Texas Instruments is a household name for their innovative technological work. They design and manufacture analog digital signal processing and DLP chip technologies. TI chips are in more than 50% of the world's mobile phones. As a company, Texas Instruments combines excellence in technical innovation with a devotion to servicing customers. In this company, employees are the source of technical genius and the developers of the new frontier. It's crucial then that Texas Instruments recruits the best and brightest to keep their company successful.

>> We're a worldwide company, so we actually recruit employees around the world, it is a global recruiting effort. We hire both hourly employees, which we call non-exempts. And then salaried employees, people with college degrees, which we call exempts. So depending on the business conditions every year, we will hire somewhere between maybe 750 and 1500 engineers a year. So we have a team of people that help us hire the non-exempt hourly employees. We have a large team of people who focus on the various engineering skills for the different business units. Then we also have a third team of people that focuses on what we call our student programs, which is our college recruiting and intern program.

>> A distinctive mission and a growing company mean Texas Instruments must constantly recruit employees for immediate and future needs. How do companies like Texas Instruments find the ideal employees? The ones that will drive company success and innovation.

>> Because our company is so engineering based, we do recruit from very strong engineering schools. And again, from all over the world and all different parts of the country. Now from a sourcing perspective, a great recruiting program has numerous tentacles out into the sourcing world. Our number one source for our employees is actually employee referrals. About 40% of our hires come from employee referrals right now. We recruit off of job boards. We do a lot of passive recruiting, kind of who do you know. We go to engineering conferences. We go to engineering focus career fairs, some of the national engineering focus career fairs. A lot of our new college grads come from on-campus recruiting. We have a very strong on-campus recruiting program and also a lot of our new college grads come directly out of our intern program.

>> Texas Instruments finds its creative genius through a combination of internal and external recruitment. The company looks to promote high performing employees and by doing so, encourages workers to stay with the company. Texas Instruments also relies on a variety of techniques for external recruitment, within an increasingly tight industry market.

>> We have a pretty extensive career page on our website and that is refreshed actually daily, every time a new job is open, it is posted on that website. And people can go apply, they can self-select and they can also have emails sent when positions open. A really good career site will have a lot more information besides the jobs. It will have information on the cities where the jobs are because if you're recruiting U.S. wide or even worldwide, you're trying to get talent interested in coming to you and if someone has never been to the city or state where your corporate headquarters are, they need to know a little bit about it before they might be attracted to your opportunities. We also have employee testimonials out there that are real employees at Texas Instruments talking about their job. Number one; what kind of cool technology am I working on? And then number two; what is it like to work at Texas Instruments?

>> Successful recruiting doesn't stop with finding and hiring employees. Companies should also employ some kind of evaluation and metric system to test their recruiting efforts and gauge the need for change.

>> Some of the things that companies will use to analyze their short-term recruiting success are time to fill. From the time the position opens, until you make the offer. How long is that? Most companies also measure cost-per-hire. Do you include relocation in the cost-per-hire or do you not include relocation? Some companies do, some companies do not. If you sponsor international engineers, international employees, where you go to get a visa and then even the perm process. Do you include that in your cost-per-hire or do you not? Most company's measure accepts as ratio. When you put the offers out, how many accepts do you get? Most companies measure intern conversion. How many interns do you have? Do you make offers, do they get in? And that shows you a return not only on your cost-per-hire, but also on your intern program. Are you investing wisely in your intern program? And the longer term aspect is did we get the right fit? And often you don't know that until at least 12 months down the road, if not 24 or 36 months. So we also do analyzation for in the first three years of an employee. Are they ranked in the top 10%, the middle 80% or the bottom 10%? So we begin to see trends of are we hiring excellent employees that are lifting the talent level at our company or are we settling? So there is a longer term measurement there that can be really important to a company that can really help a staffing organization draw better results up front.

>> When recruitment comes from strategic decisions based on the company mission and goals, as Texas Instruments has discovered, employees are truly company resources. They power the innovation the company is known for and provide the spark of genius.

>> Recruiting the right employees is probably the number one key to making sure your company has a strong competitive advantage. Many many companies use the same equipment, they use the same software, but it's their people that make the difference. It's because their core values align and their goals and their dreams. And then they see through their work, how do they fit in to drive those goals. And those partnerships become very very powerful in the workforce.

According to Diana Johnson, the diversity staffing manager at Texas Instruments, the number one key to making sure a company has a strong competitive advantage is:

a.hiring the right employees.

b.using premium equipment and machinery.

c.using the latest security software.

d.finding a proper workspace.