ERE.net

Five years ago someone asked if the adoption of social networks would lead to the demise of job boards. It was a great question, one that forced a number of people to ask: “Why would they? What value were they not delivering? How should they evolve?”

Today there are more job boards than there were five years ago, some of which are attempting to be more social, just as the social networks themselves are looking at how best to serve the employment space. While the job boards have demonstrated a steady pace of evolution, corporate career sites have not. Yes, the graphics are getting better and widgets here and there are displaying live feeds from social media sites, but in the end they serve up the same loathed experience they did five years ago.

Corporate career sites have never been compelling enough to capture an audience. Despite huge advances in content management, content aggregation/curation, and content sharing, most sites remain little more than a thin veil for the ATS-delivered online application. The always informative Doug Berg of Jobs2Web once shared in conversation that all research indicates someone desperately seeking new employment will ignore all content and go direct to whatever link is labeled with a variant of “apply now.” Knowing this, is it still worth it to build out pricy, glossy career sites no one is paying attention to when other avenues to apply are emerging? keep reading…

When it comes to meeting the recruitment expectations of American college students, the hands-down winner is German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Of the 102 U.S. sites in the review, Bertelsmann’s corporate career site and online application process were found to do the best job of delivering what students say they want.

Conducted by Swedish research firm Potentialpark Communications, the firm surveyed almost 4,800 U.S. students and grads from a variety of business schools and universities. They were asked what they most wanted from career sites and the application process. From the features and component lists developed from the survey, Potentialpark analyzed 755 sites worldwide, including 102 in the U.S.

Bertelsmann came out on top on both the career site ranking and on a second ranking for the application process.

“The biggest strength of Bertelsmann’s career website,” says the report, “is to focus on the information flow within the site itself. The thinking starts from the job seekers’ point of view and what questions they have, rather than what the company gets across.”

On the career site rankings, Bertelsmann is followed by Accenture, Ernst & Young, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte. On the application rankings, adidas, Ernst & Young, Roche, and Northrup Grumman round out the top five.

The Potentialpark surveys come just a few days after a related survey on the candidate experience by CareerXroads. In that survey, principals Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin and a team of volunteers applied to the 100 companies on the Fortune best companies to work for list. Three months after the last resume was sent, 25 percent of the companies failed to even acknowledge receipt. keep reading…

What do Santa Claus and job seekers have in common? Neither gets much respect from recruiters.

Three months after applying to the last of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Santa has no idea if the job has been filled at 78 of them. He doesn’t even  know if 25 of them got his resume.

Applying under his given name, Chris Kringle (Anglicized from the original German), the jolly old guy was looking for a job as a systems engineer in logistics or product security.

With his uncanny ability to know who has been naughty or nice, and to manage overnight global delivery of billions of packages, Kringle should be a shoo-in for every recruiter’s short list. And even though he got turned down by 22 of the 100 companies, a few recruiters did call him up for a phone screen.

keep reading…

Job boards are far from dead. For the second consecutive year, internal transfers and promotions were the primary source of hire. A quarter of the companies that have a contingent workforce have no idea how big it is. More than half the companies use social media exclusively or as a significant part of their direct sourcing programs.

And finally, and least surprising of all, referrals continue to be the leading source of external hires.

These are among the highlights of the 10th annual Source of Hire study by CareerXroads. Released today, the study reports the results of a survey of 36 large, “well-branded” but anonymous U.S. companies who cumulatively employ 1.32 million workers and hired not quite 133,000 employees in 2010.

This is the 10th year that Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have conducted the survey to see where companies source their hires. As has been the case from the beginning in 2001, referrals from employees, vendors, alumni, customers, and other sources was the leading source of external hires. Last year, the surveyed companies reported 27.5 percent of their external hires came from referrals. The percentage has fluctuated only modestly over the years. keep reading…

If you don’t care a whit about candidate experience, then you aren’t likely to be much interested in being recognized for it. For everyone else, this one’s for you.

I had a chat with Gerry Crispin today and I can assure you he is passionate about the experience job seekers have as they navigate through a corporate career site in pursuit of information. So passionate, that he approaches the subject with near missionary zeal.

Yesterday he, his partner at CareerXroads Mark Mehler, and a group of friends released a monograph on the issue of the candidate experience. I posted about it here, but could not detail every valuable morsel in the paper.

Now, the group is hoping to take the matter to a higher level. Crispin, Elaine Orler, and Ed Newman want help with a survey about what it would take and how much information you would be willing to share to create an industry award around the candidate experience. keep reading…

What does “Candidate Experience” mean?

That would seem to be an easy question. But try it and you quickly see how tricky it is to answer.

The candidate experience is the emotional impression created in a person as they proceed through the process of seeking, applying, and being considered for a job with a specific company.

That’s my off-the-cuff answer. Considering a simple Google search turned up 99,000 references to a definition, mine seems as good as any.

Which is exactly the problem Gerry Crispin, Mark Mehler, and friends say is hobbling the industry. It is “evident,” they argue in a new, and provocative monograph, “that the stated opinions are too often unsubstantiated.”

