Know of anyone who is looking for a well paying, legitimate, home-based, media sales opportunity? CollegeRecruiter.com is hiring inside sales representatives to sell recruitment advertising such as targeted email campaigns, cell phone text messaging campaigns, job postings, and banner ads to our employer clients.
Despite the generally negative economy and decline in overall employment in the United States during the first quarter of 2008, job-seeking seniors found a relatively robust job market, according to results of NACE's 2008 Graduating Student Survey.
The survey, which was conducted February - April 2008, found:
The findings from NACE are consistent with what we at CollegeRecruiter.com have been hearing from the candidates using our site and our employer clients. There are many firms who are no longer hiring and some which are laying off but for every one of those there seems to be another organization that has started or increased their hiring of college students and recent graduates. The result is a flat job market as compared to 2007. Not up and not down but flat.
Fewer grads are reporting receiving multiple offers but they're also telling us that they're more inclined to accept the first offer they receive quickly so fewer grads are in a position to receive multiple offers. If the economy were stronger, they'd likely be more confident about holding out for the best match and therefore more likely to receive multiple offers.
At the end of the day, there seems to be equilibrium. There seems to be about the right number and quality of positions available for the students and grads who are properly seeking them. Note the use of the word "properly." When I hear from students who are really discouraged in their job hunt, I almost always learn that they are doing little to no networking and what networking they may be doing isn't really networking at all. They're hiding behind their computers and applying to advertised jobs day after day. When they do, ahem, network it is only to ask others to help them find a job. That isn't networking. Networking is about asking what you can do for others knowing that at some point some of them will do the same for you. But don't start off asking them to do you a favor.
College students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs often have questions about when and how they should broach the subject of salary with a potential employer. One of the greatest blogs for this audience, Newly Corporate, has some great advice: don't. Wait until the employer asks you.
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:
Continue reading "Sure College Students Are Entrepreneurial But Where Can They Get Funding?" »
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.
Continue reading "We're Helping College Students and Grads Get LinkedIn" »
A tip of the hat to Julie Hays Bartimus, Vice President of the Alumni Career Center for the University of Illinois Alumni Association. She tipped me off to a blog article by Business Week's Stephen Baker about resumes and word clouds.
Run your resume, job posting ad, or any other document through word cloud (a/k/a tag cloud) software. The software extracts unique words from the document and increases the size of each word the more often it is used. So the most frequently used words appear as the largest clouds while the least frequently used words appear as the smallest clouds.
One of the most frequent statements that we hear from frustrated job seekers is that employers are rejecting their applications because they lack experience. The job seekers typically wonder how it is that they can get experience if no one will hire them.
The answer to that conundrum is that the job seekers should get the experience they need outside of the job market. Instead of looking for someone to pay you and to give you the experience you need, instead look for someone who will only give you the experience you need. That's right, work for free. Volunteer.
But what about those who are employed and struggling to advance? Their paths are frequently blocked or at least delayed by their lack of experience. If their employer won't give them the experience they need in order to earn the sought after promotion, how can they obtain the promotion? Again, work for free. Volunteer.
Continue reading "No Experience? Volunteer. Even After Being Hired." »
Ryan Healy at Employee Evolution just posted a very thought provoking blog article for Gen Y employees about how they can become leaders in their organizations. Healy offers four tips:
Continue reading "How and Whether to Make a 22 Year Old Your Leader" »
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:
Continue reading "How Students and Recent Grads Can Get More Job Interviews" »
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.
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
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.
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.
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 guess yesterday's blog entry in which I asked why more college students and recent graduates don't use business networking site LinkedIn really hit a nerve. As of 9pm CT tonight, I've received six comments to the blog entry when most blog entries don't receive any comments and about twice as many via email.
The consensus seems to be that most don't use it because they don't know about it. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are known and used by almost all college students and recent graduates so that's where the buzz has been but few college career service office professionals use LinkedIn so aren't able to teach their students how to use it. Kennedy Information's free LinkedIn webinar on March 4th should fill in a few of those gaps. But the bottom line is that so far few college students use it so there's little viral spread on campus like there is amongst recruiters, sales people, and other professionals. Hopefully that will change.
