I'm pleased to announce that we just completed our integration with Broadbean Technology, which provides global job ad distribution and response tracking solutions to many of the world's largest staffing companies, recruitment advertising agencies, technology vendors, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) businesses and major employers. Broadbean's success has been built on technical innovation, great customer service and a culture that rewards hard work and entrepreneurial spirit.

30,000 recruiters use Broadbean's flagship AdCourier system, which distributes in excess of 1.5 million job ads and processes up to 3 million candidate applications every month. The technology records the source of every application providing clients with management information that allows them to monitor return on investment from their online spend. This facilitates better buying decisions and is proven to save users money.

Broadbean's technical knowledge and entrepreneurial mindset has allowed them to thrive in the ever growing online recruitment marketplace. They continue to create award winning products and focus on improving business workflows and recruitment processes on a global and local level. Put simply, Broadbean helps to make the whole task of recruiting people online quicker, easier and cheaper.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 31, 2009 at 12:08 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

This is the seventh in a seven part series. To read the series from the beginning, start with the first article on Mobile Marketing for Recruiters.

I hope that the first six parts of this seven part series has been helpful as you look toward creating or perhaps even improving your mobile marketing recruitment advertising campaigns. CollegeRecruiter.com has been a leader in this space since its infancy four years ago and we continue to lead the industry as seen by our mobile web site, CollegeRecruiter.mobi, being the only mobile version of a major job board that allows candidates to not only search and read job postings, but actually apply to those postings on their mobile devices. Very few job boards have mobile sites and the others which do all require the candidates to find postings of interest and then send links to those postings to their email inboxes. So candidates can search and read the job postings on those other mobile job boards, but to apply to the jobs they must get off of their mobiles and turn on their computers. Maybe it is just me, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a mobile job board?

In our years of experience in helping our clients design, deliver, and evaluate the effectiveness of their mobile recruitment marketing campaigns, we've come across a few tips and tricks. Here are 10 of the best:

1. Ask candidates who contact you via one of your mobile marketing campaigns if they'd like to opt-in for future SMS messages from you as this will make it easy and cheap for you to build your own SMS database.


2. If you use several job boards, lists, or other media sources for your campaign, use a different keyword for each so that you can track not just the effectiveness of the campaign, but the effectiveness of each media partner that is part of that campaign.


3. Incentivize the responses by providing an additional benefit to those who respond to your mobile marketing recruitment advertising campaign. Perhaps enter them into a sweepstakes or offer to review their applications first.


4. Offer them incentives based upon their interests. If one candidate is interested in a sales position and another in a programming position, reward the sales candidate with something of interest to your sales people and the programming candidate with something of interest to your programmers.


5. If your candidates speak multiple languages, communicate in their language. Rather than sending them a text message asking them to reply with their language of choice, Lyris recommends that you send them a message like this, "Text FREE to 45471. Envia GRATIS al 45471."


6. Want to get your campaign running fast? Use a short code belonging to CollegeRecruiter.com or your mobile marketing provider. Have a month and $500 per month? Buy your own short code from the Short Code Administration. Have a couple of months and $1,000 a month? Buy a vanity code from the same source.


7. Even if your text message or keyword campaign doesn't indicate that texting the word HELP will provide instructions to confused recipients, make that happen. No matter how clear you think your instructions are, some on the receiving end will be confused and those could be some of your best candidates because if they take the time to better understand before leaping into action, isn't that a good trait?


8. Mobile marketing is a great way to promote products and services to consumers but also employment opportunities and all sorts of business-to-consumer and business-to-business communications.


9. Test, test, and test again. How does your message appear on different mobile devices. What looks great on a BlackBerry may look awful on a Razor cell phone.


10. Partner with the right organization to help you design, implement, and track your mobile marketing recruitment advertising campaign. I'm biased, but I think that we do a pretty good job. Want more information? Contact our sales team today.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 24, 2009 at 7:57 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

This is the sixth in a seven part series. To read the series from the beginning, start with the first article on Mobile Marketing for Recruiters.

Too many recruiters and other marketers spend an incredible amount of time, energy, money, and other resources deciding what media to purchase to promote their opportunities and then send out their messages but fail to properly track the results. Sticking a drop-down "how did you hear about us" onto your site is not tracking properly as well over 80 percent of self-reported responses to such questions are inaccurate.

