In the battle for corporate accountability, investor relations professionals who manage communications between a company and shareholders are under duress.In the prosperous 1990s, they had the easy task of pitching corporate success stories and maintaining high stock prices, but now the job has turned into permanent crisis management It’s no wonder companies are looking for a few good men and women to run their investor relations, or IR, departments.“These guys are right on the front lines and some of them are getting burned out,” said John Challenger, Chief executive of the Chicago employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. “A piece of information can cause an entire executive team to lose their jobs and send the stock price down.”The pressure is driving IR staff out of the field, experts say. The number of job vacancies in IR departments has jumped, with one top expert estimated the number of available positions rising ten-fold in the last six months. IR executives leave and are not replaced. “The whole investor world has been turned upside down,” said Bob Dilenschneider, a 30-year veteran of public relations and founder of the firm the Dilenschneider Group. As is damage control. Companies like Tyco International Ltd and Sealed Air Corp. are struggling to cope with investors ready to up and run at the slightest bad news, regardless of how its delivered.Tyco’s IR head left in June as the company reeled from accounting worries, inconsistent corporate strategy, and the indictment of its former chairman. But Tyco did not announce the departure for a month. Shares recently traded about 80 per cent below the year’s high in December.Sealed Air, hit with an unfavourable asbestos ruling last month, saw its stock slide nearly 62 percent in the two days after the news was released. It eventually called a news conference and tried to sooth frayed investors’ nerves by saying the market had overreacted, but shares remain at less than half their yearly high.It’s tough to reassure investors in an environment of mounting bankruptcies and disclosures of accounting irregularities that add up to the billions, experts say. “We train and condition people to believe us or not,” Steven Gaffney, author of “Just Be Honest” said. Now companies are scrambling to disclose everything from earnings statement to stock options. (Reuters)
