We regularly hear from college students searching for internships and recent graduates looking for entry level jobs that one of their biggest frustrations is getting interviews. Overwhelmingly they believe that if they can just get an interview that they will be able to demonstrate their worth to the recruiter or hiring manager. Many times the student or recent graduate is correct, but the question remains: how do you secure more interviews.

Tony Beshara recently wrote an article for the free recruiting content exchange service RecruitingBlogswap.com in which he provided this excellent, excellent advice:

The most effective vehicle to get face-to-face interviews is going to be for you to pick up the phone and call everyone you can, whether you know them or not. Find people available for an interview that might result in you being hired. Find an employer with a "pain" that your employment can solve.

Tony recommends that you think of all of the people that you can call to get an interview or a referral for an interview. Create a script to follow with each call. Then methodically work your way through the list of calls to set up interviews and get referrals for interviews.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 31, 2008 at 9:48 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was trolling through our web site traffic reports yesterday when I noticed sometime weird. Actually, very weird. We get a lot of traffic from Google and other search engines for short tail keyword phrases such as entry level jobs and internships so seeing traffic from candidates searching for long tail phrases such as entry level jobs for engineers or accounting internships isn't much of a surprise.

But what was a surprise was to see that over the past year we've had thousands of clicks for the keyword phrase naked teacher photos. If we were running a porn site that would be great news. But a college job board? Not so much. Traffic from people who are obviously not thinking about their careers isn't terribly helpful. I suspect that the visitors didn't do us or our clients any harm, but it was an interesting reminder that the value of one visitor is often quite different than the value of another visitor. A lot of traffic can be great, but only if that traffic is qualified by being interesting in the product or service that you're offering.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 28, 2008 at 8:04 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Anyone living outside of a cave or the Washington, D.C. beltway understands that there is a recession in the U.S. and that it is hurting those who are searching for a new job.

College students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs are no exception. Although a healthy 59 percent of employers plan to hire college grads this spring and summer, that's 17 percent points down from a whopping 76 percent last year. In addition to the 59 percent, 29 percent aren't sure of their college hiring plans through the summer and that's nearly twice as many fence sitters as there were a year ago.

So is there any good news? Absolutely. Of the 59 percent who plan to hire, 73 percent plan to hire at least as many people as they did last year. That optimism is being met by the students as most members of the class of 2008 expect to receive at least two job offers upon graduation. The economy can't be all that bad if candidates are receiving multiple job offers.

Sources: Monster and RetiredBrains.com

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 27, 2008 at 5:07 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'll probably get a parking ticket the next time that I'm at the campus as a result of writing about this, but then so will my MN Headhunter buddy. News from our alma mater is that the University of Minnesota Police Department and other campus officials freely admit to looking at the Facebook pages of students as part of their criminal and other investigations.

Nationally, only about 25 percent of colleges and universities admit to searching Facebook pages for evidence. I've suspected for a long time that the number is far higher and it seems that the, ahem, evidence of that is starting to emerge.

Candidates (and that means everyone): this is a great reminder that you shouldn't post anything on-line that you wouldn't want to show to your favorite grandmother because posting information on-line is like getting a tattoo. Once you do it, you can never get rid of it.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 26, 2008 at 7:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We're live with our new our newest Facebook application: CollegeRecruiter.com Career Blog.

The new application asks you a series of career-related questions. The question and your answer are then displayed to your Facebook friends and also sent to one of our employees. If the content is appropriate (no swearing etc.) then our employee approves the Q&A for publication and it gets posted to the CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog like the blog entry about whether money is a big factor in choosing a job/career.

Try it out. Add it to your Facebook page and then let me know what you think.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 25, 2008 at 2:30 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

A tip of the hat to John Sumser of Recruiting.com and Dan Kurt of CareerCam for letting me know about an innovative recruiting program recently implemented by Steve Fogarty's team at Adidas.

Rather than flying a candidate to their corporate office in Portland, Oregon at a cost of about $1,000 a trip plus a couple of days for the candidate and the hiring managers, Adidas instead gives to the short listed interviewees an Adidas-branded web cam and tells the candidates to keep the web cam whether they're hired or not. Candidates are then interviewed in real-time through the CareerCam system.