There are a number of ways to properly track your mobile marketing recruitment marketing campaign. You'll want to know how many messages were delivered to the gateway, how many of those were delivered to the mobile devices, the number of responses, and the results of those responses. So although it is nice to know that your text messaging campaign to 20,000 was delivered on-time, it is nicer to know that 19,544 of them were opened, 2,201 clicked through to your web site, 875 applied, and you hired 124 of them.

If you don't know the results of your ad campaigns, you don't know which ones worked and worked the best. And if you don't know that, then you can't know where to properly allocate your future resources. Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 23, 2009 at 7:51 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

This is the fifth in a seven part series. To read the series from the beginning, start with the first article on Mobile Marketing for Recruiters.

Too many marketers, including recruiters, believe that each new tool that comes along such as mobile marketing will be the silver bullet. They'll pore all of their energies and sometimes budgets into the one tool, it won't solve all of their problems, and they'll walk away disappointed and blame the tool for the failure. But tools are useless and often harmful in the hands of unskilled craftsmen. Don't use a saw properly and you're not going to achieve your objective of cutting through the board but you may cut through your hand. In order to use a tool such as a saw or mobile marketing properly, you must understand how to use it and that always means using it along with other tools for together they'll help you achieve your objectives but alone they'll only frustrate and perhaps harm you.

There are a number of ways to integrate your mobile marketing recruitment marketing campaign with your other marketing campaigns:

• Out-of-Home Marketing such as billboards and signs on buses are great ways to generate responses from candidates who want more information. Have them text a keyword to your short code and you'll soon be building a great, opt-in database of well targeted candidates.
• Broadcast marketing allows you to do much the same except that rather than publishing your keyword and short code in print, you're promoting it via TV or radio.
• On-package marketing is rarely used by recruiters but walk over to your marketing colleagues and ask them to re-design the packaging of the products shipped out by your company to include your short code and keyword as a response mechanism for consumers to respond to if they're interested in also becoming a candidate.
• Promotions are highly effective at generating large numbers of candidates quickly as people tend to respond well when incentivized. The Army National Guard ran a campaign several of years ago where respondents were given three iTune downloads for completing a short form in which they agreed to speak with a recruiter. Huge numbers responded at a time when it was very difficult for the Guard to generate nearly enough responses to fill their needs.
• Email marketing is another way of distributing your short code and keyword much like you would on a billboard or via radio.
• In-venue responses are those generated during live events. Do your candidates have similar tastes in music, sports, or other forms of entertainment? If so, have the presenter of the content ask the attendees to text your keyword to your short code to receive information about your employment opportunities.
• Don't forget to promote your short code and other mobile marketing response mechanisms on your web site. Candidates who don't like filling in forms or sending emails may be interested in engaging via texting.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 22, 2009 at 7:36 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

This is the fourth in a seven part series. To read the series from the beginning, start with the first article on Mobile Marketing for Recruiters.

There are six basic steps to planning and executing a successful mobile recruitment marketing program:

1. Plan your objective, strategy, and concept. What do you want to accomplish and how will you measure your results? Which candidates do you want to target and where will you get the list from?
2. Order any short codes you need from a SMS gateway service provider like Lyris or rent them from a mobile marketing partner like CollegeRecruiter.com.
3. Get your campaign approved by all of the major carriers. If you execute your own campaign, this means getting your approval in writing from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and perhaps others. If you work through a partner like CollegeRecruiter.com, the provider will take care of this for you.
4. Build or buy your list. Actually, the term "buy" is a misnomer as SMS is strictly opt-in. That means that you can't acquire the mobile numbers and permission to message them from another organization as the candidates who gave their permission gave it to the other organization to send its messages, not to your organization to send your messages. The correct terminology is actually "rent" a list and you can do so from list owners such as CollegeRecruiter.com as the permission that we've typically received from the candidates is to deliver to them messages from us or our marketing partners. As a client, you're one of our marketing partners.
5. Design your offer. What is it that you want the candidates to be interested in and what specifically do you want them to do -- reply back with "yes" to receive more information, visit your web site, come to your location to apply, or something else?
6. Test, test, and test again. Nothing is worse than spending your whole budget on a campaign and finding out that you did almost everything well except for one thing and that one thing killed your entire campaign and therefore your entire budget. Allocate a small percentage of your budget to a test. If it works well, allocate a larger percentage. If it doesn't work well, modify your plans and test again.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 21, 2009 at 7:25 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

This is the third in a seven part series. To read the series from the beginning, start with the first article on Mobile Marketing for Recruiters.

