Many newcomers and even some veterans to Twitter find the process of deciding who to follow to be very confusing. The Twitter home page, for example, has a prominent search engine but strongly implies that you search for content rather than people. I believe that both are important. In fact, I prefer to follow people who discuss content which is relevant to me. So how do you decide who to follow if you know the content but then get thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of matches back?

Perhaps the easiest way of adding up to 100 highly relevant people in a flash is a free service from TweepML. You can create lists of people ("tweeple") of your own or, as most probably do, run a keyword search or two to find lists which someone else has already created. You then review the lists of the people, uncheck those who don't seem relevant to your interests, and log into your Twitter account near the bottom of the screen.

At that point, the coolest thing happens. The screen will show you that those people are being added to your Twitter account so you'll now be following them. In just a few minutes, for example, you can follow 100 of the top recruiting experts on Twitter. Very slick.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 19, 2009 at 2:04 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

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.

Continue reading "Why Quantity is Better Than Quality When It Comes to Twitter Followers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 14, 2009 at 9:32 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

It was fun to see that Business Week's annual, 25 of America's Best Young Entrepreneurs 25 and Under included someone who the team at CollegeRecruiter.com knows and likes quite well: Lauren Berger, better known as The Intern Queen. The winners are determined based on the number of reader votes they receive. I just voted for Lauren. Will you help by voting for her also?

The Intern Queen match potential interns with more than 500 companies from across the U.S. that pay to list their internship opportunities on her web site. According to Business Week, "Berger says what sets her service apart is the personal attention--she and her small band of interns review every application and Berger calls each company to make an introduction. Potential interns can apply for one slot gratis to get a feel for the service. They pay $3 for every subsequent application; employers pay an annual fee of $50 for unlimited listings. In the four months the firm was running last year, Berger says she had about $100,000 in revenue and expects to double that to $200,000 next year. A regular on the college speaking circuit, she is also planning to expand into Canada and is exploring endorsement deals with Microsoft (MSFT) and Payless Shoes."

If you're as impressed as I've always been, vote for Lauren today!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 12, 2009 at 2:24 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Last week was a pretty brutal week of travel for me. I started in Nashville on Saturday, flew to Palm Springs through Denver and Los Angeles on Tuesday, flew back to Nashville through Los Angeles and Las Vegas on Thursday, then flew home to Minneapolis Thursday evening.

Four of my six flights featured ground and air crews who were delightful. It won't surprise many to learn that four of those flights were on Southwest Airlines but many will be surprised that the last one -- and most impressive -- was on a Northwest / Delta Airlines flight operated by regional carrier, Compass.

Continue reading "Kudos to Northwest / Delta Airlines (Really!)" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 21, 2009 at 6:07 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

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)

As one of the owners of CollegeRecruiter.com, I feel blessed that we have some really wonderful, blue chip clients. Some of them are corporations and some of them are government. One of our government clients is the Internal Revenue Service. Through our work for them over the years, I've learned a lot of things about the IRS which astounded me and probably would be astounding to most people. For example, did you know that they're the largest accounting firm in the world? And did you know that they are one of the leaders in using virtual world Second Life to recruit candidates.

When I found out about Second Life, I knew that I needed to learn more so I asked Frank Stipe,Virtual Worlds & Social Networking Project Manager, for more information and dropped a pretty strong hint that his response would be blogworthy. Well, ask and ye shall receive. In Frank's words:

Continue reading "IRS Saves Millions by Using Second Life to Market Its Employment Opportunities" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 13, 2009 at 12:29 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm often asked by clients, vendors, and other stakeholders in CollegeRecruiter.com about the amount of time that we spend on social media such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. One person recently said to me that we seem to be everywhere all of the time. I took that as a compliment. But not all comments about our social media efforts have been so complimentary. Some have said that their organizations would never waste so much time playing when they should be working. But is it playing? And if not, what are the business reasons to use social media?

Mike Figliuolo, managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC, a leadership development firm, just posted a blog article in which he thoughtfully summed up three primary reasons that businesses should use social media:

Continue reading "3 Business Reasons to Use Social Media" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 4, 2009 at 9:14 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

I've been to several of the annual conferences put on by the Society for Human Resource Management and they've all been huge. Hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of attendees. Did I say huge? This year's show promises to be almost as big as those of the past couple of years but the layoffs and budget cutbacks have hurt SHRM's numbers just like they have virtually every other organization out there. Yet even with those cuts, SHRM still expects 10,000 paid attendees to descend upon the conference in New Orleans. Wow.

CollegeRecruiter.com will be well represented at this year's annual SHRM conference. Paul Bell, Caddy Rowland, Intern Queen Lauren Berger, and I will be manning our booth and wandering the exhibit hall doing the old meet-and-greet. It should be great to reconnect with old friends and clients and hopefully make some new ones.

Continue reading "10,000 Attendees Expected for #SHRM09" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 24, 2009 at 4:14 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've been a frequent critic of most of the airlines for seemingly training their staff to be difficult at best and downright confrontational at worst. The customer service people for many of the airlines are completely unlike the friendly, cheerful, eager-to-help customer service people that you find at most rental car and hotel counters. I've never accepted the excuse that the job is somehow more difficult or the pay somehow worse than what is earned similarly qualified people in the same hospitality industry or even at other airlines like Southwest. It's just the culture.

Thankfully, I had a wonderful experience this weekend courtesy of Delta Airlines. A relative on my wife's side of the family is ill enough that my physician brother-in-law decided at the last moment to fly from the U.K. to be with him and to try to get some straight answers from his healthcare providers. My brother-in-law flew from Heathrow to Minneapolis then to Salt Lake City and then transferred again to his ultimate destination. He had only one hour and 20 minutes in Minneapolis so didn't have time to leave the secured area to say hello to us but we knew that it would mean a lot to him if we could see him face-to-face.

Continue reading "Giving Credit Where Credit is Due -- Delta Airlines" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 22, 2009 at 4:18 PM | 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)

The people who brought us diversity job board LatPro.com just launched JustJobs.com, a new job search engine intended to simplify job search. JustJobs.com is a vertical job search engine somewhat like Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com in that it searches positions from other job boards and employers' websites.

According to LatPro CEO Eric Shannon, "JustJobs.com is about creating as much value as we can for job seekers -- our goal is to show clear immediate value to job seekers, job boards and employers. In my annual review of the Top 100 Job Site Niches, I see that's what ties together the job sites that are perennial leaders -- they show job seekers immediate value."

Continue reading "CollegeRecruiter.com Joins the JustJobs.com Network" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 2, 2009 at 4:49 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Walmart Uses RSS to Promote Their Job Openings" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Saving the World (And My Week) One Tree at a Time" »

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

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

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

Continue reading "Los Angeles College Recruiting Conference" »

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

One of the greatest resources for corporate and third party recruiters is ERE.net. Today was certainly no exception. ERE published a great article by Jeff Dickey-Chasins about features that job board clients want and don't want in the job boards they use:

Continue reading "Great Wish List for Job Boards" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 14, 2009 at 1:24 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the knocks against microblogging site Twitter is that despite its 900 percent growth in traffic over the past year and millions of passionate users that it can't generate dime one in revenue. Recent events are lining up to prove those pundits correct about the incredible traffic growth but incorrect about Twitter's inability to generate revenue.

Want an example? ExecTweets launched a week ago and is already working with Twitter to compile posts (tweets) from business executives to make it easy to read what those executives are doing and thinking. Rather than signing up for a Twitter account and then manually searching out executives, following each one, and then receiving a steady stream of tweets with no prioritization or filtering other than by date and time of posting, ExecTweets allows you to sign up and follow every executive in a particular industry or just those that you care about. It has sorting tools, including voting options so the most popular tweets are the most prominent.

Continue reading "Are Your Leaders Followed by ExecTweets?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 26, 2009 at 8:09 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We're in the process of launching a mobile version of CollegeRecruiter.com and, as part of that, I checked to make sure that we owned CollegeRecruiter.mobi, which is the mobile version of CollegeRecruiter.com. I was surprised when I saw that we had not reserved that domain name when the .mobi domains became available. I was even more surprised to find that someone else owned it.

I contacted the owner, Heather Taracka of Sky Valley Ltd., and explained the situation. I offered to reimburse her for all of her costs in registering and transferring the domain. Without hesitation, she agreed to transfer it to us as she could see that we were the rightful owner given that College Recruiter is a federally registered mark and that if she tried to hold onto CollegeRecruiter.mobi that she would likely be considered a cyber squatter.

