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Talk about differences in corporate cultures: there is serious and there is not.

And from the not department comes this new video from Groupon. keep reading…

This Cleveland Clinic video wasn’t made specifically for recruiting, but it sure can’t hurt in portraying jobs at the famous healthcare organization as ones that make a difference.

Commissioned by a surgeon who’s the Clinic’s chief experience officer, it was produced in house and first shown by the CEO.

It is being sent to every hospital CEO in the United States, and was recently shown at a conference in Saudi Arabia. keep reading…

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, is out with a new book saying that women “leave before they leave,” self-selecting out of certain jobs, careers, or specialties that they feel will hurt their ability to have a balanced life at some point in the future.

Is she right? Or is the larger problem stubborn, inflexible employer policies that make it hard for people to leave and reenter the workforce?

Dr. Cassi Fields, an I/O psychologist, and I talk about this in the video below. keep reading…

Those looking to get other songs out of their head can enjoy a Gangnam parody, courtesy NASA interns.

If you want an internship that involves making coffee, and then making some more coffee, this internship’s not for you.

That’s the message from this music video called Hire Me, Maybe, whose chorus will be stuck in your head longer than you want it to. It was made by interns at the eyewear designer-distributor ClearVision; I thought I’d pass it along since quite a few ERE readers ask about interesting careers-related videos (Julia Gometz, formerly with JetBlue, pointed this one out to me today).

ClearVision looks for interns who, among other qualities (interpersonal skills, leadership, communication skills — you know the drill) have a GPA of 3.3 of above. Interns participate in workshops like one on “the Science of Shopping” and another on left- vs. right-brain thinking. They also do community service work, such as at a camp called Kehilla, for kids with social/emotional/learning challenges.

The song was inspired by Carly Rae Jepsen’s. It’s about three minutes long, below. keep reading…

If you’ve known someone who has applied for an entry-level job only to be told they need to have experience — you’ll get it.

It is a new video by some Boston University students and grads, parodying Les Miserables using what the mock-movie-preview-makers see as a sad state affairs for liberal arts majors. keep reading…

Those bitter Facebook battles over gay marriage, Planned Parenthood, and all else have taken a toll on a few friendships. Perhaps then, they are having some affect on employment relationships — recruiters connected with candidates over Facebook.

This is, after all, part of what social media’s supposed to be about for recruiting — building relationships over time, ones that could someday end up in a hire. And, on Facebook, in some cases these rough-and-tumble political fights are stopping some hires before they start.

CollegeRecruiter.com’s Steven Rothberg and I talk about this for about 13 minutes, below. keep reading…

Sure, mobile is a hot market. But are employers making the blunder of not responding quickly enough to simplify and streamline their job application processes?

Simply Hired’s CEO & Co-founder Gautam Godhwani talks about that with me in Hollywood, California, for about five minutes in the video below. We also get into:

• Just what is it job candidates want to do with a phone or iPad … apply to a job, or just briefly express interest and get back to it later?
• Investing in Facebook pages vs. investing in mobile recruiting
• How the number of people using mobile devices compares to the number using computers keep reading…

You probably already noticed recruiting videos are getting progressively less ordinary all the time. More proof of that comes in this video by flash-gaming company Kixeye that’s starting to fly quickly around Facebook and LinkedIn.

I’ll warn you ahead of time that it’s more NC-17 than G. keep reading…

As online recruiting sites get more complex, they can get harder to read for people who can’t see, as well as others who use “screen readers” because of challenges with their arms or other disabilities.

It doesn’t have to be that way, says Corbb O’Connor, a web usability consultant with O’Consulting Group. In the video below, O’Connor talks about:

• Why video and slick images aren’t always a bad thing for the blind
• The problem with contacting a company and asking for special help reading the site
• What he’s finding on corporate career sites vs. job boards
• Craigslist and LinkedIn
• Simple things to keep in mind when designing sites

It’s about 10 minutes, below. keep reading…

It’s what Joel Spolsky, an expert on hiring for technology jobs in particular, says is what employees most care about.

Google’s trying it, but other, smaller, companies are too, he says — and there are lots of ways to accomplish it.

He spells it out below, in this clip from the most recent ERE Expo, in San Diego. About 3 1/2 minutes.

keep reading…

Mystery Applicant is the winner of ERE’s first-ever competition between startups, one that began with almost 50 applicants and ended up with the candidate-experience technology firm pocketing $10,000.