Although many recruiters without strong marketing backgrounds may cringe at thinking this way, their desired candidates are their target market. The recruiter, rather than trying to sell a product or service, is trying to market a job opportunity. But regardless of what opportunity is being offered, there's no doubt that most and perhaps virtually all of your target audience uses a mobile device like a cellular phone. And if you think about how you use your phone, you'll understand that your target audience probably also has their phone with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In short, the mobile devices carried and used by your candidates provide you with the ability to reach them anytime and anywhere. No other device is so ubiquitous.

In addition to being able to reach your candidates whenever and wherever they may be, SMS conveys to them that your message is solicited and urgent. Text messages are typically read within 15 minutes of receipt and responded to within 60 minutes. The benefits of mobile marketing to job seekers are:

• You can reach your desired target audience no matter where they are because they carry their phones with them everywhere. No other media has that kind of access to the hearts and minds of its owners.


• You can reach your desired target audience at exactly the moment when you want to. Send an email and it may not be seen for hours or days. Send an SMS and it will be seen within 15 minutes by virtually everyone you sent it to.


• Your message is requested if you use an opt-in list and, because virtually everyone else is too, only about 10 percent of text messages are unsolicited so job seekers will open your text and read it as they'll assume that it isn't spam and therefore important.


• Text messages imply urgency and candidates who feel a sense of urgency are far more likely to apply and apply quickly.


• Mobile marketing allows you to engage with your candidates as they can easily read and respond to your message. You may want them to reply so you can open up a two-way dialogue or you may want them to click through to your web site on their web-enabled phones, but either way they're engaged and engaged candidates make for better candidates.


• Mobile marketing makes it easy to provide personalized treatment to your candidates. Run an ad on TV or in print and everyone who happens to see it will know that thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of others have just seen the same ad. Send a text message to a phone or even hundreds of thousands of phones and the candidate has no way of knowing if they're one of many or the only recipient.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 20, 2009 at 7:11 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I first thought of roadside billboards when I first heard the term mobile marketing. But I've since come to understand that mobile marketing refers not to the mobility of the person seeing the ad but instead to the device on which the ad is displayed. In other words, marketing messages delivered to or even from your cellular telephone are mobile marketing. So what has this got to do with recruiters? Everything.

Over the past decade, email marketing has grown from a curiosity with scum selling hundreds of thousands of email addresses on CD's for $199 to a fast growing, efficient, and economical direct marketing technique. Rather than display your job ad to everyone like you do in a newspaper or even through a job posting ad, email and other forms of direct marketing allow you to target your audience so that your message is only delivered to those of interest to you. Want to hire engineers in Atlanta? Send your ad via email only to engineers in Atlanta rather than running it on a general job board where retail sales reps in Seattle will apply to it or on a niche job board where engineers in Atlanta will apply to it but so will engineers in Seattle.

I'm a big fan of email marketing when it is done ethically with double opt-in lists and skillfully with well constructed messages delivered to properly targeted recipients. But the reality is that email marketing is not the only way to reach job seekers, and perhaps already isn't the best way to reach a large number of highly targeted college students and recent graduates. What has come of age over the past few years is mobile marketing.

Virtually everyone in the U.S. has at least one email address and many have multiple. In just a decade we've gone from being pleasantly surprised when friends, family, and colleagues have email addresses to be shocked when people tell us that they don't. But the experience we have with email in the U.S. is not typical when compared to what is happening elsewhere in the world and, as a result, we can look to those countries for insight as to what we will likely experience here in the not too distant future. Did you know that globally twice as many people use text messaging as those who use email? Did you know there are now 258 million wireless lines in the U.S. and that by 2013 virtually 100 percent of American teens and adults will have their own wireless phone? And did you know that just two years ago in 2007 mobile marketing spending was a mere blip at $1.8 billion but that's expected to grow to $24 billion by 2013? Mobile marketing is booming and the lessons learned from email marketing are keeping mobile marketing cleaner and therefore more productive for those of us who are legitimate marketers.

Over the coming days, I will do my best to define key mobile marketing terms, describe the benefits of mobile marketing programs, walk you through how to start a mobile marketing program, discuss how to integrate your mobile marketing program with your other marketing programs, look at ways to track the effectiveness of your mobile marketing program, and conclude with some tricks and tips. Some of the information that I'll present will be from experiences we've had at CollegeRecruiter.com with delivering cell phone text messaging (sms) and keyword campaigns while some will be from such third party sources as Lyris. But all of it will be written with the needs of the recruiter and hiring manager in mind for their needs are in some ways quite different from the needs of their colleagues in marketing yet in most ways surprisingly similar.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 18, 2009 at 4:31 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Organizations which are in business for the long-term, and virtually all are, need to become environmentally friendly (green) for the generation entering the workforce today places a premium on finding jobs with employers which are green. Gen Y doesn't need to work for wind power companies or other such green industries, but they do want to work for organizations which are striving to make the world a better place.

