CollegeRecruiter.com Blog

One Speaker and Exhibitor's Impression of OnRec / Kennedy Information 2009 Fall Conference

2009-11-04T21:46:05Z

I had the good fortune of attending the OnRec / Kennedy Information recruiting conference in Chicago this week. I was both a panelist on a session about how employers can use mobile marketing for recruiting and CollegeRecruiter.com had a booth in the exhibit room. The session was well attended and seemed to be well received by the attendees. Most had little to no experience with cell phone text messaging, keyword advertising, mobile web sites, or any other components of mobile marketing. Virtually all, however, seemed to realize that the future of on-line recruiting will be on web-enabled mobile phones. My experience as an exhibitor was mixed. I attended the show with Caddy Rowland, our director of sales for employment marketing. Only a handful of large employers visited our booth and several of them were already clients. We love when current clients visit us as it provides them and us with a wonderful opportunity to share information. New clients are also wanted by exhibitors and that's where the show was quite disappointing. There were only a couple of potentially large clients who visited our booth. We had thought we'd meet with a dozen or two. On the other hand, there were a large number of existing and potential partners at the show so I was kept busy and should be able to leverage the show quite well by enhancing some existing partnerships and creating new ones. So, will we exhibit again next year? Almost certainly. Do we expect and hope to do more business next year? Also almost certainly.

Report: 2009 Grads Who Interned 64% More Likely to Have Received Permanent Job Offers

2009-10-30T17:48:05Z

It is probably of no surprise to anyone involved in college recruiting that new college graduates who had internships prior to or even after graduation fared far better in their efforts to find permanent employment after graduation than did their counterparts who didn't intern. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) just released its 2009 Student Survey. The report shows that just 19.7 percent of the Class of 2009 who had applied for jobs had one by the end of April. As dismal as that one in five percent may be, it was even worse for those who had not completed an internship. Just 14 percent of those landed jobs as of April as compared to 23 percent of their classmates who had interned. In other words, completing an internship prior to graduation made members of this year's class 64 percent more likely to land a permanent job by graduation.]]> "It's not surprising that employers look first to their interns -- who have a track record with the company -- when they have jobs to fill," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. But students need to remember that an internship with an organization does not automatically lead to an offer for permanent employment with that organization. Although more than half of the seniors who responded to NACE's survey reported having completed an internship, just under one-quarter received a job offer from the organization for which they interned. "The Class of 2009 saw significant cuts in hiring, and even an internship is not a guarantee of a job offer," says Mackes. "However, the numbers show that, especially in a tough job market, the student who has an internship has a distinct advantage over students who don't have that experience."

Another Job Board Hacked

2009-10-29T15:42:41Z

The job board operated by U.K. newspaper The Guardian was reportedly hacked this past weekend and about 500,000 resumes and other information valuable to identity theft scum walked out the door. The response from The Guardian? Pathetic. They recommended that their users buy fraud prevention services. I wouldn't be surprised if The Guardian received commissions on the sale of those services, which would make this intolerable situation even worse as The Guardian would be profiting off of the inadequate security measures that it chose to put into place. A number of job boards have been hacked and many, many more will be. The information contained in a job seeker registration is quite valuable to those who want to profit by stealing the identity of others. Many job seekers include their entire work history, educational background, contact information, and even social security numbers. Anyone with access to that information can take out a credit card in your name and then use that card to fraudulently buy products. They're stealing from the retailers in some cases and the banks in many other cases, but they're also stealing from the job seeker even if the job seeker ends up not being saddled with the bill because the fraud will inevitably harm the credit score of the job seeker.]]> first major job board to kill its resume searching tool. The risk of hacking and identity theft is too great and increasing. Job boards cannot properly secure their resume banks while at the same time making them easy to log into for their employer clients. When I.T.'s security interests are pitted against marketing's sales interests, guess who tends to win? The International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS) meets next week in Chicago. Hopefully this issue will (again) be raised and hopefully more job boards will choose to follow our lead. We followed the lead of RecruitingNevada.com. A representative from that site talked about how and why they never allowed resume searching. I was convinced their approach was correct so we killed resume searching shortly afterward.

