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A tip of the hat to Jason Davis of Recruiting.com for spotting this Monty Python classic management training course interview video. For anyone who has ever been subjected to ridiculous psychological interview techniques, this is a must see.
I am in Atlanta attending the annual global conference for human resource professionals employed by Enterprise Rent-A-Car. This is an amazing organization. The next time that you think that you have a recruiting challenge, consider their annual college hiring metrics:
I travel a lot. About every other week and sometimes more frequently. It is amazing how different airports can be when it comes to being business traveler friendly. Yesterday was a long travel day and offered me three very different approaches to how airports treat their customers, the flyers.
I started in Minneapolis where the entire airport has reasonably priced ($10 per day) wi-fi and there are plenty of places where travelers who have time until their next flight can sit down at a desk with an electrical outlet and phone and get work done. Although I have a Northwest Airlines lounge pass so I don't need to use those desks in the MSP airport, I still appreciate that many travelers don't have access to the lounges yet have just as much of a need to get work done as I do.
Onto Cincinnati where I was connecting to another flight but had about 1.5 hours. It is a much smaller airport but their facilities were every bit as good. Different set up, but they've taken care to take care of their customers. They also charge about $10 per day for wireless Internet access but there are plenty of tables and some electrical outlets available for those with laptops.
I then spent the afternoon at the Pittsburgh airport. Like Las Vegas, the Pittsburgh airport provides free wireless access to all travelers throughout the airport. Hmmm. I wonder why. Could it be that they know that business travelers who are on a budget and can choose whether to transfer in Pittsburgh or another city will opt for Pittsburgh because it is more friendly? Good thinking because I'm sure that happens and the airport must easily make more money from the increased landing fees that it collects than it loses from giving away the Internet access. Unlike Las Vegas, of course, there's no gambling in the airport to make the giving away of Internet access even more economical but it still makes a ton of sense for a customer friendly airport like Pittsburgh.
Now to Atlanta, the world's busiest airport. Wireless Internet in the airport? Nope. Abundance of tables with electrical outlets? Nope. I don't get it. Maybe I'm blind in one eye and can't see out the other, but this great city with this great airport needs to awaken and realize that this isn't 1996...it is 2006. Travelers have choices and airports need travelers in order to generate revenues. While Atlanta is king of the hill right now, they won't stay that way forever if they continue to make it difficult for business travelers to get work done while they're waiting for their flights.
It was announced yesterday morning. It was astounding news. It is the grist of retention and healthy corporate culture fundamentals. The announcement was made by Working Mother magazine CEO Carol Evans regarding the 100 best companies to work for in 2006, the most mom friendly.
Now it is true that this site is dedicated to serving the interests of college students and recent college graduates. However, those populations are not entirely your traditional student. With the fact that so many are admitting that a degree is important to one's career opportunities and advancement, many are either returning to university after a break or embarking on studies at a more mature age. So it's not entirely unreasonable for us to be interested in companies that address parent-friendly issues. In fact, the criteria for making the list are: (a) flexibility, (b) leave time for new parents, (c) child care, (d) elder care, and the (e) number of women occupying top jobs.
Likewise, college students do start families while in school. Additionally, there are women who have left the workforce in order to raise familites for a time and are now ready to re-enter the workforce. These populations have dual priorities: (a) where to work that will be healthy for one's career and (b) where to work in order to have an environment that bends to the demands of raising the next crop of responsible and focused workers.
So as soon as the announcement was made, the scouring process began to ascertain which are the 100 best for 2006.
Only two companies have made the list each of the 21 years that Working Mother has announced its determination. Those two are IBM and Johnson & Johnson. Those are also two long-standing forerunners on the diversity front. These two companies deserve some closer scrutiny.
But which are the top ten? It's an interesting mix: Abbott Laboratories; Bon Secours Richmond Health System; Ernst & Young LLP; HSBC USA Inc.; IBM Corp.; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Patagonia Inc.; PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP; Principal Financial Group, and S.C. Johnson & Son Inc.
Without further ado, here's the list of 100, in alphabetical order:
During my recent presentation on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook at OnRec Global Expo 2006, one of the attendees asked whether employers should post profiles about themselves on the sites. The concern was related to the risk related to the employer becoming associated with some of the content on the sites, which can be less than wholesome. While I recognize that the issue may be troubling to employers, I believe that it is overblown as the issue is primarily seen through the eyes of Boomers and Gen X'ers, few of which use the sites and even fewer of which would be likely to search out and find the profiles. Virtually all of those who view those profile pages are members of the Gen Y and MyPod generations and these visitors understand that there is no reason to draw inferences about your profile simply because you have a "friend" (link to another profile) who has a friend who has posted less than wholesome material on their profile page.
Now comes word that the U.S. Air Force has pulled its profile page on MySpace because it was concerned that the Air Force would become associated with content that it deems inappropriate. According to Col. Brian Madtes, chief of the Recruiting Service’s strategic communication division, the Air Force "...got to the point where [it wasn't] real comfortable with the potential for inappropriate content to be posted [on the page of] a friend of a friend. [The Air Force] didn’t want to be associated with that … and tarnish [its] reputation.”
Despite pulling the profile page, the Air Force Recruiting Service acknowledged that MySpace was ideal venue for attracting young people to the Air Force because the site is popular with its target audience, 18- to 24-year-olds. “The demographics are perfect,” Madtes said. Indeed, MySpace is one of the highest traffic sites in United States. comScore Media Metrix has it ranked as the second most popular site, trailing only Yahoo!
Interestingly, one of the employer profile pages that I spotlighted during my presentation was the Marine Corps’ MySpace page. It is still active and had 21,016 “friends” as of Sept. 19th.
So should employers follow the lead of the Air Force and shy away from MySpace and other social networking sites because a link from their profile page might take you to a page that is linked to another page that might contain objectionable material? Or should employers follow the lead of the Marines and accept that the Internet is called the world wide web because, like a spider's web, its strength and vitality are dependent upon its links? If your target market for new candidates is comprised primarily of Gen X'ers and Boomers, then MySpace is probably not the best vehicle for you. But if you're like the Air Force or Marines and target 18 to 24 year olds, then you need to be on sites like MySpace.
The Air Force is too sophisticated and far sighted to stay off of sites like MySpace for long. They will get this figured out. Perhaps they aren't feeling as much of a need to be on the sites right now because they're having little difficulty hitting their recruitment goals, unlike the Army and Marines whose soldiers are at far greater risk due to the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There's little doubt that today's graduates face a lot of pressure to succeed. But is that pressure so great that they are starting to believe that cheating is acceptable? While some would argue yes, I have too much faith in this generation to believe that is the case.
Amitai Givertz brought to my attention a blog entry published by David Maister about a study that is about to published on the honesty of 5,000 MBA students from 11 graduate business schools in Canada and 21 schools in the U.S. The study is entitled Academic Dishonesty in Graduate Business Programs: The Prevalence, Causes, and Proposed Actions. It was conducted by management professors at Rutgers, Washington State and Pennsylvania State universities, and will appear in the next issue of the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal.
The study found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the last year, compared with 47 per cent of non-business students. Does that mean that business students are more dishonest than non-business students, or that today's students or more dishonest than yesterday's students? Or does it merely mean that today's business students are more likely to admit to cheating?
My experience with Gen Y students has been overwhelmingly positive. This is a generation that despises -- no, loaths -- hypocrisy. This is a generation that has chosen to follow the model of working to live rather than following the model followed by their Boomer parents, which was living to work. Viewing the way that Gen Y interacts and operates through the bifocaled glasses of their parents leads to misunderstandings, including how they communicate with each other and how they approach their professional lives. Gen Y students think nothing of similtaneously communicating with dozens of their friends in a handful of time zones through instant messaging. Their Boomer parents see only their 22 year old sitting in front of a computer. The 22 year old sees and interacts with far more people with far more diverse results than their Boomer parents were ever able to do.
So what does instant messaging have to do with cheating? Everything. When presented with one set of facts such as instant messaging, members of the Boomer and Gen Y generations see the facts very differently. What might be regarded as cheating to a member of Gen Y might only be regarded as pushing the walls of the envelope by a Boomer. What might be regarded as dishonest by a member of Gen Y might only be regarded as aggressive by a Boomer. I am not saying that Boomers are dishonest and that members of Gen Y are all saints. But what I am saying is that before we all jump off the deep end and condemn today's business and other students for rampant cheating, I think that we need to do a better job of putting that cheating in context and creating a common definition that will transcend generational differences. Until the study is released, I for one advocate that we withhold judgment and hope that it puts the cheating rate into proper context.
No matter if you have one position or ten positions to fill, one major aspect of the hiring process is reviewing candidate resumes. This process can sometimes be time consuming and stressful. However, if you take the extra time to thoroughly review resumes, you can effectively identify the most qualified candidates. Here are some key areas to focus on when reviewing resumes:
I would like to take this time to introduce our bloggers to Kip Havel of Spherion Corporation.
Kip is Spherion Corporation's director of public relations and corporate marketing. Of the many different hats he wears, his true passion is developing and conducting workforce and employer surveys.
He currently leads Spherion's workforce research programs, including the Emerging Workforce Study® and the Employment Report, a monthly worker confidence index he created in 2004. Recently named one of 10 "rising stars" under 30 by PR Week, Kip also keeps up with the latest industry innovations and trends. Before joining Spherion in 2001, Kip worked with the international PR agencies Hill and Knowlton and Edelman Worldwide. When not working, Kip can often be found rooting for University of Miami - regardless of the sport ... he *bleeds* green and orange.
Read Articles submitted by Kip Havel of Spherion Corporation.
There are a couple of hundred people who are well connected in the recruiting blogosphere. We know each other well, or at least know of each other well. The center of that growing universe is the wonderful Recruiting.com, but conferences such as the recently completely OnRec Global Expo provide recruiting bloggers such as me with the opportunity to visit and learn face-to-face from other recruiting bloggers.
One of the recurring discussions that bloggers have with non-bloggers at conferences such as OnRec is how we find the time to blog. While some of us find it easier than others to carve out the 15 to 30 minutes a day that blogging requires, the reality is that we all struggle to find the time and we're usually pretty forthright about that with the non-bloggers. One possible solution that keeps popping up in those conversations is for employers and other organizations which want to blog to hire professional writers to do the blogging. But who should they hire?
I believe that it is imperative that bloggers have a true passion for the subject matter they are writing about. While it may be ideal that they are in positions of responsibility within an organization, I don't feel that it is necessary. Indeed, it can be quite beneficial for an organization to have many of its people blogging so that candidates can get a more accurate, transparent picture of what is happening within the entire organization and not just in the executive offices. But if the executives don't have time to blog and the managers don't have time to blog and the line employees don't have time to blog, then who does? Could it be that blogging just might be the economic salvation of a new generation of journalism majors? And if so, wouldn't that make blogging this year's black?
CollegeRecruiter.com is always on the look out for candidates, employers, career counselors and others who want to blog as we have eight different blogs. Although we have hundreds of bloggers, many write for weeks or months and then move on to other challenges so there's turnover and there's always the need for more diversity of opinion. Some of the best bloggers that we've had came to us from journalism schools, either as currently enrolled students or as recent graduates. They're taught how to research, how to write, how to persuade. Hmmm. Kind of sounds a lot like the skill set of a successful blogger, doesn't it?
When I talk with those who want their organizations to start blogging but don't feel that any of their current people have the time, I recommend that they consider hiring a journalism major or recent graduate to blog for the organization. If you're looking for some great journalism majors or recent graduates, reach out to your local school's career service office or use CollegeRecruiter.com by posting a job or searching our resume bank. Although I can't promise that you'll look good in black, I can promise that you'll be a big step closer to making blogging a reality for your organization.
RepVine, an on-line reference and reputation management service, has an amusing video about the dangers to candidates when employers use MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites as part of their background and reference checking process.
As indicated on the RepVine site, information that candidates post on-line about themselves and others can be unearthed and used by employers when they are deciding whether who to hire. That information can be helpful or harmful to the candidate. RepVine helps candidates aggregate the information by providing candidates with a platform to manage their references.
DialogueDirect, an in-person fundraising organization for non-profits, has a recruitment video on Google Video that should be watched by all organizations which want to recruit college students and recent graduates for entry level jobs and internships. Note that the entire two minutes of the video speak to the needs and wants of the candidate and none of it is about how much you're paid, benefits, qualifications, etc.
This generation is very motivated to do good for their communities and the world. If your organization is able to provide them with an opportunity for doing so, then make sure that you communicate that loud and clear. Even if they won't be saving trees 40 hours a week, tell them about your organization's involvement in the community and the ability that they'll have to volunteer with groups sponsored by your organization or perhaps even through a program under which you pay employees their regular wages while they're volunteering.
Learn a few simple and unintimidating ways to ask friends or business associates for letters of recommendation.
There comes a time when you need a little help from your friends, business associates, or co-workers. That is when you are asking them for a letter of recommendation for yourself.
You will want to be sure and get good letters of recommendation. Just because someone is your good friend or co-worker doesn't mean they are good at writing letters of recommendation.
A good letter of recommendation doesn't just state how nice you are. A good letter of recommendation states specifically how uniquely talented you are for the position you are pursuing.
Writing useful letters of recommendation is a skill and it is something your recommendation sources can learn how to do. If you're asking someone to write a letter of recommendation for you, here are ways you can help:
It's not a bad idea to get a letter of recommendation from an immediate supervisor long before you may even require it. This way, you will have it on file with your updated resume and it will be ready to distribute whenever you need to.
You can approach a boss or supervisor with "I would like to have a letter of recommendation from you about my job performance. I can add it to my personal file along with the others from my previous employers." This will suggest to him or her that this is something you have always done. It doesn't imply that you are not happy at work and want to find another job.
Letters of recommendation are also appropriate to request from friends or business acquaintances from outside your employment. Since you are comfortable in asking the individual and feel that they have known you long enough to speak confidently of your work record and significant skills.
If the person you are requesting your letter of recommendation from asks you to prepare it for their signature, follow the same steps previously mentioned. Professionally type the letter with their name, title, employment address, work number and home phone number in the upper right portion of the letter. When you provide him or her with the letter for their signature, remember to tell them to feel free to change anything they don't agree with.
--Kay LaRocca is Vice President Corporate Services for CareerSoar.com. Her email address is kay@careersoar.com.
My thanks to Joel Cheesman, human resources search engine optimization guru, for making a video recording of my 9/12/06 presentation at OnRec Global Expo 2006 on how employers should and should not use social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, etc. The 30 minute presentation was designed to illuminate for corporate and third party recruiters and other human resource professionals the tremendous legal and business risks associated with using social networking sites to exclude candidates from the hiring process by using the sites for background checks yet also discuss the tremendous opportunities that the sites provide to those organizations which use them to include candidates in the hiring process.
College students and recent graduates are notorious for being frustrated by their inability to land a great job with great pay. The question they often ask out of frustration is how can they find a job if no employer will give them a chance?
 When I speak with students, I remind them that it is their responsibility to get that experience, not the employers to which they are applying. But I don't stop there. I give them concrete advice for where they can get that experience. I normally tell them to accept an unpaid internship or volunteer for a few months in a position that is related to their chosen career path. They can then use that experience to land a paid internship or entry level job upon graduation. Yet some students still express frustration and wonder why employers simply can't hire them for a paid position in the first place. The answer is that most employers would find that to be too costly, yet just how costly is it? |
A study by Right Management Consultants found that the average organization spends 2.5 times an employee's salary to replace that employee if they do not work out. That figure includes account recruitment, training, severance costs, and lost productivity. The figure does not include such relevant factors as the harm to employee morale.
Source: Campus Career Counselor
I have been to a lot of recruitment conferences. Most are great and a few are, well, not quite as great. But few have approached the quality of the just completed OnRec Global Expo 2006 put on by David Hurst and team. About 200 attendees were treated to some phenomenal speakers. There was a great mixture of speakers and attendees from the U.S. and overseas.
What struck me about this conference was that every single presentation was well attended. Very few attendees skipped out to go to the beach (there is a wonderful beach in Chicago), shopping, etc. I've been to a lot of conferences that are supposedly attended by hundreds of people yet you look around the room and you could share a cab to the airport with everyone there. So why was the attendance so great? Quite simply, the content was compelling. People felt that they HAD to attend the presentations even if those presentations were not directly related to their work because the speakers were so thought provoking and the questions from the attendees so well thought out.
I can't wait for September 2007 and San Francisco.
Accounting graduates are certainly well qualified to count dozens of dimes, but they definitely cannot be regarded as being worth a dime a dozen. The recent Sarbanes-Oxley securities laws have contributed to an imbalance in the supply and demand of new accounting graduates. There simply are far more entry level accounting jobs than their are entry level accountants. But if you think that the situation is tight in your hometown, take it easy and be thankful that you're not in The Big Easy.
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New Orleans is still devastated from the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in August and September 2005. Full recovery is years away, if ever. "Nobody wants to come here," said James LaPorte, managing partner of Ericksen, Krental and LaPorte LLP, one of the largest accounting firms in New Orleans. "But yet there is so much opportunity here."
According to New Orleans City Business, most of the accountants in New Orleans are working 50, 60, or even more hours a week while at the same time struggling to get their personal lives back in order. Making a difficult employment situation worse, many of the graduating accounting students are leaving New Orleans to start their professional lives elsewhere, according to Barbara Apostolou, chair of the accounting department at Louisiana State University. "If you're coming out of college and you have offers in Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans, where are you going to go? It's a question of how long the industry can hold on. There's no housing here." |
Source: Campus Career Counselor
The job market for 2006 MBA graduates is excellent, according to two surveys conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council. "Bottom line is, every way you look at it, the boom is back on the MBA," said David Wilson, President and CEO of the Council.
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Salaries for MBA grads are averaging $92,360, which is a 4.2 percent increase since 2005. In addition, two thirds of this year's graduates are receiving signing bonuses. Those bonuses are averaging $17,603, which is also a slight increase over 2004. The salary and bonus increases can be traced to increased demand for MBA graduates as employers expect to hire 18 percent more new MBA grads in 2006 than they did in 2005. The graduates who are the most highly sought after are those with expertise in finance or marketing. |
Source: Campus Career Counselor
Peter Weddle put on a great show yesterday with the first annual meeting of the International Association of Employment Web Sites. About two hundred job boards are members of the IAEWS (say that acronym ten times fast!) and about one third had at least one representative at yesterday's meeting at the Stephen Douglas Convention Center near Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Representatives were there from Monster, Careerbuilder, and many niche sites large and small. It was a very collegial, very informative event.
Many of the speakers were employers, including corporate recruiters, third party recruiters, and staffing agencies. Two main themes emerged from those speakers: they are frustrated by their inability to get adequate metrics from all of the job boards and they applicant tracking systems (ATS) do not provide them with the information they need. When questioned, they agreed that they do not provide the job boards with information such as how many candidates that came from the boards were interviewed or hired. They also agreed that they have not put pressure on their ATS vendors to include pretty basic tracking features that would allow the ATS systems to automatically and accurate track the source of resumes (leads) and therefore allow the employers to track the source of hires (sales). Without those basic metrics, it is impossible to calculate a return on investment (ROI) and that more than anything is what they said they need.
My takeaway is that the IAEWS will play a large role over the next year in working with the ATS companies to create a standard method for tracking the source of leads and hires. When that standard becomes accepted, and hopefully that will be sooner rather than later, we will all be better off. Transparency is a good thing. As job board owners, we each believe that we provide excellent value to our clients yet we are unable to prove it because they will not share with us accurate, reliable data about their source of hires. When that happens, they will quickly know which boards are providing the best ROI to them and they'll increase the amount of business they do with those and eliminate those with negative ROI's. That process should also open the door to them doing business with additional sites.
Another hot topic amongst the employers was their desire to increase their hiring of what they called passive candidates and diverse candidates yet they all focused their attention on resume banks (I still don't understand how you can define a passive candidate as someone who posts a resume to a job board) and they all spent most of their money with the Big Three (Monster, Careerbuilder, and Yahoo! HotJobs). One employer claimed that none of the diversity sites were any good, but I find that hard to believe. There are dozens of high traffic diversity sites. Has she used all of them? Did she use them all properly? Or was she shifting the blame to the boards for her failure to spend adequate time researching the sites and getting trained on how to use them? Also, did she only use their resume searching feature or did she try other products such as targeted emails? CollegeRecruiter.com, for example, is not a diversity site yet we can and often do help our clients connect with diverse candidates. We've done email campaigns on behalf of employers who only want to reach Hispanic candidates in certain metros and with certain qualifications. We've done email campaigns on behalf of employers who only want to reach candidates who speak Arabic and Farsi and have a math or computer science background.
While I love our targeted email product, I know that we aren't unique in providing that kind of service. If employers want to reach more diverse candidates, then they need to start looking beyond job postings and resume searching packages on the Big Three and really get creative and proactive. As Ms. Frizzle on The Magic School Bus says, don't be afraid to take chances and make mistakes as it is the best way to learn.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car is consistently the biggest employer of college students and recent graduates. Quite simply, they are an excellent choice for entry level employment and internships due to their highly rated management trainee program and tremendous opportunities for advancement. (Full disclosure: Enterprise Rent-A-Car is a client of CollegeRecruiter.com.)
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So what does your recruiting pipeline look like if you are the biggest employer of college students and recent graduates? Well, how about 200,000 applications per year from which 70,000 candidates are selected for interviews. From those behavioral interviews, Enterprise hires 7,000 students a year.
And don't assume that anyone is qualified if they have or are working towards a college degree, a pulse, and are not presently incarcerated. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is very sophisticated in knowing which candidates are highly qualified, which are not sufficiently qualified, and which are over qualified. Candidates must have clean driving records and be allowed to work in the United States, but Enterprise goes well beyond those basic qualifications. They also prefer students with bachelor degrees and customer service/marketing experience. |
The next time you're wondering where you're going to be able to find that highly qualified candidate for the position that just opened up in your organization, consider your counterparts over at Enterprise. They're asking themselves a similar question, except they're wondering where they're going to find the next 7,000 highly qualified candidates.
A tip of the hat to Amitai Givertz for bringing to my attention the BusinessWeek article entitled The Best Places to Launch a Career: The Top 50 Employers for New College Grads.
This is the first time that BusinessWeek has compiled this ranking of the largest employers of college students and recent graduates. The ranking of the biggest employers of college students and recent graduates in part reflects a beauty contest because employers with name recognition with students will tend to outperform those employers who do not have a strong brand name on-campus. But the rankings go beyond mere name recognition with students by first including feedback from directors of undergraduate career services to find out which employers were creating buzz on campus. Those organizations which had the most buzz were then asked to complete a questionnaire about pay, benefits, retention, and training programs. BusinessWeek then compared those answers with other employers in the same industries in an effort to create an apples-to-apples ranking within various industry sectors. Finally Universum Communications supplied data on the finalists.
I was happy to see that of the top 55 biggest employers of college students and recent graduates, 32 currently have jobs posted to CollegeRecruiter.com. Some of the others don't have job postings but are using our resume bank, targeted emails, banner ads, etc. The largest employers of college students and recent graduates were:
1 Walt Disney
2 Lockheed Martin
3 Deloitte & Touche
4 Goldman, Sachs
5 Enterprise Rent-A-Car
6 U.S. Department of State
7 Raytheon Company
8 General Electric
9 JPMorgan Investment Bank
10 Abbott Laboratories
11 Verizon Communications
12 Ernst & Young
13 Google Inc.
14 National Instruments
15 KPMG LLP
16 L'Oreal
17 Bain & Co.
18 Merck & Co.
19 Ameriprise Financial
20 Accenture
21 Pepsi Bottling Group
22 Lehman Brothers Inc.
23 Wells Fargo & Co.
24 UPS
25 Vanguard
26 AT&T
27 Eli Lilly and Co.
28 MTV Networks
29 Philip Morris USA
30 Ferguson Enterprises
31 BP America
32 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
33 Federated Department Stores
34 Grant Thornton
35 SunTrust Banks
36 Shell Oil
37 The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies
38 Peace Corps
39 U.S. Internal Revenue Service
40 Booz Allen Hamilton
41 U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration
42 CapGemini
43 Teach for America
44 Kraft Foods
45 Northwestern Mutual
46 Southwest Airlines
47 Kohl's Department Stores
48 Comptroller of the Currency
49 Exelon
50 Progress Energy
51 U.S. Patent & Trademark
52 Protiviti
53 Navigant Consulting
54 C.H. Robinson
55 BearingPoint
CollegeRecruiter.com has eight blogs and well over 200 bloggers. To help increase the quantity and quality of articles and other tidbits of information being posted by those bloggers, content manager Shawn Augustson recently emailed to each of them the first issue of Insights Gazette. The first issue focused on providing helpful tips on using the Moveable Type publishing platform as that is the software that we use to power our blogs.
Want a free issue? How about a free issue every month? Then sign up today to be one of our great bloggers.
Sample resumes are one of the most frequent requests we receive from the visitors to our site, whether they are are searching for entry level jobs and internships or jobs which require years of experience. Thanks to Kevin Donlin of Guaranteed Resumes, we now have well over 300 sample resumes available on our CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Resume Writers Blog.
Since the tragedy of 9/11, one of the biggest areas of employment growth in the U.S. has been in fields related to homeland security. Some of the positions require experience but many of them are entry level job opportunities and therefore perfectly suited to students and recent college graduates.
While many might think of homeland security jobs as all being government positions, the reality is quite different. As reported by The Courier-Journal (KY), an example of a private firm that hires entry level job seekers for homeland security related positions is Government Systems Inc., which is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky. They design high-tech equipment for the military and other government agencies. GSI recently hired two recent engineering graduates to build a robot that can detect tunnels. The detection of tunnels is a priority for homeland security agencies because they can be used to smuggle drugs, immigrants, or terrorists. The recent graduates who GSI hired are now earning $38,000 per year do the same type of work they did for free while they were in college.
Entry level homeland security jobs for college students and recent graduates often involve military activites, customs enforcement, disaster preparation, and disease prevention. Employers include federal, state, county, and local government agencies as well as publicly traded and privately held corporations and non-profits.
There is little doubt that homeland security is a booming area and a hot sector for those who are searching for entry level jobs and internships. In the years prior to September 11, 2001, there were 17 employers with homeland security related missions who recruited at the University of Kentucky. In the five years since 9/11, that number has skyrocketed to an astounding fifty-seven.
YouTube just launched a new section of its site where students from specific schools can upload videos that will only be accessible to other students at their schools. Or will they? My thanks to Hal Fischer of MilitaryStars.com for bringing this item to my attention.
In order to view a video posted by a student at your school, you need access to an email address from that school. So that means just students, staff, faculty, alumni, etc.
Just like with Facebook, students will incorrectly infer that the videos will only be accessible to other students. Just like with Facebook, employers will include the videos in their background checking process of potential hires. Just like with Facebook, videos with objectionable content will result in students not being hired. And just like with Facebook, employers will be making terrible decisions about whether and how to use the content.
Employers should be wary of using these videos for a variety of reasons, including that they may have been edited to portray an excellent candidate in a false light and that students will view the use of such "personal" information (their belief, not mine) as having nothing to do with their professional lives (their belief, not mine) and that any employer that uses personal information against a candidate runs the risk of becoming a pariah on campus (their belief and mine).
Should employers use YouTube as part of their background checking process? Yes, but with great caution. Inform the candidates in advance that you will be searching sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube if you are going to do so. But also use those sites to include candidates in the hiring process by searching them much like you would search a resume bank.
It is truly amazing how as hiring managers and human resource professionals we rely on paperwork (resumes), alibis (background checks), and acting skills (interviewing) when we're trying to determine if an applicant is well suited to do the work for which we are considering them. Seth Godin believes that we should stop relying so heavily on interviews and instead hire candidates temporarily so that we can more accurately measure their ability to do the work rather than just infer from their resumes, references, and interviews whether they can do the work. To illustrate his point, he uses this example:
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Juggler Interview
Circus Hiring Manager: How long have you been juggling? Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls? Manager: Do you work with flaming objects? Manager: ...knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats? Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with your juggling? Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired. |
Female college students academically outperform their male counterparts on many and perhaps most college campuses. At the University of Rhode Island, for example, women captured 70 percent of the honors degrees handed out this year and at Brown University, 30 percent of this year's female seniors graduated with honors while only 24 percent of the males did so.
Yet the difference in the grade point averages appears to be having little to no impact on the job search success of the females. Are the differences due to continuing discrimination by employers against women, or is something more subtle and less insidious going on? According to Judith Claire, Director of Career Services at Bryant University in Rhode Island, employers don't have a gender preference but look "...at many different factors, including -- but not limited to -- grades."
It is no secret that males comprise the vast majority of upper management at most larger firms in the country and that people tend to prefer to surround themselves with those who have similar interests and personalities. Hence, men who believe they've succeeded will tend to try to surround themselves by others who have similiar qualities, and that often includes gender. They may not do so consciously and they will often vehemently deny that any type of gender-based discrimination is occurring, yet a look at the corporate offices around the country reveals that we have a long way to go before hiring is truly gender blind. Some argue that women choose occupations that offer less power, prestige, and money and that may be true in some cases. But is that because they're women and are hard wired to prefer occupations such as teaching is or that because our society repeatedly, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) steers them away from highly compensated occupations such as engineering and computer science and toward more motherly professions such as teaching?
I believe that the answers to these questions are more complex than a simple yes or no. If society is steering women away from highly compensated, science-based occupations, then why the huge growth in the number of women being admitted to and graduating from medical school? The number of physicians coming out of medical schools is now roughly half female. If we look across the campus to the law schools, we see similar percentages.
Before I became a father, I was sure that the way we turned out was 75 percent nurture and 25 percent nature. As my two boys and one girl continue to grow, learn, and mature, I have come to realize that nature certainly plays a role, but it seems to me that the way we are is probably closer to 75 percent nature and 25 percent nurture.
One of our most successful recruitment advertising products is our targeted email campaign product. We can deliver an email on behalf of an employer, school, or other organization to up to 8.5 million college students and recent graduates and target them using any combination of up to 700 fields of data, including school, year in school, major, GPA, race, gender, years since graduation, experience, hobbies, etc. But excellent targeting is only part of the battle for organizations that want their campaigns to succeed. Also critical is a well designed creative (the ad that recipients see), so here are seven tips for designing a winning targeted email creative:
If your organization is not finding the right quantity and quality of candidates and you're using the same recruitment techniques time-and-time again, then perhaps it is time to add some unusual ideas to the mix.
The North Dakota Army National Guard is always looking for new recruits. While recruitment advertising, career fairs, and other routine techniques likely work well for them, those techniques don't produce enough of the right candidates that the Guard can afford to exclusively rely upon them, so they're willing to hold events that are fun and allow them to interact with potential recruits in a low pressure environment. One such event is a paintball tournament.
If you think that your job can be boring or even terrible, you'll have to admit that you don't have it bad after you check out the video to watch the temporary job that this guy has.
For years, Microsoft had a reputation of being a no nonsense, top down, corporate giant. Interesting how fast things changed from the days when they were run from a garage by a few geeks and how fast things are changing again as they embrace new media to help them with their recruitment efforts. To really see the new Microsoft, you need to watch this awesome recruitment video hosted by Ed Helms of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.
By George Lenard, the originator of George’s Employment Blawg
There has recently been considerable attention in the media to instances of employers rejecting candidates or firing employees based on information obtained from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. I may later do a review on my own blog of some of this commentary, but today I will discuss a question posed by Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com -- prefacing my remarks with a lawyerly disclaimer that I am not providing legal advice and have not thoroughly researched these issues, but am merely making some general comments.
Steven asked that I comment on the lawfulness of making adverse employment decisions on this basis. He raised several concerns: that with Facebook, students often have an incorrect understanding that only other students can access their profiles; that there may be false information on those sites, perhaps not even posted by the individuals themselves; and that Facebook’s terms of service explicitly prohibit users from using Facebook for commercial purposes.
Let me start out with the comment that, like it or not, as a general proposition employers are free to make unfair, stupid, arbitrary, and wrongheaded hiring and termination decisions, even based on false information, as long as in doing so they do not violate some specific law.
Discrimination Law
One category of specific laws that could be violated by an adverse employment decision based on information on a social networking site is federal and state discrimination laws. It could be evidence of unlawful discrimination if an employer checks for such Internet information on only certain types of applicants or employees, for example, African-Americans and Hispanics. It may also be evidence of unlawful discrimination if although the employer searches for such information on all applicants or employees, discriminatory bias affects the employer's evaluation of the information obtained. For example, an employer may view more negatively photos of an African American male, beer in hand, hanging out at a bar with a hip-hop DJ than photos of a white boy, also with beer in hand, hanging out at a rock 'n roll bar with a bunch of other white boys wearing frat T-shirts. Tell me, was it really the public evidence of drinking that disqualified the individual? How many current employees would be disqualified from employment if never getting publicly intoxicated -- or even drinking in public -- was a job requirement? These are the kinds of questions the EEOC would ask if discrimination was raised.
Sexual orientation might be another touchy area. These days, it may be frankly disclosed on social networking sites without much thought. Yet, bias remains and might cause some employers to make adverse decisions. In many states and municipalities, sexual orientation discrimination is unlawful, so such decisions will be prohibited.
Invasion of Privacy
A claim that I doubt would fly is invasion of privacy. This requires a "reasonable expectation of privacy." A student may believe that Facebook access is limited to a few thousand of their schoolmates and their closest friends. Nonetheless, it would be tough to claim that this expectation of limited access, even if reasonable, is an expectation of "privacy." The Facebook FAQs do support such a belief in limited access, stating:
Can I see the profiles of people on other networks?
Facebook was intentionally designed to limit the availability of your profile to only your friends and other people on your networks. This simple but important security measure promotes local networking and makes sure that your information is seen by people you want to share it with, and not by people you don't.
On the other hand, if you are using privacy features that you believe restrict access to very few specific people completely within your control, and an employer somehow hacks past such a privacy barrier, you may have a strong privacy claim.
Terms of Service Violation
Now, onward to the terms of service issue raised by Steve. For sake of brevity, I will only address Facebook. MySpace may present somewhat different issues, which I may analyze in a follow-up post. The Facebook terms include the following:
You understand that the Service and the Web site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You represent, warrant and agree that no materials of any kind submitted through your account will violate or infringe upon the rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other personal or proprietary rights; or contain libelous, defamatory or otherwise unlawful material. You further agree not to harvest or collect email addresses or other contact information of Members from the Service or the Web site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications. Additionally, you agree not to use automated scripts to collect information from the Service or the Web site or for any other purpose. You further agree that you may not use the Service or the Web site in any unlawful manner or in any other manner that could damage, disable, overburden or impair Web site. In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Web site to:Steven thinks it's a no-brainer that checking individuals out on Facebook for purposes of employment decisions is a commercial use. This certainly is a possible interpretation, but I believe not the only one. The next sentence focuses on materials submitted through your account, not what you do with information you learn about others. Therefore, "non-commercial use only" could be interpreted as addressing only a prohibition on posting information for commercial gain, such as advertisements. The paragraph goes on to specifically prohibit certain methods of obtaining and using information about others. Though it prohibits automated scraping and spamming, it does not address the issue of searching for specific individuals and using the information to make employment decisions.
- impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself or your affiliation with any person or entity; . . .
- intimidate or harass another;
- use or attempt to use another's account, service or system without authorization from the Company, or create a false identity on the Service or the Web site.
It seems a stretch to say an employer is "intimidating or harassing" the user of Facebook by using Facebook information to make an adverse employment decision, but this certainly could be argued.
A more serious issue would arise if the employer misrepresented their affiliation with a college to create an account allowing them to look up certain individuals, or used another's account to do so. This would appear to be a plain violation of the terms of service.
Consequences of Violation of Terms of Service
Now, let's assume the employer violated the terms of service. So what? My answer is that this fact may support a tortious interference with business expectancy claim, but probably only if it was a third-party recruiter or investigator who committed a violation. This is because interference by a third party is required. Perhaps, such a claim against the individual who obtained the information improperly, not the company, would satisfy this requirement, but that is still somewhat iffy.
Other elements of this type of client might also be difficult to prove, such as whether the candidate has a reasonable expectancy of employment.
There might also be a federal cause of action under the Federal Computer Fraud And Abuse Act to the extent the recruiter/employer exceeds authorized access (as authorized in the terms of service) in obtaining data from a computer system (the Facebook server).
Other Laws
Another law that could come into play is the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Despite its name, this law has broader application than credit inquiries. It might apply if the Facebook information was obtained by a third party investigator such as a background-checking service. It would not prohibit use of the information, but would require disclosure of the fact that such information was the basis for the decision.
Thinking Practically
Those are a few of my well-educated, but still speculative, legal thoughts. Long ago, one of my mentors taught me to always ask not only what the law requires my client to do, but also what the client should do, taking into account extra-legal factors such as business realities, employee morale, employee and public perceptions, etc. Here, I have some thoughts on what both employers and applicants/employees should do, in the face of this growing trend of employers checking social networking sites.
I would advise applicants/employees to assume future employers will read everything you post. So when you put something about yourself out there, you can be yourself, but avoid obvious negatives like saying you hate to work or posting sleazy or drunken photos. It may help to ask yourself whether you would want your mother to see your site. Sorry to say, but you may not even want to admit homosexuality or extreme political or religious views. On a positive note, use your Internet postings, including blogs as well as social networking sites, affirmatively, to build visibility and credibility as an expert in your field (or hobby). Join more "serious" networking sites like LinkedIn even if you are still a student -- and work at building a network there that can help you in future job searches.
I would advise employers to cut applicants and employees some slack. You were once young too and maybe did similar things -- if not publicly on the Internet. Ask yourself how relevant the information creating the negative impression is to job performance. If you are going to do Internet searches and use them as a basis for employment decisions, you better document them and do it consistently, without regard to any legally protected classifications, e.g. race, sex, age. I also agree 100% with Steven's suggestion to use social networking sites and blogs in a positive fashion in your search to find good candidates. Consider the whole person, of whom the Internet persona is not always a fully accurate reflection.
 | George Lenard, the originator of George’s Employment Blawg, has over twenty years of experience in all aspects of labor and employment law, including preventive law as well as litigation. His special interests include employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and noncompetition agreements. He is currently a managing partner with Harris, Dowell, Fisher & Harris, L.C., in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives in the suburb of University City with his wife, one daughter and two sons. |
