Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.”

For $50 and a few minutes of your time you get a press release (which you write, they edit) sent to an online newsservice and PlaceYourName submits your name and some bio info and your photo to what it says are four “high ranking websites, blogs, and news portals, viewable in search engine results.”

For $100, you get double the distribution plus a vanity website of your own.

There’s nothing PlaceYourName will do that you can’t do yourself. But the truth is most people don’t. Sarah Welstead, a Toronto recruiting marketing professional, a few months ago wrote about the importance of building a personal brand. Yesterday, ERE offered a webinar on this topic: “Creating a Personal Brand: Increasing Your Online Presence.” Presented by Toby Nathan of RecruitaStar is the nuts and bolts of how you build a personal brand and it’s archived here.

There’s also a valuable personal branding blog started by Dan Schawbel, a guru of personal branding.

While a service like PlaceYourName.com can get you started — and you may want to consider it and other branding tools like Personavita or VisualCV if you lack the discipline — in order to sustain the effort, you need endurance, and something to offer.

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY

Challenger, Gray & Christmas say CEO turnover has slowed since the dark days of September 2008 when the outplacement firm recorded 140 CEO departures. Last month, the firm counted only 105 departures.

Since the beginning of the year, 939 CEOs have left their posts, a 17 percent decline from the 1,132 departures announced through September last year.

Health care CEOs have the biggest worries when it comes to job security; 151 have left their job so far this year, the most of any sector. Government/non-profits are next with 116 departures.

RISESMART

This Silicon Valley HR startup is rightfully boasting about the latest member of its board of advisers. Pat Pittard, the former chairman, president, and CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, signed on to RiseSmart’s board, saying, “I believe in what the company is doing, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

RiseSmart has been getting noticed for its imaginative blending of traditional outplacement services with 21st century technology. The company stripped outplacement of the group coaching, counseling, and consulting to focus on the job getting. Services are delivered online and by phone, keeping overhead to a minimum.

Considering the cost and the focus of the program, it’s not surprising that Pittard called RiseSmart’s business model “disruptive.” He said it is “transforming how corporate outplacement works – leveraging technology, along with a laser-like focus on results, to squeeze out the inefficiencies of traditional outplacement services.”

“The novelette of their experience in the military,” says Sherrill Curtis, doesn’t always translate clearly.

Agrees Carl Blum, “The hardest problem they have is translating their military experience into civilian language so a recruiter can understand what they have to offer.

Curtis, Blum, and Blum’s partner in an organization called Tip of the Arrow, Bob Deissig, and Sgt. Major James Clark were the prime movers of a program last month at New Jersey’s  Ft. Dix called “Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair.”

They had plenty of help. The Garden State (New Jersey) SHRM council signed on early to the project, supplying dozens of recruiters, supplemented by career coaches from the state’s professional association, and representatives from federal agencies and area colleges.

But this was no ordinary job fair, although some 70 employers showed up and Blum tells us 200 of the participants expect offers.

What made this different were the one-on-one counseling sessions and workshops that prepped the servicemen and women — and some dependents — for the next day’s recruiter meet and greet.

Blum and Deissig, who founded Tip of the Arrow, began working with returning soldiers at Ft. Dix last year. Retired from careers in staffing and search, they both quickly discovered that while the men and women they met had held positions of leadership and responsibility, they were not skilled at explaining to a recruiter how what they did had value in the corporate world.

Blum told a story about a 24-year-old National Guardsman returned from Iraq who described himself as a clerk who had also been in charge of a security detail.

“I had to draw it out of him, really talk to him about what he did,” Blum says, learning the soldier had traveled Iraq returning money recovered from captured terrorists to their victims. In another assignment, he was in charge of protecting teachers and students from attack.

Saying he was a military clerk who also had worked security wouldn’t have meant as much to a corporate recruiter as explaining he was entrusted with a small fortune in cash and was responsible for the lives of a classroom full of children. Putting it that way, Blum says, lets a recruiter know that the soldier in front of them has integrity and has handled more responsibility than any job they may have is likely to require.

When Blum and Deissig connected with Curtis, who heads the state council’s Workforce Readiness committee, they found a firecracker of organization who mobilized the council and local chapters to provide the training the military personnel would need to launch successful civilian careers.

“I saw bright, articulate people,” Curtis reports. But like so many workers in the civilian world seeking a career change, “they have a very difficult time explaining what they are, what they have done, and how it applies.”

