The recruiting process is becoming more of a challenge than ever before for big companies especially when trying to attract the best candidate to fill a position. A company’s marketing strategy can no longer be limited to just clients but needs to target potential candidates as well which is often a new or growing challenge for many HR departments.

Accenture has taken a step in the right direction starting with Backstage at Accenture www.backstageataccenture.com. This is an excellent example of a recruitment site that is really making an effort to attract potential employees rather than creating the usual text-based pages. Firstly, the campaign has succeeded in grabbing the audience’s attention, there is also a human touch with real Accenture employees on the website and most importantly Accenture is presented as a forward-thinking company using innovative communication techniques.

Although I really like the campaign, I think they missed out on the true potential by not adopting a more cutting-edge communication strategy or Web 2.0 principles. Despite the message of openness, there is no true interaction with the visitor; for example, Accenture could have added a chat feature or a blog to answer candidate’s questions. There could also have added a first qualification phase to explain the mandatory skills required and the company philosophy. This feature would have been a first automatic qualification filter and using a video format is a better way to deliver the message.

Finally, from the content point of view, the work environment description is really missing. So in my mind, Accenture has adopted a cutting-edge format but did not go through the requested paradigm shift to real language from real people. The only way to deliver a true and credible message. I am still looking for Accenture’s human face.

Part 2 to follow: what I would recommend as a truly cutting-edge recruitment programme.