Jobs in Pods Blog

Setting up your YouTube recruitment channel is easy as pie with a few customizations thrown in. The first step is creating your account. Your username should be your company name so don’t enter any kind of personal information. Company name only will suffice. Once your account is created YouTube will assign you a unique URL. For example, the Jobs in Pods channel is www.youtube.com/JobsinPods.

Now lets move on to the customization part. Whats great about creating a channel on YouTube is you can actually make a number of modifications to brand it according to your company’s logo and color scheme’s. The first thing you should do is go to your My Account page. This is the “control panel” for all your settings.

1. Click the “Channel Info” link. Enter your company description. Be brief, but tell people who you are in 1 or 2 short paragraphs. In order to keep the page as simple as possible disable the ‘Channel bulletins”. You also have the option of enabling comments. You can decide if anyone can comment or only ‘friends’ you approve.

2. Click the Channel Design link. This is the page where colors and layouts are set. You can select a preset color theme but we suggest overriding those colors in favor of your company colors which you can set in the boxes below. In the Layout Properties section check off ‘Featured Video‘ and ‘My Latest Video‘. Enable ‘Subscriptions‘ and put them in the left column. Then uncheck ‘Contests‘ and ‘Bulletins‘ as they are unnecessary. Make sure the ‘Playlist‘ box is checked.

Make the ‘Videos Box’ a grid and check off Subscribers, Friends and Comments.

In the Advanced Design Customization section you can set your color scheme and upload a background graphic. Use the same colors for each of the boxes on the page. We recommend a darker color for the border and a lighter color for the background. Pick 2 colors from company log to ensure proper branding (and so your marketing dept wont get mad). Make the Background color white (#ffffff) and link to your background image which must be hosted on another server. Make it about 400×400 pixels and give it a light gray color so it doesn’t stand out too much. Choose ‘Repeat Background Image‘ so it tiles on the page.

3. Click the Personal Profile link. Leave most of this page blank except for your website URL. It’s probably a good idea to link directly to your ‘careers’ section. Then upload your company logo in the ‘Profile Picture‘ section.

4. Click the Location Information link. Enter in your company’s HQ current city and zip code.

That’s it, your done. Start uploading your videos and watch the numbers grow.

Monday we’ll have a few more tips for making your company’s videos more popular.

Too few companies realize how powerful sites like YouTube can be for marketing themselves. We’ve written about companies like Sodexho using it before. But we cant stress enough the fact that YouTube is a tremendous opportunity for employers if they use it correctly. It represents social media recruiting at its best.

There are 2 main reasons to incorporate the popular video site into your recruiting efforts.

• Employment branding
• Promoting your jobs

Once you set up a channel and add content you get FREE exposure to YouTube’s millions of users. We’re still amazed at how many companies still don’t post their recruitment videos to the site even though they are on their corporate site. Doing so could double, perhaps triple the number of views that video gets by uploading it.

Beginning tomorrow we will be showing you step by step how to setup your Youtube channel to maximize its usefulness.

Stay tuned.

We always say recruiting IS marketing. And so we like what we see of this new study from eMarketer about the use of new media tools in marketing. Podcasts have a significant presence. Notice blogging is also included. Jobs in Pods is both a blog and a podcast so we are already taking advantage of both.

Another solid example of a company recruiting on MySpace is casual restaurant chain Chili’s. Their page can be found at myspace.com/chilis. They have an amazing number of friends at 61, 025.

We think MySpace is a natural fit for restaurant chains like Chili’s. Their page becomes an extension of their brand and they can create a community of fans for free. Any company would love to have the number of friends that Chili’s does. So here’s what we like and dont like about their page;

1. Branding: the page takes most of its styling cues from the chilis.com website. Although we think their logo is way too small for the page. The logo should be placed in the upper left corner that tells the reader exactly what company it is.

2. Games/interactivity: Chili’s obviously put a lot of effort into creating a fun experience.The chalkboard and comments enhancer are great additions.

3. Showcasing an employee gives them ’street cred’. We’d like to see more of them here.

4. Forum: the forum offers news and some recruiting events. We think they could do more recruiting here by posting more jobs and highlighting their locations.

As we mentioned in our previous post, MySpace represents a good branding opportunity for jobs like retail and customer service. A few companies have been innovative enough to utilize the popular social networking site to connect with candidates. Our favorite is the AT&T MySpace page. Written by the director of non-management recruiting, Chris Hoyt, its a great peek inside him, his recruiting travels and the AT&T company and products. Here are some screenshots with the best parts.

Its a busy page but there is lots of content for candidates to consume.

