A quick look at some of the goings-on in recent days from the recruiting/human resources world:

• If you’re looking for a gift for the busy New York professional who has everything, you can now get them a “PA for a day.” The new temp firm, founded by a PR/events director for a New York ad agency, offers personal assistants for a day — actually for as little as two hours, at a rate of $20 an hour. The company says that “personal assistants cannot and will not assist with any tasks that are illegal, illicit, or questionable.” In addition, “PA For A Day currently does not offer babysitting/childcare services.” We’re not sure if they’re referring to the boss’s kids, or the boss himself.
• Hey LinkedIn, better sound general quarters. You’re under attack by a Norwegian startup. JobCruiter sent out an announcement about its launch with the in-your-face headline “JobCruiter.com Challenges LinkedIn.” The site, says the announcement, has “ambitions of being the best global career network.” Now, here’s the fightin’ words: “Many see today’s career networks just as boring overviews of their contacts where nothing is ‘happening.’“

• So many job boards launch in a week that we’re tempted to erect our own population clock. Atlanta, which has no shortage of job sites already, has one more as Twitter jobs broadcaster TweetMyJobs gets into the job board business. The city is partnered up with TMJ, which puts Mayor Kasim Reed right on the front page. The site itself does what all job boards do, provides a search box, a dashboard to manage searches and submit resumes, and a way for job seekers to see who of their Facebook friends works at a hiring company.

• Speaking of new sites, CareerBuilder took the occasion of a survey about relocation to announce its new CareerRelocate site. It’s a cool site with a graphical skills demand indicator, which told us that cowboy country is where there are jobs in the “other” industry category. But will the jobs move us? The survey says about a third of employers will. Forty-four percent of workers say they’re willing to go, but when they do 41 percent leave the family behind.

• Bad news on those relocation prospects for recruiters, though. Wanted says job ads for recruiters increased only 4 percent between December 2010 and December 2011. That’s about 50 percent better than what it was back in 2008 and 2009. But that CareerBuilder jobs demand map says most of the country doesn’t have much need for recruiters.

• Jobvite says it’s making it easier for veterans to find jobs. Jobvite customers can flag job opportunities specifically for veterans. Among other features of the application, jobs specifically of interest to veterans can be tagged, after which they automatically get added to the Veterans Job Bank.

The site is being unveiled by a job-board group called The Network, along with a Dutch labor-market research agency called the Intelligence Group. It’s first available to Network customers and its partners such as Beyond.com, with access possibly opening up in 2012.

For an example of what’s up on the site, let’s take India. If you click on India, you can find out, among other things:

• the percentage of people willing to move within India
• the percent willing to work abroad
• how long, on average, they’ll stay abroad
• the sources (e.g. job boards) they’ll use when looking for a job abroad
• what they most want to know about a company they’d go work for
• people in India’s most important factors in deciding whether to take a new job

Like any survey results, these are only as good as the survey methodology. In this case, because many respondents to this online survey were job-board users, that’ll skew the source of hire a tad, and will include more candidates with bachelor and master degrees than the general population.

“The respondents are from job boards,” says Geert-Jan Waasdorp of the Intelligence Group, “so there is some bias. But we focus mainly on motives … we know in detail what drives people from country to country B and know how to reach them.”

According to Bloomberg News, the decline was greater than the most pessimistic forecast of the economists it surveyed.

Some analysts viewed the decline with more than a little skepticism, considering the surprisingly robust sales numbers that are starting to come in.

MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse reported that consumer holiday spending on everything but cars was up 5.5 percent over last year. The total for the 50-day period ending Dec. 24th was $584 billion, making it the strongest holiday season since 2005.

The University of Michigan/Thomson Reuters consumer confidence survey showed improvement in December, though most of the measures were close to where they were at the end of last year. Only the Current Conditions Index showed marked improvement, rising 9.4 percent over where it stood last year. Still, the report said, “Consumer confidence improved in December to its best level in six months and its second highest level since the start of 2008.”

Much of the difference in the two confidence surveys can be traced to opinions on jobs. The Conference Board found consumers more pessimistic in December about future job prospects. Those saying jobs are “hard to get” rose to 46.8 percent from 46.3 percent in November. But the Michigan survey reported, “Consumers reported much more favorable news about recent changes in the job situation, and more frequently expected the unemployment rate to decline during the year ahead.”

