It's tempting, I know. There are more than 112 million e-mailboxes world-wide, and every one of them is accessible. No printing hassles, no postage costs, just pure, unvarnished candidate contact and recruiting. In today's highly competitive staffing environment, broadcasting an e-mail message to thousands, even tens of thousands of prospects seems like the perfect antidote to lousy demographic trends, full employment and understaffing. It looks appealing, but don't do it.

Indiscriminately sending out e-mail has few upsides and many downsides. First, recipients tend to view them as junk mail. No matter how appealing you might think your employment opportunities are, from the recipient's perspective your "Hey, Mack, I gotta' job for you" messages are unsolicited and unwelcome. These communications clog up e-mailboxes and, with all of the recent publicity about viruses, stimulate considerable anxiety.

Second, a number of states are scrutinizing commercial e-mail traffic. California, Washington and Nevada already have statutes on the books, and several other states are considering them. These laws impose fines and even jail time for electronic messages that do not meet certain standards. Although each law or proposed legislation is unique, all contain two basic provisions:

• E-mail must be clearly marked as an advertisement, and this "warning" must appear early in the message.
• The recipient must have a way to stop future deliveries, and that procedure must be easy to identify and cost-free.

So, what's a recruiter to do?

I suggest that you e-mail the old fashioned way. Communicate only with people you know and only with the individualized attention a friend or peer deserves. To do so, you will have to carefully control the timing and the content of your messages so that they are neither unexpected nor impersonal.

Timing. The best time to use e-mail is after you have established a relationship with a prospective candidate, not before. It's more work that way, but relationships have always been the cornerstone of good recruiting, and the Internet doesn't change that. The Internet does, however, expand the range of people you can meet and the time available to get to know them.

From the comfort of your own desktop, you can participate in newsgroups, association bulletin boards, college alumni chats and virtual communities 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, the Internet helps you reach beyond geographic and political barriers and build relationships with a far larger and more dispersed group of prospective candidates than you could have ever done cold calling and networking.

Treat them with care, and these relationships have the power to transform your e-mail. Nurture your relationships, and the perception of your messages will shift from impersonal intrusion to valued communication. Timing is everything, even in this era of warp-speed recruiting, and with e-mail it makes the difference between communication your recipients will read and that which they will delete.

Content. Database management technology now provides the capability to custom-tailor your communications to each recipient's unique attributes and situation. In other words, there's simply no excuse for abusing others with undifferentiated e-mail. If you've done the preparatory work of building a relationship with your correspondents, then you should know enough about them to personalize the contents of each and every message you send out. Technology can perform the grunt work of that effort -- parsing the database to extract and embed the appropriate attributes in each recipient's message -- but only you can establish the bonds of trust and respect necessary to acquire the data in the first place.

As a minimum, each message should reflect a person's gender, occupational field, experience level and location. For example, if you're trying to fill an engineering position in San Francisco, your e-mail message to a qualified engineer in New York City will acknowledge the need to relocate, while your message to the engineer in San Francisco will emphasize the opportunity to move ahead without moving out. You'll write one master message, and the computer will tailor that communication appropriately -- from the data you've amassed via your relationships -- and send it out to the right prospects for that job.

Clearly, these techniques are not rocket science. But as seasoned recruiters will quickly point out, treating people as individuals is a longstanding principle of good recruiting. E-mail is simply a new way to practice that old axiom.