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It is better
to not be on
the web than
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John Sumser

Reality
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complex
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it seems.
John Gall

It's better to
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If you can't
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efforts
scale back
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John Sumser

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Regionality

(January 12, 2001) Like politics, Recruiting is a local sport. Given the web's ability to compress distance and time, the concept of "local" (or Regionality when we're talking to MBAs) is undergoing change. It isn't (as national brand marketers hope) going away. The concept of Regionality and what it means is simply in a state of flux. The web, which forces decentralization and hierarchical flattening, prefers local management to towering management structures.

We like to use the local Yahoo feature that maps places on the web based on their geographic distance from our front door. It's every bit as regional as job boards that claim regional capacity by zip code sort. Yahoo's definition of local is "25 miles or less from the center of the zip code" or "one gallon of gas from home". It's a good reference point and we always start there.

But,

If you don't know about the Depot, our famous inhabitants, the Aikido Dojo, the mountain play, the Zen Spa downtown, the Mill Valley Herald, Kiddo, Mount Tam, the closest nude beach, the Zen Center, the Sweetwater, the Dipsea Race, the Dipsea Restaurant (where Lucas Breakfasts), Mama's Royal Cafe, or the Marin Headlands then you haven't got a clue about Mill Valley. The Yahoo approach simply can't grasp the nuances and they are hardly subtle.

And, the trouble with not having a clue is that it shows.

What the web does to regions is that it allows bonds to be tightened while physical geography becomes somewhat less important. While we're great fans of Craigslist, for example, the idea that it can be easily translated into New York seems sophomoric to us. Maybe the village or Westchester County but New York as a whole is better suited to regionalization by HotJobs than a loose band of techno-hippies from San Francisco. That's not to say that it won't be profitably done, just that it will always be vulnerable to something more local (and already working like MBAFreeAgents). As much as we like them real tall buildings, they are better handled by the odd folks who live with them.

This is where local newspapers (like ours) really show their strengths. It's not centralization that matters, it's an emphasis on the realities of the local market.

From our perspective, a region is best understood as an intersection of geography and interest (or profession) that encompasses about 25,000 people (max, 10,000 is better). As companies begin to master the art of building pools of candidates, they will discover that focused demographics are the key to defining these regions. In the harsh light of reality, they are as you define them. The trick is understanding just how much money can be leveraged by understanding the region you operate in or wish to extract people from.

- John Sumser

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