges, but high schools and community colleges as well, unless there's some real requirement for a bachelor's degree in your line of work. Do some networking with career counselors at the schools as well as instructors in the fields you're interested in. You don't need an intense relationship with them, but from the career folks you can find out how recruiting works there and from the instructors you might get leads on promising students. "It's not what you know, it's who you know" often works for the bosses as well as the employees.

Go beyond schools, though. If you're in an artistic field, take a look at local exhibits and see if any artists catch your eye. If it's an interior designer you want, visit some high-end furniture stores and see who really knows what they're doing -- many aspiring designers start out in furniture stores to develop their skills. If you need hairstylists, stop someone whose hair you really like and ask them who did it. You need to get out and look at people's results, not just their transcripts.

Make sure your virtual recruiting booth is out there. You've probably got something up on Monster.com, but how about on Craigslist? More and more people are looking for jobs on their lists and your competitors are probably trolling for them there, so you should be too. And even though you've probably got a website up, that's pretty passive...how are you drawing people to it? In a Web 2.0 world you are looking for people who can interact, so make sure your firm has a social network presence, with a group on Facebook or something like that which provides info about your company and encourages people -- recruits as well as potential clients -- to take a closer look.

Reaching recruits with your message is important, but more important is having a message worth broadcasting. You need to give some real thought to what you're offering potential employees. Of course, you need to be offering a pretty good job in the first place...no matter how much you pretty up something that sucks, it still sucks.

You either need to offer compensation that is comparable with others in your industry, or else offer benefits that make up for lower pay. One shift that seems to have happened is the idea of deferred compensation, whereby people work for low pay up front but gain ownership in the company so that someday (not too far away) they'll be rich beyond their wildest dreams. The dot-com bubble burst, though, as well as an increasing degree of turnover in the workforce, means many people would prefer to just get paid now, thank you very much, without worrying about ownership in a firm that might not be here -- or might be around without them -- in a couple years.

Today's Creatives want a chance to contribute something. They want to know that what they're doing adds to the company and isn't just make-work or administrivia. This was the basis for the US Army's Army of One recruiting campaign that has since gone away. Many people in the Army hated it because they thought it was emphasizing individualism instead of teamwork. But the beauty behind it was that it was saying "Hey, you...you can make a difference. We need YOU and what you offer, not just anyone." It basically told people they weren't going to be a mere cog in a huge green machine but instead would be contributors, and that's what the people whom the Army really needed wanted to hear. Tell people they'll be allowed to make a difference and the people who raise their hands are the motivated people you want working for you.

Another thing Creatives are looking for is the opportunity to grow professionally and personally, and develop their skills. As the line between home and work gets blurrier and blurrier, personal development is coming at work and professional development is continuing on personal time. you need to be able to show people that they're going to grow in your firm, not just by advancing up an organizational chart but by really developing themselves.

Many of your older workers, especially those with families, might be more attracted to a job with some stability, which they don't pan to leave because of family and financial commitments. For them you might want a dual-track system, one that focuses on developing the individual and one that develops managers and leaders. A small firm may not have this option, or may not want people who stick around, but larger firms should consider it.

The two key elements to recruiting are to have something people want and then get the word to them. In a way, you're selling the job to potential recruits, and if you think about it that way, you're liable to find the way to reach the ones you want.