The result? Faster turnaround for both interviewee and interviewers and I have to believe that Adidas is much more likely to therefore land the best possible hires and build significant good will amongst the candidates who were not hired yet remain in their talent pipeline.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 25, 2008 at 7:56 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Economists will tell you that a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, but most people on the street will tell you that the economy is in recession when they and their neighbors fear losing their jobs and their ability to pay their bills so they spend less on just about everything other than essentials and defer those purchases as long as possible. So are we in a recession? I suppose it depends on the definition but I've felt for months that the U.S. is in a recession.

There is no question that we are in an economic slowdown and let's assume for sake of discussion that we are in a recession. What does that mean for college students seeking internships and recent college graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities? The answer is that it doesn't mean as much as you might expect. According to Penelope Trunk, author of The Brazen Careerist,

The health of today's job market is not so much a function of economic indicators as it is a function of demographic trends. There is a huge shortage of employees. Baby Boomers are retiring and Generation X and Y are less able to replace the Baby Boomers than had been anticipated; employers receive fewer hours of work per person from post-Boomers because of their focus on family (Generation X) and entrepreneurship (Generation Y). Due to these factors, the employee shortage is increasing, and only a knock-down-drag-out recession will change this sunshine outlook for employees.

In other words, as the current trickle of Baby Boomers exiting the employment market and entering the world of retirement turns first into a flow and then into a flood, demand by employers for replacement workers will increase. There simply aren't nearly enough Gen X'ers to replace those Boomers so employers will need to further accelerate their hiring of Gen Y'ers. So today's college students and recent graduates should be able to look this recession in the eye and understand that it will inconvenience many of them but do serious harm to few of them. For unlike past recessions, the changing demographics of the workplace should ensure that this recession does far more damage to the psyche of the consumer than the wallet of the job seeker.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 24, 2008 at 6:36 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

A tip of the hat to employment attorney T.J. Conley of Leonard, Street & Deinard for bringing to my attention a recent survey of hiring managers by research firm Harris Interactive. Harris asked the 3,061 hiring managers to describe the top mistakes made by job seekers during interviews:

1. Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a "private" conversation.
2. Candidate told the interviewer he wouldn't be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died -- and his uncle wasn't "looking too good."
3. Candidate asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.
4. Candidate smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.
5. Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was "classified."
6. Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.
7. When an applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn't want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.
8. A candidate for an accounting position said she was a "people person" not a "numbers person."
9. Candidate flushed the toilet while talking to interviewer during phone interview.
10. Candidate took out a hair brush and brushed her hair.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 21, 2008 at 3:02 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Dauby O'Connor & Zeleski, LLC (DO&Z) is a small Indianapolis-based accounting firm that specializes in real estate. Conventional wisdom might indicate that a small firm like this wouldn't have the resources to recruit interns other than locally but the reality is that this firm is doing some great guerrilla marketing.

DO&Z has a Facebook page (although not much appears to have been done with it yet) and a video on YouTube that gently pokes fun at the menial work that a lot of interns do for big accounting firms while pointing out that DO&Z interns do meaningful, challenging work from day one.

Kudos to DO&Z for understanding that you don't need to spend big bucks on recruitment advertising campaigns in order to get the word out. In fact, spending big bucks on an ad campaign would hurt them more than it would help them because they can't possibly win the budgetary battle against the big accounting firms. But DO&Z and smaller firms like them can win the message battle by emphasizing their selling points like real, meaningful work from day one.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 21, 2008 at 10:34 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

If you are entry level or a fairly junior player without specialized skills and experience you just don't have a lot of room to negotiate. You may be able to get a higher salary if, say, you have to commute further to the new job or you need to buy a car to drive to the new job. If that is the case, mention it to the hiring manager and ask if they would consider additional compensation to cover your additional commute costs. If that isn't an option for them perhaps you can negotiate a flexible work situation that includes telecommuting for part of the week. You may also be able to negotiate additional days off or tuition reimbursement. Many companies have a dollar amount that they offer to junior employees - particularly those who join the company as a member of training program or a class (i.e.: first year Big 4 auditors or consultants) and that number tends to be pretty rigid.

