Talent Management: February 2009 Archives

Job postings can play an important role in finding candidates for specific types of jobs, however, when recruiting in highly competitive markets and for individuals with specific skill sets, it requires much more than a job posting. While I'm no recruiting expert, I've researched, experienced and learned a lot about the field over the past few years because of my involvement in GotVMail's recruiting process. As a result, I've learned a lot about what it takes to find the right candidates.

There are a lot of components to a good recruiting strategy: employment branding, authentic relationships, networking, process, among others, but for this post I am going to focus on creative sourcing techniques found "in the wild" that will put your company in front of the best off-market or "passive candidates."

Here are some examples I have seen that are really creative, ones I'll use to re-formulate our first concept, which will launch soon.

• Red 5 Studios - "Golden ticket"
  In 2007, Red 5 Studios was starting out and wanted to build an amazing team to develop online games. The company identified 100 of the best candidates with the exact skills they needed and sent them a package with a set of five nested boxes and a personalized iPod Shuffle. This generated a great response from prospective candidates, a load of media coverage, and is still referenced on their company website as generating great new candidates because of the enormous buzz it created.
• Fog Creek Software - "Get them in college"
  Joel Spolsky is well known for writing about his views on software, but an Inc. column he wrote in 2007 provides great insight into his process for finding the best college interns and paying them to work on production code and cool things in a true audition for a larger role (aka, a job with Joel after graduation). What I found particularly striking was Spolsky's description of how the company rolls out the red carpet for these interns, and makes sure the experience is amazing.

• Google - "Problem solving billboard"
  Remember how in the movie "Good Will Hunting" the MIT professor leaves a math problem on the blackboard in the hallway outside his classroom, and the janitor, played by Matt Damon, solves it in the middle of the night after washing the floors? This is a great example of a how effective a tactic like the one Google has used a number of times can be: ask for solutions to problems only people with the certain skills can solve, in a very public place. For example, in 2004, Google created a billboard that displayed a problem, and directed people to a website. Once on the website, visitors were then directed to an even harder problem. This was a clever way for Google to find people smart enough to solve such problems, and therefore, qualify them to work for Google.
• TokBox - "TokBox wants Yahoo's best"
  Yahoo announced a layoff of 1,500 people and quick-thinking TokBox, which recently raised money,decided this was an opportunity to get some of the best talent. They parked a taco truck outside of Yahoo to give out free tacos and job applications. This got some attention for sure-- maybe even the unwanted type from Yahoo security (!).

In our current economy, tons of people are looking for jobs. However, some of the best people are still employed, so you want to target that group as well. Creative recruiting becomes more important than ever if you have a staffing need that isn't being met by the traditional job posting. Here at GotVMail, we're trying to come up with a campaign that matches our culture and the type of people we want based in part on the aforementioned examples.

Have you seen a great recruiting campaign like the ones above? I'd like to know about it. Post your comments.

Part of our effort to further our "goals culture" was to put in place a performance review process that was valuable to both the individual team member as well as the team. I spent a lot of time reviewing performance management systems--all of which focused on reviews--looking at everything from huge companies to tiny start-ups. During this process I discovered that the human resource software market is a very odd one, and one that is mired in old-fashioned ideas and process. In short, many companies acquired products in an effort to provide an all-in-one solution, but the end result was the creation of many companies doing many things, but not doing any of them well.

After sitting through many demos, webinars, tours, I found SuccessFactors. At that point in time, I was impressed with their focus on performance reviews. Unfortunately, they have since gone down the "we do everything" path, which is too bad. Analysts' reports placed them as the leader in this narrow space and provided some great insight into what made them stand out, from the goals library and writing assistant to easy to use routing of forms. We ultimately decided that SuccessFactors would be the best choice for implementing a comprehensive performance review system.

We set out to create a quarterly performance review cycle that would closely align with our company, department and personal goals, while providing valuable and timely feedback to all team members. Of course, there is overhead in setting goals quarterly, between measuring them and providing feedback around goals and core values, but we feel this investment in our people is well worth it.

It's still a learning process for everyone and each quarter we will get better and continue to see the results. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and the interface is very difficult to use at times, but keeping personal or team member notes isn't efficient, either, and goals were not designed to be completed quarterly. Despite this, we push past these obstacles to make the process the best it can be.