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.

Narrowing Recruiting Scope Broadcasting to One-to-One

Defining the scope of recruiting processes and activities is perhaps one of the most overlooked elements of planning in the typical recruiting function. Instead of developing programs and practices that target a specific range of actions or individuals, most recruiting leaders engage in broadcasting, i.e. using a one-size-fits all approach. One-size-fits-all clothing generally isn’t that attractive, and neither are overly generic recruiting processes and communications. Scope, like clothing comes in many sizes, including:

• Broadcasting (targeting a large multi-demographic audience)
• Narrowcasting (targeting a smaller more defined audience)
• Microcasting (targeting a specific population within a narrowcast audience)
• One-to-one, aka 1:1 (targeting a specific individual)

Personalization is the Wave of the Future

The practice of 1:1 or personalized marketing is a well-established concept in customer relationship management circles, and is becoming more of a mainstream practice thanks to many emerging technologies. Last fall, the Castrol Oil Company practiced an extreme version of personalized marketing by placing cameras along a main road in London to capture the license plates of passing vehicles. The license numbers were then cross-referenced with vehicle registration records, enabling Castrol Oil to display targeted ads on a digital billboard suggesting which type of oil the drivers should use as they drove past the billboard!

In addition to 1:1 marketing, personalization is invading the product and service deliver arms of organizations as well. Mass customized manufacturing enables firms like BMW to personalize literally every car they produce so that no two are the same.

Rarely do HR functions support mass personalization, but there are exceptions. Cafeteria style benefits programs allow employees to personalize their benefits portfolio. Career planning tools in use by firms like Deloitte allow employees to customize their careers (Deloitte’s program is referred to as the Mass Career Customization Program.) Executive recruiting efforts often target “most wanted” individuals i.e. individuals the organization has remotely assessed and determined that they would like to recruit them in the near future. One-to-one recruiting isn’t unheard of, just rare. Google has employed it several times, most notably with its famous “math puzzle” billboard, and the practice was common at FirstMerit Bank while under Michael Homula’s recruiting leadership.

The Many Benefits of One-to-One Recruiting

When I present during corporate recruiter trainings or HR offsites, I frequently mention one-to-one recruiting examples just to see how progressive the organization is with regards to its thinking about the value of top talent. Undoubtedly, most audience participants rarely ponder the value of the talent, they seek and universally assume it’s just too expensive for them to consider. Those open to actually delivering strategic recruiting versus just talking about it, often change their viewpoint once they learn more about the approach and its many benefits, some of which include:

• One-to-one marketing builds the employer brand—one-to-one recruiting efforts provide the organization with an opportunity to establish a much more realistic brand perception among a highly targeted and highly desired population, often in a way that gets talked about by others. (Contrary to popular belief, not all employees/candidates experience the organization the exact same way, so brand perception is not universal across the organizations despite generic corporate messages that say “we are…”) Using one-to-one creates high visible individuals who can become ambassadors of your brand in the community.
• One-to-one targets act as magnets—one-to-one efforts almost always target industry icons. While you will certainly spend a little more money to capture these individuals, doing so will not only send a message that “something is up,” it will save you money in the long run as magnet hires often bring with them or attract from other organizations a significant volume of quality hires.
• One-to-one efforts can boost morale—if your organization has recruited team players who like to win, one-to-one efforts send a clear message that your organization will do whatever it takes to recruit the very best for existing employees to work alongside fellow top performers and industry game-changers. A win for the team is a win for all, and morale will likely skyrocket.
• One-to-one efforts increase visibility—bold recruiting efforts are almost always noticed in ways that dramatically increase the publicity the organization receives, raising the profile of the recruiting function both inside and outside the organization.
• One-to-one efforts will also likely net boomerangs—even if you don’t actually “catch” your primary target the first time around, the power of the one-on-one campaign guarantees that they will consider your firm again later in their career, without much additional effort on your part.
• One-to-one efforts produce amazing results—rarely are recruiting efforts 100% successful, but one-to-one efforts almost always produce positive results.

Tools and Approaches to Consider

Even if there’s no chance that you’re going to try a full-fledged one-to-one recruiting campaign, there are many tools and approaches that have proven to be extremely beneficial when included as a component of broader efforts. These approaches include:

• Identifying how to reach them—get at least a rough idea of the best way to reach your target candidates. Start by asking your own top performers in similar jobs, “how could we find you again?” Use the information your employees provide as an indication of the best ways to identify and communicate with your targeted candidates.
• Identify their job acceptance criteria—there’s no more important step in any sales process than asking each of your top targets what decision criteria they will use when deciding to accept or reject an offer. With that information in hand, you can at least modify the recruiting and offer processes to ensure that you have provided each candidate with enough evidence to prove to their satisfaction that you best meet their criteria.
• Ask them to apply—most recruiting processes assume that merely being made aware of a job opening will be enough to trigger everyone to apply. This is a huge mistake because there are a significant number of currently employed individuals who, for whatever reason, won’t apply to a new job unless they are personally invited.
• CEO calls—if you’re not already using them, you should be aware that a personalized call from a CEO who knows the candidate’s background is the most effective recruiting tool there is. If you can get your CEO to agree to a limited number of calls per month, you can use them to convince individuals to apply or to sell them on your final offer.
• Personalize the job—top candidates generally accept because the work itself and the opportunities are unique and exciting. As a result, if you expect to have a reasonable chance at landing top candidates, you will need to realize from the beginning that at least part of the job will need to be customized to their unique needs and interests.
• Identify who they would like to meet—most recruiting schedules are set based 100% on which individuals within the company have decided that they want to interview the individual. Unfortunately, that ignores the fact that the candidate themselves might want to meet certain individuals (by title) before they would be comfortable in accepting the job. Allowing top candidates to meet a few people of their choice makes the hiring process appear more personalized to them.
• Personalize onboarding—if you tailor the onboarding to their unique needs, not only will they feel accepted by their team faster, they will also reach their minimum productivity levels in a much shorter time and be more apt to share positive stories about the organization with former colleagues.

Final Thoughts

Every freshman studying journalism, communications, PR, sales, and marketing learns in their first semester that if you want “your message” to be read and accepted, you need to make it personally relevant to the target audience. It’s a basic lesson that we often forget in the world of broadly targeted recruitment advertising, candidate messaging, and employer branding. Mass personalization is essential if you are courting top candidates, but I would argue that it’s quickly becoming essential for all quality candidates. No one wants to feel that they are entering a corporate monolith where they will become lost. Recruiting leaders need to examine every program and process to determine how each can appear more personalized to candidates. They should also allocate more time to benchmarking marketing functions, which are light years ahead of most recruiting functions in the area of effective personalization.

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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.

I’m reporting these results at 11:05 p.m. ET Sunday night, a little more than an hour after the game ended and four-and-a-half hours after our poll went live. The results may have changed by the time you check (just go to the poll and check the results), but since halftime, the percentages have held fairly steady.

If you missed the ads or want to see them again, just click here and you can check them out and still vote in the poll, which we, in a completely shameless attempt to kick up the hype, will leave open until no one cares.

You’ve also probably noticed (unless your Super Bowl party was a lot more fluid than mine) that the poll numbers above only add up to 70 percent. The other 30 percent of the voters said both ads were about the same. (I told you we were into populism.) You can read that to mean anything you like.

While you’re reading into things, here are a couple of coincidences I noticed that you might as well read something into as well.

Wildlife of one sort or another figured in several of the commercials. Like Monster, CarMax had a commercial featuring a beaver. Vizio did, too, though their beaver had a minor role. There was a squirrel in another ad and Bridgestone had a whale.

