By Peter Weddle, Founder & CEO TAtech
The futurist Daniel Burrus has opined that legacy thinking is as much an organizational challenge as legacy technology. I think he’s right and wrong.
Legacy thinking can prevent a company from seeing and adapting to changes underway among its customers, product and internal technology and competitors. Now, more than ever, staying stuck in the past is the shortest route to irrelevance and ultimately failure. Especially in an era such as ours, when transformative forces are at work everywhere.
That said, a respect for the past can also be a powerful strategy for business success. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that reaching out to customers with both digital and old-fashioned print media can positively impact the bottom-line. In the study reported on by HBR, sales increased by 49 percent, and inquiries rose an impressive 125 percent.
That’s why, in the last several years, your USPS mailbox has been filled with seasonal catalogs. Retailers from Anthropologie to Vineyard Vines are mailing out millions of four-color paeans to their products. Even Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of online commerce, now sends out a print catalog featuring kids’ toys for the Holidays.
We may now work, socialize and entertain ourselves online, but somewhere in the deep recesses of our minds, there remains a soft spot for a message printed on that age-old medium called paper.
The TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing is designed for HR/TA leaders and senior professionals at enterprise employers and their counterparts among TA solution providers. To be held at the newly renovated Le Méridien Tampa, The Courthouse, the conference opens with a welcome reception on the evening of February 26 and then runs all day February 27. The agenda is still in development, but the focus will be on showcasing the latest technology and most innovative practices for moving to full-funnel recruitment marketing. Seating is limited at the conference venue, so register today to make sure you have a spot.
What’s That Got to Do With Recruiting?
I’ve ben promoting the benefits of online recruiting since I was writing my column for The Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s. (Yes, Virginia, there was an internet back then.) I continue to believe it is the most efficient and effective way to reach and engage employment prospects. But, it is not the only way. In fact, I think it’s time, once again, to consider print.
Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about newspaper classifieds. Rather, I am proposing that recruiters use print products to promote a company’s employment brand. As with Amazon’s toy catalog, these publications would not be a substitute for online sales (or in our case, candidate engagement at the corporate career site) but rather as a mechanism to drive traffic to it.
Yes, that would incur a new cost at a time when recruiting budgets are already tight. And yes, the vast majority of recruiting teams do not have the skills and support mechanisms for creating and distributing a catalog. What they do have, however, is both the need to do something different – too many positions are going unfilled – and the kind of data (see above) that would undergird an effective business case for the c-suite.
What are the benefits of such an approach? First, it’s so unusual it will set an employer’s brand apart and may even generate some ancillary publicity. Second, it finally does something useful with all that candidate data stored in a company’s applicant tracking system database. And third, a well-done catalog is likely to resonate with employment prospects the same way a product catalog resonates with consumers.
In fact, there’s ample evidence that such direct mail marketing works. According to the Data & Marketing Association, 42.2 percent of direct mail recipients either read or scan the mail they get. And according to the USPS, 60 percent of those who get catalogs through the mail then go online and visit the sender’s website. To revert to online terminology, I’d call that a pretty effective sourcing channel.
The irony in today’s talent acquisition field is that the use of online sourcing has become a kind of legacy thinking. Absolutely, it should continue apace, but not as the exclusive way employers go to market for talent. There’s now reason to believe that old fashioned print products – an employment catalog is just one example – could help to distinguish and energize a company’s talent acquisition campaign.
Food for thought,
Peter
Peter Weddle has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is the founder and CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions.