Man With a (Talent) Plan

Permission Recruiting: Everybody Into the Pool!

Imagine that whenever you needed to hire someone with a critical skill, to create a team for a new project, or to staff up an entirely new division, you could begin by dipping into a talent pool of thousands of prequalified, previously assessed candidates. Imagine that you could match your needs with the expertise and interests of those candidates. Imagine that you could communicate regularly with them, informing them of new developments or inviting them to explore new opportunities. And imagine that you could do all of that instantly, using email.

Rusty Rueff and his team don't have to imagine it -- they're doing it now. In a little more than a year, EA has assembled a pool of 34,000 potential candidates using a Web-based application from Hire.com called "e-Recruiter." Those candidates, most of whom have given EA permission to communicate with them, have provided the company with information about their backgrounds and career aspirations. The system works like this: When candidates click through EA's Web site to register with EA-Recruiter -- and, in essence, to search for a job -- EA does not ask for a résumé. Rather, it asks for some basic information: what type of work they are looking for, what their experience is, where they live, and where they would consider living.

If those interests and capabilities match a current opening, then the system immediately notifies a hiring manager. It also notifies the candidate, with an encouragement to apply. If there's no current match, EA does not thank the candidate and send them on their way. That's a huge mistake, according to Rueff. "You can't fall into the catch-and-release, linear approach to recruiting," he says. "How can you build a pipeline of talent -- the only thing that's going to help you over time -- if you put out a search only when you have a position to fill, or if you talk to 20 people, find one you want, and then throw out the rest? You can't win that way." To that end, EA asks one more vital question through EA-Recruiter: Would the candidate like to receive future correspondence: strategic updates, information on new products, notification of new job openings? Of the 34,000 people currently registered with EA-Recruiter, some 20,000 have answered "yes" to that option.

That kind of ongoing connection with talented people creates a huge advantage over time, argues Kevin Hare, 32, manager of staffing and resourcing -- and the main tactician behind EA-Recruiter. "We used to have a very fragmented recruiting process," Hare says. "We would get information on candidates from several different sources -- and end up paying a lot for it. But we wanted to build our own talent pool and then be able to slice it and dice it to figure out who the candidates were, what they wanted, and where our mutual interests could intersect down the line. As we begin to explore these capabilities, we realize that in a lot of ways, we need to start thinking not like recruiters but like marketers."

Rueff and Hare used their marketing mind-set to confront what could have been a big "people problem." EA decided to transfer the development of its nascar game from a studio in Redwood City to a facility in Orlando, Florida. To do this, the firm needed to hire more than 40 people who'd be willing to work on the project in Orlando -- and it had to hire them fast. So Hare and his team designed an email called "Get in the Game" and sent it to the 18,000 people who had agreed to receive correspondence. The email was a fun pitch with colorful graphics that outlined the various positions that EA was offering and the qualities it was looking for in candidates. It also included an enticing "sneak peak" video clip of its soon-to-be-released, highly anticipated Madden 2001, a game also developed in Orlando, and, Hare believed, a compelling selling point for why people might want to work at that studio.

The Madden preview was as slick and as riveting as a movie trailer, complete with sound effects, grunting football players, impressive real-life 3D animation, and a dramatic soundtrack: "O Fortuna," from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana -- music to get anyone's blood boiling. And it must have done just that for those people who saw the video clip and then clicked on a link to get more information from EA's Florida studio. "We had close to 3,000 people jump from passive candidates to active ones by going to the Florida link," says Rueff. "The Orlando studio was blown away."

Rueff believes that the exercise was just one small example of the power of community. "My dream is that this database continues to grow to a point where the community gets so large that we can become very targeted and, more importantly, extremely personal in our approach. We're going to get to a point where I'll ping someone who registered when he was 16 and say, 'You're 18 now. Where are you? What's new in your life? Can I tell you about some things that are going on at EA?'"