CollegeRecruiter.com Blog

David Letterman's Top 10 Signs You Spend Too Much Time on Twitter

2010-03-18T23:40:33Z

Do Your Employees Love Working For You As Much as GEICO's?

2010-03-18T21:43:20Z

One of my kids just showed me this great video from GEICO. It features GEICO ~~employees~~ associates in their places of work singing the praises of how they love helping their customers. In addition to it just being awesome that GEICO likes and trusts its employees enough to feature them in a video like this, it is just so over the top fun to see investor Warren Buffett dressed up like Ozzy Osbourne and singing better than Ozzy ever did. I have no idea whether the good folks at GEICO put any thought about how this video might effect their efforts to recruit and retain awesome talent, but whether they figured it couldn't hurt and might help or even if they suspected that it should help, they've got to realize now that it will help. If you're one of the fortunate employees to have participated in the video, how can you possibly leave even if you get a slightly better offer from the employer across the street? And if you're considering working for GEICO and you see this, what more could you ask for to seal the deal with a big YES!]]>

Ben Gotkin's Words of Wisdom for Employers Without Strong Brands

2010-03-18T16:07:33Z

I wasn't able to attend the ERE recruiting conference this week in San Diego due to some scheduling conflicts but by all accounts it was a great success. No surprise. The folks at ERE know how to put on a great conference and they do so in large part because of their almost fanatical commitment to having virtually all of their presentations delivered by brilliant practitioners. One of those practitioners is Ben Gotkin of the well respected national accounting and consulting firm, McGladrey. As described at ERE, Ben delivered a presentation at the conference about how employers without strong brand names can attract the best talent. Out of his presentation came these awesome tips:]]>

Do things differently from competitors. Find your own novel ways of getting attention.

Use interns. McGladrey has them blog about the good, the bad, and the ugly. The open, transparent, and honest communications resonates well with all types of candidates by especially Gen Y.

Be more flexible than big companies. If you're smaller, you should also be less bureaucratic. Use that as a strength to respond quickly to opportunities that may be lost to those which move slower.

Play up what you do well. In other words, fight the battle to your strengths, not theirs. If you're smaller, be faster to respond. If your employees are paid less but get better experience, play down the pay and up the experience when comparing your job to that offered by your competitor.

Don't waste money on the wrong things. We hear from recruiters all the time that they need more resumes but when we scratch the surface they complain they're overloaded with resumes already and instead are receiving the wrong resumes. Don't compound the problem. Change the situation. Focus your efforts on reducing the volume and increasing the quality by changing tools. If you have an employee referral program, stop paying for applications and instead pay for hires. That will shift the focus from quantity to quality.

Don't assume that spending more money on outside vendors is necessarily better than using your own brains on staff. Consultants, including recruitment advertising agencies, have their place and can add value, but McGladrey put together a winning referral program in a couple of hours without outside assistance. Why pay for help you don't need?

Use social media. McGladrey is probably better at blogging than any of their competitors but they also deliver podcasts recorded using an in-house studio and those podcasts are marketed through their blog entries. Cost? $0.

Don't stress out about attracting people who aren't for you. One of our clients hires exclusively students and recent graduates from the middle of their class. Those with the poorest grades tend not to be motivated enough. Those with the best grades tend to be over qualified, get bored, and quit. Don't hire people who are over or under qualified. Make sure their interests align with yours.

Open your house. Rather than spending $2,000 to $4,000 to travel to a job fair and pay their fees, host your own open house. You'll need to advertise and staff it, but your other costs will be minimal. Maybe hundreds of dollars for cookies, finger food, and soda. Gotkin told the audience that when he was at MITRE, they'd bring in 150 to 200 candidates and hire 20 to 25 of them. If those events cost even $4,000 and resulted in 20 hires, that's a cost per hire of a ridiculously low $200. Can you even come close to matching that?

What Do P4P, CPM, CPC, CPL, and CPA Mean?

2010-03-17T20:38:01Z

Ever want to enjoy a good burger and beer with a good friend? Invite Paul DeBettignies a/k/a Minnesota Headhunter out and then the conversation flow like water on a table -- all over the place. Paul and I shared some good laughs, tips, and tricks a couple of months back during the deepest, darkest days of the Minnesota winter and one of his comments really stuck with me. Well, many of them did but this blog article is about only one of them.]]>

P4P (pay for performance) - The newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, or web site that publishes your ad gets paid by you (the advertiser) only if the ad works. How do you know if the ad works? The responses to the ad need to be tracked. That tends to be done by the client in such a way that people who respond to the ad either self-identify themselves ("I saw your ad on CollegeRecruiter.com!") or, better yet, software automatically identifies the person who signs up at your web site as having come from the ad that you purchased from us.

