One of the pleasures of managing a team of talented, dedicated employees is seeing one of their ideas take root and flourish. Case in point: content coordinator Candice Arnold recommended that we resurrect our Ask the Experts questions and answers feature using our blogging software and integrating it with our customer relationship management software, Salesforce.com.

Candice's vision was quite an upgrade over how we used to do it: email the questions to the couple of dozen experts, receive their answers back in the bodies of their emails and sometimes attachments, copy and paste their answers into html templates, and upload the web pages. The entire process took hours for our staff and the experts. The new process has saved everyone a ton of time and led to a ton of great answers by the experts who choose to address the questions being asked by students searching for internships, recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs, alumni, and employers.

Each week, Candice sends out an email through Salesforce to the experts who have agreed to answer questions. None answer all of them. Some answer a lot and others answer a few. The choice is theirs. Here's the email that Candice sent earlier today:

Continue reading "Ask the Experts: Answering Great Questions from Job Seekers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 18, 2009 at 10:37 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

Now I've heard just about everything.Trina Thompson, who may win the award for making the stupidest career move ever, has sued her alma mater, Monroe College, for $70,000. Her claim? She's been unable to find a job since she graduated with an information technology degree in April and she blames the school's Office of Career Advancement (a/k/a career service office) for not trying hard enough to find her a job.

Trina's mother -- surprise, surprise -- is pretty vocal in all of this and completely backs up her precious daughter and completely slams the college. Pathetic.

Continue reading "Jobless Grad Sues College for $70k - Claims Career Office Didn't Help Enough" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 3, 2009 at 9:18 PM | Leave a Comment (3)

Yesterday's blog article about Black & Veatch Corporation hiring a new college relations leader struck a cord with some of my followers so I thought that I'd follow-up with a similar blog article about another job opening but this time on the other side of the fence. I just saw a posting on LinkedIn from Dan Ryan that University at Buffalo is hiring a new career services director.

Interested? Contact Dan. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of communicating with him, Dan is one of those people who everyone in the industry seems to know or at least be acquainted with. At least as important is that I've always heard only good things about Dan and the work that his team does. It is so critical to work with good people. Those who work with Dan get that.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Wednesday I wrote about our new webinar series for employers and college career service office professionals and discussed in some detail the first of what will be hundreds and perhaps thousands of webinars that we'll deliver over the coming months to:

• Recruiters, hiring managers, and other employer professionals;
  
• College career service office professionals;
  
• Admissions office professionals;
  
• Consumer marketing professionals;
  
• Job seekers / candidates; and
  
• Parents.
  

Continue reading "Webinar: Everything Internships For College Career Services Professionals" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 10, 2009 at 8:30 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2009 annual conference opened yesterday afternoon with a keynote by legendary CEO, Jack Welch. Most of the 10,000+ paid attendees then made their way from the main presentation room at the mile long New Orleans Convention Center over to the massive exhibit hall to begin their discussions with the hundreds of exhibitors as well as snack on catfish fingers, gumbo, mushroom caps, beer, wine, soda, and more.

The exhibit hall was open from 4 until 7pm yesterday and traffic to the CollegeRecruiter.com booth was pretty good from 4 until about 6:15pm and then dropped off a cliff. By 6:45pm it was much harder to spot attendees than exhibitors but that's pretty normal for these types of events as the reality is that most of the attendees come into the exhibit hall for the free food and drink and then leave to enjoy their evenings at local restaurants and bars. And given that this year's conference is in New Orleans, there's no shortage of either.

Continue reading "New Webinar Service Warmly Greeted at #SHRM09" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 29, 2009 at 7:46 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've been hearing rumblings from a number of college career service office professionals, employer representatives, and vendors that this week's National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2009 annual conference should be a great learning experience for all but there will be far fewer in attendance than in previous years. The reason? The economy has crushed the travel budgets for many organizations.

One career service office director told me that she lost her entire travel budget for the 2009-10 school year and expects to have nothing in her travel budget for 2010-11 either. Nevertheless, I will see her on Wednesday as she is flying in for the day and attending at her own expense. That's the kind of dedication to your craft that you don't see often enough in any profession.

Continue reading "Attendance Way Down at #NACE09" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 8, 2009 at 12:56 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Caddy Rowland, Paul Bell, Lauren Berger, and I will be in Las Vegas from Tuesday through Thursday next week to attend the National Association of Colleges and Employers 2009 annual conference. I'll be doing a presentation Thursday morning on the future of on-line recruiting and CollegeRecruiter.com will unveil our brand new booth in the exhibition room.

Will you be there? If so, drop by and say hello. We'll be making a few heads turn with an announcement and it would be fun to discuss it with career service office professionals, hiring managers, human resource professionals, business partners, and others face-to-face.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 5, 2009 at 10:53 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the best bloggers to emerge over the past year or two is Willy Franzen of One Day, One Job. Last June he posted a blog article that listed the 10 blogs which, in his opinion, are the best written by college career service office professionals.