5 Advantages of Attending Brand-Name College

2009-10-29T12:00:00Z

Attending a name-brand college or university will give you the following professional advantages over those who attended schools which are less well known:

It will be easier for you to get interviews and job offers at prestigious big companies.
Big companies will offer you more favorable starting positions and higher salaries.
People at big companies will have a more positive initial impression of you even if they haven't yet seen your work.
It will be easier for you to get involved in a more promising start-up company.
It will be easier for you to get admitted into name-brand graduate schools.

Source: Philip Guo, Ph.D. student studying computer science at Stanford University and previously an undergraduate and master's student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hispanics Respond to Cell Phone Ads 5-10 Times More Than On-line Ads

2009-10-28T12:33:42Z

One of the under reported aspects of cell phone text messaging (SMS) and other forms of mobile marketing is that it is not a level playing field. The conventional wisdom is that younger people tend to use their cell phones more and be more receptive to receiving ads on them than older people. While that is certainly true, there are also significant socioeconomic and racial differences in usage. One of the key reasons that Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and then John McCain in the general election is that Obama had an extremely well thought out and integrated mobile marketing strategy. Clinton and McCain did not. Obama understood that it wasn't just the key demographic group Gen Y who used their cell phones more than the average eligible voter, but also the African-Americans and Hispanics. A year after the election, it is hard to remember that our first African-American president did not have the support of African-Americans early in the primaries. Clinton did. So Obama needed a way to reach and get out the vote amongst his supporters and part of that strategy was sending his message to the only device that we almost all carry around everywhere we go: cell phones.]]> Mobile Marketer, entrants could win a trip for two anywhere in the world, worth some $2,500, by submitting a video and what they missed most about going back home. United ran ads on TV, on-line banners, search engine ads, out-of-home, radio, and mobile -- both SMS and WAP. The result? Their interactive ads (mobile and on-line) were more effective than their off-line ads but, most interestingly, the mobile ads were five-to-ten times more effective than on-line advertising. If you're looking for a cost-effective way of reaching Gen Y, African-Americans, or Hispanic-Americans, look no further than cell phone text messaging and other forms of mobile marketing. We've delivered hundreds of successful mobile marketing campaigns for our clients and know, like Obama and United, that mobile has come of age.

Free Admission to OnRec / Kennedy Information Recruiting Conference

2009-10-27T14:52:48Z

OnRec and Kennedy Information have teamed up to produce one of the biggest recruiting events of the year. The OnRec and Kennedy Recruiting Expo is being held in Chicago from Monday, November 2nd through Wednesday, November 3rd, 2009. Monday is a pre-conference workshop day but veterans of these recruiting events know that the information they glean in the workshops is often priceless. One of the innovative strategies that OnRec and Kennedy Information have adopted is to make the event accessible even to those who cannot get to the conference in Chicago through the Virtual OnRec Recruiting Expo produced by HR.com - completely online from your desktop. We invite you to attend the upcoming Virtual OnRec Kennedy Recruiting Expo 2009 for free. The regular price to attend is $150 per day so that's pretty sweet. ]]> link and enter your information. An access link will be emailed to you on the morning of the day you have selected to attend, just prior to the conference opening.

Video: Overview of CollegeRecruiter.com for Advertisers

2009-10-27T12:25:59Z

Free Job Posting Options Slowly Taking Root

2009-10-26T13:07:02Z

A question was recently posted to one of the discussion lists operated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The college career service office professional started by writing that she remembers from the Golden Parachute books that about 10 percent of job openings were advertised and then asked if that number was still correct. I suspect that the percentages must be far higher now because virtually every organization of any size has a web site and the cost of publishing a job to those web sites is essentially zero. In addition, there are a number of high traffic job board which accept postings for free, including Indeed, SimplyHired, and most of the Craigslist sites. Then there are sites such as LinkUp, which takes postings from many corporate employer sites and aggregates them so they're all available in one place. Of course, virtually every posting everywhere is also a click away at search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In addition, employers who want to post their jobs to CollegeRecruiter.com may now choose to pay $175 for 60 days or pay only when they receive qualified applications under our new pay-per-resume job posting option. My best guess is that about 75 percent of job openings are now advertised, although many of those are advertised for free. From the perspective of the candidate, whether a job posting is paid for or free isn't very important.

