Peter Drucker's thirty-first book, "Management Challenges for the 21st Century" (Harperbusiness, 1999), recently hit bookstores. As always, Mr. Drucker offers a savvy analysis of what's happening in the world of work and a set of thought-provoking principles for grappling with those challenges successfully. Although much of his commentary seems directed at the most senior levels of organizational leadership, several of his ideas apply to the employment function.

One of those concepts is "organized abandonment" -- the notion that organizations and employees have to expect their products, services, markets, customers and processes to grow obsolete, at which point they should be replaced with something more up-to-date and useful. Mr. Drucker urges us to evaluate everything we do on a systematic basis in order to plan for the eventual demise of the old and arrival of the new. This exercise, he cautions, is not simply change for change's sake or to grab onto the latest consultant's fad. Instead, its purpose is grounded in the real business world: Stuff happens, things change and you can either be prepared for and capitalize on those shifts or you can be behind and defeated by them.

For recruiters, the time for systemic abandonment has arrived, thanks to a demographic shift that has installed a seller's paradise in the job market. Where job seekers once chased employers, employers now compete viciously for all professionals -- especially for those who aren't job hunting. To accommodate this altered state of reality, the process, behaviors, even the culture of recruiting organizations will have to change soon. Conventional practices won't get the job done and could hurt the bottom line.

This dynamic is nowhere better illustrated than in the area of communication. Traditionally, recruiters communicated only with qualified applicants. They interacted with prospective employees only when they had to and did so at a leisurely pace. The process was recruiter-centric and laced with just enough smugness to make even the most self-assured candidate feel diminished.

Today, such arrogance won't fill empty desks. There simply aren't enough candidates to satisfy employer demand, so recruiters must now find supplementary candidate populations and woo the best among them before the competition does. Those requirements can only be met if recruiters adopt new principles of communication: using the Internet to tap potential candidates everywhere. Indeed, the resulting practices represent some of the most important attributes of effective online recruiting. They are:

• communicate with everyone,
• communicate everywhere,
• communicate all of the time and
• communicate at warp speed.

Communicate with everyone. Rather than limiting your interaction to individuals who are judged to be qualified for current job openings, use the mass one-to-one communications capability of the Internet to interact with all applicants. Why? Because those who are not qualified for today's requirement may be well-suited for tomorrow's. By establishing a relationship with a large population of potential candidates, you create a reservoir of talent from which you can recruit employees in the future.

Communicate everywhere. There's no arguing that local recruitment still has many advantages. You save relocation dollars and avoid the "family disruption factor" in a candidate's evaluation of your offer. However, organizations need world-class workers to compete in today's tough international economy, so it's equally as prudent to use the global reach of the Internet to find and recruit the best available candidates for your organization's position vacancies, wherever they are located.

Communicate all of the time. If don't talk to prospective candidates, your competitors will. Therefore, the key to successful online recruiting is continuous communication. Use e-mail and database management technology to send a constant stream of individually-tailored information, news, ideas and job announcements to every candidate you know. Carefully planned so that it is not intrusive, this unbroken interaction will strengthen your relationship with each and all of them, giving you a competitive advantage in your recruitment efforts.

Communicate at warp speed. In the good old days of staffing -- even just four or five years ago -- you could take your time contacting, interviewing and selling candidates. Often, the cycle took four weeks or longer. Today, four hours can mean the difference between an offer accepted and watching the competition hire away your best prospects. The Internet facilitates communications 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the best online recruiters take full advantage of that capability. Using a combination of e-mail and online video and audio streaming, they connect with candidates and begin the assessment and sales process the moment a qualified person is identified. Then, they keep the momentum going by using the same capabilities (as well as traditional off-line methods) to get interviews done and offers made, all within 48 hours.

Adopting these and other changes clearly represents the conscious abandonment of some of the recruiting profession's longest-standing practices. Such shifts may be difficult and unsettling. But as Mr. Drucker points out in his book, the alternative to discomfort is the early decline of your organization and your career.