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A new “matching” site, a new social media/employee-referral site, and the negatives of stripping.

Yes, it’s our regular roundup of recruiting and HR happenings, below.

Social Referrals keep reading…

The company that powers campus recruiting services, including NACElink, is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly attempting to hack into the computer systems of two competitors.

The investigation doesn’t involve NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Nor is there any evidence that NACElink was ever hacked or that any attempt was made to illegally access the system. However, Marilyn Mackes, executive director of the nonprofit association, says the organization is monitoring the situation and has been sending periodic updates to its member schools and employers.

“Is NACE going to be looking out for the interests of its members,” Mackes said rhetorically. “Of course it is.”

At this point, she says, it is “kind of premature” for the organization to make any decisions about the hosting of its career services network.  keep reading…

When U.S. college students and recent grads go looking for a job, they want quick answers, trustworthy insights, and evidence the employers know how to use the various social media channels to add value to their search.

So says PotentialPark, a Swedish recruitment market research firm. Its annual survey (U.S. results were not posted as of this writing) of 3,552 U.S. college students and recent grads found young job seekers are comfortable with social media and expect that you will be too. While 86 percent of them make use of company career sites, more than half (56 percent) expect to find a company on Facebook, and 69 percent expect you to be on LinkedIn.

What PotentialPark found when it audited the corporate career sites of almost 500 U.S. firms was that only 57 percent link to their Facebook page; 79 percent connect to LinkedIn or some other professional network. The career site itself, says PotentialPark, “rarely offers any interaction.” keep reading…

With Google instead taking the lead, for the first year since 2008 Disney was not listed as the overall first-choice employer. Disney did rank in fifth place overall in our study of where high school and college scholars most prefer to work in the future.

That’s what we found at the NSHSS, an international honor society recognizing outstanding academic excellence in high school and college scholars globally — 750,000 scholars representing over 160 countries. The full list is at the bottom of this article.

Members were asked to rank their preferred companies to work for and selected from a list of more than 200 companies.  The list of companies was created by combining the 2012 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, selected companies from Fortune’s Global 500, and popular write-in choices from prior surveys.  Respondents were given the opportunity to select up to three companies and were also allowed to write in choices. Results have are available charted by overall ranking, gender rankings, high school/post-high school rankings, and diverse/non-diverse rankings.

The most popular choices continue to reflect interests in technology and health fields, with Google moving to first place in 2012 as the most preferred employer. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, local hospital and health providers, and the Mayo Clinic all placed in the top 10 most preferred. Teach for America was a popular choice, ranking 16^th.  Many government agencies place highly as well. The FBI ranked #6 and the CIA closely followed at #8. The Air Force ranked #15, the Navy ranked #26 (up from # 31 in 2011), the Army ranked #28, and, the Marines ranked # 64.

Respondents were also asked about the importance of certain workplace factors when choosing an employer, with options separated into four categories.  Students ranked responses based on what they most want in an employer, ranked below. The factors ranking as most important in each area included fair treatment, strong benefits, opportunities to enhance career skills, and the ability to create a harmonious work/life balance.

What They Want, Ranked keep reading…

With final exams underway at colleges across the U.S., it’s only a matter of weeks before the first of millions of young Millennials will be out of school for the summer. Will they have jobs?

The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.”

The National Association of Colleges and Employers says employers expect to hire more new grads this year than last, and the hiring picture has even improved since early last fall. The organization’s spring survey update found employers are planning to increase their grad hiring by 10.2 percent over last year. In the fall survey, the increase was 9.5 percent.

CareerBuilder reports that 54 percent of the companies it surveyed plan to hire from this year’s graduating class. That represents a 17 percent improvement over last year’s results.

Students looking for internships should also have an easier time. Another NACE survey found intern hiring plans are up 8.5 percent over last year. Not surprisingly, the best salaries will go to students in engineering and computer science programs. They’ll earn, on average, $20.79 and $19.10 respectively, says NACE. keep reading…

I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and to sell them on the company and the job. Taken together, this identification, assessment and selling feature make referrals superior to any other source.

