I'm excited about hosting the free webinar, College Seniors CAN Thrive in This Job Market, by Susan Kennedy, principal partner of Career Treking LLC.

Hiring in 2009 is projected to decrease eight percent for newly minted college graduates and 10 percent for MBAs, from 2008 levels. An abundance of qualified, experienced talent and the largest number of graduating seniors ever present stiff competition for fewer openings. Despite the above-mentioned doom and gloom, there are some encouraging industry projections. In this webinar, you will learn where the jobs are for college graduates as well as specific steps you can take to manage your job search in this challenging job market.

Susan Kennedy, principal partner of Career Treking LLC, has been coaching young professionals throughout her expansive career. She has over 20 years experience hiring and managing young professionals across different industries. Her business background combined with Human Resources experience brings a wealth of experience and practical knowledge that every young professional can benefit from. Susan has a degree in psychology and economics and frequently speaks at local area colleges about the job search process.

Within an hour of announcing the webinar, we already signed up 75 attendees. We can only accommodate 1,001 so register right away and tell your friends. Go to http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=59974404824&ref=share or https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/974192279.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 28, 2009 at 1:28 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most under reported stories of the 2008 election campaign was the incredibly smart use of mobile marketing by Barack Obama's primary and general election campaigns. He understood very early on that he needed to win overwhelming support from three demographics in order to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primaries and then John McCain in the general election:

1. Millennials;
   
2. African-Americans; and
   
3. Hispanics.
   

Through such techniques as social networking and mobile marketing, he won about two-thirds of the vote of Millennials and Hispanics. In hindsight, many would regard his support amongst African-Americans as a given but remember that it wasn't always so. It wasn't until he upset Clinton in the Iowa primary that he garnered any significant support amongst the African-American communities and even then that support came slowly.

Obama's campaigns built out a far more sophisticated mobile marketing strategy than did any of his competitors. He had a mobile web site, send photos and videos via multimedia messaging service (MMS), and wove into the fabric of his campaign cell phone text messaging (SMS) both from his campaign and between his supporters. So it shouldn't be any surprise that President Obama has continued to employ mobile marketing in his efforts to mobilize his supporters. The latest example? Just before his inauguration he deployed a cell phone text message to hundreds of thousands of supporters to call them for national service.

Change is definitely coming to the federal executive branch. Other organizations, both large and small, are sure to follow the lead. Mobile marketing is still cutting edge, but no longer out of the mainstream. Is your organization using mobile marketing? If not, what are you waiting for?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 26, 2009 at 9:44 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

On Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 1-2pm EST / 12-1pm CST, I will deliver a webinar on What Staffing Professionals Need to Know About the Future of On-line Recruiting: Why Job Boards and FaceBook Are Only Gateways to What is Ahead. What are the current media options available to today's staffing leaders, and what lies ahead in the ever-changing world of on-line employment marketing? In this highly interactive, humorous presentation, we'll compare the history of consumer marketing with the marketing by employers of their employment opportunities. We'll discuss which on-line opportunities make the most sense today for employers who each are struggling to find the best possible candidates. We'll then peer into the future to see what lies ahead so that you can best market your employment opportunities using the media options of today and tomorrow.

This webinar will be held in conjunction with the Eastern, Mountain Pacific, Midwest, and Southern Associations of Colleges and Employers. The entire fee $59 for ACE members and $99 for non-members will go to the ACE's. Register today!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 23, 2009 at 8:32 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We just finalized our booth selection for the ERE Expo Spring 2009 recruiting conference. We're looking forward to being there and hope to meet with many of our partners, clients, vendors.

If you're not yet signed up to attend ERE, I can get you a discount of $100. Go to their registration page and enter discount code SD09EXH. Hope to see you there!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 22, 2009 at 1:19 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the big mistakes that a lot of salespeople make is not understanding that most people don't like to be sold to. When you're selling to a salesperson, they generally like to be sold to as they understand and appreciate what you're doing, but most people get turned off by the hard sell.

