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

How Employers Should Text Message Passive Candidates

Two of my favorite recruiting industry experts, Jim Stroud of The Recruiters Lounge and Michael Marlatt of mRecruitingcamp recently sat down for a conversation about whether employers should use cell phone text messaging (SMS) to reach passive job seekers, how they employers should text those candidates, and some tips and tricks to use to help ensure a successful campaign: Continue Reading

Employers Should Promote Rather Than Hide Their Recruitment Videos

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how many pictures is a video worth? Probably 1,000 so that means that a video is worth 1,000,000 words. If a typical job posting ad is about 500 words, that would mean that a recruitment video is worth about about 2,000 job posting ads. We can quibble over the exact numbers, but I think that few would argue that a recruitment video is going to be far, far more powerful that a job posting ad. So why is it that so few employers seem to push their videos out as far and as wide as they can?

You’d think that employers who sometimes spend hundreds but far more often spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on their recruitment videos would want as many candidates to see them as possible, but some employers seem to feel that their recruitment videos should be well kept secrets. I won’t name the employer but think major contractor to the U.S. federal government. They hire hundreds of highly skilled college students and recent graduates a year. I went to their web site this weekend to see if they had recruitment videos targeted to students and graduates and they had a bunch. I tried to grab the embed code for the videos so that I could then copy that code, click over to our site, and in a minute or two have those videos running on our site. But the videos running on the employer’s web site had no sharing mechanism. You couldn’t even send a link out through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media sites.

I then hopped over to YouTube and pulled up the employer’s channel, which is where all of their videos are housed. They had dozens of videos, many of which were targeted at their customers and other such stakeholders but a number of which were targeted at potential employees. Those videos were easily shareable on social media sites but they had disabled the embed feature so you couldn’t copy the embed code and paste it onto your web page and have the videos run for free on your site. I was really shocked. Why wouldn’t they want their recruitment videos running on other sites? What’s wrong with a little free publicity?

CollegeRecruiter.com re-launched a month ago and part of the new site re-design makes it very, very easy for employers or others to upload their recruitment videos. Those videos are then accessible to everyone who uses CollegeRecruiter.com. How much do we charge? Nothing. We could charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars and it would still be worthwhile to our clients to upload their videos but we made the decision to give away a lot of nickels like this because we know that more and better videos means more and better content means more and better candidates means more and better employer clients means more and better videos.

Want a couple of examples of employers who understand that posting their videos on CollegeRecruiter.com and other sites helps their recruiting efforts? Look no further than our friends at Sodexo and Nestle Purina. Want another example? Upload your recruitment videos and then post a comment below. Hint, hint.