If your corporation is not getting close to 50% of your hires from employee referrals, I have gathered 10 compelling numbers that should change your perspective. keep reading…

We end this week with a collection of odds and ends and surveys from our overflowing inbox.

Our first item is especially worth reading for those of you with teenagers. (If your offspring is graduating from college this spring, skim this, but don’t miss the next item.)

Since you’re a recruiter, you already know that jobs for millennials, let alone seasonal work for 16-19 year-olds, is tough to come by. That’s not likely to change, says Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“While teen employment is likely to see further improvement this summer, job gains will probably once again fall short of pre-recession figures,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of the global outplacement firm. Last year about 1.1 million teens got jobs. More will find jobs this summer, but not a lot more. keep reading…

Finally, Friday!

If your week was as long as ours, you’ll appreciate that today’s roundup isn’t going to take too much of anything seriously. We had enough of that serious stuff when we had to write out four-figure checks to the U.S. Treasury. So we’ll put the business stuff after we introduce you to Ronald Gulick.

He claims to be “a normal accounting and finance recruiter by day.” We’re going to leave that up to you to judge, after you check out Ron’s video. Spend even a few minutes with it, and you’ll appreciate why he says, “My wife always tells my friends that if they saw me at work, they would not recognize me.”

In what has to be the understatement of the week, Ron tells us, “I am a non-traditional thinker. I love new ideas. I don’t like the norm.”

“NO other recruiter has my skills (in rapping AND recruiting combined),” Ron tells us in an email, “and this is a huge differentiator between me and the competition.  Many of my clients and candidates love my videos ”

Why do them?, we wondered. “Attention, plain and simple,” Ron says, being as honest and direct as we wish the world’s politicians would be at least some of the time.

Without further introduction (Ron asked us not to involve his company in this, but, shoot, you guys are recruiters; if you can’t find Ron you might rethink that whole career path thing), Here’sssssss Ronnie: keep reading…

On Wednesday one of the newest startups to focus on internships will host one of the largest, if not the biggest, online workshops to be held on Google+.

In a sign of maturity for the social network Google launched last summer, as well as for InternMatch, a “names” group of companies have signed on to host one-hour segments for college students hoping to land an internship.

For instance, hiring managers from Nestle Purina will discuss the ins and outs of building connections and using social media in searching and landing internships. Google’s engineering recruiting lead, Jeff Moore, will do a segment on “Hacking the Engineering Internship Application,” which, presumably, won’t involve any actual hacking, but advice on how to get through the process and stand out from the crowd.

After seven hours of sessions, InternMatch will throw open the doors, so to speak, for 17 hours of online, interactive help for students. The 24-hour marathon, which begins Wednesday at 9:50 a.m. Pacific time, will end Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific.

The event makes use of Hangouts, the video chat and conferencing service that is part of Google+. Hangouts is interactive for up to 10 participants, but it has a broadcast feature that’s essentially a video stream for hundreds or thousands of viewers. The seven segments will be recorded for later viewing. keep reading…

A quick update on PwC, which we mentioned last spring had revived the Disney component of its intern program. Now it’s planning a week-long “customizable personal brand experience” on its campus website, February 6-10.

Students can go to the site each day and take an assessment and use other tools to get feedback on their careers. Monday, they’ll decide based on their strengths what path’s best for them. Tuesday it’ll focus more on their passions. Wednesday, the tool will be about their values, and what volunteer opportunities fit for them. Thursday is a day for their online reputation, and Friday they’ll create a “brand plan” — for themselves.

PwC recruits on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The New Year is an opportune time to “raise the bar” by doing something strategic in talent management. In many corporations, new plans and budgets take effect at the first of the year, so the holiday period preceding the New Year is an ideal time to review the potential strategic actions to put in front of your team. Unfortunately, many talent management leaders are risk adverse, and although they constantly talk about the need to “be more strategic” they all-too-frequently find excuses that indefinitely postpone those dramatic and strategic actions.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider. keep reading…

College hiring is about to ramp up again — and the very best college recruiting organizations would argue it ramped up several months back — so now is an opportune time to conduct an ROI analysis to determine when and where you should hire college grads instead of experienced hires. Understanding the unique competencies and skills that college students bring to a business is important not just in determining the number needed, but where to place them.

