Talent - Jeff Daniel

Jeff Daniel has seen the future of the new economy. He's seen it in coffee shops, student unions, brew pubs, and computer labs. He's seen it at colleges all over the country -- from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon, from Berkeley to Harvard. It's there that you'll find tomorrow's software developers and Web entrepreneurs, so that's where Daniel, founder and CEO of CollegeHire.com, and his recruiters practically live during the school year.

Daniel doesn't believe in the hit-and-run approach to recruiting that most companies practice. In fact, he calls it "hit-and-miss" because companies that use that approach overlook so many good candidates. Recruiters from these companies arrive on campus for a school's annual career fair, collect stacks and stacks of résumés, then disappear. Since these recruiters don't spend much time with the students, they leave the career fair with nothing more than a pile of résumés to be filtered down by GPA.

The process isn't any more enlightening for students. While they're grinding away at upper-level classes and staying up late working on senior projects, they're under siege from companies for job interviews. Researching those companies and juggling multiple interviews quickly becomes an exhausting distraction from school.

Daniel is trying to eliminate these flaws by reinventing the way that college recruiting works. "The process is incredibly inefficient, and I realized that mastering it wouldn't be as powerful as changing it," he says. "We decided to just rip this thing apart and start over -- to change the way that college students look at job opportunities and the way that companies look at job candidates."

For now, Daniel's focus is high-tech recruits, and his timing couldn't be better. Over the next several years, new jobs for computer scientists, computer engineers, and systems analysts are expected to increase by more than 36% annually, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the talent pool on college campuses has shrunk. The number of high-tech degrees (in engineering, computer science, business-information systems, engineering technology, mathematics, or physics) earned by students in the United States declined by 5% between 1990 and 1996, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Welcome to the battle for talent, undergraduate style. Large and small companies alike are struggling to hire enough young talent to support their fast growth. With hundreds of colleges from which to choose, startups are left wondering where to focus their limited resources, and organizations with vast recruiting departments are wondering how to lower costs while increasing the number of quality hires. Regardless of size, Daniel says, many companies are hampered by the same problem: "Lots of people think that they know how to recruit college students, but they don't have a clue."

That's Daniel: as blunt as he is confident, a high-energy mix of strong opinions, new ideas, and marketing savvy. Fueled by as many as six Dr. Peppers a day, he darts between campus visits, sales calls, phone calls, and emails at the only speed he knows: fast-forward. Daniel's a true rarity -- a Texan who talks faster than a New Yorker.

His approach to recruiting is based on streamlining the process with a Web site, CollegeHire.com, that lets students and companies access more information about one another. But better technology is only part of the solution. Daniel believes that effective recruiting is about building personal relationships. So he and his team build relationships to understand what motivates students and to learn what they want and need in a job.

Daniel insists that CollegeHire is more than just a recruiting company. It's in the matchmaking business -- placing qualified students with the right company, the right position, the right work environment, and the right salary. To do that successfully, Daniel needs to learn as much as he can about the students, about the colleges they attend, and about the companies looking to hire them.

He developed his strategy at Trilogy Software Inc., a fast-growing software company in Austin, Texas. As head of Trilogy's aggressive recruiting department, he helped increase the company's staff from 80 to 800 employees in just three years. Following Daniel's lead, Trilogy recruiters focused on identifying and befriending the cream of the crop, and that attention paid off. Competing against major players like Microsoft, Trilogy had an impressive 64% acceptance rate for its job offers, which convinced Daniel that other companies would pay for his expertise. Last January, he created CollegeHire.com, a spin-off of Trilogy.