Recruiting From Within

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 2000 by Teresa Ennis

To gain an edge in the war for talent, Hanley- Wood is looking internally to staff its Web start-up.

When Hanley-Wood's Internet start-up, cbuild.com, launches in September, it will have an online catalog of every building product available in the United States (pink bathtubs included), $20 million in initial funding, and partners up and down the distribution chain. What's missing now, however, is the most important ingredient needed to compete effectively on the Web: People.

The country now has the tightest labor market in three decades, and the resulting war for talent has left many companies less than fully staffed. Plus, in H-W's hometown of Washington, D.C., unemployment in the Internet market is about -5 percent, according to H-W President Frank Anton.

With that in mind, H-W decided to look for talent from within its own ranks by hosting a series of internal job fairs for all employees. "We have a lot of smart people working at the company, and we've always had a policy of looking inside first to fill positions," says Anton. The online company will be fully staffed at 50, and 19 positions have been filled so far.

But isn't this a little like stealing from the poor to give to the rich? Some traditional publishing companies have been all but crippled by the exodus of employees looking for higher-profile, higher-paying dot.com jobs. So if you recruit your best talent for the wireless positions, aren't you short-changing your print products?

"Our theory is that if we're going to lose somebody, we'd rather lose them to us than to somebody else," says Anton. "We figure that if they're out looking for a job, they will probably find one somewhere else and we'd lose them completely. We've had painfully high turnover."

Indeed, last year turnover was 30 percent--double what it was in 1998.

The job fairs, then, are a means of holding on to people who might otherwise migrate to the Web--and out of the H-W fold completely.

"Before we did this, we talked to the managers of our publishing business," says Anton. "We've been very sensitive to them and are keeping them informed. We've told everyone that we'll develop transition plans that don't just leave the print people without a work force to get the job done."