“Unfortunately, among the 100,000 or so people claiming expertise about what the candidate experience is (literary license) the few common themes we have found have little substantive support for their conclusions,” the authors note in the introduction. keep reading…

I was recently sitting on a commuter train in the Chicago area enjoying what turned out to be a record blizzard for the area. Looking around I could see that a majority of people were just staring at their smartphones, most likely searching the web, checking Facebook, or tweeting about the blizzard. You see this same behavior when waiting in line for your coffee or when sitting in the waiting room at the dentist office. Google recently reported that mobile searches grew 130 percent compared to last year, and ERE frequently posts articles about mobile recruiting.

In August 2008 Dr. John Sullivan posted an article about recruiting trends for 2009 about the importance of mobile-accessible corporate careers sites. We all know how important mobile accessibility is, yet only a few companies are truly optimizing the application experience for mobile. Here are a few suggestions to get you started: keep reading…

This was the seventh year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, but it was the military talent category, added for the first time, that was mentioned by more judges than any other category, as employers searched for creative ways to attract the many returnees coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

keep reading…

Employee referrals and social media were already merging more quickly than Brangelina. A new tool from Bernard Hodes aims to make referrals and social media more tightly knit, and more personalized.

Hodes started thinking about all this at the end of 2008, going into the beginning of 2009. It has spent the last three months developing a tool companies could put on their corporate career sites, giving job candidates a personal suggestion of the jobs that might be best for them.

Here’s how it works.

keep reading…

Rackspace is a company doing so much right in the social media space that it’s hard to know where to begin. Numbers are as good a place as any. So consider these:

1. It has more than 21,000 followers on Twitter.
2. Its Facebook page is “liked” by almost 2,700 people.
3. Visitors to RackerTalent, the company’s 8-month old career site,  spend almost three times as many minutes learning about its culture than the average for the entire site, including actually searching for a job.

“Not only can we say it’s good, but damn, this is really great.” That’s Michael Long. He’s head of global talent branding for the web hosting and cloud computing company in San Antonio.

You may recall Long from my post in March. He’s the guy who got the company’s logo tattooed on his arm. Also known as The Red Recruiter, Long shepherded Rackspace’s new career site, first as a consultant, then inside as branding leader. The site launched shortly before the tat got inked. keep reading…

Intel is trying to tie together a sprawling network of social media recruiting efforts to achieve more consistency, get more recruiters involved in social media, and have more of a conversation and less one-way communication. In addition to making sure it’s getting the messages out to the candidates it wants, Intel’s recruiting strategists also want to make sure they keep up with competitors like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intuit.

Watch for all of the following out of Intel in the year to come: keep reading…

CareerBuilder unveils a new service today for harried recruiters who know they should have a talent network, but just haven’t found the time to organize things the way they want.

CareerBuilder’s new Talent Network does it for you. It’s pretty much a turn-key service that takes your branding, your look and feel, your jobs, and creates a site, optimizes jobs, and provides a versatile link  that invites jobseekers to join your network and start getting personalized job posts. Recruiters get a searchable pool of candidates, and a way of keeping in touch with them, and with all those other candidates now languishing in your ATS.

If this sounds like something you could do for yourself, it is. And if you have already done all the heavy-lifting to make it happen, pat yourself on the back. But from my conversations with recruiters and vendors, doing it yourself  — from the planning to the ATS customization, to implementing it in a way that automates all the routine work — is  so much effort that making it happen is far down the priority list for most employers. keep reading…

A pair of surveys about the use of social media for recruiting shows that while the waters are promising, navigating them is trickier than it might seem.

One of the reports, done by Universum, which surveyed U.S. college students on social media, as well as on other means of employer communication, found the company website to be the place where more than half of them look for information. Professional and social networks were not considered as useful, and, in fact ranked behind on-campus career fairs and even job boards.

In fact, Universum says that by a large percentage, college students would rather not be receiving employer information via social networks like Facebook. According to the report, 59 percent consider it “unattractive” to receive information through that site. Business networks, LinedIn for example, are a different story. Ninety-three percent of the students say it’s ‘attractive” to get employer information there.

Does that mean employers can skip Facebook and concentrate just on professional and business sites? No, says the second report by the Bernard Hodes Group. It found that 52 percent had some sort of employment-related discussion on a social networking site. By far the biggest percentage of them (68 percent) mentioned new job opportunities, while 42 percent had discussed the job search experience or were involved in a discussion about a company’s work environment. Almost 25 percent checked out a potential employer’s social networking site. keep reading…

You may think that the title of this article is a little unprofessional because it includes the word “crap.” If you think an alternate title like “increasing the readability of corporate messaging” would be more appropriate, you probably don’t fully buy into the concept of “authenticity.”

Allowing frank language on your website sends a message to cynical jobseekers that lawyers, PR people, and corporate invertebrates have not been allowed to completely reduce your messaging to 100% corporate blah blah. Messages that contain “authentic factors” are more likely to be read and believed. keep reading…

Fidelity has upgraded its college recruiting brochure, creating an interactive online version, and has made its online jobs information more friendly to mobile phone users.

