Give Your College Student the Gift of Employment

Give Your College Student the Gift of Employment

A survey by the Associated Press found that 53.6 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. How can you help your college-aged son or daughter avoid that fate?

Give them Peter Weddle’s new guide, The Career Fitness Workbook. It’s available at Amazon.com.

The book has a number of special features:

Organized just like a physical fitness regimen, the book tells you what to do to improve the health of your career, how to do it and – unique to the Career Fitness program – how often in order to maximize the employment benefits you derive from your efforts.

From online networking to high impact resumes, the book introduces a powerful blend of the best traditional practices and state-of-the-art techniques for effective job search and career self-management in today’s uncertain times.

Filled with worksheets and exercises, the book is a complete self-study program that delivers the knowledge and skills required for BOTH job search and career success, whether you’re graduating next spring or next year or the year after that.

The Career Fitness Workbook is available at Amazon.com.

Or, if you’d like your copy autographed by the author – a one-of-a-kind Holiday gift – order it at Weddles.com.

Make sure your son or daughter doesn’t have to come back home to live after graduation. Get them The Career Fitness Workbook today and put them on the road to long-lasting success!

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How to Build a Post-Social Online Career Center

Today’s typical online career center has all of the appeal of a brick. Its one-off, transactional focus may be tolerated by desperate job seekers, but for high caliber prospects, it’s an invitation to spend time elsewhere. Those hard-to-recruit individuals have choices, so they demand a very different kind of experience, one that only a post-social Web-site can provide.

Unlike conventional social recruiting sites, a post-social online career center is designed to create and sustain a bond with employment candidates. Instead of relying solely on a technological connection, it reinforces that inanimate contact with a psychological connection. It promotes an individual’s career success rather than the organization and its open jobs. In effect, a post-social online career center is a “careerstead” – a home for individual careers – rather than an in-your-face recruitment advertising platform.

This interaction has several aspects that make it particularly appealing to talented workers.

First, it focuses on them rather than on the employer. It is about their aspirations and success, not some opening’s requirements and responsibilities.

Second, it is enduring rather than situational. It continues on regardless of a person’s employment status or the status of some opening.

And third, it is a helpful resource rather than a sales job. It provides information and insights they can use to advance their career.

Those attributes are so rare, so outside the norm of what talented people experience at online career centers (or social media sites), they forge an allegiance to the organization that has two extraordinary sourcing and recruiting benefits:

A heightened viral effect, because those who experience the site are so intrigued and pleased with what happens to them, they want to tell their peers about it.

and

A heightened employment propensity, because those who experience the site feel as if the organization has their best interests at heart.

A careerstead attracts more high caliber talent than conventional versions of such centers and transforms more of those visitors into applicants. And in this era of tight budgets, there’s no better return on an organization’s investment in an online career center.

The Features & Functionality of a Careerstead

An online career center that operates as a careerstead provides all of the content and capabilities typically offered job seekers as well as three unique aspects that are especially appealing to top talent:

A way of organizing content so visitors don’t feel as if they’re “generic candidates;”

The publication of high quality content for successful career self-management;

and

The ability to network with their peers and the employer’s top employees.

Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

Avoiding the Generic Candidate Syndrome

The content on most conventional online career centers is written as if it’s appropriate for and useful to all candidates. In truth, however, a salesperson is likely to have very different interests and questions than a finance professional, and a finance professional, in turn, is likely to have a different outlook than an IT professional. Therefore, to ensure that each candidate feels as if they are being treated as an individual and in a way that actually serves their needs, the site’s content must be (a) organized into separate channels for each of the major demographics an employer recruits and (b) tailored to their particular perspective and information needs.

For example, each of the channels would describe what it’s like to work as an employee in the occupational field which it serves – sales, finance, IT and so on – and might include testimonials from current employees in that field to add human interest and/or conference presentations or publications by those employees to add credibility.

Adding Career Self-Management Content

The content on most online career centers focuses on providing information for active job seekers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, just 16 percent of the American workforce is in transition at any time. In other words, current career center content is irrelevant to four-fifths of all prospective visitors to a site. Therefore, to ensure those non-job seekers are engaged and helped by what they find on a site, it must (a) provide the knowledge and skills required for successfully managing a career in today’s turbulent economy and (b) help them deal with the issues and challenges that can derail a career (e.g., a biased boss, an incompetent coworker).

