Spoken like a true personnel jockey. I know some very good HR folks who actually leave their desks from time to time, circulate in the professional community from which they recruit, meet new people, and find great hires through personal contacts. These HR folks are few and far between.

When a company's HR department selects a recruitment tool by comparing LOCAL ads to BIG BOARD ads, someone is asleep at the wheel.

This is not recruiting. This is sitting in your chair and waiting for flies to stick to the paper you hung out on the porch.

If anyone hunting for a job wonders why HR departments treat job hunters like dirt, read no further. You have seen the enemy.

It's pathetic.

Before a bunch of passive personnel junkies take me to task for advocating "going outside to meet people", consider this intelligent method for using the Net to find those highly specialized Symbian developers who have nothing better to do than hang around Monster. The details may be out of date, but the basic method is solid as a rock. Maybe they oughta teach this stuff in personnel school: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/gv990602a.htm