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As the investment world watches Facebook’s historic IPO today, marketers are beginning to wonder if advertising on the 900-million-member social network is going to yield anything close to the bonanza of its initial stock offering.

Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”

The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”

For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically.  keep reading…

The fastest-growing human resources technology company many have never heard of is having its own challenges attracting technology talent, and has begun a recruitment advertising campaign.

Cornerstone's billboard tonight on Santa Monica Blvd

It’s very early in the branding-advertising effort by Cornerstone OnDemand, one its CEO Adam Miller says will involve social media, and has already involved 18 employees running the LA marathon with company shirts on, partly to raise the firm’s profile.

Los Angeles is a massive, sprawling (the 37-mile drive home tonight from the Cornerstone conference took me a mind-numbing 3 1/2 hours) metropolitan area of about 13 million, but it’s not a magnet for tech talent like Silicon Valley is. (This despite a growing number of tech firms — including some in the HR field – that are setting up shop and calling the tech community by the monicker “Silicon Beach.”)

The value proposition for Cornerstone OnDemand candidates is multi-fold. keep reading…

Remember when recruiters spent Mondays fielding calls prompted by help-wanted ads in the Sunday paper?

It wasn’t that long ago — not even a dozen years ago — that newspapers were where the recruitment dollars went. In 2000, the watershed year for newspaper employment advertising, the take came to nearly $9 billion, and some newspapers — the Dallas Morning News and the (San Jose) Mercury News in particular — had Sunday help-wanted sections larger than today’s entire editions. keep reading…

the Zynga Ztrium

Here is a heads-up alert for you: be prepared because not only will the infamous “War For Talent” be returning to impact your firm, but it is already underway in its full intensity here in the Silicon Valley. Begin planning for this next round of talent wars, because once the intense competition begins, there simply won’t be time to catch up with, no less get ahead of your talent competition. If you’re not familiar with the “war for talent” phenomena, it involves a prolonged period of intense competition where top applicants are both scarce and arrogant, employees leave by the droves, firms regularly raid each other for talent, and bidding for top talent is commonplace. 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…

While talking about customer service on a radio program, I shared a customer service nightmare story last week that also happens to be a perfect analogy for the mistake so many employers make. More specifically, the way the business allocated resources to advertising vs. customer service mirrored the costly mistake employers make when it comes to recruiting, employer branding, and onboarding.

It’s a mistake you want to ask yourself if you’re making.

The story speaks to how often employers waste time, money, and creative horsepower when it comes to attracting and retaining talent because they put their attention in the wrong place.

So here’s the story …  keep reading…

Like the Giants and the Patriots, CareerBuilder and its controversial band of chimpanzees will be making a return appearance at this year’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis.

In this year’s 30-second commercial airing during the fourth quarter on Feb 5, the chimps wreak havoc with their human co-worker during a business trip, ordering 46 banana daiquiris, while brainstorming a poison ivy shampoo.

The chimps have proven to be an audience pleaser since making their debut in CareerBuilder’s first Super Bowl ad in 2005. The company’s three ads all made it into the top 10 in most of the popularity polls. The company reprised the monkey concept the following year, then tried a variety of other concepts, including viewer-conceived ads. 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…

One small business that’s hiring is in the pest-control field, saying it can’t find enough people to fill jobs as service technicians, customer service representatives, service managers, and sales managers. It even had to cut back its radio ads recently, as they were driving sales that could not be serviced due to a lack of employees. “We couldn’t recruit people fast enough,” says Anderson Pest Solutions president Mark O’Hara.

Anderson is a family-owned outfit, started in 1913 and handling tens of thousands of homes and businesses. It has just under 200 employees but wants to grow about 25% over the next few months, adding 25 “co-workers,” as it sometimes calls them, by the end of the year, and about 25 more early in 2012.

And not only is it hiring, but human resources is part of its marketing to prospective customers. keep reading…

Social media gets a lot of press. There seem to be millions of articles offering advice on how to succeed with social media, in business, in fundraising, starting revolutions, and of course, recruiting. A lot of that advice is as useful as a bicycle for a fish — since it’s often anecdotal or the wisdom of some self-styled guru writing about purple sheep or comparing anyone that doesn’t follow their advice to dinosaurs. So it’s great to read something that’s based on data and research, like a recent report from Gallup that has implications for recruiting.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online. keep reading…

Inside this modest, even nondescript brick building is the Conspiracy. I capitalize it because I’m playing along with the preposterous notion that it was selected because of grammatical significance to be part of the official name of the organization that inhabits suite 200 here on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue.

