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One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

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Larry Horton, a police-officer-turned-recruiter for the Phoenix police department, talks about one of his favorite of the general job boards (hint: it’s not Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs). He also discusses the part of the U.S. where he’s finding the most physically fit applicants; his employer brand, and more. keep reading…

For months (and years) I’ve wondered what the number of monthly searches was for job-related keywords on Google. I always knew it was a big number, but I was shocked to see it was over 100 million searches just in June — with June being the “dog days” of recruiting and job searching. The average month is more around 124 million searches.

Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:

TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs - 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs - 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs - 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs - 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs - 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs - 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs - 301,000 searches

TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs - 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs - 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs - 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago - 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs - 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs - 550,000

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If nothing else, video branding is without a doubt the recruitment trend du jour. Hardly a recruitment conference is without at least one workshop (here’s one and another) on the subject. ERE has a discussion group devoted to the subject. There are even entire websites devoted to the subject.

The wonder is that with so much attention paid to the subject, there are so many uninspired videos. You can find them everywhere. A college recruitment video from Appalachian State University, described as the worst recruiting video ever, is so bad it’s become a legend.

And then there are the “jobs” videos that newspaper websites still manage to sell to unsuspecting hiring managers and recruitment associates.

So why is Mike Nale jumping into employer video branding with a half-hour TV show?

“This is not some boring video clip of some company,” insists Nale, founder and managing partner of Honolulu based The Brand Management Group (profile; site). “This is really unusual stuff.”

We haven’t seen any of the actual employer videos, though there’s a show sampler online.
But Nale’s vision is convincing. “We’re doing a segment on a skydiving school,” he tells us. “We’re going to show you what a work day is like jumping out of a plane over an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Another planned segment is on a seafood restaurant that is growing and needs 10 more people. “It’s a company profile, with real human interest,” Nale says. How’s that? “There’s always good people stories,” he says.

That 30 minute shows called “Help Wanted Hawaii” will have two or three magazine style employer pieces, a segment on employment and job trends, job hunting tips and career advice and possibly stories from career fairs or job hunter interviews and the like. Interspersed among the pieces will be the commercials, preferably employer branding videos.

Pulling off a show like this is not easy. We haven’t found anything on the mainland U.S. that fits Nale’s vision. Undaunted, Nale tells us his secret is producer Jeff DePonte. Owner of JDesign, also in Honolulu, DePonte has done work for Children’s Miracle Network, PBS-Hawaii and for local Hawaii stations and companies. If the “Help Wanted Hawaii” work is even half as good as DePonte’s demo video, the show might just last the planned 13 episodes.

The show is set to debut on Aug. 7th on a cable channel. It will also be posted online. Watch the blog for details.

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last couple of months you couldn’t have missed hearing about Jobing.com’s (profile; site) unique and popular employee bene: Free gas.

In exchange for turning their car into a mobile billboard, 135 or so Jobing.com employees gas up at company expense and get hundreds more each month to maintain and clean their vehicle.

Since gas prices began their rocket-like trajectory in late April the U.S. media has beaten a path to Jobing’s Phoenix headquarters. The brilliantly colored employee cars with the name Jobing.com prominent on all sides have appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS and, by virtue of CNN’s news syndication, you’ve probably seen them on your local TV station, too. Then there’s the newspaper coverage, including The New York TImes, Wall Street Journal, Denver Post and scores of other newspapers.

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Microsoft has a clever strategy to recruit away Yahoo! employees. For the most part, Microsoft has successfully relied on its strong employment brand and near-boundless opportunities to attract the best and brightest as opposed to seeking them out.

That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be rated an “A” on the aggressiveness scale.

The first indication came prior to the initial merger offer to Yahoo, when its central sourcing team directly emailed recruiting messages to Yahoo engineers, playing on their concerns about Yahoo’s future. Just last week, they ran a full-page color ad in the paper announcing in bold type…“Microsoft has search jobs in the valley”.

There is no secret who the ad was intended for, despite daily defections from Yahoo there is still some top-notch talent inside the company that the competition would love to poach. No subtlety here!

Develop Talent, Hire Talent, or Buy the Competition

In nearly every industry, talent is the primary driver of both a firm’s capability and its capacity to perform. For firms that are growing, either holistically or through industry consolidation/expansion, there are really only three options to ensure access to talent.

Some companies opt to build or develop talent; unfortunately, development is often a “slow” option that provides mediocre results in a fast-changing world.

A second option, growth through mergers and acquisitions, allows the firm to increase its capabilities relatively rapidly as a result of “buying” or merging with a major competitor. It is one of the most common and fundamentally sound business strategies available, and one in constant use around the world. However, M&A is expensive, and often leads to defections of the very key talent you have liked to have retained. Mergers and acquisitions can be hostile or tame, something we have witnessed with Microsoft’s attempt to acquire in recent months.

When M&A doesn’t work, companies have yet another option, one that is less complex, less time-consuming, and much less expensive. This option is to poach away most, if not all, of the talent that provides the competition with its capacity to exist, something Microsoft is obviously doing in a very public way.

The “Neutron Bomb” Recruiting Approach as an Alternative to Mergers

The “Plan B” poaching strategy that firms should consider a feasible alternative to mergers and acquisitions focuses on using strong recruiting approaches to directly “poach away” the target firm’s key employees. This effectively gives you access to all of the capability that produced their intellectual capital without the internal drama that led to the competitor’s chaotic state.

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This past week I spent time with a major recruitment advertising agency, a large direct marketing organization, and the top-performing office of one of the largest temp-to-perm employment agencies in the country.

These meetings revealed some trends that might help you develop your future recruiting strategies.