But college students and recent graduates who are looking for a connection into an industry, organization, or department will find few tools as powerful as LinkedIn. I have a couple of thousand connections so am only a few degrees removed from virtually everyone who is part of LinkedIn. Want to become part of my network? My pleasure. Join here.
I had the pleasure of speaking to about 75 students and staff at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York earlier this week. I was invited by the school to talk with the students about how employers are using the web to both include and exclude them from the hiring process. What an impressive group of students.
During the hour long and very interactive discussion we talked how many Gen Y'ers thinks nothing of posting photos and other information to sites such as Facebook and MySpace under the mistaken impression that employers either can't see it or won't care about it. I showed some examples of students using the web to enhance their employment opportunities and others who are killing their chances because of what they've posted on-line. We also talked about what candidates can do to remove harmful information that they've posted or which has been posted by others and to bury information that can't be removed.
Interesting take on the work habits of Millennials over at the Life Before Noon blog. Author Carla Blumenthal praises her Millennial generation for being diverse, multitasking, tech-savvy individuals who love teamwork, are optimistic, and determined. But she's candid about the faults of her generation as well:
In class work, internship and job hunting we often wish for things to happen instead of actually trying. We think about doing something, talk about it with every possible adviser and then try. I spend more time making to-do lists, thinking and talking about the work I have to do than actually doing work. My friends and I often talk about the future, internships, job hunting, and applications more than we actually complete them.
Continue reading "Millennials Need to Try Less and Do More" »
In a development that must be causing fits of alarm in human resource offices everywhere, it appears that some college students and recent graduates are using cell phone text message (SMS) abbreviations and gaming slang in their job applications. This development has prompted some employers and education institutions to provide these candidates with special courses in written communication.
Now I can understand why I'd want to c if u or my bff r ok using abbreviations, but candidates of all ages need to appreciate that they need to demonstrate that they're the most highly qualified candidate for the job and to do that they need to speak the language used by the employer. It is most likely that the application will be reviewed by a Gen X'er or Baby Boomer and few of those understand SMS abbreviations and even fewer like to use them. So the best strategy is to use the abbreviations with your bff, but not with your potential employer.
1. Request more face-to-face meetings.
2. Step up your job-search activity.
3. Try to be as flexible as you can.
Great advice from Liz Handlin in a blog entry recently posted via free content distribution site RecruitingBlogswap.com to the American Forklift Safety blog:
[F]ind a job you love working for people you admire and then work your rear end off. In other words: be strategic about your career and work really hard when you find the right job. If you have a job that you are great at and you are happy in your work environment you will have the energy left to push yourself in other parts of your life (run marathons for example) and you will naturally behave with kindness toward others. Generally speaking it's the unhappy achievers who aren't very nice to be around.
More than four of five hiring managers are willing to view a video resumes according to a survey by HireMeNow.com. Of the 300 human resource and hiring managers, 83 percent indicated that they would view a video resume.
The survey also asked respondents how many minutes long a video resume should be. Some 78 percent said less than two minutes and a plurality preferred under one minute:
I just read a great blog article at Bootstrapper, a resource for any small business owner operating on a shoestring budget, and provides tips on financing, cash flow, low-cost marketing and small business loans. They posted a list of more than 50 tools for candidates to change their career paths by helping those job seekers find the best careers for them and how they can get there.
The article is divided into sections for assessment, career exploration, advice, getting (re)hired, and transitioning. Want a taste? Here's what they wrote about assessment:
Want to find a great new job quickly? Experts will tell you that your chances of success increase dramatically if you invest time on the front end doing some research into the appropriate industry, the organizations within that industry, the departments within those organizations, and the hiring managers within those departments.
But once you've identified those targets, how do you get those targets to pay attention to you? One way is to blog about them. Create a blog on CollegeRecruiter.com or other sites that provide free blogging space for candidates and write a series of short articles about the industry, the organization you're targeting, their vendors, their suppliers, etc. Prove to the hiring managers and other decision makers that you care deeply about their organization and that you can do and have done the work.
As reported by Karen Burns, University of Missouri student Andrew Cafourek used a blog to land a job with a marketing firm in St Louis. If he did, why not you too?
