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Jobvite isn’t making a big splash about this, but it has a new social recruiting tool for job seekers. Think of it as a combination of bit.ly, the URL shortening site that allows you to track your links, and Jobvite’s matching service.

I only heard about it this morning at Expo, so there has been no time to try it out. But between what I was able to see and what Dan Finnigan, Jobvite’s CEO told me, it could be a useful tool to help out friends looking for a job.

When you come across an interesting job, you can use the site to shorten the URL (which creates a Jobvite connection). Then detail the job in the next screen, which Jobvite will use to match to your Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn connections. Then you give Jobvite permission to access those friends and connections and send the job to those that match.

Must you be a job seeker to do this? It doesn’t look like it. It appears even recruiters can use the tool to send announcements to their networks.

It’s a minimalist site, so you’ll have to experiment to see what it does and how best to make use of it.

JobTarget

The company now offers metrics for all its recruitment advertising customers. OneClick Analytics lets employers analyze the effectiveness of their ad placements, measuring views, clicks, applications, interviews, and even hires, says JobTarget.

The announcement of the new service was made today.

The analytics are detailed enough to monitor even such things as “when and where candidates abandon their applications, what kinds of technology they’re using, and even what day of the week yields the most candidates,” says the JobTarget announcement.

The company has a network of thousands of niche, regional, and diversity job boards that employers can select from for their job posts. The OneClick Analytics now can help them decide which of them are the most effective, and even help them improve the job post wording.

The most powerful recruiting advertisement I’ve seen in the last two years didn’t originate from Google and it wasn’t found on a social media site; instead it was a “take your breath away” billboard designed to attract a single person.

Usually billboards are a complete waste of money, but this one dared to go where no one has gone before. We’ve all seen the famous 1916 James Montgomery Flagg portrait of Uncle Sam with the caption “I want you for the U.S. Army,” but imagine if instead of a generic message you passed a billboard or poster bearing your name, your image, and a message specific to you, i.e. Nicole Pollock “we want you!” There is zero chance you wouldn’t pull over immediately just to stare, but chances are you would have already learned about it through calls and text messages from your family and friends. Such a startling communication would even cause people who didn’t know you to take notice and to wonder about both you and what kind of organization would be so bold to attempt this type of recruiting.

The roadside billboard was only the beginning of a broad reaching “one-to-one recruiting” campaign launched by Wilkes University to land a single student. In addition to the billboard, it added personalized messages to pizza boxes at the local pizza shop, signs on top of local gas pumps, pre-screening ads in local movie theaters, directory signs in the local mall and even localized ads on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. The campaign turned everyone in the community that interacted with Nicole Pollock, the student of interest, into a stakeholder/influencer of her decision, which was ultimately “yes.”

The marketing firm, 160over90, hired by the university, clearly understood the value of the seldom used but powerful one-to-one approach. While not appropriate for every vacancy, the cost of a one-to-one campaign pales in comparison to the value of getting a top performer into a key role. Even if you are not ready to engage in an effort as bold as Wilkes University, there are components of one-to-one recruiting that can bolster any effort. keep reading…

UPDATE FROM 9:28 A.M. EASTERN ON MONDAY…USA Today has the results of its Ad Panel up online. Monster’s fiddling beaver ad ranked #10. CareerBuilder’s casual Fridays commercial was 51 out of 63 ranked ads. The first place winner was the Snickers ad featuring Betty White.

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Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.

But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.

Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.

But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad. keep reading…

Who had the best Super Bowl commercial? Yeah, we know, it probably was Budweiser. The beer company’s advertising hegemony is so nearly complete that Anheuser-Busch should probably be given the lifetime achievement award and let somebody else have a shot at the top spots.

But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.

If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below.  If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.

So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.

But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.

Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:

Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:

The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.

Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.

As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.

So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.

If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.

We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.

US.Jobs site with social elements displayed

In a blog post about yesterday’s DirectEmployers meeting, publishing industry analyst and consultant Peter Zollman called it “a valuable information session.”

