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CollegeRecruiter.com and Alloy Education announced an agreement under which scholarship and college information from Alloy's CareersandColleges.com website will be made available for search on CollegeRecruiter.com. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of job posting advertisements and employment-related articles from CollegeRecruiter.com will now be available for search on CareersandColleges.com. For additional details, check out the press release.
Corporate recruiters who want to blog or are considering blogging take note: Dave Mendoza of JobMachine.net and Kennedy Information are teaming up to present a three part teleseminar. You can attend one, two, or all three sessions or order CD recordings if you are unable to call in at the designated times.
The first seminar is entitled "An Introduction to Blogging" and is scheduled for Thursday, February 1, 2007. The second seminar is entitled "Employee Blogs: 'New School' Employment Branding" and is scheduled for Thursday, February 15, 2007. The third and final seminar is entitled "Evolution of Blogs" and is scheduled for Thursday, March 1.
Dave is a world class trainer and Kennedy Information is a world class provider of recruiting content, so this should be phenomenal series. Sign up at the Kennedy Information web site.
About five years ago, I received a call from the then Assistant Director of Career Services at Emory University's undergraduate business school. Emory, because of its location in Atlanta, is not prime recruiting ground for Minneapolis-based employers. The Assistant Director had met me at a college recruiting conference and thought that I might be willing to help one of his students. That student was just profiled in Business Week and I couldn't be happier.
When the Assistant Director called, I immediately agreed to speak with the student. I had no idea who the student was or what were his career aspirations but it didn't matter. When a student wants help, you help. The student, Scott Shapiro, called and told me that he grew up in Minneapolis and he was hoping to land an internship for the summer before his senior year. After talking with him by phone and then meeting him for coffee, I was eager to help him. Poised, polished, yet real, this was a student who wasn't going to ask for help and then disregard my advice. This was a student who listened and heard and was incredibly respectful and appreciative of his family, friends, acquaintances, the woman who made his coffee, everyone.
I called up a few employers that we worked with or hoped to work with and told them about Scott. I couldn't vouch for his work performance because he had never worked for me. I couldn't vouch for his academic performance because I wasn't involved in that either. But I went to bat for him because I knew that he would go to bat for himself and everyone around him every hour of every day. Those calls helped land him an interview with Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, which has one of the best internship programs in the country. To be clear, I did not get Scott the internship. I did introduce him to a recruiter but Scott got the interview and got the job.
Scott and I spoke and traded emails regularly that summer. We met for coffee a few times. I always enjoyed my time with him because he always made sure that the time was productive both for him and for me.
When Scott returned to Emory for his senior year, he knew that selling financial products was not his love. He went after jobs in the media and scored an internship with CNN. One thing led to another and today he is the Producer of ESPN Radio's flagship program, Mike & Mike in the Morning. He books the guests, develops content, runs ideas meetings, and serves as point person. It's his job to see that the show grows in the ratings. Ratings drive their ad revenues and he is responsible for improving them on a quarterly basis.
It is clear from reading the Business Week profile that Scott loves his work and, more importantly, his life. He is incredibly busy and challenged and wouldn't have it any other way. Rather than taking the easy way out after his junior year and finding an internship in Atlanta that wasn't a good fit, he networked, networked, and networked some more. He asked for help and offered twice as much in return. He understood that jobs which paid a lot were not the ones that were going to allow him to do the work that he wanted to do and live the life that he wanted to live, so he turned away from the money and toward the experience.
I have three kids. When they get to be juniors in college, I hope that they have their priorities as straight as Scott did.
My friend Dave Mendoza of JobMachine.net is at it again. I first met Dave just a few months ago at a recruiting conference in Denver. I was acquainted with him before that meeting, but we have become friends since. He really left me no choice, and for that I am grateful. The guy gives, gives, gives, and then gives some more. If you look up the word networking in the dictionary, his picture is probably part of the definition.
The latest example is his blog entry for today. He posted an entry about how employers are using Facebook to background check students and other potential employees. Essentially, they're using the entries that students post to their Facebook accounts against those students. If the students post information that is not appreciated by the employer, then that employer is likely to exclude the student from the hiring process. So what makes this a giving entry? Have a look and you'll see pretty quickly.
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Recruiting.com and CollegeRecruiter.com are quite happy with the CollegeRecruiter.com Recruiting.com Blogswap free recruiting article exchange program but very few things in life are perfect (the movie Slapshot is one of them) so you'll probably agree that there's room for improvement with the Blogswap. Two of those improvements just went live: |
When is a politican conservative (or liberal) not a political conservative (or liberal)? When they're a college student. According to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey of 271,441 freshmen entering college in fall 2006, 43 percent identify themselves politically as “middle-of-the road,” 31 percent identify themselves as “liberal” or “far left” and 26 percent identify themselves as being “conservative” or “far right.”
No huge surprises there, right? Well, let's continue. Based on their attitudes towards controversial social issues such as marital status for homosexuals, abortion, and the legalization of marijuana, the four most “conservative” religious groups are Baptists, Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, and “Other Christians” (mainly Evangelicals). Large majorities of students in each of these groups (58%-80%) opposed the traditional the “liberal” views on these isues of legalizing marital status for homosexuals, keeping abortion legal, and legalizing marijuana.
So these students are conservatives, right? Wrong. In none of these denominations, nor in any other religious group, do even half of the students describe themselves as being in their politics far right or even just conservative. So a lot of students are closet conservatives and just identify themselves as being liberal or middle of the road, right? Wrong again.
The most “liberal’ religious groups, based on their views of the social issues outlined above are Buddhists, Jews, Quakers, Unitarians , and those with no religious preference. Yet only half of these students identify themselves as far left or even just liberal despite their liberal views on these issues.
“These findings,” says UCLA Co-Principal Investigator Alexander Astin, “show that our popular stereotypes about political labels don’t always match the facts. Despite the students’ beliefs on these core issues, students are largely not identifying themselves as liberal or conservative.”
Second Life, one of the leading virtual reality worlds, is starting to see a startling development. Real world employers are conducting interviews for real world positions in the virtual reality world of Second Life. So far, most and perhaps all of the positions are for jobs which are directly related to virtual reality, such as game developers. But how long will it take for aggressive recruiters to experiment in a virtual reality world? And will they hold it against a candidate if they find that the candidate's virtual persona behaves in a manner that is not consistent with the values of the employer even if the candidate does not behave that way in the real world? If employers can't figure out what information is bogus and what information is real on Facebook and MySpace, then how can they hope to figure out the same in virtual reality worlds?
Are you fortunate enough to live in a city with an NHL team? Are you smart enough to understand that hockey is the greatest game ever invented? If so, then you'll know and perhaps even cherish the name Alexander Ovechkin. Alex, as he prefers to be called, is one of the bright young stars who are leading the NHL back from the brink of failure. Another is Sidney Crosby, who I saw lead Canada to its World Junior Hockey Championships win in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Two years ago, the NHL season was cancelled because of a player strike. The players lost that battle but the fans won the war because the strike gave the players and owners the breathing space they needed to clean and speed up the game. As a former Canadian, I have a soft spot in my heart for the rough and tumble days of the NHL when games were often delayed because of the blood and Chiclets left on the ice after a bench clearing brawl. But as a hockey fan, I know that the game that the NHL is playing now is the best that it has ever played. And guys like Ovechkin are flashy, flamboyant, exciting, and they have a tendency to score goals which defy the laws of physics. Want an example? Have a peak at this video. Be sure to watch all the way through so that you can see the goal in slow motion.
The NHL All-Star game is tonight. In an apparent effort to prove to its fans that it still has some of its stupidity left over from the rough and tumble days, the NHL chose to have the game broadcast on the VS network. Never heard of it? Neither had I. If you have DirecTV, it is channel 608.
Since we emerged from the labor slump of mid-2001 through mid-2003, the number of employers who hire college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities has grown tremendously and so have the average number of hires per employer. This year's graduating class, the Class of 2007, is optimistic and has every right to be so. Entry level employers are expected to increase their hiring by 7.3 percent this year over last year.
Below is a list of the top / biggest 50 employers of college students and recent graduates. An astounding 60 percent of the full list of 543 are planning to hire more students and recent college graduates in 2007 than last year while another 20 percent expect to hire the same number this year as last year. Only 20 percent expect to hire fewer students and recent graduates, and I suspect that a good portion of those would hire more if they could find enough highly qualified candidates. The competition is getting tighter and tighter for the students and recent graduates who are the best fits.
So which employer sits atop the rankings? For the fifth year in a row, that employer is CollegeRecruiter.com client Enterprise Rent-A-Car. They expect to hire 8,000 students and recent graduates this year, which is up 14 percent from last year. "Our experience in hiring for Enterprise's Management Training program has revealed the importance of showing candidates a true picture of our overall company and their potential career with us," said Marie Artim, Assistant Vice President of Recruiting at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. "While the basics like pay, hours and benefits are still important and must be addressed, a candidate's decisions are often made based on the bigger picture--so we take care to highlight the values of our company, opportunity for advancement and more."
But as much as you respect the success demonstrated by Enterprise and many of these other organization, you're not reading this article for the quotes. You're reading this article to see the list. Is your organization included? If it isn't, post a comment and tell us about your expected number of hires and what works well and doesn't work well for your organization in its efforts to hire the best college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
| Employer Name | Projected 2007 Entry Level Hires |
|---|---|
| Enterprise Rent-A-Car | 8000 |
| Lockheed Martin | 4500 |
| Walgreen Company | 4300 |
| PricewaterhouseCoopers | 4200 |
| Ernst & Young | 3525 |
| Deloitte & Touche USA LLP | 3500 |
| Target | 3035 |
| Schlumberger | 3000 |
| Teach For America | 3000 |
| U.S. Department of Agriculture | 3000 |
| KPMG | 2800 |
| Avis Budget Group | 2500 |
| HCR Manor Care | 2500 |
| Hertz | 2500 |
| U.S. Customs and Border Protection | 2250 |
| Boeing | 2200 |
| State Street | 2000 |
| U.S. Marines | 2000 |
| 84 Lumber | 1700 |
| Intel | 1500 |
| National Security Agency | 1500 |
| Northrop Grumman | 1500 |
| Southwest Airlines | 1400 |
| PNC Financial Services Group | 1350 |
| Jos. A. Bank Clothiers | 1300 |
| Microsoft | 1300 |
| Wal-Mart Stores | 1300 |
| Wolseley | 1300 |
| Farmers Insurance Group | 1200 |
| U.S. Patent and Trademark Office | 1200 |
| U.S. Navy | 1200 |
| Federal Bureau of Investigation | 1160 |
| City Year | 1125 |
| Finish Line | 1100 |
| General Electric | 1100 |
| Johnson & Johnson | 1100 |
| Raytheon | 1100 |
| Countrywide Home Loans | 1000 |
| Internal Revenue Service | 1000 |
| Investors Bank & Trust | 1000 |
| Konica Minolta Business Solutions | 1000 |
| Mutual of Omaha | 1000 |
| National Cancer Institute | 1000 |
| Pfizer | 1000 |
| U.S. Air Force | 1000 |
| U.S. Army | 1000 |
| U.S. Department of Labor | 1000 |
| American Express | 850 |
| Liberty Mutual Group | 850 |
| LabCorp | 800 |
Source: College Grad
Two of the most insightful people in our industry are Gerry Grispin and Mark Mehler of CareerXroads. They just came up with a top 10 list (actually eight) for how to write and post successful job posting ads:
One of our key clients is the Army National Guard. They, like other military services, recruit tens of thousands of college students and recent graduates per year. Below is a copy of a targeted email campaign that they're running with us to help them recruit students and recent graduates in Pennsylvania.
