One of the best writers for the Wall Street Journal is Sarah Needleman. She writes a lot about employment-related issues and many of those focus on issues related to college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs. Yesterday's article was a beauty but surely read very differently to different readers. Perhaps that was the intent.

Sarah interviewed a number of employers and candidates about the emerging trend of college students and recent graduates using cell phone text messaging (SMS) abbreviations such as "thx" for "thanks" and "4u" for "for you" in their thank you letters and other correspondence to prospective employers and after they've been hired. Not surprisingly, the employers felt that such abbreviations were terrible while most of the students and recent grads understood that the employers didn't like it but also felt that those attitudes were dated.

Now I can understand why an employer wouldn't appreciate receiving a text message full of informal abbreviations as the employer would likely suspect that the candidate would then use the same types of abbreviations when communicating with clients and if the clients aren't likely to appreciate the abbreviations then the use of them will hurt the employer's business. But I was flabbergasted by a couple of the dislikes:

• Executive recruiter Hal Reiter of Herbert Mines Associates, a New York-based search firm, discussed how awful it was for a candidate to send to him a thank you note within minutes of the interview. The candidate's sin? Sending it from his BlackBerry. Apparently Reiter doesn't process as quickly the candidate and therefore the candidate, according to Reiter, exhibited poor judgment. Please. If the candidate had waited too long that probably would have been a sin as well. Just because Reiter doesn't seem comfortable using technology to make himself more productive and responsive should he disqualify a candidate from the hiring process because the candidate's skills in those areas are better?
• Hiring manager Cathy Chin of ReThink Rewards, a Toronto-based marketing firm, felt that her personal space was infringed upon by a candidate who had the audacity to send a text message to Cathy's cell phone. A little background is in order. Cathy's cell phone number is on her business card and she gave the candidate her card. No mention in the article about Cathy instructing the candidate on how to communicate with her so it seems to be a reasonable assumption that Cathy did not tell the candidate that she'd prefer not to be called or texted. And how does a call or text to a cell phone number printed on your work card infringe on your personal space? Doesn't printing the phone number on your business card indicate that it is a business line? And if Cathy didn't want to receive text messages then why didn't she have her cell phone carrier turn that feature off? Or is that Cathy wants to be able to send and receive text messages but only personal ones? If that's the case, was it reasonable for her to expect the candidate to somehow magically know that? What ESP a stated requirement or even a preference for the position?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 30, 2008 at 9:50 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Am I just out to lunch with unrealistic expectations about customer service or do others also feel that we should expect good customer service from our vendors and not be surprised when we actually get it?

The origins of CollegeRecruiter.com date back to 1988 and over those two decades I have repeatedly been disappointed by vendors who regularly fail to deliver quality customer service. I understand that all organizations, including ours, sometimes fail in this area but the norm should be great customer service. For example, compare the customer service you get from most airlines most of the time versus most nice hotels most of the time. I notice good customer service when flying. It surprises me. It doesn't surprise me when the customer service is poor. Yet I'm not surprised when I receive excellent customer service from hotels.

Another organization that surprises me only when I have problems is a promotions company that we work with. We regularly buy
custom-embroidered logo shirts and apparel from Queensboro because their product quality and customer service are excellent and they back everything with a no questions asked, money back guarantee. Unfortunately, Queensboro is an exception in today's marketplace. Hopefully they'll have a lot of imitators in a lot of niches.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 29, 2008 at 9:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There's been a significant increase in the number of employer clients would prefer to pay for postings and other recruitment advertising on a for performance basis so that they only pay if they hire someone from the ad. I'd love to get there as well as it would ensure that the interests of the candidate, employer, and CollegeRecruiter.com would be well aligned but we can't get there until the employers make the proper investments in their applicant tracking systems.

Of the hundreds of clients we have, we'd be hard pressed to count on one hand how many of them are properly tracking the source of their hires. It is really pathetic, actually. We have one client who spend $200,000 on an applicant tracking system but didn't spend $20,000 to add the module that would give them fully automated tracking with unique URLs. So instead they have those horrid drop-down boxes. Don Firth at JobsInLogistics.com published a study showing that 83 percent of candidates misidentified their source when they clicked directly from the job board to the employer site and the job board was actually listed.

I can only imagine how much higher the percentage would be if the study included candidates who saw the posting on sites to which it was crossposted. For example, if an employer posts a job to our site then we crosspost it to thousands of other sites in our network. It is part of our selling proposition so there's full transparency with our clients. If a candidate sees the posting on one of our partner sites and then applies on the employer site, will the candidate know to identify CollegeRecruiter.com? No way.