The CareerBuilder ad, featuring a nearly naked casual Friday office, was followed by a pantsless Dockers ad.

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.

Those geo-focused sites will be supplemented by occupation-specific jobs and, where there is demand, geo-occupation-specific sites. The number could potentially reach the millions, says the information site for the project, Universe.jobs. Some of these sites launched a few months ago in beta. Here’s one for Atlanta and one for sales jobs. Other sites are detailed here.

Crispin, an early supporter of the creation of the .jobs domain, said he was encouraged by the focus of DirectEmployers in the development of the recruitment sites. “DirectEmployers intends to focus in on how to build it out as to how ICANN intended it,” he said.

(ICANN is the Internet group that decides naming conventions and authorized .jobs, a top-level domain. Details of the request by the Society for Human Resource Management and Employ Media to ICANN to create the domain can be found here.)

Crispin explained that the job listings on the DirectEmployers sites will all be real jobs from real companies, which was one of the goals in creating the .jobs domain. Another was to make it easy for job seekers to find corporate career sites. But in all cases, in order for a .jobs address to be awarded, the company had to agree to abide by an ethical code.

While what DirectEmployers is building looks and sounds like job boards, Crispin said it’s not. “At the end of the day, it’s not job boards … It’s something more.”

He was boarding a plane out of Indianapolis (where the meetings were held) so he didn’t have  much of a chance to explain. But looking at the .jobs sites, it’s clear they have evolved from their first iteration back in October. There’s a social element to them and a connection into social networks. Click into the FOLLOW tab in a job post and you can get a listing of employees on LinkedIn.

The project may well continue to evolve. Crispin said its future is “not set in stone.”

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.

Over the last year+ Monster has been introducing new career-focused tools and features, like its career-mapping service and social communities organized around professional careers.  Over the summer, it tested its semantic resume search with a number of recruiter clients, then began offering it and the seeker search as options in the fall.

After a demo of the search tools in November, I wrote “Power Resume Search is stunning.” On the seeker side, I’ve found Precision Search (Or is it PrecisionSearch. Monster references it both ways.) to be an equally big improvement over “Standard Search.”

Now, Monster is making a full-court press (or should that be a blitz) to promote 6Sense and the other features. Monster will air a second commercial, this one featuring a beaver, during the Super Bowl, and will also announce its choice of a new Director of Fandemonium during the game. Print ads in tech and business magazines like HR Executive, Wired, and Fast Company have already started running.

“This isn’t just the launch of an advertising campaign. It represents a commitment to help people make clear progress in finding the right job,” says Ted Gilvar, executive vice president and global chief marketing officer at Monster. “We know that people want help — whether it’s a more efficient way to search for jobs or helping them connect with others through specialized career networks.”

CareerBuilder will make its sixth Super Bowl appearance with an ad selected from among those submitted in a contest. Three commercials were eventually picked out of some 1,000 entries and were each awarded grand prizes of $100,000.

The idea was that the public could then vote for their favorite, which might be selected as the one CareerBuilder airs as its second quarter commercial. However,  one of the three — Worst Seat — has been nixed by the network. The commercial is pretty gross, showing a cubicle worker entertaining (some) of his colleagues by passing gas. So, of course, that’s the video embedded here.

“CareerBuilder has had a very successful track record with advertising in the big game and we are confident that all three concepts selected would play well with the big game audience,” said Richard Castellini, the job board’s chief marketing officer. “We made a strategic decision to change our advertising approach and leverage the creative minds of consumers across the country. Our decision paid off when we were flooded with a large number of very high caliber ideas, which played a major role in our decision to pick not one, but three.”

A company spokesman told me, “We have not announced any plans for our marketing past the big game.”

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.

Craigslist was the fastest-growing destination for eQuest customer job postings, tripling the volume of 2008. The most popular city destinations were the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, and Phoenix. All but Orlando charge to post jobs.

CareerBuilder and Monster, however, still hold the lead by a mile over other posting sites, says eQuest. A majority of clients want their jobs posted at one or even both sites. And no wonder. eQuest says “in a sampling of 400,000 unique jobs posted to each board between June 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, both Monster and CareerBuilder garnered staggering traffic numbers, totaling almost 200 million viewers in just six months — well above the traffic stats of any other online job source.”

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.

Besides Jones, Asia Pacific Director of Business Development Phil Guo, and Media Director Thomas Irre took the 61-story jump off the Macau Tower. The press release the company sent says, “The three made the leap in keeping with an HFI principle that breakthroughs frequently occur when you’re outside of your comfort zone.”

While we’re watching videos, here’s the Fan Favorite from among those submitted in response to CareerBuilder’s call for user-created commercials.

CareeerBuilder launched a contest last spring offering a $100,000 prize for the best user video, which it would then professionally produce for use during Super Bowl 2010.

Hundreds of entries were submitted, which are here on YouTube. CB decided that three of them were so good it awarded each a grand prize check. The three winners, the fan’s choice, and the contest rules and other details are available here.

At least one of the videos will be shown during the game on February 7th, as CareerBuilder makes its sixth consecutive Super Bowl appearance. You may recall its debut for Super Bowl XXXIX when CareerBuilder hit the ratings and critics jackpot with two monkey ads. The company — actually, its ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt — dovetailed it with an online viral email campaign called Monk-E-Mail, so successful it’s still active on the CB site.

Cramer-Krasselt and CareerBuilder later had an acrimonious divorce when a subsequent Super Bowl “Survivor” takeoff ad campaign failed to produce similar results.

Monster is reported to have bought one commercial, which AdAge implies will focus on its “Director of Fandemonium” contest. AdAge says CareerBuilder’s one commercial buy will air during the second quarter. The 2010 Super Bowl ads, which are nearly sold out, reportedly cost between $2.4 million and $3 million for 30 seconds.

CareerBuilder, BTW, was rated 26th on Glassdoor’s list of the 50 best places in the U.S. to work. When you figure that Glassdoor is a place where the disgruntled can rant freely (and often do), that’s quite an achievement.  Matt Ferguson, CB CEO, got a 78 percent approval rating.

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.

No comment yet from Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, CEO Carol Bartz confirmed what has been an open secret: HotJobs is for sale. peHUB reported last summer that HotJobs was being shopped, but Yahoo wouldn’t confirm the report, though Bartz had indicated the company was weighing its strategic importance.

Now, though, Bartz told an investment conference earlier this month that Yahoo would sell HotJobs “if we got a decent price…”

What might that price be? Bartz didn’t say, but probably not enough to make a significant difference to the $6 billion (in revenue) company.

Last I heard, HotJobs was at least a contributor to Yahoo’s bottom line, netting around $50 million annually. That number is probably a little higher, since that figure is more than a year old.

Selling HotJobs is not going to be easy. Dice took a look. Monster supposedly also has. Don’t know about CareerBuilder, but I would have to assume the company at least kicked the tires. May have even done a bit more, since HotJobs has an extensive newspaper partner network and CareerBuilder is a newspaper-owned holding.

To make sense, any deal would have to include a traffic agreement with Yahoo and the newspaper partner network. HotJobs is the job channel for Yahoo.com, which is the world’s biggest traffic destination. Yahoo funnels traffic to HotJobs from links on the site while the several hundred newspaper partners do likewise.

(Yahoo used to maintain a list of its partner sites, as most job boards do. But the link now returns an error message. That may be part of a general corporate indifference to the site. The press center link to “Press Releases and Info Flashes” hasn’t been updated since 2008.)