Source: Minnesota Headhunter

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 20, 2008 at 4:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Dennis Smith of WirelessJobs.com recently posted a video shot while he was driving to work. In the video, he advices job seekers to look around and see what other job seekers are doing and then do the opposite.

For example, if 95 percent of the job seekers are applying to advertised job openings, don't. If 95 percent of college students searching for internships are doing so primarily through their college's on-campus recruiting system, don't. If 95 percent of recent college graduates hunting for entry level jobs are doing so primarily through on-line job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com, don't. Instead, network, network, network.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 20, 2008 at 9:50 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Just saw this video on RecruitingBlogs.com and thought it would be enjoyed by readers of this blog as well. For those who are on the sensitive side, consider it PG-13 for language.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 20, 2008 at 7:06 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Training new employees properly is critical to the success of any organization but especially in work environments where there can be significant safety issues. An example would be a prison. You wouldn't want, for example, to train a new prison guard to, well, watch the video and you'll see what you wouldn't want to do.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 19, 2008 at 5:52 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Entry level jobs is a very sought after keyword search string for college job boards and other web sites that want to drive a significant amount of traffic from search engines like Google. It is what search engine optimization experts refer to as a short tail keyword phrase. If you can rank well for short tail keyword search strings such as entry level jobs then you should also rank well for the long tail keyword search strings such as engineering entry level jobs (we're currently #3 for that).

CollegeRecruiter.com has for years paid considerable attention to search engine optimization and we're pretty good at it. But we reached a very nice milestone today. Although the results will differ user-to-user, many and perhaps most who run a search on Google using the short tail keyword string of entry level jobs will see that Google has 3,740,000 pages in its index for that search term and CollegeRecruiter.com is in the first position and site we recently acquired, EntryLevelJobs.net, is in the second position. In addition, an interior page of CollegeRecruiter.com has been moving up the search results and should soon appear on the first page. So right now we own three of the top 15 pages for entry level jobs and soon will own three of the top 10 pages.

(Click below image to see it enlarged.)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 18, 2008 at 10:33 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Some advice great today about how to recruit the best interns in an article posted to our CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Employers Blog:

1. Tell them they're going to work on interesting, real life projects and follow through on your promises.
   
2. Make offers as quickly as possible. If your organization takes weeks to decide, change your organization because your competitors are extending offers in days and sometimes hours or even minutes after interviews.
   
3. Assign a willing and able mentor to each intern and make sure that the mentors will not be traveling for more than a day or two now and then during the internship season.
   
4. Include your interns in organizational activities as if they were regular employees.
   
5. Hire students who are entering their sophomore and junior years, not just those entering their senior years. And consider hiring as interns those who just graduated. These positions used to frequently be referred to as externships but they're becoming more and more popular amongst recent graduates.
   

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 17, 2008 at 10:31 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Gerry Crispin posted a short but great blog article about how employers sometimes deviate from their standard hiring practices and hire people who aren't qualified on paper yet prove to be exemplary employees. It reminded me that we did something similar about 1.5 years ago thing when we hired Mike Palmquist, our national account executive.

Mike was a good friend of mine and Faith, my wife. We had known his family for years. He happened to mention to Faith that he was looking to get out of his career as a potter (amongst other things he'd also been a sous chef) and really liked cold calling. Faith and I talked and agreed that we should see if Mike would want to work for CollegeRecruiter.com as a sales representative. He was interested and it didn't take long for him to start. And thank goodness that he did as he's been a wonderful addition to our organization.

We joke with Mike that we hired him for all the wrong reasons yet he's one of the best hires we've ever made. Working with Mike is a pleasure and we look forward to doing so for as long as he's willing to put up with me.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 14, 2008 at 11:26 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently read about a new job board, Barefoot Student. It actually isn't a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com and other premium boards are which focus on job posting ads. Instead, Barefoot Student focuses mostly on its resume bank, which isn't as much of a resume bank as an opportunities wanted board. You see, students post information about themselves and what type of work they want to do.

Want to babysit? Post your experience and describe the positions you want there. Want to mow lawns? Same.

There's always room for another good job board or, in this case, opportunities wanted board. Welcome!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 13, 2008 at 8:43 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and Apple evangelist, just announced the launch of Alltop.com, a site which helps its users explore their passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web. They've grouped these collections -- "aggregations" -- into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and, wait for it, careers.

