Entries Tagged 'Recruitment Advertising' ↓

Will Goldberg trade people for short term profitability?

Pink slips could be in the not too distant future for half of Jobster’s 145 person workforce according to unnamed sources that have been whispering to GigaOM and John Cook, the Venture Capital beat reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Jobster had this to say on his blog about the whole story on December 22nd.

“truth is that i promised our shareholders that we would drive this company towards profitability in 2007 and that’s a promise i intend to keep. period.”

It looks like 2007 may bring interesting times over at Jobster. With a swap in the chief bean counter position now in place, and promises of a profitable 2007 swirling around the investor boardroom, Jason Goldberg will have to test his breathy vision against the invariable loss in trust that only layoffs can create.

Here’s my problem with all this.

Layoffs shouldn’t come easy, and they’re not part of any good business plan for a start up when revenue is growing in leaps and bounds as Jobster’s are. If layoffs were to happen now, it would signal to me that Jason Goldberg, his executive team, and his investors have screwed up. If 2007 profitability were a litmus test, as Jason declared earlier this year, then perhaps the hiring freeze that Jobster instituted recently could have come a little earlier? It’s hard for me to believe that Jason’s people strategy or go to plan would include a cannon fodder scenario (a military term for people being used as an expendable commodity) but you never know. Is Jason Goldberg a better BizDev talent than manager? It’s a pretty common scenario with founders. The vision, skill, and gumption that it takes to start a company (and make no mistake Jason has plenty of this secret sauce) don’t necessarily translate to managing a company successfully. The switch in CFO could have more to do with this than you may think. A smart board will push a visionary like Jason to surround themselves with the management talent to support the long term success of the business. And a smart leader will do the same thing and Jason is known for his smarts. It could be that Jason’s investors are giving him no other choice, either by an outright edict or in a nut twisting investor pressure that only $48 million dollars in investor funding can bring about.

So we’re left with three scenarios to mull over until Jobster makes its real plans public.

1. Jobster management sucks
2. Jobster’s investors have gotten cold feet and Jobster’s management have no choice but to placate them with major cost cutting
3. These rumors are all a load of crap brought about by a disgruntled employee/s.

I’d have to favor number two, with a sprinkling of number three thrown in for good measure. What makes me worry about the rumors is the tone of Jason’s post that I linked to earlier, which struck me as condescending and defensive.

“truth is that i promised our shareholders that we would drive this company towards profitability in 2007 and that’s a promise i intend to keep. period.

you ever had to do that? it’s tough stuff. especially when you are in growth mode. but that’s what it takes to build a valuable business.

…and that’s what we’re doing over here at jobster.

what are you doing?”

Technorati Tags: Jobster, Jobster Layoffs

…It Has Always Been For the People By the People

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”

The ClueTrain is where the reality of today’s blogosphere and social media revolution were first predicted back in 1999. And sure enough, even my beloved - though often slow to ‘get a clue’ - recruitment industry is feeling the reverberations of social media. I am asked almost daily for tips on how to effectively incorporate social media to ‘create’ a ‘more modern’ employer brand that ‘gets it’ and resonates with the next generation of workers.

A company’s employer brand can not be created. An Employer Brand is made up of the relationships that exists between your organization and its employees, former employees, potential employees, job candidates, and even customers. These relationships, and thus your employer brand, already exist and cannot be contrived through marketing. However, it is the open and direct communications that are the hallmark of blogs, that if applied correctly, can strengthen these relationships through a deeper understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. These conversations and their effects on people are at the foundation of social media’s power - a vehicle that has the opportunity to effect lasting change on your employer brand.

When a company suddenly realizes that they are having trouble hiring in this increasingly competitive job environment, they seek out marketing professionals to come up with an ad campaign that will increase their flow of applications and hopefully hires. The result is often an ad campaign that attempts to sell candidates on imagery and messaging that are built upon ideals that the company doesn’t really live up to. You are expected to prove you mean it in today’s market by your actions and by answering the questions put to you by the marketplace. Given this reality, do you want a one dimensional print ad or job posting to represent you or an interactive forum where a dialog can take place?

In this way social media can be particularly strong as a transitional vehicle when you want to communicate that your employer brand is ‘on the move.’ You might create a more traditional aspirational marketing campaign about your company vision and work environment while simultaneously using your blog to let your job candidates know that you aren’t implying you’ve reached your desired state. By inviting your candidates behind the curtain, for a peek back stage, you give them the opportunity to see themselves in the part of making that future a reality. We appreciate it when people talk with us, and not at us, and more often than not, communicating that you’re improving your business will only give you more credibility. Credibility is the key to improving your marketing results. Just as you can smell a rat when interviewing a candidate with all the right answers, job candidates too are measuring your words for ‘company spin’ and making their own judgments and performing their own Google searches to find out what the ‘real deal’ is.

Good or bad, what social media can do is give an authentic view of your company – that can be shared and commented on at lightening speed. Social media can go a long way toward helping you begin the process of letting go of your perception that you are in control so that your people can connect and share real information. Companies that let go of their focus on controlling the message, and rather focus on nurturing the relationships that people have to their organization - will reap the benefits of their people using social media to convey your employer brand with transparency and integrity.

Technorati Tags: employer-brand employer-branding social-media web2.0 recruiting recruitment-marketing talent acquisition

As a person who focuses on employer branding and recruitment marketing everyday - I get excited when I see companies doing really smart things online to build their employer brand and attract talented people.

