80% of Job Openings Are Unadvertised

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I was recently quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that 80 percent of job openings are unadvertised. Several people have contacted me to ask where I got that number. Some believe that only 70 percent of job openings are unadvertised. So where did I get 80 percent from?

As well stated on the Jobfully blog, the number bounces around a bit year-to-year and even month-to-month depending upon the state of the labor market and is indirectly reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in their monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). The survey reports these numbers: Continue Reading

4 Best Practices to Promote Your Image As A Great Place To Work

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One of the most frequent topics for discussion at recruiting conferences is employer branding. Employers large and small have come to understand that their employer brand is separate from their business-to-consumer, business-to-business, or business-to-government brands. And for organizations with multiple products or services, each of those brands is separate from their employer brands as well.

Every employer wants to be known as a “great” place to work. Not every employer is. If you aren’t, don’t try to pretend you are as you’ll do more harm than good as now you’ll be known for lying in addition to whatever other negative issues may exist. So fix whatever problems you have until you truly are a great place to work and then promote that image to the students and recent graduates you most want to hire.

NACE’s 2012 Student Survey offers four excellent suggestions for how you can boost your recruiting according to the preferences of the college students your organization is recruiting: Continue Reading

Partial Twitter List of Attendees of ERE #SocialRecruiting Summit — Are You Listed?

I haven’t seen a good list elsewhere of Twitter handles from the 300 or so attendees of the very, very excellent ERE Social Recruiting Summit that was held yesterday at the Best Buy world headquarters in suburban Minneapolis. I created a good but partial list of attendees so that attendees could more easily network with each other, non-attendees could more easily follow the many recruiting thought leaders who were able to make it, etc.
If you attended, please check http://tweepml.org/Social-Recruiting/ to make sure that I have your Twitter handle. If I don’t, please leave a comment here and I’ll add you right away. If you want to follow everyone who attended, http://tweepml.org/Social-Recruiting/ makes that incredibly easy as you’ll be able to follow everyone on the list with just a few clicks.

Ask the Experts: Answering Great Questions from Job Seekers

One of the pleasures of managing a team of talented, dedicated employees is seeing one of their ideas take root and flourish. Case in point: content coordinator Candice Arnold recommended that we resurrect our Ask the Experts questions and answers feature using our blogging software and integrating it with our customer relationship management software, Salesforce.com.
Candice’s vision was quite an upgrade over how we used to do it: email the questions to the couple of dozen experts, receive their answers back in the bodies of their emails and sometimes attachments, copy and paste their answers into html templates, and upload the web pages. The entire process took hours for our staff and the experts. The new process has saved everyone a ton of time and led to a ton of great answers by the experts who choose to address the questions being asked by students searching for internships, recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs, alumni, and employers.
Each week, Candice sends out an email through Salesforce to the experts who have agreed to answer questions. None answer all of them. Some answer a lot and others answer a few. The choice is theirs. Here’s the email that Candice sent earlier today:

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Great Wish List for Job Boards

One of the greatest resources for corporate and third party recruiters is ERE.net. Today was certainly no exception. ERE published a great article by Jeff Dickey-Chasins about features that job board clients want and don’t want in the job boards they use:

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Are You Sowing Seeds or Salt?

Yesterday and again today I was contacted by recruiting professionals asking for my assistance in helping them find a new job. Both were recently laid off by their employers after years of service. I feel for both of them. There is never a good time to be laid off, but especially not in a volatile recession like we’re experiencing right now.
The point of this blog entry isn’t to criticize these two professionals but instead to use their behaviors to illustrate a point. I’ve been trying to talk with both of these people for years about how CollegeRecruiter.com can help their organizations hire college students or recent graduates through one or more of our products including job postings, targeted email campaigns, cell phone text messaging campaigns, and more. Neither returned any of my calls or emails. Not even to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

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Hiding What You’re Good At

I had a very interesting conversation today with a corporate recruiter who wanted to connect with me so that we could compare our thoughts on some of the new tools available to recruiters such as social media and mobile marketing. Our social media discussions were primarily about blogging, Facebook and Twitter and how to integrate those with each other so they work together and support each other. Our mobile marketing conversation was all about how employers can and should use cell phone text messaging (SMS) to help them recruit candidates.
The recruiter made a lot of very good points about a lot of issues, but one that I wasn’t happy to hear but glad that I did was that even though he is a fan of CollegeRecruiter.com and knew that we offered the leading mobile marketing product for recruiters, he had a lot of difficulty finding it on our site. I say (write?) that I wasn’t happy to hear it but glad that I did because that kind of feedback is invaluable.
We re-launched our site five months ago with an almost entirely new back-end (database, software, etc.) and a brand new front-end (the look-and-feel). Our traffic increased and complaints decreased. Almost all of the feedback we have received to-date has been positive. Until now. His critique was spot on. It is too hard for our employer clients to find product and pricing information on our site. But that’s going to change. Real fast. I promise.

Blog Comments Should Come Full Circle

A question from several of the 500+attendees to our free webinar last week on how employers can and should use Facebook for recruiting was whether employers would encourage negative comments about their organizations if those employers started blogging, using Facebook, etc.
My advice was that the negative comments will be made whether the employer has a presence or not so they should blog, actively use Facebook, and otherwise participate in Web 2.0 sites. To do otherwise would be to allow the negative comments to be posted without the employer’s side of the story. Don’t get personal. Don’t post comments saying that the blogger is an idiot. But do give your side of the story. If your organization could have done something better, admit it and provide details on what you’ll be changing and when in order to rectify the situation.

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Telling a Manager You Found Their Employee’s Resume On-line: Is It Tattling?

Here’s the scenario: you’re a hiring manager, recruiter, or other human resources professional and you’re trolling the CollegeRecruiter.com resume bank (why would you possibly want to use any other?) in search of students searching for internships or recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs. You stumble across the resume of one of your organization’s current employees. Do you forward a copy to that employee’s manager to let her know that her employee may be looking to jump ship? Do you confront the employee? Do you ignore it because taking action would be akin to tattling?
I believe that that HR should inform a manager when HR discovers that one of the manager’s employees in a job board’s resume bank. However, I also think that HR should make sure that the manager understands that the existence of the resume does NOT mean that the employee intends to jump ship.

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Best Practices for Using MySpace, Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites

I had the extreme pleasure of sitting down with Peter Clayton of Total Picture Radio last week while at the Kennedy Information recruiting conference in Las Vegas. Peter and I discussed a wide variety of recruiting-related social networking topics including MySpace (4,300% traffic increase in two years, most visited networking site with an 80% share, third most visited U.S. Internet site, over 31.5 billion page views per month, and an average user age of 35). We also talked about topics such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Second Life.

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