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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…

What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?

What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.

On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.

Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.

Marriott is giving away $100 each day for 10 days to a different job seeker, a Facebook freebie meant to generate a little attention to the company’s community and make more people aware it has open jobs.

The hotel chain received the 2012 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employment branding category. It also has experimented with Facebook contests and games in the past, as mentioned in this post by Matt Jeffery.

Marriott’s Jessica Lee and I talk about the shoe program, below. She describes what drove the creation of the giveaway; how the company will measure results; what it means by a “spirit of community” it wants to create; and the balancing act between investing in a Facebook career page vs. a corporate careers site. keep reading…

We mentioned that awards honoree AT&T had added a military skills translator to its career site. The latest to do so is Ryder, which today is launching a website section for hiring veterans that also includes a translator feature.

On the Ryder site, service members enter what’s called a “military occupation code” or a “military occupational specialty code” to see what open jobs might match what they’ve done in the military.

Ryder has said it’ll hire 1,000 veterans by 2013. It has 670 jobs open, and about 8 percent of its current workforce is made up of veterans.

What if you set out to change the business world and found a company with endless opportunities to do it?

That’s the first question Walmart asks job-seekers when they head to its new careers site and military microsite, and perhaps an appropriate one for a chain with about $444 billion in sales and 2.1 million employees.

Corporate Recruiting VP Mike Grennier says the company had multiple goals with the new site, which involved a partnership between recruiting and marketing, and countless meetings and much input from multiple divisions from e-commerce to Sam’s Club. It also used the agency TMP.

Walmart wanted a site that was authentic, with real employee photos, “speaking to candidates like they spoke to customers,” Grennier says. It wanted something clean and simple, with as few clicks as possible. It wanted to improve the candidate experience, reduce the time it takes to navigate the site, and make sure people are captured, not lost before they leave. The company wanted to showcase its technology expertise, something Grennier says the scrolling style used on the main page helps do. In addition, Walmart wanted to be easily able to update the content on the back end.

Grennier says the site is a “work in progress”; for example, the company has made it mobile-friendly, but would like to make it even friendlier. keep reading…

A repair technician - Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan

The Marines have launched a new career site, heavy on interactivity, video, and big, striking photos. A career tool asks users 10 questions about themselves — Do you have a fear of swimming? Are you a visual thinker? Are you good with maps and diagrams? — and then shows videos to candidates depending on their answers to the questions.

There’s a big section on “recruit training” overviewing the 12-week training, with video.

The U.S. Marine Corps began in 1775.

Ask the next hire you onboard to describe everything, every step they took on their way to becoming a candidate, and you may be in for a surprise.

If you track your source of hire, chances are excellent that what your numbers tell you is only a part of the story — the most recent part. What all that data is telling you may be not more than from where your new hire submitted their application.

With two-thirds of the companies participating in CareerXroads’ source of hire survey relying on the hires to say how they learned of the job, “What that’s telling us is what the candidate remembers, which is going to be from where they applied. You might get them to tell you where they first heard about the job,” says Gerry Crispin, one of the survey authors. “But we’ve suspected that more goes into this than is being captured (by source of hire reporting).”

So for the first time in the 11 years CareerXroads has surveyed America’s largest employers on how and from where they make hires, this year’s report includes the best thinking of recruiting leaders about what influenced their new hires to apply.

The just released report, 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire: Channels that Influence, not only offers a look at what recruiting leaders believe about the pathways in talent acquisition, but it also provides a data-rich look at where the 36 responding companies attribute the hires they make. The sources of hire were detailed on ERE yesterday. Today’s post looks at the social media influencers of that hiring. keep reading…

That grocery store chain popping up all over Arizona, Nevada, and California has launched a new careers website with a good main-page video talking about jobs at the British-owned grocer.

On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

The Australian defense department has started a new campaign with a “Superman” motif to recruit reservists, the first big effort like this in seven years.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

Should we put real-employee photos on our careers site, or stock art?

Swift Transportation’s new site opts for none of the above. Instead, the trucker used illustrations, something you don’t see a whole lot on career sites.

Swift, a Phoenix-based company whose drivers log more than a billion miles a year, used Bayard Advertising for the site. The two partners wanted to do something a little different than what it sees on a lot of transportation-industry sites: trucks, cars, signs, prices, clutter, and busyness.

Swift and Bayard figured that a little simpler was a little better. They also wanted to capture the employee value proposition, and interviewed current and past employees to see what they liked about their jobs — career paths with stability, growth, good pay, freedom, variety, and good bennies.

Bayard’s National Creative Director Matt Gilbert found the illustrator; the drawings were used through the career site, not just on the main page.

Swift has about 22,000 employees, about 17,000 of those drivers. It also has 31 full-service terminals, so the company tells candidates that “when you’re driving for us, you’re never far from a hot shower, a good meal, and a friendly face.”

I was just reviewing the predictions I made for 2011 written at roughly this time a year ago. Much of what I thought would happen unfolded as expected, except for talent management. I had thought there would more focus on integrating the employee development and recruitment functions, and more internal hiring. I still think that’s on tap for this year. I was on target regarding hiring: There was no great uptick in the volume of hiring, and unemployment remained static. And I was on target with predicting that social media would be core to recruiting success and that RPOs would thrive.

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. 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…

Google+ has been moving from just individuals to brands and businesses, and PepsiCo’s Talent Engagement & Marketing Leader Chris Hoyt let us know today that the snack/soft-drink giant is the first to take advantage of this from a careers standpoint, putting up a page for job-seekers with photos and videos.

PepsiCo has for years been an early-adopter when it comes to recruiting with social media, as well as making its recruiting efforts more friendly to candidates using mobile phones.