Meanwhile, the closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city composite home-price index said housing prices dropped 1.3 percent in October, for an annualized decline of .8 percent.  The decline was larger than the average in a survey of economists with six cities — Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Portland, Seattle, and Tampa — at their lowest levels since the bottom began falling out of the market.

“The double dip is almost here,” warned David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s. “There is no good news in October’s report. Home prices across the country continue to fall.”

The continuing decline in home prices has ramifications for recruiters who already have had offers turned down by candidates with underwater houses. Jason Warner discussed the impact of no equity and negative equity home ownership on candidates as recently as November, noting that “‘Go Local’ has become the strategy du jour.”

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the global outplacement firm, reported that just 6.9 percent of job seekers who found jobs in the third quarter of 2010 relocated. In the same quarter in 2009, 13.4 percent relocated.

“The relocation rate has been low for four consecutive quarters,” the firm said, “averaging just 7.3 percent since the fourth quarter of 2009. The 6.9 percent figure in the quarter ending September 30 was the lowest ever recorded by the firm, which began its tracking in 1986.”

In a LinkedIn discussion on relocation a few months ago, Rob Dromgoole summed the situation up this way:

“2007 = high house values, relocation was much easier.

2010 = much more difficult due to low real estate values. Can you sell a role if someone loses money in a move? That’s tough.”

One of the key structural changes in the talent economy is directly tied one of the key structural changes in the American economy: the mobility of candidates, which has been encumbered in two ways.

One, the most obvious, is that with more than 11 million homeowners in America owing more than their home is worth, that portion of the workforce is simply not mobile. When combined with homeowners who have near zero equity, that equates to roughly 29% of all mortgage debt being underwater; in rough numbers, 29% of potential candidates will find it very difficult to move in order to change jobs.

Remember, selling a house costs nearly 10% of its value, when you add tax, real estate fees, and other related expenses. Owning with no equity is like renting with no mobility. This drag on candidate mobility up to now has been at least partially masked by continued elevated unemployment and low demand for talent, but the issue is in large part structural until the housing market works through what will prove to be a long recovery process. Importantly, long before housing prices recover, companies will be hiring again, yet nearly a third of the talent pool will be mired with a home they are unable to sell without substantial financial assistance. As a result, candidate relocations are at an all-time low.

The second key issue is that many potential passive candidates (gainfully employed, but potentially “recruitable”) have been abnormally sticky to their existing employers.

Employed workers have avoided the LIFO risk of employment: being last in often means greater risk of layoff should the company need to cut its workforce. So the order of the day has been “it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil that you don’t” as employees have hunkered down to ride out the storm. Turnover has remained low due to uncertainty that prevails in the marketplace.

But employee stickiness is beginning to decline as the “New Talent Economy” normalizes to a “New Normal.” And this will exacerbate the problem related to lack of candidate mobility. Regretted attrition will increase as employees begin to feel more comfortable about leaving their existing employer and as a result recruiters will get pressured to back-fill departed employees. By now, inventories at companies have been worked through, revenues have stabilized, and there are substantial signs that companies are beginning to hire again … so disenfranchised employees now have greater options.

One of the non-scientific gauges I monitor in terms of economic recovery is recruiting activity. When companies start hiring recruiting staff, it almost always means the economy is several innings into a recovery. In Seattle, where I live, there are a host of senior-level talent acquisition jobs available: Starbucks, Microsoft, Expedia, Intellectual Ventures, and Amazon.com all have director-level or above recruiting jobs available as of this post. This is more than I ever recall seeing at one time. The same is true in other markets like Silicon Valley. And nearly every company I speak with is hiring recruiters again.

It is telling that a colleague of mine who is a senior-level business development executive at one of the world’s largest contingent staffing firms recently remarked that his firm recently pulled all of its sales teams out of the field in order to stop selling and focus on filling job orders. Think about that for a moment. The executive team told the sales team to ‘stop selling’ because it had too much business and couldn’t meet demand and needed the sales team to help recruit for the job orders. He also remarked that his division is having its best quarter ever; even better than 2006 or 2007, before the wheels came off the economy.