Career coaches and professional recruiters met one-on-one with the nearly 500 personnel — many of them  Army — who attended the workshop the day before the job fair. The volunteers would review resumes, teach basic job hunting techniques — there was a how-to session on career networking — and even do role-playing to help the job seekers get a feel for interviewing.

There was a panel of experienced, senior recruiters to answer audience questions on everything from what to wear to concerns about military related disabilities. International recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a principal in CareerXroads, talked about using technology for job searching. He also set up a LinkedIn group to carry on the day’s work.

The goal of the workshops was to get the military job seekers ready to “meet with an employer with confidence and articulate what they have done and how it applies to their job,” Curtis adds.

Curtis and Tip of the Arrow, which was founded to provide just that kind of help, are hoping that other state SHRM councils will pick up on the project and hold their own workshops and job fairs, with the Ft. Dix program as a model.

Then there are sites like UpMo.com that actually try to help a job seeker understand that a job is not a career. The subscription-based service launched earlier this year, but just this week added a job search engine that promises to filter the duff for its members. ResumeFit.com, meanwhile, serves the recruiter by incorporating a candidate assessment right into the resume. As a company partner told us, “this is great for triaging candidates on the front end.”

UpMo

Because this is a subscription-based service, there is just so far you can get before you must enter a credit card. From what we could see and from what its founder and CEO, Promise Phelon, says, UpMo is a career guidance resource that seems especially well-tuned to the young professional who will work for upward mobility (ergo, the UpMo name).

UpMo takes the pulse of your current employment readiness by assessing such things as the quality and breadth of your network. How often are you in touch with the people who can help you? It also compares you against a representative role model, charting your career against the hypothetical (or actual) individual whose career path you want to emulate. Like a good financial planning program, you can do “what-ifs” with your career to see how it changes the trajectory. Write a book; become a conference speaker; get an advanced degree are among the multiple choices. Of course, if you can’t write or speak, then those wouldn’t be good choices for you. UpMo is realistic about life, but it’s not going to tell you what you can or can’t do; only how actually doing it will make a difference.

Once you’ve got something you like — and can actually do — then UpMo creates a career plan so detailed it will break out the tasks into calendared increments and remind you to make that networking phone call or send a courtesy email. Ignoring it, of course, is optional. But the program is built on networking principles espoused by every career professional, so if you can keep to the schedule (which, by the way, you set) then that career timeline UpMo created for you can be achieved.

ResumeFit

You need an accountant who can handle all the financial details of your business, from cash accounting to preparing the tax returns for your growing, but still small business. So you post the job and get 200 resumes in the first 24 hours. As you work your way through the resumes, you quickly realize that it’s easy to weed out the obvious nos, but the resumes in the pile of possibles are all beginning to sound alike. Here is where ResumeFit fits in.

As Managing Partner Scott Runkle explains, “Our goals are simple near term: help a job seeker better differentiate themselves from their peers, and help the employers better understand how the job seeker may fit the role they are applying for.”

ResumeFit helps differentiate candidates by providing an assessment of their “soft skills,” those personality traits and work habits that help define “fit” and which can mean the difference between success and failure on the job. The assessment used by ResumeFit is called the WorkPlace Big Five Profile, which is based on the Five Factor Model of Personality. Job seekers take the assessment, then pay to make it available to employers.

It’s not a replacement for job-specific testing or those designed to measure how well a candidate fits within a very specific corporate culture, but for the majority of jobs and companies, a ResumeFit profile is a way to differentiate among candidates.

“For many small to midsize companies who may not even use assessments, the employer gains valuable insight into a candidate they may not otherwise gain from just the resume alone,” Runkle says.

ResumeFit offers a corporate screening service, in addition to the job seeker assessment. Role Fit Screener compares and ranks candidates against the profile of a company’s best workers.

BigDogHub

This is a site with a name to which we’re partial, even if it is misleading in that it has nothing at all to do with big dogs, literal or figurative. Instead, this is one of the new crop of profile sites, where resumes are enhanced with videos, pictures, personal data, and so forth. Ditto for employer sites, where the sample company profile is of founder John Hughes’ search and recruitment company.

The biggest differentiator here is that employers can post questions to the profiles. As the questions and answers grow, recruiters get a clearer picture of a candidate and their abilities and skills. Candidates get to do the same to employers.

Because of the nature of the site, job postings and profiles are only available to registered members.

Jobaphile$

Another “me too” job auction site, this one appealing to students, is built around the eBay model. Employers post a job; job seekers bid. Employers choose the bid they prefer based on price and the bidders qualifications.

