Small-a-nyana HR skeletons going back to the 1980’s

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After an interesting though not altogether inspiring history in advertising, Paul Brand decided to diversify his career and look for something a bit more inspiring. In those days, The Star newspaper was a major carrier of recruitment advertisements and for those who may remember, Tuesdays and Thursdays were the volume days. Scanning through the ads, Paul’s eyes lit up on an ad placed by a major paper manufacturer for a Shift Engineer – only problem being that some bright spark had left out the “f” in shift. That single omission had a substantial impact, not only on the future of recruitment advertising, but also within the HR and recruitment fields as a whole.

Back to the 1980s—Paul decided that if the omission of one letter in a recruitment advertisement could prove so embarrassing for a major corporation, then there just had to be a career calling and business opportunity to be had, ensuring that mistakes of this nature were not repeated and, in fact, that recruitment advertising as a whole could and should be substantially professionalised.

Thus, the first specialist recruitment advertising agency in S.A. was established. In later episodes, you will read about stories from HR conferences at Sun City, golf tournaments (27 of them in all!), crazy lunch dates, flights in helicopters to make presentations in very remote locations and the importance, in those days, of being able to communicate in Afrikaans. If that isn’t enough, there was also the extent to which a bit of rum in your coke can add distance to a senior HR’s golf driving skills, how to avoid driving a golf cart into a dam during a game and the extent to which an HR Director will go to in order to get a photo of him kissing Miss S.A. featured in the Sunday press and unmistakably get taken into police custody while on a train trip to Durban to attend a conference on “The effects on Productivity of attending a conference on Productivity“.
You may have gained the impression from the above that life in those days was a series of rather hilarious activities. It certainly had its moments, but in reality, the majority of time was spent on hard work—for example, devising innovative recruitment advertising solutions for sourcing staff qualified and prepared to play a role in building the massive Secunda Colliery or manning the many and diverse production facilities of the Armscor empire. Considerable time, effort and money were also spent sourcing talent abroad—this, in fact, led to a trip abroad by yours truly, but that’s another story altogether!

Now you might like to hear about one of the small-a-nyana secrets I mentioned. One day, I had invited Japs and Rob, both HR bosses from large corporations with a solid HR image to uphold, to lunch. Japs had a fitting in town for a black-tie suit for his upcoming talk to a group of dignitaries. As we drove up Barry Hertzog, Rob commented about my driving, this was after we had enjoyed a number of libations over lunch, which, as always, ended with the consumption of a bottle of Allesverloren port! I immediately stopped the car, got out, walked around to the back and sat inside with Japs. Of course, there was chaos and Rob was taking all the flack as he was in front. So, he got out and started walking; I, in turn, got out and took the keys and gave them to Japs and started walking after Rob. I can’t quite remember how we got it together, but we made it into town for Japs’ fitting on Loveday Street, but there was no parking. Rob then found a traffic cop and convinced him that we were a special group of dignitaries who needed their car monitored and protected—would you believe, this wonderful traffic cop looked after the car while we were gone for quite some time. I was sworn to secrecy on this story, even though it’s mild compared to some of the other things we had done.

It was at this time that creativity started to play a role in recruitment advertising. In essence, creative recruitment advertising began to bend the rules by, for example, illustrating the ethnicity and age of the ideal candidate for a position. The topic gained significant attention when the Sunday Times began presenting annual awards for creative recruitment advertising, which were published in their newspapers throughout the year. The awards were held at Sun City, but more about that later! There is a good and not-so-good side to creativity in job ads. The one side is that creativity can make an ad large and therefore expensive, but there is no doubt that it can be seen— that’s the client and agency’s objective, but in honesty that doesn’t make it a good advertisement, unless, it attracts a few top calibre candidates by virtue of what is being offered. Maybe that’s why the writer’s agency was a very prolific winner of recruitment advertising awards—an appreciation that creativity complements the really good motivation the client had to offer a really good candidate. One of our standout examples was a fairly large, full-colour ad placed right in the middle of a full-page, inviting candidates to see a variety of ads on the client’s website. That was a winner for me and for the client—it saved a fortune, built a database of talent and led the client to appreciate that job ads on corporate websites must be as good as the ads featured in the press.

Whoops, I have reached my word limitation for this first blog, but there is a lot more to follow… till next time. Paulus Pilates

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