Last week, we introduced numerous examples of organizations using talent contests, corporate challenges, and awards programs to source top talent that might otherwise be overlooked. This week, our attention turns to the action steps required to take advantage of this recruiting approach. Hopefully, you’ve had time to think about what recruiting needs you have that could be resolved through contests, and can start to develop a program as you read on.

Action Steps

If you want to take advantage of contest and award recruiting, here are some suggestions to get you started. We have broken the suggestions down into two categories: using other organizations’ contests, and running your own. Each can be wildly effective. If you don’t have the budget to launch your own contest, taking advantage of those that already exist is the next best thing.

Using Existing Contests, Challenges, and Awards Programs

The first step is to ask your current top performers in each mission-critical job family what prominent awards and contests already exist in their field. Professional organizations tend to offer the most awards and contests, and could often use sponsors and judges. Focus on the associations that represent your hard-to-hire and mission-critical functional areas. While sponsors can make demands in some cases, judges are given greater access to the actual talent, so figure out what you need from the relationship and pursue the role that best suits your needs. If the opportunity to serve as a sponsor or judge is not available to you, consider building a relationship with the judges and follow up with them after the event to find out which contestants impressed them. If the judging panel isn’t cooperative, look for a way that is not as barrier-prone. For example, you might consider sponsoring a special section of a local university’s newspaper to profile the contestants or interview the judges.

Examples of Professional Association Contests and Awards Programs

• The Robot Challenge. This year marked the 10th anniversary of the IEEE Robot Challenge. Founded by the Baltimore section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the challenge allows teams of students to design, construct, and battle robots. The contest is intended to provide students with a full life-cycle view of life as an engineer.
• Gold/Silver/Bronze Quill Awards. The International Association of Business Communicators operates local, regional, and international awards programs that recognize outstanding results in thought leadership, strategic management, creativity, and resourcefulness in business communications. Chapters exist in most major cities.
• IEEE Electromagnetics Award. This award is just one of many awarded annually by the IEEE. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to electromagnetic theory, application, or education. More can be found on IEEE Awards by searching its website for “awards.”
• National Energy Finance Challenge. Hosted in 2005 by the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin, this challenges pits teams of students from top schools, including the University of Chicago, MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wharton, against one another in case work. Winners in 2005 were selected by a judging panel that included corporate representatives from Chevron, Shell, Merrill Lynch, ConocoPhillips, Deutsche Bank, and Chiron Financial.

Other creative approaches to finding contests to use include:

• Universities. Ask recent graduates, “What contests and awards identify top students?” I’ve known individual professors to hold contests using any real company problem within a key class in order to assess their students’ problem-solving ability. I have used this “solve a real problem” approach in my own classes targeting Google, Genentech, Intel, HP, and Cisco. In each case, at least one student was hired.
• Business magazines. Also consider BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Business 2.0, all of which frequently list top innovators and up-and-coming stars. For example, this month’s CIO magazine lists the top 20 up-and-coming stars in IT. It’s a recruiter’s dream.
• Promotion announcements. Consider “just promoted” announcements in press releases or in your local newspaper as the equivalent of an award winner (for future recruiting) and several suddenly unhappy recruiting targets (those who didn’t get the promotion).
• Benchmark companies. In addition to targeting individuals who win awards, you also need to look at companies that continually win awards like Fortune‘s “Best Companies to Work For,” Working Mother, or the Fortune diversity list as prime recruiting grounds.
• Bloggers. There are numerous lists which highlight the very best bloggers in the different functional areas. Don’t miss them as targets.
• People who are quoted. It might seem strange but individuals who can successfully run the cynical and demanding gamut of reporters and editors to get quoted in professional articles are likely to be people on top of their game.
• Speakers. Individuals selected to speak at professional meetings and trade fairs are also likely to be, or to know, top performers.
• The Web. Innovators can be found in many areas of the Web. Individuals who contribute to open-source programs are great targets, as well as individuals who write great entries in Wikipedia (in fact, Wikipedia itself holds contests).

Running Your Own Contest or Challenge

While running your own contest or launching your own registration-required publication may seem like a lot of work, it’s a relatively quick data-generating process in which people voluntarily tell you about themselves.