One of the interesting results of wars like we have in Iraq is that they tend to polarize not just the general population but also the potential recruits. Those who are primarily interested in enlisting for college money and look upon the obligation as one weekend a month and two weeks a year tend to look elsewhere in times such as this as the likelihood is that they will be trained and then spend a year or more in Iraq.
But there is another group that is often overlooked. That other group tends not to enlist in times of peace because their country does not need them during those times. Those soldiers enlist in higher numbers when they're most needed. The military recruiters understand this so change their recruiting strategies and tactics depending upon whether the country is at peace or war. When your industry or organization goes through difficult times, do you change your strategies and tactics? During difficult times, are you still looking for people who do best when times are good or do you change your strategies and tactics to look for people who thrive under adverse circumstances? Some refer to these people as turnaround specialists. I refer to them as heroes.
It is difficult to find a handful of highly qualified hospitality industry employees in just about any market these days. It is even harder when you're trying to attract a large number of college students for part-time jobs and internships and recent graduates for entry level career opportunities. Want to make it darned near impossible? Try doing that for thousands of stores located not only across the country but around the world.
So how do you succeed? You don't write boring job descriptions that only speak to the needs and wants of the employer. Instead, you write job postings that sell the opportunity to the needs and wants of the candidate. And you create marketing collateral such as full color pamphlets printed on high quality, recycled card stock and place them in high traffic areas within your stores. In short, you do what Starbucks is doing:
Stephen Murmer is like almost any other high school art teacher. He is loved by his Richmond, Virginia students and a gifted artist. He's also a Marine Corps vet and former Teacher of the Year. So what makes his story unusual? It seems that Murmer also enjoys painting with his butt. Literally. It seems that Murmer's idea of art is to rub paint on his bare buttocks and genitals and then rub himself against canvas. The imprints typically sell for hundreds of dollars a piece.
According to MSNBC, Chesterfield County school district officials did not take Murmer's recreational activities sitting down. They screamed foul and suspended Murmer. The officials are arguing that it really stinks that a high school teacher would use his private parts to create art. But is this as crappy a situation as they make it out to be?
Murmer did not expose himself to his students. He was careful to hide his identity and used a fake name. Some would say that he kept his professional artist persona hidden behind the scenes. So how did word get out? YouTube.
No matter if you have performance reviews at the end of the year or around an employee's anniversary date, performance reviews are extremely important for employees. Employees want regular feedback on their work and what areas they can improve. Providing ongoing feedback can help improve employee morale in the workplace and help prevent larger issues in the future surrounding employee performance. Below are a few performance review tips:
Now is the perfect time to get organized at work. Not only does being organized at work reduce clutter, but it will help you be more efficient and effective everyday. Here are a few suggestions to help you get organized at work:
Facebook just passed MySpace as the most popular site amongst 17-25 year olds. Employers who are looking for new and better ways to recruit students and recent graduates take note: MySpace is becoming your father's Oldsmobile.
Employers should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to include candidates in the hiring process in much the same way that employers using resume banks at job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com.
But employers should exercise tremendous caution when using social networking sites to exclude candidates from the hiring process by using it as part of their background checking process because the sites are notorious for being riddled with bogus information by third parties and claims by students about themselves that are so outlandish that anyone with a sense of humor would get the joke, unless that person is outside of the 17-25 year old age bracket.
Tip of the hat: Matt Martone's JobSearchMarketing.com Blog
Employers spent more money in 2006 on on-line recruitment advertising than in newspaper job ads. That has never happened before but will likely happen every year from here on. Job boards and other on-line media took in $5.9 billion in recruitment advertising revenue in 2006. Newspapers took in $5.4 billion.
The study by Borrell Associates Inc. also looks forward and I like what they see. They project that the shift to on-line advertising will continue over the next five years as Internet job listings hit $10 billion in 2011. That will represent some 13.7 percent of overall recruitment advertising dollars. Newspapers? Borrell predicts they'll earn only 6.5 percent of those dollars.
"Our projections through 2011 do not bode well for traditional recipients of recruitment spending," stated the report. "Of all forms, the only ones we see growing share over the next five years are online media and recruitment agencies." With only about one-third of U.S. job-seekers saying they planned to search the Internet for work in 2006, the report projects plenty of upside remaining for recruitment spending online.
The results that Borrell is seeing line up perfectly what we're seeing at CollegeRecruiter.com. We went on-line in 1996, so we're a decade old now. Our best year ever financially was 2004 until 2005 came along. The revenues and profits for 2005 easily eclipsed those of 2004. Then 2006 came along and its revenues and profits easily eclipsed those of 2005.
What do I see in my crystal ball? In the short-term, I'm quite optimistic. The industry is healthy, the labor market is strong but not red hot like it was in 1999 and 2000 when some employers stopped spending money on recruitment advertising because it wasn't generating any responses, and our site and products are very well positioned within the college job board niche. Long-term? Who knows. One of the great and terrible things about running a dot com is that your world changes every day. To try to make accurate predictions about what we're going to see in 2011 is to ask for a major butt kicking five years from now.
There must be something in the water. My sales reps and I have been fielding a significantly higher number of calls from large employers who are fed up with their applicant tracking systems (ATS) and are asking us for suggestions on how to bypass their ATS so that they can get resumes to the right recruiters right away and be able to accurately track the source of the lead. What we're hearing over-and-over again from recruiters to VP's of HR is that their recruiting is suffering because of the faults of their ATS. "I want to kill my ATS" is something that we're hearing pretty frequently, and it is pretty disturbing. Although we have a number of solutions for these clients, they're all short-term, tactical fixes for what is really a long-term, strategic problem with their ATS.
