College Recruiting Bootcamp at LinkedIn Head Office on May 13, 2013

LinkedIn head office

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, and CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading niche job board for college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities, are co-hosting a half day college recruiting conference on Monday, May 13th at LinkedIn’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.

No Selling

During the keynote and presentations there will be absolutely no selling of any kind. There will be no exhibit hall or sponsors and all presenters and attendees will be corporate or government recruiting and human resource professionals. No third party recruiters. No career service office professionals. No vendors. Just your peers.

TedX-like Format

The College Recruiting Bootcamp will feature today’s most innovative thought-leaders in the college and university relations space. Attendees will enjoy a fast-paced, interactive learning environment as presentations will be 20 minutes or less. That lightning fast pace will force presenters to be razor focused on their topics. Continue Reading

3 Ways To Flex Your Best Work Muscles

I believe that all of us want to perform at our best on the job.  So, how can we use our best skills to our advantage?  According to the following post, there are three ways to do so.

“Know what you’re the best at; go where you can shine.”

That is one of my favorite pieces of career advice, especially good for anyone who’s just starting in a field. Or perhaps you prefer this approach: “Play to your strengths.”

Those two pieces of smart advice can ignite your career, taking it from a struggling flicker of flame to a huge roaring bonfire, big enough for a dozen people to toast their toes or their marshmallows.

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3 Ways To Flex Your Best Work Muscles

How to Negotiate an Offer

Before accepting a job offer, you need to think about what you will get out of it.  Learn more about how you can use negotiation to your advantage in the following post.

Great news! You aced your interview and have received an offer for a rewarding career, but the journey to your new career doesn’t end here. For many, negotiating the offer can be the most difficult part of finding a job. You may not know what you are worth in the civilian workplace, or have unrealistic expectations in terms of salary. Here is a guide to this complex step of the process.

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How to Negotiate an Offer

Veteran Skills to Job Act Sails through Congress

Source:

Veteran Skills to Job Act Sails through Congress

Campus Visit Trend: “How much financial aid did ‘they’ give you?”

In the current economy, it is natural for parents and/or guardians to wonder how much it will cost their student(s) to attend a particular college or university.  In the following post, learn how tour guides should handle a personal question about their financial aid.

Read this article:

Campus Visit Trend: “How much financial aid did ‘they’ give you?”

Resume Nuts & Bolts

Continue reading here -

Resume Nuts & Bolts

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

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.

ERE offers real solutions by real practitioners

Today is my last day in Fort Lauderdale. I have been here for meetings, the International Association of Employment Web Sites fall congress, and ERE conference.

Last night vertical job search engine and CollegeRecruiter.com partner Indeed.com hosted a reception. One of the people with whom I spend a fair amount of time commented on his first ERE conference by saying the speakers were great as they were real practitioners and offered real solutions. I don’t think that David Manaster, CEO of ERE, could have said it any better.

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.