As a college professor and someone that advises firms on the design of college recruiting programs, I have come up with a long list of the advantages of hiring recent graduates. keep reading…

Monster is adding some new features to its BeKnown social network, enabling companies to post jobs and creating some 3,500 college pages.

Built on the Facebook platform, BeKnown is a jobs-oriented network that allows users to build career profiles and connections separate from those on Facebook itself. By adding jobs to corporate sites and including colleges, Monster is encouraging users to conduct their job hunting within BeKnown. keep reading…

Intel is working on a flurry of online recruiting activity, with the biggest being a new technology for its recruiters to manage college recruits, a new mobile application for all job candidates, as well as changes to its Facebook pages.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job. keep reading…

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

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

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

Citigroup has turned parts of its college recruiting site into an iPhone application for students, with added features only for the smart phone users — a project handled in house in 27 days.

The “Chief Technology Office” at Citi wanted to deliver the application before the mid-September recruiting season began. The team — mostly recent grads – worked with recruiters on the concept, prototype, and final product to get it done in less than a month.

Using the app, students at select schools see a list of nearby Citi recruiting events (there are 156 upcoming events at 72 locations); get a Twitter feed from Citi; get directions to events; view “day in the life” videos, and more. Right now, it covers North America, but will later include other events in other parts of the world. Citi’s also working on making the application available on other smart phones.

Citigroup is cutting costs and limiting hiring, but a spokeswoman says the firm has “added talent in businesses and regions that are targeted for growth.”

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

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

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

College recruiting award-winner Ernst & Young is, like PwC, showing signs of better times.

It’s hiring about 9,000 students, including 5,200 from U.S. campuses, in the 2012 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2011. Those pre-recession levels cover the U.S., Canada, Israel, Mexico, and Central and South America. It’ll also use 3,900 interns, and double MBA hiring.

In the U.S., it expects to hire 3,000 grads for full-time jobs, and 2,200 interns.

The 141,000-person firm also:

• has a new internship program where interns spend four of the weeks of their internships abroad.
• is working with CampusLIVE. Later this month it will launch an ”Ernst & Young Challenge” on the site.
• is launching an new ad campaign this fall, using the tagline “See More” to encourage people to learn more about internships and jobs at Ernst & Young. Ads will run in school newspapers, wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.

Welcome to Labor Day and the last day of summer.

Yes, I know. Astronomically, summer won’t end for another 18 days. But, I’m talking symbolically, not scientifically. And in that context, the U.S. Labor Day marks a transition from summer white to fall brown. It’s when kids go back to school, and the pace of the office quickens as workers return from vacation.

Once a day of parades and political speeches in praise of American workers, which still occur here and there across the country, Labor Day is mostly now a time to head for the beach or the park, fire up the barbecue, and kick back.

In the spirit of years past, however, I present you some inspirational words on life and work in the 21st century, from two of the most widely seen commencement addresses ever delivered.

First, is the advice given to the graduating class of 2010 at Auburn University by  Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO and now, its CEO: keep reading…

University recruiting, like any relationship-management sourcing strategy, often requires a balanced mix of long-term investments coupled with numerous annual campus visits in order to develop a successful brand and become an employer of choice. Many organizations structure those “long-term investments” in annual or capital campaign monetary contributions, often to career centers or related offices, which have welcomed the donations as their own funding challenges have worsened. But while such contributions may have led to a significant ROI in the past, that may not be the same case in the future.

The reason is simple: students now turn more often to faculty members for early-career guidance and advice on which employers to start out with. In a way, this might make university recruiting relationship management easier: just shift the primary focus to the faculty. For the time being, until the economy really rebounds, this would be an effective sourcing model. But when the economy rebounds, nearly a majority of tenured faculty at many top-tier universities will at least be eligible for early retirement, and the new relationships forged in those few years will take time to rebuild with new replacements. keep reading…