Some of our clients are complaining that it takes their candidates too long to apply using the forms required by the ATS so they end up losing their best candidates as those candidates won't put up with having to jump through meaningless hoops when an opportunity that is every bit as good exists with a more candidate friendly employer across the street.
Some of our clients are complaining that their ATS is so rigid that all applications must be forwarded by a human being to the appropriate recruiter and that can lead to delays of days. One federal government agency that I talked with told me that they wished that their delay was measured in days. They don't get their "fresh" leads for several weeks!
Some of our clients are complaining that their ATS fails to track the source of their leads or tracks it in such a way that the information isn't just useless, it is actually misleading. The most common example are the "where did you hear about us" drop down boxes, which fail to take into account that many and perhaps most candidates hear about an opportunity from multiple sources yet provide the candidate with no guidance as to which one of those sources they should select. The ATS also fail to take into account the fact that candidates only have an incentive to answer the question and have no incentive to answer the question correctly.
One HR manager told me that one of the first things that he did upon being hired into that role was to ask his recruiters for a report that would show their source of hires. Seems simple enough, right? They pulled a report from their ATS that showed that Monster was their number one source of hires. Seems reasonable enough, right? My contact then asked his recruiters to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for their hires. After he explained to them what that meant and how to calculate it, they came back to him and said that they couldn't do it for Monster. Their calculations were literally showing that they had an infinite return on investment from Monster. How could that be? Because they had never used Monster yet their ATS was showing it as their top source of hires. And how could that be? Because the ATS had a drop down that asked candidates to self-select where they heard about the opportunity and Monster was listed in that drop down. The candidates, who could have cared less about remembering where they actually heard about the opportunity, picked the source that they most recognized. Compounding this problem are employers who insist on including their own web site as a source (it is a destination, not a source) in the drop downs and the impossibility of asking candidates to accurately self-select when they respond to a job posting that runs across a network of hundreds or even thousands of job boards, as do all jobs which are posted to CollegeRecruiter.com. If the candidate finds the job on another site in our network, they have no way of knowing that it was posted to CollegeRecruiter.com nor should they care, yet some ATS ignore that reality by just listing CollegeRecruiter.com or whatever site to which the employer is posting its jobs (or, the case of Monster, sites to which the employer is not even posting its jobs).
Okay, enough of the complaints. What do we do about this mess? Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, let's look at what those who market products and services on-line do in order to automatically track the source of their leads (equivalent to resumes) and sales (equivalent to hires). After all, you don't see Amazon, Dell, or even CollegeRecruiter.com asking its clients who purchase on-line to identify the name of the site who referred them so that we can properly track the effectiveness of our advertising, do you? One great solution is to borrow the lessons learned and perhaps even the technology created for affiliate programs.
One of the ways that CollegeRecruiter.com markets itself is through an affiliate program. We pay thousands of web sites for each candidate that they refer who registers with us. The affiliate solution provider (software company) we use is Commission Junction (CJ). They provide similiar services to many of the leading job boards, including Monster, Careerbuilder, HotJobs, Beyond, and more. CJ and its competitors provide the web site owner with a small bit of tracking code that the web site owner adds to the "thank you for buying" confirmation page. For employers, that would be the "thank you for submitting your resume" page. CJ and its competitors also provide unique web page addresses (URLs) to each site that runs our ads. When the tracking code on our site is combined with the unique URLs on the sites that direct their visitors to us, we are able to automatically track which of our registered users came from which of our affiliates and the entire process is fully automated. We can choose whether to allow any site to run the ads or just sites that we want to work with. We can choose for how many days to track the referrals. In this way, we can properly credit our affiliate for the lead they helped us to generate even if a candidate clicks from one of our affiliate sites on day one but doesn't register at CollegeRecruiter.com for another 45 days. So long after the candidate has any hope of remembering how she heard about us, we are able to accurately and automatically track the source of that lead. The trackable ads can even be run in traditional print media such as newspapers. Paying our affiliates is a snap. We pay money to CJ to cover the money that they pay on our behalf to our advertisers plus the 30 percent commission that CJ receives for providing the software, payment processing, fraud prevention, customer service, etc. Because we're in total control over what leads (resumes) we pay for and from who we buy them, we are guaranteed a positive ROI (there's that acronym again) on each and every registration.
So I ask you: do you still want to kill your ATS or do you want to put pressure on your ATS vendor to fix their software so that it incorporates the fully automated tracking features successfully used for a decade by Commission Junction and other affiliate program solution providers? I thought so.
Much has been written about the professional and personal goals of Generation Y, but Hal Fischer just brought some very interesting research to my attention that definitely is worth sharing.
According to the Pew Research Center 2006 Gen Next Survey of 579 18- to 25-year olds, the most important goals of Gen Y are:
1. To get rich (81%);
2. To be famous (51%);
3. To help people who need help (30%);
4. To be leaders in their community (22%); and
5. To become more spiritual (10%).
The survey also asked what are their most important individual problems: The top four were
1. Money/financial/debt (30%);
2. College/education (18%);
3. Career/job (16%); and
4. Family/relationships (7%).
The conventional wisdom is that Gen Y is much more interested in work-life balance and making a difference in their professional and personal lives than are their Baby Boomer parents. Although that is not necessarily inconsistent with wanting to be rich, I am surprised that such a high percentage list that as one of their top goals.
What would be very interesting would be to see the answers from Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers at the same points in their lives. I'm guessing that a side-by-side comparison will put the above results into context and we'll see that Gen Y is much more interested in ork-life balance and making a difference in their professional and personal lives than are their Baby Boomer parents.
