Older Workers Muscle Out Students for Internships

Competition for internships will be stiff this fall, as experienced/mature workers and college students vie for ways to get a foot in the door. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of employers report that they are seeing experienced workers, those with more than ten years experience, and mature workers, workers age 50 or older, apply for internships at their organizations. This is according to a CareerBuilder survey conducted among more than 2,500 employers between May 18 and June 3, 2010.

Regardless of applicants’ ages, more than one-quarter (27 percent) of employers said they plan to hire interns during the remainder of 2010 to help support workloads. Fourteen percent said they anticipate hiring paid interns, while 7 percent said they won’t be paying their interns. An additional 5 percent said they will hire both paid and unpaid interns. Fifty-three percent of employers said they plan to pay interns $10 or more per hour, while 5 percent said they will pay $25 or more per hour.

When it comes to responsibilities, employers reported the following tasks that interns at their organizations typically handle:

• Hands-on experience related to their goals – 73 percent
• Office support – 52 percent
• Working with customers – 35 percent
• Running errands – 23 percent
• Office maintenance – 19 percent

“The last 18 months have reshaped internships as more than an experience-builder for college students. Now, they’re also a way for experienced workers to explore new opportunities,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. “Internships can act as an extended, full-time job interview and potentially lead to more opportunities for college students and for more seasoned employees. In fact, 52 percent of companies we surveyed said they are likely to hire interns as full-time, permanent employees.”

Haefner recommends the following tips to help land an internship this fall:

• Get connected: When applying for an internship, ask family and friends if they know anyone who works in the field you’re interested in. As in any job search, an “in” at a company may help you land a job – especially if the company doesn’t have an established internship program.
• Start your search now: If you think you’ll have time to do an internship in the fall, start looking as soon as you can. Visit sites like CollegeRecruiter.com for internship listings.
• Be open-minded: Be open to a variety of different organizations, such as local charities or even small start-ups. Organizations with limited budgets are often especially receptive to the extra help an intern provides.

Survey Methodology

This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive© on behalf of CareerBuilder.com among 2,534 U.S. hiring managers (employed full-time; not self-employed; non government); ages 18 and over between May 18 and June 3, 2010 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset of U.S. Employees, based on their responses to certain questions). With a pure probability sample of 2,534 one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 1.95 percentage points. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies.

Employers Should Promote Rather Than Hide Their Recruitment Videos

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how many pictures is a video worth? Probably 1,000 so that means that a video is worth 1,000,000 words. If a typical job posting ad is about 500 words, that would mean that a recruitment video is worth about about 2,000 job posting ads. We can quibble over the exact numbers, but I think that few would argue that a recruitment video is going to be far, far more powerful that a job posting ad. So why is it that so few employers seem to push their videos out as far and as wide as they can?

You’d think that employers who sometimes spend hundreds but far more often spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on their recruitment videos would want as many candidates to see them as possible, but some employers seem to feel that their recruitment videos should be well kept secrets. I won’t name the employer but think major contractor to the U.S. federal government. They hire hundreds of highly skilled college students and recent graduates a year. I went to their web site this weekend to see if they had recruitment videos targeted to students and graduates and they had a bunch. I tried to grab the embed code for the videos so that I could then copy that code, click over to our site, and in a minute or two have those videos running on our site. But the videos running on the employer’s web site had no sharing mechanism. You couldn’t even send a link out through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media sites.

I then hopped over to YouTube and pulled up the employer’s channel, which is where all of their videos are housed. They had dozens of videos, many of which were targeted at their customers and other such stakeholders but a number of which were targeted at potential employees. Those videos were easily shareable on social media sites but they had disabled the embed feature so you couldn’t copy the embed code and paste it onto your web page and have the videos run for free on your site. I was really shocked. Why wouldn’t they want their recruitment videos running on other sites? What’s wrong with a little free publicity?

CollegeRecruiter.com re-launched a month ago and part of the new site re-design makes it very, very easy for employers or others to upload their recruitment videos. Those videos are then accessible to everyone who uses CollegeRecruiter.com. How much do we charge? Nothing. We could charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars and it would still be worthwhile to our clients to upload their videos but we made the decision to give away a lot of nickels like this because we know that more and better videos means more and better content means more and better candidates means more and better employer clients means more and better videos.

Want a couple of examples of employers who understand that posting their videos on CollegeRecruiter.com and other sites helps their recruiting efforts? Look no further than our friends at Sodexo and Nestle Purina. Want another example? Upload your recruitment videos and then post a comment below. Hint, hint.

Making the Most of Your Time at Work

Do you ever feel like there is not enough time to get everything done at work?  If so, ask yourself if you’re managing your time as well as you could.  By doing so, you may start to feel like you’re being more productive, while feeling less stressful.

Here are some tips to help you better manage your time on the job:

Don’t assume it’s urgent – Just because you’re given a new assignment, that doesn’t mean it is due “today”, so ask when it needs to be completed.

Make your manager manage you – When it seems you have too many tasks, ask your boss/supervisor to assist you in prioritizing them.  This way you’re both on the same page when it comes to what is expected of you.

Say yes to something - If you’re too busy one day to handle an assignment, offer a more convenient time to work on it.

For more tips to help you better manage your time, see the source below.

When it comes to your job, there is only so much time in a day.  By managing your time wisely, you’ll be more productive and feel less stressful.

Information provided by Sara Eckel.

Source

http://dbjobs.co.id?p=391

Video: Taking Your Recruiting Message Mobile: Why, How, and When

I had the pleasure of delivering this 75 minute presentation a couple of months ago in San Diego, California at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2010 annual conference. The description of the presentation was as follows:

Learn why your organization needs to have a mobile recruitment marketing strategy and how best to implement it so you can recruit the candidates you need and stay within your budget.

Virtually every member of Gen Y and about 90 percent of Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers care enough about only one electronic device to carry it with them virtually everywhere they go: their cell phones. If your organization’s web site and recruiting message are not fully accessible to your most sought after candidates on their mobiles then those candidates will end up becoming employees of your competitors. In this highly interactive and humorous presentation, learn why your organization needs to have a mobile recruitment marketing strategy and how best to implement it so you can recruit the candidates you need and stay within your budget.

Employ Media Publishes Evaluation Criteria for .Jobs Domains

I received an email earlier this afternoon from Ray Fassett of Employ Media to announce that they are now accepting proposals from organizations and people who wish to own a non-company name .jobs domain. The link to the Request for Proposal (RFP) form did not work for me so I replied back to Ray to tell him so and ask him to email the PDF to me. He replied back within minutes with a note saying the links on their web site worked for him and he included a link for me that worked.

The domains which Employ Media is now marketing include geographic names (i.e., NewYork.jobs), occupational field names (i.e., engineering.jobs), and dictionary words (i.e., diversity.jobs). One of the key objections that I’ve had to this entire process has been the lack of openness and transparency by Employ Media and the other driving forces behind this expansion of the dot jobs charter: Direct Employers Association and Society for Human Resource Management. I’m disappointed but not terribly surprised to read in the PDF application form that the RFP process will be anything but open and transparent. Keep in mind that if you buy a .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, or just about any other type of domain you just head over to GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or any of thousands of other registrar sites, pull out your credit card, and buy the domain name. Anyone can buy any domain name and the process is completely open, transparent, and honest. Compare that to the evaluation process that Employ Media just announced:

6.7.1 Employ Media reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to alter the schedule of proposal evaluation as it deems necessary or appropriate. Dates listed may be changed by posting on Employ Media’s Website without notice to any Applicant or prospective Applicant.

6.7.2 Employ Media will assess Proposals by applicable criteria, including but not limited to the following criteria
(i): quantity of Domains of Interest;
(ii) community value, impact and investment;
(iii) enhancement of the .JOBS brand;
(iv) business plan, capability and sustainability;
(v) technical and financial capabilities;
(vi) general company (or team) information;
(vii) compliance with the .JOBS Charter;
(viii) compliance with any and all applicable policies, practices and business rules which govern .JOBS;
(ix) compliance with all applicable ICANN requirements;
(x) quality, innovation, choice and differentiation;
(xi) the nature and strength of the applicant and/or any named partners, including historical business practices and further including historical activities and actions as such have related to the .JOBS sTLD, Employ Media, SHRM, ICANN, the Community and this request for proposal process, including Employ Media/ICANN contractual amendments and Employ Media/SHRM Policy Development Process amendments;
(xii) the effect, if any, on the Society for Human Resource Management (“SHRM”);
(xiii) the ability of the proposal to deliver as set forth, including business and technical capabilities of any relevant parties,
(xiv) willingness to work cooperatively with other applicants and third parties; and
(xv) compliance with the terms of this request for proposals. Individual criteria may be given varying weight depending upon the nature of any given Proposal.

