Desperate Job Seekers Employing Unusual Job Hunting Tactics

College students, recent graduates, and other job seekers are turning to unconventional job hunting tactics in an effort to stand out from their competitors as the nation’s unemployment rate continues to hover around 10 percent. Indeed, 22 percent of hiring managers report that they are seeing more job seekers try unusual tactics to capture their attention in 2010 compared to last year. This is up from 18 percent of hiring managers who said the same in 2009 and 12 percent in 2008.
“While we are seeing positive signs in the job market as employers gradually add headcount, competition is still high for open positions,” said Jason Ferrara, senior career adviser at CareerBuilder. “As a result, more candidates are turning to unconventional tactics to attract the attention of hiring managers. While these tactics may work occasionally, they still need to be done with professionalism. That way, candidates are remembered for what they can offer an organization and not just for an unusual antic.”

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Open Letter from Ted Daywalt of VetJobs to ICANN Regarding Transfer of .jobs Domains from SHRM to Employ Media

As reported earlier today by John Zappe of ERE, “[t]he expansion of the .jobs Internet address has been given the go-ahead by the Society for Human Resource Management, paving the way for the launch of what could be hundreds of thousands of new job boards. SHRM made the announcement this morning.”
Why should any job seeker, employer, job board owner, or other human resource professional care? Because the process stunk and lacked an open, honest, and transparent process. Despite SHRM’s many, many excellent conferences, publications, and other contributions to the human resource communities, it is making a terrible mistake here by seemingly washing its hands of a situation that it set in motion in 2005 when it partnered with Employ Media and petitioned ICANN to create the .jobs domain.
The approval specified that the .jobs domain names would be issued only with organization names and sold only to those organizations, so Microsoft could buy microsoft.jobs and Walmart could buy walmart.jobs and use those domains to drive job seekers to their corporate career sites, but CollegeRecruiter.com could not buy CollegeRecruiter.jobs and drive candidates to its job board as we would have jobs from other organizations on our job board. Similarly, Microsoft could not buy domains such as redmond.jobs or software.jobs. That’s all about to change and the only winner here is Employ Media.

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CACEE Presentation About Re-building Employer Career Web Site

Outside of the U.S. military, I doubt that there are any employers who recruit at as many college campuses and reach as many students as does Enterprise Rent-a-Car, now part of Enterprise Holdings. CollegeRecruiter.com has had the good fortune to work with ERAC for years and so I was excited to learn that Marie Artim, who heads up their global college recruiting efforts, would be presenting immediately after me at this week’s Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers (CACEE) annual conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Marie’s presentation briefly described their old web site, their recent acquisitions and subsequent name change, position in the recruiting landscape, goals for their new web site, process they followed to achieve those goals, progress they’ve made to-date, and a few items which are still on their wish list. About 100 attendees sat transfixed as Marie laid it all out in her upbeat, informative, and engaging style. Unlike a lot of the attendees, I was already acquainted with much of what Marie discussed because of the work that we’ve done with them over the years so I was sitting there listening and hoping that she would get into a discussion on the remarkable job that ERAC does in automatically tracking the source of their hires. She did not disappoint.

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Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition For Three Remaining Subscribers

32% of Gen Y Okay With Calling in Sick Via Text Message

Like the telephone 100 years ago, fax machines starting in the 1970′s, and email in the 1990′s, employers and employees alike are struggling to adapt to new communication technologies and how they can and should be used. The current struggle seems to largely be over the appropriate use of text messaging in and about the workplace.
A new survey by free texting app textPlus shows certain workplace interactions — those traditionally reserved for a face-to-face or phone conversations — are taking place more and more over text message.

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What’s an Employer Really Looking For in Your Resume?

Written By Jimmy Sweeney
Author of the brand new, Amazing Resume Creator

Most job-seekers write their resumes with one thing in mind–themselves! They toot their own horn so loud the interviewer is blown away by the sound. The “I did this” and “I achieved that” approach is important, of course. The hiring manager wants to know what you’ve accomplished in your previous line of work and how you can benefit his or her company in the new position.

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Useful Tips in Your Job Interview

Your job interview can make or break your chance of getting an entry level job. It is natural to be nervous, but if you prepare properly, you’ll be more confident, and hopefully, more convincing to the interviewer that you are the best candidate for a particular job. Here are some tips from one website to help you prepare for a successful job interview.

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Do Your Detective Work–BEFORE the Interview!

Written By Jimmy Sweeney
President of CareerJimmy and Author of the new,
Job Interview “Secret”
You know what kind of job you want. A sales associate. An office manager. A legal secretary.
Whichever position suits your personality and skills, you’ll have a better chance of landing it if you do a little detective work–before the interview. Learn as much as you can about the company, its goals, as well as products and services. Then during the interview, you’ll be ready to ask good questions, and to show how and why you’re ideal for the job.

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TMP’s “The Game” at #NACE10 Was a Great Success

One of my favorite people in the digital recruiting industry is Steven Ehrlich, Global Vice President, Client Development, of TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications, LLC. For those who have not had the pleasure of meeting Steve, his job is largely to be a visionary and tackle special assignments for TMP. From everything that I’ve seen and heard, he does his job very, very well.
Last week’s National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2010 annual conference in Orlando featured one of Steve’s special projects. TMP, CollegeRecruiter.com, and dozens of other vendors, employers, schools, etc. had booths in the exhibit room. But Steve, rather than waiting for potential employer clients to come to him, instead went to them. He approached a limited number of TMP partners such as CollegeRecruiter.com and offered to us the opportunity to be a part of “The Game,” an interactive scavenger hunt type of a game played by attendees. Each participating attendee downloaded an application to their smart phone that allowed them scan two dimensional barcodes and upload those to CardScan, the vendor used by TMP. The attendees then went from participating booth to participating booth. At our booth, they scanned our bar code (see the photo) and then answered a question about which celebrity was the first to reach a million followers on Twitter. Hint: Ashton. When they got the question correct, they moved onto the next booth.

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CACEE Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia

I’m in Halifax, Nova Scotia this week for the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers (CACEE) college and university recruiting conference. It is, more or less, the Canadian equivalent of last week’s National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) college recruiting conference in Orlando.
As you might expect in Canada given that its population is one tenth of the population of its neighbor to the south, the attendance at CACEE is significantly smaller but if you multiply the attendance here ten fold, the attendance is likely larger than what I saw last week at NACE. There appear to be several hundred attendees at CACEE and I was told there were 1,500 at NACE, so kudos to both organizations for pulling out such strong numbers in such a difficult economy.

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