Four Tips for Reaching College Students Through Email Marketing

2009-10-23T14:02:25Z

Email marketing is regarded by many as the real killer application when it comes to social networking. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and the other so-called titans of social media have no where near the number of users and amount of usage as does email. It is amazing that in just a couple of decades, we've gone from a world where the vast majority could email only within their organizations or not at all to a world where we take email for granted. Our biggest product by revenue for years has been targeted email campaigns. We typically deliver multiple campaigns a week and often a day on behalf of our employment and consumer marketing clients. That's not to say that every campaign is an incredible success. Some simply are destined to fail right from the beginning. When they do, it is usually do to one of four problems:]]>

Wrong Target Audience. The best offer and creative in the world can't overcome an improperly targeted audience. If you're a relatively unknown, small accounting firm and you're trying to hire accounting interns, be realistic and target the students who attend the schools in your area rather than the schools which top the national rankings. If you're trying to sell vacation packages to sophomores and juniors, target those with the financial means to buy those packages, not those whose household incomes are $15,000.

Wrong Offer. Christopher Golec of Demandbase summed this one up well when he wrote, "E-mail marketing has the most success if the message provides immediate value and personally connects to the recipient. The message should help readers either to learn through educational content, news or tips, or to gain savings of either time or money."

Poorly Designed Creative. We see this over and over again. Clients often take weeks and even months deciding whether to run an ad campaign and how to deliver it and then they throw together the actual ad and are shocked when the results are disappointing. You can't effectively communicate without a well designed message. Your offer and call to action such as "click here to register" should be at the top of the creative and therefore within the preview pane of the message. Link only to specific landing pages designed to convert the interested users into registered users, applicants, customers, etc. Keep your subject line free from all caps and any punctuation and make the from name field the name of your organization if we or any other third party are sending the emails on your behalf.

Wrong Day and Time. We have found over and over again that the vast majority of campaigns perform the best when delivered on Tuesdays followed closely by Monday afternoons and Wednesdays. Some but not many perform best on Fridays or even on the weekends but we get our big red flags out when campaigns arrive on a Thursday and the client pushes for a Friday deployment. We'll typically ask them why they want the campaign to go out and the response is usually that they're in a rush. Yes, but give me an actual good reason, okay? Isn't it better to wait one business day to get twice the response rate? When phrased that way, most clients will take the deep breath they should have taken before placing the order, agree, and thank us for pushing back on them. Similarly, it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of campaigns to push them out the door at 5pm when we could easily deliver them the next day at 1pm. And the time zone matters too. Although people on the coasts often forget that there are people who reside in the Central and Mountain time zones, don't forget that a campaign delivered at 3pm Pacific hits people on the east coast at 6pm. That late arrival is typically the kiss of death as that email will sit overnight and be just one of dozens of emails sitting in the inbox when the recipient sits down to work the next day. What's the easiest way to deal with such unexpected and usually not terribly important emails? Yup. The delete key.

The common theme that we see with campaigns which fail is that haste makes waste. We'll run your campaigns and we'll cash your checks. But we're first going to push back and make sure that what you're asking for is really what you want and what is best for your organization. Getting something off of your desk and being able to tell your boss that the email went out this week are typically not good enough reasons to rush through something that can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Step back. Take a breath. Talk with us. We're here for you.

Teenager Fired Because She Wrote It Was Boring on Facebook

2009-10-22T13:42:21Z

Employees need to be careful about what they posted to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. It amazes me how many will complain about their bosses, places of work, etc. and then are shocked when they're disciplined and sometimes even terminated due to their lack of discretion. Perhaps the poster child for this is Kimberly Swan, who wrote on Facebook that her job is boring...after only three weeks on the job. She was terminated. To hear her explanation and why her boss fired her, watch this video:

10 Ways Twitter, Facebook Use Can Get You Fired

2009-10-21T13:34:36Z

Friending your manager on Facebook and then complaining about your job.
Putting your personal brand in front of your company's brand.
Complaining that your company blocks social networking sites.
Attracting the wrong attention to your company's brand because of your own.
Announcing your new job on Twitter when you're still employed.
Thinking you're superior to older workers because you're tech literate.
Wearing rags to work because it's part of your brand.
Posting inappropriate photos on Facebook, forgetting that your profile is public.
Spending more time on yourself than being productive during work hours.
Calling in sick, when you're not, so that you can focus on your brand.