You can check out the Google+ page here.

And for more on PepsiCo, Here’s Hoyt and colleagues Paul Marchand and Sheila Stygar talking about their talent acquisition department in a video from the last ERE Expo. keep reading…

The trend nowadays for corporate career sites is to tell stories of employees, rather than use the careers home page for corporate-speak about the organization’s mission, benefits, value proposition, and so on.

Certainly the new jobs site unveiled by Staples, in Canada, is no exception. Scroll over parts of the site and up pop testimonials from retail and corporate employees, including an IT guy, a general manager, a recruiting/training coordinator, a sales manager, and others.

There’s also a place to see the career path of a Staples employee, and then click on job listings that fall somewhere along that continuum (click to enlarge the graphic below to see what I mean). One other nice touch: the URLs of the retail job listings include the word “great,” thus beginning with “greatcareersatstaples.ca.”

Like with most corporate career sites, many of the job descriptions lack the catchy copy of the rest of the careers site.

Some of the corporate jobs, on the other hand, do opt for the more cute and clever: for cashiers; administrative specialists; “receivers” and technology consultants.

As one of America’s largest credit unions moved from the city to the suburbs this year, it underwent intense efforts to make sure not only that current employees didn’t quit rather than move, not only that future employees would find the new location as cool as San Francisco, but that employees would feel engaged, appreciated, and not cogs in a company machine with little concern about their personal lives. keep reading…

Apple in Sydney

In Part 2 of this case study on Apple’s talent management practices, I look at its approach to innovation, compensation, and benefits, careerpathing, and online recruitment (its career site). Some approaches discussed are unique to sub-factions within Apple, as would be expected in any organization of significant size. It’s also quite rare for organizations that design, manufacture, and sell through direct retail to have consistent approaches across all units.

Talent Management Lessons To Learn and Copy (continued)

You should not be surprised to learn that the firm that made the term “think different” a brand uses talent management approaches that are well outside the norm. In addition to the lessons presented in Part 1, some approaches other firms can learn from Apple include: keep reading…

Have you seen these people? The ones in the picture to the right? If you have, immediately call the marketing police and report their location. They are on the “Most Overused Stock Image Photo” list at MarketingProfs.com.

I’ve personally tracked the photo to eight HR-related sites where it shows up illustrating employee engagement, consulting services, headhunting, and a company’s commitment to diversity recruiting. I know there are more. Google has 19 pages of results.

Is your company among them?

A moment’s digression: Google has a new, handy image search that lets you drag an image into the search box to find where else it appears. You can also upload a picture, search by URL or, with the right extension, right click an image. Google explains it all here. keep reading…

There’s probably not a week (or maybe even a day) that goes by in which we don’t read about how technology will help you in your business, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, computer, social media, applications, etc. I think many of us have the need to use every type of technology out there without really knowing why or even having a real need for it. I believe it has gotten to the point that if you don’t adopt every new technology and use it in business, people think there’s something wrong with you.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting: keep reading…

The early bird catches the worm. Mom and Grammy knew that, as did the English four centuries ago. Hardly a surprise, then, that a study of 6,600 hires finds that the sooner a candidate responds to a job posting, the better their chance of getting hired.

This confirmation of what most of us intuitively suspected comes from StartWire, a job search networking collaboration service launched six months ago by Chris Forman, formerly of AIRS, and his partner Tim McKegney, also an AIRS alum.

As part of the research and testing for StartWire, Forman collected hiring information from employers across 10 industries. Cumulatively, the companies shared data on 6,600 hires. From that emerged the correlation between speed of response and hiring.

What Forman and StartWire found was that almost 50 percent of the hires the companies made had applied within the first week a job was posted; 27 percent of the hires applied within two days. And three-quarters of those hired had applied within the first three weeks.

Forman says it sort of a “duh” revelation, but since he’s never seen a study that examined the matter, he decided it might be interesting. In the aggregate, the conventional wisdom about applying early improving a candidate’s chances is correct, he notes. On a job-by-job basis though, it might not be so. keep reading…

Home Depot has quietly been expanding its use of Facebook in online games and recruitment advertising on people’s profiles, meanwhile operating with transparency and responsiveness — returning emails in 24 hours — often missing elsewhere in online recruiting.

Miko Covin, who manages the employment marketing group, is one of the key players. She and others in that group — people like Alison Foy — came up from recruitment ad agencies like Bernard Hodes, TMP, and JWT Inside.

Covin arrived in 2008 from JWT, wanting to use the basic marketing and advertising skills she’d learned at agencies and apply them to social media and recruiting. In early 2010 (late in the game, she admits) she opened up a personal Facebook page after a friend invited her to be a Facebook member. She also saw the agency world struggling, social media increasing its role in recruiting, and wanted to move Home Depot in the social media direction.

She spent 2010 on education. There were HR people in Home Depot who didn’t get social media; in fact, some even used the now-awkward word “The” preceding “Facebook.” “I don’t know about The Facebook,” one person said.

Covin kept talking up the importance of social media in recruiting. By the spring of 2010 Home Depot began testing two things on Facebook, targeting people based on the information in their profiles. First, it tried advertising store jobs to females, part of an effort to reverse the perception as a company for male jobs. It casted a “huge net first,” Covin says.

It narrowed after that, targeting people — now both male and female — whose profiles indicated they were in HR, and were based in areas where an HR district manager was needed.

It brought on JWT, the recruitment marketing agency, to help with the Facebook project.

By August, satisfied with the approximately 100 resumes it had received over the summer from these efforts, the recruitment marketing team was feeling that Facebook was a success in recruiting, and it should be expanded. keep reading…