The only solution is fully automated tracking where the employer provides a unique URL to every board and other source to which they post the opportunity. Then regardless of where the candidate sees the posting the source will be properly tracked. Of course, that assumes that the ATS is setup to properly track those URLs and that the HR people using the ATS are properly trained on how to make that work.

We're talking with a client right now about a pay-per-hire deal. We are confident that the client is properly tracking. We'd welcome more such deals as they're great for all concerned, but I suspect that we'll get a lot of interest from employers whose systems don't measure up to their desires.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 28, 2008 at 10:47 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

RSM McGladrey, one of the nation's top accounting firms, is fortunate to have a number of highly skilled recruiters who understand that recruiting is about selling and therefore marketing their opportunities is critical to their ability to hire the best available talent. Yes, efficiency is important but efficiency at the cost of effectiveness is not a good idea as you end up with cheap hires who tend to be poorly qualified and therefore productivity suffers.

So what do new tricks has RSM McGladrey pulled out of its hat? Well, Ben Gotkin, national director of experienced-hire recruiting, just announced that they've joined the recruiting blogosphere with Success starts here: Your view into what it's like to work at RSM McGladrey | McGladrey and Pullen.

According to Ben, Success starts here will pull back the top layer and provide a deep view into RSM's culture, people, and career opportunities. It will enable them to promote relevant company news and events, offer tips to job seekers, highlight specific location and local community service events, and provide a personal approach to their recruiting process. It will incorporate multimedia along with text and pictures and provide RSM with the ability to update content on a regular basis. Ultimately, Success starts here will serve as a destination for candidates (primarily at the campus through manager level) who are currently involved in RSM's recruiting process and for those who are being courted for future opportunities with their firm.

Another benefit to RSM that Ben didn't mention in his email to me is that it will make RSM's highly qualified recruiters even better. In order to regularly write a successful blog, you need to keep current with news and trends in your niche. Those who write for RSM about college recruiting, for example, are going to need to stay very current with the latest happenings and trends in the world of college recruiting. So in addition to the RSM bloggers educating the readers of the blog, the RSM bloggers will also educate themselves.

RSM is one of a very small number of employers which has given permission to its employees to blog. It is one of an even smaller number which has encouraged the blogging. Think about the powerful message that RSM is sending to its bloggers, other employees, and candidates. "We trust you." How many employees can honestly say that their employer trusts them? As of today, one more.

Welcome!!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 24, 2008 at 1:20 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've never been a fan of traditional banner advertising. From the time they were introduced in the mid-1990's through their standardization at the urging of Proctor & Gamble in 1999 through today, banner ads have typically been sold based on the number of times they were viewed. What has always seemed crazy to me is that the Internet lends itself to precise and fully automated tracking of far more relevant statistics, so why would anyone pay for views?

Maybe I'm wrong though. We recently entered into a partnership that I can't yet write about that will allow us to offer our clients the ability to target candidates geographically in dozens of the largest metro areas in the country or by job category (i.e.,. accounting) or both. We've had some early discussions with clients about our impending ability to do more than just display their banners across our site in a completely untargeted manner. The clients are thrilled.

It seems that the clients we've been talking with over the past few days aren't terribly concerned about the number of times the banners are clicked or the number of applications they generate or the number of hires that can be tracked back to the banner ad buy. Instead, they're looking at the incredibly strategic value of branding and recognize that the much disparaged banner ad actually does a pretty good job of providing branding opportunities for employers.

It will be interesting to see if these same clients actually evaluate the banners based on their branding value or if they come back to us months from now and talk positively or negatively about the number of clicks, applications, or hires they generated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 23, 2008 at 5:57 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Well, some recruiters are flaky, but what occupation doesn't have its fair share of flakes?

A tip of the hat to Lee Charles of The Hire Sense blog for summarizing 10 mistakes that employers make when trying to hire new candidates:

1. Flakiness.
   
2. Making hiring decisions that aren't based on the right criteria.
   
3. Not distinguishing between what can be taught and what can't.
   
4. Not asking the right questions in interviews.
   
5. Letting candidates get away with superficial, stock responses.
   
6. Hiring too quickly.
   
7. Hiring too slowly.
   
8. Not getting back to candidates.
   
9. Conducting intimidating, high-pressure interviews.
   
10. Not giving an accurate portrayal of the job.
    

It never ceases to amaze me how many professionals in virtually every field claim to be too busy to do their jobs properly. Of course, I've made the same claim at times and it is always, always a cop out. If I, or anyone else, were to always properly manage our time and be proactive about the work that we do then we should never, ever be too busy to do our jobs properly.