What makes this different from the pack of other freelance and project sites in the world? Nothing that we can see. Yet we’re hesitant to dismiss it entirely, since Jobaphiles was nurtured by startup incubator Dreamit Ventures. It’s also gotten a bit of gee whiz publicity from Fox and an NBC affiliate.

The auction job genre keeps trying to gain a foothold outside the freelance world, but the concept has never taken hold. Instead, those college student jobs like tutor, nanny, research assistant, and so on gravitate to the “Gigs” section of Craigslist.

New Vault

The new Vault came out of the vault this morning, and while it bears a family resemblance to the old site, it’s got deeper content, greater breadth, easier navigation, and enough improvements big and small that collectively they make the site more useful to more job seekers at a time when they need it most.

“Today, Vault is taking a major leap forward to provide our ambitious, educated audience with a faster, more comprehensive and personalized experience,” is how Vault president and CEO Erik Sorenson announced the release of the new Vault.

Founded in 1996, Vault has ever since served professional school students, recent grads, and, in increasing numbers over the years, mid-career professionals in the fields of finance, law, accounting, and consulting. Before consumer-generated content became a buzzword, Vault tapped into employees at major firms and companies in the U.S. who provided insider views of the work environment. They also helped Vault compile its salary information, its numerous surveys, and its famed company rankings.

Now, the new Vault maintains that same approach, but has expanded its reach to 400 professions, and the industries it covers from 40 to 200. Its company profiles have grown even more broadly.

The discussion groups remain, as do the blogs that have been added in the last few years. The discussion board is where questions about the software developer culture of a company to the financial stability of another company can be asked and where users will get answers. Curiously, Vault did not jump into the Web 2.0 networking stew. That was a deliberate decision, Sorenson told us, in answer to our emailed question:

“Our main focus as a company is to gather and distribute valuable exclusive content as efficiently for our users as possible, as with My Vault, so that’s where we put our resources to start. Our discussions and message boards remain popular. However, we look forward to continual improvement of the user experience and we expect that to lead to increased social media functionality over time.”

Here’s what else he told us:

The former Vault.com homepage

Q: What were you looking to achieve with the redesign?

A: Vault’s delivery of “insider” career information has been very successful for more than 12 years. However, this is the first major overhaul of the site since it was introduced in 2001, and it was clear to us that the current site had become a barrier to continued growth. The new Vault features an entirely new approach to navigation, functionality, and branding. Our goal was to provide a much faster, more comprehensive and personalized user experience. At the same time, we are providing a better environment for our recruitment branding and advertising partners.

Q: You’ve expanded the content offerings significantly. What drove that decision? What do you expect will be the result?

A: Two reasons:

First, Vault historically has been very strong in certain core areas — law, accounting, banking, and consulting. Our goal is to build on that core by providing our users with the same quality and depth of information in a vastly expanded number of other industries and professions. We are especially focused on expanding in areas that are very active today — government, green/energy, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals.

Secondly, we are providing our users up-to-the-moment news and commentary about companies and industries. The news about certain companies — and how that news impacts recruitment — is very important to both passive and active job seekers. We feel that the combination — in-depth, insider information curated by our editors, and timely, topical news — is an exceptional benefit for our consumers.

A: Who are your users and how do they use Vault?

Vault.com has about 2.5 million monthly users, and our content is available to more than 5 million additional consumers through universities and libraries. Our users are educated, ambitious, and talented. That’s why hundreds of premier corporate recruiters like Goldman Sachs and Deloitte have partnered with us for years, and 75 new company recruitment leaders have signed on since the first of the year.

Q: Has Vault’s business model changed? What is it and how does it work today, in an environment where so many resources are available.

Vault’s business model has not changed. We have a very diversified model, which has driven our stability and success for years. Vault has three primary revenue streams: 1. Recruitment advertising; 2. Subscriptions (Note: Vault charges $9.95 a month for its premium content); and 3. Licensing of our content to institutions, like libraries and universities. Of course, we also offer career services, like resume review and career coaching.

Regarding the number of resources available today, we feel that Vault is unique in the marketplace. We have breadth and depth of insider content — gathered from nearly fifty thousand surveys each year. Importantly, it is curated by our experienced team of editors — not just raw content with no context or credibility.

Here’s an economics major from the University of Southern California who hasn’t held a job for longer than a week since graduating in 2005. On his website he admits, almost eagerly, that he went on 40-plus interviews and didn’t land a single offer in his field.

