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.”

But what you do about negative posts is much more difficult. As Sullivan observed in his article, “The new owners (of your brand) are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance.”

It should be needless to say that Sidewiki also offers significant benefits. Users can post helpful suggestions for others consulting, say, a how-to page of a site. Or offer additional places to look for information. Employers can even benefit from positive comments and helpful feedback.

So even though this article addresses the negative side of Sidewiki, there are plenty of pluses and lots of potential value for users in the application.

Before we go further, let’s talk about what Sidewiki is. It is a type of message posting system that attaches to web addresses and can be seen by users accessing the address who also have the Sidewiki app installed on their browser.

There’s nothing really new about Sidewiki. Similar tools — Purple Bunny, iComment for instance — have been around for years. None of them have gained broad enough acceptance to have a significant impact.

Google, however, has a big advantage over the other commenting tools. It’s packaging Sidewiki with its popular Google Toolbar that has been installed by millions of users. The Internet Explorer version alone from CNET has almost 4 million downloads.

“It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict if Sidewiki will get traction or how large it will grow,” says Hornung, who leads Hodes’ employer branding practice.

“Practically speaking the growth of Sidewiki will be dampened by several factors,” he adds, citing the relative lack of anonymity to the postings, the need to download and install the toolbar, and the likelihood that corporate IT will fence off downloads of Google Toolbar.

Still, there are plenty of ways around the issues and with Google simplifying the installation of its toolbar, even novices can manage the feat.

“Sidewiki may become interesting only to those who have it, mostly the tech ‘in crowd’ who bother to download and use it,” says Hornung. “Employers should be concerned about it today, especially if they are in a technical field.

“The techie crowd will (by definition) be the early adopters and a negative buzz from Sidewiki —- especially if it appears that the employer is unaware of what is going on (kind of like goofing off in high school while the teacher was writing on the board) —- could be trouble.”

Already comments have begun to appear here and there on websites. Monster, for instance, has two comments posted on its main page. One is a pitch for another job board and the other is a political polemic that has almost nothing to do with Monster.

Google has thrown site owners a bene in that they get to post their own message, which will always appear at the top of the wiki, even as other posts slide down when more relevant posts rise up the list. In spot checking several job boards and corporate career sites, I didn’t find any employer posts. Hornung did, providing the Raytheon screenshot accompanying this article.

Curiously, though, he doesn’t recommend that employers make a peremptory post.

“I would take a ‘wait and see’ approach,” he counsels. “If there is no activity, why provoke it?…

“As some observers have pointed out, Sidewiki really creates a ‘bifurcated’ Web experience: those with and those without Sidewiki will see Web sites differently. To those who are unaware of, or don’t care about Sidewiki, why create a commotion when there isn’t any?”

He says his clients are just now beginning to get their arms around the notion that an old tool may be getting some new life breathed into it. “I think the hardest part is to grasp the concept that people may comment on your Web site whether you want them to or not. Some view it as online vandalism,” Hornung says.

While many corporate communications departments already subscribe to monitoring programs or otherwise track what Internet users say or write about the company, Hornung recommends that the HR department install Sidewiki to monitor the corporate career site. ” Sidewiki can go on individual pages such as benefits descriptions or diversity programs, and it is unlikely that (marketing or communications department monitors) will drill down too deeply on an HR site when they’re trying to keep up with the hobgoblins elsewhere.

“I believe HR must be more proactive in monitoring and policing it,” he says, especially since some posts may involve employment law issues that aren’t readily spotted by others. Hodes, among others, provides a brand monitoring service for employers and has added Sidewiki posts to its scrutiny.

And when a negative comment is spotted? “If you feel you have to respond, respect the opinion. Don’t be defensive,” warns Hornung, who likens online discourse to a conversation. “If something is really just venting, you can ignore it.

“The essential lesson is you have to be thick skinned. You have to accept it.”

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.

JobDig CEO and president Toby Dayton makes that point himself in a blog posting that praises Hyatt Hotels for its community-building efforts. Now it happens that Hyatt has installed the Current Jobs at Our Company app and, presumably, is paying JobDig $39 a month for the more than five jobs capability.

But Dayton is right about the personal effort Hyatt is making. Take a look at the comments on the Wall and you can see there’s a thinking person behind the company’s comments. As he put it in his blog post, “there is a real dialogue going on between job seekers and people within Hyatt.”