So things in the talent economy are starting to move again, and for a lot of reasons many companies are not prepared to meet the new staffing challenges: Recruiting departments have been whittled down in ways I have not seen in previous recessions (including the dot-com bust, when I was leading recruiting teams in Seattle). Many of the junior-level recruiters have left the industry through the downturn, so the recruiting workforce is smaller than it has been in the past. And cost-consciousness is still the order of the day at many companies, so relocation programs and other related recruiting investments are not being improved to account for the new mobility issue related to underwater homeowners.

I was having breakfast this week with my friend Roy Notowitz, who is a long-time executive staffing leader in Portland, Oregon, and one of the smartest guys I know in the search business. He shared that many of his clients are asking for local talent as a result of the dynamics described above. “Go Local” has become the strategy du jour.

Here are a several key changes that talent leaders should consider to make this “Go Local” strategy requirement work:

1. Eliminate Past Biases: Roy and I were talking over coffee that so many companies don’t consider candidates who they have interviewed but declined previously. There is often a strong bias against them, as in, “We interviewed that guy in January, and he wasn’t any good …” Given that most companies don’t have highly refined selection processes, this is an error in strategy. For companies to win, they will need to revisit local talent who they may have interviewed previously for other roles.
2. Don’t Overweight Experience and Technical Skills: It has been proven that experience and technical skills are relatively poor as predictors of success in candidate assessment. Yet most companies I work with (and have worked for) routinely overweight years of experience and technical skills through the interview process. Simply review a typical job description and it’s clear this is a common selection and assessment error at many companies. A thoughtful question recruiters or recruiting leaders might ask their hiring managers is, “Is it possible for someone with five years of experience to outperform someone with ten years of experience? How is that possible?” Smart recruiting organizations will help their companies select on the portfolio of attributes that drive success in a job, being careful to not overweight less-predictive candidate attributes such as years of experience. Doing so will increase the candidate pool that is available locally.
3. Refine the Strategy by Job Type: Map your talent strategy to the “go local” requirement. Now more than ever, developing internal talent is a smart strategy, as it also correlates to reduced attrition. So for those jobs that can be sourced internally, organizations will be well served by doing so, provided it supports the local search strategy. For example, perhaps some jobs are easily filled with local talent, while others are nearly impossible. Consider combinations of rotation programs and internal development strategies to mitigate the risk of not being able to find the talent that you need in the local market.
4. Measure the Opportunity Cost of Key Vacancies: Although it may seem crazy to pay an extra $100,000 to help a candidate sell their home and relocate, for some jobs the ROI on doing so is well worth it. Understanding the business argument for what jobs might warrant a rich pot of relocation dollars will put you ahead of the game.
5. Adjust Your Marketing Channels to Focus on Local: Now would be a good time to evaluate recruitment marketing spend by media type and channel, keeping in mind that many candidates will have difficulty relocating.
6. Outsmart Your Competitors: Smart companies will quickly recognize that improving the value package offered to employees to attract more local talent carries far greater ROI than buying someone out of their underwater mortgage, or letting a key role in the organization sit vacant. Most companies only respond to post data to improve salaries, bonuses, and related components of the employee value proposition – waiting until attrition spikes to take action, or completing a compensation survey which typically shows data that is 8-12 months old and then taking action. In essence, waiting until the economy is in full swing before increasing salaries or benefits to compete – but that’s too late! Smart companies are responding now to improve their positions in the marketplace before things get hyper-competitive.
7. Keep Your Best: As always, the best local talent to attract and recruit are the strong performers who are already working for your company. But most companies have cut bonuses, reduced merit increases, and kept job promotions to a minimum in order to control costs during recent challenging economic times. I was recently talking with colleagues at the Recruiting Roundtable (now CLC Recruiting), and according to a recent study, only 25% of high potential employees say they are likely to stay at their current employer. Now is a good time to rethink strategy, and if you haven’t, identify the talent you can’t afford to lose, and make sure they are happy and engaged. This is also true for recruiting leaders, incidentally. Recruiters now have options, so don’t miss an opportunity to retain key staff.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Transformative vs. Temporary Change
2. Relocation “Next” Practices
3. Creative Sourcing Tactics for $500 or Less
4. Are Recruitment Mailings Considered “Commercial Solicitation”?
5. Vacancy Rate as a Recruiting Metric
6. Featured Group of the Week: TOOLS Group

1. Transformative vs. Temporary Change

Courtney Claiborne writes about the difference between transformative and temporary change saying, “We all agree that change is necessary … that in order to survive in the ever-changing landscape of our chosen professions, we MUST change and adapt — it’s the only way true performance breakthrough can happen. Yet why is it that even though we recognize the NEED to change, so many of us so often (and please forgive me for sounding harsh here) absolutely STINK at making change happen?