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.

Lesson #1: Building and maintaining candidate relationships and generating referrals are keys to survival.

Job descriptions should be dead, but I have no doubt that they will live on for a long time. We should all agree that they are not the best, cheapest, or fastest way to attract good people.

In general, you are not going to find the people you need by posting on job boards. The most successful recruiters use social networks, ask employees (and others) for referrals and focus on building talent communities of potential candidates.

Learn from product and service marketing how to do a better job. Watch how IBM or Deloitte advertise and market their professional services. Go for targeted messaging and quality, not volume. Generate candidates from relationships you form using tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and by asking for referrals. Make it a rule of thumb that if you are generating hundreds of responses to a job posting, you are doing something terribly wrong.

Lesson #2: Use targeted, bold marketing and branding to appeal to the types of candidates you want.

Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Focus your marketing messages and media on the type of candidate you are most in need of. KPMG and other organizations target college-age candidates with videos and other media designed to appeal to that age group and to the personalities of the type of candidates who usually want to work for them.

They don’t spend any time or money on marketing that is generic or that appeals to older potential candidates.

The best marketing is always targeted to a specific audience and discourages, although subtly, those who don’t fit the target. Partly this is done through words and pictures and partly by placing the information where the people you are targeting are most likely to see it.

For example, Mercedes advertises on television at the times and on programs where their research shows that highly successful and well off people watch. They place print advertisements in magazines that these types of people read. They do not advertise on Super Bowl nor do they advertise in Reader’s Digest. Targeted marketing requires research, focus, carefully thought-out graphics, and tested writing.

Wording is also key; what you say makes all the difference. If you say and imply that you are seeking only those with very specific backgrounds and qualifications, you will reduce the numbers who apply and improve quality. Even your recruiting web site needs to be worded in a way that is attractive to those you are most anxious to have apply. Cisco Systems has a web site that is appealing to technical professionals but less so to others.

Lesson #3: Do not just use, but embrace, emerging technology

Social networks, video, YouTube, candidate relationship management products, Web 3.0 websites, and SecondLife are all tools that can potentially enlarge your candidate pools, screen candidates, and build relationships.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are perhaps the most effective recruiting tools in your arsenal. Video has become king in attracting people, and YouTube is the second-most used search engine after Google itself. If your organization has a recruiting page and/or video, it’s a good start.

Once you start attracting potential candidates, there are many tools to help screen them and communicate with them. CRM tools (Avature is a good example) let you track and communicate with groups of candidates. The most current ATS vendors are also offering this capability and even allow you to link to online profiles in LinkedIn and Facebook. This means candidates do not need a resume.

There are countless email programs, newsletter distribution programs, and other free or inexpensive communication aids that recruiters can use to do a better job letting candidates know where they stand. Even automatic bounce-back responses can be more intelligently written and distributed. A follow-up email could follow the bounce-back and automatically provide the candidate with another touch point.

Lesson #4: Accept change as a way of life

We will not be heading back to the more traditional ways of recruiting, and the contradictions and paradoxes I outlined at the beginning of this article will be with us for a long time. Traditional recruiting skills will be liabilities and will generate little profit.

Everything from face-to-face interviews to onboarding new employees will be more automated and will be done using the Internet. Software applications and mobile technology will dominate the recruiting space. Video interviewing and simulations for selection will become normal within five years.

To be a thriving recruiter you need to focus on building a new mindset that is centered on the acceptance of change as a constant and on taking advantage of technology.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of this year is that we are now at the place where we can use this technology to target our marketing, focus on a smaller number of candidates, allow more direct communication between candidates and hiring managers, and spend more time on raising awareness and marketing key positions using the various technical platforms we have available.

The ability to do this will be seen as strength and will generate returning profit for years to come.

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.”

Via its Virtual Video Interviews, employers can automatically screen candidates by having them respond on camera over the Internet to prerecorded questions.  HireVue also offers two-way video conferencing for live interviews. Both types of interviews are recorded for later review.

With companies counting pennies, there has been an upswing in the use of Internet video for initial candidate interviews. HireVue says it has grown rapidly — 500 percent — in the last year, adding such Fortune 500 clients as Dish Network, CDW, and Murphy Oil. It also partnered with Taleo to make its video interviews accessible from within the company’s software.

HireVue, which competes in an increasingly crowded market for video interviewing,  was named HR Product of the Year for 2009 by Human Resource Executive magazine just two weeks ago.

EnticeLabs, in part financed by the people who founded web analytics company Omniture, introduced TalentSeekr more than a year ago to positive reviews. TalentSeekr leverages some of the same principles as Omniture, but for job postings. Besides creating a variety of ad types from a standard job req, the program places the ad, monitors its performance, and makes adjustments on the fly. Recruiters can manually manipulate the process if they want, but the strength of TalentSeekr is that it can improve ad performance all by itself. (A more in-depth description of how it works can be found here.)

The most recent $2 million investment follows an initial $1.3 million. It’s not an official A series, and with the company a bit beyond startup, EnticeLabs is calling it a strategic round. Besides money, the company is also getting the benefit of recruitment industry veteran Neal Bruce, who joins the board as the representative of First Advantage, where he is is senior vice president of product management for First Advantage’s Employer Services segment.

The well-regarded Bruce is a former vice president of the global innovation group at Monster.com, where he worked for 4 1/2 years. He previously was a recruiter for Ernst & Young, and later director of global staffing for PTC before joining Monster in August 2003. He joined First Advantage in May 2008.

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?

You’ll most clearly know you have a good headline statement when candidates you interview tell you so. Your message will get candidates thinking, wanting to know more, and ultimately, responding to your ad. Headline statements are about positioning and most tout the strengths of the position, opportunity, situation, and/or company. When done well, the statement will differentiate one job or company from another.

How can you create a great headline statement?

A good headline depends on identifying what all the strengths of the opportunity are, choosing the strongest of those, and then communicating that in a well-crafted phrase. To start the process, ask and answer the following questions:

• What are the key positives prospective candidates must know about your company and/or job opening?

• What makes you (or the position) different and/or notable?

• What do your current employees like about working at your organization?

• What tone in a headline statement best fits your image/culture? (Cleverness, Humor, Formal, etc)

• What are your competitors saying in their ads?

• After compiling the above, what single key advantage do you have that should be front and center?

Key Areas

There are a number of key areas around which headline statements can be built. These include, but are not limited to:

• Awards won/recognition given
• Strength of the company – stability/longevity/culture
• Strength of the product
• Needs/wants of the candidate
• Dollars and cents
• Quality of location/atmosphere
• Culture/mission of the organization
• Quote from employee(s)
• Play on words

Here are two examples of headlines positioning the advertiser as an “Award-wining” employer:

Want to join a company that was awarded more Media and Methods portfolio awards than any other company last year?

Join a company recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the most admired food companies!

Stability and longevity of your organization can be very attractive to job seekers. If it works in your favor, consider using it:

Since the opening of its first franchise in 1940, International Dairy Queen, Inc has established itself as one of the world’s best-loved brands of food and dairy treats

Or, a more concise example:

Customer Service Rep – 110 year-old company and stronger than ever!

(Note: this ad received 73% more views and more than twice as many applies as competing ads simply titled Customer Service Representative.)

Just as Saturn pioneered the no-haggle pricing that customers enjoy, they position this as a benefit to their salespeople. This tackles several areas (strength of the position & culture, wants of the candidate – i.e. not having to haggle as a primary duty) with one headline:

Auto Sales – “No haggle” sales philosophy!

