ATTRACTING AND KEEPING THE BEST PR AGENCY TALENT

Adapted from a presentation at
The Public Relations Industry
Profitability Summit

Sponsored by the Council for Public Relations Firms
at the Roosevelt Hotel
New York, New York
March 15, 1999

William C. Heyman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Heyman Associates, Inc.

Copyright 1999, William C. Heyman

Attracting and keeping talent obviously is something you and I both care a lot about.

Let me help you understand my perspective by pointing out that twice a week, at least, we receive phone calls from agencies seeking to fill positions paying in excess of $120,000. Think about that for a moment. We receive over 100 requests a year from agencies looking to fill six-figure positions.

Last year alone, four top-20 public relations firms approached us with the prospect of filling between 25 and 50 positions, on a world-wide basis, each job paying more than $150,000.

Preparing for today, I consulted a dozen or so top-ranked, widely dispersed PR agency executives – by phone and fax – about the five key subtopics listed by the Summit organizers. My goal was to conduct a "virtual focus group" on five issues:

• Anticipating future staffing needs
• Managing recruitment expense
• Keeping your top performers
• Compensation packages, and
• Paying for performance

Based on those comments and my experiences plus those of my colleagues for nearly twenty years, I believe it would be helpful to present to you seven personal insights on ATTRACTING TOP TALENT.

INSIGHT #1: Recognize that people really want to be recruited. If they’re truly top talent they want to be wanted. The fact is, your agency will be examined just as carefully by the candidate. So you need to romance those you are recruiting.

An example of this is the psychological notion behind the concept of a "sign-on bonus." Going home and reporting that "I received a sign-on bonus as part of my new job offer" is energizing. The lesson here is: Make a top talent feel like a celebrity.

INSIGHT # 2: Candidates want to be part of a winning organization that is recognized for doing outstanding work. Make sure your organization is admired and respected for the quality of its work and its reputation. This could be anything from winning Silver Anvils and CIPRA awards to account work for companies cited by Fortune magazine as among the most admired in the country.

The lesson here is: Top talent will be attracted by the quality of the work they will get to do.

INSIGHT #3: Attracting good people is a process for you but an adventure for the candidate. Create a roadmap for the adventure that answers key questions such as:

• What accounts will I be working on?
• What is a typical workday?
• Who will I be working with and for?
• What is my potential for promotion?

Also, be prepared to preemptively address questions candidates can’t ask but would like to, such as:

• What happened to the person who last had the position?
• How much turnover does your agency experience?
• I understand the client is "tough." Tell me about that.
• Is there a chance for an equity position in the agency?

While it may seem stunningly simple, the most important element of this roadmap is a detailed job description. It’s very difficult to have a useful discussion with a candidate without that fundamental document at your disposal.

Candidates – and the search consultants submitting them – are expected to provide details about their job histories and track records. Yet, amazingly, many prospective agency employers feel they can still get away with boilerplate job specs and generic background data on themselves. The lesson is: Invest as much time preparing for the interview as the candidate does.

INSIGHT #4: Always think about hiring from the candidate’s point of view. Remember that while you are in a hurry and live in a real-time world, you are dealing with real people with real jobs, real commitments and a real need to think carefully about the next step in their careers.

Develop a timeline which you can reasonably meet – from the beginning of the interview process through candidate decision-making to the actual hiring, orientation, and work start-up – and you’ll be miles ahead of just about anyone else who’s out there trying to recruit your candidates.

INSIGHT # 5: Establish widely that your agency believes in professional growth. What will be the candidate’s opportunity for personal growth and development? What can they learn by working for you? Make your professional development opportunities truly attractive. Brand them as distinctively yours.

Allow talent to move freely within the organization; offer both domestic and international transfers, if possible, and build a reputation for investing in the development of your people – from their perspective.

Quite a number of agencies now have training programs – they may call them "institutes, colleges or universities" – that are very similar to those of their corporate clients. Your top talent will also enjoy and profit from the opportunity to teach and showcase their knowledge and expertise to their colleagues.

INSIGHT # 6: Think and work outside the box. In the 18 years I’ve been in the executive search business, at least 25% of the assignments I have personally worked on have been in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. That continues to be the strength of many of the largest PR firms in this country and it seems destined to remain a profitable growth area.

We recently placed three national healthcare practice leaders for top-10 agencies. In all three cases our assignment was to find someone with previous agency experience. In each case we placed people who came from major pharmaceutical companies and had little or no agency experience. There just were no qualified or available candidates from the agency world. Each individual we placed is clearly succeeding.

The lesson we and our agency clients learned is: Talented people with corporate experience can bring both client-side perspective and key management skill sets which carry long-term benefits for the ongoing management growth of an agency.

INSIGHT #7: Choose the candidate selection model that best fits your organization – whether you are doing it yourself, using a contingency recruiter or using a retainer search firm.