CPM (cost per thousand impressions) - If you thought M stood for millions then you weren't listening in school when they taught Roman numerals. CPM advertising is the traditional way of buying advertising. It stands to reason that if you buy an ad in a newspaper with a circulation of 600,000 that it will cost you more than an ad in a comparable newspaper that has a circulation of only 300,000, right? That's because you're paying more to the first because you're getting more impressions or people looking at your ad. Job boards like CollegeRecruiter.com, Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, etc. have typically sold most of their ads on a CPM basis. Want to buy 100,000 banner ads? That's $800 on our site, which is $8. Want to buy a job posting? That's $175. Oh. But that's not per thousand, you say. Well, it sort of is because sites like Monster will drive a lot more candidates to your job posting ads so they can charge more than niche sites like CollegeRecruiter.com. So traditional job posting buys are like traditional newspaper ad buys in that the more people who look at an ad, the more the advertiser can charge for it.

CPC (cost per click) - Better than paying for eyeballs is paying for responses and the easiest response to measure is a click. For each person who clicks from the publisher's site to yours, you pay them $x. That amount is your cost per click. Sites like Indeed, SimplyHired, TopUSAJobs, JuJu, and other pay per click job search engines will sell you clicks for about $0.10 to $0.25. The more you buy, the lower your price. Sites like Yahoo, Bing, and Google will typically charge you more per click but you'll reach a more passive job seeking audience. If that's important to you, the extra cost may be worthwhile.

CPL (cost per lead) or PPA (pay per applicant) - Wouldn't you rather pay for qualified leads or job applicants than just a bunch of people looking at your ad or a bunch of clicks to your web site? Anything that brings your purchase closer to the point of sale for consumer marketers or hire for employment marketers is a good idea because it shifts the risk of the ad not performing to the publisher. If the ad works well, you do well and so does the publisher. If the ad does poorly, they share your pain. How much should you pay per lead or per applicant? It depends upon how many you want to buy as the more you buy the more economies of scale kick in to lower the publisher's cost and it also depends upon how hard it is for the publisher to get those people to express interest as the harder it is the fewer leads / applications they'll generate so the more they'll need to charge. Employers buying pay per applicant job postings from us typically pay $10 to $20.

CPA (cost per acquisition) - Often referred to as cost per sale for consumer marketers or cost per hire for employment marketers, CPA ad buys are the Holy Grail for advertisers as they shift the entire risk of their ad campaign failing to the publisher. If the ad results in no sales or hires, there's no cost. On the employment side, these deals are basically taking business away from Paul and other headhunters as they've traditionally been paid a success fee based upon how hard it is find a candidate who will get a job offer from the employer client and accept that offer. Candidates who are paid more tend to be harder to find so the greater the compensation, the more third party recruiters are generally paid. Job boards rarely sell CPA advertising to corporate recruiters, third party recruiters, or any other employment marketers because few really know where their hires are coming from. If they track at all, they typically rely heavily or even exclusively on candidates to self-identify their source of hire and 83 percent of candidates misidentify their source. Which option is the best? It depends. We love all kinds of P4P advertising because it aligns our interests with those of our clients. If we do our job and the client is successful, then they gladly pay our bill and come back to us for more. Yes, we incur more risk and sometimes those don't work out well, but we'd prefer to focus our energies and other resources on serving those clients for whom we can help than those clients who are beyond our help.

The 102 Best Twitter Feeds for College Students Searching for Internships and Recent Graduates Hunting for Entry-Level Jobs

2010-03-17T12:43:07Z

CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading job board for college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs, has a couple of Twitter feeds that are a good fit for students and grads:

Twitter.com/StevenRothberg and is primarily used to bring interesting and helpful career-related articles, blogs, videos, Ask the Experts questions and answers, and other such content to the attention of its followers.
Twitter.com/EntryLevelJob and is primarily used to deliver that type of content along with a sampling of the newest job postings ads running on CollegeRecruiter.com. As of mid-March 2010, the two combined have about 75,000 followers.

Not enough? How about 100 other great Twitter feeds for you to follow if you're searching for a job while in school or after graduation?

Does Google Own You? Should You Care?

