Key point: Campus recruiting is about establishing relationships

If you want your candidate pipeline to be full of talent, you need to establish lasting relationships with the schools that you recruit from.  This doesn’t mean conducting information sessions every semester and calling it good.  You need to get to know both the students and the faculty so the students know to attend and apply and the faculty know to promote your events and to recommend promising students to you.

A few related tips:

1. Turn your interns into evangelists.  Get them to talk about their experience with other students and help you connect with potential candidates.
2. Establish a campus ambassador program. Either formalize the role of former interns or allow passionate students to get involved. They can help coordinate and promote events on campus, promote the company and its products, and can also provide valuable feedback about how you’re doing.
3. Give stuff away.  Get students using your company’s products.  As the tobacco industry used to say, hook ‘em while they’re young.  Once they go off into industry they’ll bring their experience with your products with them.

Also, giving away free food during finals week doesn’t hurt either.

I find that Wii Fit suffers from the same problems as Wii Sports: too many things to acknowledge, poor feedback when trying to learn activities, there isn’t a “play” mode, and the activities are actually fairly short. I’ll explain each in a little more depth.

First off, is anyone else as sick as I am of having to hit the A button all the time to acknowledge pithy little comments from the game or its characters? I want to play the game, not respond to dialog. I find this happening in too many Nintendo-produced titles (Paper Mario, Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii). I’d really like a “quickplay” mode where it lets me jump right into playing instead of having to specify a lot of options or respond to prompts.

As for feedback, the sports titles are pretty unforgiving when it comes to executing an activity. I got extremely frustrated with some of the tennis and boxing training in Wii Sports. I knew I was doing it wrong, but the game didn’t give any hints as to how I could improve my skills and in the case of tennis, once you miss one ball, it’s over and you need to start from the beginning.

The next gripe is related to the last; many times I really don’t care how well I do on an activity or game, I just want something to help me unwind and play around. The Nintendo titles are too structured, in my opinion. You can’t just head soccer balls endlessly, keep skiing for twenty minutes, or just keep belting out home runs. How many of you prefer unstructured play to rule-driven activities?

My final complaint was the shortness of the sports activities; it’s related to the previous point, but even if I were trying to get a proper workout I find myself spending just as much time navigating through menus and dialogs just as much as I am performing the activities. I get that Wii Fit tries to ease you into exercising and gives you more reps or time when you’ve mastered the basics, but sometimes I just want to keep doing something until I perfect it, instead of having to start anew each time.

• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• The Deadline: A Novel by Tom DeMarco
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman
• The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks

(Sorry, cleaning out the queue.)

Today’s question is: if you could have three wishes, what would they be?

(No, you cannot wish for additional wishes.)

The one area I haven’t really tamed is project ideas and future items (basically my tickler file to use David Allen’s terminology). The only solution I’ve come up with that might work would be a binder that I could add pages to on an as-needed basis. The downside of such a solution is that it’s yet another thing I’ll forget to bring with me (along with my iPod, digital camera, and digital recorder), so I would really like to have something on my laptop to keep track of this. An electronic solution would also make it easier to search and add rich content to.
My requirements are as follows:

• Must be secure (accessible only by me, data would ideally be encrypted)
• Must not be publicly-accessible (may contain IBM confidential information)
• Must be lightweight (doesn’t require Notes or a continually-running service on my laptop)
• Easily searchable (I <3 live search) or have a flexible tagging system
• Would ideally allow attachments or embedded objects (images primarily)
• Must support rich text formatting
• Dependency tracking would be cool
• Related to dependency tracking — a reminder or “can’t start until X” feature would also be nice

Anybody know of a piece of software that meets some or all of those requirements?

I have all sorts of projects and ideas, if you really want to hear them, Sametime me or come by my office and I’ll talk your ear off.

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Woke up this morning and was greeted by 3″ of snow covering everything with more coming down. Thankfully the roads were fairly clear and the gym was relatively dead (as is work) so I got to have a nice quiet morning.

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That is all.

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