Recruiters and hiring managers are no different than any other professionals. I once received a call from a recruiter who had purchased a job posting ad on CollegeRecruiter.com and had some questions. I asked her why she chose to use our site and she said that it was because she had posted the same job on one of the big boards and received 200 resumes within a few days. She was really upset because she didn't have time to read through 200 resumes so she, wait for it, deleted all of them. But because she now didn't have any resumes she then had to spend valuable time and money re-posting the same job on our site to generate more resumes.

I got that she may not have had time to properly review 200 resumes but a properly written job posting for one opening shouldn't receive that many resumes. It should have been more narrowly written to discourage unqualified applicants and encourage only applicants which were highly qualified. So instead of investing some time at the front end in proactively writing a great job posting she wasted time and money at the back end by deleting the 200 resumes and re-posting them on CollegeRecruiter.com.

What a flake.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 22, 2008 at 3:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm looking forward to spending a couple of days in beautiful St. Louis next week. I'll be there with national account executive Mike Palmquist for the Midwest Association of Colleges and Employers (MwACE) annual conference. It is at the Millennium Hotel from Monday, July 28th through Thursday, July 31st.

Mike will man our exhibit booth from Tuesday through Wednesday. I'll deliver the keynote presentation on Thursday. It will be the first time that I've done a presentation on "The Future of On-line Recruiting: Why Job Boards and Facebook Are Only Gateways to What Lays Ahead." Should be a lot of fun.

I've got some great ideas percolating on how best to deliver the material but, as always, I'm happy to consider input from readers of this blog. If you were doing the presentation, what would you want to be sure to include?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 21, 2008 at 4:35 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the beautifies of being a blogger and being an owner of the web site on which the blog is published is that you have a lot more flexibility about what you write than you would if you worked for a major daily newspaper and had editors looking over your shoulder every minute of the day. Of course, the content those publications put out is slightly better than what I generate.

I just got off of a phone meeting where we were discussing sales strategies and one of the clients that came up was a large energy company. For those who have been holed up in a cave for the past couple of years, energy prices are, ahem, somewhat higher than they were. And the profits and hiring by those same energy companies are also higher. Yet the energy company that we discussed was only interested in using our killer cell phone text messaging (SMS) product to help them hire college students and recent graduates if the price was $100 or less. Ain't going to happen.

I wish no ill will upon the energy company. I hope that they make a successful transformation from selling fossil fuels to selling renewable energy and perhaps even promoting energy efficiency and conservation. Whether they can or will remains to be seen, but wouldn't that a great thing?

I guess in the meantime I'll continue to keep my eyes open when I see energy efficient hybrid cars drive by. One of my family's cars isn't fancy and definitely isn't expensive, but boy am I happy that we decided not to trade it in. You see, we have a 2001 Hyundai Accent. Its low sticker price and small interior are very consistent with its energy efficiency. It gets well over 30 miles per gallon. People who drive hybrid cars brag about the miles per gallon they get but their vehicles typically cost double or even triple what the Hyundai costs and the sizes of the vehicles are very comparable. Will we end up replacing the accent with a hybrid? Maybe. But it is far more important to me that a vehicle is energy efficient than if it is a hybrid. In other words, if being a hybrid car makes it energy efficient, great, but remember that you don't need to drive a hybrid in order to get great gas mileage.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 18, 2008 at 4:37 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

There's little doubt that Gen Y is entrepreneurial, especially the males. A lot of would be entrepreneurs of all ages figure that they just need a good idea and they'll be successful. As someone who founded and runs CollegeRecruiter.com, I can assure you that success in the world of business requires a good idea but that a good idea is much less important than good execution.

But let's leave the issue of good idea versus good execution aside for this blog article and instead focus on how to get funding. One of the key problems facing any start-up is how to get funding. There are several types of funding which are often used by start-ups:

• Angel Investors - Typically friends or family who provide funding at an early stage and can normally be relied upon not to force the entrepreneur to shut down if the venture fails to be a huge success within a few years. A stereotypical angel Investor would be a rich uncle who provides $50,000 in seed money and hopes to receive his money back plus a profit but isn't going to litigate if he never sees a dime.
• Venture Capital - The amount of money from these investors tend to be larger but also early stage. They tend not to be friends and family and require big paybacks. They may invest in 20 ventures and be happy if they have huge success with only one of them. A problem for the entrepreneur is that the VC's can often impose a lot of pressure on the venture and may even shut down a profitable venture because the payback isn't going to be enough for the VC even if it is satisfactory to the entrepreneur.
• Funding - Start-ups can also receive funding from other sources such as bank loans, credit card debt, loans from friends and families, investment by active partners, etc.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 18, 2008 at 11:44 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

