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When Dr. John Sullivan said last week that employers have lost control of their brand, he likely wasn’t thinking of Sidewiki. Why should he? When the article was published Monday Sidewiki was not even three weeks old; Google launched it on Sept. 23rd.

But Sidewiki’s potential for deconstructing a brand is enormous. Unlike all the networking sites, Twitter posts, and job board forums where the disaffected go to vent their anger, Sidewiki makes it possible to post these comments directly to your site.

Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.

If Sidewiki were to catch on and gain even a percentage of the users that Twitter has, the impact is easy enough to see.

Says Mark Hornung, senior vice president, strategy, at Bernard Hodes, “What that means for corporate employment sites is that they need to be monitored much more aggressively.” keep reading…

Two apps to tell you about today. One will get your job openings from your company website to your Facebook page in a snap and the other will get your jobs before on-the-go candidates.

The Facebook app comes from LinkUp, one of the second-tier job search engines. It’s owned by JobDig, which operates a traditional pay-to-post job board and an inexpensive on-demand ATS called JobDig Tracker.

If your company career site is one of the 22,000 indexed by LinkUp, then installing “Current Jobs at Our Company” will automatically update your company’s job listings on Facebook every day. The first five jobs are free. Any more than that and you’ll have to pay $39 a month.

In either case, LinkUp must be indexing your career site. Check LinkUp to see if that’s happening and if you don’t find them there, then you have to contact the company.

As much of a time saver as this app can be, if you don’t work your Facebook presence then it really won’t make a difference. Simply posting jobs to a friendless Facebook site is a waste. keep reading…

Still waiting on Adidas. Meanwhile, Fidelity has gone live with a new careers site, which has been many months in the making. It’s most proud of the “Meet Our People” section of videos; there’s a link to that part at the bottom middle of the site. Let me know what you think of it. keep reading…

Adidas will be going live at the end of August with a corporate careers site it’s convinced will be an “industry disruptor.”

It took a year and a half for adidas to put its new site together, with help from Carat (which is now Freestyle Interactive). Steve Fogarty, adidas North America Recruiting Captain, was the project leader. Other major stakeholders included adidas Group Global Head of Recruiting Steve Bonomo; Reebok Recruiting Manager Tara Gallone; and TaylorMade Recruiting Manager Kate Hinshaw.

Fogarty, who with Bonomo is speaking at ERE’s conference coming up in Florida, is underwhelmed by what he sees in corporate careers sites. (He does like, however, the U.S. Army’s recruiting work — “they put genuises behind it, Fogarty says” –  helped by a huge budget and support from McCann Erickson. He’s also fond of Microsoft’s Hey Genius campaign, and what Cirque does with its high-profile entertainment jobs.)

Anyhow, Fogarty found that most companies either brand themselves well, but make it hard to find what you want on their career sites, or they do the flip side of that: offer a truckload of information but the brand is lost. keep reading…

It’s not world peace, but Microsoft has managed to unite 97 countries in a single mission: Recruiting the top talent in the world.

You’d think that wouldn’t be so hard, but when you start with (give or take) 150 different career sites  and dozens of tracking systems and business units that built their own microsites because they felt their story wasn’t being told, well, it’s no surprise that for Margie Medd and Liz Friedman it sometimes felt as if they might never be done. (See our earlier story about this project, “Microsoft is Building An Ambitious, New Global Recruiting Site.”)

But Monday Microsoft unveiled its new career site that for the first time since the company went global makes it possible for someone in Moscow, Idaho to search for a job in Moscow, Russia, Redmond, Washington, Mumbai, and London all at the same time. keep reading…

A positive candidate experience translates directly into more referrals, more hires, and better quality candidates. The experience most candidates have with an organization usually starts in one of two ways: they either receive a call from a recruiter or a friend who tells them about the organization, or they go to the career site for information and to look for open positions. keep reading…

Years ago, John Sullivan was doing some consulting work for W.L. Gore, the makers of Gore-Tex. “You guys are the best story never told,” he said to them.

Not any more. Gore will be telling scientists, engineers, and other prospective employees its story by launching a new global branding campaign from Arizona to China with a modest little theme: Join Gore & Change Your Life. keep reading…

The manager of the dot-JOBS domain is weighing the possibility of opening up the registry to allow regional and occupational names.

“What would you do with it if you had nursing.Jobs,” wonders Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media. He says he has made no decision. But his question is not idle musing. Embrescia tells us he’s been doing a sort of informal survey of opinion as he talks to corporate recruiters and others.

“I’m just talking to people in a very low, quiet way. The way I’m talking to you. Asking them what they think,” he says.

