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WorldatWork surveyed more than 2,700 organizations; members are employed in the HR, compensation, and benefits departments of mostly large North American companies.

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The victors in this year’s college recruiting wars may attract Gen Yers by throwing lots of green at them. Not signing bonuses and hefty salaries, but trees. Towers Perrin intends to appeal to new grads by demonstrating its commitment to the environment, so the professional services firm will donate 100 trees to American Forests’ Global ReLeaf education and action program for each of the 50 career fairs it holds on college campuses beginning in September. It’s a new twist to recruit “green-minded” grads by a company that doesn’t specialize in environmental jobs.

Towers Perrin has also printed all of its recruiting brochures and materials on recycled paper and will distribute T-shirts embellished with the phrase “Go Green” to grads who attend the firm’s office recruiting events, according to recruiting director Jen Warne.

“We’ve tied an eco-friendly theme throughout our entire recruiting campaign, including our pending launch of a new page on Facebook,” says Warne. “It’s a clear demonstration of our corporate values, so we’re hoping it will differentiate us from our competitors.”

Little more than a year after introducing video resumes, CareerBuilder has discontinued the service. It was quietly taken offline in June.

The company won’t say how many jobseekers posted videos, but it seems the participation rate wasn’t high enough to warrant CareerBuilder’s effort. Job board spokesperson Jennifer Grasz told us, “We’re always testing the market with new tools and services to enhance the user experience. If the response rates are not there, we’ll reevaluate whether the market is ready and focus energies on other areas to aid in the job search and recruitment process.”

CareerBuilder’s main resume pages are still online, though no longer linked from the site. However, Grasz said the jobseeker videos have been removed. Jobseekers can always post their video to a service like You Tube and include a link in the resume or cover letter they have on CareerBuilder. When an employer downloads the resume, the link becomes hot.

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Rating employers is not a new idea. Vault has (profile; site) been doing it for years and for pay. There’s JobVent, which has an 11 point rating system and the ability to leave comments. Jobster (profile; site) has a feature where employees can talk about what it’s like working for their company. F–ked Company used to have the dirt on all sorts of companies until it got, you know.

So when we came across the announcement of CorporateGrade.com we were admittedly underwhelmed. But considered from the standpoint of it being part of a trend, the site takes on greater importance.

CorporateGrade.com is new and in beta, so it doesn’t have much in the way of content yet. But it’s easy to use and has a good bit of sophistication. Ratings can be anonymous, although the registration process does require a valid email address. Not that that’s going to deter bitter employees or ex-workers or even just someone out to sully a company. While that’s often the first objection raised by company officials (only the disgruntled participate in these sites), we found just the opposite to be true. CorporateGrade’s first participants appear to be a balanced lot, providing a good glimpse of life inside a company, a division or the office where they work.

Ratings have been around even before the Internet. But those were either compiled by an ambitious author (Places Rated Almanac, for example) or were limited surveys. The Internet expanded the reach, and opened the door to anyone who wanted to participate. Today, ratings have become so available and influential that a very high percentage of consumers both consult product reviews before making a buying decision and are influenced by what they read. Social media is increasingly exerting both an influence on decision-making and providing a way for consumers to offer feedback.

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Who wants to be thought of as an “employer of choice?”

“Don’t we all,” says Karin Lash, regional director, interactive strategy for TMP Worldwide.

But, how do you do that? How do you build an employer brand?

We caught up with Lash and Ryan Estis, senior vice president and chief talent strategist for NAS Recruitment, who shared with us some of the essentials of effective brand building. Watch as these experts outline the ingredients for building a brand that will help you attract quality candidates.

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You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.

Now what do you do?

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The hiring practices of one of the most famous entertainment venues in the world have been called discriminatory as the result of a background criminal check that turned up a job candidate’s assault conviction.

A New York City law firm filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming Madison Square Garden discriminates against African-American job applicants by illegally using criminal history reports in making hiring decisions.

The EEOC complaint alleges that Carlene Clarke, 27, received an employment offer letter from New York’s Madison Square Garden in September 2007 which was rescinded a month later after a background check discovered she had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault more than five years earlier.

According to the press release issued by Outten & Golden LLP, which represents Clarke, the rationale for the complaint is that “use of criminal histories in making hiring and other employment decisions has a disparate impact on African-Americans.”

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Even the military is not immune from the consolidation of job boards. Today, RecruitMilitary, LLC announced it bought competitor Landmark Destiny Group for an undisclosed amount.

A subsidiary of Virginian-Pilot Media Companies, a Norfolk, Virginia newspaper company, Landmark Destiny operates a job board for U.S. military personnel transitioning to the private sector and recently separated veterans. It will be merged into RecruitMilitary.com, a similar military-focused site.

