Cisco Systems and Micro-brewed Beer

It’s important to use demographic characteristics when considering where you’re going to go hunting for employees.

Cisco Systems, now one of the most prominent technical companies in the world, goes to beer festivals as well as home and garden festivals. They figure their demographic targets like micro-brewed beers, so they go to where the targets are.

McDonald’s likes to get applicants who like their restaurants, so they put applications on meal trays. Other companies know their employees attend football games, so they recruit at the stadium.

A corollary: consider benefits that your demographic targets will be interested in. Cisco found out that day care was extremely important to its employees. As a result, they put video cameras in child-care centers so that parents could occasionally make sure their little ones were OK. They also gave grandparents computers so that they could check on their grandchildren via the Internet.

That’s not something every company can do, but it does help reinforce the importance of figuring out exactly who you want to attract to the organization, and then tailoring your benefits and recruiting accordingly.

SOURCE: From a speech by John Sullivan, San Francisco State University, at a conference on Recruiting & Hiring in a Tight Labor Market: New Practices in Recruitment & Selection, May 5-6, 1999.