Candidate or customer?

27 October 2006

With skills in short supply, hiring talented people is getting tougher and tougher. That's why some top companies are now approaching recruitment as a sales and marketing exercise

Jeff Hunter, director of Talent Strategies and Technology at Electronic Arts, doesn't refer to potential new recruits as 'candidates' - he uses sales terminology like 'leads' and 'contacts'. He also runs his recruitment operations from a sales software application. Ignoring the traditional HR notion that talented people have to convince you they deserve a job, Hunter believes getting the right people on board is like acquiring a new customer - you've got to find the right contacts, and then you've got to sell your company to them.

As one of the world's largest entertainment and games software companies with some 7000 employees, Electronic Arts (EA) recruits on a huge scale, adding new hires at the rate of 800 to 1000 a year. But the principles it applies to recruitment are just as valid for a start-up as they are to a large business - in some respects, even more so, given that small companies don't have the resource to cope with too many hiring mistakes.

What businesses of all sizes share in common is an ongoing struggle to hire the most talented people. Demographic changes in most Western economies mean that the proportion of elderly people is rapidly expanding as birth rates decline. In the tech sector, where many skills needs are cyclical, shortages in some specialist areas are acute, and it's particularly hard for start-ups to find the mix of skills they need. If your ideal candidate combines entrepreneurial vision and commercial expertise with hands-on technical know-how, you're probably fishing in a very small talent pool - and you're certainly not the only one with a rod and line.

Approaching recruitment as a sales rather than HR exercise puts the focus on its competitive nature, and encourages aggressive rather than reactive tactics. If you pitch a customer and can't explain why your product or service meets one of their real needs, you won't close a deal: similarly, if you can't explain why a career at your company will be personally rewarding to a candidate, you won't hire the good ones.

This sales-driven approach also reflects the fact that people management and customer management are effectively two sides of the same coin. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-recognised business philosophy covering the entire sales, marketing and service lifespan, from the moment you identify a prospect to the steps you take to ensure existing customers keep on buying from you (see 'Selling Game'). Human Capital Management follows many of the same principles, particularly in recognising that good people management is about acquiring, retaining and maximising the best employee 'assets'.

In both cases, the upfront costs (to find and acquire the right customers/employees) are high, which is why you need to maximise efficiencies in recruitment as much as you would in sales and marketing. But the value typically grows the longer people stay with you. Long-standing customers tend to require less support than new ones (because they know your product) and they can be upsold to new products and services. Likewise, employees tend to become more productive over time.

All of which helps explain why EA's Hunter was speaking about HR issues earlier this month at an event run by a CRM vendor, Salesforce.com. Although its roots are firmly in the sales management arena, Salesforce is building an eco-system of development partners who offer their own specialist services around its platform - and some of them are now turning to HR. Salesforce delivers software as a hosted service over the web, rather than as a traditional package (see 'Software or Services?'), and EA is now using the platform for all of its talent management.

Even if the volume of recruitment you do today doesn't merit investing in software or services of this kind, it's worth borrowing some techniques from the sales environment. Rather than storing CVs from unsuccessful candidates in a filing cabinet and forgetting about them, for example, there's a lot to be said for keeping electronic records of all the applicants you reviewed who might be suitable for other jobs that come up, with notes from any telephone conversations or interviews and diary reminders to touch base with them. It's not customer relationship management, it's candidate relationship management - but the principles are the same.

By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research