Both LDG and RecruitMilitary also publish employment newspapers, distributing them on U.S. bases around the world. RecruitMilitary and LDG send their magazines to military bases for free distribution to transitioning personnel. RecruitMilitary publishes Incoming!, a six-page quarterly, and ships more than 50,000 copies to over 230 bases. LDG publishes Search & Employ, a 28-page bimonthly, and ships some15,000 copies to more than 75 bases.

Together the two sites have over 500,000 registered users. It’s not clear how many overlap or what percentage have completed resumes. Still, RecruitMilitary president Drew Myers said in the press release announcing the deal that the acquisition of LDG “greatly strengthens our company. We jump to first place in military-to-civilian job boards, matching our ranking in military-to-civilian career fairs. And the purchase gives us a highly competitive position in publishing.”

We couldn’t tell what ranking he meant. Even ignoring overlap, both sites together don’t come close to the traffic of Monster’s Military.com. Traffic metrics sites Compete.com and Alexa.com show Military.com far ahead in rank and visitors.

RecruitMilitary however, has been aggressively promoting its military career fairs. So far this year it has held 64 compared to 13 in all of 2006, its first year producing the fairs. The company produces career fairs in cooperation with HireVetsFirst, a part of the United States Department of Labor; The American Legion; and the Military Spouse Corporate Career Network.

RecruitMilitary also provides search services to companies looking for workers with military backgrounds.

If you’re into brown, blue and green you ought to go be a doctor or a forest ranger. See how easy picking a career is when you know your colors?

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

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Cost has always been central to recruiting. One of the most popular (though not the most useful) metrics is cost-per-hire.

But demonstrating the value of recruiting is difficult. The reasons are simple enough — recruiting costs are tangible; the benefits less so. It takes time for new hires to become productive, and their contributions are difficult to measure with any precision. Furthermore, it is impossible to attribute an employee’s performance to the recruiter’s skill at getting the right fit, in the right place and time. Consequently, tying recruiting results to cost is nearly impossible. Few even try. So recruiting managers usually find themselves under pressure to “manage” costs better — which usually means do more with less. Some companies have just given up trying and handed over their recruiting to an RPO vendor.

RPO has its own issues, but one benefit of RPO may just be that recruiting managers begin to understand costs, and how to manage them to their advantage. I don’t mean “manage” as in “limit” (although that’s a very fine thing), I mean structuring costs to maximize flexibility, leverage in-house expertise, and limit cutbacks during down cycles. This is the “manage” they teach in B-school.

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A candidate interview with Celeste O’Neil of the Biondo Group is not your typical interview. While many companies rely on technology to conduct candidate screening and interviews, Celeste takes a more personal approach with her candidates. In some instances, her interviews are scheduled around morning walks or family dinners at the CEO’s home. After hearing Celeste’s story, I was intrigued to find out more. I decided to invite her over for a non-traditional interview at my parent’s house in Milford, PA, to discuss her non-traditional interviewing.

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From the online-recruiting grapevine:

–(You heard it here first): NewmediaHire is going live with a redesign of its site today. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s based on a platform called “Ning,” popular for building websites. The video-blog-discussion-heavy site is aimed at creating a sense of community — more than just job-hunting — and is aimed at an international audience (the site has a corresponding LinkedIn group and perhaps half of that group is based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Africa, South America, and elsewhere outside of the U.S.) An Indian company helped NewmediaHire build the new site.

–A new site, moneybackjobs.com, is offering employees a “5% to 7.5% bonus for accepting a new job that’s posted on our website.” Employers pay $50 to post, and 10-12% for each candidate they hire. There are incentives for employees to be exclusive, and to take their resumes off of other sites (”trust us, we have ways of finding out,” the company says) as well as big incentives for employers to only post on moneybackjobs. Smart.

–From ThinkPanmure’s Nate Swanson: “We are hearing that several large BrassRing customers are unlikely to renew their contracts when they expire late this year or early next year, but have yet to make a decision as to whether to use their existing ERP vendor or that of a best-of-breed vendor.”

Despite the slowing economy, more employers are requesting proposals for recruitment process outsourcing services. The CEOs of Hudson Highland Group and Spherion commented that RFP activity and the new business pipeline for RPO deals remained strong during each company’s second quarter earnings conference call.

Both CEOs also acknowledged that some existing RPO customers have ceased hiring or have opted to take recruiting back in-house, causing a decrease in RPO revenues for both companies during the recent period.

Despite what he called a severe pullback from two clients, one in telecommunications and the other in the airline industry, Spherion CEO Roy Krause said the company will continue to invest in RPO, adding that while proposal activity has increased, it’s taking longer to close new deals.

