ERE.net

It’s a good thing that this year’s Super Bowl game lived up to its name because the 50+ commercials were mostly just OK.

Dogs and babies came out on top. They were the stars of four of the top five favorite ads in the USA Today Super Bowl Admeter. The M&M commercial ranked 4th.

However, it was a such a mediocre crop of ads this year that more than a few newspapers used the word “Yawn” in their headline of the coverage. The Associated Press report said: “The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.”

“What’s notable about this year versus others is that advertisers played it safe. As a result, we saw fewer standouts, but we also didn’t see as many costly mistakes,” said Tim Calkins. He’s clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who each year leads the school’s Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The panel’s top pick was the M&M ad. CareerBuilder, which ignored criticism over its use of chimpanzees, got a “B” grade from the panel. The USA Today audience ranked it in the middle of the pack. keep reading…

This morning, three days after the news that SAP is acquiring SuccessFactors, comes the announcement that SuccessFactors is buying recruitment marketer Jobs2Web for $110 million.

SuccessFactors says it will combine its “social, mobile, and collaborative recruiting management solution with Jobs2web’s leading recruiting marketing platform, creating an end-to-end recruiting system.”

Saturday’s SAP SuccessFactors acquisition touched off a rally Monday among the publicly traded HR tech vendors, as well as speculation about further consolidation in the industry. However, no mention was made of Jobs2Web.

Based just outside Minneapolis, Jobs2Web specializes in enhancing employer job postings to boost their findability by job seekers. The company optimizes job listings to improve their position on search results pages by, among other things, building micro-sites for each listing. Listings are also redistributed to multiple job boards, aggregation sites, and other places, with codes inserted for each listing so recruiters can identify the most effective marketing channels. keep reading…

The Facebook changes announced last week at the developers conference, and those in the weeks before, have major implications for the way employers use the site to brand themselves and build relationships with potential candidates and future hires.

Recruiters who now use Facebook exclusively or mostly to push out jobs will become even more marginalized by the increasing emphasis the social site is placing on engagement. Those who actively invest in courting their Facebook “fans,” offering content of value, and real conversations, will reap even greater rewards than they do now, earning their brand a place on user’s forthcoming Timelines, and the ability to broaden and measure their reach as visitors “Share” content with their own FB friends.

One of the consequence of these and the other changes Facebook is rolling out, is that it will be harder than ever for employers to compete for attention. Even before last week’s f8 conference, when the company’s most profound changes in years were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, routine updates such as a “like” or a me-too comment, and job postings, were being moved to a ticker-style activity window on the profile page. Even more is likely to appear there as Facebook’s standards of what’s worthy of being a top post, and thus rising to the top of a person’s wall, become more stringent. (A good summary of the announced changes is available here.) keep reading…

Matt Epstein really wants a job at Google. Really.

He wants to work for the company so much he’s launched a silly, almost ridiculous “Hire M.E.” campaign in which a phony mustache plays a supporting role. keep reading…

We live in a world of pictures, movies, and sound. The printed word is being replaced and expanded by cheap, easy access to video websites like YouTube as well as sites such as Hulu.com and Veoh.com.

According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013. keep reading…

Drawing recruiting lessons from a study of conversion rates for e-retail shoppers may seem a peculiar thing to do, and it probably is. But don’t let that deter you from considering what Engine Ready found when it studied the effectiveness of the various ways buyers came to a site.

The just-completed study reaffirmed a finding first reported in January 2008 that visitors who arrive at a retailer’s site by clicking on a paid search ad were more likely to make a purchase than were those who got there by clicking on an organic search result. How much more likely? Sixty one percent more. keep reading…

Oops! Those numbers that comScore, the Internet traffic counter, released last week showing Yahoo’s HotJobs (profile; site) in the number two position were not quite right. The numbers have been updated and now show Monster (profile; site) in 2nd place behind CareerBuilder (profile; site).

The changes don’t affect the standing of other job boards nor the 51 percent growth in the overall jobs category, which according to comScore was still the fastest-growing content category on the Internet.

comScore didn’t explain the error, except to say in a footnote to its chart, “The December 2008 Monster.com Job Search data have been adjusted upward from 3.7 million unique visitors to 6.7 million unique visitors due to classification of additional job search-related URLs that were not originally included.”

Even with the revision in the December 2008 numbers, Monster is hearing the footsteps. Once all but written off as a player in the recruitment market, HotJobs has dramatically grown its traffic through its partnership with about half of the daily newspapers in the U.S. as well as its higher visibility on Yahoo’s homepage and its channel position.

The comScore data shows HotJobs grew its unique visitor traffic 146 percent in December 2008 over December of 2007. Monster’s traffic grew 62 percent and CareerBuilder’s increased 78 percent. The biggest gainer, however, was SimplyHired, the jobs search engine. Its unique visitor count jumped 161 percent.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Monster’s CEO Sal Iannuzzi told an audience of Wall Street analysts Thursday that despite the global recession, “… we feel it is a time to aggressively pursue the market share rather than retreat.” Spending on marketing, among other expenses, will push the company into the red for the 1st quarter of this year.

For the first time since 2004 Monster will air a commercial during the Super Bowl, at a cost of around $3 million per 30-second spot. It will go to head to head with arch-rival CareerBuilder whose “monkey” commercial of 2005 routinely makes the list of best Super Bowl commercials. Is the high price worth it? According to the website multichannelmerchant.com, CareerBuilder experienced a 89 percent traffic spike on the Monday after the game-day ad ran in 2005. The following year, CareerBuilder’s day after traffic jumped 71 percent to 1.45 million visits.