Another car dealer stands out by promoting the strength of the product:

Sales Career – fastest growing product in the U.S.!

Case in Point

One advertiser was receiving a low response to a posted ad and sought assistance. The job title? Inside Sales. We didn’t need to probe much further for the reason for their low response – the title generates no interest or differentiation.

After a few questions about the organization, the title was revised to highlight their company culture:

Inside Sales – Family-owned, great work/life balance!

The results? During the two-week period prior to the title change, the ad received 132 views. During the two-week period after the change, 290 people viewed it. That’s an increase of 220%! Clearly, job titles matter.

What Do Your Employees Say About You?

In business-to-business dealings we often use testimonials because often what your peers say carries more weight than what a Sales Representative says to you. The testimonial not only speaks to your product or service, but also to the belief the person giving the quote has in you. It’s no different with prospective employees — they want to know what their prospective peers say about the organization. Using employee quotes can have a powerful affect on candidates.

The culture at Eide Bailly has directly influenced my ability to succeed. I’m trusted in my work and have the freedom to make decisions. — Shannon (with the Firm 12 years)

Eide Bailly, a Top 25 CPA firm, uses quotes like this in its recruitment advertising. So, does it work?

I used to think (using the quote) was a little hokey… until I tried it in an ad. I received more comments regarding the employee quote we used. One person even wanted to meet the person who was quoted. The comments I received ranged from ‘the reason I applied was because of the quote from your employee’ to ‘that quote made me want to find out more about your company’. With that in mind, I would say that using quotes can really add an element of personalization and differentiation to your ad, as long as your company is depicted accurately by the quote. –Lauri Dahlberg, PHR, HR Manager

Using a quote from an employee can be a terrific way to pique interest and get more candidates in your pool. By using this or some of the other techniques pointed to above, you will increase your chances of attracting talent that otherwise might have overlooked your opportunity.

Tone

In addition to the key areas to build your title around, you will want to consider the tone of your headline as it relates to your image and/or culture. The tone can be:

• Serious

• Fun, playful

• Inquisitive (ask questions)

• Creative/outside the box

You might think a legal publishing firm would project a staid, stuffy image. To combat that, one advertiser has used the fun, play-on-words headline: Do Your Career Justice. Now they don’t sound so stuffy after all — right?

Which large bank do you think uses the headline: Success Comes in Stages (hint: stagecoach)? Another case of a play-on-words, which in this case, ties into a company symbol and shows a sense of humor that others in banking do not.

Getting Non-conventional

Some advertisers use a traditional approach and embellish it such as: Auto Sales – Capitalize on the hot new Saturn products! Others scrap the conventional angle all together. A district manager at one of the country’s largest financial and insurance services companies, says, “I try to consider the basic facts about the opportunity, and then highlight a selected part which the reader might find especially intriguing.”

For example, while his competitors use traditional (i.e. boring) titles, the district manager mentioned above uses the headline: Take Charge of Your Career Selling Products Everyone Needs! While his competitors’ ads lead to pre-conditioned or limited ideas about insurance sales, re-framing it with a headline statement presents a positive and informative picture. This brings results.

The district manager says, “I often ask responders what caught their attention in my recruitment ad. More often than not they reply, ‘The headline, that got me thinking…’ When I hear that, I know I have a good headline.”

Another recruiter in the Financial Services field presents his job as a “Small Business Opportunity.” His title reframes the posting and turns it from a “job” into a different kind of opportunity, one that attracts entrepreneurial people.

Why Re-invent the Wheel?

In addition to brainstorming new ideas, don’t overlook past ideas that can be re-worked. It can make the job of finding new headlines easier and be as effective (or more) than dreaming up new ones. Also, you can possibly piggyback on the branding message of the company.

For example, you may have heard the Saturn tag “A Different Kind of Car Company.” Recently, one Saturn group conducted a search for a sales team — two individuals to share the role of one sales position. It’s a different approach to a traditional role. Their headline?

A Different Kind of Car Company — Again

According to Lou Adler, you have 10 seconds to capture readers’ attention. A strong headline statement that helps you stand out and strongly positions the strengths of your opportunity will help you capture that readership and deliver candidates.

Entice Labs

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.

So let’s start with the elevator description: TalentSeekr is a recruitment advertising program that creates interactive ads out of standard job postings, targets them by the criteria you specify, places them on sites in its ad network, then monitors the results, adding exposures here, reducing them there and deleting ads entirely from sites that provide too few or too poor results.

The ads can be of all types, including video, Flash, banners, and text ads, for example. Formats and placements are tested and refined in real time. Recruiters can monitor the performance of individual ad types and placements and make changes. But the automated adjustments are the real selling point. As candidates click in and are qualified, TalentSeekr learns what performs best, and provides more of the same. The longer the campaign, the better the performance and the lower the cost of each applicant.

This heuristic capability sets TalentSeekr apart from mere monitoring systems that provide lots of information but don’t act on it. With the potential of having an ad appear on hundreds, thousands, and even more websites, being able to make changes on the fly can save money on PPC postings and improve the quality of the candidates overall.

The other, and equally important capability, is the potential for capturing passive job seekers. Ads can be placed on all sorts of sites and places. Adidas managed to snare a candidate who saw an ad when checking their  Gmail.

Targeting can be contextual, behavioral, geographic, or by social media type or all of these. There’s a video on the TechCrunch site that says Entice Labs can target as broadly as a nation or as narrowly as an individual building.

On her Talent Synchronicity Burns describes the process:

“EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy. They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video, or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers.

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand. Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface, or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.”

In the interest of complete transparency I should point out that Burns and Sumser are members of the Entice Labs Expert Panel. But having seen some of what TalentSeekr can do, the descriptions are apt, if understated.

The heuristic nature of the system sets it apart from other advertising networks, most recently SnapTalent, which closed up shop in August.

TalentSeekr, as its VP of strategy and alliances, Joshua Westover, says, makes the most sense for continuous recruiting. Small companies with only the occasional need to advertise positions or those that care little for branding are not Entice Labs’ best prospects.

But, as Stephen Fogarty of adidas explains in a video Burns did with him and Westover, TalentSeekr can help fill even challenging positions, the kind that adidas used to turn over to headhunters. In her blog posting, Fogarty reports that in a test campaign to fill a difficult job, TalentSeekr produced several qualified candidates in two weeks.

Writes Burns, “The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.”

Snaptalent made its ERE debut as one of four companies to showcase at our Startup Panel. Already struggling then as the recession took hold, Snaptalent’s CEO Sumon Sadhu described the company as an Adsense-like ad network for recruiters that positioned ads on contextually related content pages of its participating publishers.

It was a well-received concept that as an exclusive recruitment ad program had no direct counterparts. However, the job listings aggregators — SimplyHired and Indeed — were already doing something similar for their PPC job postings. Because of their reach, they were able to deliver volume. Plus PPC campaigns are attractive to budget-minded recruiters since you pay only when an interested prospect clicks on the posting.

On the Snaptalent site, the farewell message acknowledges that despite the accolades the business model “ended up being economically unviable as a business. Primarily because the number of candidate leads generated per impression wasn’t able to satisfy employers to keep buying and therefore for publishers to keep getting paid.”

Within a few months, Snaptalent had abandoned the ad network concept in favor of a college recruiting platform. It was introduced in the spring — too late, even in a good year, to interest many corporate recruiters. And 2009 is anything but a good year, as the Snaptalent team admits: “Market timing couldn’t have been worse … most calls to potential customers indicated that they wouldn’t be willing to spend or focus on this area for at least another year.”

