PRO COMMENT

Don't wait until the client business comes in the door before youecruitment process should never be rushed or conducted half-heartedly, says Tim Beadle, managing director of PCMC, the direct marketing division of The Opus Group. start recruiting people to service the account. Rushing the recruitment process invites the wrong decisions to be made and only causes more problems in the long term.

There is a chronic lack of good people in the IT marketing industry and with no formal assessments of abilities being undertaken at interview stage, it is almost impossible to tell whether the candidate really knows their stuff. Ten years ago the industry was moving slower, leaving time available to teach new recruits how the marketplace works. Marketing departments are usually first to be hit in any budget cuts but the team still have to do the same amount of work. As a result, today's new recruits are expected to hit the ground running.

To help overcome this problem, The Opus Group recruits on a rolling basis.

The company works to a general rule that candidates applying for the positions of account manager upwards, must have an IT background. Positions will be created in the short term, if necessary, to accommodate new members of staff who fit the Opus profile, the company culture and, of course, have the right experience. If someone good walks through the door, we're not about to tell them to turn around and come back in six months when we might have a position available. If we don't snap them up, someone else will.

The lack of any in-depth evaluations on marketing campaigns in the IT industry makes it almost impossible to assess an individual and their value to a company, without actually monitoring them in the work environment.

For both the individual's and the company's benefit Opus runs its recruitment on a three-month trial period, a standard that is proving to be increasingly popular throughout all marketing disciplines and in all industries. A jump from an in-house department to an agency environment can also be a difficult one. Agency work is often perceived as the more exciting working environment to be in, but that's not necessarily the case. We make a point of letting candidates know the negatives of the agency side as well as the positive points. There's no point saying the grass is greener just to get them on board, they'll find out either way soon enough.

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