Now, there are plenty of jobs apps available for Facebook. There are apps for users interested in security jobs, and apps from CareerBuilder for jobs of almost every type, and Indeed, which has a new mobile app we’ll get to in a moment, has an app to find jobs where your friends work. But as far as I can tell, LinkUp is the only app developed specifically for recruiters. And no, I’m not forgetting the Jobvite or Force.com apps. They are aimed at getting referrals by leveraging their employees’ Facebook relationships. Plus they cost a boatload.

Indeed, which never seems to sleep, has the #1 most popular free business app for the iPhone and iPod. And, to give credit, where credit is due, CareerBuilder is #5 on the list.

While everybody always wishes for some feature more than the product has, Indeed’s app is rated a bit higher than CareerBuilder’s. Of course, CB released its app 14 months ago, pioneering, if you will, mobile search in the U.S. Indeed released its iPhone search in March, including some features CareerBuilder’s reviewers wanted.

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.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, as part of an in-depth article on branding, Fogarty said that the best-marketed products don’t let the customer forget the brand:

Absolut Vodka is one of the best examples of this. The Absolut bottle has a distinct shape. Every single ad over emphasizes this shape by creatively integrating the ad into the shape of the bottle. When you walk into a liquor store, whether you are looking for Vodka or not, your eyes always go to the Absolut shelf …

Let your creativity run wild. How can you develop advertising and marketing campaigns that burn your brand positioning into the minds of your candidates?

On top of that, the sites, he finds, are rarely genuine: usually, they’re loaded up not with actual employees speaking candidly, but with stock photos, carefully calculated to check off the right diversity boxes.

The adidas recruiting department got the company’s marketing department to let it borrow, so to speak, some of the star athletes who are adidas sponsors. “Our employment brand,” adidas recruiters told adidas marketers, “is as important as our consumer brand. You give us an athlete and we’re going to shape what they do. We’re going to script what they do.” In other words, canned, generic messages from athletes that didn’t relate to employment wouldn’t be pigeonholed into a recruiting site.

Adidas doesn’t want candidates to think of athletes as the demigods they’re often portrayed as in the media. At this company, a superstar is someone you might actually meet through your job. Says Fogarty: “We take athletes off their pedestal so they become more like you and I.”

A trio of these adidas sponsors will be featured prominently for candidates who land on the new site. There’s Candace Parker, of the Los Angeles Sparks’ WNBA team, Ben Watson, from the New England Patriots, who is associated with Reebok, and golfer Natalie Gulbis, pitching the TaylorMade brand. Current employees, talking about their jobs, are also featured prominently.

Right now (with the old site), adidas has one group website representing all brands. Fogarty says, of the new site, that “Instead of saying the group supersedes the brand, the group is symbiotic and made up of the brands.” So if you want to work for TaylorMade, you’re immersed in a golf-careers site. The parent company adidas group, Fogarty says, “should be thought of as the collection of brands.”

Fogarty believes the site will work because it won’t fall into the trap so many career sites do. Companies have been playing up their “best company to work for” and “employees are our greatest asset” catchphrases that aren’t really differentiators. They clutter up their career sites with confusing navigation, boring corporate-speak, the stock photos we mentioned earlier, and unnecessary multimedia.

Focus group participants, in fact, told adidas they didn’t want tons of cluttered information thrown out them right away when they land on the site. So the site, Fogarty says, will “serve up information as it becomes relevant. Only when it’s narrowed down to the thing you are most interested in will it give you the majority of information on that particular area. Most candidates don’t care about 50 bells and whistles. They want it to be easy. I really don’t give a &*()& how my refrigerator works. I just want my food to be cold. The technology shouldn’t be apparent on the site. It just should work.”

“Companies run together for me,” Fogarty says. “Even the best of the best out there aren’t doing it well. Google does great at marketing tactics. I’ll give them all the credit in the world for that,” he says, referring to such things as clever recruiting billboards. But Google, Fogarty says, largely failed to use its real differentiators, such as employees’ ability to spend 20% of their time on experimental projects.

Adidas’ version of the famous Google 20% rule — in other words, adidas’ employee value proposition — is a focus on sports and in particular on athletes, as people you can get to know and not merely worship, and how that is part of the adidas employment experience. If a job candidate leaves the site feeling like they could, if hired, someday get to shoot a hoop or two with Candace Parker, adidas will have succeeded.

We’ve said before that companies often redo their career sites, and leave the job descriptions boring. Fogarty wants to avoid that. It has created what it calls a “brand book” for recruiting leaders in every country. It’s basically a presentation showing, among other brand examples, samples of what the company wants to see in a job description. “We will hold the recruiters accountable for writing good job descriptions,” Fogarty says. “Right now that accountability is a little loose,” he says, with so much work being done on getting the new site up, among other things. “It’s a huge focus for us,” Fogarty says of job descriptions. But, he says, a good job description doesn’t make up for a bad job. “Is the job itself crappy?” he asks. “I’d rather have the job right than a perfect job description.”