Whirlpool understands that most candidates are not salespeople and will be turned off by a recruitment pitch that is hard sell. So one of the strategies that they employed is a soft sell recruitment video narrated by Reba McEntire in which she describes the partnership that Whirlpool has forged with Habitat for Humanity.

There's no hard sell in the video. There's almost no way of watching the video without getting misty eyed. And there's probably no better recruitment video out there and may never be one.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2009 at 5:29 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

The recession has thrown a lot of very good people out of work and provided many of them with an incentive to to re-consider their work choices. Do they still want to work in a big, downtown office building with hundreds or thousands of others and play all of the political games? Or would they prefer to make money from home by running an Internet-based business?

Unfortunately, there are many, many scams out there from organizations who claim to help people who are looking for quality work-at-home jobs but instead just offer those people a way of wasting their money. Many of the organizations charge a fee and send you a list of information that you could obtain just as easily and for free through a simple Google search. Or they'll happily set you up with a quasi-pyramid scheme under which you'll primary way of making money will be to recruit more suckers so you get a cut of their enrollment fee and the whole thing collapses when there aren't enough suckers left.

There are many, many legitimate employment and business opportunities out there where you can make money at home or even make money online from Internet businesses -- but be sure to investigate them. Run a search at the Better Business Bureau and do your due diligence by talking with people who are involved and finding out where they really make their money. If it is primarily by recruiting others, run away. If it is primarily by selling quality products and services, you may have just found a great new opportunity.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2009 at 1:20 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

I'm never disappointed whenever I'm hoping to find something new on the Internet. It seems that there's a site for everyone about everything. Case in point: my wife and I are remodeling our house. We've lived there for 14 years and many of the kitchen appliances were purchased and installed by the previous owners. So we're now looking at replacing the refrigerator, oven, etc.

It wasn't surprising to me to find many, many sites from the manufacturers but what I was hoping to find were sites where information was posted by other consumers. I love that about sites like eBay where you can look at comments posted by your peers, take them with a grain of salt, and form a more complete picture about the products you're considering. What I didn't expect to find for our remodel was a shopping Wiki site where all of the content is generated by users. The Internet. What a great place.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2009 at 1:12 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

On Thursday, January 15th, I delivered a webinar on how employers can and should use cell phone text messaging and other types of mobile marketing to help them hire college students and recent graduates.

Since the days of the AOL, "You've Got Mail," savvy recruiters have utilized email technology to reach current and prospective employees. But is email a dinosaur? Take a look at what Barack Obama's campaign did to recruit their target audience-- and recruit voters. They had a dedicated page for mobile content with wallpapers, ringtones and even an SMS alert service that tells you about local events, updates, and other tidbits to keep you involved and immersed in Obama. Can you do the same for your company through the utilization of mobile technology? Your workforce is global, virtual and tech savvy-- shouldn't your human capital department reflect these trends? Join us to learn the latest, and the future of, mobile technology. We'll decipher the terminology, the costs, and the potential benefits. We'll learn how a little knowledge can keep your company ahead of the curve-- and attract and retain the best and the brightest in the talent wars.

If you missed the presentation or want to watch it again, you can do so here:

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 20, 2009 at 4:55 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Geoff Peterson, Managing Principal for General Lead, delivered a super webinar for hundreds of CollegeRecruiter.com employer clients on January 15, 2009 on Twitter: Emerging Online Community for Recruiters and Sourcers. There were a few minor sound problems with the webinar but Geoff's content and manner of delivery were well worth putting up with the minor annoyances.