“Conspiracy,” explains the man whose name is also part of the title, “is a collective noun. It represents the whole.” At another point he tells me, “The intellectual power of the organization comes from the whole.”

I do not question his explanation. It has the ring of HR about it.

Maintaining his own name as part of the title of what once was called Starr Tincup signals continuity; a heritage name, he adds. I do not question this either. It has the ring of marketing wisdom about it.

Thus was Starr Tincup rechristened The Starr Conspiracy, says the man. His name is Starr, Bret Starr. A year ago he bought out his partner Bill Tincup, then promptly made partners of four of his long-time associates.

Documents that have come into my possession (and which I share with the world here) more fully detail the name change. The word “conspiracy,” says a document bearing the cryptic seal of the organization — a be-tentacled octopus with an all seeing eye – ”denotes a group of persons working in secret to influence perceptions and outcomes.” keep reading…

In Part 1 of this series I called out the need for the recruiting profession to embrace and make the business case for using market research to inform and guide recruiting efforts. In this episode, my attention turns to acting on that need.

Every recruiting leader wants top candidates, but the standard approach used by most recruiters simply doesn’t work. A more precise data-driven approach that leverages complete understanding of the attraction factors can give you a competitive edge. Market research can reveal: keep reading…

Our brand has taken an absolute battering over the last 18 months. -Jon Tait, of BP

That’s for sure. (You’ve seen the coffee video.) Tait’s the head of global attraction at BP, talking about the aftermath of the colossal oil spill that killed 11 people and spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The company is launching its first “people-based” recruiting campaign; more on that in a minute.

Tait says that in the fall of 2010, BP researched what people thought of BP, and how that compared to what they thought of competitors. It used LinkedIn for the surveys; the company’s user conference in Las Vegas today is where Tait talked about this effort.

BP found out that a lot of people — about 80% — didn’t know BP was hiring. They didn’t know other Big Oil companies were hiring either, but they knew tech companies were adding headcount. BP learned that 60% of people it wanted to hire are passive candidates, a target market it hadn’t been targeting much.

The good news it got was that more than 50% of people still had an interest in working for BP, and rated the quality of its workforce high, and its technology at least on par with competitors’.

People’s biggest concerns were the company’s financial sturdiness; its safety record; and their own long-term career goals, and whether they fit in BP.

BP’s brand — the perception it’s going for — is about bringing brilliant minds together with technology at a massive scale to meet the world’s energy needs.

Its recruitment advertising has changed, consistent with that brand, but using employees to describe it in human terms.  keep reading…

I have stated for years that “recruiting is just sales with a crummy budget,” but there is one major differentiator: sales professionals widely accept the principle that you can’t successfully sell to a customer with multiple options unless you fully understand the customer. Professional sales organizations have been using market research for decades to learn the needs, expectations, and the buying behaviors of the customer. Unfortunately few recruiting organizations have adopted this practice. If market research influenced recruiting, there would be: keep reading…

If you have posted a position on a job board and not received the response you were expecting, you have probably been through adaptive preference formation to reduce your cognitive dissonance. To put it simply, you became Aesop’s Fox and decided that the job board you posted on did not work.

Posters remorse happens a lot when it comes to job postings, and as a result sometimes recruiters may not fully appreciate the power of advertising their open positions. In fact, when speaking about job postings, many technical recruiters see them as an ineffective way to attract talent.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the apathy around postings is directly related to job boards, even though over the years leaders within this space have adapted their offering to make sure that postings get distributed to more relevant candidates. Forward-thinking job boards have made significant strides in developing a solid job distribution network, and yet recruiters generally remain unimpressed with the “post and pray” model.

You cannot really blame recruiters for being disappointed in the results they are getting; however, there is a need to address the posters’ accountability in the whole process.

Job postings do work. They can attract great candidates both passive and active. They can also generate referrals. Passive job seekers often glance at the job email that arrives fresh in their inbox each morning. Recruiters tend to forget that they have a significant influence on the response quality they receive.