You may have read about the company as it launched quietly and later said it had signed on an 80,000-candidate-a-year customer. It was picked among six finalists, including Goood Job; Lab of Apps; Ongig; Traitperception, and Venturocket. They came from as far as the UK and Israel, and as close as San Francisco to take the stage in Mountain View today at the Recruiting Innovation Summit to show off their products and fight for the grand prize.

Nick Price, director of Mystery Applicant, said after the award was announced that he’ll use the money to invest in product development. “The money is brilliant,” he said, “but the recognition of what we’re doing is really good too.”

Tweets flew fairly frequently during the competition, and the startups were grilled from judges Jason Warner, Steve Boese, and Ethel Chen, including being asked:

• How will you make money?
• How will it work with an iPad?
• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• Does your product do so many different things that the message gets muddled up?
• How do you solve the problem that some people in our networks are people we don’t really know?

Judges were asked to choose a winner based on such things as whether the companies actually solved a business problem; how well they focused on a target market; and how well they positioned their product in the marketplace.

Videos from the demos are below, broken up into two parts and followed by the announcement of the winner, which included comments by the judges. keep reading…

What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?

What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.

On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.

Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.

Political, legal, and benefits junkies have probably read and heard just about everything, pro or con, about the health-care case recently argued in front of the Supreme Court. What’s not been said as much is what this means to employers once the court rules the way it does.

Ogletree Deakins’ Thomas M. Christina, who helps clients through the process of establishing and operating benefit plans, and who has counseled employers on the health care law, talks with me about what the upcoming decision may mean for recruiting and human resources — depending, of course, on just what that decision is.

Christina is a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Associate Deputy Attorney General. The video’s about eight minutes, below. keep reading…

So Mark Murphy’s not a fan of many of the interview questions commonly used, saying they don’t differentiate between better and worse performers, and ultimately don’t result in better hires.

The questions the Leadership IQ CEO does like can loosely be split up into categories: attitudinal questions, and coachability questions.

The first type of questions help you actually tell who’s a better than a candidate than the next one, rather than having each person just tell you all their success stories. The second category — coachability — gets into what someone’s boss would say about them.

He explains more, and offers specific sample questions, in the 6-minute video below. keep reading…

That famous “what’s your biggest weakness?” question may be more ubiquitous than a Grande Frappucino, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good at determining whether someone’s a good candidate or not.

Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ and author of a book called Hiring for Attitude, says this question and many others used every day should be placed in the dustbin of history. It’s about a 7-minute video, below.

keep reading…

I have never met an unhappy, urologist anywhere.

You may not have thought you want to be a urologist. That’s perfectly understandable. But after watching a video — one that ended with the quote above — that won a marketing award, you may change your mind.

This clip called ”Why Urology?” was just honored with a platinum from the International AVA Awards competition. That’s a contest put on by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, which gets about 1,700 entries.

The video was produced by the American Urological Association, and has been viewed nearly 5,000 times on YouTube. keep reading…

When the recruiting and marketing departments are on the same page, that’s a good thing. But what if they’re not only on the same page, but they’re the same person?

Indeed: the chief brand officer at Women’s Healthcare Associates, LLC is Anita Jackson. The director of human resources is also Anita Jackson.

In the video below, about 7 minutes long, Jackson and I talk about her unusual dual role at this Oregon gynecology and obstetrics organization. She shares whether this model could work in a larger organization, and how this structure affects the candidate experience. keep reading…

With unemployment rates hovering in the 9% range in the U.S., there are plenty of people for most every job. Actually, scratch that. It’s not quite true for Siemens, where it’s tough to find engineers and others with the skills it needs.

The German company has about 336,000 employees, 1,640 locations, and about 60,000 people, and growing, in the U.S.

Rachel Romaszewski, who recruits for Siemens’ energy business, and I talk about the skills shortage and what’s being done about it. She tells me (out of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) which social media site is working well, which one works less well, and which one’s hit or miss.

“We are just growing like crazy,” she says, in the seven-minute video, below. keep reading…

Twitter: for some, it’s a great source of news. For others, a way to broadcast jobs. For still others, a quick n’ dirty way to comment, spread links, or have the proverbial “conversation.”

Jody Ordioni, who’ll be leading a session at the Expo in March, and I talk about Twitter — what we notice, what seems to work, and what seems to not. It’s a bit over six minutes, below.

keep reading…