If your organization is focused much more on short-term financials than long-term sustainability, then the days of your organization are numbered because you won't be able to attract the talent that you'll need in order to compete.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 16, 2009 at 12:50 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most enjoyable blogs to read is the Official Google Blog. It is chock full of fun, interesting, and occasionally useful tidbits of information. Example:

In 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What's New" page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.

Fast-forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google's services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones.

Wow. Maybe this "interweb" thing isn't a fad, after all.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 16, 2009 at 9:47 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There's an interesting discussion going on at ERE about where candidates are going on-line when searching for a job. Caroline Slomski of NAS Recruitment Communications notes that of "all the job searches conducted in December 2008, 42% were conducted through the search engines (Google, Yahoo), 20% on CareerBuilder, 8% on Monster." She then suggested that employers explore pay per click advertising on the search engines as that type of pay for performance recruitment advertising allows employers to only pay for the people who actually click on your ad as impressions are free.

I am a big fan of candidates and employer using the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (the big three) but keep in mind that the bulk of the top results for those searches take candidates to job postings on the job boards. Don't believe me? Go to Google and run a search like a candidate would -- so just a job title and location with no organization name. You'll likely see the first pages completely dominated by the job boards.

So what can employers do about that? Well, force your I.T. staff or ATS vendor to make your pages search engine friendly. There's a ton of great, free content on-line about how to do that so educate yourself about what needs to be done so that you can hold them accountable. If they're not willing or able to get the work done then replace them. This is absolutely mission critical to any organization.

Another option is to run pay per click or pay per lead ads on job boards. Most of the job boards will only run ads on the conventional $x for y days model but some like Indeed, SimplyHired, and CollegeRecruiter.com are happy to run PPC and PPL ads.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 15, 2009 at 10:13 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

While trolling through our site looking for glitches in the new design, I spot checked a small sampling of the hundreds of thousands of postings on our site. One of the postings that I looked at was for a Merchandise Finance Director at Walmart. Click the apply button and you'll be taken to Walmart's career page. None of that is earth shattering.

What caused me to sit up and take notice was that Walmart's career page actually includes a prominent option to create an RSS feed so candidates can have the newest job openings by Walmart delivered to their email program, desktop, or wherever they receive their RSS subscriptions. As explained at Wikipedia, "Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place."

This shouldn't be a difficult or expensive option for any employer yet it is amazing how few corporate career sites include an RSS feed. If your site doesn't have one, tell your I.T. people to add one right away. If they point fingers at your applicant tracking system company, tell them to add one right away. If they tell you they can't, won't, or it is too expensive, find vendor that actually builds a product that is in the best interests of their clients rather than a product that is convenient for them to build or manage.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 15, 2009 at 7:05 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 14, 2009 at 5:13 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Four things that a student can do to find a summer job at the last minute are:

• Call all of your adult family members and friends of your parents. Tell them you're looking for a summer job, what you're good at, and what type of work is of interest to you. Don't ask them for a job. Instead, ask them to give you the names and phone numbers of three people you should call. You've just multiplied your network by three fold. Repeat until someone declines to give you the names and instead gives you a job.
  
• Don't tell people that you're willing to do anything. Focus. Recruiters and hiring managers are turned off by people who are too flexible as it tends to mean they're too desperate and desperate candidates tend to make lousy employees.
  
• Be willing to work for little to no pay in a position which is in line with your career path. Getting experience is incredibly valuable. For money, find a job that pays well even if it isn't of interest to you or in line with your career path. Invest in yourself.
  
• Don't focus your job search efforts on advertised openings as they're only 10 percent of the job openings and 90 percent of candidates spend all of their time applying to advertised jobs. Rather than being in the 90 percent chasing after 10 percent of the jobs, be one of the 10 percent who networks and therefore is chasing after 90 percent of the jobs. Your odds are much better.
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 14, 2009 at 4:23 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

How many organizations truly understand why it is critical in this information age to be open, transparent, and honest? And how many of those actually practice it? If you're in doubt about what it means, read the blog article just posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Operations for Google.