Over the last 12 months the number of poorly written postings being submitted to sites within the technology recruitment field has increased significantly. Fewer candidates combined with low-quality postings means poor results for everyone. As a result, organizations are investing more in the proactive searching and networking side of things, but not on postings. In fact the lack of focus on quality postings is getting worse, and some organizations are missing out big time.

Postings do have a place in the talent acquisition mix; they can even act as the recruiter’s recruiter if optimized correctly.

Below are some tips to help you increase your chances of success with job postings. keep reading…

I bet you are having an ongoing conversation about the ongoing conversation. Are you listening to the conversation? Joining the conversation? Guiding the conversation? Tired of the conversation yet? You know, the conversation about the conversation that current and former employees, prospective candidates, and other interested parties are having about YOU as an employer. That conversation. Without a doubt, there are many ongoing conversations about the conversation and differing opinions as to how employers should/can/must engage in the conversation. These conversations have been going on for hundreds of years. The Internet, social media, and other tools are just exponentially connecting, expanding, amplifying and fanning the flames of the conversation.

When I interviewed for my position at TMP almost 14 years ago, I really knew nothing about the company, nor did I have an obvious route to learn more. Had I been privy to the TMP work experience conversation, I might have injected some of those nuggets and questions into the interview conversation. Without those gems I was relegated to closing the interview with “I really believe I can make an impact at TPM.” Thankfully, I still got the job. We had a good conversation despite my verbal typo.

Yes, the conversation about the conversation about the conversation can be exhausting. But, there are definitely valid reasons for an employer to be aware of the conversation. While there may not be a finite right or wrong way to determine when, if, and how to engage and guide the conversation, there are some common sense ideas to be considered.

(For those of you who have lost count, I’ve used the word “conversation” 25 times already.)

First of all, think about the conversation from this perspective: anyone can quickly and easily find well-indexed opinions about the workplace of most employers via search engines, message boards, blogs, social media, employee testimonial sites, etc. That’s a given and we should all stipulate that.

Now think about this fact: keep reading…

In case you’re looking to apply for this open HR job, be aware that the snow starts in October and melts in May.

OK, so Yukon would like you to know that there’s more to its territory than a six- to eight-month long winter.

In 2008, it began looking at a new strategy for recruiting, retention, branding, and marketing the new brand. It wanted to better attract youth, Yukon First Nation (aboriginal) candidates, people with disabilities, and others, and do a better job at staffing hard-to-fill jobs. keep reading…

In honor of back to school time, let’s check out what’s new on campus. I’ve long-advised clients who desire to keep ahead of the technology curve to follow the trends in campus student enrollment. Now there’s another reason to head back to school.

If your responsible for your company’s campus recruiting efforts, Natasha Singer’s recent article for the New York Times is a must-read. The story highlights ways companies are using student Brand Ambassadors to promote products and services, and generate loyalty via social media, in-store events, and on-campus buzz.

Traditional marketing efforts like print advertising and TV spots are yielding fewer and fewer tangible results, but did you know that this fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses as Brand Ambassadors? keep reading…

A Pfizer division is bringing on people to work on brain-related research through an expanded postdoc program, website, two-day recruiting symposiums, and a related ad campaign.

Pfizer Neuroscience employs about 130 people working on neurology, including Autism, psychiatry (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression), Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more, out of Groton, Connecticut. Last summer it began an effort to expand what was then a limited Postdoc program, from one person to about 15 or 20.

The result was, in short, a website built in about a month and a half with help from CareerBuilder, honored at Wednesday’s Creative Excellence Awards, and marketed around the science world.

keep reading…

Summertime,

And the livin’ is easy

Reqs are slowin’

No hirin’s nigh.

In the spirit of these August dog days, here’s a little collection of HR snacklets to entertain you and, maybe, even inform you. I swear, though, that it is the former, not the latter, that I intend.

An HR case from Oz.

A government worker was dispatched on a business trip to rural New South Wales, where she was instructed to spend the night. To while away the time, the 40-year-old woman took up with a male acquaintance. During what must have been a particularly frisky rollick, a wall lamp over the bed fell, injuring the woman. She filed for worker’s comp.

When it was denied, she sued, her attorney arguing in court last month that having sex is “normal behavior.” “Having sex,” he said, ” is just one of those things. It’s not the 1920s, after all.”

The court is currently considering a decision. Want more? Go here. There’s even a video. (I know what you’re thinking and it is NOT of that.)

Now let’s turn to vacations. keep reading…