Enter The Talent Show

What's the most pressing, emergent problem in IT? If you ask some quarters, it's talent: figuring out how to recruit top minds from an ever-shrinking pool of recent graduates seeking IT careers.

We asked some vendors and solution providers alike what they're doing "outside-the-box" to entice new recruits. Here's a sampling of responses:

MICROSOFT: Mining The Social Network
Video is one way Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., is attracting new, young staff. The software behemoth uses video to give recruits a sense of the type of people who work at Microsoft, and it's also not unusual to find those types of "promos" on YouTube, Soapbox, etc.

In addition, Microsoft has several nontraditional, social-oriented recruiting initiatives, each designed to help people who are thinking about applying or already interviewing for a new job. A sampling includes:

Microsoft's JobsBlog is written by Microsoft's recruiters for those who are thinking about a career at the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant, are already in the interview process, or are just curious about working at the company.

Hey Genius is a recruiting site aimed directly at college students. There are videos, Tech Talks, games and other interactive features on the site. The Hey Genius campaign also hosts on-campus activities on more than 200 campuses. A potential Microsoft recruit might be invited to hop in Microsoft's Jobcuzzi, a portable hot tub used at recruiting events.

A Facebook page: Working it @ Microsoft. Many of the "Meet Microsoft" videos can be found on the Facebook site, including employees such as Derek and Tina.

TCS: Igniting The Passion
Solution provider Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Mumbai, India (2008 VARBusiness 500 rank: 18), is confronting head-on a future with drastically fewer qualified technical workers. According to India's software trade body, NASSCOM, there is likely to be a shortfall of half a million professionals in the IT sector by 2010. Obviously, in order to fill the impending skills gap, organizations need to look beyond traditional approaches of hiring over the next decade.

"One successful approach to meet the suitability challenge is to look beyond the traditional engineering and IT talent pool and recruit and train science graduates from top-notch colleges," said Ajoy Mukherjee, vice president and Global Head of Human Resources at TCS.

"In 2006, TCS launched the talent transformation ("Ignite") program, which aims to transform science graduates into global software professionals. Ignite is the first scalable program undertaken to draw graduates from disciplines other than engineering into the global technology services industry. It is a strategic initiative that has dramatically expanded the talent base for TCS and has given us access to a wider base of talent pool in the country to meet our aggressive recruitment needs," he said.

According to Mukherjee, TCS has found that the quality of talent at the end of the Ignite training program is on par with engineering graduates. More than 3,000 science graduates have completed training and have been inducted into TCS.

AMD: Blogging For Mindshare
Traditional approaches to recruiting and hiring today's best college graduates are giving way to, appropriately enough, technology-based ways of finding new employees.

"The traditional approach to recruiting the best and the brightest from the top universities has given way to the Internet and technology. For example, students want validation that a prospective employer is an employer of choice so they rely on blogs to hear what people are saying about a company," said Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s CIO Ahmed Mahmoud.

"Companies need to leverage the Internet, social networking sites, the blogosphere and Web 2.0 at large to connect with new graduates and to attract the top talent," he said.

While on-campus recruiting is still the gold standard, companies are increasingly participating in universities' "Virtual Career Fairs." That reduces costs to companies, and gives students the flexibility to post on the positions based on their schedules.