The note concludes with a lament about the HR profession as a whole:

“It’s (recruiting) a large market ($10B/year spend), with rich customers, and poor innovation. It sounds like an entrepreneur’s dream. The truth is that there are barriers to adoption of newer technologies which come down to the position of HR in an organization. Since HR isn’t directly revenue-generative, HR decision makers aren’t as empowered to drive change required by revenue generative functions like marketing or sales.”

“Recruitment spend is bloated, so as the cost of transmitting information to connect companies and candidates comes down, the trend is for companies to use free tools which help amplify that spread. The companies that will win in the recruitment space therefore are all working on solutions which take away from job advertising spending; search engine optimization, social networking, referral hiring, improving social media presence.”

The company’s final message says it is returning the majority of the money investors gave it.

Not likely, say observers of the market (here’s just one) who have warned of the demise of the newspaper Help Wanted for years. The Conference Board, which once used the volume of employment ads in 51 of the nation’s newspapers as an index of labor health, discontinued its Help Wanted Advertising Index in July 2008. The Board explained the decision this way, “Because print advertising no longer comprehensively captures changes in labor-market demand, The Conference Board will focus its efforts on other indicators that better reflect today’s labor market …”

Earlier this month the Newspaper Association of America released the results of the first quarter newspaper revenues showing all categories down. But no classified category is down more than recruitment, off 67.4 percent from the first quarter of 2008. That’s a near disastrous showing, made worse because 2008’s first quarter was itself down by 35.4 percent from 2007.

In dollars, the drop means America’s daily newspapers took in $205.441 million in recruitment advertising from Jan 1 through March 31st. Compare that to the $119 million Monster took in from its North American job postings or compare it to CareerBuilder’s $141 million for the same period.

You don’t have to be a math wizard to see that just two online sites — the two biggest, to be sure — took in more job posting revenue than did all of the nation’s 1,400 or so daily newspapers. The newspapers also took in $3.1 billion in online revenue, with employment ads accounting for a piece of that total.

The accompanying chart shows the rise in employment advertising through 2000; its sudden drop with the tech crash of 2000 and then 9/11; it’s improvement into 2006; and, now, what is likely to be its final decline.

So definitive has been the crash of newspaper employment advertising that many newspapers are running help-wanted ads only on some days, rather than seven days a week. The Chicago Tribune, an owner of CareerBuilder, became the first major market daily to curtail recruitment advertising, when in early 2008 it decided to run ads only two days a week.

The rapid decline in newspaper employment advertising coincides with recruiter sentiment that newspapers don’t provide the same value as online job boards, employee referral programs and, increasingly, social networks.

In 2006, ERE in collaboration with Classified Intelligence surveyed several hundred recruiters visiting ERE and found they considered print advertising to be the least effective means of attracting candidates from among the five choices. Those choices were employee referral programs, job boards, career fairs, print, and social networks. We asked the decision-makers among the survey respondents about their spending on various media in 2006. Some 43 percent expected to spend less that year on print, while about that same percent expected to increase their spending on social networking sites, referral programs, and job boards.

The numbers bear out those predictions.

That’s the glass-half-empty look at print recruitment advertising. If there is a half-full point of view, it’s not evident. We could point to ads in The New York Times, Las Vegas Review-Journal, and a few others that list available openings and point to online sites for more information. The Chicago Tribune does something similar with ads it runs for CareerBuilder during the week.

Recruitment advertising agencies that used to earn 15 percent commissions on newspaper ads that cost upwards of $3,000 on a Sunday have embraced other media, generating fees from buying online advertising, designing online campaigns and building career sites, and managing search engine marketing campaigns.

Executives from these agencies no longer spend time placing what used to be called in-line display ads in the daily newspaper. Now, they advocate using newspapers for integrated campaigns and for special events like on-site open houses and career fairs, where a wide net is desired.

How do you use newspapers for recruitment? Or do you? When was the last time you ran an ad in the newspaper and what was the result? We’re anxious to hear from you. So we encourage your comments on this issue as we prepare a more in-depth article on the use of newspapers for recruitment advertising.

Post your comments below or email me directly by clicking the link at the top of this story.

The Spoke and the Wheel

“Smart Experimentation” is the motto at DaVita, whose recruiting department was recently honored by peers. The Colorado company hires nurses, social workers, dieticians, technicians, and others for its dialysis operations.

A social media research team, including three DaVita recruiters and Shaker, reviewed the Web 2.0 landscape to decide where to initially focus the company’s efforts, in addition to its corporate careers site. One topic of conversation, for example: Should MySpace be on our target list?

In February, they presented their findings to Tony Blake. As a result of the study, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube topped DaVita’s short list of social-media favorites. All 50+ recruiters have LinkedIn accounts, and an internal Spring audit showed 80% had Facebook pages.

DaVita had a Facebook careers group, but is migrating toward a better fan page, with the help of Shaker. It also uses Facebook for an internal blog, where recruiters post best practices, such as increasing followers on Twitter. Interest in that blog has been modest so far.

Although Blake and others have jumped on the Twitter wagon, it will be in Q3 when Twitter will follow Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube as the object of DaVita’s attention. What’s now DaVitaJobs will probably change to a variety of sub-divided jobs — DaVitaNursingJobs, or something like that. A number of other tactics are in the works for the rest of the year. It’ll try JobsinPods and will probably have another go at TweetMyJobs. When it posted one job there, 19 people looked into it. DaVita liked the results, but cut back when the company started charging.

This Fall, Davita will also work on a new social media plan, based on what it has learned from its “smart experiment.” Among the metrics it’ll use to judge its success: LinkedIn page views; user ratings for answers provided by DaVita recruiters on LinkedIn; Twitter followers and other recruiter-network growth; source of hire, which it’ll measure monthly; growth of Facebook fans; wall posts; and Google analytic information showing movement from social media sites to DaVita’s careers page.

Says Watson: “Our goal with the social networks and career site is to function like a spoke-and-wheel where all social sites are the spokes feeding into the center of the wheel which is our career site.”

Spreading the Word by Video

This quarter, the DaVita recruiting team will turn its attention to YouTube. Watson wants employment-branding videos made that are “really raw, the true nature of what it’s like to work there.” Perhaps, he says, the company will hold a competition where employees make their own videos showing what it’s like to work in facilities, or nursing, or other jobs.

KPMG has been at this a while. For a year and a half, interns and new hires have been putting up videos on YouTube about what it’s like to work at the company. This will be the third summer that interns can participate in a best-video contest. KPMG uses its career site to spread the best videos, and takes advantage of “campus ambassadors” who tell other students about the videos and about their internships at the company.

That’s just the tip of the social-media iceberg for KPMG, which brings in about 2,100 full-time college hires and about 1,700 interns annually.

Beyond video, other KPMG tactics include virtual career fairs, as well as one intern’s blog about the company on Jobsinthemoney.com.

Kathleen Schaum, director of the company’s campus strategy, has been at the company 20 years, the last half in HR. She says several tools developed by the company are aimed at helping candidates answer the question: “If I went to KPMG, would I be stuck in one little job my whole career?

Its employer brand (or employee value proposition; choose your jargon) is three-pronged. Candidates are told they can have three things at the company: fun; leadership opportunities; and a global career.

Recruiters can tap into an alumni network for boomerang hires. Employees and candidates each have sites to map out their career trajectories. For employees, once they map out where they want to go and have a sense of which KPMG-ers may already be doing similar work, they can use a separate mentoring tool which allows them to connect with those employees for advice.

