If you text with your candidates during the hiring process, you will likely see things pick up speed. The technology is available, and candidates are waiting for you to use it on them.

Millennial candidates appreciate employers who text with them

Sending texts to candidates has the added benefit of increasing your cool factor. At least for now (before all employers start doing this), this is one way to distinguish your employer brand. Continue Reading

As demographics change in the United States, including at college campuses, employers should have more diverse new hires. So why is the needle moving so slowly? In today’s panel discussion with College Recruiter’s Panel of Experts, we explore strategies for talent acquisition professionals to improve their diversity recruitment. Our discussion touches on mistakes recruiters make, big impact strategies and becoming culturally confident.

We were joined by Alexandra Levit, a workplace consultant; Toni Newborn, J.D., Diversity and Consulting Services Manager at City of St. Paul; and Bruce Soltys, Director of University Relations at Travelers. This is Part 1 of our discussion. Next week we will publish part 2, which discusses what an inclusive recruitment process looks like, differences between the government and private sectors, and concrete tips for talent acquisition professionals. Continue Reading

This blog is an excerpt of Steven Rothberg’s white paper, “How Employers Evaluate Career Services, Job Boards, and Other Sources, and How Mobile Recruiting Changes Everything.”

Read the entire white paper here (no need to register to download).

Few employers properly track candidate sources

The technology that allows an advertiser to track a consumer from their click on an ad to the advertiser’s website, and ultimately to a purchase, has existed since the mid-1990’s. For example, when College Recruiter began using this technology in 1998, within months, one of the world’s largest hospitality companies was paying us $0.05 per click in return for driving thousands of students and recent graduates a month to apply on their career website. Continue Reading

College Recruiter spoke with Joanne Meehl, President and primary Job Coach & Career Consultant at Joanne Meehl Career Services.  Joanne is part of College Recruiter’s Panel of Experts, which is made up of professionals around the country with top notch advice for recruiters and HR professionals, or for entry level job seekers. Here, Joanne shares her insight into resume rules that help college students and grads avoid mistakes and stand out to the applicant tracking systems. Continue Reading

Applicant tracking systems can help employers with their campus recruiting needs. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

It’s no secret the advancement of technology has changed the recruiting game. The use of applicant tracking systems (ATS) – software applications that enable the electronic handling of a company’s recruitment needs – are responsible for the technological recruiting revolution. As outlined by ICIMS, a provider of cloud-based hiring solutions, ATS recruitment “allow organizations to collect and store candidate and job related data and track and monitor the process of candidates through all stages of the hiring process.”

ATS recruitment is designed to enhance the overall recruiting experience for both recruiters and candidates. But forward-thinking employers recruiting recent college grads focus on the job seeker’s needs – the candidate experience – first.

“It’s important to make it as easy as possible for candidates to apply,” said Tim Mayer, Director of Talent Acquisition for Kraus-Anderson Construction Company, which uses BirdDogHR Talent Management Suite. “If your application is a time intensive process, people will drop out during the process or might not even try at all.”

There is some rationale for using the ATS to collect as much info as reasonably possible, including screening and ranking questions, but none of that matters if the candidate doesn’t hit “submit” adds Mayer.

“Interaction with the ATS could be the applicant’s first step in the candidate experience and can set the tone for a great, or poor candidate experience,” says Mayer.

What’s unique about applicant tracking systems is how they allow recruiters and hiring managers to customize their ATS for specific jobs, roles and even events. For example, a recruiter or hiring manager working a college recruiting fair or campus job fair could fully customize their ATS with functionality solely for that specific campus career fair, or hiring event.

SmartRecruiters is one example that allows recruitment marketing and collaborative hiring in the cloud. Bjorn Eriksson, Chief Marketing Officer of SmartRecruiters, offers some unique examples of how employers can customize an ATS for an event such as a college recruiting fair or campus job fair:

• Prepare: Know which positions you are actively trying to fill. Be sure the representatives working the booth are familiar with the open positions and hard-to-fill niche career opportunities so they can speak to them when engaging with students. With some ATS’s, like SmartRecruiters, you can publish event specific job ads tailored for college job fairs.
• Qualify: Prepare questions or a brief interview to pre-qualify applicants. Prepare questions to ask those who express an interest in your company to pre-qualify them. “It’s also a great opportunity to focus on providing meaningful information to students,” says Eriksson. “Don’t just recruit them, but ask their opinions, offer relevant advice and see if they are really a good match.” Make sure to capture students’ contact information so that you can continue the dialogue.
• Connect: Respond to inquiries and follow up ASAP after the event. While the impression is still fresh, group your candidates into: Best matches, possible matches, and no matches. View each candidate as a potential customer or future client, and tailor your follow up message to each group.

