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To recruit effectively, you have to understand what your company's brand means to potential employees. With that understanding, you'll know what aspects of your brand are attractive to job seekers, and what aspects of your brand need work to make your company more attractive in their eyes. What's the best way to learn what candidates think about your company? Ask them. HR professionals have historically relied on anecdotal evidence and good old-fashioned intuition to come to their conclusions about what job seekers need and want. While intuition is indeed useful, it isn't always reliable. To come to a more valid and demonstrably accurate understanding of the job seeker's needs and wants—and to justify the development of new or more aggressive recruitment initiatives—HR departments must follow the example of marketers and do a bit of research. Do Secondary Research The easiest place to start is with secondary research: reading articles, reports, and other information that has previously been written or compiled on whatever subject you are investigating. The advantage of secondary research is that it can be done quickly, at a relatively low cost, and with far less effort than primary research. The main drawback of secondary research is that it may be difficult to find sources that address your specific questions, or are pertinent to your company or industry. The only way to find out how job seekers react specifically to your company and the prospect of working there is to do primary research. Do Primary Research The essence of primary research is going into the marketplace and talking to your potential employees to find out who they are and what they want. You can query potential employees about their perception of your company, and you can use their responses to figure out how to sell your company to them. There are two main kinds of primary research used in marketing: Qualitative research is often a useful starting point because it is generally exploratory in nature, and you don't necessarily need a large number of respondents. Qualitative research may take the form of focus groups, one-on-one interviews, or open-ended questionnaires. In general, qualitative research is helpful in identifying important issues and in understanding subjective ideas that are more difficult to address with quantitative studies. However, qualitative research will not necessarily indicate how the population at large feels about an issue. Quantitative research typically relies on much larger pools of respondents and, if properly executed, will produce accurate results that are indicative of where the population at large stands on an issue. (Note: For research purposes, "population" refers to the group of people who are being studied.) Usually, quantitative research takes the form of a survey, which might be administered by phone, mail, Web, or in person, and it produces measurable results that can be reported as statistics. For example, quantitative research can help you determine the exact percentage of programmers in New York who are aware of your company. Be Prepared to Pay to Learn A well-executed primary research project can yield invaluable information. However, it also comes at a cost. Doing a series of focus groups can easily cost up to $30,000, and a quantitative survey of a large, representative sample can cost as much as $40,000 or $50,000 with a reputable research firm. The costly nature of this type of research is one of the main reasons why so few HR departments have done it to date. Ways to Save Money in Your Research There are ways to do primary research without breaking the bank. Find your own survey respondents. One of the most expensive aspects of conducting research is the cost of recruiting participants to be a part of the survey sample or to take part in a focus group. Most research firms will make you pay for the use of their panels of survey participants-but you can a get around this by finding your own respondents. Solicit feedback from interviewees. You can learn a lot about how you've been successful or unsuccessful in attracting employees by surveying recent hires and by soliciting feedback from people who did not accept offers of employment from your company. In the end, the cost of conducting research must be measured against the cost of ignorance, in the worst case, or incomplete understanding, which occurs more commonly. The value of research is that it can enable you to make smarter decisions. Your marketing department wouldn't wander blindly into a competitive market. Neither should you. Author Bio Laura Sewell is a freelance analyst with WetFeet's Strategic Services Group. Top of Page