Like many of you, I recently fell victim to the tidal wave of job loss that has been sweeping our great country. After spending the past year consulting with companies on career site optimization, search engine marketing, website analytics and social media as a recruiting strategy, the dismal economy finally caught up with me. Now I think my tweets will be even more relevant for job seekers as I am one of you, facing the same concerns, challenges and frustrations in real time.
I am an optimist and so I’m confident that we will all find good work in due time. I enjoy being TheJobsGuy as I have met a ton of really cool people and I will continue to do what I can to help you all find work. If any of you happen to stumble across anything internet marketing and/or social media related, please let me know, and thanks for all your follows, RTs and kind words.
BTW, anyone know of any good pink slip parties coming up in Minneapolis 
OK, we have gotten some good responses on our poll but not a lot of feedback. Please comment below and answer these questions; Have you gotten a job through one of the tools/websites mentioned in our poll or some other method? and which one? what has been your experience with the different tools we list? Your choices are;
job boards – (monster, CareerBuilder, Niche boards, etc.)
Aggregators – ( SimplyHired, Indeed, etc.)
LinkedIn
FaceBook
Twitter
Direct to company
Recruiter
Newspaper
Personal network – (family, friends, organizations, etc.)
Search Engines – (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
see results or cast your vote
Please leave a comment!
“How To Make Twitter a Valuable Recruiting Tool” will be presented as a free webinar on Thursday, June 18th at 12:00pm CST. Registration in limited to 25 participants. Click here to register online; https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/657467826
Discover how to;
- •Quickly build a list of job seeking followers
- •Find and tweet relevant content
- •Automate content and job feeds
- •Use proper twitter etiquette or twitiquette
- •Get your tweets to go viral and reach more people
- •Use IGoogle to become a content expert
We’ll start by answering the question, “What is Twitter?” Then we’ll also help you determine if
Twitter is even right for your company’s recruiting efforts, how much time is involved in doing it
right, how to choose a name, how many twitter accounts to deploy and whether to go with
company or individual Twitter accounts.
Click here to register online; https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/657467826
A message for young people about the dangers of social media and the internet.
Great video explaining how and why to use hashtags on Twitter!
I’ve been noticing a number of corporate Facebook pages lately which suggests that they are entering the world of social media. That is until I noticed that the last update posted to the page was months ago! With all due respect people, social media does not mean you set up a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account and then doing nothing. The word social implies interaction so if you really want to use social media to help promote your companies brand, products, services and career opportunities, pay attention to your audience and provide a steady stream of relevant content. By steady stream I mean at least once a week and once a day will make you more valuable to your audience as long as your updates, tweets and posts remain relevant!
Smart companies are using a combination of automated updates and human updates and most of your followers can tell the difference. If your company is not willing to invest the time to be social and provide a consistent stream of good content, just accept the fact that social media is not for your company at this time and move on!
Feel free to post your comments!
I’ve gotten a big response from this topic on Twitter today so I wanted to move it to the blog so it would be easier for everyone to participate in the conversation.
While I was in line at a coffee joint this morning I overheard a conversation regarding job search. One man asked the other, “so did you get all your resumes out yet today?” to which the other guy responded, ” I’m finding that sending resumes out to companies does not work so I am focusing my job search efforts on head hunters.
I’m curious what your experiences are with regards to applying direct to companies versus using a headhunter versus job boards. Please add your thought as a comment
I made a post a few weeks back regarding my opinion of the idea of employment branding. I want to take a moment and expand on this topic as I’m still not sure how clear it is to most people and I think I can clear it up.
First let’s clearly define “brand”. Brand can be defined as a bank account the balance of which consists of the net of deposits and withdrawals. Every time someone in your target market has a positive experience with your product, service or company, that is a deposit. Every time someone in your target market has a negative experience with your product, service or company, that is a withdrawal. Your brand is dynamic /fluid and occurs at both a micro and macro level meaning it is in the minds of both each individual you are trying to reach (or not which is a net 0) and also in the collective mind of the masses. The larger the balance in your brand bank account, the greater the strength of your brand. When things go wrong with regards to your product, service or company and executives respond poorly, that can equate to a major withdrawal that can seriously weaken your brand. When customer service is slow to respond to a common and growing customer complaint, this trend of tiny withdrawals can turn into serious brand erosion.