Indeed, Fogarty wrote in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership:

Our hope is that a top candidate who may have browsed the site and then left without action in the past is compelled and inspired now to apply. No matter how great your brand positioning is, your candidates won’t come back if your jobs suck. This is where you need to work up front to ensure your organization’s jobs are scoped correctly and you are writing compelling job descriptions.

Adidas is still working on the site and the way it coordinates with its back-end applicant tracking system from Jobpartners. Originally scheduled to go live in the Spring of 2009, it should be ready later this month.

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.

Eliminating the clicks, says Friedman, group marketing manager, was one of the functional goals of the project she helped manage. Being real, as in using real Microsofties and not stock images, and helping potential candidates get around the site they way they want, were other objectives.

From a corporate recruiting standpoint, Medd, director of employment branding, outlined a set of goals for redesign that were equally as ambitious: present a consistent global brand message, tap the global talent market in a way that allows a jobseeker in Moscow, Idaho, or one in Moscow, Russia, to fill a position anywhere Microsoft has a fit, and to make the candidate experience simple, comfortable, and direct while having enough of a “wow” element that candidates were excited by what they see.

“The message we wanted to send is that we want to truly hire the best talent from around the world,” Medd says. Reducing costs and making it quick and easy to update the content on the site were additional goals, but the driver was telling the Microsoft story.

That piece of the relaunched Microsoft career site is still being implemented. A new content management system is days away from being in place. When it is, the average time it takes to update editorial content on the site (as separate from the job postings and descriptions) will go from weeks to hours.

The jobs listings, the transactional part of the site as Medd and Friedman describe it, powered by a new SAP system, is the piece that is now in place for the 97 countries. Jobs are in English, the company’s standard. Where local regulations require or culture dictates, jobs will also be in the local language.

From the first page of Careers.Microsoft.com to the last, job searching is prominent and primary. Every page on the site has a search box. Conduct a search and it’s automatically stored without a candidate having to give up a single personal detail. If you do want to save things from session to session, then a simple registration is required. But if you would rather not, candidates can search, create a resume (or several) and apply for one or a hundred jobs without creating a permanent record. (Of course recruiters and hiring managers will have a record.)

Two years ago, when the project was in its infancy, focus groups told Medd and Friedman that three things were critical: search and apply for jobs was number one. Knowing what to apply for in a company with 100,000 employees was next on the list and third was specific information on the company and the job.

That’s why the job search is everywhere on the site. And that’s why the navigation bar has only three main channels: Apply Now, Find Your Fit, and Meet Microsoft. The content for the latter two channels will grow over the next several months, although the core pieces are in place. Microsoft’s most popular recruiting features – Hey Genius, View<my world>, and Microspotting — will stay and retain their own separate identification, though one or two might be folded into the career site over time. The irreverant “Day of Microsoft Perks” video was preserved and is a part of the channel that talks about the company’s benefits package.

In as broad and ambitious a project as this was, Medd and Friedman both said the most daunting part was creating a visual expression for the company and the site that conveyed the same impression everywhere in the world. The first version, using “watercolor images” got a thumbs-down from markets outside the U.S. The “truthkeepers out there,” as Friedman described her international focus group, thought it didn’t convey the professionalism and energy of the company.

All along the way, the 10-person team had to accommodate multiple interests and multiple stakeholders.

That effort is apparent from the very first page, with its world of diverse faces, to the pictures on every page, all of them actual Microsoft employees. Even the pulldown menus convey the sense of Microsoft as a global company. The first country listed is Algeria, not the U.S., as is typical for most U.S. companies.

It’s too early to tell what the impact of the redesign is. In fact, not even all the countries have yet been rolled out. That will occur over the next several months as the content management system comes online and local information is created to supplement the core Microsoft editorial. Monday’s launch was of the universal jobs search and the core content. The U.S. and U.K. sites also went live then. Japan is to follow soon. It will take until next spring to complete the rollout.

The recruiter’s opening remarks, telephone or face-to-face style, and assumptions about the candidate forge the initial impression a candidate gets of the organization. And as they say, you can only make a first impression once! If it is a poor one, you will most likely lose the candidates, and perhaps the referrals they could have made.

Rather than relying on a recruiter to create the candidate experience, smart organizations will strive to provide a consistent and constant experience that is independent of any individual, and that experience will be centered on the career site.

