Video Interview in U.K. Immediately After Keynote About U.S. Job Market for College Grads

Last week I had the good fortune to fly over to Leeds, England to keynote their annual Graduate Employment Conference. CEO of Graduates Yorkshire and Gradcore Martin Edmondson asked me to deliver a presentation about the U.S. job market for college and university students and recent graduates. Many of the issues we’re facing are similar to those they’re facing. They’re experiencing some of them before we do and we’re experiencing some before they do.

One issue that I knew was important but didn’t realize just how important it would be to them was the high cost of attending just about any type of post-secondary school. The cost of attending a higher education institution is far higher in the U.S. than it is in almost any other country and FAR higher than it is to attend an equivalent school in the United Kingdom. But their recent implementation of austerity measures threatens to put their schools on a similar path to that which our schools have long been on. Without exception, every attendee and organizer with whom I spoke greatly appreciated my urging that they do not follow our lead as we are making higher education impossible for many and soon, I fear, for most. As bad as that would have been decades ago, it is even worse moving forward as we cannot and should not hope to compete against other nations to see which can manufacture goods at the lowest possible cost. Unless we want our citizenry to again have third world standards of living, we need to ensure they have first world standards of work. And that means that we need a workforce which uses the muscles between their ears more than the muscles on their backs. Continue Reading

Why Hiring a Veteran is Good for Your Organization as Well as the Country

There’s been a lot of media attention recently to the hundreds of thousands of bright, energetic, decisive, and honorable veterans who are transitioning out of the military and into the civilian world.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak with a number of leaders at the Department of Veterans Affairs about their work in helping these veterans and we’re even more fortunate to be partnering with the VA to help with this most important initiative. The work the VA is doing should make us all proud. Many in the public and private sectors are doing tremendous work. The leaders in both sectors understand that hiring a veteran is good for the veteran but also makes good business sense. 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

Easily Source Veterans and Disabled From Two- and Four-Year Colleges

Many of our largest employer clients are federal government and Fortune 500 organizations because our two most popular recruitment advertising tools are well suited to organizations with large hiring needs. News out of Washington, D.C. last week got me to thinking about whether we could help our clients hire veterans and disabled college students and recent graduates. In short, the answer is definitely.

I learned just before Veterans’ Day that the federal government’s primary method of hiring interns may be illegal because federal agencies are supposed to give hiring preferences to veterans. The Federal Career Internship Program (FCIP) was designed to provide two-year structured training and development internships but a number of agencies have abused it. An arbitration board just ruled that FCIP illegally circumvents traditional civil service merit hiring principles regarding veterans.

If FCIP is dead, the agencies could shift to targeting college students who are veterans or disabled as those groups are to receive hiring preferences. But are there enough veteran and disabled college students and how can we help the agencies and our corporate clients reach those valuable candidates?

I had our targeted email campaign and cell phone text messaging campaign data guys do a bit of research and found that we can email or text on behalf of our employer clients over one million veteran or disabled students and recent graduates:

So clearly we’re able to help a federal agency, Fortune 500, or any other client that wants to hire veteran or disabled students or recent graduates. And we can drill down by targeting, for example, those who are (1) disabled, (2) juniors and seniors of four-year colleges, (3) accounting or finance majors, (4) with GPA’s of 3.0 to 4.0 and (4) are African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic, or Native-American.

If this intrigues you like it intrigues me, let’s have a look at how for as little as $2,250, CollegeRecruiter.com can help your organization reach veteran and disabled college students and recent graduates or just about any other demographic you wish. Just email your targeting wish list and we’ll figure out how best we can help you reach your recruiting goals.

The Sexy Side of HR

Jessica Miller-Merrill of Blogging 4 Jobs recently contacted me to ask if I would be interested in partnering with her and a few other human resource industry professionals to deliver a panel presentation at the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2011 in Austin, Texas. Her vision was to put together a group of us who could talk about how and why employers should use cell phone text messaging, social media, and other technologies to recruit and retain top talent. I gave her the enthusiastic thumbs up.

Jessica submitted the proposal in July and last week was notified by SXSW that her proposal made it to the second round of consideration. This next round consists of voting from visitors to the SXSW Panel Picker Page and those votes count for 30 percent of the score given to each proposal. In short, if you think that this is a good topic, it is really, really important that you vote for our panel.

Jessica (@blogging4jobs) will moderate The Sexy Side of HR panel and we’ll be joined by Joel Cheesman, Blogger & VP at Jobing.com (@cheezhead) and Carrie Corbin of AT&T Talent Attraction (@thealphafemme).