His lament is all too familiar to unsuccessful jobseekers: “I never received feedback from any employers.”

So the lanky 28-year-old began taking any job he could find. He tutored elementary school kids. Was a volunteer cross-country coach in Chicago, painting stairs, doing a little accounting, and some other jobs to pay the rent. When the cross-country job ended, he took another job in Indiana. And then another.

His resume now lists jobs as diverse as agronomist, hydrologist, cook, rodeo announcer, Border Patrol agent, and boilermaker. If you’re reading this during the fourth week of June 2009, then you’ll see 39 different jobs listed. This week he’s working as a furniture maker in Pennsylvania’s Amish country.

By now you should have concluded that Seddiqui is no mere discouraged worker. Some of you may even have seen him interviewed on CNN or local TV. His website lists more than 150 TV and print stories about him. He figures he has done more than 500 interviews.

“The objective,” Seddiqui says on his website, “is to travel all 50 states to work 50 different careers in 50 weeks. Sound Crazy??? I’m on a mission to explore various careers, environments, and cultures that America has to offer.” His quest is to sample work representative of each state, hence the corn farmer in Nebraska, logger in Oregon, and wedding chapel coordinator in Las Vegas.

Living the Map is the title of his own take on that quintessential American journey of self-discovery — the road trip. Like so many others, he was driven in part by curiosity, despair, and the freedom that comes, as Kris Kristofferson wrote, from having nothing left to lose.

“I felt like I had no opportunities,” Seddiqui told a reporter in Greensboro, N.C. “Now, they are endless. This has opened so many doors for me.” He’s gotten several book and movie offers. A book was always in the plan; a documentary may be in the works. And he’s putting together a series of videos on each of the jobs.

Lining up the jobs was hard in the beginning. He left his parent’s home in the San Francisco Bay Area last September only after lining up five week’s worth of jobs. The next few jobs were easier, thanks to the website detailing his exploits, which gave him some legitimacy. The media exposure now makes finding work easy. A racing crew in Indianapolis came looking for him.

Every job has been a paying one. For some he trades work for room and board. But, as he told Fox News, some jobs have paid him into four figures.

When his adventure is all over, which should be just before the end of August, Seddiqui says he may pick a career from among the jobs he’s held. If he does, it isn’t likely he’ll have a hard time landing a position. He’s had offers from most of the places he has worked. That rodeo announcer job, though, didn’t work out.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

If you’re a recruiting leader who subscribes, you’ll get those 10 in the postal mail. For now, here’s one: the traditional career path and all its assumptions (such as that the MBA is the ticket to success, and it’s the only path to the top) will be gone.

We’re already seeing signs that many long-held assumptions about what success looks like are now open to interpretation. Forced to get creative, companies are now reviewing the long-term effects of traditional staffing models. Buying talent from competitors fills jobs quickly, but those people don’t always stay. Fighting for a top MBA grad at the best school may give your company bragging rights, but does the expense associated with managing them (and their expectations) yield a good return on the investment?

While some managers used to be convinced that there was no talent within their own companies, many are now taking a closer look at internal candidates when filling key jobs. Career paths are now often about moving sideways, not always up. As each and every hiring decision is placed under greater scrutiny, hiring managers will become more flexible in finding ways to get work done.

What would once have been an open job that would have involved an in-person pitch from a retained search firm, a parade of candidates, a consensus-driven decision, a nasty attempt to address a counteroffer, and an expensive relocation, might now simply involve a qualified long-term employee working remotely.

Faced with the reality that their jobs might be eliminated despite good performance, employees will be more open to lateral moves and developmental assignments. And companies, desperate to fill key roles, will be willing to give them those opportunities.

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.

So when she tells the students who call her for career advice to look in Texas and expect $50,000 a year, rather than in Missouri for $100,000, she’s not surprised that some of them tell her she’s wrong. “In nursing school they are mislead to believe they are going to be making $50 an hour and are in demand everywhere,” says Picton. “We do this (recruit and place nurses) everyday. We know what the market is like.”

Now, Picton and her recruiting colleages at InHouse Assist are sharing their knowledge of healthcare careers with anyone for free.

Last Wednesday, Nurses Day and the start of National Nurses Week, InHouse Assist launched RNPathways, a career portal for nurses and nursing students. It’s a social network, with a job board, blogs, nursing and medical news, and big plans for a weekly online video show. It’s an ambitious undertaking, especially for a mid-sized medical staffing and recruitment firm like InHouse Assist.