Susan Strayer is a frequent contributor to CollegeRecruiter.com, including as an author of many very helpful blog entries and a commenter to blog entries written by candidates and others who have questions or need some guidance. After graduating from college a decade ago, she apparently decided that she wouldn’t know true joy until she had suffered some true pain, so she went back to school for an MBA and had a job hunting advice book published by St. Martin’s Press…at the same time.
Susan’s book is a gem and entitled The Right Job, Right Now: The Complete Toolkit for Finding Your Perfect Career. It is designed to be read from cover-to-cover by those who both want and need that much help. It is also designed so that those who only want or need help in specific areas can jump right to those areas. I suspect that most readers will jump right to the specific areas for which they require the most help but will then use the book as a reference tool for years to come. Many will never read the book from cover-to-cover and that’s unfortunate as there are stories, lists, action items, and plenty of answers throughout.
We should all be developing our careers all of the time, but the reality is that none of us has as much time to do so as we would like. Some of us don’t even have as much time to do so as we need. And that’s why The Right Job, Right Now is so valuable as it allows all of us to find the answers that we want as quickly as we need them.
This is the eighth and final article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
Conclusion
Thanks to the Internet, today’s promising high school and college students are more accessible than ever before; however, they are being bombarded by so many advertisers that to get them interested in what you have to offer, you have to be creative and speak to their interests.
Email messaging is a fast, effective way to reach a greater number of students in a shorter amount of time than in previous years. It’s also a way for you to quickly determine which students are the most promising and to establish a relationship with them so that they have your organization foremost in their minds when they finally settle down to begin submitting applications and browsing employment search engines.
As a recruiter, you have a tough job ahead of you when it comes to attracting the best students for your organization, but if you follow some of the guidelines presented in this white paper, you will be well on your way to making the best possible use of the Internet and email messaging.
There was a great Seinfeld episode about tagging. Although some people would argue that it stunk, I won't stoop that low by making such a punny joke. Sorry.
Down to business. Susan Strayer just blog tagged me. It is now my solemn obligation to reveal five things about myself that readers don't know and to tag two additional bloggers. Those two additional bloggers are two fellow residents of the Minneapolis/Saint Paul metro area: Josh Kahn of Best Buy and Toby Dayton of JobDig.
This is the seventh article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
7. Execution and Reporting
Before sending out any messages, always take the time to test each one in different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.), email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.) and platforms (Macintosh and PC). Click each link; keep an eye out for oddities and inconsistencies in the way images load or don’t load. This is important because you want to be certain that your message is read and understood.
In addition to testing messages before sending, consider when is the best time to send. CollegeRecruiter.com has found that best the response rates are generated by campaigns deployed on Tuesdays followed closely by those deployed on Monday afternoons and Wednesdays. Delivery should be scheduled to arrive no earlier than 10 a.m. and no later than 4 p.m. as it is best for emails to arrive while most people are at work. This gives the recipients a chance to clear their inbox of residual overnight email traffic and makes them more receptive to new messages.
Tracking your results, as mentioned earlier, is key to helping you stay on the right track when sending out email messages. List owners should automatically and at no additional cost provide a full tracking report about one week after the deployment date. These reports typically include metrics such as the number of emails delivered, number of emails opened (read), the open rate (opens divided by delivered), number of clicks and the click through rate (clicks divided by opens). Industry averages for open and click through rates are about five percent. In other words, about five percent of the recipients will read the email about five percent of those will click through.
CollegeRecruiter.com sees much higher response rates for employment and education offers, in large part because the list is better targeted. Normal response rates for employment offers delivered by CollegeRecruiter.com range from 10 to 20 percent for opens and clicks with the average being about 15 percent. Thus, for a campaign to 50,000 students, about 7,500 will open the email and about 1,125 will click through to your application page. At that point, the response rates tend to diverge pretty dramatically and are largely driven by the quality of the offer and how difficult it is to apply to the opportunity. The difficulty is determined by the number of fields candidates are asked to complete and the type of fields. For example, an application form that merely requests the name and email address of a candidate will result in a far higher response rate than a form that requires the candidate to also submit their phone number, mailing address, cover letter, resume, etc.
Education offers perform closer to 10 percent, primarily due to the prevalence of such offers and how difficult it is to design them so that they don’t look spammy to the filters. Because so many education offers are sent out and so many of them are sent to opt-out lists, the anti-spam filters often regard all education offers as being spam even if the user has opted in to receive them. Nevertheless, with careful planning it is possible to successfully deliver an education offer via a targeted email campaign.
The larger your percentage of opens and click throughs, the more assured you can feel about how well your messages are being received. Once you have established that your messages are being well received, you will want to begin developing relationships with those candidates who you feel show the most promise. Your can do this by creating your own list of email contacts, then start sending them company newsletters, location-specific information or interesting facts. For colleges, inserting a link that will take students to an on-line edition of the school newspaper is a great way to introduce them to the school and its overall culture.
It might also be a good idea to incorporate feedback opportunities into each mailing. Students like to see that their opinions are valued. If thoughtful students are being targeted, then their opinions should matter. So give them a chance to respond to your mailings by having them take a small survey, answer a questionnaire or by allowing them the opportunity to submit questions of their own, which should be answered within one or two days.
Recruiters who ask us for metrics on issues such as what percentage of candidates who go to application forms actually complete the application form are often shocked when we tell them that it is about 10 percent for a typical employer. So what happens to the other 90 percent?
