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.