As part of its employee recruitment effort, Adjoined Technologies spent $20 apiece to have “care packages” delivered to 40 IT majors who were studying for their final exams at a nearby university. The packages included Starbucks coffee, Power Bars, snack foods, and such. Cost-benefit analysis told Adjoined that $800 spent on a memorable win for 40 hand-picked potential candidates is a bargain compared with scattershot advertisements in the Sunday paper for hundreds of dollars each or recruiter's fees of $2,000 to $3,000 per hire. Moreover, providing that win got the relationship between the company and the candidate off to a beautiful start. Adjoined did not offer a position to everyone in that group of 40, but every candidate who was extended an offer accepted it.

– From “Business is a Contact Sport”, by Tom Richardson, Augusto Vidaurreta, and Tom Gorman

Now *that's* how to recruit!

Random Emacs symbol: file-modes – Function: Return mode bits of file named FILENAME, as an integer.