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Talent acquisition leaders are used to working under pressure, but there’s little doubt that the guy in the hot seat is Joe Abbott, director of National Recruitment Human Resources Management for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In May 2006, President Bush committed that he would curtail illegal immigration and improve border security. A key part of his strategy included adding 6,000 new border patrol agents by the end of 2008. Abbott agreed to head up the agency’s recruitment function and take on the challenge of sourcing 180,000 applicants to meet the hiring quota of 6,000 new agents.

Abbott’s story sounds like it has all the makings of the first reality television series featuring the survival strategies of talent acquisition leaders.

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Kenexa (profile; site) earned $9 million or 39 cents a share for the quarter ended June 30, beating Wall Street’s estimate of 35 cents and joining Taleo and Monster in reporting better than expected results.

The company’s $56.4 million in revenue was an increase of 25% over the $45.2 million for the same period in 2007. The company provides full life-cycle talent management software and multiple additional products including assessments and RPO services.

Kenexa’s CEO Rudy Karsan did a little crowing in the financial announcement, which was released after the market closed Monday. “The combination of solid sequential growth and integration of Quorum International enabled Kenexa to become the first independent talent management vendor to pass the $200 million in annualized revenue level during the second quarter,” he said in the typical, curbed enthusiasm of the financial announcements of publicly-held companies.

Quorum International was a London-based RPO provider to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The company was purchased for an undisclosed sum in April.

Kenexa told investors and analysts that it expected its current third quarter to come in at between $57 million and $59 million, which is about $10 to $12 million more than during the third quarter of 2007. After expenses, that translates to 38 to 39 cents in earnings, the company said. Analysts were expecting 40 cents a share earnings on $61.7 million in revenue.

Jonathan R. Hefferlin, managing director at MRI Dana Point, a former radio commentator and a prescient observer of economic trends, gives his weekend take on Friday’s jobs report. keep reading…

Taleo (profile; site) reported its second quarter results today, saying revenues climbed to almost $39 million, a 25 percent year-over-year increase. It also picked up 225 new customers and bought Vurv (profile; site).

The big news in its financial report is that the company turned a profit and beat analysts’ estimates. The company earned and adjusted 15 cents a share, which is 2 cents more than the consensus estimate. In terms of dollars, the company reported earning $1.1 million for the quarter vs. losing $1.8 million for the same quarter in 2007. (Numbers here include both GAAP and non-GAAP reports. See here for an explanation of what these mean.)

It got a boost from an 83 percent growth in international sales, which now represent 13 percent of company revenue. New customers from outside North America include Cargotec, Veolia, AirFrance, Baloise, Eiffage, Manpower, and Vic Roads.

“Taleo achieved record performance across the organization, posted record revenues, and set a record for the number of new customers. Our results highlight both the growing demand for talent management solutions in large and small companies regardless of the economic environment,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo.

Big news from Monster (profile; site) today. It bought jobmatcher Trovix (profile; site) for $72.5 million; settled that class action shareholder lawsuit over the stock options backdating for $25 million, and managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations for its 2nd quarter financial performance, earning 40 cents a share excluding one-time expenses. The Street consensus was the company would earn 37 cents a share.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

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Who knew that:

• Dartmouth College graduates have the highest median salary in the country with a Total Cash Compensation of $134,000;
• Colorado School of Mines has the highest median salary of all schools west of the Mississippi, excluding California, with a median Total Cash Compensation of $106,000;
• The University of California Berkeley is the state school with the highest Median Total Cash Compensation of $112,000.

These are just a few of the tidbits from the 2008 Education and Salary Report sponsored by Payscale (profile; site).

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I’m “sick and tired” of having to explain just how much disabled people deserve to work, can work, and want to work, a high-level U.S. Labor Department official says.

Neil Romano, assistant secretary, office of disability policy, told the ILG conference today that people still believe the myth that disabled people are receiving plenty of money and don’t need to work. On the contrary, Romano argues: the disabled are innovators who crave the chance at developing products others may not have thought of.

“The marginalization of people with disabilities starts very, very early,” Romano said, speaking from personal experience as a dyslexic. He said every job he has ever received has been from word of mouth, because his disability prevented him from successfully and correctly applying for jobs. “I completely messed up the health care forms at the Department of Labor — so much so that I wasn’t covered for two months,” he jokes. (Romano also tells the endearing story of when he called his mother to tell her the White House nominated him to his job, only to hear his mother respond, “do they know you can’t spell?”)

Disabilities are a running theme of this year’s ILG, with many speakers arguing that disabled job candidates are the next wave of diversity, the next band of talent largely shut out of the workplace, as women and blacks once were.

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