Ultimately though, the success – or failure – an individual or employer has with the ATS isn’t solely technology-based, says Saïd Radhouani, Ph.D., co-founder of Nextal, a collaborative applicant tracking system.

“I believe that the ultimate success depends on how the ATS is used, and not on how it’s set up,” said Radhouani. “Yes the implementation and functionality has an impact, but even if the setup is good, it doesn’t mean that recruiters won’t make mistakes.”

When a recruiter starts using a new ATS, they often won’t understand all the features and functionality, says Radhouani. As time goes on, they sometimes fail to learn new functionalities, and don’t maximize the systems capabilities. So recruiters within the same organization who use the same system should meet monthly to collaborate and share experiences, functionalities, and tips on how to best optimize their applicant tracking system.

“Recruiters should also attend webinars put on by the ATS vendor,” said Radhouani. “If recruiters know other colleagues from different companies who are using the same ATS, reach out to them to see how they are using it to ensure they are getting the most out of their ATS.”

And if the ATS vendor has a community forum, be active in the forum, ask questions and provide feedback.

Recruiters should be sure to measure success – and failure – in their recruiting by using the analytics/metrics capabilities of their ATS.

“Most modern applicant tracking systems have analytics capabilities that provide very insightful metrics about the entire recruiting process,” says Radhouani. “If a recruiter doesn’t measure what they do, they’ll never know whether they’re improving their productivity or not.”

Over time, recruiters and hiring managers get frustrated if an ATS is not user-friendly, doesn’t have specific functionality and capabilities, and does not help enhance the recruiting process. Applicant Tracking Systems are not all equal, and as hiring managers move from company to company, and use different systems, they can find pluses and minuses of each system they use. The key however, is to take advantage of the functionality of the system that is in place, find what works, and align your recruiting needs with the capabilities of the system.

“If you don’t have what you love, love what you have,” said Radhouani. “Every ATS has its good and bad sides. Recruiters should focus on the good side and work with the ATS, not against it.”

Mayer agrees.

“Really embrace the entire suite of options your ATS provides,” says Mayer. “Automate where appropriate and make sure the ATS provides a candidate experience that aligns line with your employment brand.”

Want to learn more about latest recruiting trends? Stay connected to College Recruiter by visiting our blog, and connecting with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Joanne Meehl knows the rules resume writing and has excellent advice. She is president and primary Job Coach & Career Consultant at Joanne Meehl Career Services.  Today Joanne shared her insight with College Recruiter, and you can scroll down to watch a video of our discussion. This is Part 1 of 2 of Joanne’s resume writing tips. A week from now Joanne will join us again to share more about applicant tracking systems and common mistakes that college students make when writing a resume. Continue Reading

The same tools that save recruiters time often make the application process feel robotic and cold, at least from the job seeker’s point of view. As you work to woo people into your company, it would be a bad idea to turn them off. You can use time-saving technology and still be respectful and applicant-centric.

Your employer brand will suffer if you don’t take steps to be respectful.

Any negativity that a candidate experiences can go viral. Your employer brand doesn’t just depend on the culture you create for current employees. The experience you create for potential employees, including everyone who never gets an interview, is also part of your company brand. Recruiters may groan at having to sift through 500 resumes for a single position, but that’s a gold mine for branding. That resume stack represents a captive audience. Unlike your passive followers on social media who you wish would just click “like” occasionally, those job applicants are eagerly waiting to hear from you.

Recruitment skills are like sales skills, so recruiters: sell your brand and your company’s experience. Don’t overlook how important your own customer service skills are. Your candidates are your customers.

Don’t risk losing the top candidates

When you treat candidates like a herd of cattle, think about who you are losing. Employers large and small consistently place soft skills at the top of their wish list. Those skills include integrity, dependability, communication, and ability to work with others. A candidate with high integrity will drop out of the race quickly if they sense that a recruiter doesn’t regard them as worth more than a few seconds of their time. If you lose integrity from your pool, what do you have left?

