Lessons Learned by Employers Impacted by Hurricane Sandy

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

Four weeks after Sandy, life is getting back to normal – or is it? Walking the dog around a relatively unscathed block of homes in central NJ (miles from the shore), reminders are everywhere. Tons of debris in front of every home (more than 40 homes); the noise of still more 75-foot oak trees being cut while leaning precariously over homes rends the air; blue tarps draped over roofs (5 homes) that were speared with limbs weighing tons; and a flatbed truck finally easing up behind a flattened neighbor’s car (where my 75 foot oak fell). I check to make sure he doesn’t accidentally take the new car next to it.

Sandy was a storm that has little comparison even to Katrina although we can take some comfort that lessons learned from that catastrophic event seven years ago were likely responsible for preparations last month that saved lives – response speed and pre-positioning among them. Continue Reading

Number of Apply Clicks and Cost Per Click for Job Posting Ads

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

A commonly used cliche has the buyer of advertising stating that he knows that half of his advertising is working but he just wishes that he knew which half. That cliche pre-dates the Internet as today’s marketers should and sometimes do know which of their ads is working. But even then, how do you define “working?”

One of the interesting developments since CollegeRecruiter.com went live way back in 1996 is the increased attention employers are paying to metrics so they can better understand where their money is being well spent. For 16 years we’ve heard employers say that they use niche job boards such as ours because they care more about quality than quantity yet when it came time to decide whether to renew a job posting package our sales team would invariably hear yes or no based upon how many applications the employer received from our candidates. Those employers were saying they were basing their decisions on quality but actually were basing them on quantity. Continue Reading

Source of Hire: Is It Even Possible to Track?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

With all the enterprising recruiters who pride themselves on being strictly ‘social’ recruiters, we fantasized what a map would show about the job seeker’s path to a job in the future:

1. First, the candidate would likely tell (some) friends on Facebook they were looking for a new job. (So far so good).
2. A friend might then suggest asking Siri to search Google.
3. And perhaps somebody paid off Siri to forward him to Indeed which led him to Job Central which linked him to a great position on the career site of a firm in his commute range.
4. The candidate then went to Linkedin and found a friend of a friend who worked there and had gone to the same school as he did.
   Wanting to be cool he followed the employee on Twitter, then put him in his “must meet” circle on Google+ and soon found out that he (the employee) would be at a meet-up nearby where they #accidentally-on-purpose-met. Dropping the name of the friend they both knew in common, they found other common ground (they both pinned Italian recipes on Pinterest) and the now new friend and employee agreed to be his referral for an open position.
5. When asked in the application, “How did you find us?”, the candidate put in the name of the referral and, internally, the employee completed his form referring the local candidate. When the recruiter searched his ATS, the software’s [proprietary] algorithm weighted and tagged the referred candidate as a highly qualified match and the rest is history.

Except, the firm’s SOH reporting had switched to last IP address and, since the candidate had come directly from his home computer to the company career site, the ‘unknown’ IP address was coded “Other” for Source of Hire. Fortunately the external service that put the cookie on that particular prospect at the moment he reached Indeed was able to update the ‘source’ field – except, the recruiter altered the field again based on his interview of the new hire and so he changed it to, “Facebook”.

– Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. They can be reached via email at mmc@careerxroads.com, phone at 732-821-6652, or on-line at http://www.careerxroads.com.

Free Publicity for Small Businesses Who Are Hiring

I recently teamed up with my friends over at SmartRecruiters, the free, web-based applicant tracking system, on their Got Jobs? initiative to help put America back to work.

The initiative is designed to help create one million jobs in the U.S. by simplifying the hiring process while celebrating the heroes who are hiring new employees despite today’s difficult economic times. More than 12.7 million Americans are unemployed, yet according to Bersin and Associates, 80 percent of businesses report difficulty hiring, and 3.5 million U.S. jobs are currently left unfilled. If these positions were filled, the unemployment rate in the U.S. would be an estimated three percentage points lower than what it is today.