The article admits and describes a serious mistake made by Google. It tells you that the problem has been fixed and that they're confident that it won't recur. Does admitting a mistake make your customers mistrust you? Not anymore. In today's information age, admitting your errors and explaining what you'll do to fix them makes you trusted. Google gets that. Does your organization?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 14, 2009 at 3:35 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

We successfully launched the new, cleaner design for the interior pages of CollegeRecruiter.com earlier this week. We had two columns: the main one for content such as job postings and articles and a much narrower one on the right side (the right rail) for ads and navigation. That right rail had become very cluttered with some ads which were graphical, some graphical and animated, some text, some navigation, and more. Basically, it had become a mess.

We cleaned up the right rail, moved the job search out of the top navigation, added a left rail where we have the search and tile (small) ads from employers, and a few other tweaks here and there. Much better, I think. Do you agree?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 14, 2009 at 1:42 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most anticipated movie releases of the summer is finally here: the new Star Trek movie. It has been generating controversy since plans for it were announced a few years ago. Many Trekkers were outraged when they heard that the film would not include even a cameo by William Shatner but their outrage turned to grief yesterday when they actually watched the film and found it -- shockingly -- entertaining, understandable, and well acted. For those who grew up on the TV series and were devoted to the earlier movies featuring the rapidly and not so gracefully aging cast, the new movie was quite a jolt.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 8, 2009 at 8:41 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

The lowly mobile phone (remember when we all called them cellular phones?) is on the verge of transforming our society. Think back, way back, to 1994. Few had heard of the Internet and those who used it were almost all government or university employees and a sprinkling of early adopters using services such as Prodigy. But then along came Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and billions of web sites and the world was changed. Porn sites and on-line gambling are changes that many would be happy to do without, but the vast majority agree that the Internet has made the world a better informed, more tolerant, and smaller place.

But holding us back is the need to use a computer in order to properly access the Internet. I love the iPhone but let's not confuse the ability to see a web page properly on your mobile device with the ability to properly access the Internet. Few would trade their laptop or desktop computers for an iPhone if that was the only way they could get their work done. So what happens next? What happens when devices like the iPhone and the networks to which they connect actually become good enough that we prefer to access the Internet on our mobile devices? What happens when we can access virtually all of the information ever created by anyone with a device that slips into our pocket and is always with us?

Watch this intriguing five minute video. There's a lot to celebrate and some worries too.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 8, 2009 at 7:04 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

The class of 2009 is graduating into one of the worst job markets in history. Although the class of 2008 had it rough as we were in the early days of a recession, their experiences were not nearly as difficult as their 2009 counterparts.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) just completed its 2009 Student Survey. It shows that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one. In comparison, 51 percent of those graduating in 2007 and 26 percent of those graduating in 2008 who had applied for a job had one in hand by the time of graduation.

Interestingly, fewer 2009 graduates sought out jobs than their predecessors. Approximately 64 percent of the Class of 2007 and two-thirds of the Class of 2008 had started looking for a job by this time. In comparison, "just 59 percent of this year's class has started the job search," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director.

This may be due, in part, to considerable attention to the increase in nationwide unemployment, the global financial crisis of recent months, and the impact of these developments on the recruitment and hiring of new graduates by specific industries.

Data indicate that among specific majors, engineering and accounting graduates are more likely both to have started their job search and to have a job in hand. They are also more likely to accept an offer they received. Additionally, the study shows that liberal arts majors were more likely to turn down the job offers they received.

Salary may have played a role in acceptance of job offers. "On average, engineering graduates expect to earn an annual starting salary of approximately $62,000, while accounting majors expect to earn an average of about $45,000," says Mackes. Those expectations match up fairly well with the reality. In a separate survey, NACE has found that salary offers to engineering graduates average more than $58,000, while the average offer to accounting graduates exceeds $48,000.

Despite the lack of jobs, "most respondents say they expect to enter the job market. Surprisingly, at this time we do not see a strong indication of increases in the number of students planning to go to graduate school," says Mackes. Approximately 24 percent of Class of 2008 graduates reported plans to forego the job market in favor of graduate school, while approximately 27 percent of those graduating in 2009 report such plans.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 7, 2009 at 1:12 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Yesterday wasn't one of my better days. I hurt my left shoulder last November and didn't realize that it was bad until December. I was traveling but made an appointment to see my physician upon my return in January. The diagnosis was damage to the rotator cuff and the prescribed treatment was a cortisone injection. That's when things started going downhill. The pain increased, my ability to exercise decreased, and the days grew into weeks which grew into months.