To top performers, competing in a process that tests their skills and provides recognition is significantly more palatable than sitting through an online assessment designed by a training professional using a textbook as the source of expertise. To get started, determine which job families within your organization will need or currently need an infusion of more than one candidate. Work with functional leaders in each of the areas that need talent to devise a real-world business problem that could serve as the basis for a challenge. Collaborate with line managers and corporate finance to determine the relative value of both the solution and the influx of new talent and secure resources for the award and the program. With a topic in mind, next map out potential media partners.

Media partners will bring participants to the process and lend the entire challenge more credibility. You might also want to approach your organization’s strategic partners to cosponsor the challenge, offering them registrant information as a benefit and the opportunity to serve as judges. With all of that in mind, the next step is to work with an event planner to build out the time line, requirements, process, and event components. A contest will not happen overnight. If that seems like too much work, consider outsourcing the challenge to a local university; universities always need more resources, access to companies, and visibility in the community.

Conclusion

Because the very best are not hard to find, you should expect some competition in recruiting them. However, competition will be less of a barrier than you might think because few recruiters have the courage to target award winners. That said, there’s one challenge you will have to overcome. These individuals are generally employed and now know that they are at the top of their game, so convincing them to consider another job requires you to provide them with an offer that is clearly superior to their current job. When you use contest recruiting, the battle shifts from finding prospects to convincing them to apply and accept. If you’re not sure what it takes to convince them to shift jobs, consider asking them directly, “What would be your dream job?” Also ask, “What criteria would you use to determine if a new job was right for you?”

If you can get these two questions answered, all you have to do is tailor the job and the situation to fit their criteria. It might seem like a lot of work to tailor a job to these individuals, but these award winners are likely to be game-changers and magnets who will almost automatically attract other top performers. Organizations keep saying they want the very best. Now you know where to find them. The remaining question is: Do you have the courage to try contest recruiting?

You may not have realized it, but a growing number of functional excellence awards programs are promoted, sponsored, and, in some cases, even organized by corporations. From math challenges to contests aimed at identifying the best customer service associate in a local geography, these events are quickly becoming a powerful tool used by organizations to build a who’s who database of talent. Even events that are not corporate affiliated are hunting grounds for good recruiters. Why are contents growing in popularity? Well, isn’t it obvious? If you wanted the fastest runner, what better way to find him or her than to wait at the finish line of a foot race? If you wanted someone that could dunk a basketball, the winner of a slam-dunk contest would be an obvious choice. Want the best golfer? Look for the one with the brand new tacky green jacket (at the Masters).

Finding the best in business is just as easy. If you want to identify the very best, it should be obvious that you should target any process that sorts through hundreds of professionals and then identifies the very best. Now is the time to begin looking at the winners of professional awards and contests as recruiting targets. Better yet, maybe you should consider sponsoring your own contest as a sourcing channel. The very best are not hard to find; their names have just been called as award winners.

Recruiting at Contests? I’ve Never Heard of That!

Now, maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ve never heard of that before,” or “My company would never do that.” But, before you start thinking negatively, realize that the practice is actually quite common. Notable firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, UBS, Bloomberg, Motorola, and even the National Security Agency have used contests as recruiting mechanisms. If you haven’t used them, you’re missing out on one of the most cost-effective mechanisms for identifying the very best. If you haven’t seen it, it might be because most awards and contest recruiting is stealthy.

The Benefits of Recruiting Contest and Award Winners

There are numerous reasons why you should recruit contest and award winners. Some of the primary reasons include:

• It’s easy. Finding the winners is incredibly easy because the names of the winners and the finalists are almost always published.
• Selection is based on results. Contests focus on results rather than the more prominent screening criteria of education or experience. As a result, when you recruit an award winner, you’re getting someone that has actually produced superior results.
• They’re a great source of ideas. If you run the contest, even if you don’t end up hiring one of the winners, you do get to capture all of the answers and ideas that were generated. Many times, the business value of these ideas far outweighs the cost of the contest.
• It’s also a learning tool. After identifying award and contest winners, the conversations with them can be great learning mechanisms, whether you hire them or not.
• Referrals are another output. Obviously, you can’t hire every award winner, but you can certainly build a relationship with them and use them as a referral source. They might refer mentees, people they know, or even members of their own team that need new experiences or who are in dead-end positions.
• It’s cheap. If the contest is run by someone else, there’s no cost in capturing the names of the winners. If you run the contest, most entries can be done online, so there’s no paper and the administration is easier. For software contests, the entries can even be assessed automatically using software.
• It’s low-volume and high-quality. Most recruiting sources get you high-volume and low-quality candidates and, as a result, sorting is a nightmare. However, when you’re recruiting award winners and contest champions, there are no “turkeys” to screen out. All of them are winners, and often even non-winner participants are also top performers (in the Academy Awards, even the losers for Best Picture are probably outstanding).
• They’re less biased. Because most contests are anonymous and are based on real problems, the process is generally less biased than most face-to-face selection processes.
• It’s global. Because contests can be web-based, it’s possible to get global award winners and thus global recruiting targets without having to get on an airplane.