How do you encourage transformative change in your organization?

2. Relocation “Next” Practices

Jill Heineck posts a piece on how relocation plays a huge part in your overal talent attraction program: ”In the day and age of the war on talent and cost containment, companies are challenged with continued business growth in a volatile economic climate.Incenting top talent to make a move in Today’s real estate market in an effort to take the business to the next level requires creativity, planning, and a strategic approach.

What are your thoughts on relocation as a recruiting differentiator?

3. Creative Sourcing Tactics for $500 or Less

Sarah Welstead has some interesting tactics for sourcing that don’t require a lot of money. “Remember when having a job to fill meant spending $500 to post it on a job board somewhere? Well, these days, $500 (or less) can buy you a lot of sourcing — and without having to wade through the masses of unsuitable candidates that job boards can deliver. Here are five you may not have thought of.

Take a look at some ideas and see if any appeal to you.

4. Are Recruitment Mailings Considered “Commercial Solicitation”?

A forum member asks if recruitment mailings are considered commercial solicitation, “I work for a large veterinary company. We order lists of licensed veterinarians from various states to populate our CRM database. Occasionally we get flack from a state that warns us against using their information for “commercial solicitation.” Can recruitment mailings (with actual employment offerings) be considered commercial soliciations?

What do you think? Have you experienced this before?

5. Vacancy Rate as a Recruiting Metric

Another forum member asks, “After reading the article on DaVita, i was interested to know more about using Vacancy Rate as a perf metric. I would like to more about your experience with vacancy rate. Is it a reliable performance indicator?  Is it more applicable for a specific type of recruiter and/or recruiting situation (IE. exempt vs non-exempt, high volume, Executive)?  Is there anything else I should know?”

6. Featured Group of the Week: TOOLS Group

I am featuring some of the groups we are looking to find leadership and increase activity for and our TOOLS group is a popular one for finding information about software, training, and other tools used to improve in recruiting.

If you have a discussion or question about selecting or using tools in recruitment, this is a great place to start!

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

Many firms are hiring college graduates and interns for next summer. In many of those cases, relocation is paid to the college graduate or summer housing is arranged for the intern. A look at the experienced hiring market illustrates an entirely different story. A search in Google for “local candidates only” delivers more than 250,000 results. Sure, several of these openings are for retail or hourly employees where considerable education credentials aren’t required.

But you get:
50,000+ results for “local candidates only” vp
5,000+ results for “local candidates only” mba

If you sift through there a bit, you’ll find some senior openings like Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. Would it not be wise to mix in talent from other regions, if not solely to have different vantage points and a more diverse perspective? The best companies I’ve ever worked for had these qualities and created true diversity in skills and life perspectives. Ideally, you should be recruiting the best people who are passionate lifelong learners with cutting-edge skills capable of a building a collaborative, high-performing culture regardless of their location.

It’s similar to what I see when analyzing strategic Internet marketing programs. It comes down to one simple thing: legacy, incumbent budgets that prevent you from achieving the desired outcome. Long-standing, legacy budgets fund college graduate and intern relocation programs and are regularly renewed while mid-level, experienced-hire budget resources are highly irregular and often insufficient to acquire the best talent.

The expenses for experienced hire candidates, such as airfare and hotels during interviewing, and relocation costs of an experienced hire, often come directly out of the P&L of the business unit doing the hiring. As you enter budget cycles in the years ahead, you should consider creating a flexible budget pool for experienced hires that is independent of the business unit. This not only will help your recruiting programs hire the top talent you need today, but will position your firm strategically to have a nimble experienced hiring process in the upcoming years as the baby boomers begin to retire and you look to hire replacement leaders from Generation X.

