Financial Services
Thought Leadership
Use PR to Attract and Retain Your Best People
Can PR help a company attract and keep its best people? We say it can.
Marketing PR campaigns are all about customers, right? Gaining revenue and market share? Well, yes—but in today’s ever more interconnected and transparent world, they can have a positive impact on a wide variety of stakeholders, internal and external—and those hovering in between.
Take prospective employees. A company’s reputation, delivered by word-of-mouth or through third-party endorsement, can have a significant effect on whether a top candidate takes a job. And securing those top candidates can, in return, have a make-or-break effect on the future of that company’s reputation. It’s a virtuous cycle.
We’ve seen it in practice with a few of our clients, but none more dramatically than a midwestern asset management firm. The firm in question is headquartered about as far from Wall Street, culturally, as one can possibly get. Yet it needs top-notch analysts and portfolio managers the likes of which rarely venture west of the Hudson. Attracting and retaining the best people is absolutely essential to this company’s business model, so that it can rack up performance numbers to compete with the best money managers in the business.
When positive feature stories about this firm appear in the industry’s trade publications, the head of HR and the COO see the positive difference in recruiting and retention. When the company reaches out to a prospective candidate—or a potential “lift-out” from another firm—a quick Google search shows that this asset manager isn’t a backwater—it’s an industry leader that just happens to reside outside of NYC.
Said the COO, “The best thing about this PR campaign, to me, is that I haven’t had to pay search fees to executive recruiters in at least three years.” And the number he’s talking about is, conservatively, half to three-quarters of a million dollars a year. That’s not counting the value of the reputation building among clients and pension fund consultants, nor the morale boost among current staff.
Today’s digital realities mean that segmenting messages to different audiences is pretty much a thing of the past. No more can one control and direct one message to a unique and airtight set of listeners. But maybe that’s a good thing.
Take-aways?
- In asset management, performance may be king, but performance is generated by superior people executing a proven process. A loyal, stable team of investment professionals can be the key to top performance ratings, whatever the style box.
- One message fits all: Make sure that strong media coverage is merchandised internally and with recruiting, as well as with current and prospective customers.
- Don’t give trade media short shrift. You may call them “trade rags” but your next superstar might be reading them!
AGC