Internet addresses could be issued for regions — say California.jobs or, to use Embrescia’s example, Malibu.jobs. Or, he says, “We could give anyone who has a business plan one for their zip code.”

More likely is that the addresses would go to job boards, social networks, or other organizations, he says. keep reading…

Entertainment giant Bertelsmann was named the No. 1 corporate career site in the U.S. and Europe, according to web recruitment research and communications firm Potentialpark.

The company released its top 30 corporate career site lists today for Asia, Europe, U.S. and elsewhere. As might be expected for a list developed by surveying business and tech students and grads, many of the top sites are banks, investment firms, tech, and pharmaceutical companies. Microsoft, which is in the midst of a major overhaul of its career sites worldwide, ranked 5th in the U.S. and was among the top 30 in Asia.

Bertelsmann missed the top spot in its home country of Germany. There Bayer, the pharmaceutical firm, topped the list. (Bertelsmann was 20th.)

Making the U.S. list depends on how Potentialpark analyzed the 102 corporate career sites it selected against criteria established by polling 2,159 students and graduates about “how they behave and what they expect when searching for careers online.”

Not surprisingly, Potentialpark’s survey found that 92 percent of the students and grads go online to research potential employers and career opportunities; 86 percent use company career sites.

Julian Ziesing, head of research at Potentialpark, says, “If you want to find all career opportunities that a company offers, you have to go to their own career website. Events, campaigns, contacts, assessments, career opportunities and application form — the best chance to find everything is to go straight to the source.”

None of the sites on any of the lists made the nominees’ list for a Webby. Webbies claim to be the “leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.” Winning a Webby is an honor. Out of 10,000 nominations, awards are given in about 100 categories. They are selected by votes from the 550 members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the awards. There’s also a People’s Voice category which is just what it sounds like. This year’s winners will be announced May 5th.

Two of Potentialpark’s top 30 also won top honors in ERE’s 2009 recruiting awards. Both Ernst & Young and Microsoft won in two separate categories each.

There’s also a User’s Choice Awards run by Weddle’s. It’s a popularity contest that is more entertaining than instructive. The brand names invariably make the top 30, and because it imposes no limits on voting, the poll is susceptible to ballot stuffing, as the occasional placement among the top 30 by relatively low traffic job boards suggests.

Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its recruitment marketing that is matched only by an equally ambitious overhaul of its recruitment technology.

When the decision was made a couple of years ago to update its talent acquisition system by tying together all the company’s far flung offices with an SAP system, Microsoft decided it was a good time to rework its global careers face. As happens with companies that grow from a bright idea to a 100,000 worker worldwide enterprise in barely 30 years, Microsoft’s recruitment efforts had sprouted dozens of online iterations for different countries, different regions, and even for different business units.

Bewildered candidates looking for opportunities around the world had to visit multiple sites since there was no central jobs listing. Behind those career sites were different tracking systems, making it challenging for Microsoft to manage promising candidates.

Even in the U.S., where centralized recruiting has been the rule, Microsoft’s online recruiting presence has become so bloated that candidates can become lost in the navigational maze. The sheer breadth and depth of the content can become an obstacle itself, causing information overload that could keep job seekers from getting to what they wanted to know.

In the words of the woman whose job it is to bring order, and consistency, and, yes, excitement to Microsoft’s global recruiting presence, “We wanted a consistent global message for Microsoft; consistent storytelling and improved transactional capabilities.”

Margie Medd, Microsoft’s director of employment branding, says the work to update the software company’s online recruiting began about two years ago, when the company decided to invest in a new talent acquisition system. It made no sense, she explains, to roll out a global ATS, “but then have all these separate sites.”

Thus was born the recruitment marketing initiative that Medd leads. Her team includes recruiters, recruitment marketers, web developers, a validation group, and representatives from some of the countries where Microsoft has a recruiting presence. Not all of them work on the project fulltime (about 10 do that), but all of them have a part in developing the new Microsoft global careers site. keep reading…

Congrats to my buds at Yahoo for winning ERE’s prestigious 2009 award for best corporate careers website last week. This accomplishment is particularly impressive in light of the type of questions they had to answer as part of the evaluation process. “How has the site has paid off or contributed to improved profits, better employees, and other quantifiable outcomes?” This was no beauty contest; it was about hardcore metrics and making a measurable difference in the greater business strategy.

Since I wasn’t part of the judging process (maybe next year), I don’t have their answers, but as a researcher, I do have lots of questions and so should you. Your company’s career website is the hub for all applicant traffic and you should be asking yourselves the hard questions about how it’s measuring up. keep reading…

Worktank has won a Web Marketing Association award for the “changing face of Microsoft” website.