Allyson Holbrook, Fidelity marketing director, HR MarCom, says that Fidelity is getting about 1,000 monthly views on the college recruiting brochure. Holbrook’s initial plan was just to update the normal company brochure. As she looked into it more, she realized the brochure was expensive, wasn’t even handed out by recruiters all of the time, and sometimes ended up in a trash can even when it did make it into a candidate’s hands.

So Fidelity rebuilt its brochure for both print and online, and made it more interesting than most. keep reading…

My younger brother Barak got married August 12, 2010. When we were growing up, the thing I knew for sure was that I hated him. It was the “hard fact.” There was no way around it. I hated him. Every time he said something I wanted to kill him (and obviously the other way around is true), and this picture is one of the few that I found when we were smiling and hugging. Later I seem to have managed to always have someone stand between us (quite like I see with my own kids these days).

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

Today he’s my best friend; we consult with each other on every new direction or thought, from big to small. We support each other on a daily basis.

I thought of him this morning, about our relationship, and the fact that in the distant past I was so confident that I’ll never want to help him, thinking that I hated him — for me was at the time, a “hard fact.” Something no one could argue with.

This morning, thinking of him and how things have changed during the past approximately 20 years, connected me to my conversations with many recruiters in Israel about their relationship with their corporate partners — usually from the U.S.

“They Would Never Agree to this”

I’ve been training thousands of HR recruiters and managers during the past four years regarding online recruiting. When I ask local recruiters about their progress in implementing social media tools and online recruiting in their company, I usually hear the same sentence: “We’re in a unique position, representing a U.S. corporation in Israel, and they would never agree to that…”

“They” is the U.S. based corporation. ”That” is usually one of a few things that “they” usually don’t agree to: keep reading…

Tens of millions of searches are conducted on the job boards every month. These are the active job seekers, drawn to one or another or, as is usually the case, more than one job board because, as Willie Sutton never said, that’s where the jobs are.

But for every active seeker, there are many more who, if they learned of the right opportunity, might just be convinced to kick the tires. Reaching those millions of others in order to find just that one, perfect candidate, is a recruiting goal best described as a quest.

For years, now, the job boards have been in hot pursuit. They’ve partnered with newspapers — CareerBuilder is mostly owned by newspaper publishers and Yahoo’s network is hundreds of newspapers deep — they power niche sites, buy keywords on search engines and traffic from social media, and have built networks of hundreds, even thousands of blogs, content providers, hobby sites, professional associations, and others.

In most cases, the networks and traffic deals simply broaden the distribution of job postings. Some, like the programs run by SimplyHired and Indeed, offer publishers the ability to choose what types of job ads to display. It’s a rudimentary type of targeting based on the content and nature of the site.

Monster’s Career Advertising Network is more sophisticated in that it targets ads to the user based on their browsing and job search behavior. Come across an ad that catches your attention and you click into the posting on Monster.com.

But recruiters are looking for more; instead of simply collecting apps, recruiters, influenced by social media, want to build relationships with candidates and bring them to the corporate career site. keep reading…

Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world. –Annie Lennox

I recently finished reading the book The Power of Nice. I especially liked this book, because not only was it written by two very successful women, it was written by people who work in the advertising industry. I work in the advertising industry, specifically in the niche area of human resource communications.

As I was reading this book, I felt reassured in knowing there are people who do believe that doing right by people and treating them with respect should be a given, and not an exception to the rule. What the two authors, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, espouse in their book is similar to something that I read in the book How to Become a Rainmaker. Both books talk about how the importance of being nice is a good thing to do as a respectful human being and how this action can carry over into building and elevating your business relationships. What helped me to truly appreciate The Power of Nice was thinking about the people I have met during my career and the impressions they made on me, some of those impressions were good and some rather bad.

In this same vein is the multitude of comments, articles, and blogs I have read recently describing the way people are treated during the application and interview process. keep reading…

I’m a major advocate of parallel benchmarking, i.e. learning from the best practices that have been successful in completely different business functions or industries than your own. A key parallel practice from advertising and marketing that recruiting and HR practitioners need to be aware of is “delivering authenticity.”

Being authentic is about much more than simply being accurate. It’s about developing a perception among your target audience that they can trust what you say, that your message is credible, honest, or genuine, and ultimately convincing. There are many times when people are accurate in what they communicate, but not credible or perceived as being genuine.

As a subject, authenticity has received much more attention these days, largely due to the rapid growth of social media, which many perceive as a more authentic communications channel. Peer-to-peer messaging, a tenet of social media, isn’t subject to the layers of bureaucratic editing that render most corporate messages generic and bland.

Compounding the issue today is the fact that many of us communicate with a highly diverse global audience comprised of individuals from different cultures each with established expectations and communication idiosyncrasies.

Most of the discussion about authenticity has been limited to expounding the need for it, with little attention being paid to how to assess or measure the degree to which your messages are in fact perceived as authentic. This article focuses on the approaches that an organization can use to assess the authenticity of recruiting messages. keep reading…