The Hindu Business Line : Now, they're on the job, riding radio waves

IN the crowded job market, it always pays to be innovative. Whether it's the employer wooing the employee or vice versa, it's creativity that picks the winner. And the IT industry has always come up with new channels for exploration — headhunters, online recruitment, and telephonic interviews.

i-flex Solutions has embarked on the latest version: Recruitment ads on Radio City, a Bangalore-based FM channel. Says Mr R. Vidyasagar, Vice-President, HR, i-flex Solutions, ``We have always looked at multi channels for our recruitment ads and we said, why not this new medium?''

The company chose three spots to be broadcast twice every day for two weeks. According to Mr Peter Yorke, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, i-flex solutions, ``Our gut feeling was that IT employees like to listen to Radio City. Unlike other mediums, here there's no market research available yet on the listenership, etc.''

The company chose two time slots, between 8 and 10 am and in the evening between 6 and 8 pm, because that's the time the IT employee is driving to work and listening to the radio in his car.

The campaign, which is just ending has already generated about 200 CVs for the company. Though the spots do not talk about any specific job vacancy, it urges the listener to look up the career pages of i-flex.

In a way, it's more of a brand building exercise for the company.

Agrees Mr Yorke, ``There are two things that have happened with this campaign. One is that the prospective employee is being made aware of the career opportunities at i-flex and another thing is the internal PR that we have managed to build up.'' Current employees are proud to be associated with the company and are relooking at the career pages.

i-flex is a solutions provider to the financial services industry and has provided solutions and services to about 350 customers in over 80 countries.

Has adopting this unconventional route presented any danger to its image? Mr Yorke explains that i-flex has never believed in staid ads.

``Even our product ads stand out and our brief to our ad agency is do things differently''.

Of course, when the agency presented the campaign to the company, Mr Yorke says, the company had to reject a few spots that sounded `flippant'.

But i-flex has gone in for a three-pronged effort of radio, print and relaunching its Web site for the recruitment campaign.

Simultaneous recruitment ads were released in leading national dailies. The two-week radio campaign cost i-flex Rs 2 lakh. As Mr Yorke says, ``The radio ads are mainly to create a mindset about i-flex and like in campus recruitment, we may not select all candidates, but build an image for ourselves in the career market.''

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