Over the next decades it will become a requirement that every organization have an interactive career site that will be the portal for candidates at any stage of the hiring process to provide feedback, information, and to develop and grow their relationship with your organization. Some organizations have started on this journey, including Deloitte, Microsoft, and KPMG. They have put together websites and online events that are targeted at their most desired candidates and create positive impressions. But, most career sites are weak at creating any impression at all and are just fluff.

For most organizations the candidate experience process is weak, broken, and badly in need of being rethought. As more and more candidates are from Gen Y, they expect to see dynamic, interesting, and authentic career sites that provide specific information. They are much less focused on talking directly with a recruiter or with developing a face-to-face relationship. Yet, recruiters are notorious for believing that the only possible way to know people is by “pressing the flesh”: meeting them in person, calling them on the phone, or having lunch or dinner with them. While these are all useful and time-tested, it is also possible to get to know people and build relationships using the Internet. By using technology to extend out from the small number of people it is possible to meet and know face-to-face, a recruiter can become vastly more effective.

Building electronic relationships with no personal contact is not only possible, it may even be desirous. Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric, has said that human relationships are declining in the selling of goods and services. What he means is that telephone and face-to-face connections between corporate buyers and their suppliers is rapidly being supplanted by Internet and email conversations. The same is also true of relationships with customers. Amazon, Dell, Lands’ End, and other retailers have developed sophisticated tools to build and maintain long-term relationships with their customers.

Here are six ways to build a more positive candidate experience into your career site.

1. Move your thinking from a career site to something more like a social network. Turn your career site into a social network by using tools such as Ning to create one, or engaging the services of an organization such as Standout Jobs that specializes in recruiting networks. This will automatically give you many of the features I describe.
2. Have recruiters write blogs. Blogs have become the voice of authenticity and provide the most credible information. Candidates become attached to specific bloggers and keep coming back, which results in them having a relationship and deeper understanding of your organization than they could have gotten in any other way. Even though we have been blogging for years, only a handful of recruiting sites have a blog aimed at candidates. The most well known is Heather Hamilton’s at Microsoft. Most of us have let legal issues and the difficulty to overcome internal bureaucratic processes stifle the use of this potentially excellent communication and relationship-building tool.
3. Make the site adapt to the candidate’s needs. Build in choices so that candidates who are analytical can get data, facts, and charts while those candidates who are more verbal get similar information in text or pictures. Creating various forms of the same content is a clever and effective way of adding what seems to the candidates a personal touch to the website.
4. Hold webinars. Periodic online seminars, or webinars, can be used to build traffic and create some opportunities for people to learn what your organization does and how they might fit into it. There are a number of webinar firms that offer inexpensive software that you could harness for this purpose. These can be recorded and offered later as podcasts.
5. Hold a contest. Promoting contests and games can also be a useful way to generate excitement and build relationships. People respond to trivia games, contests, and online minisurveys. They like the instant feedback and the ability to do something rather than just read. These contests are also a way to get people to come back over and over again to your site. Each time they return is another opportunity to recruit them — or at least to have a conversation with them and keep them excited about your organization.

The point of all this is to give candidates authentic information when they need it in a way they respond to. A good career site is not just a listing of open positions but also a carefully thought out and targeted marketing tool. By spending your budget dollars to develop a dynamic career site, you can lower your overall sourcing costs, increase candidate volume and quality, and build your organization’s reputation.

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.

Barbara Pizzala is one of Gore’s global leaders in recruiting. Well, sort of: Gore does without official titles, direct reports, or indirect reports. She’s one of two co-champions of the project; the other represents the company’s corporate communications team. Pizzala says work started on the campaign about three years ago in Europe. It was put on hold, and then work began anew about a year ago. The ad agency TBWA, in Hamburg, has been involved.

The hub is a website, which spells out such things as the company’s fundamental beliefs and what it’s like to work there (if you need more structure, try the Gap).

As with most other corporate career sites, if you make it all the way through the Taleo system to the job descriptions, you may find them a little boring (something I said a year ago about Cellular South.) Says Pizzala: “Job descriptions will have a more brand-reflective look to them. This is something we are still working on. Each and every posting will be more brand-reflective than today.”

A second website, modified for European locations and using German and British English, will launch in Europe in about four weeks. A third site, in Chinese and English, will launch in Asia about four weeks after that.

Pizzala says Gore will drive site traffic using 1) big boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, and to a lesser extent, niche boards for the medical device field; 2) a minimal amount of print newspaper ads in Arizona, Delaware, and Maryland (and significantly more print ads in Europe); 3) campus recruiting and career fairs (it has bought new booths); and 4) social media, which hasn’t really begun yet.