Recruitment consultant Gerry Crispin, who attended this morning’s second session, described it as a useful meeting that left him “very satisfied that the intent (of the creation of the dot-jobs domain) I have consistently written about … is reflected in what DirectEmployers is doing.”

The meetings they and a few others — perhaps a dozen in all — attended in Indianapolis were called by the DirectEmployers Association to answer questions and explain the non-profit recruiting consortium’s plans to build-out tens of thousands of recruitment sites all with an Internet address ending in .jobs.

Zollman reports in his blog post that next week 25,000 of the sites will go live. The “number will increase exponentially on an ongoing basis,” writes Zollman, until every community in the U.S. over 5,000 population has a job site for itself. keep reading…

Monster ad from Wired

Monster fired the first shot in the ad wars Sunday with a commercial during the AFC championship football game featuring the Boogeyman and a new tagline.

Bad at his job scaring children, the Boogeyman searches Monster and finds his perfect fit as an accountant. As he settles into his cubicle, the words “New precision job search” appear followed by the tagline, “Get a Monster advantage.” The new tagline replaces “Your calling is calling.”

Precision Job Search is the branded seeker product powered by Monster’s overhauled back-end search engine. Power Resume Search is the recruiter version. Both come out of beta on Feb. 2, the official launch date of 6Sense, the branding Monster is applying to the semantic search engine it built out of technology it acquired when it bought Trovix. keep reading…

Job posting distributor eQuest says CareerBuilder and Monster are still the most requested sites for advertising openings, though Craisglist and the free job boards were among the fastest-growing posting destinations.

The company’s customers got more than 15 million responses from ads placed on free job boards and with the job aggregators in 2009. Google Base was the most requested free board among eQuest’s 20,000 clients. That makes sense since the help-wanted listings are integrated now with standard Google search results.

The data points are contained in a press release issued by the company this week. keep reading…

As we count down the final hours of 2009 — an “Amen” seems in order here — there are a few fun, and even one or two useful pieces of recruitalia that have turned up to help us close out the year.

The first reminds me of that expression about drinking your own Kool-Aid. It’s a video starring Human Factor International’s Managing Director Jeffrey Jones. Human Factor International is an executive coaching and transcultural leadership training firm. The company says its process “is designed to help executives close the gap between where they are and where they want to be in their personal and professional lives.”

Now watch the video and you’ll see why I extracted that phrase from the company website, though I don’t believe HFI meant to imply the process accelerates at 32 ft/sec squared. keep reading…

The technology insider website TechCrunch says Yahoo has launched a curious recruitment advertising program that involves buying keywords against the names of former employees.

Just before Christmas, TechCrunch reported that Delicious founder and former Yahoo executive Joshua Schachter discovered that searching on his name on Google brought up a recruitment ad for Yahoo. He announced in a tweet saying “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.”

Schachter joined Yahoo when it bought Delicious in 2005. He left three years later, part of a mass exodus of top talent that left the company reeling .

Turns out that Schachter isn’t the only ex-Yahooer to find ads popping up on their Google search results pages.  TechCrunch said PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf is among the keyworded. keep reading…

Adversity is a great teacher, and the past year will certainly be one of the most adverse and professionally difficult that we will ever experience.

It has been a year of paradoxes and contradictions: unemployment is soaring, but many organizations cannot find the qualified people they need. Rather than restructure work or rethink how work gets done in order to find people, we continue to seek people to work in traditional ways. More people are looking for part-time, temporary, or contract work, yet only a tiny percentage of companies are looking for these type of people. We know that being discourteous to people creates negative branding and is morally questionable especially when so many are unemployed, but we have perhaps never been as discourteous to applicants are we are now. Energy costs have fluctuated wildly and global warming is a topic on every agenda, yet most organizations and people prefer face-to-face relationships rather than asking people to save energy by working from home.

Here are four lessons we should have learned this year. keep reading…

Two early stage recruitment tech firms — EnticeLabs and HireVue, both based in Utah — reported this morning that they’ve received investment dollars to finance their growth.

