Attracting and retaining the best and brightest

Whether you're recruiting prospective students, building your corporate team, or trying to strengthen your board or lab, competition for the best and brightest is a highly competitive endeavor.

To attract the best and brightest to your ranks in an era of unprecedented mobility, access, and options, organizations need to offer more than a degree, job, or seat on a board. They need to articulate a clear and compelling competitive position; they need to help their prospects—desirable students, high-performing employees, must-have faculty or board members—understand how your and their values and vision align.

Our approach

You need to demonstrate and prove that alignment on both rational and emotional levels. Rational, by showing you have the key offerings being sought; emotional, by showing that the prospect will feel like he or she will belong and connect to your culture. We help organizations look inward to articulate their core values, and outward to understand the dynamics of their markets.

Through strategic messaging, compelling visual design, and by crafting a communications architecture that helps you to connect to prospects through the channels that are most effective, we help you craft and communicate a story that really connects. We collaborate to express what's special and urgent about your organization, and help people see how they can fit in with your vision and how you can fit into theirs. And just as there are many ways to begin a dialog, there are many ways to continue it. You aren't monolithic and neither are your constituents. We design communications with different entry points and different "tours"—to begin and progress dialogues and to help relationships grow.

In practice…

Harvard College looks to assemble a student community diverse in many dimensions. But the school's brand, among the most well-known in the world, does not resonate with everyone; some qualified, desired candidates select themselves out. The messages and recruiting materials we've developed help the College reach into traditionally under-represented communities.

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research was founded through the largest gift ever given to MIT, but the new Institute would not have a real home for four years. We evolved a brand and communications system that helped (and continues to help) the Institute recruit top talent in research and leadership, and establish an influential place in the research community.

Goodwin Procter LLP is one of the nation's leading law firms, with 850 attorneys in seven cities. It is also growing. To attract new associates, summer associates, staff, and more experienced attorneys, it needs to project its strengths, values, and unique culture. We've worked with this energetic firm to help it connect to those people who will fit in, add value to the team, and propel the firm's vision.

MIT Sloan, among the nation's top management schools, needed to evolve a competitive position that it could own—one that would truly differentiate it among top-tier schools and attract candidates for its programs who would both fit in and benefit from the school's approach and culture. The brand system we collaborated to build balances powerful, shared messages across programs with more specific value propositions and details appropriate to MBA, PhD, and Fellows candidates.

Attract people closer by standing apart

The qualities that make your organization special and desirable may be clear to you, but harder for an outsider to discern. Delivering your message with power and clarity can help you stand apart from the crowd, and attract the people you need to realize your vision.