Still Not a Believer? Would You Believe That a Contest Can Find Gold Underground?

How about a contest to find gold underground that was won by someone a continent away that never set foot in the mine? In this example, a contest was held to find a business solution. Rob McEwen, a former banker with Merrill Lynch, followed the dreams of his father who had a passion for gold. Rob became a majority shareholder in Goldcorp, Inc., which owned an underperforming mine in the Red Lake gold district of Ontario, Canada. The mine had extremely high operating costs, labor issues, and was producing less than one-third the gold that other neighboring mines were producing. Rob looked at the output from a neighboring mine and decided he needed another way to find it. This industry had historically relied on hiring large teams of geologists who would conduct site studies, take core samples, and predict where the gold was, but this approach was not proving successful. Desperate, with resources being depleted, Rob’s investment wasn’t looking like a good one. While attending a conference on open source technologies at MIT, Rob was struck by the effectiveness of the open-source model. He soon realized that what he needed was a new way to get hundreds of scientists and geologists whom he could not afford to put on the payroll to help him find his mine’s gold.

With this in mind, he made a risky move. At an industry conference, he unveiled the “Goldcorp Challenge,” in which he challenged the best around the world to find his gold remotely. Rob made all of his company’s past geological data available to anyone who wanted it via the Internet, with the premise that whoever could provide the most viable solution to help him find his gold would win the $105,000 top prize. More than 1,400 parties in 50 countries registered and downloaded the data. To everyone’s surprise, a team of geologists and geoscientists in Western Australia, thousands of miles away in another hemisphere, used the data to produce a 3-D map of the mine, pinpointing where gold would be found. They won the contest based on a judging panel of five industry experts. Once implemented, the open source solution proved to be phenomenally successful, increasing output from the mine by an amazing 10-fold. The lesson to be learned is that contests can harness the talent of hundreds of off-the-payroll volunteers from around the world producing a ROI that’s nothing short of amazing.

Contests Also Prove Effective for Internal Sourcing

While most contests used for recruiting purposes focus on finding talent outside the organization, some companies have found them to be profoundly effective at identifying hidden talent already in the organization. MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, for instance, has used contests to identify star chefs, bartenders, and entertainers. During a black-box competition, the hotel’s version of Iron Chef (in which culinary employees from different venues compete against one another), the hotel found an unlikely replacement for an executive chef in a four-star restaurant. A 23-year-old sous-chef from one of the hotel’s more budget-oriented eateries rose to the top, besting professionals handpicked by the world’s most elite chefs. Under the direction of this new chef, sales in the four-star eatery have gone up more than 400%. No career planning process in existence would have predicted the move, and most organizations would have implemented processes and policies that would have prevented it. But, this approach allows the talent to shine, regardless of where it may come from.

The challenge is not only a great development tool, but it also serves as a morale booster for the rest of the hotel staff; if you can produce results, you can move from a support position on the buffet line to an executive chef of a four-star restaurant in little more than a single pay period!

Other Examples

Some additional examples might further convince you that it’s time for you to catch up and take advantage of this approach.