Transferring domains isn't an easy task. The registrars make it difficult, partly because they don't want domains hijacked and partly, I believe, because they don't want to lose the business. But Heather's efforts prevailed and last night the transfer was completed.

Heather's company does web site development and hosting for small businesses. If you're looking for a decent person to work with in those areas, start with Heather.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 25, 2009 at 9:06 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Joel Cheesman has again put his money where his mouth is. Joel is one of the greatest proponents of job boards, corporate employment sites, and other career-related sites adding mobile versions.

Joel and I definitely see eye-to-eye on this issue. If you want to see the future of the web, pull your cell phone out of your pocket or holster because it is right there. And the next time you do so, head over to Cheezhead.com as Joel's fantastic recruiting blog site is right there. Think of it is the wonderful future of the Internet right now on your phone and therefore in your hand. Or think of it is as another smart investment by Joel. Or think of the dwindling number of reasons for why your organization has yet to go mobile.

By the way, if you're struggling with how to go mobile, Joel's mjob.com can definitely help. He's taking job boards, corporate employment-sites, and likely some others from the computer to the mobile screen at very reasonable rates.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 21, 2009 at 3:07 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of my favorite tactics for college students hunting for internships or recent graduates searching for entry-level jobs is for them to create a blog or other type of web site about why a particular employer should hire them.

Many and perhaps most large organizations now have Google Alerts set up to email them whenever a new web page is posted that includes a reference to the organization, so if you're targeting a web savvy organization then your web site will quickly come to their attention and if what you've written on that site is compelling then you'll pretty much force them to hire you -- which is good for you and them.

Want an example? Jamie Varon is the poster child for this tactic. She wants to work for Twitter so created a site all about that. Rather than just talking about how great Twitter is and how much she wants to work for them, she explains in some detail why hiring him makes tremendous business sense for Twitter. The result? She scored an interview and I'll be shocked if she doesn't get hired.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 20, 2009 at 9:49 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

Our sales team had a great strategic planning meeting earlier today with our management consultant, Keith Thorndyke of Remergenz Management. We've done this a couple of times now but the every time we all walk away feeling enlightened and invigorated.

Keith has a gift for listening well and encouraging every participant to, well, participate. Most meetings with half a dozen or more people tend to be dominated by extroverts but Keith's meetings are always well balanced. Every member of the team gives ideas and feedback in a positive environment. What is really awesome is how easy Keith makes it all seem. That's the mark of a real star: when they make the work they do look simple.

Continue reading "The Need for Strategic Planning by All Employees" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 10, 2009 at 5:45 PM | 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)

Last week, more than 400 ERE.net community members tuned in for a webinar on college recruiting with a shoestring budget.

The presenters, Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett, covered three main areas:

1. Why employers should be doing college recruiting even in a down economy;
   
2. How those organizations can stretch their own time resources by leveraging those offered by others; and
   
3. Tips for some recruiting opportunities which come at little to no cost.
   

Continue reading "College Recruiting on a Shoestring Budget" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 18, 2009 at 7:15 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Joel Cheesman of Cheezhead and HRSEO has just released a new white paper, Why Go Mobile.

The white paper is excellent. About a dozen pages, suitable for beginners or experts, and chock full of excellent tips. Download it for free from mjob.com.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 17, 2009 at 4:28 PM | Leave a Comment (2)

Internships, co-ops, apprenticeships and other such systems have existed for hundreds of years. They help young adults get the experience they need in order to be hired to do interesting, meaningful work by a quality employer that pays fairly. Students are no different from those of us who have been in the workforce for years or even decades. We all want to do work for which we are competent, which we value, and which is of interest to us.

The problem right now, however, for students is that the economy is in shambles. Far fewer employers are hiring interns this year than in years past and those who are hiring are being deluged by applications. With fewer positions and more applicants, more and more employers have re-thought their internship programs. So what adjustments should be made? The Intern Queen recently posted a great list:

Continue reading "How the Weak Economy Has Impacted Internships" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 13, 2009 at 12:22 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

One of the big mistakes that a lot of salespeople make is not understanding that most people don't like to be sold to. When you're selling to a salesperson, they generally like to be sold to as they understand and appreciate what you're doing, but most people get turned off by the hard sell.

Whirlpool understands that most candidates are not salespeople and will be turned off by a recruitment pitch that is hard sell. So one of the strategies that they employed is a soft sell recruitment video narrated by Reba McEntire in which she describes the partnership that Whirlpool has forged with Habitat for Humanity.

There's no hard sell in the video. There's almost no way of watching the video without getting misty eyed. And there's probably no better recruitment video out there and may never be one.

Continue reading "Sometimes the Best Sell is the Softest Sell" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2009 at 5:29 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm never disappointed whenever I'm hoping to find something new on the Internet. It seems that there's a site for everyone about everything. Case in point: my wife and I are remodeling our house. We've lived there for 14 years and many of the kitchen appliances were purchased and installed by the previous owners. So we're now looking at replacing the refrigerator, oven, etc.

It wasn't surprising to me to find many, many sites from the manufacturers but what I was hoping to find were sites where information was posted by other consumers. I love that about sites like eBay where you can look at comments posted by your peers, take them with a grain of salt, and form a more complete picture about the products you're considering. What I didn't expect to find for our remodel was a shopping Wiki site where all of the content is generated by users. The Internet. What a great place.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2009 at 1:12 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the dirty, dark secrets of the job board industry is that many of the boards do a terrible job of protecting the safety of the candidates who use their sites. The feeling amongst the owners and managers of these boards is somewhat like caveat emptor -- let the buyer beware. What these boards seem to be saying to their candidates is that if the candidates are stupid enough to be using their boards then the candidates deserve to have their identities stolen, bank accounts emptied, or worse. That's just wrong.

CollegeRecruiter.com is a member of the International Association of Employment Web Sites and one of the goals of the association is to improve not just the image but also the practices of the industry. I'm not saying that the job board industry is dirty or untrustworthy. But in any industry there are some bad apples and our industry is no exception. One way that the more trustworthy members of our association and industry protect our candidates is by verifying the authenticity of job postings. Unfortunately, some of the most popular job boards do little to no verification so the ads running on their site include many, many bogus job postings.

Continue reading "Bogus Job Postings" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 15, 2009 at 4:05 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I delivered a webinar today for Human Capital Institute today on how employers can and should use mobile marketing, including cell phone text messaging, to reach today's college students and recent graduates. To help illustrate why and how employers should be using this fabulous new tool, I looked at the awesome mobile marketing strategy employed by Barack Obama's campaign. About 800 people paid to attend so the interest level was certainly there.

But not everything was peaches and cream. I neglected to attribute some of the content to a blog written by David Erickson, the director of e-strategy for Tunheim Partners, a strategic communications company. David wrote a series of brilliant blog articles about Obama's use of mobile marketing, including http://e-strategyblog.com/2008/08/texting-the-vp-barack-obamas-mobile-marketing-effort/ and http://e-strategyblog.com/2008/12/obamas-microtargeting-campaign.

If you want to learn more about mobile marketing then run, don't walk, over to David's blog.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 13, 2009 at 4:56 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Kevin Donlin of TheSimpleJobSearch.com tipped me off to a great, integration of Facebook and YouTube by a staffing company. Curious? I thought so. Have a look at what was built by Express Employment Professionals.

Kudos!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 23, 2008 at 6:39 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the benefits of having a full-time content coordinator like Candice Arnold is that we are able to keep a close eye on what type of content is of most interest on our site. We track which blogs, videos, Q&A's, podcasts, etc. are generating the most clicks from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN and then try to add more of that productive content and reduce the types of content which have proven to be of less interest to college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs.

We recently noticed that many of the most popular articles on our site included information specific to certain metro areas, states, or other regions. After Candice and I discussed the finding, we agreed to invest some resources in the creation of a new blog. The CollegeRecruiter.com Career Locations Blog features articles about great places that you may have never considered before, giving a brief overview of various places where students and recent grads can go to live, work and study. Enjoy!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 16, 2008 at 3:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I just returned from the Kennedy Information 2008 annual conference in sunny Orlando. Perhaps it was the very pleasant weather or something in the water, but all of the doom-and-gloom in the economy didn't seem to have much of an impact on the vendors who exhibited at this year's conference.