Did you miss the presentation? Want to watch it again? In this 60-minute webinar, we learned how Twitter is taking recruiting to a whole new level. Geoff fully demonstrated Twitter, walked through it's search capabilities and demonstrated how to build a "following" which benefits recruiters as they promote open positions and search for active and passive job seekers. Geoff also showed backdoor tips and tricks of using other sites and reviewed how recruiters and sourcers can use them to begin building relationships within online communities. Among the valuable takeaways for this interactive seminar were:

• Learned how to utilize Twitter to recruit and source candidates;
• Discovered a fast-growing social networking community online;
• Found active and passive candidates who "live" online;
• Learned how to grow your Twitter networks in seconds; and
• Uncovered hundreds of "leads" in the Twitter community.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 20, 2009 at 4:45 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

One of the dirty, dark secrets of the job board industry is that many of the boards do a terrible job of protecting the safety of the candidates who use their sites. The feeling amongst the owners and managers of these boards is somewhat like caveat emptor -- let the buyer beware. What these boards seem to be saying to their candidates is that if the candidates are stupid enough to be using their boards then the candidates deserve to have their identities stolen, bank accounts emptied, or worse. That's just wrong.

CollegeRecruiter.com is a member of the International Association of Employment Web Sites and one of the goals of the association is to improve not just the image but also the practices of the industry. I'm not saying that the job board industry is dirty or untrustworthy. But in any industry there are some bad apples and our industry is no exception. One way that the more trustworthy members of our association and industry protect our candidates is by verifying the authenticity of job postings. Unfortunately, some of the most popular job boards do little to no verification so the ads running on their site include many, many bogus job postings.

Susan Joyce, Editor/Publisher of Job-Hunt.org, recently posted a blog entry about the bogus job posting problem, how to recognize them, and, hopefully, avoid them. If you're using any job board, make sure that you read her excellent blog article.

Tip of the hat to Charles Kearley Cassels, MCSE, MCSA, MCP, Network+, A+ Systems Engineer, for tipping me off to Susan's blog article.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 15, 2009 at 4:05 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I just received an email from an employer who is going through some layoffs. A manager wants to hire some interns but is considering hiring them on an unpaid rather than paid basis. They wanted to know if I felt that there will be more unpaid internships due to the weak economy.

I definitely foresee a higher percentage of internships being unpaid both employers will want to save some money, students won't have as many options, and employers will know the students don't have as many options.

As the economy strengthens, employers will understand that they're being penny wise and pound foolish by trying to save a few thousand dollars by not paying their interns as it is productivity that drives organizations, not labor savings. The better the caliber of your workforce, the better your profitability.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 14, 2009 at 6:10 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I delivered a webinar today for Human Capital Institute today on how employers can and should use mobile marketing, including cell phone text messaging, to reach today's college students and recent graduates. To help illustrate why and how employers should be using this fabulous new tool, I looked at the awesome mobile marketing strategy employed by Barack Obama's campaign. About 800 people paid to attend so the interest level was certainly there.

But not everything was peaches and cream. I neglected to attribute some of the content to a blog written by David Erickson, the director of e-strategy for Tunheim Partners, a strategic communications company. David wrote a series of brilliant blog articles about Obama's use of mobile marketing, including http://e-strategyblog.com/2008/08/texting-the-vp-barack-obamas-mobile-marketing-effort/ and http://e-strategyblog.com/2008/12/obamas-microtargeting-campaign.

If you want to learn more about mobile marketing then run, don't walk, over to David's blog.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 13, 2009 at 4:56 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

There is little doubt that today's college students and recent graduates use email for communication. They use it a lot and they use it well. A recent study by eROI indicated that two-thirds of students check email at least once a day and 55 percent of those check email more than three times a day.

But students and recent graduates don't prefer to use email when offered a choice between email and cell phone text messaging (SMS). According to the study, the preferred means of communication are:

• Text messaging (37%)
• Email on a computer (26%)
• Social networking IM (15%)
• Instant messaging (11%)
• Social networking email (11%)
• Email on a mobile device (12%)

Tip of the Hat: Art Koff at RetiredBrains.com for bringing this study to my attention.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 13, 2009 at 10:24 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Virtually everyone who has anything to do with today's college students and recent graduates knows that the vast majority of them use Facebook. A recent study by eROI provides proof of that:

• 83 percent of college students actively use Facebook;
  
• 65 percent actively use MySpace; and
  
• 21 percent actively use LinkedIn.
  

