Marketing your firm from the inside out.

• Author: Berman, Sharon
• Position: Business Marketing

Additional vacation time or flex time may help your firm recruit and retain employees, but that's usually an insufficient incentive. In reality, making your firm more attractive to current and prospective employees is as much a marketing job as is obtaining new clients and keeping existing ones.

Here are some marketing tactics that are often overlooked when it comes to selling your firm as a place to work to the kinds of employees you want.

In marketing to employees, your three main objectives are identical to those used to market your firm to clients:

* Name recognition;

* Positioning; and

* Differentiation.

NAME RECOGNITION

One of the key jobs of marketing is to make your prospective clients or, in this case, employees, comfortable. The truth is that people feel most comfortable with a firm that is a known quantity, a name they've heard of and seen mentioned in a positive context.

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When you or someone from your human relations team calls to schedule an interview, you do not want the candidate to say, "Which firm are you? I've never heard of you." You want to hear, "Oh, yes. I've heard about your firm," or, "I remember reading about you."

Preferably they will have read about you in a positive context.

Name recognition makes public relations a key to recruiting both employees and clients. People want to work for a firm their friends and family have heard of and think well of. This doesn't mean that you need to be a large firm or spend a lot of money on a public relations campaign. It simply means that you need to strategically position your firm--occupy a place in your target's mind--as one that's moving, growing and innovative.

You can begin with something as simple as announcing new hires in trade publications or in community publications. Building on that, your next step might be to position your CPAs and consultants as expert resources for the media so they are interviewed and quoted. You can do this by having your professionals write articles to distribute and post on your website.

POSITIONING

Another public relations tool to make your firm attractive is probono work. Contributing time and effort to the community creates a positive feeling with employees and enhances your reputation in the community.

For example, some firms have developed policies to support employees who volunteer, such as compensating them for a certain number of volunteer hours as if it were billable work. In addition, leveraging your probono...