In the short term, you need to get a bit more creative to give offers to the best and brightest talent. Here are a few ideas for obtaining the best, most geographically diverse talent:

Actively Seek Out Renters as Candidates. It’s understandable that you don’t want to take on real estate risk unless absolutely necessary, especially in the current marketplace. Additionally, you want to be hiring candidates who demonstrate responsible financial behavior — they might have the same positive tendencies when making decisions for your business! Renters with no outstanding debt or without hard-to-divest real estate should be therefore highly sought-after assets! An added benefit of this is that there is a correlation with having fewer personal belongings when renting and that would lead to a higher likelihood of a lower-cost move overall.

Target Veterans Terminating Active Duty Military. Lisa Rosser is a book author and founder of The Value of a Veteran, a firm that advises and trains organizations on the value and hidden benefits of hiring veterans. According to Lisa, “Over 100,000 service members separate from active military duty (i.e., not National Guard or Reserve duty) each year and it’s a little known fact that each and every one of them is entitled to one free move anywhere in the United States.” The veteran can request that benefit any time within one year after the date of separation. Many military members begin their job search eight or more months in advance of their last day of contracted service. That is the optimal window to begin marketing your company and its typical hiring needs to the military audience, and wrangle that free move on Uncle Sam’s dime. She also encourages people to look at the skills and competencies fully, not just their job titles and/or organization. These aren’t just infantry folks — among them are computer programmers, highly skilled engineers, nurses, and healthcare professionals.

Seek Out Spouses of Recently Relocated Workers. You might find some candidate gems here. Larger companies in your region who frequently relocate people might have lists of such people or access to organizations that provide support to these people. Look at their skill sets completely — not just their last job title and company brand. If you find a way to quickly show these people that you see value in them when they first move to an unfamiliar place, you are very likely to make an extremely positive impression. The result will be acquiring an appreciative, loyal, and content worker who has a higher likelihood of remembering your gesture.

Target Individuals Who Have Shown Interest in Your Geographic Region. You can seek bloggers and social media participants via search engines such as Google who mention the position’s location favorably in their writings about a vacation, a relative, or close friend that lives in the region, a business trip they particularly enjoyed, or otherwise. Then again, a candidate might present you with an old-fashioned letter to someone at the company stating a desire to move the area. Due to the affinity that they have for the area, they might be highly motivated to move to the region and happily share or absorb the costs upon receiving an offer. Just like with the relocated spouse, this individual will be highly appreciative of the opportunity. As an added bonus since you found them via their blog or social media tools they are likely to tell the story over and over, creating positive word of mouth about your employment brand.

Focus On Sourcing Candidates Who Once Lived In Your Region. If the role is New York City, knowing that they can handle living there can be an important factor in selecting a candidate. Potential candidates will likely fall into one of two buckets: A) they loved it and can’t wait for the opportunity to return; or B) they never wish to return. The latter might have ideas about candidates who might be appropriate due to their prior experience in the location, so even that outcome is not a waste of your time and effort.

This was incredibly time-consuming back then because the Internet was still in its infancy. Today, the Web is a treasure trove of resources to help you identify the most logical markets for your recruiting strategies. Data is now available on everything from migration trends and job growth to housing prices and industries – all of which can combine to give you a much clearer picture of where to target next.

Where Talent Will Move or Stay When building a regional or relocation recruiting strategy, knowing which markets are gaining or losing the most people is a great starting point. Markets that are losing high numbers and percentages of people are the most ripe for targeting. Many economic factors, including housing prices, costs of living, job availability, climate, and crime rates, factor into which areas have the highest migration rates. Beginning at the state level, domestic migration to southern states continues to increase, with residents in Western and Northeastern states (including many retirees) beginning to move south seeking more affordable housing and better standards of living.

