Check out the agenda for the upcoming ERE Expo 2009 Fall in September!
Tag: corporatecareerswebsite
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.
Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.
Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.
Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.
To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:
Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.
Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.
An automated e-mail response, which roughly translates to: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” is the only communication most applicants receive after they’ve spent 15 to 30 minutes online filling out applications, questionnaires, and experiencing the frustration of pasting their resumes into boxes, (only to find the plain text version looks like it’s been encoded for secret transmission by the CIA).
The fact that most companies now acknowledge applicants by sending a generic e-mail is actually a significant improvement, according to the CareerXroads 2008 Mystery Job Seeker Survey, because some companies still don’t reply to applicants at all.
For months (and years) I’ve wondered what the number of monthly searches was for job-related keywords on Google. I always knew it was a big number, but I was shocked to see it was over 100 million searches just in June — with June being the “dog days” of recruiting and job searching. The average month is more around 124 million searches.
Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.
Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:
TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs - 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs - 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs - 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs - 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs - 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs - 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs - 301,000 searches
TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs - 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs - 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs - 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago - 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs - 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs - 550,000
–In Illinois, a home healthcare company settles a case regarding an employee allegedly not hired for being black.
–Meanwhile, Disney is sued for allegedly not hiring someone who didn’t have the “Disney look.”
–Who says the newspaper is dead? Well, I do, often. But Brian Hauswirth of the Missouri Department of Corrections tells me the paper’s the main reason why his career fair just surpassed all expectations. “When we ask people, ‘where did you hear about the career fair?’ the no. 1 reason is the newspaper,” he says. About 165 people attended the fair, he says, and about 103 applied for Corrections Officer 1 positions at a new prison. They still need to pass background checks, but Hauswirth says the results are “very promising.” Those with military experience make up about a quarter of corrections officers.
–Cellular South has completed a redesign of its careers site. It’s no EY site, but the company does use video to try to get applicants who fit its culture: fast-paced, challenging, competitive. It had Bernard Hodes (profile; site) help out (after realizing that consumer marketing and employment branding are cousins, not siblings, so Cell South can’t just use its in-house marketing folks), but still uses Sonic (profile; site) to track applicants.
Barb Miller, VP of human resources for the 1,000-employee company, one of the largest privately held wireless companies in the U.S., says the employees you see on the site are indeed employees, not actors, though Hodes and Miller’s team did discuss the idea of using actors (some Cellular South employees underperformed on camera, resulting in an SVP filling in at the end). Cellular South will measure results of the site through the “capture rate” (who leaves the site?); quality of hire (performance reviews, retention); traffic; and productivity (how many customers they can get with a certain number of employees). I asked Miller about the company’s snooze-inducing job descriptions. “You hit on something good,” she says. “That will be the next phase of what we do.”
In this final installment of the four-part series, I tackle a critical issue: making content on your careers site seem genuine. When candidates are asked about careers sites and their shortcomings, one of the biggest issues identified is the lack of candor nearly every site presents. Most candidates know that it would be nearly impossible for an organization to adequately describe every aspect of what it would be like to work for the company, but they also know that not every firm can be a recognized leader. They are looking for more than marketing points; they are looking for facts and honesty. In addition to tackling this issue, we will finish off the feature categories and briefly cover metrics for assessing your efforts.
Numerous studies have confirmed that nearly everyone who eventually gets hired by an organization visits the organization’s corporate careers site at some point prior to being hired. Most leave disappointed, having had received no value whatsoever from a site that is supposed to be all about them. The first two parts of this series presented a lot of ideas about how to change that, but we are only half way there.
This article focuses on gathering information from visitors and on presenting content to sell visitors on the prospect of joining the organization.
More workers than there are people in all of Miami were put out of work in June, a development that surprised economists and ... more »