Jobs in Pods Blog

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

Kudos to a member of the Sprint recruiting team who has made several hires from her social network profile. Read about it here.

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!