Good help is hard to find

With online talent in short supply, retailers increasingly grow their own

Scenic Cumberland, in the lush Potomac River valley in western Maryland, may beckon to hikers and bicycling enthusiasts. But it’s tough convincing the kind of skilled workers online retailers need to move to the city of 21,000 nearly a three-hour drive from Washington.

Just ask Kim Butler, president of web retailer Dishes, Décor and More, which is based in Cumberland. She has tried without success advertising open positions in newspapers in such nearby cities as Morgantown, W. Va., Altoona, Pa., and Hagerstown, Md. Nor has she gotten much from online job sites.

That’s why Butler was excited to hear about a new course this spring in Electronic Marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business. “Even if they are just graduating from college, they will be leaps and bounds ahead of what I’m going to be able to hire in this community,” she says.

Recruiting is particularly tough for e-retailers like Butler, who can’t offer the glamour of big cities, or the resume-enhancing allure of a household name like Google or Amazon. But finding skilled workers is tough for all Internet retailers at a time when unemployment is low, high-tech hiring is up and e-retailers are looking for people with skills that didn’t even exist a decade ago, such as developing pay-per-click advertising campaigns and analyzing how web site visitors respond to video.

“The market seems hot,” says David Scifres, the former head of e-commerce at CampingWorld.com and now a vice president with a unit of parent company Affinity Group Inc. “This is the most jobs I’ve seen in the market since 1997-98.”

Where to look

Like Butler, Scifres is looking for bright young university graduates to fill lower-level positions in marketing and programming. Executive recruiters are getting a lot of calls from online retailers looking to fill managerial positions. And some retailers have come up with a special perk or recruitment tactic designed to lure workers with Internet-related skills (see salary survey, page 108).

Evidence abounds for the robust demand for tech workers.

AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association, reported in April that the U.S. added 146,600 high-tech jobs in 2006, up nearly 68% from 87,400 jobs added the year before. Recruiting and placement firm Robert Half Technology reported a month earlier that its survey of CIOs found 14% planned to add full-time information technology staff in the second quarter while 2% planned staff cuts, a net 12% increase that was the second-highest in five years.

And when workers are in demand they demand more money. The Yoh Index of Technology Wages, based on wages of temporary technology professionals by placement firm Yoh Services LLC, was up 5.5% in January compared with January 2006. Wages for all U.S. civilian workers went up 3.5% in the same time, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Workers with just a few years of Internet experience are commanding substantial salaries. The 2007 National Salary Guide compiled by recruitment firm Crandall Associates says e-mail marketing managers with one to three years on the job are being paid $60,500 to $69,900 and those with four or more years $66,600 to $73,100. Internet marketing directors with one to three years experience are bringing home $80,000 to $89,300 and those with seven-plus years of work $93,800 to $122,700, the Crandall study reports.

And those are just base salaries, without counting bonuses or stock options. Harry Joiner, whose firm EcommerceRecruiter.com specializes in online retailing, this spring was working on a half-dozen vice president-level openings with larger web or multi-channel retailers. “Four of the six are paying over $200,000 base pay with a significant bonus on top of that,” Joiner says.

And wooing an experienced manager may require a signing bonus, says Les Gore, managing partner at Executive Search International, a recruiting firm. While they vary widely, Gore says a “welcome aboard” bonus for a vice president could be in the range of $25,000, reaching $100,000 for a company president or chief operating officer.

What execs want

Companies may have to pay well because there are so few managers with multi-channel experience that includes the web, says Rich Lloyd, president of Peruvian Connection Ltd., which sells luxury apparel and accessories through the web, catalog and four stores. “It’s really hard to find people who have experience in multiple channels and who understand the interaction between the web, catalogs and retail stores,” Lloyd says.

Lloyd’s own history illustrates how quickly talented people can advance. He was only 33 last year when Peruvian Connection hired him as president, scooping him up from Dell Inc., where he spent seven years in increasingly senior positions after completing his MBA at Harvard.

Why would he leave Dell for a family-owned company based on a farm outside of Kansas City? Lloyd, who admits he never expected to live in Kansas City, says, “The growth and leadership opportunities at a small or midsized firm can be attractive. And the integrity and caring with which this particular business has always operated aligns with my values.” Plus, Peruvian Connection, with web sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, has an international flavor and growth potential that Lloyd finds exciting.