One of my biggest frustrations with helping college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs is that many don't yet know how to network. It isn't that they're stupid or lazy. They simply haven't been taught. So how do you get a Gen Y'er who grew up with computers and can hardly remember a time when the Internet wasn't at their fingertips how to network? One way is to guide them to the best on-line tools and remind them to use those tools over and over again.

Today we added a new feature to CollegeRecruiter.com that will provide the students, recent graduates, and alumni who use CollegeRecruiter.com to help them find internships and entry level jobs with easy access to one of the best on-line networking tools: LinkedIn. Now when a job seeker applies to a job, they're taken to a page that shows the candidate who they know at the organization to which they applied and, perhaps even more importantly, who the candidate knows who knows people at the organization.

Instead of submitting a job application to XYZ Corporation and then hoping to hear back, candidates will now submit the job application and then instantly see who is in their network who works at that organization or knows someone who works at that organization. The idea is that the candidates will then contact those people and ask them to bring the application to the attention of a decision maker. The reality is that not all candidates will choose to make use of this great new tool. But those who do will find that their chances for success will skyrocket.

CollegeRecruiter.com is one of the first job boards and the first college job board to integrate LinkedIn's business networking tools. As a result of the integration, CollegeRecruiter.com users can utilize the LinkedIn network of more than 24 million users to find inside connections at employers who are advertising their job openings on CollegeRecruiter.com.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 17, 2008 at 2:30 PM | Leave a Comment (3)

One of my buddies in the recruiting industry is Paul DeBettignies of Nerd Search. In addition to being a huge University of Minnesota Golden Gopher football fan, having a last name that is pronounced completely different from how it is spelled, he is also bright, funny, passionate, and the driving force behind the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference.

The conferences were born out of a Chipotle lunch that Paul, Josh Kahn of Accenture/Best Buy, and I shared a couple of years ago. We wanted to find a way for Minnesota recruiting bloggers to get together and instead created a series of recruiting conferences where no one pays, no one sells, but everyone learns from each other. Josh has been critical in helping us get the wonderful facilities at Best Buy's world headquarters. Nicole Bodem later joined our merry little band as Paul's "wingman" and masterfully has taken care of making sure that everything runs smoothly. In addition to being an SEO expert, she's also a gift from logistics heaven. My role has evolved into occasionally helping promote the events to Upper Midwest employers who are in our database. In other words, I don't do nearly as much as the others yet still get to be called a co-founder. Cool.

The next conference is only 1.5 weeks away and registration just opened yet it is almost sold out already. Wow. Paul, Josh, and Nicole found a way to increase the size of the room to fit 250 recruiters and it will likely be sold out within a few days of the announcement. Perhaps it has something to do with the line-up:

• John Sumser, CEO/Founder of the Recruiting Roadshow - Spiky and Flat: How Demographics Make Local Regions The Most Important Part of the Flat World
  
• George LaRocque, VP Sales Bullhorn - Recruiter IQ
  
• Joel Kramer, Editor and CEO of MinnPost.com - The Rapidly Changing Local Media Landscape: What's Happening and Why It Matters
  
• Steven Rothberg, CEO CollegeRecruiter.com - Advanced Social Network Recruiting Techniques
  
• Don Ramer, CEO/Founder of Arbita - Recruiting As If People Mattered
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 16, 2008 at 5:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

We're all pretty relieved over here as one of our favorite yet least productive employees had successful surgery yesterday. Seems that Maggy K. Neign had bladder stones but the surgeon was able to take care of the problem and Maggy is resting comfortably.

I suspect that the surgery will have little effect on her personality. She'll still be terrible on the phone, lousy at typing, and pretty much the laziest bitch you've ever met. Yet we all love her.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 15, 2008 at 5:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Job applications from college students to federal community service programs such as Teach for America are way, way up. The explanations vary, but it is clear that far more of today's college students are applying for positions with AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and other such organizations than in years past.

According to the Star Tribune, "Teach For America, a two-year program that places college graduates in low-performing schools around the country, the number of applicants fell in 2007 but this year jumped 36 percent to nearly 25,000 would-be teachers. Only 3,700 are placed. When the program began in 1990, 2,500 students applied."