Here we are almost seven months later. There's been a steady and unwelcome increase in the pain and my frustration with being physically unable to do basic household tasks. Three months of physical therapy, a lot of icing, more pain relievers than I care to admit, and four cortisone shots haven't done the trick. My surgery is scheduled for May 26th but I wish it were this afternoon. The surgeon told me yesterday that I've probably got a four to six week recovery after the surgery but if there is a hole in the rotator cuff muscle then I'm looking at four to six months. I'm generally an optimist but after everything that I've tried and suffered through with this injury, I can't help but be pessimistic and that got me pretty down yesterday afternoon and evening.

My best friend, Sid Levin, emailed me a link yesterday to a blog article about his family. I didn't want to read it when I was feeling so glum so saved it for this morning. I should have read it yesterday. It would have given me the boost that I needed but better late than never.

If you're looking for a boost or just enjoy a feel good story about how wonderful kids tend to be, then read the story about how Sid's family spent six hours in their minivan driving from Minneapolis to the Superior National Forest up in northeastern Minnesota, planted hundreds of trees over a couple of days, and then drove back. This is a story about a husband and wife who love each other deeply and who are blessed to have four wonderful and very unique kids. This is a story about Mitch Levin, a kid who knows everything about baseball and who is about to become a Bar Mitzvah yet chose to spend a weekend in a minivan with his three younger siblings and parents and out in the cold woods planting trees so that future generations will be able to enjoy one of the most tranquil and beautiful places in the world as much as he, his parents, and his grandparents have. This is a story that I needed to hear.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 7, 2009 at 10:53 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm getting excited about my trip in two weeks to Las Vegas to attend the western regional conference for the International Association of Employment Web Sites the first day and then Kennedy Information's Recruiting Conference 2009 and Expo on May 20th and 21st. Kennedy also has pre- and post-conference days on May 19th and 22nd but I won't be able to attend those.

Kennedy Information hosts events that recruiters, HR, and talent management professionals travel far and wide to attend because they always provide fresh approaches to old and new problems from delivering brand experience to discovering actionable strategies for developing and integrating a workforce focused on driving performance at the individual level -- Kennedy's expert speakers promise invaluable advice you'll revert to time and time again, throughout 2009... advice that will help you advance your career despite a slowing economy.

This spring's conference is comprised of more than 25 sessions, six targeted tracks (Healthcare, Recruiting, Tools, Sourcing, Hospitality, Legal), three workshops, five intensives, a Sourcing Summit, and over 50 expert speakers. I'm fortunate to be one of those speakers as I'll be serving on moderator Gerry Crispin's green recruiting panel.

I've talked with a number of human resource leaders about their attendance at conferences and all of them have told me that they aren't able to attend as many as they'd like because of budgets. Kennedy did something brilliant. Attend the conference at the Mirage and they'll pay for your hotel room for up to four nights. Sweet.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 6, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Despite the weak economy, I am discovering that some employers are having significant new challenges with their recruiting. Two weeks ago I presented at the Campus Recruiting Forum in Chicago and heard some interesting comments from some of the employers there about the challenges of recruiting in this economy.

Some referenced the fact that they are still hiring students, but that they're expected to do so with a much smaller budget. Others mentioned that many highly qualified students appear to be avoiding the job search process altogether because they have heard such discouraging reports about the job market. The career center reps at the Forum echoed this sentiment and said they should be busier than ever helping students in this market, but the students are not coming -- they've given up!

But the biggest challenge seems to be regarding hiring the right candidate -- one who will stick around when the economy turns around. On the one hand, employers are thrilled to have great candidates available, but on the other hand they are worried that these candidates will be difficult to retain when jobs become more plentiful.

When the market is changing like this, I can't emphasize enough the value of participating in conferences and other opportunities to share with other organizations -- competitors or otherwise. If you are interested in learning more about how to succeed with your recruiting in this economy, I strongly recommend that you attend the next Campus Recruiting Forum. It takes place in LA on May 28th. The employers at the Chicago one seemed to love the event, I'm sure the LA one will be just as good.

CollegeRecruiter.com is proud to be a sponsor of the Forum. In fact, as a sponsor, I am able to give you this special discount code, CRC241. You can use it to save $50 on one registration OR use it to get 2 registrations (for you and a colleague) for the regular rate of 1 registration (save more then $500!). Full details are here: www.CampusRecruitingForum.com.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 4, 2009 at 6:27 PM | Leave a Comment (2)