A recent study indicates that 21 percent of college admissions offices admit to searching social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as part of the process of deciding whether to admit a potential student. I suspect that the real percentage is actually much higher.
My conversations with employers and other career professionals indicate that about five to 10 percent of employers admit to searching the social networking sites as part of their background checking process yet when you ask if they use the Internet for the checks at least 75 percent say yes and then explain they run the candidate's name through Google. Well, then that means that they're also checking the vast majority of social networking sites.MySpace, for example, defaults so that pages are not password protected and therefore when an employer searches Google they're also searching MySpace. Facebook is the opposite in that pages are by default not accessible to search engines.
Continue reading "College Admissions Offices Using Facebook" »
We've all heard the stories about how social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook can be dangerous to job seekers when those people post on-line what most people would deem to be embarrassing photos or stories about themselves. After all, what employer is going to trust the judgment of a candidate who posts a MySpace page about herself and uses it to brag about how she likes to get drunk and have sex with strangers?
But what about candidates who make their political beliefs known in a low key way? One of the basic questions that Facebook asks, for example, is your political orientation. Your options include very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, apathetic, liberatarian, and other. Unless you change your default settings, which most don't, your choice shows up for all to see. But what if your employer or potential employer sees your choice?
Continue reading "Employers Looking at Political Orientation" »
Imagine that you're at 27 year old student days away from graduating from the School of Education at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and you're at a party, have a photo taken of you wearing a pirate hat and sipping from a plastic cup, and you post it to your MySpace page with the caption, "drunken pirate," and then your school refuses to aware you the degree in education and the teaching certificate that comes along with it. Fair? Not according to Stacy Snyder.
Millersville administrators, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the image of a 27 year old wearing a funny hat and drinking out of a plastic cup on her own time was somehow "unprofessional" so they essentially barred her from earning a living in her chosen profession and instead awarded her a degree in English. No word on what punishment they've handed out to faculty who have been photographed wearing fancy hats and drinking fine wine out of crystal glasses.
Continue reading "Student Denied Degree Due to MySpace Photo" »
Tuesday's Dr. Phil Show spotlighted Facebook group 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night. It is one of the largest Facebook groups with 175,000 members.
The basic idea of the group is for female members to upload to Facebook photos of themselves after they've gotten drunk. Many of the photos are pretty harmless and just show a group of friends smiling and laughing. Few would object to those.
Continue reading "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night" »
One of my favorite corporate recruiters is Mark Liston of Valpak. He's a fountain of energy and passion and cares deeply about his work and the people that he serves. And Mark understands that the people that he serves include but are not confined to his superiors at Valpak. They also include the Millennial college students and recent graduates that Valpak recruits for some of the best entry level sales opportunities in the land.
Well, the blog article that Mark posted yesterday was typical Mark. Some stream of consciousness mixed in with a lot of great, practical advice. Including what he refers to as the ABC's: "Always . . . Be . . . Coachable."
Six unionized members of an industrial plant ridiculed their supervisor on Facebook. The derogatory postings were made using personal equipment during personal hours. The employer moved to terminate them. Their union stepped in and saved their jobs but two of the employees ended up with one-week suspensions and the other four received letters of reprimand in their personnel files. Ridiculous? Not even the union would say so.
"This is a growing problem and employees have to be very, very careful of what they do," said Robert Ziegler, president of Local 832 United Food and Commercial Workers in Winnipeg, Canada. "This all falls into the category of off-duty conduct and under precedent and case law, all that can be held against you and our members can be disciplined and even fired. If an employer can prove that anything you've done affects the reputation of the company or created an atmosphere where other workers will not want to work with you, then the employer can discipline that employee," added Ziegler.
Keep in mind that this case arose in in Canada where labor laws are more socialist than they are in the United States. Also keep in mind that these statements are being made by a union official. There's no doubt, folks, that statements made on-line on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc. have the potential of negatively affecting the reputation of employers and if an employee makes such a statement, they can be disciplined or even terminated.
One of the reasons that I love working and hanging out with national account executive Mike Palmquist is that he's got a great sense of humor. For example, he loves the killer rabbit scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Live. So it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise to me that he found a career-related blog article that used that scene as an analogy by comparing co-workers to killer rabbits.