For example, the site might offer a self-study curriculum in career self-management that would keep people coming back to the site continuously and offer assessments and quizzes that could help them gauge their current status in the workplace and the health of their career.

Creating a Career Conversation

Most of today’s online career centers subject their visitors to a “unilog,” a one-sided conversation. The sites do all the talking (through dense, unexciting prose) and candidates are expected to sit back and take it. Of course, most of the best prospects don’t. What they want is a dialogue both with those who would be their colleagues if they went to work with the organization and, equally as important, with their peers. Therefore, to ensure that top talent has the kind of professional conversation that will attract and retain their interest, a site must provide (a) the functionality for an open but moderated discussion of occupational and industry topics and (b) a mechanism for interacting with employees in a representative range of career fields.

For example, the organization might set up a program which enables top employees to compete for a short (e.g., 3 month) assignment blogging on the site about what it’s like to work for the organization in their field. Participation could be promoted by providing selectees with a bump in their next performance appraisal score, a monetary reward or both.

The best talent are almost always employed. To recruit them, therefore, we have to convince them to do the one thing we humans most hate to do: change. Only a post-social online career center can create the psychological connection that predisposes them to do so.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

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Outside-the-Box Training Sessions

WEDDLE’s is pleased to offer a number of uniquely insightful and practical training programs for corporate and staffing firm recruiting teams. The courses can be tailored to your specific industry or career field focus and delivered onsite at your facility or via Webinar.

The programs include:

Creating a “Careerstead” for Post-Social Recruiting

Optimizing the Candidate Experience

Developing an Employment Brand for Top Talent

Best Practices in Online Recruitment Advertising

Optimizing the Content for Candidates Wherever You Contact Them

Building a Corporate Career Site for Passive, High Caliber Talent

The Art of Social Recruiting for “A” Level Performers

Transforming Your Resume Database Into a Candidate Gold Mine

How the World of Work Has Changed in the 21st Century

For more information about each program and its cost, please contact Peter Weddle at 203-964-1888 or [email protected].

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Sourcing Your Own Career Success

As recruiters and HR professionals, we spend 33 percent of our day (or more) on-the-job and 100 percent of our job helping others to achieve career success.

Don’t our own careers deserve equal attention? Absolutely! And the one best way to do that is by sourcing career success with WEDDLE’s books. They include:

A Multitude of Hope: A Novel About Rediscovering the American Dream. This modern-day epic traces the journeys of three out-of-work professionals searching for answers in today’s seemingly nonsensical job market. Along the way, they discover the secret to “career security” and the pathway to real and lasting success.

The Career Fitness Workbook. This self-paced instructional guide introduces a complete regimen of activities that will help you successfully compete for and hang onto the job of your dreams. Think of it as “the habits of highly effective career activists.”

Recognizing Richard Rabbit. This fable for adults will entertain and delight you and help you out of the boxes that keep you from becoming the champion inside you. It is a novel and engaging way to recognize the talented person you are meant to be.

The Career Activist Republic. This blockbuster of a book provides a provocative yet positive assessment of the changing world of work in the American economy and describes an innovative strategy that will enable you to avoid the pitfalls and capture the opportunities in this new environment.

The Success Matrix: Wisdom from the Web on How to Get Hired and Not Be Fired. This anthology collects the best of Peter Weddle’s columns on job search and career success. It is the only book you’ll find that provides a candid and totally up-to-date look at how to get and stay ahead in today’s workplace.

In addition, read Peter Weddle’s WorkStrong blog for Career Activists. It’s a quick and easy way to stay on top of all of changes underway in today’s workplace and, best of all, it’s delivered right to your e-mailbox. Just click here to register.

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Be At Your Best With the Best Tools

The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Guides for Recruiting Success. Get yours today!

WEDDLE’s 2011/12 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. This is the 10th edition of the Guide the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of job boards and social media sites.

WEDDLE’s Guide to Association Web Sites. This book details the recruiting resources and capabilities that are available at the Web-sites of over 3,000 professional and technical associations.

Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.