“Didn’t Pay a Dime”

When it comes to social media, LinkedIn is a winner for Christina Ousley, a senior HR generalist in California for CO-OP Financial Services.

She recruits sales, HR, accounting, and other jobs for the company, which is involved in the electronic funds transfer business. Last year, she helped bring in about 100 people to the 250-person company. Recently, to backfill a PR manager job, she emailed targeted people who were part of her LinkedIn network. They emailed it and re-emailed it and sent it to marketing and PR groups. The result is a new employee, and, she says, “I didn’t pay a dime.”

She has also used LinkedIn to get a hold of recruiters at credit unions where she reads about layoffs. In one case, she contacted such recruiters, and ended up conducting a little outplacement session at the company. She had three really qualified people for an open job. Did she hire one? “Almost,” she says. “It would have been a great success story.”

Jeff Todd, also in California, is using LinkedIn at Berkeley. The state is so broke that it’s talking about shutting down parks, freeing prisoners, and selling off landmarks. School funds are being cut and some University of California-Berkeley employees who handle IT, publications, and fundraising, and other areas, will lose their jobs. Todd is teaching them to build LinkedIn profiles and join LinkedIn groups, as well as learn their way around Facebook.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, he’s posting articles about the school from his Twitter page, and using HootSuite to measure success. With HootSuite, he can set up a special URL to see what’s generating traffic and what’s not; politics (such as a post in which he said “UC Berkeley lab conducts stem cell research, free for the first time from restrictions lifted by Obama”) and entertainment seem to sell. The goal: to build a relationship that’ll be necessary when things turn around. “When things get hot,” he says, “the people who are going to talk to you are those you paid attention to when times were slow.” His wife would probably agree, as she recently hired someone at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who had been forwarded her job-opening post on Twitter.

“In the Future, They’ll Be There”

Brianna Foulds, who has been Tweeting using her married name BrieNadal, is the senior manager of recruiting at California Pizza Kitchen. She works on the hiring of restaurant managers in the Western U.S., oversees the corporate recruiting, and is involved in internal promotion and succession-planning initiatives.

While the chain would prefer an expanding economy, one thing that’s helping it hold up well is its thank-you card program, where repeat customers have the manager open up a card entitling them to a gift.

Anyhow, Foulds is experimenting with social media like so many others. “We’re really just trying to get on the big ones,” she says. “We’ve decided it’s best to be on a couple sites and really own them, rather than a lot and not really be effective.”

The restaurant doesn’t have a formal plan in place, but the marketing department is building a Facebook fan page (which Foulds’ department will then help keep up). It’s going to be one Facebook site for fans, whether you like your job being a hostess, or you like the Thai pasta. Meanwhile, the PR department is Tweeting about the thank-you cards mentioned earlier, as well as other topics, under the handle http://www.twitter.com/calpizzakitchen.

For office jobs like HR, “LinkedIn is a fantastic place,” Foulds says. The company isn’t finding as many restaurant manager candidates on social media as it’d hope, but “in the future, they’ll be there,” Foulds says.

John Nykolaiszyn, one of four senior corporate recruiters for Burger King Corp, is also dabbling in social-media for restaurant-industry jobs. “We want to be ahead of the competition,” he says. “We’re quietly using Twitter. We’re using LinkedIn. We’re exploring search engine optimization and search engine marketing to promote our brand.” That brand has four parts to it; “Bold, Accountable, Empowered, and Fun.”

Right now, the modest steps are getting good buzz. A June 9 list of top Twittering recruiters (say that 10 times fast) included BK, as well as the line: “This list is almost as interesting for who’s NOT on it at this point. We have Burger King, but not McDonald’s.”

“People Are Terrified”

Matt Alder is the director of product strategy for Barkers, the largest recruitment communications agency in the UK. He’s helping clients manage their employer brands online, which involves, he says, two things. The first is getting the message out about their companies, whether through videos, Twitter, or something else. The second is monitoring what people are saying about them.

Privacy, he says, is a bigger issue across the Pond than in the U.S. As mentioned before, it’s easy to be uneasy about what you find on social media sites.

“People have a real potential problem with people looking up on Facebook and things like that. Facebook is still considered quite private. The press over here jump on every single invasion of privacy that social media throws up.”

Advertising on Facebook, he says, is fine. But researching candidates: not as much. “There are fewer employer Facebook fan pages in the UK at the moment. LinkedIn and Twitter seem to be something companies are comfortable with. But who can see what they’re doing on Facebook — people are terrified about that in the UK. Facebook has had massive, massive growth year over year and people are very keen to share … but with family and friends.”

Christina Ousely, from CO-OP Financial Services, is using Facebook “for personal use, but I haven’t really tapped into it (for recruiting). I’m hesitant to add people to my page, because it has pictures of my daughter, stuff like that.”

These are challenges at Berkeley, too, according to Jeff Todd, the fellow mentioned earlier who’s helping with outplacement and testing out Twitter there. The university is still trying to figure out who should be looking up what on social media sites: Should it be HR? Search committees? Someone else? Todd says there are innumerable issues that arise when viewing a Facebook profile and finding out a person’s religion, politics, and appearance. The problem, he says, isn’t just about rejecting someone because of what you learned about them – something that hopefully won’t happen much. It’s that once you take a look at their profile, there could be the perception that you rejected them for that reason.

Foulds, from CPK, occasionally posts a job on her personal Facebook page, or otherwise receives an careers inquiry there. But, she tells candidates: “I try and keep Facebook a little more personal, for friends and family. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.”

“Loaded Up on Tweets”

Managing all this social media is also a challenge.

Christina Ousley has a close relationship with CO-OP’s marketing department, and is talking to the marketers about the best way to send out jobs via Twitter in the future. For now, if she wants to Tweet jobs out, she’ll do it by hand, not RSS.

She’s still using Monster, for entry-level positions in particular. Ousley’s “trying to find the manpower” for Twitter and other social media.

Mainly, she’s using Twitter to find good articles about best practices, and network with corporate recruiters who are also using it. But, she says, “As the only recruiter, it’s hard for me to sit there and Tweet all day (something she says often goes on with independent recruiters). I’m not a beginner with Twitter. I think I know more than a lot of people out there. But it’s time-consuming. I am glad I work really fast. I’m glad I can multitask. My cell phone is loaded up on tweets. Some people just Tweet all the time.”

Similarly, CPK’s Brianna Foulds (who also likes the restaurant community Fohboh as well as the Talent Revolution site) is using Twitter to learn about best practices in recruiting. “The thing I found that is absolutely wonderful about Twitter,” she says, “is the networking with others, sharing best practices and information. There’s a huge presence of professionals. I try to go in a couple of times a day and read Tweets, and try some re-Tweeting of my own. It’s adding on to my normal, typically busy day. Some days I just don’t find the time.”

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.

Before we get into our Q & A, you should know that Barker himself is a bit unconventional and certainly no amateur. His undergraduate degree is in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA in entertainment production from UCLA before working in Hollywood for 12 years as an independent screenwriter and media developer whose deals made it into Variety on occasion.

And a note of caution: Be nice to Eric should you meet him. His LinkedIn profile mentions that he’s a mixed martial arts/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner who has trained with champions.

ERE: How long have you been looking? Are you currently employed? What’s your specialty or type of job?

Eric: I just graduated MBA school (May 18), believe it or not. My background is in media and entertainment — it’s all I’ve ever done. From writing screenplays for Disney and Fox to transitioning Spiderman creator Stan Lee’s superheroes to the web to marketing the Wii for Nintendo, helping companies bring people great entertainment has been my thing. Now that I’ve completed my MBA, my focus is product marketing/product development for companies involved in the media and entertainment space.

