2006: The year of the employee FOR FAMILY, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES
who know me, the headline above may come as a surprise. They're thinking, 'Aren't
you the guy who's been bragging for weeks about downloading and installing a Linux
distribution on an old laptop? Aren't you the guy who wants to buy a $2,000 robot
dog when his younger son leaves for college? Aren't you the guy who has just launched
a new, technology-oriented section in BtoB called 'Tools and Metrics'?" (More
on our new section in a bit.)
Guilty as charged. I'm an unrepentant gadget
lover. And I seriously doubt anybody would disagree with the statement that new
technology, from Gutenberg's press in the 15th century to the Internet today,
has transformed communications more than any other force.
Nevertheless,
companies and campaigns succeed not because of these marvelous tools but because
of the skilled, imaginative people who use them. Marketing organizations that
fail to hire — and retain — talented, tech-savvy personnel will be
in just as much jeopardy as those that didn't adopt these new and exciting platforms
in the first place.
This brings us to some sobering statistics courtesy
of the U.S. Labor Department. The agency's so-called quit rate reached a four-year
high in September when voluntary esignations totaled 2.3% of total employment.
That marked the 20th consecutive month in which the rate was up from a year earlier.
There's a whole lotta churn goin' on.
"It's interesting that when we
deal with clients — marketing directors, managers, the guys who are looking
for staff — they themselves may be looking," said Jadey Ryndak, regional
manager-Midwest for Paladin Cos., a staffing firm that specializes in marketing,
advertising and creative recruiting.
Ryndak and others agree the top job
areas right now are those involved with online marketing, including search, analytics,
metrics and e-commerce. (For more on the employment crunch around search marketing,
in particular, see Senior Reporter Carol Krol's story on Page 1.)
"These
people are expensive, hard to keep and they are relatively midlevel in their careers,
which is also the main target for companies across the board," said Ryndak,
who predicts a "dog fight" for this talent, particularly as companies
seek direct hires and thereby reduce their reliance on outsourcing to agencies.
"All companies are waking up [to the fact] that this is an intricate part
of their business that they can't farm out," she said, adding that the pace
of hiring will quicken throughout the year and begin to impact non-online positions.
"What's already happening in online and search will trickle to other [jobs],
especially those that can be tied to ROI, such as direct marketing," she
said.
Internal branding may be one way to retain employees, said Allan J.
Steinmetz, founder of Inward Strategic Consulting, who detects a sea change in
how companies are talking to employees. "They used to just communicate through
e-mails and intranets a party line about 'This is good. We need to do this,' "
he said. "Today, it's much more experiential around training, and teaching
and consequences to change behavior, followed by new procedures like incentives
and rewards."
In this issue we inaugurate BtoB's ewest section, "Tools
& Metrics" Every month this section will explore applications and best
practices modern marketers are using — or should be using — to improve
their performance and communicate their worth. Turn to page 17.