Juli Smith, President of The Smith Consulting Group, agrees that the lack of respect for candidates has consequences. “It can be very devastating to hear nothing.  Even bad news can be taken better than radio silence for days or weeks.” Candidates may have gotten used to being treated insignificantly during the job search, but that doesn’t mean they’ll put up with it for much longer. As companies start to figure out how to treat them better, you don’t want to be the last company standing with a humorless, disrespectful and overly-automated job application process.

A few little tweaks can make a difference

Like other great salespeople, good recruiters know how to read people. Let your recruiters bring their own humanness to the process. Don’t stifle their instincts to be respectful by automating every step of the way. If they truly have no time to insert a human touch along the way, then ask the most jovial member of your team to come up with better automated responses to candidates. Compare these two auto-emails:  Continue Reading

Isn’t it great that today we can find employers from across the world online? Our parents would have had to scour the newspapers and ask everyone they knew and still found only a fraction of the opportunities available. If you are like many job seekers, however, all this information doesn’t make the the job application process any less frustrating.

One company is dedicated to hearing your complaints and calling for change. Potentialpark conducts an annual global survey that aims to make it easier for job seekers to interact with companies, find career information and apply to the right jobs. Their survey recently opened in the U.S., and you can participate here. (Bonus for participating: you can win prizes!)

Potentialpark goes through thousands of career websites, job ads, online applications, and social media channels. They check what they find against the survey results. Finally, they make a powerful case to employers to make things clearer and more accessible for their applicants.  Continue Reading

Recent college grads and entry-level job seekers with military experience can set themselves apart from other job seekers because they have experience beyond the classroom that employers covet.

But the only way to do that is to create a resume and cover letter that highlights how military experience translates to the professional world.

It’s easier said than done, and takes practice, patience, and persistence. Recent college grads should reach out to their college career services department for resume and cover letter writing assistance, as they are skilled at helping veteran students and grads market their resume and cover letter.

At Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, veterans are about 10% of the MBA student population.

“Most of them have amazing backgrounds, but some of their best characteristics can get lost in translation,” says Eric Johnson, Executive Director of Graduate Career Services at IU’s Kelley School of Business. Johnson is a Kelley grad, an executive coach and the leader of the team responsible for career management and professional development of Kelley graduate students. Kelley students are required to meet with career services on a regular basis, where career experts advise them on all aspects of professional development and career management, including resume and cover letter writing tips.

Here are some of Johnson’s resume and cover letter writing tips for veterans:

Lose the jargon: Military terms like “dustoff” or acronyms like BCT, TIF, or MOS mean something to military audiences, but are a foreign language to most civilian recruiters.  “Use layman’s terms in resumes and cover letters so recruiters can easily understand what you’re talking about,” says Johnson.

Focus on your transferable skills: Veterans rarely bring traditional marketing or finance experience to a job interview, and sometimes lack confidence as a result. They shouldn’t – hiring managers are often more enthusiastic about the transferable skills of veterans than they are about the marketing backgrounds of their classmates. “Companies can teach marketing – they can’t coach initiative,” says Johnson. So veterans need to highlight their leadership, teamwork, learning agility, language skills, global immersion, problem solving, ability to deal with ambiguity, and ability to cope with change (among other things) when building their resumes, cover letters and networking profiles. These areas will make their resumes stand out.

Don’t be too humble: “My experience with veterans is that many view their experiences as having ‘just done my job,'” says Johnson. “Initially, many are reluctant to talk about awards they won, commendations they received, or honors that were bestowed on them because they didn’t do tasks for glory – they did them out of a sense of duty or patriotism.” As noble as that is, civilian recruiters are trying to answer the questions, “how good were you at your past job?” and “how do you stack up against others from your past profession?” “It’s not bragging to cite these awards if they are presented as facts and in the context of the job that was done,” says Johnson. “It’s honors like these that can differentiate one candidacy from another.”

Dennis Davis is the Chief Translation Officer for MetaFrazo, a company whose mission is to maximize veteran employment opportunities in the private sector and provide best in class tools and expertise allowing corporations to identify, attract, hire, develop, promote, and retain veterans.

