In the 18th century, the elite Gordon Highlanders provided an unusual signing bonus to the strapping young men they recruited: Each received a kiss from one Lady Gordon. During the kiss, she transferred a shilling from her teeth to those of the new soldier.

Oh, for those good old days. Today, signing inducements cost a lot more than a shilling. Top candidates may receive BMWs, trips, and stock options. Students often have their school loans repaid.

Even those grand gestures usually aren’t enough, because everyone is throwing goodies at the great people. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about a highly recruited student who, told that he had won a vacation in a drawing, responded: "Cool, I won one of those last week, too."

Companies are competing so hard for people because business has largely become a war for talent. In the Internet age, things are changing so fast that businesses have to have the most creative, the smartest, the most passionate people if they’re to innovate quickly enough to win.

In my experience, landing the best talent is only partly a function of money. It’s mostly a matter of effort: You have to involve everyone in your organization in recruiting, from the chief executive officer on down. Oddly enough, you also have to be willing to show all the weaknesses of your business to those you’re recruiting.

To be a bit more systematic about it, I find that you need to think about recruiting in two ways: process and people.

A PROCESS WITH ‘TEETH’
And I don’t mean Lady Gordon’s. I mean that the commitment to recruiting has to start at the top, with the chief executive. Otherwise, people won’t take time and resources away from other, revenue-generating projects to help out.

When we first started hiring at Diamond Technology Partners, every single partner in this digital-strategy consulting firm, including the chief executive, attended campus recruiting events. This was actually a lot of fun for everybody. We scared the pants off young recruits by putting the CEO on their interview schedules, but they liked it. (As much as I think recruits love talking to me, I know that they’d rather meet the CEO or some senior line partner. I can deal with it.)

Even if the CEO doesn’t want to go drinking in campus bars, he can still lend important support by visibly assigning responsibility for recruiting to a senior executive. The CEO should also send out weekly messages about new hires and accepts, to underscore their value, and should personally send out reminders about recruiting events.

In general, you should shower job candidates with as much attention as you would potential clients. After all, you’re recruiting the future leaders of your firm.

In addition to getting commitment from the senior management, you have to find ways of convincing recruits that they will have the opportunity to do exciting work that will teach them new skills. You have to let them know that you will give them exposure to top management, the opportunity to work with new technologies, the ability to work on a variety of challenging assignments, advanced training, and a defined career path. The work should mean more than money to good people—if you find a guy who is more interested in the features of the Beemer he got as a signing bonus than in his work, you’re better off without him.

You can send the message about work partly by talking, but it’s better to show. At Diamond, we have summer interns do real work on real projects, and we seem to be succeeding. In the last two years that we’ve focused on getting them onto challenging consulting projects, 80% of those who received offers accepted them.

You should, in fact, show as much as possible about your firm to recruits before they come aboard. Otherwise, they may realize too late that you and they are a bad fit and leave shortly after arriving, wasting all the time and money you put into recruiting them.

At Diamond, we invite everyone with an outstanding job offer to one of our quarterly All Hands meetings, where the entire firm comes together for training, updates, and networking. These events can include pointed discussions about the direction the firm is taking, but we hold nothing back. These events are who we are, warts and all. Recruits almost always come away feeling more comfortable about our people and our work. Last year, I was repeatedly asked if the meeting attended by our campus recruits was "staged" for their benefit; they felt everything was too good to be true. Right. Try "staging" almost 600 creative, intelligent, outgoing personalities!

Even if you don’t make an offer to a candidate, he should feel he had a great experience interviewing with you. Job hunters now have broad access to information. They will share details about how they were treated by a company, especially on business-school campuses. They create spreadsheets of their offers and send them to friends. (If I want to know what my competitors are doing, I ask the candidates. They all know.) Someone who has a bad experience could start spreading stories that will come back to haunt you.

I have heard plenty about a company that sent out rejection letters to the candidates that it wanted to call back for second rounds. Oops.

PEOPLE POWER
The people who already work at your firm know the environment better than anyone. They know who would fit in that environment. They know who they’d like to work with. They probably even have friends they’d like to recruit.

So, help them. Use everybody in the firm as a source of referrals and as coaches to help recruits figure out whether they’ll fit in.

At our firm, we have a group of Carnegie Mellon University alumni who have committed to putting serious muscle into the on-campus recruiting effort there. They spend their own time reviewing resumes, screening candidates, answering questions, attending functions, and closing deals. As a result, over the past two years, when we made job offers to 29 students, we had 22 accept. These are top, top students.

You know, I’m sure that recruiting is easy at some firms. When a new hire goes golfing with his buddies and says, "I just took a job with Goldman," that name speaks volumes. People must be lining up to work there. But the way I look at it, if we just hire enough of the right people over the next few years, we’ll become a marquee brand, too, and my team and I can finally stop working so hard.

Rupple is the partner in charge of recruiting at Diamond Technology Partners. She can be reached at rupplej@diamtech.com.