• Top Coder. Clearly a best practice leader when it comes to running challenges in the software industry. It holds worldwide electronic code writing contests to identify the very best in software engineering for forward-thinking firms like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Not only do top contestants get job offers, but Top Coder figured out how to leverage the contests to produce code that they could, in turn, sell to organizations. Codewalkers provides similar contests in the web application and development area. WizardHunt offers “contestware” for firms.
• Matching problems with problem-solvers. One company, InnoCentive, was recently highlighted in Bill Taylor’s leading-edge “Mavericks” column in The New York Times. InnoCentive’s leading-edge site allows companies to post their latest problems online and provides problem solvers an opportunity to submit solutions. The winning solution gets a monetary prize and the company gets outstanding answers and the names of some outstanding problem-solvers. If you can propose a catalyst system for an improved synthesis of a monoresorcinyl-triazine, your solution could be worth $50,000.
• Professional associations. Nearly every professional association holds both national and local awards and contests. For example, the IEEE holds an annual Robotics Challenge, a prime recruiting event for electrical and mechanical engineers.
• Department of Defense. Even the government has gotten into the contest game, offering prizes for university teams that develop driverless cross-country vehicles. Hanging around the pits at these events will produce candidates who are several levels above those who can be found at most college career centers.
• Quicken loans. This forward-thinking firm has contest plans for the best customer service person and the best salesperson.
• The best wait person. One major hotel chain held a “find the best waitress/waiter contest,” challenging its employees to identify the very best in their city. In essence, this created the world’s first employee referral contest.
• Student challenges. Colleges have been holding “drop the egg from the roof” and “Concrete Canoe” contests for years, and the winners are highly sought after. Similarly, winners of debate contests are sought out as potential salespeople, and photography and film contests make it easy to identify the best students in media.
• Scholarship contests. There is no better way to get detailed information about the best college students than offering a scholarship and then utilizing the application data to identify potential college interns or hires.
• The best nurse. The New York Times recently ran a full-page ad asking individuals around the United States to submit the names and stories of wonderful nurses. Think of the learning, referral, and recruiting value if you could develop a contest or process that captured the names and stories of the best nurses in your region.
• NFL-type draft. National Oilwell Varco holds an internal NFL-style draft for its college hires after they complete their initial rotations. A brilliant approach because competition raises management’s attention, and it also brings out the best in almost all situations.
• The best in HR. Even SHRM holds Jeopardy-type contests among its university chapters. Anyone who wins an Optimas or ERE Recruiting Excellence award is certainly also at the top in his or her field.
• The best salesperson. If you spend a lot of time at the bars of hotels that cater to a lot of company events, just look for those with brand-new Hawaiian shirts or leis around their necks. Invariably, they just won the best salesperson award and thus, a free trip to Hawaii.
• Others. Interactive Brokers Group has an electronic trading Olympiad, the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which helps identify the best at building barriers to hackers. In addition, Legoland California has a contest to find the best model builder, and L’Oreal has its e-Strat challenge.

As you may have concluded from all of the examples provided, contests are anywhere and everywhere these days. While top candidates will walk away from recruiting processes that feature in-depth online assessment, they love opportunities to showcase what they can do, and contests and challenges provide that opportunity. Hopefully, your creative juices are flowing and your competitive spirit is engaged, and a concept for contest or challenge is brewing in your mind. If you’re ready, stay tuned; next week, we will discuss the major action steps required to take advantage of contest recruiting.

Recruiting Structure

Google has plans to nearly double its workforce, growing from approximately 5,000 employees to 10,000 employees in the near future. The recruiting structure that they have designed to enable such growth is, like most successful recruiting organizations, primarily a centralized operations model. The basic reason why firms use a centralized a recruiting function is to ensure that most of the recruiting is done by recruiting professionals, as opposed to generalists, who for the most part don’t have the skills or the attitude to be great recruiters. Centralization also makes it easier to share top applicants between business units, a key activity which seldom occurs when decentralized generalists execute recruiting.

The recruiting function is headed by Arnnon Geshuri. A key tenet of any excellent recruiting function is that the function has the capability to handle in-house the most important and visible positions, i.e. executive search. At Google, recruiting is responsible for filling both executive leadership and top-level technical positions. The executive group is notably headed up by Mike Strong, one of the best recruiting leaders I have ever met. Because Google believes wholeheartedly in sourcing the best talent that is ferociously sought after by competitors, every element of the recruiting function is abundantly staffed with highly focused professionals. They realize that the volume and caliber of talent they desire is not going to be mined from a job board, resume bank, or general recruitment advertising (something Google consciously avoids.) To ensure that the company has the capability to recruit talent at the capacity needed, the recruiting model has been broken up into very distinct roles, each requiring specialized expertise. These activities, carried out in a highly choreographed manner by teams tied to divisions and business units, include:

• Recruiting research analysts
• Candidate developers (sourcers)
• Process coordinators
• Candidate screeners
• Specialized recruiters for college
• Specialized recruiters for technical and leadership executive search
• Specialized international recruiters to be located in Asia and Europe
• Recruiting program managers
• Recruiting project managers