Gore has brought on Jobs2Web to help with social media. “They’re educating us, Todd,” Pizzala says. “This is new for us.”

Senior Leaders Got It

Gore has never had a global employment brand.

“It is a first ever,” Pizzala says. “Historically, Gore does not go out and boast much about who we are. It’s a part of our culture — humbleness, humility. We expect our products will speak for themselves.”

But, senior leaders knew that had to change. They realized that the company wasn’t visible enough in some of its markets — in the Asian medical-device field, for example.

“If there’s one thing that really worried us,” Pizzala says, “It’s whether we were going to be able to hire enough of the right people. It was a pretty widely held belief among our senior leaders that talent would be one of our biggest constraints for growth.”

Gore has had little to no decline in its medical-division hiring, Pizzala says. While it has used the slow economy to develop and move people internally, there are some things you can’t train overnight — like when you’re trying to hire a scientist with experiencing dealing with the FDA. So, she says, “We’re finally telling our story.”

Branding junkies can learn more about the topic by checking out your April 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership; seeing Steve Fogarty’s presentation coming up September 10th; or by doing a search.

“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.

Nothing is imminent, Embrescia adds. The economy is a factor, but not much of an obstacle to selling the more desirable addresses. If the address registry were opened up tomorrow, Embrescia tell us he could sell millions. “We could do it,” he says, though the company has “refrained from that.”

Up to now, the domain (to be discussed further in the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) has been issued almost exclusively to companies, which use the extension with their corporate name as in www.cocacola.jobs. Most companies appear to simply take job seekers right to their career centers, bypassing the company’s homepage and the sometimes challenging navigation. A few, like ATT.jobs, make a greater effort to appear the site is independent.

When Employ Media and its partner in the venture, the Society for Human Resource Management, proposed the creation of the domain, they argued that it was needed to encourage the use of company job sites, make it easier for job seekers to find company-specific jobs, and provide a measure of quality assurance for job seekers that the job sites were legitimate and not some scam to collect resumes. They received approval for .jobs in 2005 and the first of the site came on line late that year.

Under the agreement Employ Media has with the agency that oversees Internet naming — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — .jobs domain “registrations are limited to the legal name of an employer and/or a name or abbreviation by which the employer is commonly known.” There are other requirements, including one that the applicant for an address subscribe to the SHRM code of ethics.

The rules can be modified, but it appears it would require SHRM’s acquiescence. No one from SHRM could be reached to discuss the possibility. However, Embrescia insists that the overriding requirement is that dot-JOBS sites “have to be used for HR content,” which, he said, is what a 90210.jobs address or an occupationally focused one would be for.

Recruitment consultant Gerry Crispin, who served on SHRM’s advisory panel on the creation of a dot-JOBS extension, says opening up the registry defeats its purpose.

“If this action is taken it will be the death knell of the domain,” he emailed us from SHRM’s staffing conference in Las Vegas. Crispin called it “Just another commercial effort to squeeze dollars from employers and mislead job seekers. Disappointing that resources were never devoted to marketing to the jobseeker.”

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.

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.

The team followed a methodical path, setting business, and marketing goals. First on the list was to present a consistent global message, perhaps a natural for Medd, whose first career was in marketing. No less important was to improve the user experience, making job searching and applying simpler, and more logical.

Not only an office software provider, but a burgeoning entertainment business, Microsoft also wanted a candidate wow factor; career site elements to “impress and inspire them,” says Medd. “We were looking for a much more modern voice.”

The end game of all this, Medd notes, “is increasing the throughput of qualified candidates,” and, she adds, “telling our employment story for ourselves. This is our brand to manage.”

We didn’t explore with Medd the recruiting challenges Microsoft has been facing in recent years from the likes of Google and the “name” startups, but the Redmond, Wash. giant has lost talent battles to these companies, as well as to hundreds of less-known startups. Even though it’s got a successful game unit (Xbox 360) and the much-maligned “blue screen of death” is mostly a fading memory, Microsoft’s recruitment marketing, at least the part you find when you search for “Microsoft jobs,” is uninspired. The U.S. homepage is busy. The message fuzzy.

There’s no doubt the company realizes that, as Medd observes, “We have been underinvesting in telling the company story. We’ve let others tell our employment story for us.” On its pioneering View<my world> site there’s a page that begins:

“Microsoft is one of the world’s best kept secrets.
That sounds funny when you’re talking about a company nearly everyone’s heard of. But the truth is, most people don’t know the whole story about what it’s like to work here. And you should, because it’s a good story.”