In any given instance, one or more of the criteria listed above may be dispositive in terms of Employ Media’s evaluation of a Proposal, but need not be so. Employ Media may, in its sole discretion, choose to ignore or decrease in importance, or increase in importance, one or more of the criteria listed above, and Employ Media may do so on a proposal-by-proposal basis.

You also must agree to negotiate with them, they can reject your application for any reason, they can for any reason pull the domain from you after you go live even if you’ve managed to build it into something valuable, you must indemnify them if they’re sued for anything related to your domain, and they can do whatever they want with any information they collect from you including publish on the Internet the financial statements and business plan that they’re requiring you to provide.

Okay, so let’s say you can live with all of that and you still decide to proceed. What’s the cost? Who knows? Your application will cost you $250 and that’s non-refundable. They don’t even have to consider it. They can just pocket your money and tell you to buzz off. But let’s say they do cash your check (no credit cards!!) and give you the positive news that they are willing to temporarily lend to you one of the domains (remember they can pull it back whenever they want). How much will the domain cost? Who knows? You need to tell them how much you’re willing to pay. Maybe that’s where revenue share comes into play. If you have big plans and they are convinced that you can properly execute, it seems to me that they’re going to be far more likely to approve your proposal if you promise to pay them even one percent of your revenues than if someone with a plan which is equally as good and is equally as likely to executive promises to pay them dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.

Wow. What chutzpah! (defined: Yiddish for unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity)

CollegeRecruiter.com Adds Language Filters

It has been an interesting and education process this past month as we continue to make the move from a Web 1.0 platform where virtually all communication was from our staff and our employer clients to the job seekers over to our Web 2.0 platform where far more communication is user generated. We knew going into this, for example, that we’d inevitably have some users who wouldn’t post appropriate content and that some of that content may end up offending other users. When I outlined my vision for what we were and where I wanted to take us, I got a lot of “are you crazy” looks and remarks back from friends, family, employees, contractors, clients, and other stakeholders. One of their biggest concerns was how would we deal with the inevitable person who didn’t just accidentally step over the line but deliberately leaped over the line by posting porn or other such content which would be very offensive and potentially harmful to our business.

Fortunately, we’ve had only one real problem in the month but I’m realistic enough to know that we’ll have more and probably more frequent. We’ve been able to minimize the number of incidents by being proactive and responsive. On the proactive side, only members can post content and all members must verify they’re for real by registering at our site, receiving an email to the email address they provide, clicking on a link within that email, completing their profile, and answering a math question to help verify that they’re actually human rather than a “bot” (computer program). Are those hoops fool proof? Of course not, but neither is the lock on your front door but locking your house makes it far less likely that you’ll be robbed so you lock it even though you know that a very determined burglar will smash down your door, break a window, whatever.

So what do we do to prevent illicit content once the member is registered? We moderate all blog, video, photo, and other such content. Unless you’re one of the administrators, if you post a blog article then that blog article does not go live until we’ve reviewed and approved it. There are a handful of blog contributors who post frequently and their content is always top notch so we don’t even have to read their blogs. We just approve them. But if we don’t know you well, we’re going to read your blog article to make sure that it isn’t objectionable. It may not be beautiful prose, but we’ll approve it if it isn’t terribly objectionable.

Over time, I anticipate that we’ll see more and more blogs, videos, and other such content posted to our site and we’ll welcome that. So the review process will become more and more of a burden. How will we minimize the burden on our staff time while still doing what we can to minimize the illicit content? One way is our new language filter. This administrative feature enables us to filter out offensive or otherwise prohibited words from content on CollegeRecruiter.com which will help us more efficiently moderate the user generated content, as well as increase the value of your site traffic to the rest of our members and clients. The language filter is sort of a 2010 version of George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say on the radio” skit where he said aloud seven of the most popular swear words. Maybe it is a reflection on society, but our filter has a lot more than seven words in it. In fact, it has dozens upon dozens.