Develop your search strategy from four different perspectives:

1. Knowledge of candidate pool;
2. Knowledge of your firm;
3. Speed and time factors;
4. Cost factors.

No matter what…the candidate expects a seamless, well-timed process with a logical beginning, middle and end, and frequent communication in between.

Now let’s look at some of the ways in which an agency may fail to attract talent.

FAILURE #1: The inability to demonstrate you truly care about the recruiting process and the candidate being considered. Despite the high priority put on finding talent, it is surprising how frequently clients are unprepared to interview a candidate.

• Often there is a lack of familiarity with the candidate’s background. In fact, many candidates have told us they believe the first time the interviewer has looked at their resume was when they walked into the room.
• Interviewer questions such as "Tell me about yourself" or "How long have you been in the profession?" signal a lack of preparation.
• Some interviewers exhibit just plain bad manners. They take telephone calls in the middle of an interview or step out because "urgent" matters have arisen.

These behaviors speak volumes about the your firm – far more than any glossy recruiting brochure or spectacular Web site ever will. Whether you really care shows.

FAILURE #2: Organizations too often have difficulty explaining their work setting and culture in ways that give an outsider confidence. Again, one of the most important ways to demonstrate your organization’s strength is to provide a well-crafted job description and organizational information that is truly revealing and relevant.

The lack of a highly focused job description sends a powerful message about your commitment to being serious about the candidate’s career-move concerns.

FAILURE #3: Perhaps the most common complaint we hear from candidates is the hurry-up-and-wait nature of interaction with prospective employers. There seems to be an enormous crush to meet the person and get that out of the way. Then days, weeks, and months go by until something actually happens.

That’s why it’s so important to put someone in charge of controlling the search timeline and providing attention to potential candidates. Inspire everyone in your organization who is involved in a search to be committed to making it work – on time.

Let me add that we are encouraged by how many agencies have hired top human-resources professionals to tighten up this part of the recruitment process.

Members of my "virtual focus group" have said the issue of most concern to them is KEEPING THE BEST TALENT.

Every single day PR professionals tell my colleagues and me they are interested in moving for four basic reasons:

• Something is "missing" or "unresolved" where they currently work
• Too little information is available about the whys and hows of their compensation
• They don’t really know of what value they are to the agency beyond the key account on which they work
• Quote: "My anniversary came and went and I was given no annual evaluation."

Let’s look now at some positive lessons to be gained from such comments.

LESSON #1: Put people in the right jobs. As we all know, there are essentially two professional tracks – one for those who run things and the other for people who do the work. The fact is, most talented individuals in the public relations profession are doers. They want to work; they want to be on the front line; they prefer to leave the paperwork and management issues to someone else.

Look at your own agency. How many of your colleagues really fit into the category of manager? Are they the ones who want to supervise others and are no longer interested in day-to-day account work? Put people where they want to be and can make a positive contribution. This is a critical element in creating an environment where people will want to stay.

LESSON #2: Work hard to keep and develop good people. Having talented people around can cause unintended consequences. Managing such talent can be extremely frustrating. To grow talent takes a personal investment and relentless energy – and patience, too.

One of my favorite stories is about a public relations agency that asked us to find a head for its technology practice. The agency was seeking someone who could stabilize a group which was experiencing more than 100% turnover. The previous head of the group lost everyone in the department and then started losing the new people as well. Finally, he was let go.

The individual we identified and whom the client hired was from a corporate environment. He had run the PR department within a major technology company as an "in-house" agency and had a reputation of being a particularly astute manager and a terrific recruiter.

After six months things seemed to be going well. But at twelve months the president of the agency was absolutely frustrated and gave me a call. While the technology group had been stabilized, he told me, it was simply unable to build new business. The staff couldn’t sell…including the new leader. Yet the new department head had obviously accomplished the original objective. Despite its frustration, senior management was smart enough to hang in there and help the group head develop into an effective new business builder, in fact the top rainmaker in the agency. He got an opportunity to learn how to use his own strengths to sell. And, he remains an excellent manager with a stable working environment.

LESSON #3: Create an environment where new talent integrates smoothly into existing teams and structures. That means managing egos, which is the toughest part of supervising in an agency. And talented people bring egos the size of their talent. Invest the time to create a win-win environment when dealing with stars.

LESSON #4: Love the people who go home at night. In most organizations there are those who live to work – the ones who come early, stay late, constantly take on new projects and are forever moving the organization along. Then, there are those who work to live – the folks who come in at 9:00 and want to leave to make that train or bus at 5 o’clock, virtually every day.

You’d be surprised how often big talents fit this latter category. They artfully manage not only to get things done well and on time but to have a "life" beyond the office. Respect that, nurture it, love it. Adapt to their way of thinking and make room for them in growing numbers in your organization. Ignore their life-balance aspirations at your own risk.

LESSON #5: Assess personal contribution and potential effectively. Be direct in your assessment. The top talents I see want to be critically assessed and measured. They want to understand the lay of the land and know how they’re doing. They ask: "How does what I do really matter?"