Such specialization enables the function to be managed in a way similar to a supply chain. The specialized positions allow Google to manage a high volume of resumes, estimated to exceed half a million each year. without degrading either the candidate or hiring manager experience. Some outside consultants have argued that such a large number of recruiters and specialized positions is an indication of inefficiency, but I have not found that to be true. Like all things in business, obtaining a specific level of efficiency requires that one make tradeoffs between output quality and input cost, and at this point in time Google values the quality over the cost. The willingness to fund this recruiting model is a clear indication that talent more than any other input is the most critical at Google, a notion many pay lip service to but few actually execute. Since, however, Google’s recruiting and HR metrics are “underdeveloped,” for lack of a better word, it’s difficult to make an accurate assessment as to whether their approach is producing new hires with exceptional on-the-job performance. All that can be said to quality of hire at this point is that Google managers believe they are getting it, a perception few other organizations seem to be able to develop.

Like many young firms experiencing rapid growth, Google has been slow in forming its international recruiting unit, but with the appointment of Jason Dellinger, an up-and-coming star, it looks like it will develop into one of the best global recruiting functions in the world. Mr. Dellinger is currently implementing an ambitious plan to attract the very best recruiters simultaneously in both Asia and Europe. His plan provides for the needed degree of consistency in recruiting around the globe while simultaneously allowing a reasonable amount of local flexibility to meet unique market needs.

“Wow” Recruiting Tools

As you might expect, Google employs a variety of impressive recruiting tools that certainly “wowed” me while I was performing this case study:

• AdWords as a recruiting tool. Google’s first “wow” approach is its use of its own Google search tool to find “passive” candidates. Because Google is recognized as the “master of search,” it’s not surprising that they utilize their own search tool to find top candidates without active resumes. In addition, they attract top performers by placing their own job ads that appear when certain keywords are typed into a search (in a fashion just like the sponsored product ads that we’re all familiar with). Anyone can do this by “buying keywords” (AdWords technology). For example, if someone types in a search that includes the words nurse and Phoenix, it’s highly likely that the person doing the search is either a recruiter looking for a nurse in Phoenix or a nurse professional that is looking for nursing position in Phoenix. Smart companies can thus buy keywords in order to identify and recruit smart recruiters or to find nurse candidates for the Phoenix area. These types of searches are even more effective if you place your job opening announcements around searches that include words like “becoming a great nurse” or “awards for nursing excellence” because these types of searches are indications of a professional that is striving to become one of the best. Google has also placed position announcements on searches that include the name of top Google scientists and engineers.
• Contests as recruiting tools. A second “wow” aspect of Google recruiting is its use of a contest to identify and attract top software engineers. The Google Code Jam, as they call it, is a global online software writing contest that can attract over 7,500 people each year. The top 25 finalists are invited to the Mountain View campus to compete for $50,000 in prizes as well as a chance to work at Google. The contest is powered by TopCoder, a vendor that helps manage the contest and score the winners. The concept itself is just brilliant. What better way to assess potential hires than to have them write code that is relevant to your firm’s problems? In addition to being a great recruiting tool, the publicity related to the contest helps further strengthen the employment brand of being innovative and creative. Another interesting aspect of the contest is that it demonstrates that the winners seldom come from noted U.S. universities. The information gathered on participant education can be used to better refine the college recruiting model so that it also includes lesser-known European and international schools that have a proven ability to produce graduates capable of producing simulated on-the-job performance.
• Brain teasers as recruiting tools. The third “wow” aspect of Google’s recruiting is its creative use of roadside billboards and “math tests” placed in magazines to garner the attention of math and programming wizards. Google has placed “brain teaser” billboards in the Silicon Valley and by Harvard Square. The math puzzles on these billboards challenge math-oriented people and get them thinking. Although they do not specifically mention Google, the billboard puzzle does eventually lead interested participants to the Google site. In addition, Google has placed math and problem solving tests in magazines read by mathematicians as well as Linux and open-source programmers. Not only do the tests create a buzz (again, Google does not focus on traditional advertising) among Google’s target community, but it also results in direct hires.
• “Friends of Google.” The final “wow” recruiting tool is the “friends of Google” system. This tool creates an electronic email network of people that are interested in Google and its products but not necessarily interested in working for the company. By signing up these individuals and then periodically sending them emails about the firm’s products and events, Google can build a relationship among thousands of people that like the firm. After building and maintaining relationships with these individuals over time, recruiters eventually begin to utilize the membership list as a source for referrals and potential hires.