What sets RNPathways apart from the better-known sites like NursingWorld are the recruiters who are already fielding a dozen or so career calls a day from nurses and students. In bold lettering on the front of the new site it says “we provide free, confidential career services” and gives a toll-free number.

Danny Gutknecht, CEO of InHouse Assist, says job listings are important, and online networking is crucial, but “at the end of the day, people still want a personal contact. Someone to talk to.” His recruiters have always been encouraged to build relationships with cold callers, helping them understand the job market whether they are nurses, physicians, or other healthcare professionals, including administrators and IT.

“I think a lot of people jump into our business strictly for the cash,” Gutknecht says. And though InHouse Assist is in business to make money, the company’s recruiters have always been able “to get on the phone with (job seekers) without a price tag on the candidate’s head.”

Picton, by way of example, says she has personally helped revise on the order of 2,000 resumes during her career as a recruiter. She’s spent hours on the phone talking through major life decisions with professionals who may never be placed through InHouse Assist. Others, of course, are.

“We are very good with people keeping in touch,” she says, telling us about a woman with whom she’d been in contact for two years before being placed in a California hospital. Just recently, she went to lunch with an unemployed candidate who moved to Arizona, where InHouse Assist is headquartered.

While actually speaking with a recruiter may be its most unique offering, Gutknecht expects RNPathways to grow in other ways. In the week since it launched, almost 90,000 people have signed up. They are among the half-million candidates in the InHouse Assist database invited to participate. The acceptance rate is striking, and far above the 5 percent email response rate considered excellent.

Now adds Gutknecht, “We have to make sure that there is an integrity of content out there — interesting content.”

IT jobs accounted for the next largest group, but their 11 percent of the total showed the continued weakness in the sector. The job count was off on a year-over-year basis, decreasing almost 3 points from the 14 percent of jobs in the first quarter of 2008. Even so, they were up slightly from the last quarter.

By far, the largest number of jobs on the Beyond network are essentially entry-level. The report says 59.5 percent of the jobs during the quarter specified less than one year of experience. Another 22.5 percent sought 3-5 years of experience.

That’s bad news for the 68% of network candidates whose resumes show five or more years of experience. The largest increase in candidates was the 2.1 percent jump in older candidates — those with 21 or more years experience. The biggest drop was among candidates with less than a year of experience (1.62 percent).

While the percentages suggest that companies, when they hire, are looking for cheap labor, which typically means entry-level or close to it, the survey results are specific to the Beyond.com network. Big though it is (traffic is among the top 25 employment sites), Beyond.com itself is the only all-purpose site; most of the company’s job boards are regional or industry.

I have just been at the Australasian Talent Conference in Sydney, Australia, for the past week and what was most interesting was to listen to the issues and concerns of those recruiters who have not been laid off and whose organizations are still hiring.

They are faced with challenges that many of the ERE writing team have talked about over the past year.

First of all, many candidates are reluctant to shift jobs — or even take a job when they are unemployed — unless that organization and position fit very closely with their career objectives and values. It is not about money or security. It’s about alignment with their own inner self.

Second, they are carefully looking at the interaction with the recruiter as a reflection of the organization. How I am treated and served by the recruiter is likely to be how I am treated as an employee.

And third, they are looking for work that is engaging and meaningful — not a job, but a passion.

This may sound silly or even unrealistic given the economy, but it is a real phenomena. I am not sure what is driving it. Perhaps it is the fact that Generation Y values of passion, meaningfulness, and sustainability are becoming more mainstream. Many are looking for much more than a job.

I believe this is driving a change in the skills recruiters need. A modern recruiter needs less in the way of the traditional technical skills in the mechanics of recruiting, and much more in the way of “soft” skills.

Here are five skills for recruiters. These are ones I have used before, but updated for new times. I have also inserted a simple diagram that you are free to use, modify, and add to. I am open to your opinions about what should be on this chart and your thoughts on whether this is the right set of values and skills or not.

Skill #1: Recruiters have personal values and talk about them
Do you do what you say? Do you answer their questions honestly? Are you upfront about the issues and problems they may face? Do you connect them to people who are objective about the company and the position?

Knowing yourself and what your values are about work, people, and relationships is key to being a successful recruiter. You must be authentic and convey your sincerity to candidates who will test you and probe you to see if they are really your values. Candidates can sense if your values and the organization’s are not aligned, and that disconnect will make the best candidates much harder to close.