How can co-workers be like killer rabbits? Well, they come into your life as seemingly harmless and even friendly but then morph into horrible and frightening creatures. Unless you're an incredible judge of character, and most of us think we are but actually aren't, take it slow so that you can better understand if they're a mere rabbit or a killer rabbit.
By Tahjia Chapman
Marketing yourself and your e-portfolio (also known as a personal portfolio) is one career goal worth planning. If you want to get your dream job, place your e-portfolio before prospective employers and possible clients. You may not be familiar with internet marketing, but we have you covered. We have compiled a list of the top five methods of increasing traffic, visibility, and importance of an e-portfolio for recent college grads and students. You must work on these tips to build a foundation then add more link building strategies for more exposure.
Why should you focus on marketing your e-portfolio?
Your e-portfolio is one marketing tool that sells your skills to an employer. An e-portfolio places you before an audience with information of who you are, why they should know, and how they can contact you for job interviews. It is important to use your e-portfolio as an introduction for prospective employers by placing your most valuable work before their eyes. The marketing plan for your e-portfolio will include all five marketing strategies to gain interests from future employers.
One of the greatest experiences that a college student or recent graduate can have is to work abroad. I had the good fortune of doing so immediately upon graduation from high school and then again after my sophomore year in college.
During the latter period, I hooked up with friends from London, England that I had met during my first work abroad experience. I was able to stay and hang out with them during the evenings and weekends while during the day I worked in London.
But what if you don't know anyone in the city you want to work in? Thanks to the Internet, it is now just about as easy to connect with employers in world class cities like London as it is in the city in which you currently reside. If you have a chance to work at a job in London, grab it. It will be one of the greatest times of your life.
I just returned from two recruiting conferences in Orlando. Both were fantastic. The first was organized by Kennedy Information and was attended by about 500 human resource professionals, most of whom were corporate recruiters. While at the conference I had the pleasure of meeting several senior Wal-Mart recruiting professionals and learned not only just how big of an employer Wal-Mart is but also just how great a place it is to start a career.
We all know that Wal-Mart is big. In fact, really big. But I had no idea that it employed 1.3 million people just in the USA. That's about one out of every 250 people people. Yikes. In addition to those folks, they also employ about 600,000 more worldwide for a total of about 1.9 million. The company's sales are $345 billion per year.
Think their head count and revenue numbers are big? Fast forward to 2012 when Wal-Mart projects worldwide employment of 2.5 million and sales of $500 billion.
So how does this fit with college recruiting when all of their employees are stocking shelves or running cash registers. The answer is they aren't. In addition to the thousands of people working outside of the stores in logistics, information technology, finance, marketing, etc., about 75 percent of their store managers started as hourly employees. That's right. About 75 percent. So if you're in college and want a career in management, consider working for Wal-Mart part-time while you're in school as there's a good chance that upon graduation they'll have a management position waiting for you.
Great blog article at MNHeadhunter.com about do's and don't's for resume writing and also this tip for how to think of them:
"The best use of a resume is as a really large business card--a leave-behind after you have interviewed a potential employer."
It has been pretty well documented that about 75 percent of employers admit to looking at information that candidates post to Facebook, MySpace, and other web pages as part of the hiring process. In other words, today’s college students and recent graduates are often finding in their race to find career opportunities that the finish line is being blocked by the risqué photos or stories about drunken parties that they or their friends posted on-line. What has not been as well documented is that the this same generation is often finding that the starting line is also blocked.
A recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth found that 25 percent of college admissions offices admit to using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN to research potential students and that 20 percent look for the same information on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The reality is that the percentages must be even higher because colleges and universities have little incentive to overstate their reliance on these digital dirt web searches but they have a significant incentive to understate their use due to a fear of negative public relations and likely backlash from many Gen Y candidates who view information that they post to MySpace and some of the other social networking sites as somehow being private even though it is accessible through a quick Google search.
Front page news in the Minneapolis newspapers over the past couple of days has been the killing of Katherine Ann Olson. While any murder is tragic, this one is noteworthy to employers and job seekers alike because it appears to be related to the victim's use of Craiglist to find a nanny position.
