I have to post this quote from today's (4/23/06) issue of the New York Times. It's from a story entitled, "To Hire Sharp Employees, Recruit in Sharp Ways." Essentially, it's a story about how the best employees already have jobs - jobs they probably also like. So, there's a great line in here which made me laugh, cause it's so opposed to the way Rochester works. John J. Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University (ok, not exactly Harvard or Standford, but let's ignore that credential for a moment, shall we?) - a critic of traditional hiring practices states, "It's amazing that so many companies still use job fairs to recuit talent. Who goes to job fairs? People without jobs! All you get are worthless resumes and lots of germs. Recruiting has to be a clever, fast-moving business discipline, not a passive, paper-pushing bureaucracy."
The job-fair is the answer to all our problems in Rochester - or so the "thought leaders" believe. Job fairs and business planning contests are the most innovative ways to solve our problems, so they'll say. That, and spending lots and lots of money with these self-proclaimed thought leaders on their pet projects which do nothing more than pay for their travel expenses and make them feel like a saviour-in-out-midsts. Of course, ask them five-years from now for a report on all their successes, and you'll get nothing but spin, and the real outcomes will be slight-to-immeasurable.
Of course, in the same story, the director of talen acquisition for Quicken Loans (one of the fastest growing companies in the US) states, "We're after certain kinds of people, not people from a certain business.... We can teach people about finance. We can't teach passion, urgency and a willingness to go the extra mile." Don't tell that to another Rochester-institution that has based it's entire marketing strategy on the "We teach... passion" campaign!