EnticeLabs, whose first product is an online advertising platform, got an infusion of $2 million from a group of investors lead by First Advantage. The company says the money “will be used to accelerate system development, accommodate higher-than-anticipated sales, and build out the infrastructure warranted by the rapidly expanding client base.”

It also gained the expertise of former Monster VP Neal Bruce, who joins its board of directors.

HireVue, which facilitates video interviewing, received a Series A round of funding led by Peterson Ventures joined by The Garber Fund of Penn State University, and others.

The company didn’t say how big the investment is, though it did say the money would be used to expand management, “strengthen market awareness, and make product enhancements.” keep reading…

Shopping for a car? Need groceries? Want new clothes? Looking at trying a new restaurant? Whether we are actively searching for a given product or not, we form opinions and make decisions based, at least in part, on the marketing messages we receive about them.

The world of employment advertising is no exception. Attractive logos, extensive benefits packages, flexible schedules: all these can be used to make an impact on job candidates and affect how many people read and reply to your postings. When considering how to initially attract readers to your employment ads, the key opportunity may lie in your job title and/or headline statement. These prominent statements give advertisers the chance to attract the attention and readership of job seekers, and motivate them to respond.

According to marketing legend David Ogilvy, five times as many people read a headline as do the entire ad. Therefore, without a strong headline statement, your ad may be skipped entirely. Another source (copyblog.com) says that while 8 out of 10 people will read a headline statement, only 2 in 10 read the entire ad. By designing a strong, compelling lead-in, you’ll increase the number of candidates who do go on to read your ad, and apply to your job, while your competitors’ ads get skipped over.

Creating Job Titles or Headline Statements

What makes a good title/headline? keep reading…

Entice Labs, the Provo, Utah, company that set out to create a better recruitment marketing system, is suddenly getting industry buzz.

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at. keep reading…

Snaptalent, a company whose name may be familiar to anyone who attended the fall ERE Expo, has shut down, leaving behind a poignant note about the difficulty of making inroads to the recruitment market generally, but especially in the economic conditions of today. keep reading…

At a time when one of America’s largest newspapers is worth perhaps $1 — assuming it can be sold at all — is there any likelihood that the print industry’s single largest revenue category will ever even come close to approaching the $6, $7, and $8 billion glory days of a decade ago? keep reading…

As the summer’s gathering of social-media-using recruiters kicks off at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, recruiters at DaVita, KPMG, CO-OP Financial Services, Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and the University of California we talked to over the last couple of weeks say that social media is an ongoing experiment, one that in some companies is being done without any specific plan, but is nonetheless yielding results. keep reading…

Like tens of thousands of seniors across the U.S., Eric Barker graduated this month with no job.

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says. keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

As the economy tumbles, and companies right-size their recruiting departments, the bottom-half is the first to go. Under this scenario, those formerly in the relatively secure 2nd quartile are now in the bottom-half. So be wary or get better.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

keep reading…

Compete has a report on the impact of last week’s Super Bowl ads on traffic to advertiser sites and, Ouch!, for the millions Monster (site; profile) and CareerBuilder (site; profile) spent, they got nothing. Actually, less than nothing. The Compete report says their sites saw declines in reach of 18 percent and 17 percent respectively.

Denny’s, on the other hand, saw a lift in its site traffic on Super Bowl Sunday of nearly 1,700 percent. A traffic bump to the site was to be expected, since the ad was promoting a free breakfast, and users had to go to the website to get the details. The next biggest traffic bump was to Frito-Lays’ Cheetos.com. Traffic there rose 313 percent on game day, as compared to the average reach of the previous week.

Monster ran two ads, one of them a co-promotion with the NFL for the job of Director of Fandemonium. CareerBuilder’s 60 second spot, you may recall, was the one featuring a stuffed Koala getting socked and ending with a guy in a Speedo on the phone in an office cubicle.

Now, in the interest of fairness we doubt either company was expecting a big game-day jump in traffic to their job boards. (Compete didn’t provide details on whether it included traffic to the Fandemonium site.) As Compete itself points out: keep reading…