Tonight - I came across one of the SMARTEST tactics to date, and it was by Yahoo!. Here is how it happened: I am giving a talk on Thursday called ‘Creating Great Employment Brands Online’…so I sat down and did a Google search on ‘Employer Branding’ on my new Google Custom Search Engine - popula8ion - to see what my peeps are saying about this topic. Then I did a technorati search to see if the ‘blogosphere according to technorati’ had anything else to offer me.

Here is a screen shot of the Technorati SERP and look what I found in their Sponsored Links:

Do you recognize that URL from the recruitosphere? If you don’t - that is http://www.jobsearchmarketing.com - the terrific blog by Matt Martone, a Recruitment Media Sales Executive over at Yahoo!.

My first reaction was that I couldn’t believe Matt was buying text ads on search engines to promote his blog. After all, he works for Yahoo! - what could he possibly gain personally by paying for an SEM campaign to attract readers to his blog? If you have your own business - that is one thing. But if you work for a company - what would make it worthwhile to spend your personal money like this?

I am so intrigued. So I click on his ad (sorry to skew the numbers Matt ;-)) - and here is what I see this time:

If you aren’t connecting the dots the way I did - the text ad on Technorati links to a specific post on Matt’s blog called - “What’s it like to work at Yahoo!“. I think that this is a recruitment marketing campaign!

Yahoo! is leveraging the fact that their employees blog and using Matt’s to recruit talent. (OR Yahoo! has a KICK ASS employee referral program and Matt IS using his own money as he is betting that he will make more money from an ERP bonus than the cost of this SEM campaign). Yahoo! is leveraging their employee bloggers to recruit talent. SO smart. I love it. The post is complete with a recruitment video that you can see here if you’re interested:

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, recruiting blogs, employer brand, employment brand, employer branding, employee blogs, recruitment marketing

JG and I spoke today on his way to Toronto to play Poker with Jay-Dee of Recruiting.com and many other recruiting cronies. No, I wasn’t talking to my JG - Julian Gude, rather - Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster. I really wanted to go to play a few hands with those boys, but My JG basically said, “over my dead body.”

Regardless, during the conversation with Jason, I found out that during his talk at the Direct Employers meeting he made it clear that Monster.com provides its users with a poor user-experience. To be specific, he said that:

these guys are literally printing money with a crap product.”

and that Monster users are:

giving their personal info to some companies that Monster has basically pimped out their site to …”

What was he talking about? Interstitial ad pages. You know, those annoying pages that appear and force you to physically click the link to skip the page before you are allowed to see your content. These are now an integrated part of every Monster search. The defined Monster user path: Job Search > Special Offer > Search Results.

Jason is right about this one - bad job seeker experience - but I am curious about the kind of response rates those pages garner on Monster. Julian worked for a short period of time at a clearing house for this type of product that made huge amounts of money for online leads like these interstitials generate. He shared with me that these registration pages are tremendous direct response vehicles for advertisers and that they will bid anywhere from a few pennies all the way up to $100 or more for every one of these submitted leads. So clearly these are huge money-makers for Monster. What affect do ads like these have on brand? I know that my reaction to seeing an interstitial page is that is asking for my personal information is that the company is begging - not the best brand message.

Monster has taken quite a bit of flack in recent years, and while I agree with Jason’s sentiments completely - I DO give Monster credit for almost single handedly directing job seeker behavior away from newspaper classifieds to online classifieds in the Web 1.0 world. It is easy to dismiss them as the money printing dinosaur and as much as we hate it - today, if you ask any job seeker on the street, they will know what Monster.com is, but few will know a site like Indeed.com for example.

While improvements to online Job search are coming in leaps and bounds - the new job sites have a long road ahead of them evangelizing and getting current users to spread the word about their new solutions in order to change job seeker behavior again. It remains to be seen if the new job sites can attract gaggles of job seekers simply because they’ve produced a better solution or if they will need a blimp and a mascot. What is the key to changing the job seeking behavior of the masses? It can’t happen fast enough for me


BTW: I updated my Jobster profile today just to see how the new Superstar tags work. Its cool. Go ahead, add your profile, add me to your faves :-). Now - if only they would allow me to display my RSS feed on my profile page….

Technorati Tags: monster, jobster, intersitials

In my last post I discussed how a corporate blog impacts employer brand by enabling prospective job candidates to find out more about a company than they typically find on the careers section - even if the corporate blog doesn’t overtly speak to recruiting or specific employee related issues.

In fact, except in some standout cases, it may be that the blogs that aren’t focusing specifically on recruiting will be viewed as more authentic by potential job candidates than the true recruiting blogs.

It is possible that the Fortune 500 companies that are allowing their employees to blog about their job, their function and their company openly and honestly (and with integrity) may actually have an advantage over the ‘recruiting blogs’ that represent the voice of a recruiter whose job is to sell top talented candidates that may be a match on working at the company. Despite this possible advantage - most corporate blogs fail to acknowledge this and forget to take simple steps like providing links to job search; benefits info; day in the life profiles etc.

In my opinion, the ideal situation would be a blog where both voices are represented - the recruiter that can offer up information about who they are looking for and why, as well as employees that are empowered to blog about their jobs and company. At some point in the process of engaging and connecting with readers - the reader may very well decide to explore job opportunities at the company. Doesn’t it only make sense to provide a link at the right time/place that says something along the line of:

“We understand the value of our people. Would you like to discuss the possibility of working together? Click here to learn more”

Why doesn’t this happen more often? It is related I think to companies still learning what it means to truly have a recruiting culture. That it is the job of every employee to seek out and recruit top talent to work along side them. Only when this ideal is coursing through the veins of a workforce do you tend to see a blending of corporate communications and process with recruitment communications.