We had our first booth there ever and plan to return next year. We weren't overwhelmed by the business that we generated but were quite pleased. We were able to get some valuable face time with some clients, have a private dinner with a large client that should become much larger, and meet with 15 to 20 potential clients. We also had the pleasure of speaking with dozens of representatives from other organizations whose hiring needs are not a good fit for our college job board and that's fine as you never know when the people that we met on Monday or Tuesday may change places of employment and then be in a position where we can help them with their staffing needs. Or they may stay with their current organizations and those organizations may change and start to hire college students for internships or recent graduates for entry level jobs.

Continue reading "Kennedy Information Surprisingly Successful for Exhibitors" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 19, 2008 at 12:57 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

It always amazes me how critical of Gen Y are a number of thought leaders in the recruiting industry. You hear words being thrown around like lazy, selfish, misguided, under educated, and worse. There's no doubt that some of those words are entirely appropriate to describe some members of Gen Y but then the same words also apply to some members of Gen X and some Baby Boomers.

I recently read an article by Sarah Welstead of Head2Head and she makes the point that rather than complaining about the motivation, skills, or other attributes of Gen Y, those who complain would be much better served by directing some of that negative energy into helping members of Gen Y improve. Do you know a member of Gen Y who is unmotivated? Rather than bemoan their lack of motivation, give back to the community by investing in that young adult and teach them how to become better motivated. Do you know a member of Gen Y who struggles with oral communication skills? Give back by teaching them how to better articulate their thoughts.

Criticizing something is easy. Being part of the solution is hard. I wonder -- are these critics willing and able to become part of the solution? I hope so.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 21, 2008 at 10:25 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Charissa Cowart, the WALA FOX10 News Daily Dot Com Reporter, is quickly making a name for herself in the recruitment blogosphere by doing a great job of quickly summarizing a few job search resources at a time for her viewers.

A couple of weeks ago she provided her viewers with some great information about JibberJobber, which is essentially a web-based, job search organizational system for candidates that allows them to easily and accurately track the jobs to which they've applied, been interviewed, received offers, etc.

Continue reading "Job Search Tips from the Daily Dot Com" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 8, 2008 at 1:36 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

There aren't too many heroes in the financial crisis currently gripping Wall Street and, as the politicians are too fond of saying, Main Street. But one of the few is Wells Fargo & Co. Why? Because they've proven time and time again that they're one of the best managed banks in the country.

I was interviewed by a journalist a few days ago and she asked me for examples of industries where college students should look for internships and recent graduates should look for entry level jobs. It was a difficult question to answer given the severity of the crisis and the lack of hiring by most organizations right now -- even healthcare is seeing layoffs. My answer was that the federal government looks like a safe harbor right now for those who want to maximize their chance of being hired while minimizing their chance of being laid off. But I should have pushed back on the question a bit and reminded her that job seekers don't apply to work for an industry. They apply to work for an organization and that there are many very good organizations which are hiring.

Continue reading "Financial Crisis Heroes" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 6, 2008 at 5:36 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Heather Huhman, the careers writer for Examiner.com, has some great suggestions for internship and entry level job candidates regarding how you should negotiate your starting salary and other compensation in these tough economic times.

First of all, during tough economic times like we are in now, all candidates, but especially entry-level candidates, should understand that employers will be less likely to be willing to negotiate compensation packages because they face an abundance, not a shortage, of well-qualified candidates. The employer holds the negotiating power. That said, here are five tips:

Continue reading "Salary Negotiations in Tough Economic Times" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 3, 2008 at 7:14 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

My thanks to Peter Clayton of Total Picture Radio for making available the recording of the talk we had at the recent International Association of Colleges and Employers (IAEWS) conference in Chicago. Peter and I had a fairly short but wide ranging conversation about how corporate recruiters are compensated for hires but should be compensated for the performance of their hires.

Peter and I also talked about how many corporate recruiters tell CollegeRecruiter.com and other job boards that what they want out of their recruitment advertising campaigns more than anything else are quality candidates. Yet when those same recruiters talk with us and the other job boards about whether to try our sites and whether to renew with our sites the conversation is almost always about the number of clicks to their web sites or resumes they generated as a result of their job postings, banner ads, targeted email campaigns, cell phone text messaging campaigns, or other ad campaigns.

Continue reading "Recruiters Say They Want Quality But Actually Want Quantity" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 2, 2008 at 11:20 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the opportunity to sit down prior to the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS) conference with Jonathan Goodman, Vice President of Business & Membership Development, and Mark Willaman, President and Founder, of FISHER VISTA, LLC / HRmarketer.com.

For part of the meeting, Jonathan recorded his interview with me during which we discussed the economy, the future of the job board industry, the conference, and some assorted other odds and ends. HRMarketer did a really nice job cleaning up the audio. If only they could have made some of my answers a little more intelligible.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 2, 2008 at 6:51 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

Nicole Bodem at HR Search Marketing just posted a play-by-play blog posting of the free webinar that we hosted today on how employers can use cell phone text messaging (SMS) to recruit college students, recent graduates, and alumni.

I'll post the recording of the webinar here within a week but in the meantime, Nicole did a great job of capturing all of the crucial details.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 25, 2008 at 5:43 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of my favorite employers of college students and recent graduates is RSM McGladrey. Unlike the stereotypical accounting firm, the folks at McGladrey are interesting, fun, and not afraid to take some chances. My experience with them is that the chances they take typically pay off but I'm sure that they'd be the first to admit that some have worked out better than others.

The most recent chance that they're taking has very limited downside and I'm excited to see how it turns out. Ben Gotkin, their National Director of Experienced-Hire Recruiting, reminded me earlier this week that a few months back he asked me if I was aware of any company that had created a site, blog, etc. specifically for parents or influencers of college students. In his email, he told me that despite the lack of such sites McGladrey went ahead and built one.

Continue reading "McGladrey Launches Recruiting Site Targeting Parents of Gen Y Candidates" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 25, 2008 at 6:28 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Interesting blog article by Recruiter Guy a/k/a Christopher Hoyt about ways that employers can better engage with today's college students. Christopher identified some traditional routes such as job fairs and college job boards but then spent most of the blog writing about some non-traditional routes.

Two of the non-traditional routes he highlighted are CampusAve and CampusBlvd. Both are quite interesting. CampusAve is a network of classified advertising opportunities on college newspaper and local web sites. Go to any of their partner sites and you'll see classified listings for housing, items for sale, and jobs. So if you're only willing to consider candidates from a small number of specific schools, CampusAve may be a good option.

Continue reading "CampusBlvd Sells SEO Benefits to Employers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 24, 2008 at 9:34 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

Peter Weddle, the executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites, put on a great conference yesterday in Chicago at the Donald Stephens Convention Center. About 200 attendees representing about 120 boards attended. Two themes dominated the conversation: the effect of the recession on the job board industry and issues surrounding the mergers and acquisitions that effect our industry just as they effect any other fast growing industry.

Everyone that I heard talk about the recession issue agreed that we are in a recession even if the economists can't agree upon that. Actually, an economist spoke who said we are in a recession and it would likely get worse before it gets better. The discussions weren't so much about whether we are in a recession though but rather what effect that is having on our businesses and what we should do to minimize the damage. The consensus was that the recession is hitting some sectors worse than others but that the vast majority of boards are seeing reduced sales, longer sales cycles, or both. The boards who seem to be weathering the storm the best advised the others to focus on customer service and proving to their employer clients that their job postings and other recruitment advertising products are working. That can be difficult as most employers rely on candidate self-identification for their tracking or use some other fundamentally flawed technique but all of us can be doing a better job. Another word of advise from yours truly was to stop competing by focusing on innovation. Introduce products such as targeted cell phone text messaging campaigns where there is no competition in your niche and clients who want that product will need to come to you.

Continue reading "IAEWS Job Board Association Meeting" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 9, 2008 at 4:55 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Our search engine optimization expert friend, Joel Cheesman, recently posted a congratulatory note to some of the fastest growing job boards as ranked in the annual Inc. 5000 awards.

The winners that Joel highlighted were:

Continue reading "Fastest Growing Job Boards" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 5, 2008 at 1:48 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Clearly there are a number of corporate recruiters who do blog and some of their blogs help them hire people. But why don't more corporate recruiters blog? Why is it that the recruiting blogosphere is dominated by job board owners, vendors, and corporate recruiters who do blog and some of their blogs help them hire people. But why don't more corporate recruiters blog? Why is it that the recruiting blogosphere is dominated by job board owners, vendors, and third party recruiters?