So what is driving the sudden surge in interest in these wonderful programs? Some reasons are:

• High student loan balances coupled with loan forgiveness programs.
  
• Gen Y'ers are generally more community service oriented than Gen X'ers or Baby Boomers.
  
• The economy is sputtering and these programs offer job safety and good benefits.
  
• Students see these opportunities as good breathers between their undergraduate and graduate school studies.
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 14, 2008 at 4:27 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Since moving to the U.S. in 1988, I've grown to love football. Not football like just about everyone outside of North America thinks of it. That's soccer. My kids play and love it. I get the game enough to know that it isn't for me. Not intensive enough.

My favorite sport is hockey. No surprise as I was born and raised in Canada. But hockey is it without a doubt. Hands down. Fast, intense, skillful, and at times brutal. What an incredible combination.

Football has to be second. It has the intensity, skill, and brutality but lacks the speed. Oh well, not every sport can be perfect.

So I'm really excited about tonight because I'll be attending my first Canadian Football League game. I lived in Winnipeg for 22 years and never went to a Blue Bombers game. Incredible. But that's all about to change. Should be a lot of fun.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 11, 2008 at 7:57 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Late June and July are great seasons for college job boards to connect with their largest employer clients and help them plan and budget for the upcoming college hiring year. One of the big changes that I've noticed this year is that, finally, only a minority of the employers with which we've been talking regard job postings as being cutting edge.

The bulk of the larger employers with which we've been speaking correctly believe that job postings are efficient and effective but if they need to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands then a handful of job postings will help but not nearly enough. To get the people they need, these employers are embracing our two biggest products by revenue: targeted email campaigns and cell phone text messaging. I've also been watching with pleasure as many of these same employers embrace products offered by other organizations such as recruitment videos, podcasts, video interviewing, and more.

We're moving into a brave new world here, folks. Some employers will make great use of these new opportunities and thrive. Others will stumble and get hurt. Those who stick to their old ways will fail.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 9, 2008 at 9:49 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

It is amazing and most gratifying to hear employer after employer and client after client telling us that their organizations recognize the strategic value of a strong internship program and how they're taking steps to build or enhance their programs.

When we went live in 1996, about a quarter of the Fortune 500 employers had web sites, about as many had email, a small minority had formalized college recruiting programs, and virtually none had formalized internship programs. Now, all Fortune 500 employers have web sites and email and many have formalized college recruiting programs that include an internship program. Thank goodness.

College recruiting and internship programs are strategic and most leading employers today recognize that fact. They understand that their management and leadership ranks will be decimated by the retirement of their Baby Boomer employees unless those soon-to-be retirees are replaced now by Gen Y students and recent graduates. It will take years for today's hires to gain the experience that the departing Baby Boomers have accumulated so to expect today's hires to immediately be as productive is foolish. But to replace those retirees with lateral hires will be incredibly costly in terms of recruiting dollars and, perhaps even more significantly, the ability of the organization to control its own culture.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 7, 2008 at 8:42 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada and moved to the U.S. to attend grad school. I became a naturalized U.S. citizen a few years later. Since then, the first week in July has been quite significant to me for a few reasons:

• July 1st is Canada Day.
  
• Three days later is U.S. Independence Day.
  
• This is about the only week in the year when there's virtually no risk of snow here in Minnesota.
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 3, 2008 at 3:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Well, not a wedding in the traditional sense but still a match made in heaven.

Jason Davis -- founder of Recruiting.com, later founder of RecruitingBlogs.com, owner of dozens of great recruiting domain names, and master poker player.

Dave Mendoza -- quite simply one of the most masterful networkers the planet has ever known and one of the very few people I know who talks-the-talk and more importantly walks-the-walk that networking is all about what you can do for others, not what they can do for you.

So what's up with the wedding? Well, Jason recently extended an offer to Dave that Dave graciously accepted. A few joyous tears may have been shed and calls to the family made, but the union was one of business for Dave has joined RecruitingBlogs.com as a partner.

Apart, these two were dynamite. Together, they will move mountains.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 2, 2008 at 6:01 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Eric Shannon just launched a new job board. Well, not exactly. He launched a new blog for his job board. Not quite either. He launched a new blog about job boards. Getting closer.

Eric just launched JobBoardBlogs.com, which provides readers with a quick overview of blog entries posted by various job boards, including CollegeRecruiter.com.

Great idea, Eric!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 1, 2008 at 5:57 PM | Leave a Comment (0)