Redmond’s recruiting is on a roll. It’s a finalist for the diversity, technology, and department of the year categories in the ERE awards to be announced in San Diego. Speaking of “America’s Finest City,” as they like to call it down there, Microsoft’s Kelly Chapman will be speaking at 1:30 on April 1 about “Managing Diversity Recruiting on a Dime.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers has launched a career toolkit with videos for college students and downloadable worksheets to help students develop career plans.

The toolkit resides at the company’s pwc.tv site (beware of mildly irritating and repetitive music). PricewaterhouseCoopers partnered with Lindsey Pollak, a career development specialist, to create the site. Pollak is also doing a career blog for students to ask career questions on the site.

The initiative began as a workshop PwC put on at Ohio State University and at University of Texas-Austin. It filmed the workshops and put the videos online. All told, it took about four to five months from concept development to getting the toolkit online.

PwC will hire about 3,000 college grads this year.

Claire Prager of the Cheesecake Factory describes the making of this $30,000, four-minute video developed and produced in two months last year as “pretty painless” — which is not how I’d describe trying to finish off its entire dinner-size Thai Chicken Pasta.

Job seekers are viewing the video at a rate of about 40,000 per year. Their eyes are peeled for an average of 3:48 minutes. (The average for similar videos is 2:33.)

Prager, senior manager, talent selection, was responsible for the overall execution of the video, a task she says MadDash’s good work made easier. The video, aimed particularly at the passive job seeker, was posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, AHRE.org, and HCareers. The Cheesecake Factory shows it again during new-hire orientation (which, we report with jealousy, involves a meal at the Cheesecake Factory), as well as at college career fairs and other job fairs, and on the company’s careers site.

The Cheesecake Factory selected an Area Director, Senior Vice President of Kitchen Operations, Executive Kitchen Manager, and General Manager to play key roles in telling the story. While developing the video, it selected the following elements to include:

1. Who is The Cheesecake Factory?
2. Quality
3. Our People and Our Culture
4. Technology and Innovation.

The uber-consistent restaurant chain also owns the Grand Lux Cafe and now RockSugar.

If you think it’s hard to convey to candidates how they might feel after a stressful day as a nurse, law enforcement officer, or air traffic controller, imagine trying to describe what it’s like to fly an F-22A Raptor or carry an M-16 rifle in the Iraqi desert. The U.S. military (whose recruiting tactics are explored in more depth in the March Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) uses a blend of artificial intelligence and human intelligence to provide prospects with realistic combat previews, so they can make informed choices.

On the U.S. Army Web site, prospects can access podcasts, participate in discussion boards, chat online with active duty soldiers and recruiters, and watch videos which depict various Army careers and combat training. But the Army also gives candidates access to free war games, so they can virtually experience combat situations and assess their skills. The games resonate with millennial prospects, who average 17 to 24 years of age, and who are quite comfortable having a joystick in one hand and a mouse in the other.

“We use photos, tell stories, and recruits hear soldiers talk about combat in experience centers set-up all across the country,” says Lt. Col. John E. (Ed) Box, battalion commander, Chicago Recruiting Battalion, U.S. Army Recruiting Command. “In the experience centers, soldiers returning from combat relay their personal stories to recruits. We also provide virtual combat experience through the America’s Army website, which features free war game downloads for computers and the Xbox 360.”

The use of simulated training environments has grown in a number of industries for good reason; virtual training has proven to be effective and trainees are free to make mistakes, without creating dire consequences. Airline pilots have trained in-flight simulators for years and surgeons practice new medical procedures through a combination of hands-on and simulated experience. The military is highly advanced in its use of simulated training; applying the technology to the recruiting and screening process is a logical way to immerse candidates into stressful situations, so they can experience the environment and the emotions it evokes.

In the “See What It’s Like” section of the U.S. Air Force Web site, candidates can test their ability to refuel jets at 22,000 feet or fly with the Thunderbirds. The interactive tools comprise just a small portion of the tactics employed by military recruiters to achieve the increasing annual goals for new signees. Despite the obstacles of lengthy deployments and ongoing war, recruiters from the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps are achieving their annual recruiting mission by bonding with prospects, using carefully crafted messages and being brutally honest about military life.

What’s wrong at IBM? Not too much. The company hired 47,000 employees and contractors in 2007, for operations spanning 170 countries. But IBM’s global recruiting director, Alex Cocq, (featured in-depth in the February issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), says there is still room for improvement at Big Blue; most notably Cocq wanted to attain increased recruiting efficiencies and a decreased cost-of-hire.

keep reading…

Gerry Crispin of CareerXRoads claims that about 55% of corporate careers websites cannot answer the question, “Why come here?”

