In a great article on creative strategies to find job candidates in the October 16th edition of Human Resource Executive, a New York travel company with one such strategy was profiled. The travel company was having a difficult time finding people for its call center and grew frustrated as turnover climbed to 35%. With little to no success from traditional methods, the company hired 15 people to hand out 25,000 fliers at the Times Square subway station. The fliers simply informed people that the CEO would be at the station on the 5th day handing out jobs. On the 5th day, the CEO was there to hand out customized business cards with a number to call that played a prerecorded message. The following week, the same 15 people handed out another 10,000 fliers at the station with the same phone number to call. 100,000 people called the number over the 2-week time-frame, and the company ended up hiring 15 people and building a pipeline of 1,100 qualified applicants.
Stories like this will become increasingly common as companies begin to get serious about the coming war for talent. Media is becoming increasingly fragmented, newspapers are dying, most online job boards cater solely to active jobseekers and do a poor job even at that, and candidates are becoming harder and harder to find. As the large demographic trends begin to materialize (retiring baby-boomers), things will become even more difficult, if not impossible for countless companies. As I have said in the past, companies will succeed to the extent that they begin to devote as much attention, energy, and resources to finding and retaining new employees as they do currently to finding and retaining new customers.