Content from a number of my favorite bloggers are included at Alltop, including Penelope Trunk, Jason Alba, Karen Burns, G.L. Hoffman, Gautam Ghosh, Todd Raphael, Joel Cheesman, Gerry Crispin, George Lenard, Dave Mendoza, Lindsey Pollak, and Toby Dayton. Oh, and this blog is there too.

Each of the 40 Alltop sites displays the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page -- they call this "single-page aggregation." Think of Alltop as an on-line magazine rack that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Their goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99 percent of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Alltop describes their approach as as "aggregation without the aggravation."

So what does this have to do with Jason Goldberg, former CEO of Jobster? Well, Jason's new venture is a product called social|median. When it goes live, social|median should enable people to get highly personalized news inspired by people with similar interests. The site is currently in testing and recently put out a call for beta testers.

Does the earlier release of Alltop spell the doom of social|median along with its $1 million in funding? Hardly. Jason's a smart guy. And so is Guy. :-) But as a college professor once told me, there is always room for another great pizza restaurant. Just because you're first to market doesn't mean that you will succeed nor does being second or later to market mean that you will fail. The better the idea and the better the execution the better the chances of success.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 12, 2008 at 10:58 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

Those who meet me often quickly detect that I have a strange accent for someone who lives in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis / Saint Paul. Some people here think that I must have grown up in New York while others more accurately put my hometown somewhere up in the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. The latter is closer to the truth but not quite there.

I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and became a dual citizen after moving to Minneapolis for school and the weather. One of the advantages of growing up in Canada is that you realize better than a lot of Americans do just how intertwined the countries are and aren't. Culturally they're pretty similar but they have some remarkable differences. Economically they're even more similar yet are still and probably always will be remarkably separated.

An example of that economic separation are recruiting conferences. Few American recruiters or other human resource professionals have ever ventured north of the border for a recruiting conference. That's a shame because there are some wonderful conferences in world class cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. And the lack of northern exposure shouldn't be the case because those cities are so incredibly easy to get to from just about every American city.

I will have the pleasure of speaking about how recruiters can and should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at the Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services (ACSESS) 10th Anniversary Conference on May 9, 2008 in Toronto. There are more than 15 non-stop flights daily to Toronto from Chicago, New York, and the Washington airports and there are over 10 a day from Atlanta. It is easier, much easier in fact, to get to Toronto from any of those cities than it is to get to San Diego so if you're in search, employment, or staffing then join me in Toronto.

The conference runs from May 7th through 9th in beautiful, clean, inspiring downtown Toronto. Register by calling 888-232-4962 or at acsess.org.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 11, 2008 at 3:37 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently wrote a blog entry about how to artfully dodge stock and often pointless questions from employers such as, "what is your greatest weakness."

But sometimes stock questions aren't silly at all and are deserving of a well thought out and delivered response. We now have a great video on our site that walks you through how to answer tough interview questions.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 10, 2008 at 2:56 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was just reading a CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog entry about how to overcome tough interview questions and it caused me to remember an answer that a friend of mine used to give interviewers who asked him what was his biggest weakness. He would answer that it was chocolate. That would end that silly line of questioning for most interviewers but for those who were better prepared and could actually explain what information they were after he would provide them with a more meaningful response.

When I interviewed for jobs in college and after graduation, it never ceased to amaze me how ill prepared both the interviewers and candidates often were. Interviewers often had little to no training and frequently knew nothing about the candidate until they had scanned their resume as the candidate was walking in the door. So rather than asking meaningful questions about the candidate's credentials, they would ask stock, open ended questions like, "describe your greatest weakness." What a waste of time for everyone in the room.

I frequently hear from recruiters and candidates how hard it is to find the right match. They spend hour upon hour, day upon day, week upon week, and sometimes even month upon month searching, searching, and searching. Then when they finally do connect with what seems to be a good fit, they come into the interview far less prepared than they should be. If they invested even 30 to 60 minutes ahead of time then their chances of success would skyrocket but they often don't so the interview often goes no where and they're right back on the same old treadmill.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 7, 2008 at 8:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've been trading emails for a few months with Garett Howardson, a PhD candidate at The University of South Dakota. His thesis is on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and employer selection practices. He needs some employers to take the short survey anonymously and will send the results to any participant who so requests.