The bulk of abandonments of application forms (this isn't just an ATS issue) is primarily due to the application forms being longer than they need to be. Some recruiters don't fully appreciate that their goal at that stage in the application process should be to simply connect with well qualified candidates. Be proactive on the front end by placing your ads in well targeted media so that your ads are not seen by many unqualified candidates. Be proactive on the front end by spending a few more minutes writing a really good job posting that not only talks about your requirements but more importantly talks to the needs and wants of the candidates. Sell the candidates and you'll attract the high calibre that you need. If you can do that, then you won't have to attract as many candidates and you'll be able to spend more time with the candidates who do apply -- which is recruiting.
I see application forms all of the time that require candidates with years of experience to provide information about where they went to high school. Who cares at that point in the hiring process? I can understand for background checking that you might want that so that you'll know where they've lived, but do you really need to know at the application stage that the nurse with 10 years of experience went to XYZ High School 14 years ago?
This is the sixth article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
6. Developing a Relevant Recruiting Message
As our attention spans continue to shrink, email marketers must quickly state the purpose of their email with a simple blend of words and/or graphics. It is hard to gain the attention of college students because they are bombarded with marketing messages throughout the day and are continually multi-tasking with technology and gadgetry. A simple message, with buttons, text links and easy-to-follow calls to action will pass the skim.
There is a danger with trying to speak the language of a college student, simply put. There is no universal language for students on campus so don’t think that throwing in words phrases lie “Drop it like it’s hot” or “Fo’ shizzel” are going to make you look cool on campus. These attempts are far more likely to make an organization look like a dork, which will ensure that your recruiting efforts will fail. The best policy is to use the words of your own organization’s culture. Today’s college youth will appreciate your honesty and transparency and, therefore, will be more receptive to it.
So, how do you instill optimism in your prospective recruits? Create a dialogue. And reinforce your organization’s legitimacy throughout the year with all your marketing. Email messages provide a way to start this dialogue and keep it going throughout their college careers. Here are some tips from Campus Media Group for creating legitimacy in your messaging:
Examples of recruitment advertising campaigns that have been run successfully by CollegeRecruiter.com are in the free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper.
This is the fifth article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
5. Buying a Student Email List
Before we go further, it is important to note that “buying” an email list is actually a misnomer. It is not possible to truly buy an opt-in mailing list because the seller owns the permission, not the buyer. When people refer to buying an email list, they are usually referring to paying the list owner to send or deploy an email on behalf of the buyer. As a result, many prefer to think of the process as renting rather than buying the list.
Regardless of whether one looks upon the process as buying or renting, it isn’t an easy process. There are certain questions that must be asked and answered to ensure that you have a list that is going to best serve your interests. Jeanne Jennings offers some advice in her article “Renting Email Lists: What to Ask Before the Send.” She advises that you first ask whether or not the list is opt-in. She also suggests asking to see the “mechanism by which the recipients opted in.” As someone who is paying for a list, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) applies. Check to make sure that the people you will be emailing willingly agreed to allow third party mailings by reviewing the mechanism by which the recipients opted in to make sure that it is consistent with your understanding. Jennings next recommends you ask “who handles the send? The best email service providers (ESPs) tout deliverability rates in the high 90th percentile, meaning fewer than 5 email messages in 100 are undeliverable. Not everyone who sends email can claim these results,” she says. Some list owners such as CollegeRecruiter.com guarantee 100 percent deliverability by closely working with ISPs to ensure that all emails sent to valid email addresses are delivered and by sending more emails than the buyer purchased to more than offset the small number of email addresses that were incorrectly entered by the student or which are no longer valid because the student has abandoned the email address. The final question that Jennings suggests you ask is “how has the list performed historically?” You want to get a list that has a history of good result. If the list does not produce the results the list broker promised, then request a make good, which is another send either from a different portion of the same list or a completely separate list. Some clients of CollegeRecruiter.com will test the lists they’re buying by purchasing the minimum list size. If the list performs well for them, then they typically move forward with a larger campaign.
Lists which are available to rent fall into three primary groups: opt-out, opt-in, and double opt-in. Opt-out lists are lists where the recipients have not requested that they be added to the list but can remove themselves from the list owner through mechanisms such as clicking on an unsubscribe link. Opt-in lists are far more common amongst quality lists and are those where the recipients have requested that they be added to the list. Double opt-in lists such as the CollegeRecruiter.com targeted email list are the rarest and the highest quality. Not only must the recipient ask to be added to the list but they must also confirm that request. The typical process is that the recipient opts in at the list owner’s Web site. The recipient then receives and email from the list owner. If the recipient ignores the email, they are not added to the list. This extra step ensures that the recipient truly wants to be added to the list and hasn’t made a mistake or been added by some third party.
Since you don’t want to spend your valuable time worrying about whether or not you have a good list of recipients, buying or renting a double opt-in mailing list is the most efficient and effective way to go. By working only with double opt-in lists, the deliverability and response rates should not be a concern so you will be able to focus on the critical issues of content and creativity.
Yikes. A recent study indicates that 48 percent of 2006 college graduates plan to move home after graduating and 44 percent of 2005 grads still love at home.
My thanks to Hal Fischer of MilitaryStars.com for bringing this disturbing trend to my attention.
Almost everyone who spends a significant amount of time on-line has heard of Wikipedia, the on-line encylopedia which is created and maintained not by some faceless group of writers, researchers, and editors at a publishing house but instead by a faceless group of writers working in their bunny slippers at two in the morning. Wikipedia, like many wikis, is collaborative, user generated content. If I post an article with which you disagree or wish to enhance, you can edit my words. An editor is generally assigned to make sure that those edits are appropriate. The result is a document or series of documents that are reviewed, corrected, and enhanced by thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.