Standard Recruiting Tools

In addition to the “wow” recruiting approaches above, Google also has successfully implemented many of the standard best practice tools found at other companies:

• Employee referral. Google’s referral program is without any industry leading features, but the company’s strong brand coupled with its highly enthusiastic workforce makes up for weaknesses in the program.
• College recruiting. Google hires a large number of PhDs on the premise that they enjoy exploring areas that no one else has explored. To accomplish this, they have developed a network of direct relationships with over 350 professors at major schools. In addition, Google has an outstanding internship program that has a very high conversion rate to permanent hires. (Internship conversions typically have one of the highest success rates of any hiring source, according to my own research.)
• Professional networking. Google also effectively uses networking groups like Linkedin and other live professional events to recruit top performers.
• Recruiter training. Google is one of only a handful of companies that requires most newly hired recruiters to go through extensive recruiter training prior to starting. Most of the training at Google is handled by the exceptional group headed by James Duran, whom I call “the godfather of recruiting.”

Some Weaknesses in the Google Approach

Google’s primary strength in recruiting comes from the fact that they “change the work” and that they have and continue to make an outstanding business case to fund the recruiting organization at an unparalleled level. But it’s equally important to point out that Google recruiting is not without weaknesses. Some of the current and potential issues facing Google recruiting are outlined below. Given the relative youth of the company, none of these weaknesses even reach the level of being considered a threat, but in a company whose slogan is “great isn’t good enough,” it’s critical that HR and recruiting management spend some time and resources in the following areas:

• Employment branding. Although Google is clearly well known as a great employer, it is clear that much of that recognition has come as a result of programs and ideas that originated outside of HR. The only long-term recruiting tool that is available to any firm is employment branding. It is critical that HR and recruiting devote resources to developing a formal employment brand strategy and execution plan.
• Metrics. At a technology company driven by mathematics and staffed largely with mathematicians, it’s almost unbelievable how both the HR and the recruiting function have dragged their feet on developing metrics. In particular, Google’s inability to track the on-the-job performance of new hires is inexcusable. everyone in recruiting must be more cynical and learn to make decisions based on data, not intuition. In a company whose slogan is “great is not good enough,” the use of metrics is an absolute requirement.
• Recruiting strategy. Although Google recruiting obviously does great things, those things seem to occur “at random” and in spite of the fact that there is no formal, well-communicated recruitment strategy. Whether you talk to recruiters or hiring managers at Google, no one seems to be able to clearly articulate the strategy and how it differentiates Google from its talent competitors. Having a written recruiting plan and a superior strategy that focuses on building and maintaining a competitive advantage is essential.
• Speed. Almost everyone that has been a candidate at Google comments on how slow the screening, recruiting, and interview process is. The fact that some stock option grants and all new professional hires must be approved by senior management (an activity limited to one day a week) is “industry leading” in a way that hurts the recruiting effort. Excessive approvals at the top and the related time to fill issues must be addressed as the company becomes larger and more global.
• Contingent labor. The number of temps and contractors in the recruiting function at Google is high. The unwillingness to give permanent jobs immediately to recruiters may reduce Google’s ability to get seasoned recruiters, who have mortgages and car payments like the rest of and require a certain level of stability. One of the net results of this policy seems to be a disproportionately large number of “rookie” recruiters who learn as they go.
• Emphasis on youth. Google’s emphasis on “youth culture” might hurt its ability to attract more senior and experienced personnel. I heard concerns related to their emphasis on “youth” from more than one employee, and at least one former worker has accused them of age discrimination.

Perhaps the most surprising area in need of significant attention is Google’s corporate careers site. Don’t get me wrong, it does have features that many sites don’t have, including streaming video of the headquarters site and a few narrative personal profiles. But for one of the world’s leading technology companies, it gives the impression that HR is exempt from utilizing the latest in Web technology. The passion and excitement of the employees and the campus just don’t come through on the job site. Position descriptions are dull. Even the information on Google’s record-breaking benefits is static, with no opportunity to actually get more information about them. There is no personalization on the site.