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Charlie Brown never got much respect. Not from Lucy, who when she wasn’t snatching the football away at the last minute, was making fun of his pitching skills, nor from the Little Red-Haired Girl, with whom he was so infatuated.

Now, as it turns out, Charles Brown doesn’t get much respect from Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Out of his 100 applications for a job as a marketing manager, the Charlie Brown of our story has no idea where he stands with six out 10 of the companies.

Six weeks after applying, Charlie heard directly from only 28 companies that he isn’t getting a job. Seven more gave him a reference number, but despite having an MBA from Michigan and BA in mechanical engineering, Charlie didn’t know what to do with it. Three companies allowed him to check his status through their website. One — REI, the outdoor company that has been on the 100 best list for years — actually gave him a call.

As the other Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief.” keep reading…

Informatica, multiple honoree of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award, has launched a new careers site whose design isn’t full of bells and whistles, but whose verbiage touts Informatica’s “big data, big difference, big purpose.” It’s part of an ongoing relaunch, with more changes to come.

The company, fighting hard to bring in hundreds of people, got help from an agency not well known in the recruiting field — Emotive Brand, which had about 10 people working with Informatica from start to finish.

What Emotive delivered over the past year was more than a site, but a larger strategy as to how to recruit. Its research showed that Informatica had a strong company brand, but not a strong employer brand. Put differently: you may not have heard of this company. Perhaps more important, “I don’t think people really knew why Informatica mattered,” says Emotive Partner Tracy Lloyd.

Screen shot of the top of Informatica's previous careers main page

Cindy Cloud, talent attraction consultant at Informatica, says the site has been designed to be “teed up” for a mobile version. In other words, it was built in such a way that it’ll be easy to convert to a mobile site, and has a bit of an iPad look to it. “Minimalist on content,” she says, “big on job searches. You don’t have to read through blah blah blah, culture this, culture that — this just accentuates our brand discourse, our language, instead of the usual.”

As online recruiting sites get more complex, they can get harder to read for people who can’t see, as well as others who use “screen readers” because of challenges with their arms or other disabilities.

It doesn’t have to be that way, says Corbb O’Connor, a web usability consultant with O’Consulting Group. In the video below, O’Connor talks about:

• Why video and slick images aren’t always a bad thing for the blind
• The problem with contacting a company and asking for special help reading the site
• What he’s finding on corporate career sites vs. job boards
• Craigslist and LinkedIn
• Simple things to keep in mind when designing sites

It’s about 10 minutes, below. keep reading…

Chrysler uses the “Get in and Drive” theme of its employment branding in a new website, one that begins with you looking down on a car with no roof and allows you to stop and start the car as it moves along.

The company is hoping to show it is committed to change, is innovative, and willing to develop people. It got help in the redesign from NAS, The Right Thing, and mResource.

Chrysler also has jobs pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

In a video (below) used throughout the site, it plays up its organization as one of risk-taking and innovation. keep reading…

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…