So what does this have to do with job boards? Everything. Job boards range from having virtually no content generated by users to having a huge amount of content generated by users. For those of us in the latter group, I think that most would agree that we're not afraid of user generated content. To the contrary, we embrace it and see it as a way of both enhancing the information on our sites and the sense of community surrounding our sites. A great way for job boards users to contribute content and to be part of the community surrounding the job board is to contribute articles to a wiki or edit articles which have already been posted. That's why we recently added a job hunting wiki section to CollegeRecruiter.com with articles on almost five dozen of the biggest employers of college students searching for internships and recent graduates looking for entry level jobs and other careers. A nice side benefit: early indications are that the search engines like the content so the wiki section is also helping to increase our traffic numbers in a low cost, sustainable fashion.
Is your organization listed? If not and your organization hires a lot of college students and recent graduates, send us an article similar to one of those already running and we'll be happy to add it. Or, better yet, create a free wiki account and add the article yourself. That will increase your interaction with CollegeRecruiter.com and build your feeling of community with others using our site.
This is the fourth article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
4. Building Your Student Email List
Depending on the size of the company or school for which you are recruiting, building a list can be a tedious task. When dealing with email, you want your message to reach students who are going to be the best fit for your targeting goals and objectives. Email lists and a targeting strategy can be developed with the help of marketing companies like CollegeRecruiter.com and Campus Media Group. Your recruiting goals and budget depend on it. Targeted email campaigns provide today’s recruiters with a tool that has some of the most detailed targeting options available among media channels that exist on campus. Building a targeted email list is a very important step in building your recruiting database. These people will be the brand ambassadors for your company or school, spread the word, and hopefully be your future employees or students. Here are some targeting options that will help you narrow your search and give you the most qualified applicants:
As students begin their job/school search, it quickly becomes difficult for them to keep track of all the opportunities that exist for them and to which they’ve applied. They may send out hundreds of applications. The winners in this recruiting game are the organizations that stay in front of these students and keep their brand in front of them throughout the school year. Clearly, one email deployment is not enough to accomplish that goal. After you have established your first dialogue, check back with them in a way that they specify. Be sure your recruiting team has the tools to follow-up and communicate with students via phone, email, text messaging, instant messaging and snail mail correspondence. The key is learning how they want you to communicate with them and respecting that. This will also help reinforce how your everyday culture might easily fit into their hectic schedules as they decide to transition into your organization. Remember, students will do their own research on their own terms and timing. Be sure your Web site has all the information they need as they begin weighing the pros and cons of joining your organization.
Today’s college youth have very large extended networks. Social networking sites, instant messenger lists, blogs and other lists allow students to speak to dozens, even hundreds of their friends instantly. Utilize them to share opportunities you are offering to their friends. Encourage reposting of your opportunity, the forwarding of your email, etc. Even if your initial prospect doesn’t feel there is a fit, they may know someone who is.
This list of the 100 best companies to work for in 2007 is based upon the most extensive employee survey in corporate America. More than 105,000 employees from 446 companies responded to a 57-question survey. Two-thirds of a company's score was based on the survey, which was sent to a minimum of 400 randomly selected employees from each company and asked about things such as attitudes toward management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie. The remaining third of the score came from an evaluation of each company's responses to the institute's Culture Audit, which included detailed questions about demographic makeup, pay, and benefits programs, and open-ended questions about the company’s people-management philosophy, internal communications, opportunities, compensation practices, diversity programs, etc. After the evaluations were completed, if news about a company came to light that may have significantly damaged employees’ faith in management, that company may have been excluded from the list. About 1,500 companies participated. Any company that was at least seven years old with more than 1,000 U.S. employees was eligible.
Got that? Good. Then with no further delay, here are the top 100 employer to work for in 2007:
Source: Fortune
This is the third article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
3. Top Ten Rules for Emailing Students
Let’s talk about spam. It is a nuisance, and one thing you don’t want is to have your email messages dumped in a recipient’s junk mailbox. The recently enacted CAN-SPAM legislation created clear rules for commercial emails, including those which promote employment and educational offers or promote products and services. Nevertheless, just because an email can legally be sent does not mean that it will be received. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are free to block emails that they deem to be spam and how one ISP defines what is spam may and often will differ from the definition used by other ISPs. This confusing landscape becomes even more complicated when one considers that each major corporation and school is effectively its own ISP. With 23 million businesses in the United States and thousands of colleges and universities, it simply isn’t feasible for any organization to successfully deliver their commercial emails via every ISP, corporation, and school. So before we can even discuss what the message should be so that is well received by the student recipient, we must discuss how to get that message delivered to the student.
Commercial emails can be opt-in or opt-out. Opt-in emails are those which were requested by the recipients. Internet users often opt-in to commercial mailings when they register at Web sites such as CollegeRecruiter.com and are offered the opportunity to sign up for newsletters and other such mailings. Opt-out emails are sent to recipients who did not request the mailings in advance but who may choose to remove themselves from the list after they start to receive the mailings. As a result, opt-out emails are more often regarded as being unwanted spam than are opt-in emails. But regardless of how recipients define what emails are spam, ISPs have their own rules and will often block opt-in emails while allowing through opt-out emails. Also, because ISPs each have their own continuously changing rules, what gets delivered one day by one ISP may be blocked the next day by the same ISP or other ISPs. In short, delivering a targeted email campaign is both an art and a science and somewhat akin to trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
So how do you ensure that your commercial emails are delivered? There are two primary factors: working with the ISPs and being recipient friendly. To successfully work with ISPs one needs for them to recognize your mail as legitimate and opt-in. ISPs will deliver opt-in emails if they know in advance that your mailing is opt-in. With millions of corporations, schools, and other ISPs, it isn’t feasible to properly notify all of them in advance about your mailings, so the best practice is to work very closely with the consumer ISPs as there are far fewer of them and they service the vast majority of recipients. The ISPs want proof that the emails that they’re being asked to deliver are opt-in, which means that the list owner must keep meticulous records of when the recipient opted in to receive the mailings (date and time stamp), the computer that the recipient used (IP address), and, if possible, the page on which the recipient opted in and the offer to which they responded. List owners such as CollegeRecruiter.com are able to provide such documentation to the ISPs and are therefore white listed so the ISPs will deliver their emails.
