Jobs in Pods Blog

LinkedIn, the “business social network” with over 20 million members is now offering profiles for companies.

For employers this is good news as it makes your company more transparent and gives job hunters a unique peek inside whats happening at your company. The new profile page shows;

• all the employees at your firm who are part of LinkedIn
• recent promotions and changes
• most popular (on LinkedIn)
• key company contact info/stats
• related blogosphere coverage

Its still in Beta right now but we hear they will be adding even more features such as letting you adding content (i.e. videos, etc) in the coming weeks. Just as job hunters must create a digital trail online so too must companies.

Here’s a video about the new features.

I just listened to a podcast interview about Best Buy’s internal social network called Blue Shirt Nation. During the interview they mentioned a statistic that absolutely blew us away.

Normal turnover rates for retail employees is 40-60%. However turnover rates for those employees ENGAGED on Blue Shirt Nation is only 8%.

Now if that isn’t proof positive that social networks can improve your retention efforts and keep employees engaged, then nothing will convince you about the power of social networks.

The podcast and related blog post is on the Marketing Edge. Get it here. It’s a must-listen.

Note: Blue Shirt Nation has 18,000 employee members.

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!

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 just read this terrific post “Social Media Talent Wars“. Its basically a mantra about using social media (aka…blogs, podcasts, social networks) to recruit the next generation workforce. This particular quotes says it best;

“The modern workforce is very used to using blogs, podcasts and other social media tools in their personal lives. It becomes a near impossible stretch for them to lead interactive, digitized lives at home and shift to low-tech, paper-based, one-sided communication in the office. It just doesn’t translate.”

The job market is changing and companies must begin to add social media as part of their recruiting strategy.

CNNmoney is reporting that LinkedIn is opening up its application to developers much like Facebook did. I think of LinkedIn as a B to B networking site so this is good news for recruiters. Cant wait to see what apps will develop.

LinkedIn, the popular social networking site for business, announced a platform that allows outside developers to build applications on LinkedIn as well as for their own sites. The company also added a slew of new features to its home page.

LinkedIn, which has 17 million members worldwide, said that its first partner in the applications program is BusinessWeek, the magazine owned by McGraw-Hill (MHP). At the BusinessWeek Web site, readers will be able to access their LinkedIn connections, look up profiles of people featured in BusinessWeek articles, and search for professional connections at companies mentioned in stories.

LinkedIn is in talks with other publishers and hopes to announce other partners soon, said LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye.

LinkedIn is the latest social networking company to open itself up to outside developers. Facebook has seen its traffic soar since doing so earlier this year. And Google (GOOG) recently unveiled OpenSocial, which lets developers create widgets…or as Google calls them, gadgets…for a variety of social networking sites.

Employers should take note that Yahoo has just launched a social network for college students and recent alumni called Kickstart. I created an account today which you can see below.

I recommend corporate recruiters create their own accounts on the site so that users can “follow” your company and connect with your recruiting team. It’s free and it should prove to be useful in the coming years. Setting up an account is very user friendly.

Here’s an interesting story about Serena Software and an innovative way to use Facebook. Serena, based in San Mateo, CA is encouraging its employees to hold “Facebook Fridays“. It’s a chance for “employees to find fun and personal connections in the workplace. Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends.” The company is rolling the initiative in all 18 of its global offices.

I absolutely love the idea. Many companies don’t realize that Facebook can be a free way to create an intranet for its employees. I think Serena’s idea will go a long way towards retaining its employees. The company’s press release says that their President is an avid user of the popular social networking site.

Serena President and CEO Jeremy Burton is an avid user of Facebook, using it to keep in touch with employees, friends, and business partners from wherever he is in the world—in Japan visiting customers or racing cars at Laguna Seca. He wants to bring the benefits he gains from using Facebook to his company, and allow employees to have more fun combining their personal and professional lives. He is doing this by making Facebook his company’s intranet—a place where employees can find everything from a list of company holidays to the CEO’s favorite movie. Burton believes that colleagues who get to know one another on a more personal level will work together better. The company already has more than 30% of its global workforce on Facebook prior to the launch of Facebook Fridays.

“As our business continues to grow, the workplace becomes more and more distributed, which can make us feel disconnected from one another,” said Burton. “Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers—on demand. A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done. Companies that do not embrace social networking are making a huge mistake.”

I’m willing to bet more companies will follow this trend.