Skill #2: Recruiters know and can explain the talent market
The competent recruiter is able to tell the hiring manager what the talent market looks like, what the supply of talent for a particular job is likely to be in her area, and how difficult it will be to find and close on candidates. This knowledge has to be data-driven and can only be collected by vast reading, lots of discussion, the intelligent use of surveys, and other data tools. They are finding web-based tools that help them mine and understand candidate trends, likes and dislikes, and they can tell you which candidates are most likely to be good employees.

Gathering and interpreting data, making correlations between competencies and success, and measuring the impact of different marketing messages is already a skill top-notch recruiters need to have.

They also know the direction the market is moving for their client or organization. Are competitors laying people off? Is the market growing, shrinking, flat? This kind of information, combined with the ability to build relationships, can make an ineffective recruiting function very powerful.

Skill #3: Recruiters build relationships
The ability to find great people and build relationships with them should be the core competence of every recruiter. This is what all great recruiters do. Recruiters within organizations need to get out of the organization and get to know people at all levels and professions who might be useful to their firm. They need to use technology to help create the initial relationship, and then they need to leverage that by using social media including Twitter, blogs, websites, and anything else that will create authentic interaction with a potential candidate.

More than half of every recruiter’s time should be used to network, build relationships, communicate, and get involved with candidates. Recruiters who can provide some career advice, listen to candidates’ concerns, and provide advice on which positions might be the best fit will be recruiters who grow and thrive in this and any economy.

Skill #4: Recruiters prove their value
Competent recruiters use metrics to put together business arguments for programs they initiate or for the systems they buy. They use facts, numbers, and results to get what they want. They have a core set of metrics that show how they add value, raise quality, improve profits, or save money.

If a CFO asks for the ROI of recruiting for a position, a really modern recruiter will have data and can help a hiring manager make a business case for that position.

Skills #5: Recruiters sell and close candidates
In the end, a recruiter is as good as the number of candidates that she can close. To do this, she needs to be good at selling candidates and hiring managers. She needs to know how to overcome objections and turn negatives into positives. She needs to offer solutions, work out compromises, and in the end make the hire happen in a way that is consistent with her values and those of the organization.

Being a modern recruiter is, in some ways, easy. It’s about treating candidates as you would like to be treated. It’s about knowing who you are and what you believe so that you can quickly know when the direction you are headed is wrong.

There’s no need for anything fancy — we know that a lot of people are recently out of a job and want to make it easier for as many recruiters as possible to find a new gig.

So let’s do this super simple. If you’re a recruiter and you’re in the job market, leave a comment with your:

Name

Email address

Former title

Former company

Location

Feel free to leave additional details as well if you’d like.

We are getting emails and calls every single day from very capable friends in the industry who are being laid off or having contracts come to an end. There’s no shame in looking for a new job in this economy.

Lastly, don’t forget to check out the ERE Job Board. There aren’t as many listings as there were before the recession, but there may be a match!

Best of luck, and let us know how we can help.

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed.

When I assess candidates, this is one of the factors I examine — finding out how the person got better. Not surprisingly, the best people have this core trait in common, and in spades. They’re always getting better. All of them improved themselves and the activities they were directly responsible for. A good portion of these people went out of their way to improve things they weren’t directly responsible for, so you need to give these people an extra star.

A much smaller group went out of their way to improve not only themselves, but also the people they worked with, whether they were responsible for them or not. These were the true leaders of the bunch.

As you assess candidates in the future, look for the degree the person got better, which will help you more easily separate the best from the merely good.

Surprisingly, very few had the exact level of skills, academics, and experience requirements listed on the job description. While they all possessed enough of the requirements to do the work required, the mix was different than the “must haves” listed, and the level of experience in absolute terms was generally much less.

Offsetting this was something far more important — a track record of consistent high performance doing comparable work, often in different industries.

Just like top people in any field, recruiters needs to consistently change and improve, just to stay even. To get better, you need to change even faster.

With that said, here are some ideas on how to get massively better. With recruiting departments being cut 30%-70% on average, getting massively better represents a survival of the fittest mentality.

In my opinion, if you don’t want to get massively better, drop out of the industry and do something you want to get massively better at.