Yet even if the ISPs deliver a targeted email campaign, there is no assurance that the campaign will succeed. Two more factors come into play and both are driven by the message of the email. If the design of the email itself looks spammy, the recipient may never see it if they have an anti-spam filter installed on their computer. One way to help prevent this is by making your messages either all graphics, all text, but not a mixture of the two. If the message is text, it is important not to use words or phrases that are often included in spam emails. These include references which are often used to promote education, work-at-home, or get rich quick offers. In addition, the opt-out language required by the CAN-SPAM laws should be all graphics because the spam filters will look for that language. Because spam filters can’t read graphics, emails that use a graphic for the CAN-SPAM required opt-out language are far less likely to be deleted by anti-spam filters.
Emailing to teens and other young adults isn’t easy because they change email addresses frequently and their parents are concerned about who is emailing their children and for what purpose. By keeping your message straightforward and to the point, you stand a much better chance of impressing your target audience and winning their parents over as well. To accomplish these goals, CollegeRecruiter.com and Campus Media Group recommend that targeted emailers act in accordance with this list of 10 rules:
Now that you know the rules of engagement, it’s time to start building a list of contacts that will generate quality students.
Ernst & Young LLP hires more than 5,500 college students and recent graduates a year for internships and entry level career opportunities...and that's only in North America. How does an organization with such huge hiring needs find enough highly qualified candidates? In addition to the traditional on-campus recruiting efforts, employee referrals, and advertising on job boards and other media, E&Y now has a page on the social networking site, Facebook, which is one of the most popular sites amongst college students.
E&Y's sponsored Facebook page contains information and discussion boards aimed at college students. Although students and other individuals use Facebook for free, E&Y paid an undisclosed fee to Facebook as their page is more akin to advertising than it is to a traditional Facebook profile page. Dan Black, director of campus recruiting for the Americas, told the Wall Street Journal that employers seek "new ways to reach out to the college audience." While that is true, the WSJ correctly outlined some of the risks accepted by E&Y, such as negative comments posted to their page by students and other individuals who use Facebook and even enabling people who don't like E&Y to connect more easily and perhaps allow their negative views to be more widely disseminated. In addition, the price paid to Facebook is only part of the true cost as E&P will incur costs related to the tremendous amount of staff time required to properly maintain a Facebook page. If they are not responsive to students who contact them through the page, they will look out-of-touch and do more harm to their brand than good.
E&Y's page is the first sponsored page on Facebook that is used exclusively for recruitment purposes. Other organizations such as Microsoft have pages that include information about their hiring efforts, but this is the first time that an organization's Facebook page has been only about their efforts to hire college students who are searching for internships and recent graduates who are hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
The response so far? About 5,100 Facebook users have linked to the E&Y page as "members." I am one of them. Once you have a Facebook profile, you can search for people or organizations which are of interest to you. I found the E&Y page easily just by typing in "Ernst and Young" (without the quotation marks) into the Facebook search engine. Facebook then gave me the option of becoming a member of the E&Y page and I accepted. That's all it took. Now E&Y's recruiters will be able to review my profile. If I were a college junior or senior with a high GPA in a program such as business, finance, or accounting, my phone would probably be ringing right now.
On balance, I believe that this is a brilliant move by E&Y. College students and other members of Gen Y reward employers who embrace transparency. This is a big step towards E&Y becoming more transparent. It also sends a powerful message to students that E&Y is listening to their needs, wants, and desires. Recruiters who tell highly qualified candidates that they must apply through traditional channels will lose those candidates if those candidates want to connect through newer channels such as Facebook because those candidates have options and they know it.
Want to become a member of my Facebook page? Click on my "badge" and you'll be added right away:
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Sources: Todd Raphael's World of Talent and the Wall Street Journal
This is the second article in a series of blog articles about the best practices for using targeted email campaign to help employers hire college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. This series is based upon a free targeted email recruitment advertising campaign best practices white paper co-written by Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group and me.
2. Campus – A Recruiting Environment
Many of the most successful employers recruit on college campuses because they understand that college hiring is a strategic, low cost source solution to their goal of recruiting their next generation of leaders. These employers tend to recruit from the same schools year after year. Colleges that recruit from high schools tend to focus on athletes, but some colleges recruit high school students based upon their academic accomplishments. Whether the recruitment is for employment or education, recruiting has traditionally been done on-campus with representatives of the employers and schools actually visiting the campuses from which they are recruiting students. While those visits are still popular, the growth in targeted email and other marketing options have allowed recruiters to connect with far more students at their target schools and to reach students at schools which the recruiter would like to visit but can’t due lack of resources.
College recruiting is increasingly Web-based. As a result, recruiters must battle for their student recruits on-line as well as off-line. With more and more high school and college students spending more and more time using the Internet for homework, reading the news and socializing via social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, a creative recruiter can reach a much broader audience in much less time than it would take to physically go to college campuses.
On-site visits are still a great way to meet students because they give recruiters a chance to really get a feel for the candidates. It also gives recruiting a personal touch. Even the new trend of video interviewing can’t replace the value of personal interaction. This is why targeted email campaigns should not be used on their own, but rather coupled with other recruiting initiatives such as on-campus recruiting, job postings, and career fairs. Targeted email campaigns fit well in any recruiting program and provide a great way to both build brand by maintaining contact and building rapport with students and also quickly drive a large number pre-qualified candidates to your Web site where they can submit applications.