The Hiring Event Literature

Nortel, like most other high technology companies, was in an active hiring mode in the year 2000. This meant that one of the duties of the development managers was to actively hire people to replace the experienced people leaving Nortel to work for a startup with stock option stars in their eyes.

A good, productive hiring event is not something that can be treated cavalierly. Its not a matter of putting an ad in the paper, setting up some chairs and tables on the appointed day, and then taking in resumes for follow up later. The purpose of a hiring event is to reach out to prospective employees. The company is marketing itself as an employer into the labor marketplace. Due to the simple economics of the labor market for employees capable of being contributing members of a high technology organization in the year 2000, high tech employers must treat the hiring event in the same terms as they would any other marketing event.

Richard was minding his own business at work when his manager, Julie, telephoned. Julie informed Richard that she needed help with a hiring event. He could either work the Coop student hiring event the coming weekend or the hiring open house event the following week. Since Richard had classes on Saturday, the only option was the hiring open house.

In the case of this Nortel hiring event, the ground work had already been laid by people who were handling the arrangements. The overall event location and advertising (print ads as well as small signs at several key road intersections similar to the small signs advertising new homes) were already in place. According to Julie, a hiring manager, the expectations of the hiring managers were to show up at the hiring event location, a large room on the Nortel campus, with a couple of people to act as assistants. Richard would be there in order to greet people, screen out obviously inappropriate people by pointing them to other department's tables, and to answer questions that people may have. If nothing else came of this, at least Richard would be ready for a job as a Walmart greeter.

The afternoon before the event, Richard received an e-mail concerning the event's physical arrangements and location. The e-mail mentioned that the participating hiring managers needed to provide table, a departmental banner, and hiring materials. Since Richard didn't know of the existence of any such materials or the need for any such arrangements, he telephoned Julie to follow up on what he needed to do as a hiring manager assistant. Julie said that she had been told it was all taken care of and there was nothing to worry about. Richard, being the type of person who likes to know something about what he is about to do, pressed for details. Julie had none but she did have the name, Susan, of the person who was supposed to be making the physical arrangements.

Richard then telephoned Susan who said that tables were all arranged and she had brochures to hand out to prospective hires. Richard, being of a curious nature, walked down to her office to see the brochures and to talk through the event arrangements. Richard asked questions of Susan and her co-worker, Paige, as he looked through the materials they had for the event. All three agreed that the materials were unsatisfactory for the hiring event.

The material content was inappropriate being primarily Nortel sales literature. The quantity was also insufficient since Susan expected several hundred people to show up based on the number of mailed in resumes as well as the level of advertising she had pushed. Finally, through this event, Nortel could reach out through the people who attended to those people's friends and acquaintances through the use of appropriate materials. Every person who attended would be an opportunity to contact others who did not attend. The hope was that a brochure that provided useful and enticing information about the benefits of working for Nortel could be passed on to other prospective employees.

Susan suggested that with Richard's help, the three could come up with something that would be targeted at prospective employees. Richard pointed out that he was not sufficiently knowledgeable to write the kind of copy that would suffice nor was there sufficient time required to start from scratch.

Richard suggested browsing about the Nortel corporate web site for material. Susan, Paige, and Richard spent an hour browsing about the Nortel corporate web site pulling down material to answer one major question, why should a person want to work for Nortel Networks. As they found material to provide answers for that question, they pulled it down off the web saving the web pages as files. They were then able to open the downloaded files with Microsoft Word, reformatting it to improve its look and feel. Finally, they had a good packet of material about Nortel as an employer with a couple of nice graphics which were also pulled down off of the web site and manipulated into a more agreeable form with Microsoft Powerpoint. After a couple of test print runs and a final review, everyone involved agreed that the product was good enough.

Paige, meanwhile, had telephoned a Kinkos business center she had used for other copying projects. She worked out the logistics of getting a softcopy of the hiring material to Kinkos in sufficient time to have copies ready the next day. Susan ran upstairs with a copy of the brochure to find someone with sufficient signing authority because the copy bill was going to be big. The manager of the Kinkos said that it would be best if the material were in Adobe Portable Document Format which would ensure that the formatting of the copies would remain true to what was displayed in Word. Richard generated PDF files using Adobe Exchange from PostScript files from Word which he put onto a floppy diskette. Paige drove the diskette down to Kinkos about 10:30pm and the copies were available the next morning around 10am in plenty of time for the hiring event at 3pm.