How to Get Massively Better

1. Become someone worth knowing. Recruiters need to be able to connect with lots of top-notch people on an ongoing basis. This is the best way to get referrals of great passive candidates. If you’re worth knowing, hiring managers and candidates will seek you out. They’ll refer the best people they know to you without asking. If you’re not worth knowing, you’ll only attract the attention of those desperate for the job you’re currently representing. This is a transactional relationship. Those who are worth knowing develop long-term relationships that span years, not just a few days. Here’s an article on how to become someone worth knowing.
2. Know the job. If you don’t know the job, the best you can do is screen on skills and experience. If you know the job, you can quickly become someone worth knowing. You’ll be able to counsel and advise your candidates and hiring managers alike. You’ll be more accurate in your assessments and you’ll be able to defend qualified candidates from those hiring managers who conduct superficial or narrow interviews.
3. Build a network of all-stars. If you’re placing similar type positions (e.g., developers, tax managers, ASIC engineers, pharma sales reps), most of your placements should come from referrals. To get these referrals, you’ll need to be considered an expert in your field. Part of this is cultivating relationship (not transactions) with every top person your best employees are connected with on LinkedIn. If you’re a third-party recruiter, build these relationships with the best people on your LinkedIn list. While they won’t give you great referrals right away, after a few months of professional nurturing and knowledge sharing, you’ll have a strong network to work once the req is approved.
4. Become partners with your best managers. Recruiters are at least 50% more productive when they have a peer relationship with their hiring manager clients instead of a subservient one. This recruiter/manager partnership is developed when recruiters have a strong understanding of real job needs, present a few highly qualified candidates in a timely manner, have strong assessment skills, and can influence the shape of the job and the person ultimately hired. You know you’ve arrived when your hiring managers see everyone you recommend without having to review their resumes.
5. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. During the first few days of a job search, the best active candidates contact their close confidantes, previous mentors, and a short network of influential people. In parallel, they Google for jobs by searching on the job title, the city, and the word “jobs.” The best of this group start interviewing within the first week. Time is now a competitive advantage, so being called first and being found first is the key to hiring the best as soon as they enter the market. Becoming an early-bird is an essential skill if you’re sourcing active candidates.
6. Become an expert in consumer marketing. The messaging (ad copy) is a critical aspect of implementing an early-bird sourcing strategy. Rather than benchmark other recruiting departments, benchmark the best consumer products companies. When you do, you’ll notice that their advertising is written to appeal to their target audience with a focus on the benefits of the product rather than the technical specifications. For recruiting, this means eliminating traditional job descriptions filled with requirements (comparable to the product specifications) and start describing what the person will do, learn, and become (the benefits). While there’s much more than this consumer marketing stuff, it won’t help much if you’re posting boring job descriptions.

These are just some ideas on how to get massively better, and it really doesn’t matter if you do these exact things. What does matter is that you start getting massively better at what you’re doing today. Once you get on the path of getting better — whether it’s more training, attending meetings, leading workshops, taking on more challenging assignments, or becoming more innovative — don’t stop. Getting continuously and massively better is the real goal here.

As Jim Rohn said, “Things will get better for you when you get better.”

I was a junior at Stanford University and the president of Stanford Women in Business, a pre-professional organization of 400 undergraduate women. I helped recruiters meet talented women in our organization, and I had recently thought of an idea for a startup to improve diversity recruiting. I named the startup Anapata, the Swahili phrase meaning to find, to obtain, to achieve.

I had come to the ERE Expo 2008 to learn about the recruiting industry’s technological advances and needs firsthand from the movers and shakers of the industry.

Arriving at the conference mid-session, I started my experience at the exhibit hall. It was here that I found the world of recruiting software. In traditional online recruiting, there were the big job sites — Monster, CareerBuilder, Simply Hired, and the like — followed by the niche job sites, such as the Ladders and AfterCollege. There was no existing company that helped employers with diversity recruiting. None.

The hot new category of companies present in the exhibition hall was social media companies, LinkedIn being featured first, immediately next to the door. In addition, social media companies were highlighted all over the conference. Clint Heiden represented VisualCV in the Startup Forum panel. A whole session was dedicated to using Diigo for social webpage marking. Penelope Trunk, founder of Brazen Careerist and a keynote speaker, shared her expertise on Gen Y and emphasized the necessity of online social media as a modern recruiting tool.

Social media marketing was a hot strategy that most companies already included in their budgets; however, social media recruiting was new and brilliant. The job search was no longer a sporadic and private chore but rather a social activity and a continual process. In other words, the norm was becoming a world in which candidates considered their careers not one path to a dream destination, but a lifelong journey comprised of many interesting stopovers that is navigated by creating and maintaining relationships with recruiters, mentors, and colleagues via online social media.

