The Recruiting Inferno

Very important article from today’s WSJ on creating an employment brand through overt creativity. Very nice quotes from Dave “Hole Man” Lefkow…

Extra special thanks to Rob “Google’s Inspiration for their Company Came from my Last Name” Dromgoole for apprising me of this article.

Start-Up Lures Talent with Creative Pitch

Red 5 Studios Created a Wish List Of Its Ideal Job Candidates and Set Up A Campaign to Woo Each One

By SIMONA COVEL

June 4, 2007; Page B4

Four months ago, a FedEx box landed on the desk of Scott Youngblood, a videogame designer working in Bend, Ore. Inside, he found a glossy box nestled in thick foam. Inside that box was another and, within that one, another.

Eventually, Mr. Youngblood opened five boxes, nested Russian-doll style, and discovered an iPod shuffle music player engraved with his name. He pressed play and heard the voice of Mark Kern, president and chief executive of online videogame maker Red 5 Studios Inc., talking about Mr. Youngblood’s past work on games and inviting him to a Web site to learn more about Red 5.

“I was blown away,” says Mr. Youngblood. Within two weeks, he interviewed at Red 5. And a little over a month later, he started a new job there — leaving his position at Sony Corp.’s Sony Computer Entertainment America and moving more than 800 miles away.

Chasing the Best

Mr. Youngblood’s package was one of 100 that Red 5 sent to its “dream hires,” identified through a concerted recruiting campaign. Four months after the recruiting effort launched, three of the candidates have joined the Aliso Viejo, Calif., upstart while one is currently interviewing. And industry buzz about the campaign has helped to raise the company’s profile.

Red 5 has struggled to compete against established, well-known companies to attract top talent. Traditional postings on industry Web sites didn’t generate enough résumés. Placing ads next to big companies’ or setting up booths beside them at industry fairs, Mr. Kern says, “diminished the perception of the opportunity and didn’t do us any good.”

It’s a perennial concern for small companies with limited resources, recruiting budgets and name recognition. “Most people you want are probably working,” rather than trolling job boards, says Dave Lefkow, chief executive officer of talentspark, a recruiting consultancy in Seattle.

So experts say small firms’ resources are often best spent focusing on ideal job candidates and courting them in attention-grabbing ways, rather than casting a wide net with job listings and waiting for candidates to come to them.

“The key point is creativity” for small companies, Mr. Lefkow says.

The Wish List

Red 5 was founded in 2005 by several members of the team behind the popular online game “World of Warcraft.” It has 37 employees in the U.S. and 12 in China, and hopes to fill as many as 30 additional positions in coming months. Red 5 was self-funded until late last year, when it received $18.5 million from venture-capital firms Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures, both based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Last summer, a company board member quizzed the 39-year-old Mr. Kern about how hiring was going, and, he says, he could answer only that he had ads placed and recruiters working on searches. “The resume flow was very poor,” he says. “No one had heard of us.” With many competitors trying to double their team size, Mr. Kern adds, “it’s pretty tough out there.”

The director told him he wasn’t looking for the right people — or using the best methods. So Mr. Kern decided to come up with a wish list of videogame pros he would ideally like to hire and find a way to tell them about Red 5’s plans to build its flagship game. He hoped to fill three or four key positions and sow the seeds for more hiring.

Red 5’s staff, then numbering 20, brainstormed on a roster of about 250 sought-after game developers. Then, Mr. Kern and about 10 employees spent four months learning what they could about each. “The hardest part of the project was the research,” he says. “It starts with Google, and you branch out from there.”

They rented and played the developers’ games, looking for the animation style or technology they wanted in their games. Hunting for clues to individualize each pitch, the team tracked down the prospects’ blogs and posts in industry forums. The list eventually narrowed to 100.

At the same time, Red 5 looked for help in crafting the pitch. The company spent $4,000 working with a Seattle design firm that Mr. Kern says didn’t seem to understand who Red 5 was trying to reach. So he turned to San Francisco-based Pool, whose package designs he had seen and liked.

After considering a few options — including an envelope containing a key, to be followed the next day by a locked box — the company settled on the nested iPods.

The fifth box contained an iPod with a personalized recording from Red 5’s CEO Mark Kern.

Mr. Kern installed a Chinese gong in the office to ring each time a candidate contacted him. The day the packages were expected to arrive, “nothing happened,” he says. “It was nail-biting.” But within a couple of days, the gong was ringing so often the building manager called to complain, he says.

The project’s initial budget was $8,000, a figure Mr. Kern says is “laughable.” By the time the company was finished, it spent $50,000 — about as much as it would cost to pay a recruiter to fill two key positions, he estimates.

Creativity on the Cheap

Talentspark’s Mr. Lefkow says firms lacking the same kind of recruiting budget can still replicate Red 5’s strategy. For instance, a company could offer gift cards or an invitation to a company-hosted event. Or luring talented candidates could be as simple as sending flowers and a note or a birthday card.

Also, small firms have an advantage in being able to reach out from the CEO’s office — a touch that’s appreciated by job candidates, Mr. Lefkow says, and that’s difficult for big companies to replicate because big-company CEOs typically don’t get involved in rank-and-file hiring.

Mr. Lefkow adds that when companies don’t have a lot of money to spend, it’s important that they focus on the right pool of candidates.

While Red 5’s project drew the hires and interest hoped for, it was costly and time consuming, Mr. Kern says, and the firm doesn’t plan to repeat it anytime soon. “Our resume flow is about 10 times what it was before the campaign,” he says. The company lists job openings on its Web site, but it doesn’t post paid ads on job sites anymore.

Less quantifiable are the relationships forged and the boost to the firm’s cachet within the industry. The campaign triggered a wave of blog posts from gamers, recruiters and marketers.

“Getting a new T-shirt is nice, but it seems like there are probably better ways of making an impact on new recruits,” says Jay Jamrog, senior vice president of research at Florida-based Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp).

“The company should use the opportunity to have new employees communicate and build relationships with leaders in the organization right out of the gate.” Jamrog also added that orientations “offer a unique opportunity to gather a new recruit’s impressions of the marketplace and the company.”

In employment parlance, that would be selling the brand.

What bothers me as a recruiter with both in-house and out-house experience is how often recruiting has little say on the matter of orientation. Mediocre orientation screws up world-class recruiting 9 out of 10 times (made-up statistic), yet few organizations let recruiters in on the fun.

Just imagine…

Read the entire SHRM article here.

Is it possible that the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department needs to be trained in how to effectively – and legally – hire people for its own organization?

In a very small article that I almost missed in today’s Newsday, “…the department said it also was looking into hiring practices within its Civil Rights division. Lawmakers have questioned whether the division has hired prosecutors with strong political resumes but little civil rights experience.”

Apparantly the department’s former White House aide admitted that she erred in considering applicants’ Republican Party loyalty before approving their hires.

In an unusual move, a letter signed by Justice Inspector General Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility counsel Jarrett, effectively widened the existing Justice Department probe into hiring practices by the White House aide, other Justice officials, the Civil Rights division, the department’s honors programs and summer law intern positions.

Nothing quite like the fox being in charge of the hen house.

This past week saw quite a few articles on Circuit City’s laying off 3,400 of their most experienced sales clerks; my two favorites were David Carr’s “The Media Equation” column entitled, Thousands are Laid Off: What’s New? and Maureen Rogers, Pink Slip blog post, Circuit City: Layoff Circuits on Overload.

In case you missed it, they “fired the cream of their work force, not even giving those employees a chance to re-apply immediately for their job at lower wages until after a cooling-off period of 10 weeks. In doing so, the company engaged in a kind of domestic outsourcing.”What they also succeeded in doing was destroying one employment brand and replacing it with it’s sinister twin. I wonder if the recruiting leaders at CC even put up a fight?

In his Times column, Carr wrote that “Circuit City seems to have forgotten that the customer interaction — the user interface…is their point of difference in an age when consumers can have perfect pricing information with the click of a mouse.” As Christopher Martin, Associate Professor of Journalism at Miami University noted, “In a service economy where all the books say you are supposed to put the customer first, Circuit City is doing exactly the opposite.”