So what happens if you post a blog article with one of the words in it? Chances are that you’re a “real” person and that you just stepped over the line. Maybe you did so accidentally and maybe you did so deliberately but if your blog article is good other than a four letter word that you included, we’ll want to publish your blog article but not with the swear word. So the language filter automatically edits the swear word so only the first letter of the swear word is shown and the rest are replaced with (*). So if “swear” was a banned word and you entered “swear” in your blog article, the word will will show up in your blog article as “s****” (without the quotes). Words are filtered when the page is being prepared for display to the user.

Neat, huh?

Consider Career Retraining

In the current economy, you have probably heard career experts encourage job seekers to explore job retraining, which requires learning new skills for a specific position.  Depending on your situation, this idea may or may not be suitable.  However, there is another option to consider and that would be career retraining.

Career retraining involves preparing yourself to work in multiple jobs inside a certain career field.  As a result, job seekers give themselves more flexibility in the workforce.  Here are some steps to help you get started in career retraining:

1. Find an occupational field in which you would enjoy working - Think about what you like to do, and choose a field where you can apply that interest.
2. Figure out which way the winds are blowing in your industry - In other words, do your research on the field you’re interested in, weigh the pros and cons, and make a decision based on your happiness and where you believe you can have short-term and long-term success.
3. Become an expert in two fields: the occupation you selected and the management of your own career – While acquiring new skills and improving the ones you have is important to establishing a career, managing your own career is also a key.  This will allow you to create your own path to success by making decisions that are in your best interest.

So, if you’re thinking about changing careers but want to give yourself more flexibility in that career, then career retraining may be a great option for you.

Information provided by Peter Weddle.

Source

http://thecareernews.com/newsletter.php?news=1871&archive=0

How to Find the Right Job Board for You

There are some 50,000 job boards which target U.S. job seekers and another 50,000 job boards which target job seekers in other countries. If you’re looking for a new job, how do you know which job board is the best for you?

I recommend to job seekers that they look at a bunch of job boards depending upon their interests and location. Monster and Careerbuilder should be two of the boards that virtually all U.S. job seekers use as they’re big and general. Other boards that fall into that “general” category would be Indeed (their postings run on our site after the jobs posted by our employer clients), SimplyHired, JuJu, LinkUp, and TopUSAJobs.

Job seekers should also use at least one board in their relevant niches, so if you’re looking for an internship in marketing in Seattle, use one or two college job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com, one or two marketing job boards, and one or two job boards which focus on Seattle or the State of Washington. You can find these niche boards by running at search at Google, Yahoo, Bing or whatever search engine you use. For a college job board, you can just type in “college job board” (without the quotes) or “internship jobs” or “entry level jobs” and you’ll see on the first page or two a bunch of good sites. Repeat that process for your occupational field, geographic location, and other characteristics which are important to you.

TheLadders falls into a niche that is somewhat like college job boards in that it targets by pay level which is strongly correlated to experience. Few entry-level employees make at least $100,000 per year and those are the only candidates who are allowed to use TheLadders. So if you’re in that $100k income bracket, then TheLadders, 6FigureJobs, and some others are good choices. But if you’re an intern, you won’t be allowed to use those sites.

Finally, a great resource for figuring out if the job board you’ve located is legitimate is to check to see if it is a member of the only trade association for our industry: the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS). It has a roster page that allows you to see a complete list of all member sites and even sort it alphabetically or by industry so you can also use it to locate a job board instead of just using it to verify that the job board you’re thinking of using is legitimate. Scam sites are not allowed to join the Association so you can feel a lot more comfortable about the board you’re using if it is a member than if it is not.

Crowd-sourcing sessions at onrec Expo 2010

(Chicago, IL – August 25, 2010) — onrec Expo 2010 provides a thriving educational network opportunity for today’s recruiter. Onrec is the highly regarded “must attend” recruitment event of 2010 where corporate recruiting practitioners and thought leaders will share cutting edge sourcing and recruiting solutions to meet current and future talent needs.

onrec Expo 2010 brings attendees, presenters and exhibitors together to share their common interests – sourcing and recruiting top talent; to provide networking in an educational and professional environment which will stimulate beneficial partnerships, discussions, and debates.

