Recruiting Secrets of the Smartest Companies Around

An ever-tightening job market calls for rigorous, creative recruiting techniques. Here are some of the good-old-fashioned ways to find workers, plus some new, unorthodox methods.

How far will you have to go to find the best people? No matter what your business is, the answer is the same: further than you've ever imagined

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.--Totally Apocryphal Technologies (TAT), a fast-rising player in the rapidly expanding field of genetic engineering, recently announced that it would proceed with a controversial program to take tissue samples from top-performing members of its engineering, sales, and management staff. Rather than using the samples to screen for illegal drug use or preexisting medical conditions, TAT hopes to use its recently developed human-cloning technology to address a critical lack of available talent. In a recent statement, TAT CEO Hugh R. Keating described the project as "a logical application of our core technology in what continues to be an extremely tight labor market."

Sorry, but the story above is fictitious. And even if cloning should become an option for today's employee-starved companies, it will be too late for Mark Roesner. Only a year ago, with sales at his filtration-and-fluid-handling-products company doubling every year, Roesner decided to take a drastic step in response to the job glut: he sold his company. "One key reason was the current job market," he says. "I decided it was impossible to grow and maintain our profitability level."

Roesner's solution may seem extreme, but his predicament is all too familiar. Thomas Kenyon, president of Pettit Fine Furniture, in Sarasota, Fla., grew so frustrated with the dearth of good people that he recently declared a 90-day growth freeze for the $1-million furniture-manufacturing company. "We told our sales reps to put a moratorium on finding new dealers," he says. "It was frustrating, but I knew it was the right thing to do." Kenyon says he still has to limit his growth (for instance, by not expanding into the Washington, D.C., area, where there's some demand for his furniture) because of the difficulty in finding qualified woodworkers.

Right now lots of folks are infuriatingly stalled, tantalized by the opportunity for record revenue growth but limited by their inability to locate qualified personnel. Frazzled CEOs are also lamenting increased employee workloads and the concomitant decreased customer satisfaction. It's becoming clear that for fin de siècle entrepreneurial companies, successful recruiting will make the difference between growth and stagnation--maybe even between life and death.

And the human drought shows no signs of letting up. According to Bill Styring, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, "It's going to get a lot worse." He points to the ratio of probable workers (ages 25-64) to probable retirees (ages 65 and over), which currently stands at four to one, as it has for the past three decades. However, in 2011 the first baby boomer will reach 65 and will be looking to retire, with 76 million fellow boomers right behind. That's when the ratio will start dropping, down to three to one in 2020, and to nearly two to one in 2030. "That's a demographic fact that business needs to deal with," he says. "The population of available workers is going to implode like you wouldn't believe."

As the need for employees becomes acute, CEOs are finding that their standby staffing methods aren't enough anymore. Two years ago, Lou Hoffman, president of a $5-million public-relations firm in Silicon Valley, was in the enviable position of being able to grow without necessarily adding new business, mostly because his high-tech clients were growing so quickly. If only he could find the staff to meet the demand.

Hoffman figured he needed to at least double the Hoffman Agency's staff of 25. He hired a recruiting consultant to generate leads. "Once we have the names, our close rate is pretty good," says Hoffman. "The problem was, our funnel was empty." Hoffman says his slot for group account manager--the chief liaison between the company and all its customers--went unfilled for 10 months, and his inability to meet client demand was starting to affect client satisfaction. Hoffman and other high-ranking officials took turns filling the void, but he says it was "only so long before clients started to feel there was no one giving them full-time attention."

That's when Hoffman realized his recruiting practices needed to be a lot more systematic. Previously the company hired on an as-needed basis, with Hoffman himself taking the hiring helm. Now, although his company wasn't always hiring, it needed to be always recruiting. Hoffman likens it to painting the Golden Gate Bridge: by the time the painting crew is done, it has to start over. By the time Hoffman's recruiting process has found a good candidate, he'll probably have a job for that person.

But for that to work, Hoffman's recruiting efforts needed to expand. So he replaced his 20-hours-a-week human-resources person with a full-time staffer hired primarily for her crack recruiting skills. "I know that sounds obvious," he explains, "but we were trying to limit 'unnecessary' functions, positions that didn't generate revenue. But it was foolish not to invest in full-time human resources." Hoffman also hired a 28-hours-a-week consultant to head up the company's on-line recruiting efforts, which include searching through Web databases, placing banner ads on third-party recruiting sites, and attending on-line career chats.

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