Strategically Thinking » CI Series: 13. Recruit a Staff

Jul

CI Series: 13. Recruit a Staff

Tom Hawes Competitive Intelligence 2009-07-27

FIT One of my favorite assignments has been to visit my alma mater and recruit graduating students. It’s been fun to sit across from them as they start their careers and give them a sense of what is possible in the corporate world. They are eager, bright and full of potential. Who knows what they will accomplish as they follow their passions and develop their skills?

I fondly remember my own college interviews. My interests came down to two very good choices of solid companies. Both did the kind of work that interested me. Both were in good geographic locations. Either might have worked out well. I chose the Texas company and never looked back. All these years later, I can state that I was well rewarded for my career there. I learned, contributed and gave back to the company many things.

The inducement to work for one company or another comes down to the factors that are important to you. As I mentioned, I cared about the focus of the company, my specific assignment, where I would live and, of course, the pay. More or less standard concerns, I would guess. That’s the way I was recruited and it was the way that I recruited others that were starting out in corporate life.

What about recruiting for the competitive intelligence function that you are building? Why do you need other people? What inducements make a difference to the people you want to recruit? And how is the best way to approach your candidates?

In the formation process of the competitive intelligence function, it will be essential to recruit help from within the company.

Here are three reasons why that is true.

There is too much to do for one person. A prior step of The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series dealt with expanding the scope. If that step was successful, you are now into areas beyond what you started doing. Engaging with other senior managers (besides your sponsor) will introduce a wide range of topics. Your choice will be either to accept the new assignments (which means that you will need more resources) or reject them because the people to help are not currently identified. I suggest that you accept and put a staffing plan together. More about this later in this article.
The needed knowledge (e.g., financial, marketing, technology, business development) is unlikely to reside in one person’s head. The exciting challenge of competitive intelligence is the diversity of subjects involved. The valuable competitive intelligence work comes from people that can integrate the disparate information into patterns and stories. Given a choice, this is where you want to focus. The implication is that you will work with a range of experts that have narrower focused than yours. Your task is to identify and begin nurturing these contributors. Make is easy and rewarding for them to supply you with information.
Less intuitively, it is important to cede ownership of some of the work to cement the support for competitive intelligence. Even if you could do everything, you wouldn’t want to do so. The reason is that you are after meaningful change in the organization’s strategies to make the business more successful. Most businesses involve many people that must understand and support change. And there are not people more interested in these topics than the people that feel ownership. Your job, after recruiting for scale and specialties, is to recruit owners. One way you do this is to give them some say in the direction of the analysis and the interpretation of the results.

How do you recruit someone to help with competitive intelligence?

Here are some hints that have worked for me.

Know who you want to help. Make a list early with the names and functions of the people that are critical to your success. This is part of assembling your toolset.
Give before you get. That is, by being proactive and intentional, provide value to the people that you want to help before you ask for their help. There are many ways to do this through providing information, tailored analysis and targeted news.
Respect their role. This is a key issue since effective competitive intelligence can often be threatening to strategy decision makers. As we have previously discussed, CI can call into question previous decisions and current directions. Therefore, be gentle and cautious with the people that are affected to increase the likelihood that they will help you.
Credit their contributions. Few things motivate people more than looking good in front of management. If you can make this happen for people, they will be far more willing to help you. On the other hand, slight someone and you can almost guarantee that they won’t be helpful.
Limit their work. While some people will be inclined to help you, they probably can’t do so when it takes too much away from their other assignments. Hence, when you have something for them to do, carefully define your request and make it as small as possible. The principle is to give credit liberally but make assignments conservatively.
Transition ownership. Over time, some parts of the competitive intelligence function will begin to run smoothly. Look for people to assume ownership responsibilities for these parts. These people will “announce” themselves to you by their regular interest in CI. Or, their job may be redefined by management to include the CI tasks that you have developed. Either way, involve and guide them.
Identify and enable champions. Once you have been successful a time or two presenting to senior management, others in the organization will want to do the same. Let them. The only things to “control” are the standards that you have established. Within those boundaries, let those with the energy and ability to provide excellent analysis establish their own identity.

If you apply these hints, it is not hard to find people to help you. Perhaps a few will do CI fulltime. Even if that is true, you will need still more people that are not working fulltime to help. Thus, you need to be an excellent recruiter. Luckily, you can be.

What’s next? Simple. No more passive analysis. No more waiting for others to set an agenda. It is time to use Competitive Intelligence as an offensive weapon. That is the next topic in The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series.

Next topic is “Go On The Offense”.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Which ones do you think are especially important?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence