My hat is off to Jason Goldberg of Jobster. It appears that high flying Jobster, for which I have tremendous respect, is about to lay off a significant number of its employees in an effort to become profitable in 2007. Unlike most CEO's, Jason has been open and honest with the readers of his blog about what is happening. I'm sure that there are things that he has not been able to discuss because of the fiduciary obligations that he owes to his VC and other shareholders, but it is truly amazing how he has been willing to not only acknowledge the very difficult issues in his blog but also link to blogs and other articles that are trash talking Jobster. He even approved a comment from a disgruntled parent of one of his recent college graduate employees.

This is a difficult time for Jason, his shareholders, his employees, his clients, his vendors, and others who care about Jobster. Yet when they all look back upon this period, they will trust Jason more and because of that Jobster will be stronger and even more respected than it already is.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 30, 2006 at 9:36 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Informational interviews are one of the most effective methods of networking. Traditionally these interviews have been held face-to-face, but today's college students are increasingly conducting such interviews via email.

University of Pittsburgh senior Emily Guzan, for example, used her college career service office's database of alums and then emailed five who are working as attorneys, which is her chosen career path. All five responded and two of them invited her to shadow them in their offices.

While those who are used to networking face-to-face will likely abhor this trend, I believe that it is a positive development. With more and more of the population being highly mobile and increasingly communicating via instant messaging and email, this trend will help students connect with the best possible sources of information even if they're not local. In the past, a student attending school in New York would have been very hard pressed to connect with someone in Los Angeles. With email, that distance no longer matters. The danger, however, is that networking that should take place face-to-face will shift to email. Too many job seekers hide behind their computers rather than risking the possibility of being rejected. As any good sales person knows though, a rejection brings you one step closer to an acceptance because it allows you to stop spending your time and other resources on leads that may be fruitless. So job seekers who spend all day sending emails and applying to advertised jobs are often doing so to help themselves feel that they're busy and therefore being productive. Well, that's just not the case. There is a huge difference between being busy and being productive. You can shuffle a whole lot of paper and not produce any value. When you do, you're busy but not productive. So students who use email to help them establish real connections with people deserve our encouragement but those who use email to avoid face-to-face meetings deserve our encouragement to change their ways.

Source: Campus Career Counselor

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 29, 2006 at 3:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Two of my favorite members of the recruiting blogosphere are Dave Mendoza and Joel Cheesman. Both care deeply about their clients and profession and are very knowledgeable. I always learn something whenever I talk with them. For a fully recovered lawyer, that's hard to admit.

At least as importantly as Dave and Joel being class acts professionally, they're also class acts personally. They're a real pleasure to be with. So isn't it great that they're receiving the accolades they deserve from their blogging brethren? Dave's blog won the Recruiting.com popular vote as the best recruiting blog and Joel's blog won the judge's vote as the best recruiting blog. Folks, there aren't any losers here. They're both winners.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 28, 2006 at 4:52 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Recruiting.com just announced the top 10 recruiting blog winners for 2006. Last year, we were fortunate enough to win two of the best blog awards. This year, the format changed and there was far more competition due to the huge increase in the number of blogs. Nevertheless, I was proud to see that three of our blogs were in the top 25.

Interestingly, all of the blogs at ERE.net were combined into one entry and together they secured 93 votes, enough to land them in the top ten. If you were to add up the votes for the three nominated CollegeRecruiter.com blogs, we would have had 112 votes and finished sixth. I kind of feel like a proud dad watching his kid take his first steps. Well, maybe not that proud but still proud.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 27, 2006 at 11:02 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

If you're one of those who are primarily motivated by money, pay close attention. The 10 highest paying jobs in the country are as follows:

1. Surgeons at $137,050/yr
2. Obstetricians and gynecologists at $133,430/yr
3. Anesthesiologists at $131,680/yr
4. Internists, general at $126,940/yr
5. Pediatricians, general at $116,550/yr
6. Psychiatrists at $113,570/yr
7. Family and general practitioners at $110,020/yr
8. Dentists at $110,820/yr
9. Chief Executives at $107,670/yr
10. Airline pilots, copilots and flight engineers at $99,400/yr

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 26, 2006 at 11:11 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

College students who are searching for great internships and recent graduates who are looking for the highest paying entry level jobs often search job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com for the highest paying employment opportunities. There is little doubt that the highest paying internships are great for students who want to make as much money as possible. Similarly, the highest paying jobs for college graduates are great matches for recent graduates who want to make the most money.

So what is an example of an entry level career opportunity that is one of the highest paying jobs? Securities Commodities and Financial Services Sales Agents.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 22, 2006 at 7:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

David Hurst and the rest of the OnRec crew runs a fine recruiting conference. Their first effort on this side of the pond was in Chicago a few months ago and was truly fantastic. Incredibly high level of discussion, even when I presented about how to use and how not to use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook for recruiting purposes. One of the great bonuses of that conferences was that it was held in the same location one day after the first meeting of the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS), a great organization headed by Peter Weddle. Job board owners and employees such as me were able to attend both. HR professionals just attended OnRec.

Well, great news. David and Peter are teaming up again. The next IAEWS conference will be held September 17, 2007 in San Francisco and OnRec will be in the same location on September 18th and 19th. I'll be speaking about college recruiting. Given what we do over here for a living, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill the allotted half hour.

Excited? Me too. It should be awesome.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 21, 2006 at 5:31 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Want another indicator that Gen Y'ers has different priorities than Gen X'ers or Baby Boomers? An increasing number of college students are choosing to study abroad in countries for which the U.S. State Department has issued travel warnings. Although almost two-thirds of American college students still choose to study abroad in the more traditional locations of Western Europe and Australia, more than 7,000 students studied in Africa during the 2004-05 year. That's a 25 percent increase from the year before. Even more startling is that the number of students who chose to study abroad in the Middle East more than doubled in that one year period.

Why are so many more students choosing to put themselves in harm's way for what many Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers looked upon as a quasi-vacation? Career development. Today's students and their parents believe that it's "good to have an exposure to a country that's particularly unique...to get an employer to pay attention," said Peggy Blumenthal, the chief operating officer of the Institute of International Education, a non-profit organization that helps to organize international exchanges such as the Fulbright program.

Yet is it really the case that employers are paying attention to these high risk trips? Corporate recruiters don't seem to be as enthusiastic as are the candidates.The recruiters typically feel that study abroad experiences don't make a good candidate, but they can influence a decision about a candidate if that candidate's credentials are very close to another candidate without a similiar experience on their resume. "It depends on how much [the students] immerse themselves in the program and how much time they are spending there," said Danielle Domingue, a senior recruiter at JPMorgan.

Employers like study abroad programs because they expose students to global business environments and help students to prove that they can take initiatives, risks, have an adventurous side, and know how to stay safe in hot zones.

-- Source: Wall Street Journal

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 20, 2006 at 7:10 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

If the thought of getting on another airplane and having to endure more delays gets under your skin, consider for a minute the people who are on airplanes all day long, every workday. That's right, the flight attendants. If you think that traveling is rough on the passengers, think about it from their perspective. Or, better yet, watch this CollegeRecruiter.com video, one of 350 career videos that we offer on our site and which any site can run for free:

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 19, 2006 at 6:54 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Minnesota Headhunter has a great blog entry today about employers who allow their workers to volunteer for other organizations on company time. If you're struggling to hire more or better Gen Y candidates, pay close attention. They are highly motivated by the desire to make a positive contribution to society. Those organizations that do the best job of supporting that desire will recruit and retain more of the best.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 18, 2006 at 1:27 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

The CollegeRecruiter.com Recruiting.com Blogswap is off to a great start. Participants can either be authors, publishers, or both. But what is the CollegeRecruiter.com Recruiting.com Blogswap? Well, it's really two tools in one...

If you're a blog or website "author", then it is a tool to spread the word about your blog or website and your content. Some people refer to this type of a tool as an article submission service. By offering your originally authored articles to blog and website "publishers" you gain a much wider audience for your work, greater recognition for your blog or website, valuable links back to your site, and higher search engine rankings because of those links.

If you're a blog or website "publisher", then you get free content. You will have the choice of keeping an article and publishing it or, if the article isn't a good fit for your site, you may return it and wait until you receive an article that is a better fit for your website. By adding more content to your site, your site becomes deeper and richer. It is more likely that your target audience will find your site when they run searches at Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and the other search engines. In addition, the search engines will recognize that your site has more pages and sites with more pages are ranked higher in the search results.

We currently have three dozen participants and that number is growing almost every day. They include:

• George Blomgren, Blomgren;
  
• Jeannie Borin, College Connections;
  
• Tiffany Bridge, Magic Pot of Jobs;
  
• Craig Campbell, Talentwoo;
  
• Carl Chapman, cecsearch.com;
  
• Mark Clark, Lowe's Companies, Inc.;
  
• Alise Cortez, ImprovedExperience.com;
  
• Jason Davis, Recruiting.com;
  
• Tracey de Morsella, Convergence Media, Inc;
  
• Paul DeBettignies, Nerd Search, LLC;
  
• Jim Durbin, Durbin Media Group;
  
• Claudia Faust, ImprovedExperience.com;
  
• Rob Humphrey, Jobster, Inc.;
  
• Michael Kalchman, Cortex Search Inc.;
  
• Shweta Khare, Careerbright;
  
• George Lenard, Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris, L.C.;
  
• Alexandra Levit, alexandralevit.com;
  
• Eric Luu, WorkBloom;
  
• David Maister, Maister Associates;
  
• John Mallon, John Mallon;
  
• Matt Martone, Yahoo Corporation;
  
• Steven Phenix, itzBig;
  
• Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com;
  
• Wesley Schoonover, Dibussolo and Associates;
  
• Sandra Schwan, Kensington International;
  
• Shannon Seery, exceler8ion.com;
  
• Susan Strayer, University and Career Decisions;
  
• Jim Stroud, Jim Stroud 2.0;
  
• Janet Sun, Experience;
  
• Mike Tiffany, Net Effects; and
  
• Mick Wist, Insourced.

  Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 15, 2006 at 7:11 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There's been a lot of buzz in the Recruiting Blogosphere about Jason Goldberg's video in which he stated that Monster has a crappy product. Be that as it may, it now appears that Monster's accountants are even crappier. Apparently, from 1997 through 2005 the site overstated its profits by some $272 million.

What do you think? Could this lead to additional SEC and shareholder problems? Maybe? Just maybe?

If you haven't seen the Goldberg video, here it is:

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 14, 2006 at 5:44 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Just when recruiters, hiring managers, and others who post jobs on-line thought that they were beginning to understand the various options being thrown at them by leading job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com, along came some additional options that have created more confusion. In an effort to eliminate that confusion, let's talk about the differences between nationwide job postings, standard job postings, and job slots.

Whether you purchase a nationwide job posting or a standard job posting, it will be distributed across our network of 15,000 niche career sites. The job posting will appear in any relevant searches performed by candidates across our network of sites. So if you post an entry level nursing position for your facility in Philadelphia, then your job will appear on CollegeRecruiter.com because it is an entry level position, it will appear on network partner PhillyJobs.com because the position is in Philadelphia, and it will appear on networking partner Nursing.com because the position is for nurses. But it will not appear on network partner ManhattanJobs.com, our accounting sites, etc.

Nationwide job postings appear in searches where candidates select industry categories and keywords that match those identified in your job description, regardless of the geographic location the candidate specifies. Nationwide job postings are ideally suited for companies offering the same position in multiple locations, work-at-home positions, or other positions offered on a national scale because they run under all cities in all states.

Standard job postings, also known as local job posting ads, appear in searches where candidates select industry categories, keywords AND geographic locations that match those identified in your job description. Standard job postings are ideal for companies recruiting for positions in a single geographic location because they run under one city and one state.

Job posting slots, also known as concurrent job posting ads, allow you to post and take down a job as often as you need within a given time period. For example, if you purchase one job posting slot for a term of 90 days, you can post your job description and, when that position is filled, you can post a new position. You can do this as many times as you like before the 90 day term is over. With nationwide or standard job posting ads, you can change the requirements and description in the posting as much as you want and as often as you want, but you cannot change the job title or location so if you post that nurse in Philadelphia position today and fill it tomorrow, you cannot change it to accountant in Philadelphia, nurse in Chicago, or accountant in Chicago. But if you purchase a job posting slot and fill the position tomorrow, you can change it to anything you want.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 14, 2006 at 9:30 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 13, 2006 at 7:46 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Last year, CollegeRecruiter.com won two best recruiting blog awards from Recruiting.com.

The format has changed somewhat this year. You're now supposed to vote for up to five of your favorite blogs, which is handy because three of our blogs have been nominated: CollegeRecruiter.com Blog, which is our staff written blog, CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Employers Blog, which is written on a volunteer basis by dozens of employers, and CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog, which is written by 200 students and recent graduates who are seeking employment and educational opportunities. We'd love your vote for all three of them!

As they said in Chicago, vote early and vote often!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 13, 2006 at 7:17 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Although some HR search engine optimization experts might question how well MySpace and other social networking sites can be used for recruitment purposes, such blue chip recruiting organizations as the U.S. Marines use MySpace for recruitment purposes. But if you're a smaller organization, can and should you use MySpace as a recruiting tool? If you're a small bakery in Sacramento, the answer is yes.

According to a story in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, an employee of the Freeport Bakery created a MySpace page for past and present employees of the bakery. Most of the bakery's 47 employees are high school and college-age students and use the site to stay in touch with friends and family.

So what's so great about the Freeport Bakery's use of MySpace? It truly is networking. They're using it to stay in touch with current and past employees. They're networking with them. When they have a job opening, they can instantly communicate it to their network. Maybe a past employee will be interested in becoming a boomerang employee by returning to work for the bakery. Or maybe that past employee will refer her sibling, cousin, or friend. Awesome.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 12, 2006 at 5:16 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 12, 2006 at 10:38 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

College career service office professionals, recruiters, and hiring managers often are puzzled when I tell them that they should not use MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites to exclude candidates from the hiring process except in very rare circumstances but they should use those sites to include candidates in the hiring process for almost every type of position. Why? To me it boils down to whether your organization would prefer to hire people who've never done anything distasteful in their lives and are therefore likely to be the types of people who won't embarrass your firm but probably also won't lead your firm or hire people who apparently don't mind and perhaps even enjoy being in the spotlight and being exhibitionists so therefore may embarrass your firm at some point but also will be far more likely to be leaders.

Want a couple of examples? Have a look at this first video if you want to see what I mean by a safe candidate. Pretty vanilla. Definitely not the type to inspire your clients, vendors, employees, or stockholders but also probably not the type who is ever going to embarrass you.

Now look at this second video. This is a guy who is rumored to live his life the same way off the ice as on it: full throttle 24 hours a day. He will embarrass himself and the company that he works for by making spectacular errors in judgement, yet every organization in his field would just about kill to have the opportunity to have him on their roster.

Now ask yourself, who would you rather have on your team? If you are engaged in college hiring and therefore are trying to hire the next generation of your organization's leaders, who do you want to hire? The guy who is so safe that he puts you to sleep or the guy who does the amazing almost every time he is on the ice?

I thought so.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 11, 2006 at 6:18 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

About a week ago I noticed that the Coca-Cola Company had begun to run pay-per-click recruitment advertising on CollegeRecruiter.com through Google AdWords. They purchased the text ad from Google. When visitors to CollegeRecruiter.com clicked on the ad, Coke paid Google some amount of money that only Coke and Google know and then Google shared some of that revenue with CollegeRecruiter.com. By running that pay-for-performance recruitment advertising campaign, the Coca-Cola Company became the latest organization to understand that they could shift the risk of a campaign not performing to CollegeRecruiter.com and any other sites running it through Google. Presumably, CollegeRecruiter.com and the publishers of the receive a bit more for the Coke advertising over the long run in return for assuming that risk.

Lest anyone think that pay-per-click and other types of pay-for-performance recruitment advertising is only for organizations with the deep pockets of the Coca-Cola Company, I just noticed a similar pay-per-click advertising campaign by the Peace Corps:

If you weren't convinced before that pay-for-performance recruitment advertising has arrived, you should be now. And if you're a job board or other publisher and have refused to embrace this more customer friendly and efficient system, you should be now.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 10, 2006 at 9:18 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the pleasure of speaking in Seattle yesterday to a packed room at the Mountain-Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers (MPACE) annual conference about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The participation and enthusiasm exhibited by the attendees was great and that made the presentation a lot of fun and probably a lot more interesting for the attendees. Most of the attendees were college career service office professionals, but a sizeable minority were employers who are actively engaged in college hiring.

One of the feedback forms suggested that I add a slide to my presentation that defines what a Gen Y'er is as I often referred to that generational group during the presentation but never defined it. If I had been speaking to a general audience, I definitely would have done so but I figured that people who are engaged in college recruiting wouldn't need to see that information. Perhaps the suggestion came from someone who is new to the field.

In any case, as I was reading through my favorite blogs I came upon a recent entry by Chris Russell at the Recruiting Fly Blog about the Millenial Generation, also known as Gen Y. Not only is Chris a great guy who provides great value for his AllCountyJobs.com clients, but he's also a great blogger. To summarize the blog entry by Chris, Millenials are:

• Born between 1982 and 2002. There are 80 million of them.
• They're the most "wired" generation ever. [Chris didn't write this, but they're also the most wireless generation ever.]
• They spend their free time on-line. Forty-three percent spend more than 10 hours on-line a week with their favorite destinations being Google, Yahoo, and MySpace. Seventy-five percent spend less than two hours reading magazines and 67 percent spend less than two hours reading newspapers.
• Their top resources for job searching are networking, university career centers, and internships.
• When they graduate, 43 percent plan to stay in same state as their college, 23 percent plan to return to the state in which they grew up, and 28 plan to relocate to a third state.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 8, 2006 at 10:11 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I travel to Seattle today to speak tomorrow morning at the Mountain-Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers 2006 annual conference. I'll be talking about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and the dangers and opportunities they present to candidates and employers.

After speaking, I might just have to find my way over to Pike Place Market where there's a really fun restaurant that I went to a couple of years ago with my one of my kids. He was eight then. He had never experienced mussels before so when they came as garnish on his plate, he asked what they were. I told him mussels and, because he's an adventurous eater, encouraged him to try them. I figured no way would he like them. He took a small, tentative bite. His eyes lit up.

Next morning, I asked him what he wanted for breakfast. "Mussels!" He had to wait until lunch. I like mussels, but not enough to eat them at 7am.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 6, 2006 at 6:37 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The CollegeRecruiter.com Recruiting.com Blogswap is off and running. We have about 30 authors and publishers of blog articles participating now. Authors submit their articles for free and they're automatically assigned to the next publisher in line. That publisher posts the articles to their blog within a day or two or kicks back the article to CollegeRecruiter.com for re-assignment if the article doesn't fit well with the theme of the publisher's blog. Many of the participants, including me, are both authors and publishers.

To help promote the Blogswap, we recently made available to the authors and publishers a couple of banner ads. My thanks to Jason Davis of Recruiting.com and Jim Durbin of StlRecruiting.com and CharlotteRecruiting.com for adding the banners so quickly to their sites. Want to do the same? Feel free to grab either or both of these banners and add them to your site.

If you're looking for a great way of building traffic to your human resources or career-related blog, then the Blogswap is perfect for you. Authors get the benefit of click throughs to their blog from people reading their content on other blogs. In addition, when your articles run on other blogs, the search engines pick up the keywords in your article and see the link in your byline to your blog so they infer that those keywords are related to your blog. The result is that when your target audience runs searches at Google etc. for those keywords, your blog will come up higher in the search results. For publishers, receiving the free content helps them add more and more content to their blogs. More content means more traffic from the search engines, both because there is a better chance that you will have content that matches the keyword strings being entered at the search engines and also because the search engines rank sites with more content higher than sites with less content.

Want to participate? I thought so. Sign up for the free human resource and career related content exchange program a/k/a the CollegeRecruiter.com Recruiting.com Blogswap.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 5, 2006 at 9:04 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Coca-Cola Company, maker of Coke and other leading consumer products, is running pay-per-click recruitment advertising through Google AdWords. Rather than paying flat rates for job posting ads targeted to college students seeking internships or college graduates looking for entry level career opportunities, Coke is paying per click.

When a visitor to CollegeRecruiter.com or any other site on which the ads run clicks on the Coca-Cola recruitment ad, Coca-Cola pays Google for the click and then Google shares that revenue with CollegeRecruiter.com or whatever site the visitor was on when they clicked on the Coca-Cola ad. The amount paid per click varies considerably, but Coke is paying at least $0.10 per click as that's the minimum cost but is likely paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.25 per click.

Let's assume that the cost per click is $0.25. If 10 percent of those clicks turn into resumes (applications) at the Coke site, then the cost per per resume is $2.50. If Coke hires even five percent of those applicants, then the cost per hire is a mere $50. Let's compare that to the typical real cost of a job posting ad. On CollegeRecruiter.com, the cost of a job posting ad for 60 days is $175. That's pretty typical for a niche site. While some employers fail to hire anyone from a job posting ad and others hire multiple people, for the sake of discussion let's assume that employers hire one candidate for each paid job posting ad. If that's the case, then the cost per hire for a job posting ad is $175. So by purchasing pay per click advertising, Coke is reducing is cost per hire from $175 to $50. Pretty smart.

I've long been an advocate of pay for performance advertising. We purchase most of our advertising through the pay for performance affiliate program that we launched way back in 1998 and we sell pay for performance advertising to some of our clients through our pay per lead program and through Google AdWords. As job postings become more and more of a commodity product, it is inevitable that more and more employers will opt to purchase their recruitment advertising on a pay for performance basis and more and more job boards will follow our lead in not only offering those products, but encouraging their adoption.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 4, 2006 at 7:55 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

One of the nice things about being a self-employed human resource search engine optimization expert is that you get to work from home as much as you want and spend lots of quality time with your new baby boy. While that is all true, there is no truth to the rumor that this video shows baby Cheesman being prompted by proud papa.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 3, 2006 at 9:58 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

College students who are searching for great internships with some of the biggest employers of college students should check out a video uploaded to YouTube by Sony. Some of the largest employers of college students, including Sony, have joined forces to create an internship contest. If anyone has any doubts remaining that the world is getting flatter and flatter, then this should help eliminate those doubts.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 2, 2006 at 1:46 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

It may initially seem like an odd partnership, but blue chip financial services behemoth JPMorgan has partnered with non-profit Teach for America. Under the partnership, students who accept a position with JPMorgan receive their starting bonuses immediately but are allowed to work for Teach for America for up to two years.

JPMorgan is incredibly selective in the students that it hires, as it should be. Students who go to work for JPMorgan are quickly involved in deals that often involve tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars and impact tens and even hundreds of thousands of people. The stereotype of these high achieving, high earning, money motivated students is hardly the same as the stereotype of the save the world, huge a tree students who work for Teach for America. Yet this partnership is wonderful for both organizations.

"We feel that the kinds of students that apply and are accepted to [work for Teach for America] are the kinds of individuals we want here at the firm," said JPMorgan vice president Adam Castellani. In other words, JPMorgan recognizes that diversity in the work force is important and that it is healthy to have employees who have a background of experiences. They also recognize that this generation has different motivations than did the generations before them. Baby Boomers were far more likely to be solely focused on advancing their careers. Gen X'ers weren't quite as focused on career advancement as Boomers, but few would have been inclined to defer Wall Street salaries and careers for two years to do something such as teaching in a public classroom in East Saint Louis.

Gen Y'ers, thankfully, have their priorities more in order and understand that it is better for them to work to live than it is for them to live to work. The work that they will do for JPMorgan will have little to do with making life better for an poverty stricken kid in a slum and Gen Y'ers and their bosses at JPMorgan know that. Yet through this program, JPMorgan is able to tap into the best and brightest of Gen Y without losing some who were well qualified but who decided that Wall Street didn't provide the kind of personal fulfillment that they needed.

A tip of the hat to JPMorgan for creating a partnership that does real good through the work of Teach for America, its clients by allowing it to continue to recruit the best of the best, and its employees by allowing them to do good work for their employer and for the communities in which they live.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 1, 2006 at 7:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)