Please take out two minutes and do the following: Go to the Panel Picker Page, click the link to “Sign In” near the top corner, click “create a new account” (assuming you don’t have one already), complete the simple form, and vote for The Sexy Side of HR panel. It really is that simple. Thanks!!

Mobile Ads 5 Times as Effective as On-line Ads

Although virtually all job boards generate about 90 percent of their revenues from the sale of job posting ads and resume searching, CollegeRecruiter.com has long seen the inevitable demise of those two products as pricing for job postings races to zero and resume searching becomes more and more problematic given the risks of hackers who want to download resume for identity theft purposes and financial services and other sleazeballs who buy access to peddle penny stock or other products and services to job seekers rather than using their resume data as it to be used: for hiring. Our two biggest products by revenue over the past couple of years and likely for 2010 as well are targeted email campaigns and targeted cell phone text messaging (sms) campaigns, and a study was just released that supports our experience in just how powerful the sms campaigns can be.
InsightExpress, a leading digital marketing research firm, released today Mobile InsightNorms through Q4 2009, including a comparison of mobile media types and verticals. Benchmarked to the impact of online advertising, these findings continue to show the power of mobile as an advertising channel.

Continue Reading

Increase Your Profits TODAY with E-Mail Marketing

Internet Marketing Strategies – E-Mail-Based Marketing
Internet marketing campaigns utilizing tools such as e-mail marketing and e-newsletters offer a great return on investment.
We have been asked several times in the past few weeks about e-mail marketing and e-newsletters and how they can be used to benefit our clients’ business. In this rough economy every small business can benefit from increased profit, so everyone seems to be looking at ways to help their bottom line. We will be putting together a 4-part series on Internet marketing that will help any business get an edge up on their competition.
Why should I use Internet Marketing?
That is an easy question. If performed properly you can get returns of roughly $50 for every $1 spent. I would bet that most people you know have e-mail. So Internet marketing is a viable solution and relatively inexpensive. The cost for sending out 2500 e-mails is roughly $25. That equates to a return on investment of roughly $1250!
Most businesses are interested in Internet marketing, but feel that doing so has to be technical, expensive or have heard of the SPAM laws and the consequences of violating the law. While at one time these were valid concerns, the technology has advanced to make it much easier to create your own Internet marketing campaign. Since there are so many businesses performing this service it has decreased the cost of sending out this type of marketing. Continue reading …
Article by, Kori Rodley Irons and courtesy of Associated Content, Inc.

Email Campaigns Losing their Appeal?

Are you having problems with your email campaigns losing appeal to your target audience? Have click rates started to drop? There are a few ways you can adjust your email message to increase the appeal to your target audience.
One of the most effective ways to increase email response rates is to give recipients a number of ways to interact with the email. Most email campaigns have a couple of links and that is the only action a reader can take. Think about adding an email address link for responses, a phone number or an SMS short code. If you want to get even more creative include a video message or a short survey that can be completed in the body of the email. Including coupons or special offer codes are other great ways to increase reader interest.
Make sure the email message is short and concise. We see so many email creatives that are overloaded in text. It is very difficult for the reader to find the message when there is so much to wade through. Keep the text simple and the graphics relevant and the reader will not be overwhelmed with too much information. The email should be used as a teaser to encourage individuals to visit your website!
Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to reach a specific target. Increasing the effectiveness of email messages ultimately increases website traffic and conversions.

Ways to keep your email campaigns out of Junk/SPAM folders.

Are you suddenly having issues with your email campaigns being relegated to junk mail or SPAM folders? Try taking a closer look at your subject line. Do you have punctuation? Is a word all in CAPS? These are a just a couple of the things that virtually guarantee your email message will end up being flagged as junk mail. Here are a few quick tips to help reroute that email to the recipients inbox.

1. Eliminate puntuation. Particularly offensive to SPAM filters are quotation marks, exclamation points and dollar signs.
2. Do not include any words in ALL CAPS or us extra S p a c e s in words.
3. Keep the subject line as simple as you can while still conveying your message effectively. The greater the number of words, the greater the chance of it going into a SPAM filter.
4. Avoid certain words like free, guarantee, act now, apply. For a more comprehensive list, visit Top 100 Words to NOT use in a Subject Line.

These tips should help your email campaigns reach your desired recipients. If you still have issues with the email going to junk or SPAM, spend some time testing alternative subject lines and different word combinations. This has proven successful for us!