“We live in an increasingly connected world. Hiring should be fast, easy and social; not lengthy, painful and expensive like it is today,” said SmartRecruiters Founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck. “Through the Got Jobs? Campaign, we and our partners are seeking to make it easier than ever before for companies to hire, grow their businesses and strengthen the economy. We are laser-focused on creating one million U.S. jobs. We welcome everyone to join our Got Jobs? crusade and the Zero Unemployment Movement.”

The Got Jobs? campaign honors the people, business owners and managers who are creating jobs. In recognition of those job creators, SmartRecruiters created the “I Hired” Badge. The “I Hired” Badge can be displayed on a company’s website or Facebook profile and represents to its fans and followers that the business has created a job in 2012. This social campaign encourages the public to consider whether a company is driving our economy forward by asking a simple question: “Got Jobs?”

As part of the campaign, SmartRecruiters has created a series of custom landing pages (see above) featuring business owners who have hired in the past year.  Visitors to the page see a changing series of business owners who have made hires, and invites the visitor to create an additional job right then and there.

Would you be willing to have your face/name/company name/number of recent hires included on one of these pages?  It will lead to some good exposure for your brand.  Post a comment below if you’re interested.

Best Regards,

Steven Rothberg, Founder and President
CollegeRecruiter.com

What’s the Difference Between a Job Posting and a Job Description?

As one of the owners of CollegeRecruiter.com job board, we get feedback from our clients and even other job boards on a wide variety of job postings for a wide variety of organizations. We hear that some postings generate a huge number of views (job seekers reading the posting) and applications while others generate few views, few applications, or both.

The response rate to jobs posted to general and niche job boards varies considerably and is primarily driven by the job posting ad itself. In short, job postings which are more attractive and are for more attractive positions far outperform job postings which are unattractive or are for unattractive positions or both. On average, about 10 percent of candidates who run a search at a job board will read a relevant job posting ad, about 10 percent of those will click the apply button, and about 20 percent of those will apply. So if you want to generate 20 applications for a position then you need 100 apply clicks, 1,000 job views, and 10,000 job searches. Continue Reading

96% of Job Seekers More Likely to Apply If They Will Receive Updates From Employer

A new job seeker survey has found that leaving job candidates in the dark about their application damages a company’s reputation.

The survey of more than 2,000 respondents by CollegeRecruiter.com partner, StartWire, found that 77 percent of job seekers think less of a company that doesn’t respond to a job application. Going further, 72 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to recommend companies’ products or services, and 58 percent would think twice about buying a product from a company that did not respond to their job application. Continue Reading

83% of Candidates Incorrectly Self-Identify Their Referral Source

There’s been a significant increase in the number of employer clients would prefer to pay for postings and other recruitment advertising on a for performance basis so that they only pay if they hire someone from the ad. I’d love to get there as well as it would ensure that the interests of the candidate, employer, and CollegeRecruiter.com would be well aligned but we can’t get there until the employers make the proper investments in their applicant tracking systems.

Of the hundreds of clients we have, we’d be hard pressed to count on one hand how many of them are properly tracking the source of their hires. It is really pathetic, actually. We have one client who spend $200,000 on an applicant tracking system but didn’t spend $20,000 to add the module that would give them fully automated tracking with unique URLs. So instead they have those horrid drop-down boxes. Don Firth at AllRetailJobs.com and JobsInLogistics.com published a study showing that 83 percent of candidates misidentified their source when they clicked directly from the job board to the employer site and the job board was actually listed.

I can only imagine how much higher the percentage would be if the study included candidates who saw the posting on sites to which it was crossposted. For example, if an employer posts a job to our site then we crosspost it to thousands of other sites in our network. It is part of our selling proposition so there’s full transparency with our clients. If a candidate sees the posting on one of our partner sites and then applies on the employer site, will the candidate know to identify CollegeRecruiter.com? No way.

The only solution is fully automated tracking where the employer provides a unique URL to every board and other source to which they post the opportunity. Then regardless of where the candidate sees the posting the source will be properly tracked. Of course, that assumes that the ATS is setup to properly track those URLs and that the HR people using the ATS are properly trained on how to make that work.

We’re talking with a client right now about a pay-per-hire deal. We are confident that the client is properly tracking. We’d welcome more such deals as they’re great for all concerned, but I suspect that we’ll get a lot of interest from employers whose systems don’t measure up to their desires.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg