Meet the Influencers: Joe Coombs, Society for Human Resource Management

I’ve collaborated with Joe Coombs on Greater Washington business stories for more than five years. When we first met, he was covering economic development for the Washington Business Journal and I was working with the Greater Washington Board of Trade to share positive stories and economic indicators about our regional business community.

Joe recently changed fields for a position in the association industry, where works at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) as a workplace trends and forecasting specialist, SHRM’s research department tracks ongoing trends and issues in the workplace, and produces several Website publications and reports that are regularly sent to its 245,000 members around the world. I didn’t want our relationship to come to an end, and I was curious how PR and marketing professionals could continue to work with any journalist when he or she changes fields (which is increasingly common). I sat down with Joe to pick his brain on these topics and thought SBX readers would find the following interesting.

- Julie Buckley

1) Unemployment has hit a five-year high in the U.S. What are some of the challenges being faced by human resource professionals and recruiters during this difficult labor market?
For HR executives and recruiters that are actually hiring, it’s getting easier to find talent. With more people on the hunt for work right now, vacancies are getting filled at faster rates compared to this time last year. However, more companies are either laying off staff or freezing positions right now – a monthly employment indicator that SHRM publishes showed that hiring expectations in October 2008 are at their lowest levels in four years. That is based on responses from members of the manufacturing and service sectors. Together, those industries employ more than 90 percent of the nation’s private sector workers.

For those that are hiring right now, recruiting is also getting more costly for top-level positions, no thanks to the housing market. If a company can’t find the right person locally, relocation packages will come into play and they’ll be more expensive, considering the difficulty that many people are having selling their homes.

2) The changing nature of print journalism is forcing many reporters to change careers entirely. How do you suggest PR and marketing professionals, as well as industry subject experts, maintain their relationships with former journalists now working in different fields?
This will depend largely on the nature of the journalist’s new job. On a personal level, I have written about the economy and labor market for the past several years, and I’ll be transferring that knowledge to my new job with SHRM. As a result, I’m trying to keep close tabs with economists, recruiters, federal labor sources and others that I’ve called on in the past.

If the journalist’s new job takes him/her out of the field entirely, or completely removed from the subject matter that the PR/marketing/expert source specializes in, that can be difficult. In this case, I would suggest simply keeping in touch with this person through their transition to the new job, and perhaps asking if he/she can arrange for a meeting with the new reporter on their old beat. When I left my last job, I compiled a lengthy “beat note” that included plenty of contact information on sources for my eventual replacement. If you’ve had a good relationship with a journalist, ask if they’ll refer you to their replacement.

In many cases, it will be more important for the PR/marketing rep to maintain a relationship with the publication, and not so much the journalist.

3) Whereas you were once writing the news, now you are influencing the content to be considered newsworthy. What recommendations would you share with marketing communications execs on how to make their content story ideas interesting to journalists?
The first rule is to know the publication you’re targeting. Read it every day, every week or whenever they publish material on the Web, and get a real sense of the topics and issues they cover. A big frustration for journalists is getting a pitch that would have absolutely no place in their publication. As a business writer, I would get frequent pitches on either new businesses or companies that recently experienced rapid growth. Those are usually interesting only to the companies themselves that make the pitch, and there were no avenues for those types of stories in the paper because they occur so frequently.

Anything that’s unique or would have broad appeal for a target audience are the best bets. More importantly, before you even send pitches to a journalist, take time to meet with them first and find out what they’re interested in covering. Now, you don’t have to become best friends with this person, but a couple of informal coffee appointments can go a long way in understanding what they’re looking for in a story.