Hire Great People Fast

Not every company sits at the intersection of serious business and pop celebrity. But that doesn't mean they can't become talent magnets. Cisco is a case in point. The company is a competitive juggernaut, with revenues of more than $4 billion and a market value of more than $40 billion. But there's no chance that Cisco will ever capture the popular imagination the way Netscape has. So it uses guerrilla techniques to raise its profile. Cisco's build-the-buzz strategy centers on the primary market for its products: the Internet itself.

The company's Web site (http://www.cisco.com/jobs) has become a turbocharged recruiting tool. Looking for a job at Cisco? Search by keyword to match your skills with openings. You can also file a résumé or create one online using Cisco's résumé builder. Most important, the site will pair you up with a volunteer "friend" inside the company. Your new friend will teach you about Cisco, introduce you to the right people, and lead you through the hiring process.

But the real power of Cisco's Web site is not that it helps active job-seekers move more quickly. It's that it sells the company to people who are so happy in their current jobs that they've never thought about working at Cisco. "We actively target the passive job seeker," says Michael McNeal, director of corporate employment.

That's why the company advertises the site in places where its kind of people hang out. Cisco has linked to the Dilbert Web page (www. dilbert.com), the darling of disenfranchised programmers. Last winter, right before the Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots, Cisco advertised on Boston's leading electronic city guide (www.boston.com). The site was registering 2.5 million hits per day, many from engineers and Net-savvy managers from Route 128. Cisco also buys space on sites like TravelQuest (www.travelquest.com), the reservation service. Software lets Cisco read the URLs of Web surfers, match them to outfits it likes to recruit from (such as competitors 3Com and Bay Networks), and then, and only then, paint a banner with a link to the company's jobs page.

Thanks to these and other savvy tactics, Cisco's jobs page records as many as 500,000 accesses per month. Cisco generates a stream of reports about who is visiting the site and fine-tunes its strategy accordingly. For example the company knows that most hits come from the Pacific time zone between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The conclusion? Lots of people are trolling for jobs on company time, always a nerve-racking pursuit. So Cisco is developing software to make life easier for stealthy job-seekers. It lets users click on pull-down menus, answer questions, and profile themselves in just 10 minutes. It even covers their backsides. If the boss walks by, users can hit a key that will activate a screen disguise -- changing it to "Gift List for Boss and Workmates" or "Seven Successful Habits of a Great Employee."

Never Settle for Less

You're desperate to fill that slot in marketing. you're losing business. You finally have a decent candidate. He's not exactly what you're looking for, but somebody beats nobody, right? Wrong. A cardinal rule of power staffing is that you should never hire people you wouldn't hire if the people shortage weren't so severe.

Hiring fast doesn't mean you have to lower your standards. And refusing to settle doesn't mean you have to slow to a crawl. The secret is to decide up front the kinds of people you want to hire, identify mismatches quickly, and then develop techniques to evaluate the remaining candidates for the traits you need.

EMC, the red-hot manufacturer of enterprise storage products based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, uses just this approach. Four years ago, when it was still a relatively manageable 700 people, the company realized that demand for its products was taking off. It was about to go on a growth (and hiring) tear. But top management wondered how the company could add literally thousands of new people without losing its identity -- the cultural attributes that had made it such a success in the first place.

So a team of senior executives and HR specialists began to brainstorm: What characterized great EMC employees? Those sessions led to the EMC "Employee Success Profile," a detailed definition of who makes it at EMC. It is built around seven categories: technical competence, goal-orientation, a sense of urgency, accountability, external and internal customer responsiveness, cross-functional behavior, and integrity. "We've held fast to those attributes as the core nuggets" of hiring, says John Ganley, EMC's director of corporate staffing. That's why, he argues, EMC is still much the same company it was four years ago, even though it now has 5,100 employees.