That means most candidates are lost as soon as they stumble on one of these sites, Crispin told a pre-conference workshop at ERE Expo on Tuesday.

keep reading…

The 2010 Census recruiting campaign launched this week with a new website and recruiting videos that target a diverse workforce, along with a toll-free jobs line (866-861-2010) that provides information to interested applicants in English and Spanish. Callers are automatically routed to the appropriate local office, where they speak with a recruiter. One hundred fifty offices are already open to take applicant calls and a personal, localized touch is part of the recruiting strategy — so the bureau chose not to have applicants apply online.

The U.S. Census Bureau recruited 3.7 million applicants and hired 1 million temporary census-takers for the 2000 Census, which was the largest peacetime recruitment of American workers in history; the goal for the 2010 Census is 3.8 million applicants. The 2010 hires (explored in more detail in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) are likely to be a little older and more ethnically diverse than the last, because the population demographics have shifted since 2000 and the bureau maintains a goal of hiring contingent workers that reflect the local community.

Based upon data compiled by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these will be the major demographic shifts from 2000 to 2010 that the bureau must address through its diversity hiring initiatives:

• Between 2000 and 2010 the number of people who are between the ages of 45 and 64 will increase nearly 30%.
• The Hispanic population will grow 34% from 35.6 million to 47.8 million.
• The African-American and Asian populations will outpace the growth of whites.

Census Bureau leaders say there’s no magic bullet for meeting the recruiting numbers and the diversity goals, so recruiters from local census offices will be out in force at churches, community centers, and schools. But given the aging population, the Bureau has also taken steps to tap pools of retirees and a diverse applicant base.

“I requested permission to hire retirees (federal government annuitants) and that rule was changed beginning this calendar year,” says Tyra Dent Smith, chief of the human resources division for The U.S. Census Bureau. “The annuitants will be able to work without any offset to their salaries.”

In addition, Dent Smith applied for other waivers that will allow federal employees to moonlight if they wish to work as part-time census-takers. People receiving federal assistance will also be allowed to work without benefit offsets.

In preparation for the main event, the bureau runs a series of dress rehearsals and test censuses.

Yahoo asks itself four questions when sourcing candidates of different generations.

• Where are they?
• How do they want to receive information?
• What makes them respond and engage?
• What’s the same and what’s different about the generations?

Carol Mahoney, Yahoo’s VP of talent acquisition, talked about the questions today at an HCI event. For Gen-Xers, Yahoo is focusing more on career sites as well as recruiting events. For younger applicants, the emphasis is on social networking (Twitter is big among Yahoo hiring managers) and a long courting process. “They do not want to just drop in and get their info and go,” she says, of millennials. They want to be courted. It’s more than information. It’s a relationship.”

This courting includes friends and family. In India, Yahoo laid off what Mahoney says was a very small number of people, and many were placed in other roles. But it was “such a huge deal” in India that Yahoo had to explain the layoff to families of wary job candidates.

With generational differences in mind, Yahoo has redone its career site. On the upper left, for example, the quick job search is aimed at Gen X-ers who don’t want to beat around the social-networking bush. In contrast with most career sites, which could put a wild boar to sleep — Yahoo has done it right, actually using the career home page to excite people about working at the company. (Its older versions, Mahoney, who arrived at Yahoo five years ago says, were “appalling.”) You leave the site with the impression that a Yahoo job involves doing something important, something that has an effect on people.

There’s more on generational recruiting from this webinar:

Everyone in recruiting and employment branding strives to demonstrate to potential candidates the excitement that can be found within their organization. Most rely almost exclusively on “words” in paid advertising, brochures, and websites, but words are “so last year.”

Each month, fewer and fewer people read newspapers and books, and more of us get our information from moving media, including online videos, film, and TV. Why? Because videos require little effort to watch but still provide a powerful message. Written “words” are weak tools for quickly transmitting the energy and the passion that your employees have for their work. A better alternative is pictures, but they too can be limiting.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…then a video must be priceless. Recruiting videos can excite by allowing potential recruits to better “see, feel, and hear” the passion and the excitement at your organization. Videos allow an outsider to “meet” your employees, to see your technology, and even to tour your facilities.

However, for some reason, despite their incredible power, videos are the most underutilized powerful electronic recruiting tool.

Let’s face it, most traditional recruiting tools are waning in power. Brochures are time-consuming to develop, hard to distribute, expensive, and seldom read. Still pictures and narratives posted on corporate websites have value but they seldom stimulate or excite the visitor.

keep reading…