As an employer, do you think of your website as a recruiting tool?

Researchers at CareerXroads, publisher of an annual job and resume Web site directory and CareerJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal’s executive career site, state that a company's website is fast becoming a recruiting tool for the coveted passive job seeker.

85% of the respondents to this survey say they've visited a company's website for a variety of reasons -- only to ultimately become curious about current openings. 64% have applied for available positions, on the website.

The passive job seeker is the ideal candidate for any company.
This candidate brings enthusiasm and energy, in addition to their qualifications.

According to Salary.com and an America Online Survey, American’s waste more than 2 hours a day at work. That adds up costing companies $759 billion a year!!

And what exactly are these employees doing with their time?? You guessed it….surfing the web….More than 10,000 employees who responded indicated that the number one way they waste time at work is personal internet use (checking emails, IM, online polls, games, message boards and chat rooms…just to name a few). Personal internet use was cited by 44.7% of respondents as their primary time-wasting activity.

Other top-time wasting activities included:

Socializing with co-workers 23.4%
Conducting personal business 6.8%
Spacing Out 3.9%

Hopefully, you business is not in the following states. Below are the top 5 Time-Wasting States:

Missouri 3.2 hrs/day
Indiana 2.8 hrs/day
Kentucky 2.8 hrs/day
Wisconsin 2.8 hrs/day
Nevada 2.7 hrs/day

It is interesting to note that the Internet is the number one reason people slack off. It shows you just how integrated it has become to our personal and professional lives. Samara Jaffe, America Online, notes that “Today, there are so many useful tools and Websites on the Internet that have enabled people to become more efficient with accomplishing multiple tasks in a shorter period of time.

But, at what cost to the employer? Are workers really expected to work non-stop eight hours a day? According to a survey of corporate HR Managers, employers actually expect the average employee to waste about an hour a day…in addition to the worker’s lunch hour. A certain amount of “slacking-off” is built in to the salary structure. The figures above show that on average, workers are wasting a little more than twice what their employers expect.

So you too are probably guilty of wasting time at work, and since you are reading this between 9am & 5pm you probably are! It just may be comforting to know that you are not alone!! So I’m off to do some shoe shopping at shoes.com…talk to you later!

Has anyone heard of craigslist?
8.5 million people visited a Craigslist site in February, up from 3.7 million a year earlier. That's astonishing growth. What started as a simple, free community board in the spirit of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream and Mother Earth has grown to more than 205 sites covering cities in every state, as well as cities in 35 foreign nations. It is a category killer and the category is the online classified advertising space- 3.1 billion in sales this year — a 17 percent jump from last year — and will reach $4.7 billion by 2010. Newspaper classifieds, by contrast, will reach about $15 billion, up just 5 percent from last year.

I was surprised when I got to read a very expensive research report entitled Outlook 2006, about online recruitment advertising. Ok, I've been busy growing my business but I was shocked to see that CraigsList has overtaken Monster and is the 2nd largest job board, second only to America's Job Bank.

Anyway, I'll write more on the job boards maybe tomorrow (but I can't commit). Today I wanted to talk about the Contenders to CraigsList.

There's Google Base at base.google.com

Google Base is a place where you can post anything and then list the attributes that make it "findable" by a google search.

And now, Microsoft unveils its latest board- Windows Live Expo- expo.live.com and according to today's times "nother node in its growing network of Internet services, and a direct stab at Craiglist's vital organs: free, local classified ads."

I mention it here because its new and its free. I encourage all of you to use it and take advantage of every avenue to find and keep talent to your organization. The price is certainly right. Please let me know how you do.

	craigslist	monster	career builder	hotjobs
NYC	$25	$395	$389	$299
LA	$25	$395	$389	$299
SF	$75	$395	$389	$299
Boston	$0	$395	$389	$299
Chicago	$0	$395	$389	$299
Seattle	$0	$395	$389	$299
Denver	$0	$395	$389	$299
Miami	$0	$395	$389	$299
Dallas	$0	$395	$389	$299
Phoenix	$0	$395	$389	$299
DC	$0	$395	$389	$299
Phila	$0	$395	$389	$299
Atlanta	$0	$395	$389	$299
Detroit	$0	$395	$389	$299
Raleigh	$0	$395	$389	$299

Job Board Effectiveness*
craigslist	4.25
careerbuilder	4.00
monster	3.79
hotjobs	3.50

We're lucky -- some people get it. An endorsement from the Product Advertising Players on the benefits of using yours truly to conduct Employee Focus Groups. Reprinted verbatim with permission- names omitted to protect the environment.

Topic: Employee Group Discussion Guide

The purpose of this entire brand attribute discovery is to turn a white hot light on our consumers, revealing their real preferences in the service experience. We're looking at them from all angles, and that means also studying them through the eyes of our employees who are the ones in the field rubbing elbows all day.

From our employee's perspective, what are consumers looking for? What attributes? And from our employees perspective, what attributes do they feel we can deliver.

Not only is this learning critical, but when we/you stand and deliver our research bases attributes, we'll be able to say "To be sure what the right brand attributes should be, we asked our two most important audiences: We asked our customers, and we also asked you"

This doesn't just get us compliance, it gets us true buy-in from the very people we expect to enact our promise."

The attached employee tools at once mirror our consumer guides to see where the traction is and where the possible disconnect is - we've included the identical attributers for exploration. Then it takes it a step further.

Please call me with any questions.

