IQ Interview: How Maritz Makes Every Employee a Recruiter
By Jamie Danziger
Maritz Canada, with nearly 400 employees, focuses on delivering solutions that support businesses in achieving their objectives through the human dimension of sales and marketing. Everything from sales channel enablement, engagement marketing and consumer loyalty, Maritz offers the expertise to help companies grow their business. As a professional services firm, it also realizes that it’s their people that are their true competitive advantage.
Marketing Magazine ranked Maritz Canada as one of this country’s leading sales and marketing performance services companies largely because of the team they’ve built. They understand the importance their people play in their success, and their approach of every person in the company acting as a recruiter has lead to almost 40% of Maritz’s hires being driven through their employee referral program.
We sat down with their VP of People and Values, Brian Henry, to hear how they attract, hire, and retain top performers.
Questions:
IQP: Do you have an overriding people strategy?
BH: We do, and it begins with the employee experience. We believe a good employee experience will equate to engaged employees, and we take our people strategy from three key angles:
First we look at employee engagement at different stages of the employee life cycle. From the attraction stage, selection, on-boarding, career, and all the way through, we try and take a broad look at it because we found the needs of a ten-year employee are quite different than those of an employee who has been with us for eighteen months. So as it relates to their career, performance expectations, and compensation – all of those things are very different.
Second, we look to add more rigour in how we assess people to make sure there’s a fit within our culture, within the needs of our clients, and within the needs of our overall business going forward. We offer innovation and creativity to our clients so obviously we have to find people who have those characteristics as well.
Third is the development of our unique culture at Maritz which is both celebratory and human. We actively work on initiatives and activities where we listen and act on the feedback we get from employees, and where we create an environment that is both flexible and fun. We found it’s important to have a caring and responsible organization both for employees and for the community.
IQP: What are the key steps in your hiring process?
BH: Ours is actually quite similar to a typical hiring process, but one of our key steps is attraction, which begins well before we meet that person we end up hiring. For us it begins by having that solid employee experience for existing people, and then those people going and sharing their positive story about our company in the marketplace, through their networks and through social media. We’ve identified our employees as the key advocates for the organization. Conversations are happening everywhere all the time, and in many cases people talk about work and their employers. We want to give people a compelling story to tell and a reason for them to say positive things about our company. The result of that is that our story spreads and we generate interest in others who may want to work for us.
To support this, internally we have a referral program that now drives almost 40% of our hires - so it’s a key vehicle for us in terms of how and where we’re finding new employees.
Related to that, another critical point for us is the on-boarding. This is where we ensure the values that we communicated throughout the hiring process really get instilled in the person and come to life. And this isn’t necessarily the day they arrive, but it’s the day they get their offer letter from Maritz.
IQP: How have your hiring processes evolved over time?
BH: They’ve actually evolved quite dramatically, especially in terms of how we think about recruitment and how we approach it. We’ve started thinking of recruitment beyond the day-to-day – we’re now focusing more on things like on-going recruitment and pipe-lining. It’s similar to a sales person who has targets and is always thinking of what’s next. You’ve got to nurture your existing clients, but you have to go out and get new clients as well – and you have to have a process to track all of that. So being mindful of recruiting, particularly when you don’t have headcount, is probably the most important thing.
Additionally, we approach recruitment with the mindset that everyone in the company is a recruiter – everyone needs to have that recruitment hat on because there are always conversations and intersect points that offer an opportunity to say great things about the company.
We’ve also started utilizing different tools like LinkedIn and getting engaged in smaller networks and associations for recruitment purposes – going straight to the source of where we feel great people who fit our company would be.
IQP: How do you retain top talent?
BH: Well most importantly, we try to communicate as much as possible with our people. We use an annual employee engagement survey, and we also do annual talent reviews where the managers are required to come to me or the President/CEO to talk about the people on their team and how they’re doing, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and what we can do for them from a development and career perspective.
We try and be innovative as well - in one segment of our business we’ve just identified all of the competencies required for success in certain roles and then mapped those against the training and development required. Investing in training and project management like that is one of the keys we’ve found, to retaining great people.
IQP: Your employment brand plays a large role in your recruiting – what’s the message and how do you instill it?
BH: It’s really telling the same brand story we take to our clients. It’s a simplified message around what Maritz does – we apply different consumer loyalty strategies, sales channel enablement strategies, and engagement marketing strategies. We take that story out to the marketplace and the more you tell it, the more it resonates and people want to become a part of it.
IQP: What do you see in the future in terms of your recruitment strategies?
BH: We plan to continue bringing the Maritz brand to the forefront and featuring it more prominently than we ever have in the past. How our brand is represented in the marketplace is key to attracting the right people.
Ironically, the future actually feels a little old school for us. Too many companies rely on the technology and forget the human side of it, so I see that as a change. One of the key elements that’s lost in the element of technology and social media is the notion of doing it right the first time and the grassroots aspect of attraction which is meeting people and engaging them, talking to them, and demonstrating the passion you have for the business, and just connecting with people one-on-one.
I also see more involvement with our clients in the people that we attract – clients playing a more integral role in the selection process going forward.
Brian Henry’s Top 3 Tips for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent:
- Create an engaging employee experience for your current employees and give them a compelling story to tell - they will become your best recruitment tool.
- Communication is key – get feedback from your employees and act on it to create a rewarding work environment.
- Think of recruitment long-term and what you’re going to need to do to succeed not only today, but tomorrow as well.
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As Sr. VP, Operations, Jamie Danziger plays a key role in the on-going growth and success of IQ PARTNERS.
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