For answers, turn to the man who always seems to have great answers to great questions: Jim Durbin of StlRecruiting.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 29, 2008 at 12:27 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Those who know me know that one of my pet peeves is the atrocious customer service that most airlines seem to serve up most of the time even though similarly qualified and compensated customer service people who work for hotels seem to serve up great customer service most of the time. Why the airlines can't or won't figure out how to deliver customer service while their travel industry siblings did long ago is beyond me.

Want some examples? Well, too bad. Here they are:

Continue reading "U.S. Airways Really Knows How to Tick Off a Frequent Flyer" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 28, 2008 at 9:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Inc.com, which bills itself as the daily resource for entrepreneurs, each year releases its list of the 5,000 fastest growing, privately held companies in the U.S. This year, CollegeRecruiter.com made the Inc. 5,000 list as the 1,403rd fast growing company, 17th in the fast growing education companies (apparently job boards fall into the education category), and 23rd in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area.

According to Inc.'s analysis, our rapid growth is due to two primary factors:

• In 2004, we added new products and candidate-friendly software. Our innovative products include:
  
  • Pay per click job postings;
    
  • Pay per lead job postings;
    
  • Targeted email campaigns to our double opt-in database of 10 million college students, recent grads, and alumni; and
    
  • Cell phone text messaging (SMS) campaigns to the same database of 10 million college students, recent grads, and alumni.
    
  
  
• We found new ways to advertise its site to job seekers by creating CollegeRecruiter.com Facebook applications and even a Youtube channel with more than 350 career-related videos.
  

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 20, 2008 at 6:37 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

A question from several of the 500+attendees to our free webinar last week on how employers can and should use Facebook for recruiting was whether employers would encourage negative comments about their organizations if those employers started blogging, using Facebook, etc.

My advice was that the negative comments will be made whether the employer has a presence or not so they should blog, actively use Facebook, and otherwise participate in Web 2.0 sites. To do otherwise would be to allow the negative comments to be posted without the employer's side of the story. Don't get personal. Don't post comments saying that the blogger is an idiot. But do give your side of the story. If your organization could have done something better, admit it and provide details on what you'll be changing and when in order to rectify the situation.

Continue reading "Blog Comments Should Come Full Circle" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 19, 2008 at 5:13 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

We had well over 500 attendees to our free webinar on how employers can and should use Facebook for recruiting. Within minutes, HR Search Marketing posted a fabulous recap. A tip of the hat to Nicole Bodem!

Our next free webinar will be on how employers should use cell phone text messaging to recruiting college students. It will be on Thursday, September 25th. Seats are limited. Register today.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 14, 2008 at 2:46 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Since job boards essentially came into existence 14 years ago, the pricing model has overwhelmingly been a flat rate for a specified period of time. For example, we charge $175 for a job posting ad for 60 days. Many sites charge more and many sites charge less.

Vertical job search engines such as Indeed and SimplyHired should take a bow as they have been instrumental in educating the recruiting industry that there is a better way to pay for advertising than on a flat rate basis. The job board industry loves flat rate because the clients assume all of the risk if the postings don't work. But what is in the best interests of the client is also in the best interests of the job board so we're excited to announce that we've become one of the first premium job boards to allow clients to post jobs on a pay per click or pay per lead basis.

Continue reading "Pay Per Click and Pay Per Lead Job Postings" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 13, 2008 at 5:03 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Eric Shannon and the rest of the LatPro team recently created a new site, JobBoardBlogs.com. It promises to deliver career tips, job-search tips and other news from top job boards to readers -- updated every 15 minutes and available to by RSS.

The goal of JobBoardBlogs.com is to help candidates, employers, and others stay informed and anticipate or react to changes in online recruiting. My blog, CollegeRecruiter.com Blog, is a member and therefore included in the JobBoardBlogs.com feed. Others include Accounting Jobs Today, Diggings, EmploymentMetrix, Hispanic Jobs, Indeed, InsuranceJobsBoard, Job Dig, Minnesota Jobs, Mountain Jobs, MyFirstPaycheck.com, New Media Hire, PostJobFree, Simply Hired, Six-figure Learnings, Skilled Trades Blog, Talent Zoo Journal, Trovix, and Wired & Hired.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 11, 2008 at 1:02 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Two of my favorite recruiting experts recently teamed up to shoot a short video. The topic? One which is near and dear to my heart: tactics and strategies that employers should use to attract the best Gen Y / Millennial talent to their organizations.

In the video below, Bill Vick interviews Alexandra Levit. If you've never read Alexandra's work, you'll love it. If you've read her insights before, you'll likely be reminded of some great ideas and learn some new ones.

Continue reading "Alexandra Levit Video: How Employers Should Attract Gen Y" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 11, 2008 at 8:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

You've heard the express that "a picture is worth 1,000 words," right? Well, if that's true, then how many words is this recruitment video from Whirlpool worth?

Continue reading "The Best Recruiting Video" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 8, 2008 at 5:00 PM | Leave a Comment (4)

One of the outstanding authors in the employment space is Alexandra Levit, founder and president of Inspiration at Work, a career consulting firm. After leaving her gig as a nationally syndicated career columnist with Tribune Media Services, Alexandra turned her attention to blogging for HuffingtonPost.com and GetTheJob.com. She's also authored several books, including the just released Success for Hire: Simple Strategies to Find and Keep Outstanding Employees.

One of the reasons that I read everything that I can of hers is that she writes in a clear, concise, no nonsense style. She's one of those rare authors who understands that if a book can communicate its message in 100 pages then it should be 100 pages, not 250 because some publishing house guru thinks that it will look better on the shelf at 250 pages. Another reason that I read her works is that a disproportionately large number of them focus on issues related to Gen Y / Millennials.

If you care as I do about how employers can and should deal with the impending retirement of many and perhaps most Baby Boomers and their replacement in the workforce by Gen Y, then you need to read Alexandra's new book: Success for Hire. It is written for hiring managers and human resource professionals to help them deal with this impending crisis in an efficient, effective, thoughtful manner.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 5, 2008 at 1:26 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently received a book from one of my Peter Weddle a/k/a Mr. Job Board. Peter's book, Recognizing Richard Rabbit: A Fable About Being True to Yourself, is a quick, easy read about recruiting. But that's not why you should buy a copy and read it for yourself. What delights me about Recognizing Richard Rabbit is the very unusual and effective way in which it delivers its content.

Rather than reading through a book chapter-by-chapter as you normally would, this book is set up with dozens of pairs of pages which face each other. Pages 54 and 55, for example, face each other and are paired with each other. The right side of each pair encourages the reader to use their creative side while the left side of each pair encourages the reader to use their reasoning and logical thinking abilities.

Continue reading "Recognizing Richard Rabbit" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 4, 2008 at 1:28 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Am I just out to lunch with unrealistic expectations about customer service or do others also feel that we should expect good customer service from our vendors and not be surprised when we actually get it?

The origins of CollegeRecruiter.com date back to 1988 and over those two decades I have repeatedly been disappointed by vendors who regularly fail to deliver quality customer service. I understand that all organizations, including ours, sometimes fail in this area but the norm should be great customer service. For example, compare the customer service you get from most airlines most of the time versus most nice hotels most of the time. I notice good customer service when flying. It surprises me. It doesn't surprise me when the customer service is poor. Yet I'm not surprised when I receive excellent customer service from hotels.

Another organization that surprises me only when I have problems is a promotions company that we work with. We regularly buy
custom-embroidered logo shirts and apparel from Queensboro because their product quality and customer service are excellent and they back everything with a no questions asked, money back guarantee. Unfortunately, Queensboro is an exception in today's marketplace. Hopefully they'll have a lot of imitators in a lot of niches.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 29, 2008 at 9:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

RSM McGladrey, one of the nation's top accounting firms, is fortunate to have a number of highly skilled recruiters who understand that recruiting is about selling and therefore marketing their opportunities is critical to their ability to hire the best available talent. Yes, efficiency is important but efficiency at the cost of effectiveness is not a good idea as you end up with cheap hires who tend to be poorly qualified and therefore productivity suffers.