For Kevin Green, the opportunity to work for an up-and-coming company that had recently gone public was one reason he left Lillian Vernon, an established gift and household products catalog and web retailer, last year to become president and CEO of Celebrate Express Inc., an online retailer of party goods. Also influencing his decision, which meant moving his family from New York to Seattle, was the uncertainty at Lillian Vernon, which was about to be sold for the second time in three years.

Get your story straight

Experienced online executives will take a hard look at any potential employer, which means retailers have to demonstrate that their top executives are fully behind a coherent Internet strategy.

Billy May, a consultant who has held senior online positions at Lowe’s Cos. Inc. and Benchmark Brands Inc., says he declined to pursue a couple of jobs because senior management was new to the Internet and had unrealistic expectations. “If there’s not a clear definition of success and a clear vision that’s rooted in reality, you can easily step into a situation where you couldn’t be successful,” he says.

Talent is also scarce at less senior levels, particularly in hot, new specialties like search engine optimization and marketing. Scifres of Affinity Group says he hired a junior staffer from CampingWorld.com and sent him to conferences and training courses to turn him into a search engine optimization specialist. “If you go out to the market, the compensation is high for SEO people, more than we can afford,” he says.

Scifres says compensation varies widely by market. Affinity Group, which operates 52 e-commerce and informational web sites, has operations in Los Angeles and Denver, as well as in Bowling Green, Ky., where Scifres is based. He says a search engine optimization expert in a major market can command a base salary in the range of $80,000 to $120,000, while in smaller markets they might receive $45,000 to $80,000.

Back to school

Scifres is one of several online retailers turning to local universities to find students to train in hard-to-find skills. He asks professors at Bowling Green University to recommend top students in marketing, advertising and programming, then offers the students part-time jobs at $8 to $11 per hour.

“In the first 90 days, if they’re not any good, we know it and get a replacement,” he says. “If they are good, they stay on for a year or a year and a half, and by that time they have experience.”

Tom Cox, president and CEO of web-only retailer Golfballs.com in Lafayette, La., gives presentations to business and computer science classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “That keeps me plugged into a steady flow of young people ready to graduate,” he says. “We really haven’t recruited nationally. We’ve found good talent locally and grown that talent.”

More courses are being taught in online specialties. Teaching the course at Ohio State is Laura Thieme, president of Columbus, Ohio-based search engine marketing company Bizresearch. Thieme says she proposed the course because she has trouble finding workers with knowledge of such subjects as paid and organic search, search engine optimization and web site analytics.

“I have a shortage of staff, and I don’t know of any search engine agency that isn’t struggling with it,” she says,

Also recognizing that staffing shortage, the Search Engine Marking Professional Organization this year launched its SEMPO Institute, which offers online courses in search marketing. The first course, Fundamentals of Search Marketing, attracted 81 students.

Think out of the box

In a tight market, retailers not only have to find good workers, they also have to recruit them. Gore, the recruiter, notes that nearly half of Ph.D. candidates in U.S. science and engineering schools are immigrants. He says companies that have a diverse work force and programs, including mentoring, that help people feel included will be more attractive to those from other countries.

Special perks or tactics can help attract and retain skilled workers.

Catalog and web retailer L.L. Bean tries to turn its location in Maine, well off the beaten track for many Stanford or Princeton grads, into a plus by offering employees free use of seven company-owned cabins and access to camping, fishing and other outdoor gear. The company also paid 4,900 employees, including all full-time workers, a 7.5% bonus last year.

So Young Park, who moved from New York City to head up e-commerce at Musician’s Friend, an online retailer, began a blog to describe to friends and relatives her experiences in rural southern Oregon. Joiner says the blog helped him recruit two candidates to work for Park last fall.

“The blog really humanized her,” he says. “I would e-mail it to candidates and say, ‘There’s the person you’re going to be working with. Read the blog and you’ll see how smart and nice she is.’”

And, every now and then, fortune smiles on a retailer, even one in Cumberland, Md.

Butler of Dishes, Décor and More says she recently hired an I.T. professional who had been working for defense contractors in the Washington area and wanted to move back to Cumberland, where she had a home and could more easily commute to West Virginia University, 60 miles away, to work on her Ph.D.

“She had the experience we had been looking for for six months and hadn’t been able to hire,” Butler says. “I lucked out.”

don@verticalwebmedia.com

What do recruiters charge?

There are two types of recruiting firms, with different fee structures.

Some recruiters work on a contingency basis and they only are paid if a candidate they find is hired by the client firm. Harry Joiner of EcommerceRecruiter.com works on this basis, and says his fee typically is about 20% of the employee’s first-year base pay.