Source: Personal Branding Blog

10 Least Stressful Jobs

2009-10-20T14:40:06Z

Source: CNN Money

Cell Phone Text Messaging (SMS) Campaigns Watched by Direct Marketing Association

2009-10-20T12:42:49Z

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is finally acknowledging that many of their members market products, services, and other opportunities to businesses and consumers and that those advertising and other marketing campaigns should and now do fall under the purview of the DMA. No longer will members of the DMA be able to apply different standards to an ad campaign sent to the mobile phone of a consumer than to the same consumer's email address. That nonsensical "the same rules don't apply to difference devices" policy was used by a number of less ethical members of the DMA in order to circumvent the DMA's consumer protection policies. No more. According to Direct Marketer, the five big highlights of the new rule are:]]>

Marketers need for prior express consent for marketing communication that is business-to-consumer (b-to-c) or even business-to-business (b-to-b).

Notice regarding consumer preferences should be offered in the privacy policy of the mobile marketer.

Mobile marketers should use appropriate suppression files such as the DMA wireless lists and the federal Do-Not-Call registry.

The new guidelines also cover location-based marketing messages, mobile subscription services, and mobile premium-rate products and services.

Members must abide by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, including obtaining prior express consent from parents before sending marketing messages to their children and to offer opportunities for those parents to opt-out.

Lack of Preparation for H1N1 and Other Disasters

2009-10-19T16:54:45Z

My wife and I have three kids, one of which attends an elementary school and the other two attend a middle school. Both schools recently notified the Minnesota Department of Health and the parents that at least five percent of students were out sick the same day with "flu-like symptoms." In other words, at least one in twenty kids probably has the H1N1 virus as the seasonal flu has yet to make its appearance here. And note that I wrote "at least," because it is likely that many parents are reporting their kids absent due to illness and not providing the information about fever, cough, etc. required to include the kids in the "flu-like symptoms" bucket. How many more than one in twenty is anyone's guess, but based on what my kids are telling me it seems that it is more like 10 percent. If 10 percent of your employees were to call in sick at the same time and for a week, what impact would that have on your productivity? What if 10 percent of your key employees were out sick for a week and then another 10 percent the next week and then another 10 percent the next week? For employers, the big college hiring season is happening right now. Recruiters are swarming over college campuses all over the country. What if 10 percent of those people called in sick this week and another 10 percent next week and so on? What preparations has your organization made to minimize the threat of mass illnesses amongst your employees and to deal with the productivity problems if those illnesses occur? And what can we learn from this process about how to deal with other disasters, be they natural like influenza, man-made like terrorism, or a lot of both like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?

Why Quantity is Better Than Quality When It Comes to Twitter Followers

2009-10-14T14:32:32Z

Keith Luscher wrote an interested blog article about why it is better to have a smaller but more engaged group of Twitter followers than a larger but less engaged group of followers. Keith is great and I normally agree with his opinions, but on this one we diverge. There are definitely two schools of thought on this issue and both have merit. One group follows Keith's opinion and emphasizes quality versus quantity when it comes to Twitter followers. They believe that the results they see from having a smaller but more engaged group of followers is greater than if they had a larger but less engaged group of followers. I respectfully disagree. ]]> http://www.Twitter.com/StevenRothberg has close to 10,000 followers and the second, http://www.Twitter.com/EntryLevelJob, is closing in on 20,000 followers. Combined, we therefore have close to 30,000 followers. We tweet links to articles and jobs on our site and other sites one to two dozen times per day and those tweets generate dozens and sometimes hundreds of links to our site a day. Google sees those links and understands that we are an authoritative source of information about careers so ranks us higher in the search results for those search terms. In addition, the tweets and re-tweets from our almost 30,000 followers generates a lot of traffic to our site. Twitter is one of our highest sources of traffic and the thousands of visits we get per day don't cost us a dime. Would we have all of that benefit if we had 100 very passionate followers? No way. What if we had 10,000 very passionate followers? Sure. A large number of very passionate followers is likely better than a slightly larger number of passive followers, but the choice usually isn't so marginal. It is usually between a lot of passive followers or a few passionate followers. It is kind of like a rock band having the choice between playing in front of 10 very passionate fans in a backyard or 18,000 somewhat interested fans in an arena. Almost every band will take the arena any day and I suspect that Keith would too if faced with that choice.