I was inspired. I was so taken away by Penelope’s grasp on social media recruiting that I waited eagerly after her talk to ask for five minutes of her time and hear her thoughts on my new idea.

The idea was to use social media to transform diversity recruiting. I would provide group management tools and professional networks for diversity organizations across the country. The majority of diversity organizations at colleges and graduate schools do not have the budget or means to create a strong website. This lack of online presence makes it unnecessarily difficult, if not impossible, for outside entities — similar groups at other schools, employers, recruiters, and non-profits — to find or collaborate with these groups. Anapata would provide a place for these groups to maintain their web presence and their national network in one place, and in doing so, groups would help their members discover more employers, mentors, and diversity-focused resources towards achieving their career goals.

Student organizations are crucial to recruiting. Active participants in these organizations are those students who take the self-initiative to learn and engage in a particular subject (be it finance, clean energy, or engineering). These students are often the visionaries in their field. And, as a bonus, their participation in these organizations teaches them the extra ingredients for success — teamwork, leadership, follow-through, and dedication. There are a few companies that focus on helping employers reach student groups — a popular one being AfterCollege, a company that provides targeted job boards for student group websites. Direct student group recruiting, building a long-term relationship with group members and hiring the right students, however, would be Anapata’s unique platform.

It was in the conference center bar with Penelope (literally on drink napkins) that the business plan for Anapata became clear. I had originally thought of Anapata as a Google-like tool for recruiters to easily search resumes and meet diverse students for particular job opportunities. However, my means and market were not well defined. Five minutes turned into two hours, and by the time Penelope left the bar, I had a smart executable business plan. Penelope encouraged the idea of using social media, namely student group management and networking, as my primary means for diversity recruiting. We also discussed a number of initial markets and decided to focus on the legal profession. Minorities are underrepresented in law more than in any other line of work in the country. What’s more, the use of web-based recruiting and online networks in legal industry is abysmal. I was ready to revolutionize. Meeting Penelope at the ERE Expo was one of the best things to happen to Anapata.

A year later, Anapata is now an online diversity recruiting platform helping employers find talented and diverse law students at law schools across the United States. Anapata provides professional diversity networks, targeted job opportunities, and sophisticated online tools (such as mentor matching and web-based job interviews) to help diverse law students find the right employment. In turn, Anapata has not only created a place for employers to meet diverse talent from across the nation, but has also designed sophisticated recruiting tools to help employers find diverse candidates based on geographic interests, work preferences, group affiliations, academic performance, and extracurricular activities.

Attending the ERE Expo was an incredible experience for me. I heard recruiters’ discussions on student outreach and diversity firsthand, learned about the new methods and resources for successful recruiting, and gained a “pick up the phone” advisor — Penelope — who made clear to me that she is the type of advisor who will always “pick up the phone.” In the coming months, I’m excited to expand Anapata not only into a larger office space but also as a service to diversity networks in other industries. I’m so grateful for the support of ERE and Penelope, and I continue learning from them both through this exhilarating journey and recruiting revolution.

Executives were asked, “How long, in months, can a top manager remain unemployed before it hurts his or her career?” The mean response was nine months, with a significant number saying 10 to 12 months.

Recruiters who leave (or get new jobs within) the profession have more to offer than most prospective employers probably realize. For that matter, they have more to offer their own companies than their own employers probably realize — for example, during tough times, a lot of recruiters have research skills that could be put to use in the sales department.

Perhaps we can get a reasons-you-should-hire-a-recruiter list going (post in the comments section).

Dear Potential Employer:

Please accept this letter of recommendation for the journalist applying for your job opening. I know this is unorthodox — a generic reference letter. But permit me to explain. Thousands of men and women who made journalism their vocation have lost their jobs. For many, telling a community’s stories through words and images is the only career they’ve known.

They didn’t leave their jobs; their jobs left them. Many are still shell-shocked, wondering if potential employers in other fields will place any value on the things they do best.

That’s why I write this letter. I don’t pretend to know the individual who’s applying to you, and certainly, every journalist is unique. But as someone who has spent decades hiring and firing, coaching and mentoring journalists, I know a bit about their skills and values and what they could mean to your organization.

I also know that journalists may not be comfortable appearing to brag about what they do well; self-esteem can get downsized pretty easily these days.

So permit me to make their case to you. Here are 10 reasons you should hire a journalist.