2010-03-15T16:56:04Z

Google launched in 1998 and didn't really start generating revenue until 2002 when it realized that marketers of products, services, jobs, and other opportunities would pay to place a very small text ad adjacent to relevant search results. As its revenues started to flow in faster than anyone could count them, it started to branch out into other businesses in part through acquisitions like that of YouTube. Perhaps somewhat ironically, this video was posted to YouTube yet questions Google's dominance and even goes so far as to say that Google "owns you." If Google's attempts to know about you and everything is so that it can serve ever more relevant advertising to you, is that such a bad thing? Wouldn't you rather see ads which are relevant to your interests and therefore not annoying? Or would you prefer that Google not know so much about you and instead serve you ads which are irrelevant to your interests, much like newspapers, television, radio, and other legacy media outlets have done for generations? ]]>

Job Seekers Should Focus on Their Transferable Skills and Growth Industries

2010-03-13T17:52:22Z

Joe Watson, career strategist and author of "Where the Jobs Are Now" tells Kelsey Hubbard job seekers should focus on transferable skills and growth industries such as health care when looking for work.

4 Tips for a Successful Targeted Email Campaign

2010-03-12T03:23:39Z

Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group recently published a great blog article about how organizations should use targeted emails to reach college students:

Leverage or build your brand name because name recognition matters. Stronger brands result in more of your emails being opened, read, and responded to.
Time your campaign to hit not just the inbox of when your target audience is most likely to respond but when they'll be looking at their inbox. Sure they want pizza at midnight, but are they checking their email then?
Hit your target and not someone else's. It sure is nice that your email campaign was delivered to 100,000 students, but wouldn't it have been better if the accounting majors received your email asking if they'd be interested in working for your accounting firm instead of 100,000 random students?
Make your campaign memorable so they'll remember and respond to it hours, days, or even weeks later. If you can't sum up your message in one sentence, try harder. The most successful campaigns that we deliver are those with the fewest words. The email is to generate enough interest that they'll click to your landing page. That's to generate enough interest that they'll tell you they're interested, buy your service, or otherwise do whatever the heck it is that you want them to do.

]]> Campus Media Group For more information on targeted email campaigns, visit our pricing and information pages for Consumer Marketers and Employers.

I was attacked by Glenn Beck

2010-03-11T03:56:27Z

How to Create a Cell Phone Text Messaging Ad Campaign

2010-03-09T13:36:50Z

There's a nice discussion on a component of mobile marketing going on at the American Express Open Forum as a result of an article about how small businesses can deliver successful targeted cell phone text messaging (SMS) campaigns to their customers. The same suggestions, however, apply to large organizations and to organizations which want to use SMS campaigns to reach potential employees. Steve Strauss, the author, suggests:]]>

Know your audience. In other words, make sure that you properly target your campaign. Are you trying to reach accounting seniors at six schools in Florida? If so, don't text all accounting students in Florida. If your list or the list owner that you use can't properly target your message so that it is only delivered to the audience you want to reach, then look for a better list.

Don't spam. Solid advice. The author correctly states that any list you build will far outperform any list that you buy, rent, lease, or whatever description you want to apply when you pay a third party list owner like CollegeRecruiter.com to deliver your message on your behalf to your target market. But the author doesn't state a key truth: any third party list will greatly outperform the list you don't have or the list you have but which is still too small to be usable. Use third party lists when your in-house list doesn't exist or is not yet large enough to meet your goals.

Choose the right service. Again, solid advice. There's a huge difference in cost and quality between the services that will deliver your message either to your in-house list or to theirs. Shop around and compare but be sure to compare apples-to-apples. If one vendor will deliver your message for $X but can only target by major and state and another vendor charges 50 percent more but can also target by year of graduation, GPA, diversity, and perhaps other selects, you're better off with the latter option as you'll reach the people you want to reach for a lower over all bill rather than just a lower bill per person but end up reaching a ton of people who you don't want to reach.

Now, back to the consideration of whether you want to text just people on your own mailing list who have given you permission to do so or whether you want to use a third party list which has received permission from its subscribers. Either way, it is imperative that the permission to text be explicit and knowing. People who receive unwanted text messages can become your worst nightmare. If you build your own list, be sure to maintain copious records of when the person subscribed, on what web page or location, and exactly what was the offer. It isn't enough to just know that they subscribed but you need to know exactly what they subscribed to. For third party lists, we recommend that the list be double opt-in to help ensure that the subscribers really, really wanted the information. In other words, they must subscribe and then confirm that subscription. Finally, don't expect to get a great response to a text if people must sign up for something on your web site. For our clients, we include an HTML email follow-up campaign so the students or recent graduates typically first receive the text and that builds great awareness of the offer. Then, perhaps a few days later, they receive the email and that provides them with the convenience needed as they can click from that to your web site to sign-up for your offer.