According to Garett,

One study published in Managing Accounts Payable states that, "Over one-quarter of 254 surveyed employers (26.9%) have at some point reviewed job candidates' personal web pages on social networking Internet sites such as MySpace and Facebook." This study seeks to determine if employers use social networking websites as a means of information collection, what specific information employers look for, and what importance employers place on that information (either positive or negative).

The survey we develop is used primarily to determine the importance that employers place on information that can be found a social networking website profile. We ask employers about many different types of content that can be found on a profile and ask them to rate how that information would impact an potential job candidate's chances of being chosen for employment. We also utilize the survey to gain an understanding about a company's culture or inherent value system and if that culture or system has an impact on the likelihood of an employer using a social networking website. For example, would companies that traditionally identity themselves as being more conservative consider some content more negatively than a traditionally liberal company would.

The results of the survey will primarily be used to determine if social networking websites can have a positive impact on workforce selection or if they are doomed to remain the taboo subject that they currently are. Social networking websites give individuals far more freedom to express their identity than a simple resume. We hope to find that positive information on a social networking website profile can have as great an impact as negative information. Thus, individuals could use their profile as a robust, but informal, resume for potential employers to view.

Human resource professionals are notorious for their interest in what the rest of the HR world is doing. I believe this study provides a great outlet for HR professionals to obtain information an a current trend that is definitely prevalent across the country. Participants will be given the option at the end of survey to leave their contact information (in a separate survey not connected to their responses) so that they may view the results upon completion of the study. Participants will also be given the chance to sign up for a drawing for one of five $30 restaurant gift certificates.

To take the survey, get the results if you wish, and be entered into the drawing for one of five $30 restaurant gift certificates, go to
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=f_2fnpJl80Aon_2fs_2f0J6AMNPg_3d_3d.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 6, 2008 at 10:13 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

According to America's finest news source, The Onion, the top ways of firing an employee are:

• 19% on the "while you were out" slip;
  
• 11% right before penetration;
  
• 20% with failed explosive vest still on;
  
• 28% embossed letter lowered into mine shaft;
  
• 10% pushed out of boxcar; and
  
• 12% in the Victorian style of firings.
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 4, 2008 at 5:22 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the pleasure of attending the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference this past Friday. It was again organized by Paul DeBettignies, again located at the Best Buy world headquarters, again sold out, and again attended by well over 100 recruiters and other human resource professionals. About 60 percent were corporate recruiters/HR, 20 percent consultants, 15 percent third party recruiters / headhunters, and five percent oddballs such as me. Next date is Friday, May 16, 2008. Be there or be square.

The first session was by TJ Conley, an attorney with Leonard, Street & Deinard. About the only thing that I can take credit for is that I helped to connect Paul and TJ.

The presentation by TJ covered a fair amount of ground but the area that was of most interest to me was about the legal risks to employers when they use Google or other Internet resources as part of their background checking process. Those risks include:

• In states such as Minnesota, there's a risk of a discrimination lawsuit if the employer declines to hire an employee because of off-duty conduct such as smoking or drinking alcohol. Too bad that such protections apparently don't extend to teachers in Pennsylvania who are photographed drinking out of plastic cups while wearing funny hats.
• States such as New York prohibit employers from discriminating against a candidate because of their political beliefs. But in states such as Minnesota, it is perfectly acceptable to decline to hire a Democrat if you're a Republic or vice versa. I guess we don't take our politics as seriously here.
• Nationally you're going to run into a problem if you discriminate against someone based upon a protected characteristic like religion or disability. Ever look at a Facebook profile? Right up near the top is a spot for your religious affiliation. Hmmm.

• Establish a company policy regarding which search engines they're going to use, how they're going to use them, etc.
• Have a non-decision maker filter out the bad information such as religious affiliation and then pass the rest of the information to the decision maker for review.
• Confirm the information. If a candidate's MySpace profile indicates that they like to get drunk and have sex with strangers, don't assume that they posted that information. It may have been posted by someone else for kicks and giggles or to hurt them.
• Document your decision making process and adhere to it.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 3, 2008 at 12:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)