A story recently came out in the press in response to Steve Jobs’ announcement that he is leaving Apple as CEO. As the story goes, one of the top product guys at Google received an email in the middle of the night from Steve Jobs complaining that there was a major issue with the Google icon that appeared on the iPhone. It was such a big issue that Steve Jobs was personally going to assign an Apple representative to work directly with the Google employee to resolve the issue immediately. So what was the problem? It turns out that the yellow color in the letter O of GOOGLE was slightly off.

Was this slightly off-colored letter going to cause major issues for Apple or Google? Absolutely not! The key takeaway is the care for the granular detail that Steve Jobs had/has. In product development, maybe some of the details are more apparent but certainly in recruiting there are parallels. For example, when a recruit calls your phone and you don’t answer, what type of message will they hear on your voicemail? Is it something that is welcoming and open or is it a short/brief ‘leave a message’. If you are out of town for a few weeks and they send you an email, is the automated message back informative and interesting or is “I’m out of town for the next 3 weeks with limited access to email”. When they browse your website, is the information about you enticing and powerful or is it “Head Coach for past 3 years”.

The trick is to look at every single interaction a recruit could have with you, your program and your school. This is not just limited to emails, calls, and on-campus visits. There are many many other signals that they absorb and you can’t control them all but if you think outside the box, you can control more than you currently are. Apple did not go from near bankruptcy to one of the most wealthy companies in the world because they built a few great products. They did this by looking at all the granular details from the yellow O’s to the box that the product comes in. If you start controlling the signals and pay attention to your slightly off-colored O’s, they will add up.