and the environment within which the new recruit will be working.
A failure to do so can result in disillusioned employees, low
employee retention and poor word of mouth, as employees warn
other potential recruits not to apply for positions within the
company. A good example of how employees’ expectations have
been poorly managed through the recruitment process can be
found in the Club Med case (Case Study 5.1).
One company that is particularly innovative in searching for
prospective employees is Cisco Systems, a San Jose networking
company, with sales of $6.4 billion in 1997 and profits of $1.4 billion.
Because good employees were becoming increasingly difficult to
find, they embarked on an innovative strategy to find, lure and keep
talented staff. They started by holding focus groups with targeted
groups of people to find out how they spend their free time, what
websites they visit and how they feel about job hunting. The
company then used this information to access potential recruits and
devise ways of improving the whole recruitment process. One of the
methods that the company uses to maximum effect is the Net.
Newspaper job advertisements are used to feature its Internet
address and an invitation to apply at Cisco. There are major benefits
for Cisco in directing all job seekers to its website address. On the
Internet it can inexpensively post hundreds of job openings and
information about each one. It can monitor and measure the number
of visits to the site, which is important for assessing the effectiveness
of the recruitment programme. The company is also able to identify
where people work, as most prospective employees visit the website
from their place of work. Cisco have also launched a friends pro-
gramme to help prospective employees make a friend at Cisco. The
Cisco employee is able to describe what it is like to work there and
if they are successful in helping to recruit a new employee are
rewarded with referral fees which start at $500 and a lottery ticket
for a free trip to Hawaii. The company, essentially, matches employ-
ees to prospective candidates based on their backgrounds and
expertise. This strategy was designed to help entice people to come
for an interview and smooth the whole recruitment process. To date
the programme has been tremendously successful, with 1000 Cisco
employees volunteering for the programme and a third of all new
recruits coming through the friends programme.
Having identified the main methods for recruitment and the
importance of building relationship strategies with recruitment
third parties and individuals, the next stage of the process is to
308 Relationship Marketing