In the same way, the rank-and-file employees are a company’s point of difference not the C-levels. Yet it appears as if this concept is lost on the Circuit City decision makers – on the Circuit City website is this gem:

Our Associates are our greatest assets. We expect every Associate to demonstrate that they respect and value others for their efforts, their knowledge, and the diversity that they bring.

For all the rhetoric accorded ethics and rusing in the ERE community, nowhere has anyone brought up the word “backbone” – as in where was the backbone of the head of Circuit City’s recruiting team when all this carnage was taking place?

Considering that a politician or two may shortly be taking a white-collar vacation at Camp Woah-Is-Me, I suspect that they’ll be forced to wear ankle bracelets to monitor their movements. Which got me thinking about a cure for all that evil rusing that is purported to be running rampant in our profession save for the people who belong to associations and take vows of ethical behavior.

A neck “bracelet” that gives a shock whenever a recruiters ruses – produced by the new Corporate division of Fido Fences. Just a thought.

I’ve been involved in this community for 10 years. During this period Manaster has managed to look the same, Dalton is still enamored with the grunge look (ok, he’s much cleaner now). From a scant few curious recruiters to tens of thousands now, we’ve grown from articles written by Lou, John and Kevin to articles written by Lou, John and Kevin (jk – the slate of authors is exceptionally impressive these days – and even more thought provoking than back in ERE’s prehistoric era). From no groups to groups of all shades and colors – I still can’t believe my NYC ERE Group was the first; from no blogs to blogs offering both thought provoking and colon tightening content (again, hard to grasp that I had the first one).

[Yes, I’m one of the ERE’s guinea pigs]

In anticipation of a “state of the community” article by David Manaster (prod-hint), I’m curious as to how YOUR association with ERE has impacted how you approach recruiting. What has changed since you’ve joined the community? What are your favorite parts of ERE.net?

It’s all about community development…

The on-going inane battle between corporate (in-house) and third party (out-house) recruiters continues on the ERE, various yahoo groups, and even on calls I make (from a TPR who went “dark side” and is wondering what they can do to smooth the transition). This argument is a big crock of…

All this energy is misplaced; grey matter is being wasted; we’re missing the chance to use our collective intelligence on far more important issues. Yes, I’ll start explaining. 

My friend Gerry Crispin has time and again given the Army’s website the only five-star listing among career websites – and I wholeheartedly agree. You think your workload is tough? Try being an Army or Marine recruiter (not to slight Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard recruiters but recruiting for ground fighters is just a notch above in difficulty; and to those wondering, no, I have never been a soldier – want to be one – but I have been a COI for several years). “Why yes, Ma’am, your son/daughter will most likely see combat and the bullets will be real. Yes Sir, the casualty figures are real as are the number of soldiers who return from war disabled.” And you’re complaining about your open workload of 42 positions…or HR managers who don’t return your calls. Please.

So here we have our country spending BILLIONS on soldiers, equipment and warfare to put out the best fighting force ever (sure it’s debatable but not here; and for the record, I’m against the conflagration in Iraq but will do anything possible to support those fighting) and how do we repay those who come back missing arms, legs, and significant parts of their sanity?

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was only after Dana Priest and Anne Hull wrote this story in the Washington Post on February 17 that the DoD took notice and began to make changes. Priest noted that, “the Army said they were unprepared for the large numbers but that’s been four years now.”

“When we came to them with these problems, they laid out a number of improvements that they had made, including hiring more staff, to bring down the case manager-to-patient or -outpatient ratio, and those sorts of things.”

“I think they need more training. The soldiers complained often, and this was very surprising, about being rudely treated by people at Walter Reed, obviously not everybody. There are a lot of people who care up there and work very hard. But often they got treated, they thought, in a not very compassionate way.” 

It’s all rosy when we recruit but once a person becomes staff they are more frequently treated in a substantially different way. Your employment brand is more than what recruiters do – and I’m talking in-house and out-house recruiters. Yet as a profession we talk about brand as if it’s something that is owned solely by recruiters yet most organizations don’t give recruiting sufficient resources and span of control to do something about it.

Bottom line: Any recruiter who doesn’t at least attempt to ameliorate less than ideal working conditions after hiring a person should be ashamed of themselves.