Most and Least Admired Employers

2010-03-05T21:07:32Z

I see a lot of "best of" lists out there. Best restaurants, ice cream, places to live, colleges, phone service, and places to work. Today a number of bloggers and other media outlets have re-published a list of the most admired companies just released by CNNMoney.com, but not many (none?) have published a list of the best and worst employers. Maybe they don't have the guts. Maybe they're smarter than I am. But whatever the reason, here are the most and least admired companies in terms how they manage their employees: Most Admired Employers:

Goldman Sachs Group
Apple
Nike
United Parcel Service
Polo Ralph Lauren
Cisco Systems
VF Corporation
Walt Disney
Intel
Procter & Gamble

Least Admired Companies:]]>

Nortel Networks

Dillard's

Japan Airlines

UAL

Health Net

Citigroup

Las Vegas Sands

Boyd Gaming

PDVSA

YRC Worldwide

Top 5 Unusual Ways to Impress Recruiters

2010-03-04T13:06:33Z

Great tips provided by the Wall Street Journal for any job seekers who are even considering working with a recruiter:

Have an accomplishment sheet
Help the competition
Be specific
Use old-fashioned communication
Be genuine and honest

]]>

College Grads Prefer to Job Search Using Niche Job Boards, Not Social Media or General Job Boards

2010-03-03T22:34:20Z

Anyone who is involved in the world of college recruiting will find it of no surprise that a recent survey found that graduating college students who are searching for a job rely heavily on their university career centers and prefer to use niche job sites over general job boards and social networking sites. The survey, commissioned by Beyond.com and conducted by students of the Wharton Small Business Development Center, included participants from a variety of schools across the United States and select European and Asian Pacific countries. It showed that most college students use social networking sites on a personal level, but are hesitant to leverage these sites for career-related purposes. The survey indicated that 98 percent of students visit Facebook on a regular basis, but less than 35 percent of students currently leverage this site for job search related tactics, such as becoming a fan of a potential employer or joining industry specific groups. It was also revealed that more than 35 percent of students are uncomfortable using social networking sites for personal branding and networking -- both valuable tools in securing post-graduation jobs. "It was surprising to learn that 75 percent of students are waiting to search for jobs until six months before graduation and are relying so heavily on their colleges to introduce them to employers," says Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com. "University career centers alone are not enough to compete in today's competitive job market, which is why job seekers need to be proactive by starting their job search early and considering all opportunities to search for employment, especially those that enable job seekers and employers to create more targeted connections." In addition to other methods of traditional job searching -- such as university career centers, corporate websites, and personal networking - -survey participants ranked online job boards among their top choices to find employment. When searching for jobs online, most students prefer niche job boards over general job boards because these sites offer more targeted job search results and a greater variety of relevant job opportunities.

Yahoo CEO to Facebook: Show Me the Money

2010-03-03T19:25:46Z

Carol Bartz, new CEO of Yahoo!, in addition to telling Washington to shut up, makes a snide remark about Facebook's lack of revenue. Let's re-visit this in a few years to see whether her confidence in her business model and apparent disdain for Facebook's proves to be justified. ]]>

TweetMyJOBS Generates "Only" 18,000 Clicks to 1,000 Postings

2010-03-03T15:39:58Z

One of the interesting topics of discussion this week amongst those involved in the job board industry is a recent announcement by TweetMyJOBS that they generated 18,000 clicks in January to the web site of their client, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). Apparently, TweetMyJOBS generated about 18 clicks per average job as 1,000 of IHG's jobs ran in January. I've seen some comments critical of 18,000 clicks for 1,000 postings as being not many clicks, but I believe those commenters aren't putting the performance of the campaign into the proper context. The key factor they're missing is the cost per click. ]]> volume discounts on job posting ads. To generate the same effective cost per click as TweetMyJOBS, we would have needed to send 1,260 clicks per posting to the employer's site. It wouldn't have happened. I'm biased in favor of our site as I believe we provide exceptional value to the vast majority of our clients, but I'm also a realist. We simply won't generate that many clicks from a single job posting ad. Not even close. Kudos, TweetMyJOBS and IHG!