A growing number of recruiters view their online activity as a sort of three-legged stool.

One leg deals with job postings at their web site, commercial recruitment sites and affinity group sites such as professional societies and trade associations.

The second leg involves sourcing resumes from commercial recruitment web sites and affinity groups, and by probing for contact information from newsgroups and other corporate web sites.

The third leg of the stool focuses on on-going, long-term connections with individuals in critical employment fields. Building rich candidate relationships is increasingly viewed as the one online recruiting activity with the greatest potential return on investment. Done well, it provides a ready pool of candidates, cuts the time and cost of sourcing and improves the yield from sourcing.

To date, most of the effort to establish such connections centers around finding individual information -- names, postal and e-mail addresses as well as skill and experience data -- for passive and active job seekers who have never worked for the company. In other words, recruiters use relationship building to get to know strangers. There's nothing wrong with that. But while new relationships are central to good recruiting, they should not interfere with keeping up old relationships.

And there's the rub. With rare exceptions, recruiters have largely disregarded departing and former employees as prospective candidates. They have ignored their organization's alumni and the rich trove of information the organization already has about them. In today's dynamic recruiting environment, that's a mistake.

These professionals, whether they left last year or have set their departure date for next week, are all prospective candidates. If they were good enough to be hired once, they will probably be just as good the second or third time around. In fact, unless an alum was separated from the organization for cause, consider them for open positions. You will accrue several significant benefits from doing so:

• Unlike with its new candidates, the organization already knows a great deal about the on-the-job performance of its alumni. Their personnel files are filled with data describing their ability to work in teams, meet deadlines, see the big picture and contribute to the organization's mission. These are key factors in any new employee's ability to succeed within the organization, and they are especially hard to evaluate when getting to know a candidate for the first time.
• Further, alumni have the right stuff to hit the ground running. They are likely to be productive more quickly because they already know something about the organization's culture and procedures and may even be acquainted with members of their work team.

The downside to such familiarity, of course, is that alumni may also bring along potentially disruptive baggage from their prior employment. It's important to probe for such issues, and when they're uncovered, to address and resolve them before the alum begins his or her new job.

With that single caveat, a candidate database of former employees provides a ready platform for relationship recruiting. Thanks to available technologies, mass one-to-one communication is possible. By using management information systems to parse the personal information from its database, the organization can send information and news to each alumnus that is individually tailored to their occupational field, level of experience, location, work schedule preference and other circumstances. And by using the Internet to send those messages as e-mail, the organization can maintain a continuous connection with its alumni while minimizing the labor and cost of that effort.

Although the Internet and other technologies make mass one-to-one communication possible, the medium is definitely not the message -- the relationship is. To be successful, alumni must perceive the electronic interaction former employers as something other than simple sourcing. They must be convinced that it represents the organization's genuine commitment to their personal advancement, wherever they are employed.

It's not that they don't want to be told about the organization's open positions; in most cases they do. But they will expect much more if they are to stay engaged. For alumni, the interaction becomes a relationship only if it addresses their future as well as the present and only if it provides career as well as employment information, personal development opportunities as well as job openings. To put it another way, they want the organization to see them as people, not as the answer to an open req.

When an organization makes that level of commitment, it transforms simple e-mail messages into the bits and bytes of respect and trust. It infuses the power of technology with the powerful bond of the human spirit. It takes job posting and resume sourcing and adds the balance and competitive advantage of relationship recruiting.