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One of your network administrators has just given notice that he's leaving to pursue other interests. You wish him a fond farewell, then get down to business - you need to find a replacement, and pronto. You dig out a recruitment ad you drafted three years ago, brush it up, then rush it off to your human resources department. You're feeling great: It's not even noon, and you've already made considerable headway toward finding a great new someone to watch over your gigabit backbone. Nice try. If your idea of effective recruiting rests on an ad in the Sunday help wanted section, you're sorely out of touch with today's best hiring practices. Once a bastion of employers and job seekers, newspaper ads today serve next to no purpose for smart companies looking for IT talent.
"The only people reading newspaper ads are those who are job hunting, but most people make job changes when they back into an opportunity. A recruiter calls, or a friend or a vendor," says Jane Snipes, project manager at Management Recruiters in Kannapolis, N.C.
If you still haven't developed more with-it methods for recruiting, be warned: Your competition for IT talent has. Sunday recruitment advertising is down 20% from 1998, says Duke Getzinger, president of Interaction, Inc., an interactive ad agency that focuses on recruitment. Much of the decline can be attributed to high-tech companies rethinking how to get access to potential employees, he adds.
Brooktrout Technology, a small network equipment vendor and Interaction client, is one company willing to venture into unusual waters to find new employees. In fact, the company hasn't posted a job ad in the main local paper in about two years. As Brooktrout's HR Director Jamie Basler says: "We want to attract computer-literate people, and that takes a different approach."
Basler, like counterparts at an increasing number of technology companies, favors the Web as a recruiting tool. Last year, more than 80% of the 10,000 résumés Brooktrout received came from the Web. It hired 75 of those people. "We obviously have to do a lot of sifting, sorting and screening, but we've found posting and sourcing résumés on the Web to be highly effective," Basler says.
But even posting and sourcing résumés on the Web is becoming blasé. So what did Basler do this fall to find the Unix administrator and help desk technician needed to round out Brooktrout's IS department?
For starters, Basler coupled an age-old incentive - cash - with a New Age employment forum - the Web. Her goal was to extend the company's employee referral program to outsiders via a Web site.
As of late September, anyone who has a Web browser can hit www.brooktroutcash.com, read about open positions at Brooktrout and refer someone. If the nominee gets hired, the person who submitted the name pockets $1,000.
Likewise, successful internal referrals will net an employee $3,000. Basler has even reprogrammed the company coffee machine so its electronic greeting reminds employees of the referral program.
Brooktrout IS Director Chris Ledoux especially likes the idea of BrooktroutCash.com and the internal referral program. "It's how we've gotten great people from all around [Boston's] Route 128 high-tech area."
Of course, it's not likely that many people will just happen upon BrooktroutCash.com in a routine Web stroll. So Basler has to promote the site. For that, she envisioned the company's name on the big screen. Customers seeing movies at one of five theatres near Brooktrout headquarters in Needham, Mass., or one near the company's Los Gatos, Calif., office will see a preshow ad promoting the BrooktroutCash.com site. "These are captive audiences of local people - why not?" Basler says.
The same could be said of commuters driving down Route 128. That's why Basler plans on draping headquarters with a banner advertising the company's hiring needs in general or BrooktroutCash.com in particular. The building is visible from that hallowed highway, and Basler already has found banner advertising effective in drawing IT people to open houses she's held to find new hires.
Silicon Valley companies have found building banners and billboards effective at getting the word out on hiring, as well. On-Link Technologies, an electronic commerce start-up, even sent an airplane circling over the heads of commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area one morning last month. Its target: employees at Intel, Oracle, Siebel Systems and Sun who might be impressed enough to pursue jobs with the company.
Finding the best job candidates is all about motivating people and driving their curiosity, Interaction's Get-
zinger says. He cites as an example a recruitment campaign he orchestrated for Motorola, which was seeking embedded systems engineers.
Interaction secured the registered attendee list for an embedded systems engineer conference and sent 1,300 people from that list a transparent plastic card with the simple message: "www.forewarned.com. Go ahead, tempt fate." The card piqued the curiosity of 1,100 recipients.
Once each of these people went to the Web site, they discovered that Motorola had job openings. "We provided a comfortable environment where they could provide information to Motorola without their employer knowing," Getzinger says.
Hiring managers within corporate IT (or their partners in HR) have to use the same sort of resourcefulness in trying to find new employees.
"You've got to apply reverse engineering. You have to base your search on the habits of the people you want to hire," Getzinger says.
If you're looking to hire a WAN technologist, for example, then the best place to start is with other people in the network department. Ask those folks what newsgroups they participate in, what publications and newsletter they read, what Web sites they visit, what associations they belong to, and what trade shows and conferences they attend. Heck, even ask them to save all their junk mail. Then get the mailing lists, contact the Webmasters, hunt down membership information or attendee lists, and think of some innovative way of capturing the attention of all the other people on those lists, he says.
Maybe one of your network staff participates in a local user or standards-setting group. Open your doors for the group's next meeting, give everybody some pizza and something to drink, and leave them with literature on your IT department and what jobs are available, Getzinger suggests.
Maybe your staff members download source code from a favorite site. Sponsor that site, but don't stop there. If you really want to capture the attention of potential job candidates, see if you can get your recruitment ad placed in the window that appears while that source code downloads.
While recruiting college students, one Interaction client asked for a family history. It discovered that 63% of the students were pursuing engineering degrees because a parent had one. Now that's an interesting statistic that the best hiring managers would run wild with, Getzinger says. "Use the student as a liaison to the professional. Offer an incentive: 'If we hire your mom or dad, we'll pay for your books for a year.' "
Inacom, a large technology outsourcing firm, wanted potential job candidates to have fun at its Web site while it gathered knowledge about them. So it morphed plans for an Internet-based technology assessment tool into development of a multimedia game that quizzes participants on a variety of LAN and WAN topics. Top scorers are eligible for a quarterly $1,500 same-as-cash drawing. They also become the target of one-on-one marketing: "We capture people's names, mailing addresses and e-mail so we can recruit them," says Eva Fujan, vice president of technical recruiting at the Omaha, Neb., firm.
Inacom passes out "tickets" for game play to potential job candidates at career fairs, college recruitment sessions and trade shows. Fujan estimates that an average of 2,000 people play the game monthly and that Inacom has hired between 200 and 300 of them (out of a total of 2,000 to 3,000 employees yearly).
She considers the game a big success and intends on expanding it to drive even more people to the site. After all, even if those people play the game but don't apply for a position, they'll be giving Inacom their contact info - and that's a huge advantage for anyone in hiring mode.
As Shaun Kelly, vice president of IT recruiting firm EDP Staffing Services in Newington, Conn., and author of Network World Fusion's Career Doctor column, points out: One of the best things to remember when you're looking for job candidates is that they're not looking for you.
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