Flash memory takes the hire path

Devices which flaunt their flash memory are often frowned upon in a corporate setting, but it turns out that you can actually use them as a novel recruitment aid.

Highly paranoid companies (and let's face it, the words "highly paranoid" may be redundant when you place them in front of "companies") often ban connecting any device which can potentially be used to export corporate data.

This can frequently lead to a large and pleasing tick on the annual compliance report, though it also can result in a seething underbelly of disgruntled workers who can't keep their iPods up to date and are secretly plotting to spit in the IT manager's coffee at the first opportunity.

More forward-thinking businesses recognise that there can be advantages in having some form of external backup system, especially for mobile workers.

However, it's taken until now for Snorage to encounter an example for a business case for MP3 players which doesn't involve either people working for the music industry (again, a relatively loose use of the word "work") or rather tenuous claims about delivering training materials in audio form.

The secret sauce turns out to be recruitment. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, US games developer Red 5 Studios decided that simply cold-calling potential recruits wasn't going to be enough to convince some of the people it wanted to hire to come on board.

Instead, the company identified 100 "dream hires" and sent each of them a personally engraved iPod Shuffle, with a message from the company's chief executive urging them to consider coming on board.

For reasons that aren't completely clear to Snorage, the Shuffles were also enclosed Russian-doll style in five boxes. Why delay the satisfaction?

In any event, the plan worked, with four candidates taking up the offer. Now, that might seem a relatively expensive way of recruiting -- after all, 96 Shuffles have been given away -- but it's still a lot cheaper than paying a recruiter.

Mind you, the odds are good that at least some of the people who took advantage of the freebies won't be able to take advantage of them in a work setting anyway.