Ms. Olson was looking for a nanny job. She had successfully used Craigslist before and so searched it again. She found an ad of interest responded. She told her roommate that she was going to meet the family from the ad. After she didn't come home, police initiated a search and found her dead in the trunk of her car at a park in Burnsville, Minnesota late Friday night.
A tip of the hat to my friend and Recruiting Roadshow Unconference buddy, Ami Givertz, for alerting me (and other readers of his blog) to a great YouTube video that explains how social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace can help people find new jobs, mates, and other connections.
If Web 2.0 is all about making existing web sites work properly and Web 1.0 was all about getting web sites on-line, then Web 0.0 must have been college job fairs. Technologically advanced they are not, yet don't infer from my sarcasm that I dislike college job fairs. To the contrary, I am in favor of employers and candidates using a variety of methods to connect with each other. No serious marketer should put all of their eggs in one basket regardless of the success of that basket as there is a huge difference between success and exclusive success. In other words, there are normally multiple strategies that should be employed when marketing a product, service, employment opportunity, or your own services so don't rely exclusively on job boards, newspaper ads, on-campus recruiting, referrals, or job fairs.
Continue reading "Job Fairs: Tips for Finding an Internship or Entry Level Job" »
Content provided by EssayEdge.com.
Graduate School Statement Samples
This section contains five sample graduate school personal statements:
My freshman year at Harvard, I was sitting in a Postcolonial African Literature class when Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o (the influential Kenyan author) succeeded in attracting me to the study of African literature through nothing more than a single sentence. He argued that, when a civilization adopts reading and writing as the chief form of social communication, it frees itself to forget its own values, because those values no longer have to be part of a lived reality in order to have significance. I was immediately fascinated by the idea that the written word can alter individual lives, affect one's identity, and perhaps even shape national identity.
Professor Ngugi's proposal forced me to think in a radically new way: I was finally confronted with the notion of literature not as an agent of vital change, but as a potential instrument of stasis and social stagnancy. I began to question the basic assumptions with which I had, until then, approached the field. How does "literature" function away from the written page, in the lives of individuals and societies? What is the significance of the written word in a society where the construction of history is not necessarily recorded or even linear?
Just when you think you've seen it all, you're sent an email by Ami alerting you to a candidate who uses her MySpace blog to, ahem, expose not only her employment qualifications but also her under cleavage.
Continue reading "Under Cleavage Is Not Appreciated by Employers" »
Given that CollegeRecruiter.com is a leading job board for students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities, most of what we focus on when we're looking at social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are issues related to careers. But colleges and university students are discovering that the information that they post on-line is not private even if they think that it should be and even if the web site has privacy settings.
A tip of the hat to Charles Cassells for alerting me that Oxford University is investigating what appear to be fairly petty crimes using Facebook. The video of just under three minutes shows a student upset that her school would use photos that she felt would be private and that there would be consequences to her law breaking behavior even though university officials did not witness the crimes first hand. Hopefully she'll become a little wiser through this experience. I've said it before and I'll say it again: posting any information on-line anywhere is like getting a tattoo. There's nothing inherently wrong with it but you have to realize that once you've done it, it is permanent and you won't always be able to control who sees it or how they will react to it.
A month ago I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Wagner of Accord Management Systems at the Valpak annual conference. He and I were there to speak to their 300 franchisees. Bill did a masterful job of explaining to the franchisees why they should hire as independent sales representatives people who are entrepreneurial. He also discussed with some candor their strengths and weaknesses, explained what makes them tick, and why they are able to start businesses while others simply dream.
If your entrepreneurial or merely wondering if you are, then pick up a copy of Bill's book, The Entrepreneur Next Door: Discover the Secrets to Financial Independence. You won't be sorry.
Dave Lefkow, formerly of Jobster, then his own consulting firm, TalentSpark, and now Bacon Salt entrepreneur, is featured prominently in this television interview about on-line recruiting.
The piece covers the gamut from revenues earned by job boards last year ($1.3 billion) to tips about how to find candidates or employers on-line including in virtual worlds such as Second Life. One great tip: if you're pulling a virtual resume out of your virtual pocket to hand to a virtual recruiter, make sure that you don't instead pull out a virtual beer.
