Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Hiring
When hiring gets tough
Coping with a tight labor market
By Janet Weaver
Your assistant city editor, the one you’ve had your eye on as a potential
city editor someday, has just come in to tell you she’s taking another
job. The pay is better. The job is what she’s always dreamed of doing.
The paper is twice your size, in a city known for its quality of life.
Or how about this: You want to hire the kid who did so well for you
as a graphics intern last summer. You’ve got a position that would be perfect.
When you make the job offer, he hems and haws and finally confesses he’s
taking a job designing Web sites for three times the money you are offering.
Does any of this sound familiar?
With the economy booming and newsprint prices steady for a couple of
years now, editors find themselves competing in a seller’s market when
it comes to newsroom talent. Bigger newspapers that reduced staffing during
the newsprint crisis are adding positions back. And that has started the
newspaper equivalent of the food chain: Big fish eat medium-sized fish,
medium-sized fish eat little fish.
And it’s not just traditional print competition that’s going after the
talent — online products are creating new opportunities, particularly for
designers and graphic artists. As if those weren’t hard enough to come
by anyway.
As someone who has been blessed with the opportunity of filling lots
of positions in the last year (both new jobs and vacancies created when
a big fish swam through my neck of the ocean), I’ve had the opportunity
to talk to lots of editors about the job market. I’ve talked to them because
I’ve called them looking for candidates. The response has almost uniformly
been: Yeah, right, if I had the name of a good city editor, you think I’d
give it to you?
And even if you do get the name of a good candidate, better race to
the phone — it’s almost guaranteed someone else will be hot on the trail.
"We’ve been high on several different people who were entertaining several
different job offers at the same time as ours,’’ says Marvin Leon Lake,
director of recruitment and retention at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.
And that frenzy doesn’t just surround experienced journalists. Twice
in the last year, I’ve gotten into bidding wars with papers three times
my size over job candidates who had just graduated from college — with
nothing but internships on their resume.
For those of us who became newsroom managers in the late ’80s or early
’90s, this is a most disorienting situation. We’ve never really learned
what how to hire in a competitive job market. We’re darn good at laying
off and making do with smaller staffs. But some of us are learning that
hiring when the competition is strong can be just as stressful as watching
positions go dark; granted, it’s a good kind of stress, but stress nonetheless.
So how do we learn how to hire again? How do we develop deep pools of
talent so that when positions open, we’re not scrambling to fill them?
Listen to the perspective of those in the midst of the fray: a recent
hire, a college professor looking to place his students, and the placement
director for a 200,000 circulation daily newspaper. Perhaps you’ll pick
up some tips, or at least have your memory jogged, about how to hire in
the good times.
The New Hire
Colleen McCain graduated from the University of Kansas in December 1996.
She’d been one of the school’s standout students, with strong internships
at the Detroit News and the Kansas City Star.
She had every reason to expect that she would get a good job offer when
she graduated.
She got six.
"I think you can take from my experience that the job market is really,
really good right now,’’ says McCain.
With so many offers on the table, McCain could afford to be choosy.
She had a very clear idea what she wanted from her first full-time job.
"I was looking for the opportunity to do good stories, to do important
stories right off the bat,’’ she says. "I wanted a chance to learn as much
as possible, to learn a beat and also to do stories that were important
to the newspaper.’’
McCain also wanted to work in a place where she would get personal attention
from editors and reporters whose opinions she valued.
"I wanted a job where I could work for people I could learn from, people
whom I really respected,’’ she says. "I think your first job is one where
you should be improving and learning. I didn’t want to go to a big paper
just to go to a big paper.’’
McCain turned down the big papers and went to work at The Wichita (Kan.)
Eagle. Her front-page stories in her first year have included coverage
of the city’s bus strike, pieces on a local minister whose conviction in
a money-laundering case was overturned on appeal, and following the Kansas
relatives of a man killed in the Oklahoma City bombing through the one-year
anniversary of the blast. She is now covering the Legislature for the paper.
The college professor
Tom Eblen was one of McCain’s advisers at the University of Kansas.
He teaches there and directs students on the university’s teaching newspaper,
the Daily Kansan.
He says his students have definitely benefitted from the good job market.
"It’s been a great job market, especially for copy editors, who can
almost name their place and their price,’’ says Eblen. "There are some
excellent copy editing jobs available, and some of our folks are scoring
big.’’
Reporting candidates haven’t fared as well. Newspapers tend to pass
over reporters fresh out of college, preferring any experience to taking
what they see as a risk on a young reporter. That’s not the case with copy
editors; those positions are hard ones to fill, Eblen said.
"It’s the old law of supply and demand,’’ he says. "There are just a
lot more copy editing jobs out there. And the key component there is that
copy editors have lousy working hours that don’t work so well as people
age and have families.’’
Papers looking to fill copy desk jobs would do well to stay in touch
with universities that are producing students with copy editing skills,
Eblen said. And you never can tell — that close contact might lead you
to a bright young reporter like McCain.
The Recruiter
Marvin Leon Lake, recruitment and retention director at The Virginian-Pilot,
knows that he can’t do it all by himself when it comes to finding new talent
for his newsroom.
So he’s turned recruitment into a responsibility for the whole staff.
"One person can do it,’’ says Lake. "I’m always saying to, for instance,
our copy desk chief: ‘You know more copy editors than I do, and your staff
knows more copy editors than both of us do.’
"The more names we put on the table, the more possibilities there are.’’
Lake has been at the recruitment game for a while; he knows that the
industry is in a hiring cycle right now. And he’s maintained contacts with
journalism schools and gone to job fairs on a regular basis.
But he also knows that’s not enough to succeed in a seller’s market.
The key, Lake says, lies in answering this question: "What can we do
to ensure we have top people in mind before we need them?’’
With that in mind, he has set out to turn the whole newsroom staff into
recruiters for the paper.
When staffers attend journalism seminars or forums, they carry along
forms they can fill out if they meet someone particularly impressive. Lake
uses those forms to solicit resumes and clips.
As part of the orientation process for new hires, someone at the Pilot
asks the new staffer who else he knows who would make a good fit for the
paper. Those names are also collected, and the promising prospects get
a letter from the paper, asking for resume and clips.
Lake contacts state press associations that sponsor contests for the
lists of the winners. And the paper, itself long considered a feeder
paper to major metros like the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington
Post, looks for good, smaller papers to feed its staff. The paper subscribes
to those feeder papers, looking for reporters who do consistently good
work.
But recruitment is only part of the equation, Lake stresses. That’s
why his title now includes retention.
"You’ve got to be thinking about how you’ll hold on to the good
people,’’ he says. "You can get caught up fighting fires, not paying attention,
and then somebody comes along and starts sending the flowers and the wine
and starts the courting process with one of your staffers.
"People want to feel like their careers are advancing, like they are
growing and developing, like they are getting what they need.’’
Lake suggests talking with staffers when they are hired to develop a
clear set of expectations. The supervisor needs to know what his employees
expects to get out in terms of career development; the employee needs to
know whether those expectations are realistic.
"In the hurry to bring that person in, you make so many promises,’’
Lake says. "You need to make sure you can deliver what you are promising.
And if you can, then that person just might turn down the offer from the
bigger paper, if they can honestly say they are getting what they need
from you.’’
Weaver, co-chair of The American Editor Committee, is managing editor
of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune.