Like Willy, we here at CollegeRecruiter.com want to see more blogs written by those in career services because we know that they have tremendous wisdom to share with their students but also with students, recent graduates, and alumni from all schools. In an effort to make it easier to follow what is being written about at all of the career service office blogs, staff writer William Frierson compiled and recently updated our blog of blogs: the CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Career Services Experts Blog.

Is your school's blog on our list? If not, let William know. We'll be happy to add them right away!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 5, 2009 at 4:27 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

On Thursday, January 22, 2009, I delivered a webinar on What Career Service Office Professionals Need to Know About the Future of On-line Recruiting: Why Job Boards and Facebook Are Only Gateways to What is Ahead. Interested? Watch the webinar by clicking on the video below.

What are the current media options available to today's students and staffing leaders, and what lies ahead in the ever-changing world of on-line employment marketing? In this highly interactive, humorous presentation, we'll compare the history of consumer marketing with the marketing by candidates of their skills and by employers of their employment opportunities. We'll discuss which on-line opportunities make the most sense today for students and employers who each are struggling to find the best matches. We'll then peer into the future to see what lies ahead so that you can best help your students market their skills and employers with whom you work market their employment opportunities using the media options of today and tomorrow. What does the future hold for your stakeholders in on-line recruiting? This session spells it out!

This webinar was held in conjunction with the Eastern, Mountain Pacific, Midwest, and Southern Associations of Colleges and Employers.

Continue reading "What Career Service Office Professionals Need to Know About the Future of On-line Recruiting: Why Job Boards and Facebook Are Only Gateways to What is Ahead" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 2, 2009 at 11:49 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I posted a question to the NACE JobPlace discussion list a few weeks ago asking the college career service office professionals and other readers of the list to let me know the web page addresses (URL's) of blogs written by college career service office professionals. I did so in part because I regularly hear at NACE and regional ACE conferences that many of the offices have blogs yet I was unable to find most than a handful of them despite a lot of searching. It was almost like Big Foot. A lot of people were sure of the existence but no one actually had seen it.

Fortunately, a number of JobPlacers replied with links to their blogs or blogs written by other career service office professionals. Even more replied asking me to publish the list. What we decided to do was to essentially create a central location where you can read all of the blogs in one place.

Continue reading "Blogs by College Career Service Office Professionals" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 18, 2008 at 8:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has for years advocated for the use of technology by its college career service office members but like those members, NACE is often left with bigger dreams than budgets. While budgets in all organizations will always be limited, it appears that NACE is loosening the purse strings a bit on its technology budget and moving towards revamping its web site and even how it communicates with its employer, career service office, affiliate, and other members.

Case in point: I received an email from NACE asking me to view at YouTube the September 2008 message from NACE President, Manny Contomanolis, PhD. I had the pleasure of getting to know Manny in Saint Louis a couple of months ago at the Midwest Association of Colleges and Employers (MwACE) annual conference. Without a doubt, he's one of the brightest and most energetic people in the industry and I suspect that he's used those assets to help guide NACE towards this new and exciting approach.

Continue reading "NACE Embraces Video and Other Technology" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 1, 2008 at 11:22 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

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.

Continue reading "Resumes, Job Postings, and Word Clouds" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 25, 2008 at 12:24 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Virtually every organization that recruits college students for internships or recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities has the same problem: students either don't know what your organization does or they don't know what opportunities your organization offers. Either way, you've got a branding problem. Some tried and true methods of building brand on-campus are to recruit on-campus year in and year out, hosting information events in conjunction with your on-campus interviews, and creating and enhancing your long-term relationships with the staff and faculty.

Another great way of building brand that isn't so tried and true is to participate in career exploration programs through the college career service offices. At Kennesaw State University in Georgia, for example, the career service office brings in professionals from a variety of fields and industries to talk with students about their careers. The speakers typically aren't recruiters. Instead, they're recent graduates, line managers, and others who speak from first hand experience. So if your organization is struggling to recruit electrical engineers, you'd send in a recent graduate from your electrical engineering program or perhaps a manager in that department.

Continue reading "Use Career Exploration Events to Build Your Brand On-Campus" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 2, 2007 at 7:17 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Much has been written in the media about the dangers of blogging so it is so refreshing to see that colleges, or at least some colleges, are actually encouraging their students to blog. The career centers of Harvard University and University of Washington are leading what I hope will become a trend. They understand that blogs are like knives: they're dangerous in the hands of careless people but wonderful tools in the hands of those who are somewhat thoughtful and careful as they provide bloggers with a tremendous opportunity to improve both their personal and professional brand.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 17, 2007 at 6:02 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There is no doubt that parents of every generation have been concerned about their children and have wanted their children to succeed. But what happens when you take probably the most career-focused generation in history – Baby Boomers – and turn them into parents? You get parents who hover over their children so continually that sociologists have begun to refer to these Boomers as helicopter parents.