That will all change when the first of the new career pages is unveiled this summer. Focus groups and employee surveys, including “a healthy dose of recent hires,” gave Medd and her team a sort of mantra for their work: “We have talented people doing amazing things.”

In the new site, these people will be telling their stories in videos. “It will be dev to dev,” she says, meaning one software developer talking to another. Or one project manager talking to another. “There is a desire for authenticity,” says Medd, adding that the videos won’t be scripted or “scrubbed. They will be true to the experience.”

Job seekers will be able to search for any Microsoft job anywhere in the world from one place. They’ll be able to learn of jobs that meet their qualifications and their interests, via the improved keyword matching capability of the SAP system. They’ll also be able to quickly find out more about a job or a division, thanks to easier and clearer navigation, and less wordiness.

“Everything,” says Medd, “will be new.”

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.

That’s where Web usability testing comes in handy. As the name implies, these are studies that enable you to evaluate your career site by testing it on users, employees, or even yourself.

In a study conducted almost exactly one year ago by Forrester Research entitled “Best and Worst of Career Web Sites,” the 12 websites examined all received failing scores due to poor performance and usability. Common problems included missing content and functions, flawed navigation flows, illegible text, and poor use of space. Do any of those sound familiar?

Step one is admitting you have a problem.

Usability testing can measure just about anything, but here are the key factors you need to consider:

Efficiency: How many steps did it take the user to accomplish pre-specified tasks (did the user develop carpal tunnel or fall asleep)? Was there a call to action? Was it easy to respond?

Performance: Did the user make any mistakes, and could they easily recover from them?

Recall: What information did the user remember afterwards. Does it communicate important information clearly and accurately?

Emotional connection: Would the user recommend the site to a friend? Is the site on-brand (i.e. did the experience match the expectation)? Did it make the user smile or cry?

Conduct your own Usability Research Study

After my last move, I set up the kitchen and called my kids in: “Quick! find me a bowl and spoon.” If they went for the right cabinet first, I knew I had successfully unpacked. They checked the dishwasher. Try again.

Your usability study will be a lot like that. Pick out a range of employees from various disciplines within your company and watch them perform 7 to 10 pre-determined tasks based on various scenarios. Be prepared with a pen and paper to take notes, and have a stopwatch ready so that you can measure time-on-task. Remember to reassure participants that their jobs are not on the line as you stand behind them with a stopwatch, or you’ll be witness to some rather erratic web browsing and sweaty palms. You won’t need to test it with more than five users. The first test will probably tell you 35% of all you need to know.

Task 1: First Impressions
Task 2: 5 minutes of free exploration (where did they go first, second, and third?)
Task 3: Learn about employee benefits (timed task)
Task 4: Apply for a job (timed task)
Task 5: Replace upload forms
Task 6: Give them a place to go (i.e. “job description”) and check the path they took
Task 7: Return Exploration: let them go anywhere they felt confused about or wanted to revisit. Capture the stops.

Save time at the end for some open-ended discussion on recall, branding and overall user experience. “What did you like best?” “What would you change?” While you’re at it, have some employees perform this test on one of your competitor’s sites. Use that as a benchmark for your site as you track it over time.

If the results are eye-opening (in a bad way), then it’s time for a sit-down with the head of your IT team. Be sure to come armed with the results of your test and a positive attitude, or you may experience some resistance. Have an open discussion about how to make usability improvements and offer your assistance in finding the right vendor that specializes in this work. Worse comes to worst, have your IT manager participate in your next usability study.

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.”

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.

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.

Cocq’s vision was to move IBM away from its collage of recruiting and hiring processes to a single global process, with only slight variations for each region’s culture. He also wanted to drive passive candidates and applicants toward the company’s recruiting Web site to reduce agency fees and print ad expenditures. But could a site that features one main recruiting message resonate with a globally diverse audience? Surprisingly, Cocq discovered that the answer to that question was yes.

“We found that universally, people are interested in social issues and career advancement; they want to know that their work matters and that it accomplishes something for society,” says Cocq.

In June, the company launched its new careers Web site which features this message: Come work for IBM and make a difference. But while the message may be universal, the way the message is communicated to each user is unique. The concept is to hook candidates and entice them to return to the site, by allowing each user to create their own Web 2.0 experience. Candidates are invited to join online communities or collaborate online with IBM employees after submitting an application. They can also share online content about IBM and comment about it through a link to an IBM page on the Digg Web site or receive an opt-in newsletter.