When it comes to writing resumes and cover letters, “defining what you have done and the values you used to achieve success are the best way to set yourself apart,” says Davis, author of Not Your Average Joe: Profiles of Military Core Values and Why They Matter in the Private Sector. “You have tremendous value that you can bring any employer.”

Do that by writing a resume and cover letter that focuses on achievements and responsibility and how it translates into the professional or corporate world. Employers crave job seekers with experience outside the classroom – those who have worked in the military have that. They have learned a wide variety of skills – leadership, communication, operations, logistics, troubleshooting, analytical, and interpersonal skills, teamwork, and much more. Highlight those areas on a resume. Create bullet points backed with proof of accomplishment that translates your military experience to the civilian world, like this example:

• Leadership: Oversaw a team of 20 that operated in multiple remote, overseas locations throughout the world.
• Developed communication, interpersonal and troubleshooting skills by working closely with leaders from other countries and military units.

“Separate yourself from all other recent college grads,” says Davis. “You have had far more responsibility than many recent college grads, prove it on your resume.”

When recruiters read resumes, they scan them first, so put key achievements or successes in bold to stand out. Note: Bolding doesn’t often apply when submitting a resume via an applicant tracking system, but it can be effective when emailing a resume to a specific contact or uploading a word document of a resume into an online system.

Justin K. Thomas is a Media Placement Specialist for the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He’s also retired from the United States Navy, and has had success writing resumes that connect his military background to the needs of civilian/corporate/professional jobs.

Many recent college grads with military backgrounds may tend to write how they speak in their branch of service, says Thomas. For example, military language may call for this type of comment:

“Was a leader of 8 soldiers who created journalistic products for Army leadership.”

A better and more concise statement could be this:

• Served as a news editor to 8 public relations specialists that created over 300 feature news articles, video and graphic design products for civilian media outlets on behalf of the U.S. Army.

The second sentence gives the hiring manager an idea of the cause and effect of your abilities. “It helps them understand what you did in the military,” says Thomas. He provides these additional tips:

Always write a cover letter: Resumes can be rigid, and it’s sometimes hard to explain in detail all of one’s experiences, especially in the military, says Thomas. A hiring manager can’t always fully understand a key accomplishment or skill set. Cover letters allow one to expand on these details.

“Cover letters allow you to convey your skills and experiences in greater detail and prove you have the ability to work for their organization,” says Thomas.

Always proof your resume and cover letter: Check your work for common mistakes such as punctuation marks and sentence structure. Read it from bottom to top to gain a different perspective. Print the resume and cover letter and proof them. Let it sit for a day before submitting, if possible. Reviewing it with fresh eyes can help find or correct mistakes.

“You will not believe what I caught after I hit submit on the job application,” says Thomas.

Customize each resume and cover letter to the specific job: The best military resumes are like those of any other job seeker – they are customized and tailored to the specific job for which you are applying. Read each job description and highlight your related skills to the company needs, using the job description as your guide. Tweak it, update it and change as needed for each job. A one-size-fits-all resume doesn’t work.

Many employers covet hiring veterans – but they have to understand what you did in the military to know the true value and expertise you can bring to their company. “If an employer is looking for someone with both a degree and experience, the military veteran will always win that battle when properly defined – beginning with your resume,” says Davis.

Want more tips and advice on how to market your military resume and cover letter? Then stay connected to College Recruiter by visiting our blog, and connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Group of businesspeople at work. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Five years ago, Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, rarely heard employers talk about using analytics or data when making hiring decisions.

“Now I can hardly walk down the hall at a recruiting conference or spend 30 minutes on a call with a client and not hear some reference to it,” says Rothberg. “There is no doubt that HR professionals recognize the value in using data-driven decisions, but probably fewer than one percent of employers are good at it.”

Ian Cook, Head of Workforce Solutions at Visier, a company that develops cloud-based applications that enable HR professionals to answer workforce strategy questions, talked about the impact of analytics, specifically to campus recruiting and the hiring of recent college grads, in the College Recruiter article Analytics, data changing way employers recruit, hire college graduates.

“This is no longer a nice to have,” Cook said in that article, referring to the use analytics and data to drive recruiting and hiring decisions. “Everyone knows the game has changed, and if you are not using analytics to play the best you can then you will be left behind.”

