Directly contracting with an independent professional colleague: Outsourced professional employee Today’s economy challenges HR professionals to demonstrate their advocacy of responsible stewardship. Historically, personnel agency evolved as American franchise economy grew from 1950s. By 1970s, franchise usage expanded—from food to cars to personnel. The decade of 1990s required franchise and boutique staffing agencies to invest heavily in technology or sink in mud.

The novel Ivanhoe characterized soldiers who offered their lances to any king as free lances. Today’s e-commerce and growing media technologies, wireless Internet with DSL, and effective corporate Web sites with e-mail together provide daily tools used by modern entrepreneur. A solution with both strategic and visionary applications is to identify and formulate direct relationships with independent HR professionals. How can you partner and leverage these tools immediately?

With research, you can determine outsourced professional employee who is a solution in search of problems. A July 2003 survey by Consultive Source asked human resource professionals to rank importance of following three vision & values competencies held by HR vendors: •MEASURABLE RESULTS — Delivery of solutions by alignment of HR mission, vision and strategy •CONSULTIVE — Solving problems with hands-on industry experience, creating a strategic alliance significantly stronger than a typical vendor/supplier relationship •HUMAN RESOURCE LEADERSHIP — The blending of business savvy, leadership, facilitation/coaching, strategic perspective, conceptual thinking, internal consulting and tangible perspective of human resources within organization

The survey listed MEASURABLE RESULTS at top, with 77 percent of vote. CONSULTIVE SKILLS and HUMAN RESOURCE LEADERSHIP tied for second place.

Any freelance outsourced professional employee may prescribe to this and should prioritize their skill set accordingly. Concerns about outsourced professional employee’s abilities, stability and results can resolve themselves by taking a “test drive.”

Similar to your auto mechanic and electrician, you expect consistent service from those you know and trust. The traits exhibited by every outsourced professional employee must include high quality service, fair prices and deadlines met as needed to name just a few.

The right outsourced professional employee at a fair and competitive rate will provide innovation in education, strategy, technical resources and skills. Choosing to outsource and manage this partnership and process successfully will enable you to protect corporate capitol and shareholder value. Which technology applications or transactional differences describe your vendors as a strategic partner of choice?

Now, what happens to that goal? You select a strategy to get you where you want to be. The choices are few indeed when it comes to perception and opinion. You can create perception where there isn’t any, change existing perception, or reinforce it. That’s it. You should, however, match your strategy selection to your newly-established public relations goal.

Clearly, most sensitive, even difficult step in this problem- solving sequence is message preparation. At ther same time, it’s your opportunity to write something that will change somebody’s opinion, and that is a really satisfying experience.

First, your message must stick to its knitting and not ramble. Address inaccuracy, misconception, untruth or rumor clearly and in a believable and as compelling a manner as possible. Remember what it must do if public relations program is to be successful – alter, change or reinforce what a lot of people believe. And that is a big job and a big responsibility.

If message is bullet, your “beasts of burden” are gun, means by which your communications tactics carry your message to eyes and ears of members of target audience.

And what a list of tactics offer themselves to you. Everything from open houses, feature articles, press releases and speeches to personal contacts, broadcast appearances, newspaper interviews and so many more.

Your measuring stick for each tactic is, does it have a proven track record for reaching people like those who make up your target audience?

So, you will get antsy and wonder if you’re making any headway with your new public relations program. Best way to tell is to monitor target audience perceptions all over again. Use questions similar to your first monitoring session.

Big difference this time, however. Now, you need to see indications that perceptions are being altered as a result of your corrective message.

If you want to speed things up, you can always add a few more tactics to mix, AND increase some of their frequencies. The message should also be re-evaluated for strength and persuasiveness of its underlying facts, as well as impact and clarity.

Yes, you may believe you “don’t need no stinking PR,” but there’s no denying that people in your area behave like everyone else – they take actions based on their perception of facts they hear about you and your operation. So, you must deal promptly and effectively with those perceptions by doing what is necessary to reach them.

And what that means is, in your own best interest, you must persuade many of your stakeholders to your way of thinking, thus moving them to take actions that lead to success of your organization.

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Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks to general management personnel about the fundamental premise of public relations. He has been DPR, Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR, Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communications, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press secretary, The White House. mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com