Continue reading "Job Board Revenues and Second Life Recruiting" »
What horror stories have you heard about or perhaps even happened to you as a result of information that was posted to blogs or social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook?
One of the worst that I've heard was from a friend of mine who was hiring a technology sales representative. He ran a Google search on her name after he and everyone else at his firm had decided they wanted to hire her. Although she had been careful not to include her name on her page, her friends weren't so smart and created a link from her name on their pages to the candidate's MySpace profile page. Google is smart enough to have understood that although the candidate's MySpace page didn't have her name on it, because her friends linked using her name that people searching for the candidate by name will want to go to the candidate's MySpace page.
The problem wasn't that she had a MySpace page. The problem was that the content indicated that she likes to get drunk and have sex with strangers. My friend declined to extend the job offer to her not because of that (he doubted she'd get drunk and have sex while on the job) but because her posting of that information on-line indicated a lack of good judgment.
Continue reading "MySpace and Facebook Career Horror Stories" »
Thanks to our recently implemented partnership with CareerTV, we're able to bring the users of CollegeRecruiter.com so truly fantastic career-related videos. One of my favorites is Internships Rock, which explain the importance of internships and how to find them. If you're a college student searching for an internship or even a recent graduate trying to bolster your experience through a post-graduate internship, you'll want to invest the few minutes it takes to watch this great video.
Because of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, a growing number of mortgage and finance professionals are hitting the streets, looking for jobs. Yet, these layoff victims largely lack the most important career skill of all: How to market themselves.
"The moves most mortgage and financial professionals have made to advance their careers to this point are probably exactly the wrong things they should do to find work in the current job market," cautions recruiting professional David Perry, managing director of Ottawa, Ontario-based Perry-Martel International.
Here are 3 typical wrong moves most mortgage/finance job seekers are making now:
Continue reading "Help for the Mortgage / Finance Job Market" »
For many, one of the least enjoyable aspects about post-secondary education and the years immediately following it is finding a new place to live. When I moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota, I moved every year for five successive years. Now all of that moving does have some benefits. Boxes which were not opened two moves in a row somehow found their way to the nearest dumpster. If I didn't need the stuff in two places, I wouldn't need it in the third and I certainly wouldn't want to have to move it the third time.
Conventional wisdom in these digital days is that your resume should be written in a standard fashion so that employers can easily add it to their automated applicant tracking systems and then pull it up through a keyword search. But what if you're not a conventional candidate or otherwise want to stand out from the crowd? Some job seekers who fall into those groups are creating resumes with aesthetic features that highlight their creativity, attention to detail, or otherwise are designed to draw the attention of the employer.
Examples of what job seekers are using are:
Continue reading "Special Looking Resumes: Pain or Panacea?" »
We launched our second Facebook application late last week and we've already got about 225 installations. But that's not all that interesting. Want interesting? Read on.
Facebook applications allow third parties such as CollegeRecruiter.com to add features to Facebook so that its million of users can customize what they see and use when they go to Facebook. Think of them like computer programs that you download to your computer. Each person works differently so we each have our computers set up differently. Facebook recognized that desire for customization and a couple of months ago they created the applications section.
Our first application was essentially a (yawn!) job search engine. Practical but not exactly exciting. The second has a similar front end but features two improvements, one minor and the other major:
Want to see on your Facebook profile page the newest internship and entry level job postings in your area of interest and state? Add our brand new Facebook application and we'll do just that. Essentially, we'll keep an eye out for you for the newest internships and entry level jobs so that you don't even have to come to CollegeRecruiter.com -- you just need to go to Facebook to keep an eye out for jobs that you want to apply to before anyone else.
Posting information about yourself on-line is like getting a tattoo: there's nothing inherently wrong with either but you just have to realize that both are permanent even with expensive surgery. Sure you can try to erase the information by removing it from your Facebook or MySpace page but if those pages are indexed by Google or other search engines or copied and posted to another page or web site, then you've lost the ability to ever permanently remove the information. So before posting information about yourself on-line, ask yourself if you would feel comfortable sharing the same information with your favorite grandmother. If so, then you're probably safe.
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