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 itÂ’s important to know what types of companies you are competing against; and how companies can better identify their recruiting competition.
(PRWEB) October 17, 2003
For Immediate Release
Contact: Michele Groutage
Company: MedZilla, Inc.
Title: Director of Marketing & Development
Phone: 360-657-5681
Email: mgroutage@medzilla. com
URL: http://www. medzilla. com (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 theyÂ’re trying to benchmark against competitors, says Les McKeown, President and CEO, Deliver The PromiseÂ…, 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 donÂ’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 HealthviewÂ’s case would be other pharmaceutical advertising and communication companies. The next circle of HealthviewÂ’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 donÂ’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 youÂ’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 theyÂ’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.”
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About MedZilla. com
Established in mid 1994, MedZilla is the original web site to serve career and hiring needs for professionals and employers in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, science and healthcare. MedZilla databases contain about 10,000 open positions, 13,000 resumes from candidates actively seeking new positions and 50,000 archived resumes.
Medzilla® is a Registered Trademark owned by Medzilla Inc. Copyright ©2003, MedZilla, Inc. Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute this text in its entirety, and if electronically, with a link to the URL www. medzilla. com. For permission to quote from or reproduce any portion of this message, please contact Michele Groutage, Director of Marketing and Development, MedZilla, Inc. Email: mgroutage@medzilla. com.
