9.5. THE PERSONAL TOUCH

The days of wining and dining students aren't over yet. Virtual recruiting clearly has its limitations and must be supplemented with personal interaction as a company narrows its list of prime candidates. Face-to-face meetings in social settings and interview rooms allow both the company and job applicant to size each other up and decide whether they're a good fit. After all, recruiting really is all about matchmaking skills. An active recruiting company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to try to bring the best and brightest millennials on board. It can't afford to make many bad matches.

Deloitte & Touche's recruiters and executives are limiting their virtual recruiting and spending additional time at their more than 40 target schools, getting to know students better. "There's a fine balance between how much you use technology and how much you do in person; students still want to hear and talk to people directly," says Diane Borhani, U.S. national campus recruiting leader at Deloitte, an accounting and consulting firm. "I've also learned that students prefer that we interact with them through our own careers site and through other professional careers sites more so than through personal social networking sites, such as MySpace."

Karen Calo of IBM agrees. "I'm not sure Second Life and other new technologies will ever totally replace traditional recruiting," she says. "You can only see students' intellectual curiosity, excitement, and body language in a face-to-face situation." Even as it goes more high-tech in its recruiting, IBM also is trying to increase personal contact. It is organizing "power panels" at some schools, for example, bringing IBM executives, local companies, government officials, and business partners together to discuss job skills and opportunities.

To try to make a stronger impression, some companies hope to form tighter relationships with prime prospects through more intimate events, such as dinners with only 10 students rather than a mass cocktail party. They are assigning "buddy employees" to hot prospects to help woo them, and they are making a more concerted push to close the deal once a job offer has been extended. Opera Solutions, a boutique consulting firm, assigns each of its M.B.A. picks to a "cultivation team," a group of employees who offer the student advice and information about Opera and its projects and arrange visits to the company's office. The firm wanted to ensure that students who are offered positions become very familiar with its culture to increase acceptance rates. Opera believes that this approach helped it recruit students who had offers from other top consulting companies and that it could lead to higher retention rates.

Wachovia Corp. believes strongly in the power of personal networking, too, and it has created some clever and distinctive social events to appeal to millennials. At some schools, Wachovia recruiters and senior managers interact with students at wine tastings and cooking classes. Giving its own spin to speed dating, the company also invites students to speed-networking events where they talk with Wachovia representatives for 15 minutes until a bell rings and then move to the next table. The meetings may be brief, but at least students can connect with everyone.

Especially popular are the financial services company's poker tournaments where M.B.A. students play cards and socialize with senior leaders from Wachovia and their business school's alumni who work at the company. Wachovia chose poker because the gambling game has become so popular with young people. The company feared it might attract only men, but women showed up as well.

"This generation loves to network, but not at a formal dinner where they're stuck talking to the same person all evening," says Kanika Raney, Wachovia's campus recruiting chief. "With our recruiting events, we try to show that we're not as stuffy as some of our competitors in investment banking."