So what do new tricks has RSM McGladrey pulled out of its hat? Well, Ben Gotkin, national director of experienced-hire recruiting, just announced that they've joined the recruiting blogosphere with Success starts here: Your view into what it's like to work at RSM McGladrey | McGladrey and Pullen.

Continue reading "RSM McGladrey Joins the Blogosphere" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 24, 2008 at 1:20 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of my buddies in the recruiting industry is Paul DeBettignies of Nerd Search. In addition to being a huge University of Minnesota Golden Gopher football fan, having a last name that is pronounced completely different from how it is spelled, he is also bright, funny, passionate, and the driving force behind the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference.

The conferences were born out of a Chipotle lunch that Paul, Josh Kahn of Accenture/Best Buy, and I shared a couple of years ago. We wanted to find a way for Minnesota recruiting bloggers to get together and instead created a series of recruiting conferences where no one pays, no one sells, but everyone learns from each other. Josh has been critical in helping us get the wonderful facilities at Best Buy's world headquarters. Nicole Bodem later joined our merry little band as Paul's "wingman" and masterfully has taken care of making sure that everything runs smoothly. In addition to being an SEO expert, she's also a gift from logistics heaven. My role has evolved into occasionally helping promote the events to Upper Midwest employers who are in our database. In other words, I don't do nearly as much as the others yet still get to be called a co-founder. Cool.

Continue reading "July Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference Almost Sold Out" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 16, 2008 at 5:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Well, not a wedding in the traditional sense but still a match made in heaven.

Jason Davis -- founder of Recruiting.com, later founder of RecruitingBlogs.com, owner of dozens of great recruiting domain names, and master poker player.

Dave Mendoza -- quite simply one of the most masterful networkers the planet has ever known and one of the very few people I know who talks-the-talk and more importantly walks-the-walk that networking is all about what you can do for others, not what they can do for you.

So what's up with the wedding? Well, Jason recently extended an offer to Dave that Dave graciously accepted. A few joyous tears may have been shed and calls to the family made, but the union was one of business for Dave has joined RecruitingBlogs.com as a partner.

Apart, these two were dynamite. Together, they will move mountains.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 2, 2008 at 6:01 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Eric Shannon just launched a new job board. Well, not exactly. He launched a new blog for his job board. Not quite either. He launched a new blog about job boards. Getting closer.

Eric just launched JobBoardBlogs.com, which provides readers with a quick overview of blog entries posted by various job boards, including CollegeRecruiter.com.

Great idea, Eric!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 1, 2008 at 5:57 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

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)

One of my favorite job board industry people, Peter Weddle, contacted me about an opportunity where I could help the members of the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS). The messenger and message were both great so I immediately said yes and I'm even more excited now.

The IAEWS has a strong, engaged membership base comprised of virtually every major job board and dozens of small niche players as well. The Association has been hosting two Member Congresses a year but some of the feedback that Peter has been receiving from members is that they'd like to participate but aren't always able to attend. In short, can the IAEWS find a way to bring the Member Congresses to the offices of its members in a virtual manner? Peter, always looking for ways to say yes rather than ways to say no, figured out that an attendee could blog about each session in real-time and solicit feedback from those who are attending virtually.

Continue reading "Blogging at Job Board Association Meeting" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 13, 2008 at 7:49 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

So Detroit Red Wings goaltender Dominick (The Dominator) Hasek has decided to retire at the tender age of forty-two. For two decades this incredible athlete has stopped puck after puck that he had no right in even seeing let alone touching let alone stopping.

But this blog entry isn't so much about Hasek as what we can learn from him and his decision to retire.

Continue reading "End of an Era" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 12, 2008 at 1:29 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

The feedback continues to flow in from stakeholders in the job board industry regarding the decision by CollegeRecruiter.com to eliminate resume searching. Our two primary concerns were:

1. Illegitimate organizations, most of which were international, using the resume data for illegitimate purposes such as identity theft. Most job boards have done of good job of preventing that by manually verifying their clients.
   
2. Legitimate organizations, most of which are domestic, using the resume data for illegitimate purposes such as pitching credit cards and other financial products to high income earners or those who have the potential to be high income earners, such as the college students and recent graduates who are the primary users of CollegeRecruiter.com.
   

Continue reading "Other Job Boards "Shocked" CollegeRecruiter.com Eliminated Resume Searching" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 9, 2008 at 8:02 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've been receiving a fair number of kudos recently for some of our policies, some of which are new and some of which are old.

An example of a new policy for which we've been receiving a lot of praise is that we stopped selling resume searching when two weeks ago we re-launched our web site with new back and front ends.

But we're equally as proud of some of our old policies, such as our effort to be as transparent as we can. I recently wrote about how after our re-launch we've seen daily job applications increase by about 100 percent. Today I'm happy to reveal that since our re-launch we're also seeing an increase in the number of job applications per posting increase by some 140 percent. Prior to the re-launch, we typically saw about 10 percent of candidates who viewed a job posting apply to that job posting. We're now seeing about 24 percent apply to viewed postings.

Some might argue that increased applications isn't a good thing but our clients would disagree. The vast majority of our clients regularly comment on the number of applications as a key criteria for how they decide whether to use a job board and to what extent to use that job board. Almost every large employer has an applicant tracking system or other software that helps them identify the best prospects for a particular position so rather than having each job board try to infer which candidates are best and then having different and often incorrect standards applied to those candidates, it seems to me that it makes the most sense to put those decision into the hands of the party best suited to making them and making them consistently: the employer.

We're not screening applicants. We're not testing them. We're not running background checks on them. We see our job as connecting quality employers with quality candidates. And we're cognizant of the fact that what makes for a quality candidate to one employer makes for a horrible candidate to another. So rather than asking our employer clients to re-enter their selection criteria into our system so that we can screen, tier, or otherwise rank candidates inconsistently with the employer's own software, we've made it as easy as possible for those employers to receive applications from the candidates using our site. At most the candidates need to complete four fields of data in order to apply: name, email address, resume and/or cover letter, and their geographic location. That's it.

We've come to the conclusion that less is more. Less intensive graphics make for a faster and therefore more enjoyable experience. Less clutter makes for a more easily navigated site. And less application fields makes for more applications, more candidates who are happy, and more employers who are happy.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 3, 2008 at 4:10 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the opportunity today to reflect on the tremendous accomplishment by the employees of CollegeRecruiter.com in re-launching our web site this past weekend. The planning for it hit a fever pitch early last fall and development was underway by early winter.

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were expended in creating a site that we are proud of and continuing to work hard on to make even better. Many of the changes we're making now are subtle and not at all obvious to the casual observer. But all of the changes that we've made since last fall were made with one goal in mind: to make our site as efficient and as effective as possible for the candidates, employers, schools, and others who use it.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 23, 2008 at 2:59 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the regrets that I have about the education that I received as a child and sought as a young adult was that I did not learn how to effectively communicate with the sight or hearing challenged. Having grown up in bilingual Canada, we were forced to take French through eight grade but I was terrible at it and dropped it as soon as I could. Through all my years of primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate school I never had the opportunity to learn Braille or sign language. That's a real pity because I rarely run into those who rely on their ability to converse in French yet I regularly run into far more people who are blind and use Braille or are deaf and use sign language.

Speaking of running into people, I had the pleasure of meeting Noorani Khan, the national recruitment manager for Manpower in Canada. She attended my presentation at the ACSESS conference last week in Toronto on how employers can and should use social and business networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Noorani handed me her business card after the presentation so that I could email a copy of the PowerPoint to her.

Now receiving a business card after a presentation is not a newsworthy event as I always receive a number of cards after presentations. What made this one special was her card. In addition to the typical corporate logo and printed contact information it had a whole lot of bumps all over it. Yes, Manpower is starting to print its business in Braille. Noorani said that she's the first but I sure hope that she's the first of many and that Manpower and other organizations transform the world of business cards from being friendly not only to the sighted but also to the blind.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Monster founder Jeff Taylor just announced that he's spinning off the obituary classifieds section of Eons, his social networking site for Baby Boomers. The obituary site, Tribute, is intended to aggregate obituary listings placed by funeral homes much like Monster was one of the first job boards to aggregate job listings placed by employers.

