In a recent article, Seth Godin noted that Starbucks offers 19,000 different ways to order a beverage, and that our beloved Oreos come in 19 different flavors. His point was to emphasize the choice and clutter faced by the average consumer. I’m beginning to think it’s not so different in the world of recruiting.

Do you remember what it was like to recruit pre-Google? I started my recruiting career in Dallas, TX in 1996 – two years before Google was founded. In 1997 I landed my first corporate recruiting gig and sank my teeth in to the likes of The Monster Board, HotJobs, CareerMosaic, Headhunter.net, Online Career Center, and JobDirect. Never before had we seen so many choices and so many different ways to track down the elusive technical candidates. We thought we’d died and gone to Recruiter-Heaven.

It’s hard to believe that we were still 12 months from even knowing that a word such as “Google” existed, and even longer before recruiters would be using Google to search for candidates via Boolean search strings! In light of today’s over-stuffed toolkit, it’s hard to believe that we even recruited without the likes of LinkedIn. While we believed in the importance of networking, many of us still thought LinkedIn was a dumb idea when we received our first LinkedIn invitation (come on, tell the truth). Do you recall when you first heard about LinkedIn? Considering how it wasn’t founded until late 2002, it is amazing to realize that LinkedIn has only been in our “recruiting vocabulary” a few short years.

And we haven’t even mentioned, Google Blog Search – TechCrunch – CollegeRecruiter.com – YouTube – craigslist – TheLadders! Do you realize that MySpace was founded in August 2003 and Facebook launched in February 2004? On September 28, 2004, a search on “podcast” in Google turned up 24 matches. As I write this today, the number is 142,000,000. On July 26th, a search on “blog” in Google turned up 1,270,000,000. Yes, billion. And it boggles my mind to believe that, according to Technorati, there are approximately 100,000 new blogs created every day.

And it’s changing everything.

Today, when you apply for a job, so do a thousand other people! And they do so from the comfort of their local Starbucks, complete with a Grande’ Soy Latte’ and high-speed Wi-Fi! On the flip side, when a star candidate surfaces in the market, one thousand companies are vying for her hand in marriage! This is not my grandfather’s job market. It’s not even my father’s job market. My grandfather stood in line for his jobs and he only had two jobs in a thirty year span. I’ve had two jobs since 7:30am…this morning!

Michael McNeal, VP of Talent Acquisition at Intuit, and budding stand-up comedian, recently said,

“The race to a million resumes yield no winners.”

The point? It’s not about outracing our competitors to the stack of resumes. It’s not about posting as many jobs as we can and praying that the best candidates magically float to the top. It’s about doing things that provide an advantage over our competitors. It’s about doing something remarkable that makes our company stand out. As Seth Godin would say, “It’s about being a Purple Cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins.” In a word, unique. Why? Because the way we do business is changing. The way we apply for a job is changing. The way we recruit is changing. And we cannot continue to recruit like it’s 1997 (hiding behind our corporate firewalls and email aliases) and expect that we are going to win (or, at a minimum, endear the coveted candidate).

Two words effectively describe the essence of what differentiates one organization from another: candidate experience. And those companies that successfully remove the noise and clutter of “choice” facing the mass of job-seekers will have done so by elevating their candidate experience from good to great.

Virtual communities – social networking – podcasting – blogging – vlogging – recruitTV – wiki webs. While many of us continue using the same good recruiting tools that we’ve used since 1997 (and some with good reason), too few of us are getting our hands dirty on the post-Google technology that can assist in our mission toward greatness. As a result, there are not many organizations we herald as unique.

Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” I disagree. I think you can go home (1997) as long as you don’t make plans to live there.

Not if you want to be remarkable.