Now let’s cover the difference between the two; your brand is what consumers say about your product, service or company and the value of your brand is expressed in how often consumers choose your brand over your competitions.
Your employment brand is driven by what your employees say about working at your company and is expressed in many ways including how they refer to their job or company in the social networks or by looking for a job in another company. The only thing worse than a a good employee who quits and leaves your company is when a marginal employee quits but doesn’t leave.
With sites like www.glassdoor.com and social media sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter employees now have a number a places to anonymously voice their comments, concerns or compliments. Each time an employee refers positively to their employment experience, that’s a deposit in your employment brand bank account. Every time an employee posts a negative comment on Glass Door or one of the many social media sites, that is a withdrawal.
The first step to managing your employment brand is to make sure you have a great place to work. Survey your employees if you’re not sure what this means. The key to managing your employment brand outside of your company is to provide your employees with many social media outlets and tools to share their positive experiences. Whether this is a fan page on FaceBook or a group on LinkedIn or something else it is important to open up the channel.
Secondly, companies need to monitor the chatter and the good news is there are many ways to automate this monitoring like www.search.twitter.com or Google alerts for your company name. Both of these tools provide RSS feeds so it is easy to turn on your computer everyday and see if people are making deposits or withdrawals into your bank account.
And finally, leaders need to understand transparency and be willing to respond to comments, concerns and complaints in a respectful responsible manner. If your company is smart enough to develop and participate in social media channels, (by the way, you’re employees are doing so with or without you), but fails to respond to member feedback, especially when it is negative, this can turn into a serious withdrawal.
I totally agree with the importance of employment branding although I’m still skeptical that any amount of advertising and promotion can create one where it didn’t exists before. I just want company leaders to clearly understand where it comes from and what they can do about it.
In my humble opinion.
One of the best, and most used, applications of the web 2.0 revolution has been to technologically enhance the way we all interact with each other. As we’ve seen, the “social” web has altered too how employers interact with talent pools. It has also sucked up time and energy on useless efforts to create meaning and hires.
This webcast will share how Microsoft has optimized their recruiters’ activities on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Ning, Twitter, and other key social channels to make them more productive on these networks. We’ll also learn about the creative ways they are measuring the effectiveness of these sources.
For more info or to sign up, click here
If your talent acquisition leaders are getting caught up in “employment branding” conversations with their agency, ask them, “to what end?”. Fact of the matter is the value of your brand is determined by your target market, not by your advertising agency. Advertising creates awareness but awareness does not equal a powerful brand. Preference equals a powerful brand and outside of maybe the fashion industry, no amount of brand marketing can deliver the amount of preference or consumer choice required to create a brand.
Employment Branding is an even more nebulous, what does “employment branding” even mean? Ask 10 different agencies and you will get 10 different answers. Why, because employment branding is not easy to understand and many agency reps tend to explain it in a manner that makes it sound like recruitment marketing, which it is not. You may have a strong brand that helps you attract candidates like Microsoft, Target, Wall Street Journal or a strong local or regional brand, but the odds of you building an “employment brand” with a company that isn’t already a strong brand are slim at best. Yet millions of dollars are spent every year by talent acquisition execs that were lead to believe this would have an impact on their recruiting efforts.
Iin this day-and-age, with unemployment at historic highs, it is a rare exception when a job seeker actual stops before accepting or applying for a position to consider the affects of the companies brand on their resume or future employment. Today job title and location are the two big attractions and if I am an employer, I simply need to make sure that my jobs are easily found by job seekers and it is easy for the job seeker to interact with my company.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have your company logo prominently displayed on all your recruitment marketing efforts, or an employment branding strategy, in fact I recommend it. But never lose sight of the fact that the first responsibility of a talent acquisition leader is to make it easy for your recruiters to find and hire quality candidates. Deploying an “employment branding” campaign will not be a means to that end.
The bottom line is that the only time when something called “employment brand” actually exists is when an unbiased third party like Fortune, Forbes, Money or some other magazine or respected media comes out with a “Best Places to Work” list and your company is on it. Other than that, you’re better off spending your employment branding dollars on lottery tickets!
In my humble opinion.
Stay tuned for my next post on the topic of “Brand Jacking”
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Authors
Ken Horst