Jobs in Pods Blog

On Thursday March 6th at 12 noon, we will be starting a new internet radio call-in show about all things social media recruiting.

Ben Yoskovitz (Standoutjobs.com) and Chris Russell will be your hosts. The show will be broadcast twice monthly, probably on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of the month. Each show will be run an hour from 12-1 eastern standard time to allow people to listen at the lunch hour.

The goal of this program is to educate HR people and recruiters on the evolving social media landscape as it pertains to recruiting. We encourage anyone interested to call in and ask questions about things like Facebook, Youtube, blogging or any other web 2.0 technology that can help you recruit.

Next Thursday’s show will focus on general trends in social media recruiting, including a discussion of our recruiting starfish. Ben will opine on “recruiting as a marketing effort” — which would encompass a discussion on the tools marketing people have at their disposal for selling products and services and how that can be applied to recruiting practices.

So please tell your colleagues and tune in to our first show! It can be found on BlogTalkRadio;

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SocialMediaRecruiting

We were browsing the company groups on Facebook today and came across Oracle’s page. Upon first glance it appears to be a popular group with more than 1600 members. But we were disappointed to find that it is rarely updated with content, nor has anyone bothered to remove spam on their comment wall.

There are problems with this group from several standpoints. First, it appears that a lone employee started the initiative. Bad move. Companies wanting to utilize Facebook are better off assigning a TEAM of people to manage the group. That way if one person leaves or loses interest, the group will not get stale.

Secondly you need multiple people to add content and engage the members. There is some content on here but most of it appears to come from overseas members. Its curious why they didn’t start the network as a closed network (employee only) because anyone can join. The only reason to create an open group is for recruiting or PR purposes.

Thirdly, spam has found its way to the Wall and no one has removed it. All administrators have the ability to remove spam so its obvious that the creator has forgotten about this group. (A group can have multiple administrators)

Perhaps one day someone at Oracle will discover this group and close it or revive it the right way.

eMarketer is out with the top 10 sites among college kids. No surprise Facebook is #1.

Obviously if they are hanging out there so should your recruiters. Here are some tips to do that.

iPods arent just for music or Jobcasts. We recently came across the following story in WSJ about how one company came up with a very unique use for their own ipod recruiting technique.

Small companies tend to have an easier time merging marketing and HR, largely because managers are used to wearing multiple hats and the CEO or owner is in a better position to make sure his managers are cooperating. That was the case at Red 5 Studios, a video game company based in Aliso Viejo, California. CEO and founder Mark Kern had had horrible luck with traditional recruiting techniques, in part because his venture-backed company was still in stealth mode and hadn’t yet released a game. Though at his previous job Kern led the team at Blizzard Entertainment that created the wildly popular World of Warcraft games, he couldn’t get top programmers to submit resumés and had no luck posting want ads on online job boards. “It was hard to communicate anything about our company in a way that stood out from the other guys,” says Kern.

So Kern decided to dedicate himself to creating an employer brand. He identified the 100 workers in the game industry whom he most wanted to hire and sent them each a special package in the mail. The package contained a box, with a smaller box inside of it, with an even smaller box inside of it, and so on, like a Russian nesting doll. At the center of the smallest box was an iPod Shuffle. On the iPod, Kern had recorded a personal message describing why it was worth applying for a job at Red 5. “At Red 5 we’re assembling a team of incredibly talented individuals dedicated to pushing the envelope in online entertainment,” the recording said.

Mashable has a nice conversation with Rob Walch (one of the ‘Grandfathers’ of podcasting) formerly of Podcast 411 and now working at Wizzard Media, the podcasting company. It’s an interesting chat if you want to learn more about this medium as it relates to business and consumers. Click here to listen.

We haven’t talked much about how to make your company career site more engaging to candidates. But there are a variety of things you can do improve the job seeker experience. Whether its adding a live chat feature or pushing out your jobs via RSS, there area host of web 2.0 ways to do it.

One new startup in particular, Standout Jobs, has actually created a web 2.0 “career site in a box”. Its a hosted service (product name: Reception) for which you pay a monthly fee ($149) and they give you a customizable career site complete with the ability to add blogs, video, photos and an ATS. For larger companies this may not be an attractive offer but for the small to mid size business its a quick, easy and inexpensive way to present your company and its culture.

So much of social media recruiting is about making your company more transparent in the eyes of the job seeker. A service like Reception is a welcome addition to the toolset. They do offer a 90 day free trial so it might be worth investigating its use for your company. At the very least it might make you think how to re-define your career site.

We have confirmed through our client contact at Intel that their first podcast from December has resulted in a hire. This is the second such success story for Jobs in Pods. Read about the first here.

Their jobcast was about a Marketing Manager. Jodi McMaster, whom we interviewed for that jobcast says:

“I went back to one of my managers I did hire who reports to me and she did say that is how she found out about the job and she said she loved it. So we do have a win on this”

We actually followed up with the successful candidate who says she found the jobcast by googling some info on Intel. According to her email, she loved the fact that the podcast gave her more info than a written job description and also that Jodi talked about her expectations of the role.

So once again we have proved the value of podcasting your jobs. Thanks to Intel Corp for believing in us.

We got a call yesterday from a recruiter at a major insurance company. She was investigating the use of “web 2.0” technologies (aka ‘social media‘) for recruiting and wanted some advice. It was a refreshing call. We think HR is finally beginning the push into these new media tools.

Several employers we have talked to recently seem to be researching the tools of web 2.0, so at least they are beginning to recognize the fact that they have to change their strategies to take advantage of them. In this month’s HR Magazine we came across a study about the use of web 2.0 and HR.

(full press release)

Its interesting to note that 34% are actively using some form of web 2.0 to recruit.  But 65% of respondents said they do not use or have never heard of them. Over the next 2 years that should change in our opinion. Most HR departments are rather slow at adopting new technologies, but as the milennials enter the workforce their influence will help change that. They will expect their employers to integrate these tools into the workplace (see what one company does). In fact, we think there will be whole new positions created like “Social Network Recruiter” whose sole job it will be to post jobs and interact with users on Facebook and MySpace.

Social Media Recruiting. Just do it.

We have updated our case studies which can now be found on the main Jobs in Pods site on the top navigation. The NCO case study has been updated and their is a new one from AT&T. Each one comes with a downloadable PDF file for later use.

http://jobsinpods.com/case-studies/

Jobs in Pods has been featured in today’s online edition of the Wall Street Journal. The article, written by reporter Sarah Needleman, is a profile of our site and also features a quote from one of our clients at AT&T. It’s part of a series of articles called Recruitment 3.0 and features several items about how the web is changing the recruiting landscape. Here are links to the articles.

Listen Up Job Hunters (Jobs in Pods)

Recruiting 3.0

Recruiter Target Practice