This year, onrec will also offer Crowd-Sourcing, a public distributed problem-solving model. First, the problems are broadcast to attendees – also known as the crowd – in the form of an “open call” for solutions. The group works together to form a successful solution to the problems at hand and offer up actionable solutions to help the recruiters at their organization.

This year’s Crowd-Sourcing sessions for the main event include:

• Crowd-Sourcing – “The Power of Social Media”, presented by Eric Winegardner, Vice President, Client Adoption, Monster.com and Marie Artim, Assistant VP of Recruiting, Enterprise Rent-A-Car
• Crowd-Sourcing – “Sourcing”, presented by Donato Diorio, Founder & CEO, Broadlook Technologies
Crowd-Sourcing – “Recruiting”, presented by Steven Rothberg, President and Founder, CollegeRecruiter.com and Stephen A. Lowisz, President and CEO, Qualigence

General topics have been pre-determined (i.e. sourcing, recruiting, assessment, screening, etc.), and typically the attendees form into mini communities, with 2-3 attendees, they then submit solutions to the specific topics’ problems. The attendees also sort through the solutions, finding the best ones that will provide workable results. The best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place – the crowd-sourcer, as well as the attendees. The winning individuals within the crowd are then rewarded with kudos, intellectual satisfaction, and recognition of a job well done.

About onrec Expo:

onrec Expo is Onrec.com’s annual international recruitment conference featuring a wide range of over 25 industry specific topics from more than 40 of the top thought leaders and industry experts – and with the 2009 acquisition of Kennedy Information’s Recruiting Conference and RecruitingTrends.com, onrec Expo has effectively become the must attend recruitment conference of the year.

About CollegeRecruiter.com:

CollegeRecruiter.com is the leading job board used by college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities. CollegeRecruiter.com features over 100,000 internship and entry-level job posting ads as well as tens of thousands of pages of employment-related articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and Ask the Experts questions and answers. CollegeRecruiter.com also has a double opt-in database of 10 million students and seven million recent graduates who have asked to receive employment and other offers that CollegeRecruiter.com delivers via email and cell phone text messaging.

Fighting Blog Spam

We re-launched CollegeRecruiter.com a month ago with an entirely new job search engine, content management system, and blog software. The blog software we’re now using is the open source WordPress and we’ve been very happy with it.

Perhaps the biggest problem we’ve had to-date with the WordPress installation was the huge amount of blog spam. People, and I hesitate to describe some out there as “people” because they’re such scum, have created programs that post bogus comments to blogs in the hopes that some of those comments will either go live automatically because the blogger foolish lets all comments publish or the comment will go live because the spammer has managed the trick the blogger into thinking that the comment is legitimate. Within days of launching with the WordPress blog, we were receiving hundreds of these spam comments a day with most of them being either a “your blog be very nicest” comment or a longer description of some product or service that the spammer was peddling. The products and services being pitched in either case tended to be porn, illegal pharmaceuticals, or just traffic generating links to site that made their money by serving banner ads.

So spam became an issue and we were confronted a decision as to how to tackle it. One option commonly employed is the captcha form which requires the user to read squiggly letters and type them into a form correctly. If they do, the web site infers that they’re human and not an automated comment spam generating program so their comment would be automatically approved or at least make it through the filter so the blog owner would be asked to approve it the next time she logged in. Another option is similar but just asks the user to answer a math problem. We took the latter road. It isn’t as secure as we’ll need to frequently change the math problem or at least change it if we see spam comments increasing because spammers could look at the question and program their system to answer the question correctly. Realistically, I think it is like locking your door at night. Burglars can still break in and there really isn’t a foolproof way of preventing that kind of a crime but the vast majority of break-ins are prevented with the use of a simple deadbolt lock and there’s no need to lay mine fields in your front yard or position snipers on the roof. Well, maybe if you’re the President of the United States but not for us common folk.

So we added the math question and tested it out. So far, so good. No spam comments all day. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Will you do the same?