Guest Writer – Katie Butcher

THERE’S STRANGER THINGS TO DO ON THE INTERNET…

We’re lucky at my firm, West End Enterprises, that we enjoy the benefits of an absurdly qualified team of staff and volunteers when we work here in Nashville. Our events are generally populated with people who come from great educational backgrounds and have solid industry experience. However, even through we made our home-base here, occasionally, like everyone else, we have to leave. Working out of town for almost any firm can be scary. (No, I’m not talking about shipping your gear…but that can be scary, too.) No matter how good your connections are or how well you know the area, at some point, you’ll likely exhaust your resources and need to pull in additional workforce. So you turn to the dreaded internet.

My experience has been that even the most tech-savvy of firms fear actually recruiting and hiring people online. After all, it’s the same medium that offers up daily email spam encouraging you to buy timeshares in Florida and male enhancement drugs. The platform that brought the world Farmville, Chat Roulette and stupid videos of that creepy dancing baby – do you really want to find your employees via this medium.

Yes, yes you do. We’ve had great success with it when working on out-of-town projects. Here’s how we’ve cut through the clutter, evaluated our potential team and made smart hiring decisions without talking to or actually meeting our out-of-town employees:

• Look - for a Base From which to launch your Email Messages or Online Posting

• Find – Colleges that specialize in music business or entertainment degrees, small town radio stations/clubs, professional development groups or even student groups are all great places to start because they offer you a pre-qualified pool of potential team members. To gain entry and maintain their existence in these organizations, they have to have some awareness of industry practices, standards and norms which helps weed out crazy fans or star-struck industry wannabes. They may also have some experience in events, radio promotions, grassroots marketing, etc.

• Pay Attention To Emails – Ask for a list of information in addition to the resume and application. A response that includes all of the requested info is a great, quick way to find out if someone can pay attention to details or follow instructions.

• Be Forthcoming

• Don’t be afraid – List parameters like dates, times, job length, hours, pay scale, responsibilities and required skills. People are typically pretty self-regulating and know when they’re out of their ability level. It’ll prevent you from reading a whole lot of under-qualified resumes in the end.

• Know Your Locale - Take ten minutes to Google the local colleges, major companies and other important industry connections that exist in the area. Knowing what’s available to your candidates in their neighborhoods will help you determine how involved they are within the industry. For example, an active individual is probably working his local weekend music fest once a year or volunteering to teach kids music at the town library on Wednesday nights. More often than not, those are the guys you’re looking for…but it’s hard to know that if you’re totally unaware of the local market.

• Bring in an Expert – A self-plug if I ever saw one but sometimes, the best way to manage online hiring is to just get someone who already knows how. Whether it’s a local recruiter or a company like mine that specializes in staffing projects in your area of expertise, it may be the best investment you make.

So, stop playing Mafia Wars and start looking for the talent you need…it’s probably out there hidden by those Linked-In invitations and yesterday’s email from the Prince of Whever asking for $5,000 to be wired to his personal bank account in the Cayman Islands.

The MCI team would like to give a big thank you to Katie Butcher for being our first guest writer on the site. We appreciate you being our guinea pig and letting us in on your expertise!

Katie is the first in our series of guest writers coming up each month. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest writer on MCI please contact us at info(at)musiccityinteractive.com.