Recruiting as entertainment...

Are you hip to The Daughters of Freya? Its a mystery novel that is delivered to your email in short spurts everyday. Its a very cool concept that had me thinking. How cool would it be to merge recruiting with entertainment? What if someone wrote an email mystery about a junior, but talented programmer who uncovered irregularities in some computer code or network drive? The programmer would post his/her observations on their blog and ask for help in discerning what could be happenning. As the mystery continues the technical clues become more elaborate and only the sharpest geeks can provide the answers. Sound too fantastic to work? I don't think so. As a matter of fact, I can point to a few noteworthy examples of combining entertainment with recruiting.

1. The US Army: Downloadable games, reality shows, online chat, user-friendly interface... Kudos to the masterminds behind this one. After cruising through this website I almost signed up (wink!)

2. Rob's Dog: A simple (or was it?) challenge was given by Microsoft's Central Sourcing Manager to online researchers and curiosity seekers.

"My name is Rob McIntosh. What is the name of my old dog in Australia?.....See if you can find it and tell me how you got there."

How many diehard researchers could ignore it? Many tried, many failed, but the end result was a tidal wave of publicity for Microsoft's recruiting department and the names of several online sourcers who met the challenge. Pretty slick Rob...

3. Google billboards challenging any and all geeks to resolve a riddle that only engineers could crack.

Each of these ways were effective means of recruiting because it spoke directly to the intended audience, intrigued the intended audience into action and as a result, the intended audience not only repsonded but discussed the events with their peers. A wonderful thing as it increased the impact of the recruiting strategy.

Now despite the effectiveness of these techniques, they have yet to become an industry standard. This kind of innovative thinking seems to be an anomaly in the world of HR and I (really) wish it was not. Where is it written that recruiting has to be boring? Where is it written that the only way to advertise a job is with Monster? I would like to pose two rhetorical questions to my fellow recruiters. Forget about Monster for a minute, jobfairs and even employee referrals and consider, "What is the most creative thing you can do to recruit candidates by non-traditional means?" And my second question is, "Why haven't you done it?"