ERE: What made you decide to buy an ad?
Eric: I thought it would be unconventional and innovative. I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin’s work. The old model of marketing is changing. It’s trickier to reach people and to reach people effectively. I took this to heart not just in my marketing work, but in how I market myself. You know that old saying, “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.”

ERE: Why did you pick Facebook for the ad?
Eric: Facebook was the perfect place for me to put my ad. It gets enormous traffic, it’s inexpensive, allows you to precisely target your advertising, and provides you with solid metrics with which to track your efforts. Plus I think people enjoy going there, spend a lot of time there, and are in a good mood while they’re on the site. And most importantly: nobody else was doing what I was doing. That was key.

ERE: What is it costing you?
Eric: No more than $10 a day. Usually under five. I can control my bid price and set a cap on my daily spend. Starbucks puts a bigger dent in my wallet than promoting myself online does.

ERE: What kind of response have you gotten?
Eric: 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. My ad got tens of thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks and more than 20 people contacted me with offers of assistance. More than that, the quality of the interactions is very high — people were impressed with the concept.

ERE: Had any solid bites? Interviews?
Eric: No interviews just yet but plenty of solid interaction, lots of buzz, and most importantly, I’m making good contacts.

ERE: Do you have a sense as to whether this approach might work for others? Why do you think so or think not, as the case may be?
Eric: I think this could definitely work for others. The market could quickly get saturated, of course, but given proper targeting this is a good way to reach the right people cheaply and passively — to work on job-hunting even when you’re sleeping. But past the method itself, you need to have something to offer. In the end, it’s all about the value proposition. But if you’ve legitimately got something that the company needs, this can be a great way to reach the right people with minimal effort and expense.

ERE: What other approaches have you tried to finding a job?
Eric: You want me to reveal ALL my tricks?

ERE: Is this something you would or will do again?
Eric: Now that this method is getting exposure, a lot of people may start doing it and it won’t be quite as innovative. I’ll just find another unconventional way to reach employers — but if my personal marketing keeps going this well, hopefully, I won’t need to. :)

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.

Still, the results ring true (a comment that must be like a poke in the eye to our statistics professor). They jibe with other nursing surveys in the areas of demographics and career motivation. And (here I go again professor) there’s no reason to think the students who frequent CampusRN are much different from other nursing students, besides being more attuned to the Internet and willing to take a survey.

More directly of interest for recruiters, though, are the findings of how students seek or expect to seek jobs when the time comes. As might be expected from a survey conducted online, digital sources dominate, with 83 percent of the survey takers mentioning one or more online sources. Half mentioned healthcare or nursing specialty job boards.

Career fairs also were mentioned by half the respondents as a place to look for work. Clinical rotations are also a source of jobs and leads for 40 percent. In fact, in the report written by Hodes, rotations and externships were found to be among the most effective ways a student has of finding out what it would be like to actually work for a particular employer. “Clinical rotations are perceived as very effective at conveying a realistic perception of work environment,” says the report.

There are plenty more nuggets for recruiters. For instance, you won’t find most of these students by doing a resume search; 60 percent have not posted anywhere. Of those who have, 20 percent have posted to CampusRN, while 12 percent have posted to Monster and about the same to CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

Pay close attention to your career site. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they look there for information about prospective employers. They notice what you don’t have. Somewhat more than a third of the students say these sites lack crucial information such as career development, benefits, and continuing education offerings.

Don’t want your career site to go into detail about some of those things? You should know these students spend an average of 3.6 hours a week on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and CampusRN2RN. The survey doesn’t say what they exactly do there, but at least occasionally asking about an employer would be a good guess. (There goes that A we got in statistics.) After all, 43 percent of the students are willing to hear from a recruiter connecting with them via a social network.

The report includes a section entitled Recruiter Checklist. Scan it, if all you have time for is a quick read.

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.

If you’re not in this double RIF-proof group, you’ll find out what you have to do to get there. For those of you doing any pre-RIF assessments, it will help you figure out who goes, who stays, and who’s worth saving. What a crazy idea! (Note: your comments are being collected on my Recruiter’s Wall blog.)

Using Adler’s Crazy Metrics as the New Recruiter Scorecard

The world of recruiting continues to evolve faster than most of us can adapt. To see where you rank in the new age of recruiting, evaluate yourself on each of these factors on a zero- to 10-point scale.

This has been designed for full-cycle recruiters and it’s based on a curve, so you need to score around 65-75 points to be in the upper quartile.

1. Voice Mail Return Percent. If you’re calling passive candidates (those not looking) you should be in the 70%-80% range here. This is worth a full 10 points. Average in the current economy is about a 20% return rate and is worth about 3 points. You only score points here if you’re calling people who are fully employed or where your personal influence is the key to getting them interested. (Note: see point 3 for how to increase your voice mail return rate.)
2. Number of Days Looking. Getting people as soon as they enter the job-hunting market is a huge competitive advantage. So start asking your active candidates how long they’ve been looking. If you’re the first recruiter or company they’ve spoken to, give yourself all 10 points, but only if you had anything to do with pulling this feat off. You get a big donut if the candidate says they’ve already accepted another offer, they’ve got other offers pending, or if they’ve been in the market for more than two weeks. Give yourself 5 points if most of your candidates found your ad in the first 5-10 days of their search. If you had nothing to do with making sure the ad was found, that it was compelling, or in causing your candidate to respond, you don’t get any of these points. Instead, give them to the person who pulled this off.
3. Referrals Per Call. To score all 10 points on this factor, you need to average 2-3 worthy referrals per call. Someone is worthy if they are highly qualified and a strong candidate for your open job, or personally knows someone who is. An average score (3 points) on this factor is about one decent referral per call. I have a personal rule that has enabled me to increase my personal productivity by 300%! It goes like this: first, don’t call anyone who will not call you back! Second, don’t call anyone who’s not a top performer. Third, only call worthy prospects. The only way to pull this is off is to get 2-3 worthy referrals on every single call you make. (Here’s a networking tips article for help on improving your score here.)
4. The Maslow vs. Money Index. Here’s an article summarizing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s must-read material for recruiters. The key point here is that good candidates don’t take new jobs primarily for the money. They take them for some combination of growth, opportunity, a chance to learn new skills, to do something important, or to increase their personal satisfaction. Unfortunately, most candidates ask “what’s the money?” early in the courting phase, putting most recruiters on the defensive. Good recruiters quickly shift the conversation to Maslow-related ideas, suggesting that the primary reason a person should select one job over another is because of the opportunity for growth and personal satisfaction it represents, not the money received. (Caution: this will only work as long as your comp is reasonably competitive.) Score all 10 points if you handle this money question smoothly all of the time, and zero points if you stumble all of the time. Give yourself 2-3 points if you can convince a fair percent of your candidates to reconsider, independent of the pay.
5. Not Interested Conversion Rate. This is the percent of candidates who initially say they are not interested in your job opening but who reconsider. You score all 10 points if you phrase your questions in such a way that everyone says they’d like to talk with you about your open opportunities. Score zero points if you walk away from most of these candidates without some type of clever rebuttal. The key to good recruiting and scoring high on this factor is applicant control. You know you have it when you — the recruiter — determine if you’re interested in the candidate, not the other way around.
6. Partner vs. Vendor Ratio. If you’re a partner with your hiring manager clients you have a better understanding of real job needs, you’re more influential, they’ll see candidates who are a bit off the mark based on your recommendation, they’ll trust your judgment, and you’ll make more placements without wasting time. A vendor-like relationship with a client puts the recruiter into a subordinate and less-influential role. The recruiter typically has less knowledge of real job requirements, the hiring manager refuses to see candidates who don’t meet the exact requirements, and the manager won’t reconsider candidates he or she has incorrectly assessed. Divide the percent of your clients who are partners by those who are vendors (Note: 50/50 is equal to one and is worth 4 points.) A good ratio here is two, meaning two-thirds of your clients treat you as a true partner, so give yourself 7-8 points for this.
7. Unsolicited Referral Rate. If you regularly get great referrals without asking for them you score high on this factor. Great recruiters are known in their niche market and top people want to connect with them. Give yourself all 10 points if at least 50% of your placements are made from these unsolicited referrals. If you get 4-5 strong unsolicited referrals each month, whether you place them or not, give yourself 5 points on this factor. You get a big zero if you don’t get any good referrals, unsolicited or not.
8. Technology Utilization Factor. Whether it’s being an ATS geek, a Web 2.0 aficionado, a search optimization fanatic, or a CRM guru, recruiting in today’s era requires significant technology expertise. If you still advocate a tech-free environment, you earn a big zero on this factor. Googling for resumes is not a big deal anymore, so you get nothing for being good at this. If you’re training others in using the latest recruiter-tech stuff take all 10 points. If no one laughs at your lack of tech-expertise, score 5 points here.
9. Advertising Efficiency. To get all 10 points on this factor, you have to make sure your ads are found and at least 50% of the people who find them click through. This means you need to use reverse engineering to select the best boards and make sure your ads are so compelling top people are intrigued enough to respond. If you just post your traditional job descriptions on boards that have not been vetted, your score is equal to the number of great people who apply — zero!
10. Gauge of Persistence. Recruiting top people is never smooth. People always have concerns. Candidates always have other offers. Managers always want to see more candidates. Pushing through these issues is at the heart of great recruiters. If you can convince most of your candidates to reconsider, get your managers to see and hire people who don’t meet the exact requirements, and are constantly pushing the process forward, regardless of the challenges, you deserve most of these 10 points. Take them all if your candidates and clients thank you for persevering. You don’t deserve any points here, if you complain about all of the challenges involved, procrastinate, or make excuses about your lack of results.