“Our new site features a single landing page and then redirects prospects to a number of subsites or micro sites based upon their interests and preferences,” says Cocq. “While the overall message is designed for universal appeal, we’ve adapted how we’re driving traffic to the site to meet each country’s Internet viewing habits.”

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.

As you contemplate your own system, check out a few other insights Crispin shared with attendees:

On virtual career fairs:
“I see some pieces to this, but I don’t see it adding value to the candidate experience. If the company doesn’t provide any additional data or value, in the end, it doesn’t add value to your candidate experience,” he says. 

He points out that Phillips has the “most interesting approach” to this, with a series of people willing to talk to you.

On checking your careers site:
“I challenge any company to check their own jobs at least once a month,” he says. Many sites, he says, lose credibility with broken links, outdated job postings, etc.

On internal movement:
More positions are filled with internal employees than any other source, he says. 

“It is kind of fascinating to me,” he admits.

The most important thing is a map on the corporate careers site to show how people move within organizations. Look at source of hire, be transparent, and let people choose to come to you.

“You say you develop employees, but not a single company in the United States publishes internal employee movement. Most won’t even reveal it to their own employees,” says Crispin.

“The only company I know that does it in a transparent way inside their company is Pepsi. Every month they publish how many people were promoted from division to division, level to level, etc. Those figures are then broken down by race and gender,” he says.

On managing job expectations:
“You have to be able to say why you come and why you stay,” he says.

He points to RIM’s site, as well as KPMG’s site.

At KPMG, for example, prospective applicants get deep data in terms of a profile of an individual and why they are there.

“Different value propositions can let you search on profiles of partners. If that person isn’t like me, it’s very simple, and I can navigate it quickly, and that adds a lot of value to me,” he says.

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.

• 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:

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.

Videos on the Internet are one of the hottest trends in society and especially among the younger generations. With the growth of the Internet and mobile phone technology, videos can be viewed almost anywhere by almost everyone. In fact, 56% of Americans with Internet access have viewed a video or listened to audio online, so it’s important for organizations to get their recruiting message out via recruiting videos.

Benchmark firms like Google have learned how to exploit recruiting videos. For example, Google’s powerful seven minute “an inside look at Google” has been viewed by well over half a million people.

Microsoft has also demonstrated its leadership in leveraging video on its “viewmyworld” site, which portrays the company in a way that many feel is more “honest” than ever before. The U.S. Army has utilized videos in a broader range of applications than any other organization in order to demonstrate that their jobs can be exciting.

Online video has become so pervasive that not to consider it while developing your recruiting strategy would be a serious mistake. Even IBM, long considered a conservative organization, was an early adopter of online video for mobile devices.

Today, more than 200,000 people download IBM podcasts monthly. Octagon Global recruiting showed that videos have a place on TV by placing its recruiting video as an ad in the season finale of the popular TV show Lost.

What is a Recruiting Video?

A recruiting video is a relatively short video that is available for viewing on the Internet. Its primary goal is to excite potential candidates by showing them the compelling features of your firm and jobs.

Recruiting videos can be placed on your corporate careers website, on popular video sites like YouTube, or can be packaged as downloadable podcasts for mobile media devices.

Types of Recruiting and Branding Videos

Most recruiting videos can be categorized into nine basic coverage areas:

• The traditional overview of the company and its products
• A “day in the life” of an employee
• Profiles of individual employees
• “Why I work here” videos covering critical recruiting factors
• Facility tours
• Humorous videos demonstrating that your firm is a “fun place”
• Videos and highlights of company perks and benefits
• Videos of company events
• Videos that demonstrate the firm’s excellent management practices

Ways to Create Recruiting Videos

Hold a contest or competition among employees to create a range of videos. Both Deloitte and Hyatt have utilized contests to encourage their employees to create creative videos. Deloitte called it a “film festival” to give it a little more panache.

The concept is simple. Hold a friendly competition among your employees and between departments on who can produce the most powerful video that depicts the excitement of working at your firm. Having a contest creates a buzz within the firm about your employment brand image, which is exciting by itself. Using employee videos combined with the employee referral program provides every employee with a chance to be involved in recruiting, and because almost every employee has access to an inexpensive video camera, you will likely get high participation rates.

Contests are an effective tool because they allow employees to use their creativity in order to identify and cover exciting factors that those in corporate might never have thought of. In addition, the high number of videos generated gives you more choices of videos and more different approaches to choose from.