Assess regularly – frequently, early on; routinely but no less purposefully thereafter. Be direct in your assessment and provide positive reinforcement.

Many top managers tell me they learn more about their business through timely, rigorous assessments of employee progress than through almost any other means.

LESSON #6: Provide opportunities for self-improvement. Help people grow personally and professionally. Whether you use internship programs, professional development exercises, flextime, sabbaticals or help creative people manage personal issues, self-improvement is an individual goal.

What sets talented people apart from others in an organization is a strong personal desire to improve and excel. The more opportunity you provide them, the more likely they are to stay.

LESSON #7: Negotiating and rewarding all talent should be an ongoing rather than sporadic process. As talent increases, its value increases. So in this particular time in our economy, think about those talented people who have been with your organization for many years but might have been taken for granted.

Much of the great movement in the public relations industry recently has been among people who have been with an employer for a long time but no longer feel the sense of importance they once enjoyed.

Compensation and rewards are vital factors for recruiting and retention. I tend to look to Michael Vance, a protŽgŽ of the late Walt Disney, for an understanding of their value to the individual. He describes compensation as a series of personal equities:

• Emotional
• Psychological
• Spiritual
• Physical
• Financial

The easiest to achieve, of course, is financial equity – just write the check. But, it’s wiser to think of equities as parts of a mathematical equation and that every employee’s or candidate’s equation is different. Some people view financial equity as a very large factor and de-emphasize other aspects. Others will prefer more emotional and psychological equity.

If you think about the concept of these different equities and shifting personal priorities, it’s clear why the retention process has to involve ongoing monitoring and negotiation.

Agency failure to keep top employees seems to have three root causes:

• The agency seems to care more about new business than its own reputation as a good place to work or about "me" as a person.
• The agency seems insensitive to individual financial considerations. We often hear: "They care a lot about money around here, but not mine."
• The agency places too much emphasis either on money or on soft compensation, such as a title or appointment to a senior management committee.

But again each person has to be viewed as an individual.

A key part of your overall retention strategy needs to address not only those you already know are considering leaving, but also those who might be. That’s why keeping people informed of new compensation models, creating a preemptive counter-offer strategy, and giving frequent positive feedback are critical methods to retain your best people.

We all know the scenario in which the departure of a $120,000 per year executive winds up costing an agency $500,000 in replacement costs, lost time and revenue, potential reputation damage, and recruiting fees.

Acceptance of larger financial offers from other agencies is often symptomatic of personnel problems other than money. In our experience, just a counter-offer in dollars will probably not be enough to retain an individual for the long term. A truly well-thought-out counter-offer strategy takes into account the soft issues that may have led the individual to consider looking elsewhere. The lesson we’ve learned is to solve the soft issues along with the financial issues.

In summary, let me share six elements to improve your hiring and retention process:

1. Attracting and retaining talent has to become a daily, incremental process within your organization.
2. Take the time to interview candidates even when you’re not looking for a specific person. Be opportunistic.
3. Ask your staff to be on the lookout for talent at all levels. Reward them for being alert and opportunistic.
4. Learn the ingredients of competitive compensation packages in today’s marketplace and the techniques being used in different industries to attract and retain talent: Is it bonuses? Is it lifestyle compensation? Or is it one of Michael Vance’s equity concepts I mentioned earlier?
5. Search for talent by business sector, but be open to that special individual who is adaptable, talented and looking for a chance to move out of the sector they may feel they have been stuck in for some time.
6. Create a full-fledged human resources organization that takes on the entire spectrum of recruiting, retaining, assessing, training and continuing education.

And let me add, based on my experience, four very powerful generalizations I suspect will also resonate with your experience:

1. The marketplace will dictate the quality of the people you find, especially if you avoid getting really good at attracting talented people. Learn to work effectively on your own and with a recruiting partner.
2. People stay for their own reasons. People leave for their own reasons. Learn what those reasons are and work hard to resolve them. Follow through with regular, thorough assessments and remember to provide positive feedback.
3. Be preemptive when discussing compensation with employees. Bring up the subject first and make sure your employees fully understand the true value of their benefits and perks. They may well be underestimating them.
4. Finding out at the exit interview why someone is leaving is too late. I add this because we constantly hear: "My present employer isn’t listening. They simply can’t seem to hear what I’m trying to tell them."

Listen carefully. When employees (and candidates) say their concern is not about money, it’s probably about money. When they say it’s not about title, it’s probably about title. When they say it’s not about a reporting relationship, it’s probably about a reporting relationship. Listen carefully and CARE A LOT!

The foremost reason why people stay where they are is: "People here care about me."

Perhaps that’s something worth putting on a "words to live by" wallet card, don’t you think?

WE ATTRACT AND KEEP
THE PEOPLE WE CARE ABOUT

© 2004 Heyman Associates, Inc.