Free BONUS ADD-ON: Buyer vs. Seller Quotient

Divide the percent of the time your strong passive candidates are selling you (meaning you’re the buyer) by the amount of time you’re selling them (i.e., 50/50 is equal to one and worth 5 points). If you sell more than you buy, you get 1-2 points, and if you buy a lot more than you sell, you get 7-8 points. Good recruiting is about getting a strong candidate to sell you on why he or she is qualified for the job. They’ll only do this if they believe your job represents a strong career move for them. This is also referred to as applicant control and is a core competency of every top recruiter.

New-age recruiting is about influencing people who have multiple opportunities to consider what you have to offer. While there is more technology now available to find people, this is now the easy part. Getting on the phone, recruiting them, and networking is now the real skill involved with being a great new-age recruiter. That’s a crazy idea, isn’t it?

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:

“Service-based advertisers such as Monster, CareerBuilder, Cars.com, and E-trade actually saw notable declines in site reach on the day of the game. Aside from branding, from a direct response respective these spots were targeted only at a subset of the viewing audience that is currently “in-market” for a new career, vehicle or investment account.”

Just to double-check, we consulted Alexa, another web traffic counting site. Like Compete, it has its faults, but it, too shows the Sunday traffic drop, giving the results a little more context by showing weekend drops are typical. (Illustrating the point that people look for jobs during the weekday, at work.) And even those who go job surfing over the weekend apparently decided to take Super Bowl Sunday off.

Still, a double-digit decline? After spending $3 million for every 30 seconds? During what is turning out to be the worst job market in 35 years?

As I have previously written, video has become king. A recent report by Gartner predicts that 25% of all content will be delivered by audio or video by 2013. Those who want to gain mindshare and generate interest in their career opportunities or organization need to use some kind of interactive media — video, instant messaging, polls — anything that attracts and engages Gen Y. The most useful and powerful interactive tools include social networks — particularly Facebook if you are targeting college students — and even LinkedIn and Twitter — as well as video sites such as Youtube, Hulu, and AOLvideo.

Laura Short at Stout University of Wisconsin has created an interesting slideshow for college students giving them reasons to use LinkedIn and encouraging them to — because it is where you are. In this presentation she encourages students to develop a personal video and post it as a LinkedIn video. She also talks about the importance of a video presence.

As video is becoming the dominant form of communication, recruiters who stick with text-based career sites and even text-oriented social networks will find themselves in trouble if they are looking for younger candidates.

There are many services that produce videos and I have listed a cross-section of them in previous articles. But it is very hard to find any company doing something different enough that it may change the way we interact and communicate with candidates. All the social networks I am aware of are based on reading and writing. You have to create a written profile and list and bullet your experiences, education, and so forth. Recommendations are written. Resumes are written. Any interactivity is through asynchronous conversations (e.g. email), a smattering of instant messaging, and sometimes the ability to post messages, pictures, and videos and make comments.

There is, however, one company that has gotten my attention. It is U.S.-based and aimed squarely at college students.

It is called ThinkTalk Networks and, while it has not yet revolutionized the recruiting or social networking industries, it is thinking and doing things differently. ThinkTalk provides video-based career TV for college students. It allows organizations to make videos that are professionally produced that talk about their careers, culture, environment, and people. None of this is revolutionary.

What is different is that ThinkTalk is also an online video-based career community. On ThinkTalk students can ask questions of upcoming guests, chat with human resource professionals, and interact with students who have similar career interests using video. It has also developed a a TV broadcast network that includes over 175 colleges, and is growing. These colleges play a new 30-minute program that ThinkTalk provides each week to help it build their online audience.

What excites me is envisioning ThinkTalk becoming a social network where communication takes place with video used in a variety of synchronous and asynchronous ways. I can easily picture candidates and recruiters creating and uploading video content using webcams, professional studios, or cameras in laptops or cell phones. Gen Y will surely be attracted to that kind of site, and I imagine other age groups, even Baby Boomers, will too. After all, for most of us it’s a lot easier to talk than write.

Corporations and individual recruiters could produce their own videos. And, nicely produced videos become the equivalent of the musical videos singers produce and link nicely to the way young people think and act. Many of ThinkTalk’s videos have already been picked up by other sites such as AOL Video which shows their viral marketing potential. It seems more and more that any video posted to one site will end up on many.

But, ThinkTalk does more than simply showcase an organization: it also provides career guidance and inspiration through other videos they produce. In this interview with actor Emile Hirsch, students ask him how he got started and how he picks the roles he plays. The students become part of the show, get involved, and ask what they want to know. This becomes an educational experience as well as entertainment and information. I also see recruiting messages being integrated into product marketing and overall branding messages. Smart phones, like the iPhone for example, with their ability to connect to higher speed 3G networks become tools for watching, making, and spreading short videos. Already there is a video equivalent of Twitter called 12seconds which allows you to post — yes, you got it — 12 seconds of video.

Getting the word out about your organization, career opportunities, and culture will become more and more video-based over the next few years. I believe that social networks will quickly adapt and evolve into video platforms as it becomes ever more painless to make, edit, and post short video segments. It has taken growth in bandwidth and the development of higher-speed cell networks to power this revolution, but the time has come. ThinkTalk Networks won’t be the last of these innovative video-based services.