More On College Recruiting from WorkForce Week:

• 2006 will be the most competitive college recruiting environment since pre-2001
• 54% of NACE Members will be on campus this spring -- up 12% from last year
• Students are receiving more interviews and more offers
• On one California campus, there were 150 companies 2 years ago and this year they capped it at 250.
• Job content, fit with the company culture and salary are the top three things that are important to students from an employer perspective.

How about today's NEW YORK TIMES
Spring Break

Marketers will spend more than $75 million this month to reach students on spring break, according to research by Vacation Connections."The days of putting a branded tent on a beach and then handing out stuff is just dead."

Beachfront bars, advertising on everything from room keys, pillowcases, shower curtains and rolling toothbrushes are just a few things happening as everyone tries to make an emotional connection and get the party started.

Why?
According to Deanne's Alloy Media, the college market was responsible for more than $175 billion a year in consumer spending.

Let's get the party started.

Call them whatever you want... just call them! Deanne at Alloy Media Marketing gave me great research last week. I forgot my promise to promote it until this morning what I got an email from Electronic Recruiting Exchange about the same subject. Since there are no coincidences - it must be time for the blog on how to understand the generation of people born between 1980 and 1994.

Almost 100% of today's college students have a cell phone
Almost 82% of children between the ages of 15 - 19 have a cell phone.


College Student Facts From Alloy Media
99% go on the internet
97% go on TV
94% listen to the radio
92% go to the movies
19% access the internet from a cell phone

According to Kevin Wheeler:
Students expect to access in-depth material about your organization, philosophy, and even find out experiences others have had with your organization. Recent graduates and newly hired employees are already starting to contribute to their online alumni chat rooms and blogs their experiences as an employee at your firm. Through email, text messaging and blogs, many recent grads stay in touch with those still at school and give them the inside scoop on how to get employed at your firm, which managers to avoid, what to say and do or they offer up reasons to avoid your firm.

The smart organization will have an up-to-date, youth-oriented website for college recruiting and offer a variety if ways to interview, including online and virtual interviews. There will be much less effort and time spent on campus involvement and more with getting students to the website and involved in virtual communication.


According to me:
It's a wonderful time to be alive in technology. NYU offers degrees in interactive telecommunications! That means text messaging applications. Check out www.dodgeball.com and think about what this might mean if you're looking to build relationships with candidates of choice.

Yes, I'll write design and place recruitment ads for you but please, someone, lets promote the culture. Lets sponsor key word searches. Lets blog a little. Podcast our messages during spring break. Lets cut through clutter, have some fun and get results.
------------------------------------------------------
PS: 95% of teens believe there is a God.

Just because you have a first paragraph that describes your place among the Fortune 500, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a great job posting.

Here's a juicy tidbit from WorkForce Week:

How Do We Link Job Descriptions With Our Business Strategy?

What best practices could we follow when developing and linking job descriptions to our organizational strategy?

—Making HR Count, finance/insurance/real estate, Harleysville, Pennsylvania


ANSWER
Given the turbulent market conditions facing modern companies, including frequent reorganizations and changes in business strategy, preparing job descriptions that withstand the test of time is especially challenging. Nevertheless, the steps below offer some practical approaches that should help you.

1. Be clear about the purpose your job descriptions will serve. For example: When preparing job descriptions for purposes of compensation, companies tend to use phrases that convey "compensable factors" that enable categories of responsibilities to be compared and contrasted across different jobs. But these factors may not align well with the content of your business strategy. Job descriptions aimed at selection or performance management, on the other hand, tend to align more closely with strategic objectives but must be frequently revised lest they become outdated.

2. Verify that a logical linkage exists between each job accountability and your business goals and strategies.

3. Make sure you pay adequate attention to defining logically linked competencies and skills related to each job.

4. Anticipate a short life expectancy for job descriptions. Given the rapid rate of change of high-tech companies, for example, job descriptions for research, engineering and information technology will need to be revised far more frequently than those for finance, legal or human resources.

5. Recognize that performance management is a natural complement to job descriptions. When effective, performance management emphasizes short-term outcomes (about one year) that are within the "line of sight" of your organization's more long-range goals.

In fast-moving professional services and high-tech firms, traditional job descriptions are practically obsolete. Instead, these companies rely on individual performance plans to define work objectives, performance standards, competencies and needed areas of development. The goal is the same: to motivate employees in ways that sustain their organizations' performance.

A SWOT analysis (analysis of an internal environment’s strengths and weaknesses, and an external environment’s opportunities and threats) of jobs starts with examining the linkage between the jobs and these two environments, and what your department must deliver as results.

For example, if your department is required to deliver high-quality repetitive tasks, this would require competencies related to attention to detail and motivation by performance of small tasks. On the other hand, if your department is responsible for designing a major component of the engine for the space shuttle, this would require competencies related to analysis and innovation.

By first linking the departmental results to job competencies, you can then analyze the job descriptions to determine if they contain competencies that support departmental outcomes, or if there are competencies missing that are critical to delivering results.

Opportunities and threats can be viewed in several ways. One way is to think of opportunities as ways you can use skilled people from other departments, or job families in the same department, to bolster a lack of competence in a specific job. The same may be true in looking at threats, in that even though people in the department have the requisite competence, they could be overburdened with work, or they could be asked by other departments to fill in at critical times and not be available when needed.

Another way of looking at opportunities and threats is in relation to experiences needed to develop competence. You may have enough people today that are competent, but if there are not development opportunities for junior people, a threat to the department may be a lack of skilled workers in the future. An opportunity would be the ability to give people cross-training by assigning them to projects with those who possess those competencies.