On the lighter side, we hardly expected that our visit to the Kelly site would involve anything humorous. But, there it was... the Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations. Or LIAR, for short. Here's a little taste:

LIAR may be used to offer a negative opinion of the personal qualities, work habits or motivation of the candidate while allowing the candidate to believe that it is high praise, Thornton explained last week.

Some examples from LIAR

• To describe a person who is totally inept: I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever.
• To describe an ex-employee who had problems getting along with fellow workers: I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine.
• To describe a candidate who is so unproductive that the job would be better left unfilled: I can assure you that no person would be better for the job.
• To describe a job applicant who is not worth further consideration: I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment.

It doesn't stop there. Kelly Services uses the rest of the site to establish a real model for how a large complex firm can approach the web and make it a smooth transition. There are searchable databases of locations and simple, easy to understand intro to the rest of Kelly's product lines. We are really impressed.!!

Career Resources

Reaching Candidates

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, front page (!), a recruiter was quoted as saying "Your recruiting plan is more important than your marketing plan". Obviously, you'll have to take that with a grain of salt. But, the current demographic dip at the entry level plus low unemployment plus crowding in the web recruiting marketplace seems to indicate that a focused outreach program (read marketing plan) will be the key to success for the long term winners in the web recruiting game.

Passively waiting for candidates to come to you was fine when the market was characterized by lots of transitions as it was in the late 80s.

New Bernard Hodes Study

Students said they are most likely to use recruitment brochures as their primary source of information on jobs, followed by the Internet -- to which 94% have access. Videos, computer disks, and interactive media play a much smaller role. And there's no substitute for the human touch -- over 77% of students used their campus career services office to look for a job and 74% had attended at least one career fair.

"On-campus recruitment is more aggressive than it has been in years," said Bernard S. Hodes, president and CEO of Bernard Hodes Advertising. "Recruiters from big corporations are vying for the attention of the brightest students across the country and around the world. How they reach out to the top graduates is of the utmost importance. With this study, we set out to discover not only what the students want to know about a potential employer, but how they like to receive their information. What is notable is the fact that the World Wide Web has had a real impact on the way students gather employer information over a very short time frame. Two years ago it was a novelty. Now it's a fact of everyday life."

The survey also highlights a saavy approach to job hunting by students, with many respondents saying they want and need more employment and company information in recruitment media, and less generalization in the materials available.

When asked what makes a company's recruitment brochure "outstanding," students cited employment information such as job descriptions, available positions, and staff profiles; and company information. Moreover, many indicated they don't want 'fluff" or self-serving generalization in the materials they receive from recruiters. Instead, they want hard facts about opportunities and to know what it will be like to work at a particular company.

Headhunter Results, Newspaper Prices

This doesn't inherently mean establishing a website.

With over 3500 sites competing for attention, giving advice and offering job listings, sticking out against the background is quite a challenge. Anymore, targeting the specific groups that you are trying to recruit is critical before you launch a site.

We've been reminded of Alan Cory's fantastic Bay Area Jobs and Chivas Regal's Career Toolbox. Both squarely target audiences and deliver value. The underlying motivations are interesting. Chivas wants to sell scotch so they target "Wall Street Types". Alan wants to sell houses, so he targets upwardly mobile professionals in the Bay Area. Neither are recruiters per se. Both are astounding quality tools for job hunters. With few exceptions, offerings from within the industry pale by comparison.

Their advantage, coming out of the starting gate, is that they are both used to targeting audiences as a business practice. Their core competencies don't involve finding needles in haystacks. Rather, the build increasingly big haystacks in order to increase the raw number of available needles.

Their approaches are repeatable but require significant investments in time, money or both.

Recruiters' Internet
Survival Guide

See a detailed index of our past issues

	Week Ending November 17, 1996 New Hodes Study Kelly's Super Site Chivas About Work Student Center
Week Ending November 10, 1996 IBM Eudora Bad Design Great Design Revolution StrategosNet	Week Ending November 3, 1996 Doing The Resume Sift Follow The Money Corporate Recruiting Managing Links 1997 ERI
Week Ending October 27, 1996 Non-Industry Recruiters Stalker's Page Career Descriptions HR: The Next Level Corporate Recruiters	Week Ending October 20, 1996 Internet Alternatives Watching The Newspapers 809 Phone Scam Resume Databases USJob.netWork
Week Ending October 13, 1996 Snorkeling The Web Email Etiquette Job Listings As Infotainment Niche-Ing With Nation Job	Week Ending October 6, 1996 Kevin Johansen Interview Community and Recruiting Starting A Web Business Web As Recruiting Tool Recruiters as Leaders The Future
Week Ending September 29 1996 Resources for Researchers Netshare Design: Doomed to Tombstones? Job Bank USA Regionalizing Austin Knight	2 Weeks Ending September 22 1996 Including: Job Lynx Career City Launches Better Not To Bother Scratch The Niche Role Of Marketing Salary Surveys
More Archives	More Archives

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