Piper Jaffray: Losing track of time

Failure to keep track of a recruitment feature creates a damaging impression.

The Site

Piper Jaffray is one of the US’s oldest-established securities and investments firms with more than 100 offices across America. The Career Opportunities section of its website includes details of positions for college students and recent graduates in the investment banking division.

Among the supporting information is a Recruiting Calendar with a simple alphabetical search that allows students to check if and when Piper Jaffray is making a recruitment visit to their campus. However, all the dates listed fall between September 2004 and February 2005, while the calendar itself is headed ‘2003-2004’. There are no indications of future recruitment drives.

The Takeaway

For a firm whose reputation depends on paying meticulous attention to its clients accounts, Piper Jaffrays’ failure to keep track of its own investment in online recruiting is unfortunate to say the least.

The original investment was a smart one. Piper Jaffray is in the market for the pick of the graduate crop, and college students and graduates are assiduous researchers of potential employers’ websites. The searchable calendar is a neat way of channelling them into the campus recruitment programme – provided it is kept current. Continuing to post information that is self evidently out of date is damaging on the practical level of getting people in front of the firm’s recruiters. Especially so as the calendar dates would suggest that the start of the 2005-2006 recruitment round is less than two months away (if this isn’t the case, there should be at least a clear statement of when the next recruitment drive will take place).

But equally damaging is the impression it creates – slack, inattentive, more important things to think about – that runs counter to the alert, astute, dynamic one Piper Jaffray aims to give.

First published on 14 July, 2005