I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Jeff at a recent International Association of Employment Web Sites conference. He sat on a panel and was a vocal participant in a number of issues where his experience and advice was invaluable to many members in the room. Other than some warm fuzzies, it is unlikely that he got nearly as much out of the meeting as most of the other attendees but he didn't seem to mind. If Jeff's new venture is half as successful as the industry that Monster helped spawn then this is yet another blow to the viability of newspapers.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 6, 2008 at 9:22 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

I recently completed watching Battle 360, a multi-part series on the History Channel about the famed World War II carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise. Our primary contact at client Enterprise Rent-a-Car gave me the heads-up about the series and am I ever glad that she did. It was fabulous.

Enterprise Rent-a-Car was founded in 1957 by Enterprise by Jack Crawford Taylor, father of current CEO, Andy Taylor. Jack served as a fighter pilot on the U.S.S. Enterprise during World War II. The History Channel series did a very nice job of tying the men and women of Enterprise Rent-a-Car together with the proud legacy of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Continue reading "A Great Gift to Our Nation" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 5, 2008 at 3:07 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Kudos to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) for creating the All That Jazz blog to help engage their members and hopefully increase the attendance at this spring's annual conference in New Orleans. The NACE annual conferences are very well attended and offer a wealth of content, but given how the career service office, employer, and other members are so spread out geographically it must be very difficult for NACE to engage with them throughout the year.

NACE asked for volunteers to write for the blog. I jumped at the opportunity and so did a handful of others. The entries and related comments so far have been diverse, regular, and interesting. A great example is a post about low student attendance at career center programs and ideas for what to do about it.

If you're looking for insight into the hearts and minds of those who live and breath college recruiting each and every day, then read the All That Jazz blog.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 17, 2008 at 11:29 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the fringe benefits of running a job board and being an active blogger is that you receive a regular stream of career-related books. Most are quite good. A few, well, not so much. But definitely falling into the former bucket is Alexandra Levit's How'd You Score That Gig?

Alexandra's book provides an in-depth look at the 60 careers that over 500 Gen Y and Gen X voted to be the coolest jobs. But the book does more than just give examples or describe the jobs. It also helps the reader determine which jobs are most suitable for them through a unique self-assessment.

What I really loved about this book is that it includes insider accounts. So rather than just taking Alexandra's word for what a particular job is like, you'll be able to learn about the jobs from peers who actually are employed in these cool jobs. And if their experiences resonate with you, the book then walks you through how to get the job.

We regularly advice job seekers to conduct a series of informational interviews with people who work in the types of jobs which are of interest to the job seekers. The job seekers should not ask these people for a job but instead they should ask them to describe their work and how they got their jobs. This book is a great supplement to that process it will enable the job seeker to walk into these informational interviews with a lot more insight into the jobs they are considering and likely save them a lot of time by helping them include jobs they may not have considered and excluding jobs that they didn't realize were not suitable for their competencies, interests, or values.

Bravo, Alexandra! The bookshelves of every college career service office should include at least one copy of the superb How'd You Score That Gig?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 15, 2008 at 10:12 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently read an article at ERE and noticed a comment posted to it by Lisa Graham, Client Relationship Manager for FurstPerson / Sprint. Lisa's comment caught my eye because she wrote that she's made four good hires from MYSpace and had multiple potential candidates ask questions about her positions and express interest in them. She's had similar responses from Facebook. And to make her comment even more intriguing, she admitted to being a relative newbie as she's only been using MySpace and Facebook for about six months.

I emailed Lisa to ask her to share her wisdom and she very kindly obliged right away. Lisa hires for Sprint's contact center in Oklahoma City. They focus on tech support but have some customer service positions available as well but the customer service department is smaller and her group does not hire for it very often.

Continue reading "Do Employers Really Hire Candidates from Facebook and MySpace? FurstPerson / Sprint Does." »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 3, 2008 at 7:06 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the biggest frustrations in running an Internet job board like CollegeRecruiter.com is trying to accurately measure the value that we deliver to our employer clients. The problem, simply put, is that the most of them don't know either.

The vast majority of medium to large employers use applicant tracking systems and the vast majority of those do not properly track the source of those applicants. Most of them do a fine job of tracking the applicants from the point of application but for an employer to understand where their recruiting dollars are best being spent they also need to track the source of the applications.

The ATS companies and many of their clients insist that a drop down box listing different sources used by the employer suffices. The reality is that these candidate self-identification systems only suffice in providing inaccurate information to the employers. A recent study by Don Firth's JobsInLogistics indicates that self-reporting mechanisms like these notorious drop down boxes result in the misidentification of the source some 83 percent of the time. In other words, five out of six job seekers do not know how they found the employer's on-line career site even though the bulk of them probably just clicked through from a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com, a targeted email, cell phone text message, etc.

Continue reading "Internet Job Boards Number One Source of Hire" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 2, 2008 at 9:24 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

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" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 31, 2008 at 9:48 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

A tip of the hat to John Sumser of Recruiting.com and Dan Kurt of CareerCam for letting me know about an innovative recruiting program recently implemented by Steve Fogarty's team at Adidas.

Rather than flying a candidate to their corporate office in Portland, Oregon at a cost of about $1,000 a trip plus a couple of days for the candidate and the hiring managers, Adidas instead gives to the short listed interviewees an Adidas-branded web cam and tells the candidates to keep the web cam whether they're hired or not. Candidates are then interviewed in real-time through the CareerCam system.

The result? Faster turnaround for both interviewee and interviewers and I have to believe that Adidas is much more likely to therefore land the best possible hires and build significant good will amongst the candidates who were not hired yet remain in their talent pipeline.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 25, 2008 at 7:56 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Dauby O'Connor & Zeleski, LLC (DO&Z) is a small Indianapolis-based accounting firm that specializes in real estate. Conventional wisdom might indicate that a small firm like this wouldn't have the resources to recruit interns other than locally but the reality is that this firm is doing some great guerrilla marketing.

DO&Z has a Facebook page (although not much appears to have been done with it yet) and a video on YouTube that gently pokes fun at the menial work that a lot of interns do for big accounting firms while pointing out that DO&Z interns do meaningful, challenging work from day one.

Continue reading "Small Accounting Firm Uses YouTube and Facebook to Recruit Interns" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 21, 2008 at 10:34 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

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.

Continue reading "Do the Opposite of What 95% Are Doing" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 20, 2008 at 9:50 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Gerry Crispin posted a short but great blog article about how employers sometimes deviate from their standard hiring practices and hire people who aren't qualified on paper yet prove to be exemplary employees. It reminded me that we did something similar about 1.5 years ago thing when we hired Mike Palmquist, our national account executive.

Mike was a good friend of mine and Faith, my wife. We had known his family for years. He happened to mention to Faith that he was looking to get out of his career as a potter (amongst other things he'd also been a sous chef) and really liked cold calling. Faith and I talked and agreed that we should see if Mike would want to work for CollegeRecruiter.com as a sales representative. He was interested and it didn't take long for him to start. And thank goodness that he did as he's been a wonderful addition to our organization.

We joke with Mike that we hired him for all the wrong reasons yet he's one of the best hires we've ever made. Working with Mike is a pleasure and we look forward to doing so for as long as he's willing to put up with me.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 14, 2008 at 11:26 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently read about a new job board, Barefoot Student. It actually isn't a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com and other premium boards are which focus on job posting ads. Instead, Barefoot Student focuses mostly on its resume bank, which isn't as much of a resume bank as an opportunities wanted board. You see, students post information about themselves and what type of work they want to do.

Want to babysit? Post your experience and describe the positions you want there. Want to mow lawns? Same.

There's always room for another good job board or, in this case, opportunities wanted board. Welcome!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 13, 2008 at 8:43 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the pleasure of attending the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference this past Friday. It was again organized by Paul DeBettignies, again located at the Best Buy world headquarters, again sold out, and again attended by well over 100 recruiters and other human resource professionals. About 60 percent were corporate recruiters/HR, 20 percent consultants, 15 percent third party recruiters / headhunters, and five percent oddballs such as me. Next date is Friday, May 16, 2008. Be there or be square.

The first session was by TJ Conley, an attorney with Leonard, Street & Deinard. About the only thing that I can take credit for is that I helped to connect Paul and TJ.

The presentation by TJ covered a fair amount of ground but the area that was of most interest to me was about the legal risks to employers when they use Google or other Internet resources as part of their background checking process. Those risks include:

Continue reading "Reporting from the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 3, 2008 at 12:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

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.

