Hall Radio HR Radio Recruitment Seminar

On February 5th, 2008 I attended a HR radio recruitment  seminar at Burlington's DoubleTree Hotel. The event was organized by Hall Communications, Inc., and featured Chris Stonick of Stonick Recruitment Incorporated, a nationally recognized media consulting and employee retention agency since 1989 who has been featured in HR Magazine for innovative HR practices involving radio recruitment advertising.

All in all, I think that Hall Communications did a great job keeping the seminar informative and non-sales driven. In addition, it was nice meeting Sue from 99.9 the Buzz in person, (someone who I have spoken to many times before over the phone, but until now had not met in person).

During the event I was impressed with a few ideas that I felt would be appropriate to share with "NMO" followers. Over the next two days I will highlight some of those ideas.

In the US the average tenure for an employee is two and a half years. This statistic applies to employees who are considered "active job seekers." The definition of an active job seeker is someone who has been fired, is out of work or miserable with their current job. These are people who HR does not want to hire, but in many cases will hire if they see their employee pool as low.

Passive job seekers are people who are not currently looking for work, but would consider changing employer if a good opportunity arose. These are the people HR should hire and can reach through creative and thoughtful communication strategies.

Passive job seekers are the applicants that tend to have a higher tenure within an organization while active job seekers tend to last only the average of 2.5 years before bouncing to another company.  

To reach passive job seekers, an employer needs to find an avenue that is less direct. While newspaper classifieds offer direct avenues to reach active jobs seekers, radio can offer a way to reach passive job seekers.

Many passive job seekers are not looking for a new job because they are happy with their current employer. This means that they are not looking in the classifieds (and in many cases not listening to the radio). However, radio recruitment reaches influentials in a passive job seekers life. In most cases these influentials are their spouse, family members, friends or acquaintances that are the ones who actually hear the radio ad and then pass along the recruitment information to the passive job seeker through “word of mouth."

Passive job seekers are much more valuable every employers workforce because they are currently employed and are in most cases good at what they do during the workday.

These are employees who are doing their job, doing it well and happy where they are in their current position and with their current employers.  Businesses who want to be profitable and productive should understand that they these employees because they are extremely valuable, harder to recruit, and offer longer tenure to a single organization.

Tomorrow, I will discuss retention of passive job seekers and how that can impact you bottom line. But until then, employers with great employees should realize that they have an asset (their employees) that cost more to replace then to retain.