Video: Taking Your Recruiting Message Mobile: Why, How, and When

I had the pleasure of delivering this 75 minute presentation a couple of months ago in San Diego, California at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2010 annual conference. The description of the presentation was as follows:

Learn why your organization needs to have a mobile recruitment marketing strategy and how best to implement it so you can recruit the candidates you need and stay within your budget.

Virtually every member of Gen Y and about 90 percent of Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers care enough about only one electronic device to carry it with them virtually everywhere they go: their cell phones. If your organization’s web site and recruiting message are not fully accessible to your most sought after candidates on their mobiles then those candidates will end up becoming employees of your competitors. In this highly interactive and humorous presentation, learn why your organization needs to have a mobile recruitment marketing strategy and how best to implement it so you can recruit the candidates you need and stay within your budget.

Have a Facebook Fan Page? Get Ready for Changes!

One week from today, Facebook will force some significant changes upon employers, consumer marketers, and others with profile and Fan Pages. Most individuals likely won’t notice or care too much about the changed appearance of their personal pages as Facebook has made many such changes in its short existence. But the changes will come as a rude awakening for many organizations.

According to Facebook’s blog entry that announced the changes, they will “simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers and enable [Facebook] to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.” There will be three primary changes:

1. Any “boxes” that exist in the sidebar of a page will be removed.
2. The Boxes Tab and all of its contents will be eliminated.
3. When you click on a tab, the page itself will become narrower. The new width will be 520 pixels.

If your organization has a Facebook Fan Page, immediately do the following:

1. Check it to see if you have any custom tabs. If so, click on the tabs. The narrower page width means that Facebook will re-size or re-format some and perhaps all of your images or banners. Of course, any such changes will be made automatically so no one at Facebook is going to look at your page and make the changes in such a way as to minimize their impact on you. Nope. The changes will just be made. It is up to you to minimize any impact.
2. If you have a Boxes Tab, click on it to see what content you have there. If you still want that content to be accessible to your visitors after Monday, August 23rd, create new, custom Facebook tabs.

5 Tips for College Recruiting

ERE.net just published another great article for those engaged in college recruiting. This article was written by Kevin Wheeler, President and Founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc.

Kevin’s article first made the point that college recruiting hasn’t been as easy for employers during this recession as one might expect for a variety of reasons. For example, instead of graduates looking for work like they would in a normal economy, many more have chosen to stay in school for a double major or to go to graduate school while still others have chosen to travel or work abroad.  Kevin then provided employers with the following five excellent suggestions:

1. Focus on brand building and on getting your best employees to engage with students in discussions, webinars, and in ongoing interactive conversations. This builds trust and starts to develop a relationship that can lead to high interest in a job offer.
2. Let managers do the recruiting. If HR is doing more than 50% of your college recruiting, you do not have an effective program. By using HR staff, you are adding expense and reducing the quality of the interaction that the candidate could have with a potential boss. Avoid the temptation of thinking that HR has some “magical” ability to psyche out candidates or do something a hiring manger couldn’t do. It isn’t true! No one knows the job better or can get a sense of whether a student might be a good candidate or not than a manager.
3. Don’t focus your attention so much on the school itself. Developing a relationship with a particular school usually means getting known to the placement office. This may have some limited value, but it is far better to get students to join your Facebook fan club or your Twitter stream.
4. Develop a longer-term approach to recruiting college students. Start your initial contact with a candidate when they are in their freshman year. Build an internship program and invite candidates in to work, even if only for short one- to two-week stints, so you can establish some face-to-face understanding. Follow up with email by offering them research help, mentoring via the Internet, or whatever makes sense and meets both of your needs and abilities. By the time they have entered their third or fourth year of school, both of you will know if there is any commitment in the relationship.
5. Use print, video, and even campus television to drive candidates to your social media and websites. Don’t waste time on campus-based job fairs. The best campus job fairs attract only a few candidates, most of whom have no interest in your firm at all. Create a virtual job fair that you advertise via the print media. Do this job fair every few weeks and keep up the advertising.

Source: 5 Tips for Getting Ready for College Recruiting in 2011 – ERE.net.