The reality is, if you are not using analytics and data, your competitor who already is using analytics to recruit and hire recent college grads and entry-level job seekers probably has already interviewed or hired that candidate that may have once been interested in your company.

“If you don’t dive into analytics, then you are increasing the likelihood that your competitor will be able to scoop up all the great talent that you need,” says Cook.

The move to using big data and analytics for campus recruiting, hiring recent college grads or entry-level employees has been met with resistance by both small and large employers. Many of those employers believe their campus recruiting efforts, combined with a strong social media outreach, and robust campus careers page, drives success recruiting recent college grads or entry-level job seekers.

“We do hear the ‘our college recruiting program is a well-oiled machine’ from some employers,” says Rothberg.

But at the same time, both small and large employers are now successfully using analytics and data to drive hiring decisions. That list includes these three well-known companies:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Dylan Schweitzer of Enterprise Rent-A-Car spoke publicly about how they use data to track their sources of hire and that allows them to reduce their spend on schools, job boards, and other sources which are more expensive than their other sources.

Lockheed Martin: Alton Fox of Lockheed Martin mentioned at TalentBlend 2016 that they’re shifting more and more of their university relations budget toward job boards and other virtual sourcing tools because the cost-of-hire is far lower AND the employees are far more productive.

Uber: Uber tests, tests, and tests some more with different job titles, geographic targeting, job descriptions, landing pages, and more. They work with a wide variety of media partners and many of those partners are paid on a performance basis, so if the ads they run work well then Uber keeps working with the media partner and probably increases how much they spend with that partner, says Rothberg. If the ads don’t work well, Uber shifts those resources to better performing sourcing tools.

Using analytics and data to make recruiting and hiring decisions should be viewed as a way to bridge the gaps that can be cause with human oversight or human error. Analytics and data also provide a unique insight that has never been available before. So why not use analytics and data when making hiring decisions?

Many organizations are focused on analyzing candidates, such as by resume parsing or extended social profile analyses, in order to improve their likelihood of landing a great hire, says Cook. Others are taking a more strategic approach and attempting to analyze the workflow and outputs of the recruiting function.

They are looking at questions such as:

• Can we recruit faster?
• Are we spending our sourcing dollars in the right place?
• If we change up our process, do fewer people abandon their applications?
• Which sources consistently produce employees who stay and perform?

These are complex questions involving multiple data sources, but they are all are aligned to ensuring the function is delivering what the business needs.

“Predominantly, we see industries that need to recruit a lot of high value talent being early adopters or ahead of the game when it comes to talent analytics,” says Cook. “Organizations that hire lots of software engineers or technical medical staff or specialists with financial skills understand the value that comes from being data-driven as opposed to following the old ‘post and hope’ model.”

College Recruiter has been using analytics and data for years, providing employers with specific and organized reports to help achieve their recruiting and hiring goals. But many recruiters and HR professionals simply fear change, or the challenge of implementing analytics into the decision-making process.

“The biggest reason that I see employers resisting the use of data and analytics is the fear of math,” says Rothberg.

Here is an example: Rothberg recently asked the head of HR for a 5,000-employee company if they would like a detailed proposal that walked through the outcomes of the various recruitment advertising packages being considered. This proposal included projections on the number of candidates that would be sent to that company’s applicant tracking system from College Recruiter, how many would apply, how many would be hired, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire.

“She asked what I needed and I asked her how many people she wanted to hire and over how many months,” recalls Rothberg. “She didn’t know. I asked how many applications she would expect to generate for every 1,000 clicks we sent to her ATS. She didn’t know. I asked how many hires she would make for every 100 applications. She didn’t know. As unfortunate as all of that was, she didn’t want to know. She was the head of HR for a 5,000 person company and she didn’t want to admit that math scared her.”

Don’t let analytics scare you. Employers, both large and small, are using analytics to drive talent decisions. Dive in, before your competitors steals your next great hire.

“We can always find ways to save a little money, hire a little faster, diversify a little more, and hire people who perform a little better and are retained for a little longer,” says Rothberg. “Data and analytics help us identify those areas where we can improve, whether there is only minor or vast room for improvement.”

Wondering how analytics can help drive your recruiting decisions and successes? Contact College Recruiter today to learn more, and be sure to Check out our blog and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.