Video: Research Links Happiness to Success

We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk from TEDxBloomington, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity.

Web Streaming Means Conferences Are At The Beginning of Their End

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin

Educational Technologies (broadband video, collaboration tools, e-learning development tools, marketing and distribution tools, apps, etc., etc.) passed a tipping point in 2011 and will change ‘training’ and ‘learning’ business models forever. 2012 is the beginning of the end for current approaches to how we attend conferences; collaborate at seminrs; develop ourselves and our colleagues; train our subordinates; support local-tax-based school systems; matriculate at college and much more.

This article in Forbes: M.I.T. Game Changer (passed on to us by Carmen Hudson) begins by noting an M.I.T. announcement from December 19, 2011 that it will offer online courses for free beginning in January (not its current decade-old OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative with 2300 courses online anyone could audit but) “a new online learning initiative, internally called M.I.T.x, which combines research, technical innovation and new online learning opportunities” and where “Students using the program will be able to communicate with their peers through student-to-student discussions, allowing them an opportunity to ask questions or simply brainstorm with others, while also being able to access online laboratories and self-assessments.” Individuals who complete the program will receive a certificate of completion. Continue Reading

Videos and PowerPoints From FedCollege Recruiting Conferences on 12/7 and 12/8/2011

On April 1, 2011, Steve Tiufekchiev of RECSOLU and I co-organized the first FedCollege recruiting conference for federal, state, and local government employees who were involved in the hiring of college students for internships and recent graduates for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities. The conference was at The George Washington University’s Marvin Center in Washington, D.C.

Partnering with RECSOLU on this non-profit venture was a natural as Steve and I work well together and RECSOLU’s services are quite complimentary to the job postings, targeted emails, banner advertising, targeted cell phone text messaging, and other job board services sold by CollegeRecruiter.com. RECSOLU is a leading recruiting software, solutions, and services company, whose clients include more than 100 major corporations. Their packaged solutions enable their clients to achieve their college recruiting goals more effectively, with less staff time, greater efficiency, greater accuracy, and less cost.

We had hoped for 50 attendees to the April conference and were pretty happy when we ended up with 72 attendees. It was apparent to us that we should host another but we didn’t want to end up with even more attendees so we split the conference into two days with corporate and non-profit employer representatives scheduled for Wednesday, December 7th and government employer representatives scheduled for Thursday, December 8th. It was a good thing that we split the conference into two as we ended up with over 80 attendees between the two days. The smaller number of attendees per day really paid off as the sessions became more interactive than they would have been in larger rooms and attendees were able to meet and visit with each other much more easily. Continue Reading

The #1 Reason You Do NOT Need a Social Media Strategy

Guest post by Graham Donald

Graham Donald of Brainstorm Consulting

But most employers do NOT need a social media strategy. Continue Reading

Unless You’re Smoking Crack, Your Web Site is Not a Source of Hire

Alex Charraudeau of 4MAT

In a nutshell, Stop Gap Group used Broadbean to distribute their job postings to a number of job boards and then were quite disappointed with the apparent lack of applications and hires. Broadbean is a partner of our job board, CollegeRecruiter.com, so I’m quite familiar with them. They do a great job of distributing jobs to a wide variety of job boards and then measuring the responses to those postings but they can only measure what the employer has allowed them to measure. Continue Reading

CollegeRecruiter.com Hosting College Recruiting Conferences in D.C. in December

Steve Ehrlich of TMP Worldwide

Tickets just went on sale and promise to sell out quickly for both conferences. Continue Reading

Half day college recruiting conference at GWU

This past April, The George Washington University, RECSOLU, and CollegeRecruiter.com worked together to pilot a half day college recruiting conference (FedCollege) for federal government employees involved in the recruitment of college students and recent graduates. We hoped that 50 attendees would join us but we were delighted when 72 showed up and created an oversold event! Continue Reading

Employer Branding Is More About the Candidate Experience Than Fancy Graphics

Jonas Barck, marketing manager for Universum Communications, invited me to attend their employer branding conference this past Wednesday at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. In addition to the facility being absolutely top notch, so was the content.

