Laurie Mitchell, exasperated by the bruising dearth of talent available for hire in the PR biz, confesses to her outlandish new recruiting plan. "I'm going to make my own
candidates," she says dryly. "I'm working with the people who cloned Dolly the sheep."
Although human cloning is admittedly a most creative approach, the technology is still a few years away. Which leaves Mitchell and some of her colleagues to scour for corporate
and agency personnel in imaginative, but more realistic, ways.
The general response, though, has been more old-school than Run-DMC: throw money at the problem. "Between there being a shortage of candidates and prices going up, the very
best candidates are going to the companies that upped the ante even if it isn't the best job for them," laments Mitchell, who has been recruiting in Cleveland for 16 years.
But experts say mo' money - especially at the upper echelons - is hardly the enticement it used to be. "In today's tight labor market, competitive pay is the price of admission
for employers," says Rick Beal, a compensation consultant at Watson Wyatt Worldwide. "It is not a key differentiator. Our message to employers is not to underrate the importance
of non-financial rewards in influencing behavior."
Technology Wars
Jennifer Johnson had that notion three years ago when she left her job at Novell to start a virtual PR agency, Johnson & Co., with its home office on the Internet. Johnson
now harvests the clients and doles out assignments to her 20-person team of "free agents" across four time zones. She even has three virtual interns from Brigham Young
University.
"The difference here is that we give people the freedom to work from home and a variety of work and they don't have to hustle for business," Johnson says. She attracts talent
by promoting a "give yourself a pink slip" campaign, exploiting the drudge of the daily commute, power lunches and dressing up for work.
"Within 10 years, one of the top 10 agencies will be an agency of virtual workers collaborating together in teams that can come together on the fly," Johnson predicts.
In some cases, though, you don't need sequins and rhinestones to get noticed. Sometimes it just helps to be the 400-pound gorilla. It was enough for Charles Holleran, who left
his post at PriceWaterhouseCoopers - no slouch of a company - to become the chief communications officer at Coca-Cola about a month ago. "If you were in the business, what are the
half dozen jobs you'd hope to have in your lifetime?" Holleran asks bemusedly. "Wouldn't Coca-Cola be one of them?"
Veterans Among Us
No doubt the labor shortage is prompting many hiring managers to give up old biases. Jarrod Krull's resume was initially rejected when he applied for a job at Padilla Speer
Beardsley, a Minneapolis-based agency. Probably it was because the guy's main experience was training soldiers how to defend themselves in the event of a biological weapons
attack.
But when Krull called to inquire further after getting a form rejection letter, he caught the ear of an HR official, who listened. Agency founder Donald Padilla had also put in
a couple years for a public affairs unit in the U.S. Army, it seemed.
Krull now handles some of the agency's high-tech and manufacturing clients, like Rockwell Automation. In the military he learned how to translate scientific gobbledygook into
English, a valuable PR skill if ever there was one. "Rockwell's developed some sensors for the manufacturing industry that are very similar to the work I had done with chemical
detection work on the battlefield and it crossed right over to the account I was working on here," Krull says.
Elaine Goldman, a recruiter in New York, says high-tech firms generally remain unrealistically picky about finding people with the "right" expertise. "I had a biotech firm tell
me, 'We want a person who has a biotech background, switched into PR, and knows a lot of science,' " she says, explaining that in today's tight market companies really ought to be
more flexible in their approach. "If they were more creative, they could see that there's a base skill set," she says. "All of us in the recruitment business have more business
than we've ever had; the bad news is it's harder to get the job done."
Goldman has yet to turn to the military for recruits, but has seen an increase in the number of lawyers making a transition into PR, bringing with them a good set of strategic
thinking and basic writing skills. Mostly, though, Goldman is frustrated by the number of candidates negotiating in bad faith. She even placed one person who never showed up for
the first day of work, presumably having signed somewhere else without bothering to tell anyone.
Full Speed Ahead
Even the government knows how alluring the PR business has gotten, although in their statistics they still lump advertising and marketing in with PR. "Advertising, marketing
and public relations manager jobs are highly coveted and will be sought by other managers or highly experienced professional and technical personnel, resulting in substantial
competition," the Department of Labor says in its Occupational Outlook Handbook. It predicts that employment of PR professionals will grow "much faster" than other service jobs
through 2008.
Marie Raperto, president of the recruiting firm The Cantor Concern in New York, is unfazed. She swears up and down she has no problems finding talent in what most consider
today's Sahara-like conditions. Raperto finds the tried-and-true poaching method works just as well today as ever. "When we need someone at an agency, we go to other agencies, and
when we need someone in a corporate, we go to other corporates," she says. "The hardest thing is still the personality fit."
Of course, the dotcoms have become everybody's favorite scapegoat, getting blamed for vacuuming up creative folks from all walks of life. But Darcy Provo, a VP at the Antenna
Group, a high-tech agency, says that phenomenon is history. "I think it's changing because of the recent news that options aren't all that they're cracked up to be," she says.
In four years, she claims her 26-person, San Francisco-based agency has lost only two to dotcoms. Provo has had little trouble finding people at the top levels and for junior
posts. The middle tier has proved more grinding. To help pique interest, she recently upped her finder's fee from $500 to $2,500. "I'd be willing to up it even more if I need to,"
she says.
For now, Mitchell, the recruiter-cum-cloner, is trolling for talent in new and unusual places, as well as in the old familiar haunts: "I'm looking for people out of trade
publications; I'm looking at people from the types of companies I wouldn't have paid attention to in the past; I'm looking at some hospital publications people; I'm looking at
some people who have worked for some pretty sleepy manufacturing companies; I'm looking at people who didn't have the sophisticated agency experience that I normally want."
And, though Mitchell didn't think to do it herself, one source who was contacted for this story actually floated a resume request to a certain tousled reporter trying to make
sense of the talent shortage in PR. It was this invitation that made it obvious just how bad things have gotten.
(Beal, 301/581-4600; Goldman, 212/685-9311; Holleran, 404/676-2121; Johnson,
616/874-8313; Krull, 612/872-3783; Mitchell, 216/292-6001; Provo, 415/896-1800;
Raperto, 212/333-3000)
-Jeff Goldfarb