According to a recent USA Today article, one of the dominant trends is movement away from our biggest cities. States like New York, Illinois, California, and Massachusetts demonstrate the impact that this new urban flight is having, although they make up for this population outflow with international immigration.

view full-size image The percentage of people entering or leaving each state due to domestic migration is also a great tool to identify areas where it is possible to have some recruiting success. Midwestern states like Kansas, Iowa, and North Dakota score highly on this list as potential target states. Delaware, South Carolina, and Idaho, among other states, score much lower on this list.

view full-size image At the city level, the U.S. Census Bureau’s data demonstrates the impact of out-of-control housing markets in some of our biggest cities. Metro areas with the biggest net migration to other areas from 2000 to 2004 were New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. The biggest beneficiaries of these migration trends were Riverside-San Bernardino, California, Phoenix, Tampa, Atlanta, and Dallas. As you’re putting together your next recruiting strategy, housing prices remain a huge indicator of where the population will move next and the areas from which it will become easier to pull talent. The areas mentioned above are pricing many people out of their market, and in other cases, individuals are pocketing the money they have gained from their houses and moving elsewhere.

The net impact of talent migration for a recruiting team is as follows: Without a phenomenal job offer, targeting candidates in a lower cost-of-living area like Texas if you live in a high cost-of-living market is nearly impossible. However, all is not lost. “Weather recruiting” – hitting specific markets when the weather is unbearable, like Texas in the summertime or the Northeast and Midwest in winter – can be a highly effective strategy, one which I have used successfully for many companies.

Understanding the Job Market, Part 1 The job market in a metropolitan area is another reason why people move from one state to another. A poor economy and weak job market often translate into an excess talent supply. The Milken Institute, a non-profit economic think tank, is an excellent source of data on local economic conditions and job growth. Its analysis of the 200 largest cities and 179 small cities is one of the most useful resources on the Web to evaluate the economic health of a potential target market. Not only does it provide sortable data on job growth, wages, and population, but it also gives an indication of the high-tech industry base in a given city. Its data confirms that some of the hottest talent markets are in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arkansas (thank you, Wal-Mart). A harder to use but equally valuable resource is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics site at http://stats.bls.gov.

About as detailed as it gets, the BLS site’s most useful statistics are its tracking of regional and metro area unemployment statistics. The most current release shows that unemployment rates are high in states like Michigan, Kentucky, and Alaska, and low in states like Florida, Virginia, Utah, and Nebraska. The metro rates of unemployment are also very revealing – at times an indicator of economic health in attractive climates (like Cape Coral-Fort Myers and Fort Walton, Florida) and at other times an indicator of markets that have a hard time keeping their local talent (like Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Fargo, North Dakota). The month-to-month statistics on the metro area unemployment rates are perhaps the most useful component of this chart, giving one an idea of whether the economy in each metro region is expanding or contracting.

Understanding the Job Market, Part 2 General job market data like job growth and unemployment is useful, but not if you can’t find the specific types of individuals you seek. In my hometown of Seattle, for instance, the strong high-tech market means that there are relatively large numbers of programmers and software engineers (approximately 85,000 of them, to be exact), which is reflected in the BLS data on occupations and wages by metro areas. There’s not much of an entertainment industry here, which is also reflected in the low numbers of Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes (only 50 of them in Seattle compared to 2,610 of them in Los Angeles). Occupational data is also an important indicator of whether the types of individuals you seek live in a given market. For example, you can see which metro areas and states have high concentrations of recruiters and which pay the highest wages. It will take you a little while to navigate, but the “customized table” function allows you to view an Excel sheet with detailed data by city. This data shows that New York and Chicago have by far the highest numbers of recruiters (over 10,000 in each city), followed by Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

The biggest gap in the BLS statistics is in industry by state. If you’re looking for pharmaceutical employees, you’d want to know that the areas you’re targeting have high concentrations of employees in this industry given its specialized nature. The U.S. Census Bureau has very general statistics on industry employment by metro up to 2004 that are relatively helpful, and this data can often be supplemented by state departments of labor, a helpful list of which can be found here.

Finally, your own knowledge of competitor locations and the types of individuals they employ in each location are incredibly important. One of the best resources for this type of data is each organization’s career website, which can give you an idea of what types of employees they recruit and in which locations they recruit them.

Putting it All Together Using a combination of your knowledge of regional job markets, industry concentrations, migration patterns, and costs of living and your competitors, an organization can begin to create an effective regional recruiting strategy. The tools provided above can help you strategically identify and whittle down your target list. Now it’s up to you to create a message that speaks to the selling points of your area relative to your target markets and learn from your experiences along the way.