Contrary to popular belief, hiring the best candidate for a job really hasn’t changed much in recent years. To be sure, the process by which companies identify potential new hires is vastly different today than it was just a dozen years ago, with the Internet the primary reason.

But distinguishing a great candidate from a good one, or even one who’s likely to grow in the job versus someone who jumps ship in two years, is basically the same.

I’ve agreed to write this column at the request of Kennedy Information for the simple reason that I enjoy writing, and haven’t had much time to do so lately -- either professionally or personally. My goal is to share insights from 20+ years of reporting, writing and editing articles about the world of recruiting.

Frankly, my interest tends to favor the candidates’ perspective, so many of my columns will cover flaws and successes from the job hunters’ view. But I’ll also be sure to share stories and ideas as they relate to the world of corporate and executive recruiting.

Collaborating on the launch of a new web site so auspiciously named RecruitingTrends.com and jumping back into the author’s chair helped me to think about my own experience as a candidate, albeit a life-long passive one. By the end of this reflective journey I realized that my career in recruiting journalism mirrors the evolution of recruiting itself.

So, from pre-history to the dawn of the Internet to Web 2.0 and beyond, I offer my own tale as an allegory of recruiting itself.

I began writing about the career world for Dow Jones & Co. in 1983, after earning a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. My first position was as a staff writer for the National Business Employment Weekly (NBEW), where I helped launch Managing Your Career, a magazine for college students. I also wrote the “Managing Your Career” column in The Wall Street Journal several times a year, and contributed to a range of HR publications.

Who’s who in recruiting
After becoming NBEW’s editor in 1989, I created a series of more than a dozen books on all aspects of job hunting and career management, published by John Wiley & Sons, which included several best sellers. But the highlight of those NBEW days was our ability to publish three to four full-length feature articles every week, written by many of the smartest minds in the career field, including Dick Bolles, David Rottman, Taunee Besson, Arlene Hirsch, Douglas Richardson, Howard Feinberg, Harvey Mackay, Jack Falvey and many others. We even published the very first version of Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” well before that book was published. I also had the chance to represent the publication as a speaker at career conferences around the globe, as well as on a wide range of TV and radio programs, where I was a regularly scheduled guest on such programs as The Today and Early Today Shows, Good Morning America and CNBC’s Power Lunch.

Launching CareerJournal.com, a brief history
By 1997, it was clear that the Internet would soon replace the need to reprint help-wanted ads from across the country (the NBEW’s primary selling point), so I moved to what is now Dow Jones Online to help launch careers.wsj.com, which soon became CareerJournal.com. Fortunately, we were able to maintain the high-quality editorial content we’d launched in print, and within a few years we’d archived more than 2,000 articles on everything you needed to know about finding a job and advancing your career. We then expanded sections within the site into fully developed sites of their own: StartupJournal.com, RealEstateJournal.com, CollegeJournal.com and several others.

It was around that time that Dow Jones needed to identify a new technology provider for its job and resume databases. Fortunately, a fellow named Rick Miller and I found each other, and Rick developed cutting-edge databases that fit the bill. Rick’s new company was called CareerCast, and CareerJournal became his firm’s first media client. Soon after, Dow Jones purchased 40% of CareerCast to help provide equity for its future growth, and I took a seat on CareerCast’s board of directors, where I helped with strategic direction and client references.

By 2006, after serving as publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online Vertical Network of sites for several years, I finally made a career change much like the ones I’d written about for so long. CareerCast had changed its name to Adicio to reflect its growth beyond recruitment, and had become a global provider of classified database solutions. But many of Adicio’s clients needed help with senior-level guidance on how to apply Adicio’s products and services to their specific needs. Adicio’s recruitment networks also needed dedicated support, and demand to create business-development relationships and provide Best Practice consulting and regional workshops was high. The opportunity to work directly with Rick and his terrific management team was too good to pass up, so I became Adicio’s chief alliance officer and executive vice president. My office remains at Dow Jones, thanks to their equity interest, and we’ve recently starting adding East Coast staff, especially in light of our new alliance with Monster.

I’m looking forward to tackling some of the issues facing all of you in your drive to succeed. Hopefully, my background will help put my future columns – about such topics as how to generate positive PR for your recruiting efforts; a review of the typical pet peeves of candidates looking online; an explanation of the beauty of networking; and trends we can expect to see in recruiting next year and beyond – into perspective.