Chris writes a weekly blog which talks about his personal life as well as his recruiting efforts at AT&T. This type of intimate look at his work and dailly life help him connect with candidates on a ‘personal’ level thus giving him and his company a deeper relationship with candidates. By keeping it up to date, he encourages people to come back regularly.

By including his family in the blog he makes it more interesting and personal. All this enables candidates to “get to know him”. His other ‘channels’ (Facebook, Dogster, etc) allow candidates to follow him no matter where he goes.

AT&T is also one of our clients and our jobcast ‘widget’ is prominently displayed along the left side. They do about one per month. This ’series’ helps encourage repeat visits and lets his team of recruiters talk about their jobs and favorite reasons to work for AT&T.

Product videos he adds showcase the cool products prospective candidates would be working with or selling. And Awards help to reinforce why AT&T is a great company.

All in all this is a great example of MySpace recruiting. Oh, and by the way, Chris has gained 442 ‘friends’ which follow his MySpace musings. These are all prospective candidates in disguise!

Social Media writer Monica Hamburg has just written a great post entitled Recruitment 2.0/HR 2.0. There is a particular passage which caught our attention;

Companies should keep in mind that there is now, more than ever, a balance of power with e-recruiting.  Businesses can learn more about candidates and attract ideal employees, but employees have the same ability to research businesses and find their perfect workplace.  With that in mind, company culture has become an immense selling point for prospective hires.  The use of a company’s own videos and pictures can entice candidates by giving them a glimpse of the inner workings and presenting the human side of the company. 

Natalie Michael, Partner of the Karmichael Group, an executive search and recruitment strategy firm, states that now “there is even greater pressure on organizations to focus on employee engagement and retention, and having a culture that is a unique differentiator.  If competitors are “sharing employee lists” by having employees visible on Linkedin, for instance, “they need to strengthen their people practices so this is not a competitive threat.  They can do this by having a unique value proposition, focusing on meeting individual’s needs and having a culture that can not easily be replicated by the competition.”

She is so right. Your company culture has to become a major selling point in your recruiting efforts. Anything you can do to showcase that culture, be it video, pictures, blogging or podcasts is a good thing. Today’s job seeker has a myriad of choices before them. Your company needs to give them lots of reasons to make you their employer of choice.

Being proactive with social media recruiting is the latest way to do just that.

With MySpace being the first big social network on the scene, there were obvious opportunities for employers to exploit it. But the reality is its not very good for recruiting. Someone once described it as the “online version of a teenagers bedroom wall”. They are right.

The one exception in our eyes is lower end retail and customer service jobs. A number of companies in this space have been able to leverage their MySpace page for recruiting purposes. We’ll be featuring some of them over the next few weeks on this blog.

“Facebook is the white collar social network and MySpace is the blue collar one”

While thinking about MySpace it occurred to us that there are big differences between them and Facebook. Even though MySpace is bigger than Facebook in terms of users the two sites are perceived much differently. We think Facebook is the white collar social network and MySpace is the blue collar one.

So it makes sense then that certain types of companies will do better than others when it comes to recruiting on each. Look for the first company feature later this week.

We love that Sodexho created their own channel on YouTube. Any employer that has recruiting videos on the site should take the time to refine their channel and maximize its potential. So we thought we’d offer Sodexho some constructive criticism. There’s always room for improvement.

1. Profile Box: Sodexho does a good job describing itself but we recommend adding their logo here instead of showing a video snap shot. Better to brand this page as Sodexho’s to keep the “employment brand” in front of the viewer. Also the Profile box allows you to enter a URL back to your site so Sodexho would be wise to add a link back to their corporate careers page.

2. Background: the color is too dark. We recommend a white background and coordinating the overall color scheme with the company’s official colors. Sodexho should also create a watermark background in a light grey color with their logo and employment branding slogan “Making Every Day a Better Day“. (see the Jobs in Pods channel for example)

3. Other Options: we’d like to see the Subscribers box and Comments box enabled below the video section. It would be nice to see who is subscribing to their videos and soliciting comments is a good thing.

Blogger buddy Matt Martone of Hotjobs alerts us of the recruiting efforts of Sodexho. They are embracing social media with a fervor by utilizing YouTube, blogs and Facebook. They also use Second Life.

Now if they would only add podcasts they could be maximizing their social media recruiting efforts!

As we’ve stated before, all employers need to start crafting a social media strategy for recruiting. The next generation workforce is waiting in the wings.

For those of you who rather follow our jobcasts from our YouTube channel we’ve set up a handy YouTube RSS button for you to subscribe with. With one click you can add our feed to your favorite RSS reader.

Our YouTube channel has been a nice success for us generating over 1400 views since launching about 6 weeks ago Every jobcast (as long as they are under 10 min long) gets published on YouTube in order to provide extra exposure for our clients.