Colleges Using Blogs. Why Not Employers?

The number of college admissions offices which are using blogs to recruit students has been exploding over the past couple of years. Some schools have paid staff members write about the school, the city in which it is located, the degrees it offers, the employers who recruit on-campus, etc. Other schools have currently enrolled students writing as they feel (and I agree) that a high school student is far more likely to listen to the opinions of someone who is currently a college sophomore than someone who was a college sophomore when Al Gore was busy inventing the Internet.

Cheap shot aside, if bureaucratic, conservative institutions which move at a pace which can only be described as glacial are now blogging, why aren’t more employers? Virtually all employment-related blogging is coming out of the offices of job boards and third party recruiters. With very few exceptions, virtually no corporate recruiters are blogging. That’s a real shame as those same corporations are crying the blues about how hard it is to recruit the best Gen Y workers yet their recruitment and retention policies are decades old and reflect the needs and wants of their Baby Boomer and Gen X managers rather than the Gen Y’ers they want to recruit.
Wake up, folks. If you want to recruit a group of people, you need to speak to their needs and wants and that might mean getting out of your comfort zone and taking some chances.