The numbers in the study understate the percentage of students who have Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn accounts but eROI measured what percentage actively use those accounts.

I was very pleased to see that 21 percent of college students are using LinkedIn. Based upon my conversations with students, I inferred that the percentage was well below 10 percent and perhaps below five percent. Recruiters may feel that 21 percent is a small percentage because such a high percentage of recruiters use LinkedIn, but the vast majority of college students are not planning to become recruiters. A more accurate comparison would be what percentage of the college educated workforce is actively using LinkedIn? I bet that percentage is far below 21 percent.

LinkedIn is a wonderful networking tool but like all others you get out of it what you put in. If you put no effort in, you'll get little to nothing out of it.

Tip of the Hat: Art Koff at RetiredBrains.com for bringing this study to my attention.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 8, 2009 at 11:28 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

A strategic advantage for any organization over its direct competitors is to have innovative products. We believe that we have consistently rolled out new products a little ahead of the curve and that allows us to provide our clients with better products, service, and pricing.

An example of one of these new, innovative products is our Facebook Fan Recruiting Page development. In short, we consult with our clients to better understand their needs and then create a home page on Facebook for them so that they can better communicate with the millions of students and recent graduates who use Facebook almost continuously.

As of my writing of this blog entry, our CollegeRecruiter.com Fan Page has 343 "Fans." A Fan in Facebook-speak is to a Fan Page what a Friend is to a personal page. They are people who want to learn more about you by keeping track of what you do and otherwise communicating with you.

I just announced to the 343 Fans of the CollegeRecruiter.com Fan Page that we are delighted to have been able to help Valpak launch their new Facebook Fan Recruiting Page. If you have not yet done so, become a Fan of CollegeRecruiter.com and Valpak!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 7, 2009 at 11:29 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

College students searching for internships and recent graduates applying for entry-level jobs often ask whether to include their grade point averages on their resumes. There are essentially two considerations:

1. Grade point average is often, but not always, important when applying for internships and entry-level jobs. Some employers will refuse to consider candidates whose GPA's are below some cutoff point such as 3.0 or even 3.5. But the vast majority of employers use GPA as merely one of many factors when considering candidates so if your GPA is low but your other qualifications are exemplary then you still stand a good chance of landing an interview and being hired.
   
2. A good rule of thumb for deciding whether to include your GPA on your resume is that you want to include it if it is good as that will increase your chances of landing an interview but you want to leave it off of your resume if it isn't good as that will decrease your chances of landing an interview. But that rule of thumb also begs the question: what is a good GPA? That depends upon the employer and position. If you're trying to land an interview with a top management consulting or investment banking firm then anything less than a 3.5 is not going to be regarded by the employer as being good. But if you're trying to land an interview to work in customer service for a travel or hospitality firm then a GPA as low as 2.5 for many firms would be regarded as being good enough to increase your chances of landing an interview.
   

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 6, 2009 at 6:17 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

A number of recent studies have reported that the use of email to reach college students is a dying marketing channel because the students are primarily using email to sign up for email alerts from sites such as CollegeRecruiter.com and to sign up with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Our targeted email product is our biggest product by revenue so this is an area that we know a lot about. We've long questioned the validity of these studies as we've seen no drop-off in the response rate to the employment-related emails that we deliver to candidates who opt-in to receive the emails. A new study by eROI supports our experience and refutes the theory that students only use email for alerts and to register with social networking sites.

The eROI study finds that:

• Only about 36 percent of students use email alerts to keep up to date on what's happening on their social networks;
  
• About one-quarter of students originally got an email address for social networking purposes;
  
• One-quarter got an email address for the ability to buy online;
  
• 81 percent got an email address for communicating with family; and
  
• 52 percent got an email address for communicating with friends.
  

Tip of the Hat: Art Koff at RetiredBrains.com for bringing the eROI study to my attention.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 5, 2009 at 7:35 AM | Leave a Comment (0)