One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

keep reading…

I don’t run into many recruiters/staffing/HR professionals who don’t agree with the statement: Recruiting is just like sales.

While we can argue over the differences between the two professions (please don’t lose sight of the trees through the forest on this one), we all know the parallels are overwhelming.

keep reading…

In my sales management career, I would bet that I’ve seen about 5,000 resumes for salespeople. Yet, I still haven’t seen one that shows someone who has achieved 40% of quota. Every single resume shows 100%, 200%, or 2,000,000% of goal. Where are all of the people who have had less-than-stellar sales performances? Did they all leave the sales profession? If all of the resumes that I saw truly represented the performance of the individual, the U.S. economy would be thriving, to say the least. Every company would be enjoying record revenue performances.

If you have read my past articles, you’ve felt my passion for creating sales marriages, those relationships whereby a mutually-beneficial relationship is formulated between a sales professional and a company based on synergistic matches of needs. This is not easy to do as, right off the bat, the relationship begins with a flawed tool: a resume. It is this tool, not necessarily the individual, that dupes, tricks, and stretches the truth of a person’s pedigree. Yet, as an employer, that is what you have to work with when hiring a sales professional. You need to find a way to mine through the information in a quest for the complete truth.

keep reading…

As recruiting professionals, quite often our clients solicit our advice when defining the roadmap of a particular business unit within their organizations. Some of us even go so far as to become third-party consultants on subject matter with which we have particular expertise.

Regardless of the industry vertical in which we specialize, our clients rely on our guidance to assist them in reaching/exceeding their revenue goals by leveraging the benefit of our experience. Telephone selling brings with it a unique set of challenges and opportunities that, if managed correctly, can produce new incremental revenue streams and deliver an impressive ROI.

keep reading…

There are few decisions more critical for a company than the hiring of the leadership of their sales organization. Yet, few know how to do it well. Many err and “promote” their best seller to a sales management position.

Why this is called a promotion is beyond me. The job of the sales manager is vastly different than that of a sales person, so why is this considered employment elevation? Often sales managers earn less than the top sales people. Promotion?

keep reading…

Many cars today tell the driver when it is time to perform maintenance. Even better, some tell the driver that maintenance is needed in 1,000 miles with updates along the way. It would be great if as a business executive or small business owner, you had this kind of technology at your fingertips.

Unfortunately, managing a sales organization will always be a manual effort. Sure, CRM systems and contact managers help, but there is no technology that replaces the leadership associated with sales management.

keep reading…

It’s a common assumption. A good sales manager should first be a good salesperson, right? Wrong. It is a big jump from being a skilled “doer” to being a skilled “coach of doers.”

In many cases, the top sales person is an enigma. Salespeople are ego-driven and competitive and want to be recognized and rewarded. But like a cup with a hole in the bottom, no matter how much water you add Monday, it needs to be refilled by Tuesday. Top salespeople are often driven by ego-validation that comes from each sale and public recognition, and it never stops.

keep reading…

The importance of a good market analysis in your area cannot be over emphasized, and whether you’re a large corporation or a small firm, understanding your market will help identify many different factors that can have an impact on your business or clients.

As a recruiter or consultant, the employment market analysis will give you an overall projection of industries within a specific state, region, or ZIP code. There are many different companies offering detailed employment or industry data along with many different factors. I like to use www.economicmodeling.com, which has detailed data on occupations and industry location quotient, to name a few.

keep reading…

There is something truly magical about that precise moment when a product is bought or sold. I suppose it’s because our species has relied upon this most fundamental form of capitalism for so long.

As humans became more efficient in drawing sustenance and were no longer engaged 100% in the act of survival, we learned to plant a little more rice or catch a few more fish. This abundance was then taken to the “marketplace” where people traded it for something they didn’t have but nonetheless needed. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I’d be willing to bet the act of buying and selling activates some ancient and primitive part of the human brain.

keep reading…

By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Over the course of the last three weeks, we have laid out a model for managing the portfolio of job opportunities an organization produces similar to that used by organizations to manage their product/service portfolio.

keep reading…

This is an article about how to find more top candidates. It might not seem like it until the end, though. To start, conduct a Google search using these terms: Internet marketing (basics OR 101) class You’ll find the this link in the top five listings: Online Class – Internet Marketing 101 – eLearning Certification. You might want to click on the link to see the whole course agenda. Just reading the agenda will make you a better recruiter. Here’s the agenda topic that stood out for me:

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines ó Top Search Engines; How They Work; Page Rankings Explained; Keywords; AdWords; Optimization; Submitting your site; Pay-Per-Clicks; Link Popularity; and more.

keep reading…

We’re now in the midst of my annual recruiting and hiring challenges 2005 survey. You might want to take it. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by participating in an important industry study. It will be especially important to you if you’re not hiring enough top candidates right now. The survey will show you what you need to do to break this bottleneck. The preliminary results so far are quite revealing. Two big findings stand out:

1. Few corporate recruiters are actually cold calling passive candidates. The survey shows that less than 30% of corporate recruiters do it, and few of them are any good at it. This is a big issue if you want to compete effectively with external search firms. It’s one way to hire more top people without paying agency fees.

keep reading…