Recruitment tales from the past: How smart ads created success stories

Smart recruitment ads can work wonders. Sometimes they can turn first-time entrepreneurs into crorepatis

Recently, I met up with Ranjan Chopra, an old client. It must have been nearly three decades since we last connected. As we chatted, he reminded me of a recruitment ad I had written (yes, I would sometimes double up as copywriter in those days) for his company, Team Computers, in 1991, or thereabouts.

 

He was back then a freshly minted, bright IIT engineer and had just launched his own company in a small basement office in Delhi. He already employed a dozen or so engineers, but business was growing exponentially, and he needed to ramp up recruitment quickly. So, we agreed to release a quarter page ad. “So, who is your ideal kind of employee?” I had enquired. “Henry. He’s one of our best. He’s well-qualified, hardworking, open to new learnings, and generally affable.” So, I went ahead and wrote the headline, “We are looking for Henry”. And described who he was, why we wanted to hire him, and why we would always value him.

 

Applications came in by the sackful. Day-after-day. The tiny basement office was inundated with thousands of CVs. The client was overjoyed. That much of the story I remembered from so many years ago. But Ranjan in our recent meeting told me something I had not known all these years. Three of his other top engineers, all of them Henry’s colleagues, quit the day the Team recruitment ad appeared. Ranjan went chasing them to their homes, but in vain. Henry had been glorified; they had been ignored. They were very hurt; and adamant. They never returned. An ad I had always prided myself on had actually caused unintended collateral damage — by glorifying one employee and alienating the others. A valuable lesson learnt, but learnt perhaps 30 years too late. Thankfully, Team Computers is today a Rs 3,000 crore company and has 4,000 Henrys that have joined Ranjan Chopra to help build a fantastic IT success story. So, my error of judgement from so many years ago can hopefully be forgiven.

 

Around the same time that I wrote the Team Computers ad, I won a CAG award in the Best Recruitment category (yes, as copywriter!) for a brand called Herbonic. The herbal milk additive had just been launched by two young entrepreneurs. The product was excellent. But it had zero distribution. So, I recommended a small trade recruitment ad which we ran in North India, our prime catchment area. “Where were you when Maggi, Surf & Rasna were looking for distributors?” screamed the headline.  The body copy went on to explain that Herbonic was going to be a blockbuster no smaller than Maggi, Surf and Rasna (yes, in those days we could use names of other brands without any fear of intellectual property issues!) and it would be a wise move both for the business, and for future generations to apply for a Herbonic distributorship. Since the client’s office was in some back-of-beyond location, we had put the address of our agency in South Delhi for correspondence and future dialogue.

 

The next morning, when I got to my office, there was pure mayhem reigning there. Hundreds of potential distributors (yes, no exaggeration on the hundreds) were queued up outside our office waiting to be signed up by Herbonic. Aspirants had driven from as far as 250-300 km early in the morning to be ahead of other suitors. Some had come by train. Some had bus-ed it and were alighting from autorickshaws. There was a jam outside our office, and traffic police had already been summoned by our neighbours. Street food vendors had magically appeared, selling chai and snacks to the swelling crowd. It was nothing short of a mela in progress. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

The client, of course, was over the moon. The duo was being treated like royalty and potential distributors were happy to signup on full advance terms and hefty volume commitments — something unheard of for a brand that was almost non-existent.

 

The ad had obviously been noticed elsewhere too. Many large FMCG companies started approaching Herbonic, keen to buy them out. The promoters couldn’t believe their luck! In a matter of months, they sold Herbonic to Maharishi Ayurveda, the Patanjali equivalent of the 1990s, pocketing a not-so-insubstantial sum by the standards of those days.

 

Smart recruitment ads can work wonders. Looking for the right Henry can cause a few departures, but if the Henrys keep coming, you get to build a big company. And hooking distributors by dangling a future Maggi, Surf and Rasna can enrich nouveau promoters by crores!    

The author is chairman of Rediffusion