Continue reading "Students Not Using LinkedIn" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 27, 2008 at 10:51 AM | Leave a Comment (9)

Willy Franzen of the Secrets of the Job Hunt career advice social network launched a new web site a few days ago. Fabulous. OneDayOneInternship.com profiles the internships offered by a different employer each day.

Willy, you're a genius!

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 21, 2008 at 1:44 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting says has a good reminder for employers who are considering hiring college students for internships or recent graduates for entry level jobs:

Generation Y'ers, with their 'different' approach to work, at the same time are demanding more from their jobs and their working environments. They are really looking for a sense of purpose and worth in their jobs, and because of this, the 'job for life' mentality has gone well and truly out of the window!

Continue reading "Gen Y Not Interested in Job for Life " »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 11, 2008 at 9:14 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

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:

Continue reading "50 Tools to Change Your Career Path" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 7, 2008 at 9:41 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

Shally Steckerl, one of the most knowledgeable sourcers ever to walk the earth, recently emailed me to let me know that he is now blogging at http://jobmachine.net/blog/shally and also to provide my readers with a few choice resources that have helped him:

Continue reading "Shally's Tips for Bloggers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2008 at 7:15 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Thanks to Super Dave Mendoza, I just learned that sourcing mavin Shally Steckerl recently interviewed Jason Davis about the value of the Recruiting Roadshow Unconferences. Jason was a third party recruiter when he started Recruiting.com, sold that business to Jobster, and is now running RecruitingBlogs.com and working to increase the number of recruiters who subscribe to the excellent Fordyce Letter.

Shally's interview of Jason took place this past fall in Atlanta at the second Unconference. I had the pleasure of being one of the keynotes and spoke about how recruiters can and should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. They mention my presentation a few times during the 11 minute interview, but what I really got a charge out of came at the end when they were interrupted by one of the attendees. Her evaluation of the conference was candid and great. Have a look:

Continue reading "The Value of Recruiting Unconferences" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 15, 2008 at 8:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the pleasure of meeting Super Dave Mendoza at a conference in his hometown of Denver. We were both speakers at a Bayard Advertising recruitment advertising event. I flew into Denver International a couple of hours before the event started and then spent what seemed like four hours driving through three states to get to downtown Denver. Got to love $80 cab rides. One way. Dave was up all night. In our college days that was something to be proud of. But his reasons were far too lame to go into here, although I can be bribed at quite reasonable rates. But I digress.

Continue reading "Dave Mendoza - Blogger Extraordinaire" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 11, 2008 at 6:53 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

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."

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 4, 2008 at 12:01 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the greatest changes that I've seen since we became engaged in the world of college recruiting in 1995 is the rise of the formalized internship program. In 1995, few organizations had interns and those who did rarely made good use of them. It was unusual when you heard about an organization that looked upon its interns as strategic resources and converted even a bare majority to permanent, full-time employees. My position then is the same as it is now: if your organization does not convert at least 75 percent then you are failing your interns and your shareholders.

But how does an organization without an internship program or with a failing internship program reach such a goal? One way is to pick up a copy of Total Internship Management: The Employer's Guide to Building the Ultimate Internship Program and implementing the many views and tips that it includes. The book by Richard Bottner of Intern Bridge, Inc. is based on the New England Internship Study, which was one of the largest internship research projects ever undertaken. The book also is based on the real-life experiences of more than 6,000 college students and 240 employer organizations. It walks you through the steps from understanding if your organization is ready to start recruiting to properly evaluating your existing interns to identifying which ones should receive offers for permanent employment to retaining those future employees.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 24, 2007 at 10:16 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Minnesota Headhunter has a great blog article on how parents who hover over their kids and therefore can be described as being helicopter parents are getting a bad rap.

As a volunteer at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), he has a lot of contact with Gen Y college students and their parents and feels that they can do their kids a lot more harm than good by giving them rope but not enough to hang themselves with. That's a great analogy and his advice is especially meaningful because it comes from someone in the recruiting world who works both with college students and their parents yet is neither a college student nor a parent. He's knowledgeable yet objective. And he's got a lot of wisdom.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 19, 2007 at 7:47 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

One of the benefits of our partnership with CareerTV is that I've been able to learn a lot about how employers can and should use recruitment videos to help them hire the best possible candidates. So I was delighted when I recently read in Interbiznet's Electronic Recruiting News some great tips from Helen Luttemo, Director of Public Relations for CareerTV:

Continue reading "Best Practices for Recruitment Videos" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 5, 2007 at 6:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the skills that is critical to the success of any entrepreneur or intrapreneur is the ability to see around corners. That is, to be better able to predict the relevant future than your competitors. Those who have the skill are at a huge advantage as they are able to better position themselves and their organizations than are their competitors. Corporate recruiters who want to peer around the corner to see what practices will soon be popular need only look at what the various branches of the U.S. military do, including the U.S. Army.

For decades, the Army has used the promise of money for college as a recruiting tool. But starting this January, their message will change. Rather than promising tens of thousands of dollars in money for college, the Army will instead promise up to $40,000 towards the purchase of a home or the creation of a business. And rather than directing the messages at the potential enlistees, the Army will direct a significant portion of the messages at the parents and other adult "influencers" of the enlistees. "If you want to get a soldier, you have to go through mom, and moms want to know what kind of future their children will have when they leave the Army," Lt. Col. Jeff Sterling, the program's architect, told the Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading "Army Targets Influencers: Why Don't All Employers?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 4, 2007 at 1:43 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Great news out of Texas: the Dallas Recruiting Roadshow Unconference is sold out. My congratulations to Ami Givertz and John Sumser for organizing such a great line-up of presenters and marketing it so well to recruiters and other human resource professionals. CollegeRecruiter.com is proud to be one of the sponsors and looks forward to continuing to partner with these gentlemen.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 30, 2007 at 7:21 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Paul DeBettignies a/k/a The Minnesota Headhunter has done it again. No, I'm not talking about his almost completely irrational devotion to University of Minnesota football. I'm talking about his great job in organizing the second Minnesota Recruiting Unconference.

The conference kicks off (pun intended) tomorrow morning at 8am and concludes at 2pm. In between, the attendees will be treated to breakfast, some great networking opportunities, great speakers, some great networking opportunities, lunch, some great networking opportunities, and then some more great networking opportunities. Did I mention that there's no charge and no selling from the podium?

I was privileged to be one of the presenters for the first conference. This time around, CollegeRecruiter.com is privileged to be one of the sponsors. If you're within driving distance of the Best Buy headquarters in suburban Minneapolis tomorrow, you need to sign up right away and join us.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 29, 2007 at 3:06 PM | Leave a Comment (2)

One of the great new additions to the world of recruiting blogs a/k/a the recruiting blogosphere is Mark Liston of Valpak. He just posted a great blog entry in which he gave an example of how a Gen Y sales rep would handle his work differently than his Gen X and Baby Boomer counterparts:

Continue reading "Gen Y vs Gen X vs Baby Boomers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 21, 2007 at 11:22 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There was a great promotional event held today at the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis. Papa John's, one of the nation's largest pizza chains, unveiled a new ordering system that is designed to appeal primary to Gen Y customers. Rather than calling in an order, you can now use your cell phone to text it in. As fun as that was to watch, it was even more fun to see Jason Bakker of CollegeRecruiter.com client and vendor, Campus Media Group, being interviewed on local TV about the idea.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 15, 2007 at 8:11 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've had the pleasure of meeting Art Koff of RetiredBrains.com before but I've never been able to spend as much time with him as I have over the past two days at the great recruiting conference put on by the folks from Kennedy Information. Art is caring, smart, passionate, and funny. And does he know how to pick a dinner entree.

A group of speakers and attendees had a nice dinner together Monday evening at Orlando's Samba Room. Art ordered the yellow snapper special. People actually applauded. Wow.

Continue reading "Art Koff is the Big Fish" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 14, 2007 at 6:21 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Just heard from Jason Davis that the most recent entries to the Recruiting Blogswap free content exchange program are now being featured on the home page of his well regarded RecruitingBlogswap.com site.

The Recruiting Blogswap is a great way for recruiters and other human resource professionals to share their opinions by authoring articles which are then automatically distributed by the Blogswap software to the next publisher in line. The publishers are recruiting bloggers who want to provide more content and more diverse content to their readers. There is no charge to participate. We run this program as a service to the recruiting community and it also builds links back to CollegeRecruiter.com as each entry includes a "sponsored by" link at the bottom. Win-win-win.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 13, 2007 at 9:29 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

It hasn't been formally announced yet, but earlier today one of our partners, Beyond.com, acquired another of our partners, HRHQ / JOBANIMAL.COM INC., owner of hundreds of niche job boards. My congratulations to both parties.