Content to Include

When creating recruiting and branding videos, here are some tips on how to make the content of the videos more impactful:

• Focus on well-managed practices. Many videos focus on benefits, but it’s important to realize that top performers care less about benefits than they do about working at a “well-managed” firm. Although demonstrating excellent management practices can be dry, it’s critical that you highlight them if you want to attract innovators and top performers. Management practices to profile include rapid decision-making, two-way communications, challenging opportunities, and great managers.
• Show off your technology. Right after being “well-managed,” top performers and innovators expect to be able to use the latest technology. Show what technology you use; make sure the script describes how your technology is superior to competitor firms.
• Use employee-generated videos. There’s just something about employee-created videos that make the viewer “believe” that the message is coming directly from employees.
• Show unique perks. Google became famous by highlighting its unique perks like free food and in-house washing machines. Be sure and highlight them by having employees utilize them.
• Have a tour. A virtual tour of the facility can show not just the building but the level of excitement that you feel when you visit. Make sure that the “sounds” depict the excitement at your firm.
• Have employee profiles. Everyone wants to work at a place that has “people like me,” so profile a cross-section of your employees. If you’re highly competitive, consider including comments from employees who used to work at competitors highlighting how much better this firm is. Be sure and include their first and last name to show that you’re not afraid of “losing them” to recruiters from other firms that view the video.
• Think global. Demonstrate that your firm is a global player by including videos created by your teams around the world. They should also consider making your videos available in several languages.
• Think diversity. Make sure that your video shows a broad range of diversity including race, gender, age, disability, and nationality (other potentially controversial possibilities include sexual orientation and religion).
• Use college videos. College students are the most frequent viewers of videos, so it’s important that you develop targeted videos for university students.
• Feature events. Include coverage of company events that might interest an outsider. Avoid the corporate annual meeting, but consider including short coverage of celebrations, parties, and awards ceremonies where the company is recognized as being a top place to work.
• Show “real” executives. Provide clips of executives directly involved in day-to-day work activities, and demonstrate when possible that executives at your firm have risen from entry-level jobs to the top.
• Make the industry exciting. If your firm happens to be part of an industry that most consider to be dreary, consider including a separate video that highlights the excitement and the challenge that few outsiders get to see.
• Highlight the region. If your firm’s facility happens to be in an area that many consider to be less than desirable, highlight the exciting things to do and see in your region.
• Involve customers. If your product is available to the masses, include customers praising the impact of your products in your recruiting videos.

Tips on Increasing Viewability and Impact

Some additional tips to help increase the number of video views:

• Paint an “imperfect” picture. Obviously, the goal is to highlight the best features of the firm but you must be careful that your video doesn’t include a 100% perfect message. If you want the company to come across as “real,” acknowledge at least a few things about the firm that are not perfect. You might have to fight with PR on this issue, but any video that looks like an “ad” or political speech won’t get very much traction. Incidentally, if you over-brag, expect ex-employees to comment or even to create counter “mocking” videos.
• Increase its viewing potential. Keep videos short and compelling. The best are between two and three minutes, and seven minutes is about the limit that most will watch. Don’t forget to “pre-test” your videos among your target audience to assess their impact. The very best videos are “passed on” to others because they’re so funny, exciting, or compelling.
• Periodically change your videos. All but the most compelling videos will eventually need to be replaced by newer videos. Either offer the visitor a choice of videos or periodically rotate them to give the visitor reasons to return in the future.
• Track their effectiveness. When possible, provide a “number viewed” calculator so that you can track the number of people who view your videos. You can also add a feature that allows viewers to “rate” your videos. Finally, because the very best videos are powerful enough so that viewers will want to send them to their friends, provide a feature to track the number of links that were forwarded to others.
• Use blogs to support videos. Employee blogs are another powerful tool to make your firm appear “real” to outsiders. Work with bloggers to get them to talk about your videos.
• Share with product videos. Work with product advertising to convince them to include a few short “it’s a great place to work” scenes in their product videos and commercials.
• Search for negative videos. Because employees and others can post videos in a variety of places “on their own” and without permission, periodically search for videos that might hurt your firm’s image. If an employee posted it, you can ask them to revise it or take it down. However, if it’s posted by a non-employee, you need to offer either a counter video or request that the site remove the video.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve ever watched a compelling TV show, documentary, or film, you already realize how powerful videos can be in sending a memorable message. Now that most mobile phones have Internet access and video recording capability, potential recruits have increased opportunities to view compelling videos.

Rather than making video a “one-time” event, develop it as on ongoing powerful channel to communicate with a massive audience that has already adopted video as its preferred channel. Conceiving, producing, editing, and publishing video needs to become a permanent process and a primary strategy in 21st-century recruiting.