At about 2pm, a recruiter for one of the many Fortune 500 employers in the room commented that his takeaway from the day was that employer branding was a lot more about delivering a positive candidate experience than fancy brochures, web sites, pamphlets, or career fair giveaways. Yes! In one sentence, the recruiter absolutely nailed it. All of the fancy collateral in the world won’t result in the improvement of your organization’s brand unless there is real substance to back-up the style. In other words, actions speak louder than words. If you tell candidates that you have a collaborative work environment — which Gen Y loves — then they better not walk into your office and find a Dilbert-esque cube farm.

One of the presenters who did a great job talking about branding was Kelly Bartkiewicz, Personnel & Organization Director – Talent Management at MARS. You’d think that with all of their wonderful candy, pet food, and other consumer goods that branding would be the least of their problems and yet it actually is one of their most significant problems. You see, consumers and therefore candidates have preconceived notions about MARS because MARS has a strong consumer brand. But that brand isn’t what they want to project to their candidates because working at MARS is a lot different than eating their candy or feeding your dog Greenies or any of their other pet-related products. So MARS has to stay true to its consumer brand yet also carve out a different employment brand. That’s not an easy task but it seems that Kelly and her team are having real success in achieving that goal.

Another large but very different organization that we learned about was the National Security Organization. Lori Weltman, marketing manager, delivered the keynote presentation on how the NSA connects with its candidates. As a very selective intelligence agency, it takes them months and months to go from the point of initial contact to extending an offer of employment and just that delay frustrates a lot of candidates and inevitably costs them some good hires. Yet they’ve also learned that their candidates value working on some very, very leading edge technology without the pressures of earning a profit this fiscal quarter and their candidates want to do real, meaningful work that helps their nation. So the NSA focuses is branding messages on those and other hot button issues. Unlike MARS, the NSA has no consumer brand as it doesn’t sell anything to consumers. Yet that lack of consumer brand presents challenges to the NSA as they need to explain what they do to an awful lot of very highly qualified and difficult to hire candidates. Again, Universum picked a great presenter as Lori did a great job of communicating their tactics and strategies and her employer seems to have great success in achieving their goals.

Kudos to Universum and all of the presenters. The conference was informative, engaging, and well worth the time for everyone in attendance.

Learning How to Recruit and Retain Millennials

I don’t have a human resources or recruiting degree of any kind yet, as an owner of job board CollegeRecruiter.com, I need to understand the issues facing those who do. I attend a lot of human resource and recruiting conferences and try to take in as many of the sessions as possible and speak with as many practitioners and thought leaders as I can. Today I had the good fortune of listening to two of the foremost experts on the recruitment and retention of Gen Y / Millennial young adults: Terese Corey Blanck and Judy Anderson.

Terese and Judy are the principals behind Emerging Advantage, which helps organizations gain a competitive advantage by providing services which engage and accelerate the development of entry-level employees impacting retention, performance and promotability. In a 2.5 hour presentation to a packed room, Terese and Judy skillfully played off each other and the attendees in first making the case that Gen Y behavior frustrates many employers then proving that it has been misdiagnosed as a generational issue and then laying out specific recommendations for how employers both large and small can recruit and retain those 18-30 year old, emerging adults so they are ready to replace the Boomer Generation as the retirement of those older workers accelerates over the next decade.

The session was sponsored by the Emerging Leaders Association, which also deserves kudos for putting on such an interesting and informative event in an effort to help its members and guests like me guide our future leaders to a state of readiness for the uncertainties and challenges ahead. If your organization is struggling with recruiting and retaining Gen Y candidates, I urge you to contact these two fine organizations to learn more about how they can help.

Lawson Software Booth at HR Technologies Conference

Today was day one of the 2010 annual HR Technologies conference in Chicago. Every year it is one of the premiere human resource conferences and this year was no different.

But if one booth in the exhibit hall stood out from the rest — and one did — it was Lawson Software’s. This video shows why. No booth was larger and with the artist perched well above the exhibit floor and accompanied by John Lennon tunes, this booth was a real eye catcher.

Find more videos like this on CollegeRecruiter.com