CollegeRecruiter.com has worked with Beyond.com for the past 4.5 years and we referred HRHQ to Beyond shortly afterwards. Since its founding in 2000, HRHQ has seen tremendous growth in revenues yet managed to stay small, nimble, and client focused. It is a true pleasure working with them.

Beyond provides job search and resume bank functionality to JobAnimal, CollegeRecruiter.com, and 15,000 other career sites. Although you could describe JobAnimal as the holding company for hundreds of niche job boards powered by Beyond, what really defines JobAnimal is their “Short-List PRO” technology, as well as customizable, scalable services, and the application of sound recruiting to provide their clients with the best, qualified candidates.

Unlike the practice of simply advertising in local newspapers or on job boards that may simply overwhelm the clients of JobAnimal with resumes or applications from all kinds of unqualified candidates, JobAnimal effectively does the upfront work of qualifying a short list of candidates and providing them to its clients in the manner that best suits their current hiring strategy. In addition, JobAnimal's fees are based on a volume of candidate leads model and that tends to significantly reduce the costs of the employer's recruitment process.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 6, 2007 at 4:48 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most interesting ideas that came out of my participation as a panel member on Minnesota Public Radio's In the Loop show was something contributed by audience member, Liba Herman. She works for The Carney Group, a Minneapolis-based marketing communications and design firm.

The Carney Group regularly interviews and hires Gen Y candidates. While the candidate is being interviewed, the interviewer will ask them for the address of their Facebook and MySpace pages. The interviewer will then bring those pages up on a computer screen and walk through them with the candidate. Is Carney doing this to criticize the candidate or dig up digital dirt? No, and that's why I love this idea so much. Instead, they're bringing up these pages in order to allow the interviewer and the candidate more opportunities to better know each other. If the candidate's page shows that she loves football and the interviewer saw a great game the day before, they have an increased personal connection and that's going to increase the likelihood that the candidate will want to work for Carney and that Carney will want to hire the candidate.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace present grave dangers to candidates and employers, but also tremendous opportunities. Kudos to The Carney Group for recognizing and implementing the latter.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 19, 2007 at 12:09 PM | Leave a Comment (3)

We can probably file this blog entry in the "this isn't quite news but it is still interesting" category. A few weeks ago, private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson announced a majority investment in on-line job board, Vault.com. My congratulations to both parties. I've long been a fan of Vault for the quality and quantity of employment-related content that they produce. We've also been around for about the same period of time. We went live 12 years ago. They followed a year later.

Just two short years ago, Vault laid off one third of its staff (25 people) in an effort to become profitable. I did some research on-line but wasn't surprised when I wasn't able to turn up any type of reliable profitability measurements for Vault. Is it profitable today? Probably. But it is certain that today, with its revenues reported to be $9.6 million, it is valued at $60 to $85 million. If so, that's a pretty rich revenue multiplier of 6.25 to 8.9 times as compared to some other niche job boards. For example, Dice Holdings, Inc., the owner of information technology niche job board Dice.com, is trading at 6.59 its annual revenues. All things being equal, a public traded company usually trades at a premium over privately held companies because investors prefer to be liquid.

Continue reading "Vault.com Acquired by Veronis Suhler Stevenson Private Equity Firm" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 15, 2007 at 7:13 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Ami Givertz deserves a huge slap on the back for a job very, very well done. He was the driving force and organizer of the second Recruiting Roadshow Unconference and did a masterful job by pulling together John Sumser and some other great speakers. The conference on Tuesday was attended by about 150 mostly corporate recruiter and human resource manager attendees.

I had the privilege of delivering the post-lunch keynote on how employers can and should use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. It was interesting that the material was new to almost everyone in attendance. I've spent a lot of time thinking, writing, and speaking about these issues over the past year or two so it was great to be able to help those in attendance become aware of the issues and hopefully to help them understand that the sites are neither evil nor silver bullets but used wisely can become another arrow in their recruiting quiver.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 27, 2007 at 11:49 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

New York state Attorney Generl Andrew Cuomo has launched an investigation into social networking site Facebook after New York undercover investigators posed as children as were allegedly solicited by sexual predators.

Cuomo said that agents posing as children were solicited by adult sexual predators and that the agents could easily access pornographic photos. Agents contacted Facebook but their complaints were often ignored. Facebook, to its credit, did take down some of the offending material and close the accounts of some of the predators but to its shame it apparently failed to do so on all and perhaps most of the time.

Facebook is only three years old. It was founded in 2004 in the dorm room of Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and opened its site to everyone in 2006. The company says it now has more than 42 million users. Unfortunately, some of those users are scum and we should be thankful that Cuomo and his staff are working to keep this wonderful resource as safe as possible for all.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 26, 2007 at 5:23 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Ever used Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia? It is written by some of the most brilliant and, ahem, not so brilliant people in the world in a collaborative manner that is truly remarkable. You can post an article about a topic you know a lot about, or about a topic that you know nothing about, and I can edit your words to improve, or damage, the quality of your article. The theory is that if enough people edit an article, the quality of the article will be improved. That's the theory and it usually works well. Usually.

The reality of Wikipedia is that because anyone can post an article or edit someone else's article, all articles must be read with some skepticism. The errors in the articles may be accidental or deliberate and very few of the contributors are scholars.

So along comes Scholarpedia, which takes the best of Wikipedia but using similar wiki technology but gets rid of the worst but only accepting articles and edits from actual experts. Here's how they describe their venture:

Continue reading "Size Matters Not" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 20, 2007 at 7:58 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm more of a feminist than many females that I know and thank goodness as I am the father of a bright and strong seven year old daughter and husband to a bright and strong wife. I joke that my sons, both of whom are older than my daughter, need to learn to be overly protective of her, but I have no doubt that she's able and will continue to be able to take care of herself along with those around her. So it was nice for me to see the Satisfying Career - Happier Life Career Blog entry by Shweta Khare that Millenial (also known as Gen Y) females are stronger and more confident than the Generation X (my generation) working females.

Continue reading "Rock On Sisters!" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 22, 2007 at 7:35 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Ernst & Young LLP hires more than 5,500 college students and recent graduates a year for internships and entry level career opportunities...and that's only in North America. How does an organization with such huge hiring needs find enough highly qualified candidates? In addition to the traditional on-campus recruiting efforts, employee referrals, and advertising on job boards and other media, E&Y now has a page on the social networking site, Facebook, which is one of the most popular sites amongst college students.

Continue reading "Ernst & Young Becomes First Employer to Use Facebook" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 9, 2007 at 9:55 AM | Leave a Comment (3)

My hat is off to Jason Goldberg of Jobster. It appears that high flying Jobster, for which I have tremendous respect, is about to lay off a significant number of its employees in an effort to become profitable in 2007. Unlike most CEO's, Jason has been open and honest with the readers of his blog about what is happening. I'm sure that there are things that he has not been able to discuss because of the fiduciary obligations that he owes to his VC and other shareholders, but it is truly amazing how he has been willing to not only acknowledge the very difficult issues in his blog but also link to blogs and other articles that are trash talking Jobster. He even approved a comment from a disgruntled parent of one of his recent college graduate employees.

This is a difficult time for Jason, his shareholders, his employees, his clients, his vendors, and others who care about Jobster. Yet when they all look back upon this period, they will trust Jason more and because of that Jobster will be stronger and even more respected than it already is.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 30, 2006 at 9:36 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Two of my favorite members of the recruiting blogosphere are Dave Mendoza and Joel Cheesman. Both care deeply about their clients and profession and are very knowledgeable. I always learn something whenever I talk with them. For a fully recovered lawyer, that's hard to admit.

At least as importantly as Dave and Joel being class acts professionally, they're also class acts personally. They're a real pleasure to be with. So isn't it great that they're receiving the accolades they deserve from their blogging brethren? Dave's blog won the Recruiting.com popular vote as the best recruiting blog and Joel's blog won the judge's vote as the best recruiting blog. Folks, there aren't any losers here. They're both winners.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 28, 2006 at 4:52 PM | Leave a Comment (0)