As a Gen X’er, I understand but don’t condone this type of behavior. I understand that these parents have raised highly programmed, multi-tasking kids. I get that these parents are used to running their kids from one after school activity to another to another. And I even get that some of these parents have a hard time letting go when little Johnny or Jenny move away to attend a great college. But after four or five years of living away from home and hopefully entering the workforce, John and Jennifer are no longer kids. They’re adults. So you’d think that by the time John and Jennifer have chosen to go back to school for an MBA that their parents will also have grown up and realized how destructive their hovering can be. Well, you’d have figured wrong.

Continue reading "Helicopter Parents Invading the MBA Schools Now Too" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 27, 2007 at 7:57 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I received an email earlier today from a college career service office professional asking for advice about what to do about the huge number of job postings she's receiving from organizations that help U.S. college students teach English abroad. The positions are typically in Asian countries, but not always. Her concern is that there are so many of these organizations and so many of them are new that it isn't feasible for her small staff to determine which ones are legitimate, which ones are scams, and which ones are somewhere in between.

Continue reading "Bogus Job Postings" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 18, 2007 at 4:21 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Readers of this blog know that I love social networking sites in general and Facebook in particular. While they have their downsides, they make college campuses smaller and friendlier to students and that is a wonderful thing. But other than being used to meet friends on-campus, those who study Facebook are often stumped when it comes to listing tangible benefits.

Continue reading "Another Great Use for Facebook" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 18, 2006 at 7:15 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

The month of October is a busy month as relates to observations. Of the several, Roy Grizzard, Assistant Secretary for Disability Employment Policy of the Department of Labor today released an announcement of the Department's recognition of individuals with work differences.

There are resources, recognition dates, and programs to assist employers, job seekers, and college career counselors in opening the diversity doors and creating employment empowerment for those typically called "disabled." One of the most significant programs encouraged by the Department is mentoring. Having a counselor who can guide a worker through the intricate employment maze and over the rungs of success is imperative to anyone's career. One who can help an intern or "young" worker navigate these trails is a proven factor to success on both sides.

So many times individuals with disabilities are rejected from employment opportunities because of their observed impairment without testing or asking if they feel they can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation. It would behoove us to face the facts of workplace access and the opportunities that abound in creating a diverse environment.

Posted by Yvonne LaRose, CollegeRecruiter.com - Career Coach on October 2, 2006 at 2:09 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

This blog entry is courtesy of Amitai Givertz and is another in the series of blog swap entries as organized by Recruiting.com.

If I was a student today – like you are perhaps – I would be pretty ticked off with the quality of online services and resources being provided by my college’s career center. Of course, there are always exceptions and I’m sure that somewhere out there is an unbelievably terrific resource that provides everything that would give me a competitive edge in my job search, but I haven’t seen it yet. What I have seen ranges from what I can only describe as mediocre, a typical offering of generic and conventional blah. Admittedly, my sampling for this missive was random and limited to the relatively few colleges who at least understand that students google. But you know what – this is a rant about shortchanging students working stuff out online and not an article about best practices. If career counselors or recruiters want to argue the toss – and I wish you would – hey, leave a comment.

Here are my top three peeves and some practical suggestions for you to consider:

Continue reading "College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 1, 2006 at 6:22 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

I am fortunate enough to be the moderator of the College Recruiter discussion list at the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, a group which has 861 members as of 7/21/06. A question that was recently posted to the group asked how to make college career service offices more relevant to students as very few students use the services of their college career service offices and the writer wanted to increase that number. I agree that career service offices are grossly under utilized by students, but as I mulled over the issue for a few days I came to the realization that the problem has at least two sides to it. In addition to the offices being under utilized, many of them also measure their effectiveness incorrectly.

I spoke at a college recruiting several years ago when this topic came up. An attendee from MonsterTRAK said that he had seen a study that indicated that only 14 percent of college seniors have ever physically visited their career service office and that it was quite challenging for their business to get students to use their site when they aren't using the services of their career service offices because their site depends so heavily upon the effectiveness of the career service offices. He felt that career service offices should not measure their effectiveness by the number of students who participate in on-campus interview, career counseling, career fairs, etc. but instead on the outcomes: how many students find a job in their desired career field with six months of graduation.

I believe that his belief was correct. Focusing on how many students walk through your door or how many resumes you help write or any of the other tactical issues causes you to lose sight of the strategic issues which are the most important: are your students finding the right jobs in the right timeframe? Stop defining success by the successful completion of tasks and instead define success by the outcomes that really matter.

Successful organizations do not measure the success of their sales people by how many sales calls those sales people make. They measure their success by their sales. Similarly, successful career service offices should want to measure their success by their outcomes rather than by their daily tasks.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 21, 2006 at 6:47 AM | Leave a Comment (2)