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In the world of recruiting, there’s no substitute for a strong attraction. And, while current employees can court candidates during interviews, an inspiring job announcement makes great candidates say “yes” to the first date.

To get a passive candidate to apply, you need an inspiring job announcement: one that stirs emotion, piques curiosity, prompts wonder, and triggers surprise.

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JWT, the specialized communications firm which partners with clients such as: Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing, AT&T Wireless, Nissan, and Compaq, announced that it has changed its name to JWT Inside. The name change coincides with a shift in the firm’s strategic positioning and an internal structural change. JWT, which has been known for its communications programs tailored towards the recruitment of external candidates, intends to offer more comprehensive communications programs targeted toward internal employees as well.

The press release from the company states that employers are looking to align their internal and external communications and branding strategies as a way to drive employee engagement and increase productivity. The firm’s name change, positioning shift, and structural changes are designed to meet changing client needs. JWT Inside will be led by Jerry Touslee, as its president over North America, and Peter Womersley, as managing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Differentiating your organization from others in the eye of the candidate is becoming our challenge as recruiters. It is increasingly difficult to recruit solely on the basis of salary or benefits or even on the merits of a particular job.

With everyone offering almost the same packages, tweaked and customized as they are, how can an organization gain a competitive advantage in recruiting? What tools or techniques can recruiters use that don?t simply rely on salaries and benefits?

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Most corporate recruiting efforts are painfully conservative. That fact might not seem like something that you should waste a lot of time worrying about, but what if taking a conservative approach contributes significantly to your constant shortage of quality talent?

Most managers and recruiters do not yet realize that a few firms have dramatically changed the game of recruiting and brought it up to a new level, a level that some people would call “outrageous.”

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Are job boards still the most popular recruiting tool?

The findings discussed in this webinar are part of the first comprehensive study of recruitment advertising effectiveness to be conducted on a broad national scale. ERE Media and Classified Intelligence collaborated in developing the survey and analyzing the results.

We wanted to provide guidance to recruiters looking to get the best results from their advertising budgets and to advertising publishers, whether print or online, seeking to understand the changing recruitment marketplace. We studied online job sites, print media, employee referral programs, the budding social networks, and career fairs. We asked recruiters to rank each and, for online job sites, certain sub-sets on a scale of 1-to-5 for effectiveness. We compared the effectiveness ratings to dollars spent, hires made, and spending intention for the balance of 2007.

View the webinar here.

Many organizations struggle to get enough high-quality applicants. While corporate websites, job boards, and events generate lots of flow, most agree that the quality is lacking in a vast majority of applicants.

The culprit might be how organizations sell their opportunities. A quick scan of major job boards, print advertisements, and corporate career sites reveals that organizations rely on ordinary, bland recruiting materials and dull position descriptions to attract talent.

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While many firms fight a war for talent, that phrase doesn’t adequately describe what goes on in the healthcare industry. For most industries, the war for talent is a temporary condition that will eventually end, but the battle to attract and retain talent in healthcare is a struggle that literally has no foreseeable end!

In the good and bad economic cycles of late, hospitals and healthcare facilities have faced shortages, the most visible of which has been a shortage of nurses. Further exacerbating this nursing-shortage problem is the baby boom retirement surge that will tax the current healthcare establishment with a surge of elderly patients armed with disposable incomes and high expectations.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Over the course of the last three weeks, we have laid out a model for managing the portfolio of job opportunities an organization produces similar to that used by organizations to manage their product/service portfolio.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

It happens to each of us nearly every day. We read something, act on the information, and find out later that the information we acted on deceived us in some way. An advertisement for a sandwich from a quick-service restaurant features a plump, juicy, perfectly grilled chicken breast stacked on a freshly baked sandwich roll with crisp lettuce, juicy, ripe, red tomatoes, and just a hint of mayo. Unfortunately when you order the sandwich you get an anemic-looking piece of chicken devoid of grill marks, wilted, rusted lettuce, green sliced tomatoes, and an old hamburger bun that looks like it got run over by a truck.

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Corporate strategy has stressed the need for companies to focus on their core product or service and not to dilute their efforts. Many firms spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what their core competency is and how to nurture and grow it. Marketers narrow their messages to a selected audience and promote products via media aimed at that audience.

We live more and more in an age of personalized messaging, tailored products, and with a mentality of “do it your way.”

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There’s a largely untapped source of talented Americans working overseas. Many of these expatriates are keen to return home but find it difficult to get a lucrative assignment within the same organization. That makes them excellent targets for recruiters who are willing to think creatively about sourcing overseas.

Non-national expatriates (non-U.S. citizens) can also be a superb source of global talent to tap into because of the unique skills and experience they can bring. It’s worth exploring their unique circumstances to determine whether your firm can assist great candidates in obtaining visas.

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Article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

In the high stakes game of procuring the world’s best talent, organizations are increasingly realizing that positioning one’s self correctly in the labor market is essential to even being considered as a viable employer.

While 10 years ago candidates may have trusted what employers had to say, today top talent is presented with a bevy of options that enable them to “get the skinny” on what it is really like to work for an organization from nearly every perspective. The Internet has not only radically changed how people communicate and associate with one another, but it has opened the global labor markets directly to employers and made organizations transparent.

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Yesterday while I was having brunch with a friend, my cell phone buzzed with a new awaiting message. Thinking it was an important message, I anxiously pulled my phone out of my belt clip. I opened the message and gasped.

Perhaps if I had been seeking a vacation timeshare my reaction might have been different, but imagine my horror the first time I received an SMS SPAM text message on my cell phone. It read “MSG:Lookng to sell or rent your Time Share logon to - www.webu….”

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