Archive for March, 2009

They’re not exactly love letters — but they just might steal your candidate’s heart. In fact, you might even fall in love with CareerBuilder.com’s My Letters tool if you’re really lonely.

The gist:

My Letters allows you to create and save up to 20 different automatic response letters to send to job seekers after they submit an application to your job. Job Postings on their own are great, but if you’re not using My Letters, you’re:

1. Sporting this style of desk (and life) organization
2. Wasting a lot of time painstakingly hand-writing response letters with your old-school quill pen, you Thomas Jefferson wannabe.
   OR…
3. Ignoring candidates altogether. And really, that’s no good. No good at all.

Also known as:

The bento box of CareerBuilder’s Free Tools You Can Use. Y’know — Compartmentalize. Organize. (Yes, that’s Mario.)

Why you need it:

Communication is one of the most important elements of both personal and business communication — and with layoffs on the rise and more job seekers searching now than in the past, it is an absolutely crucial element of your hiring process. My Letters is a particularly effective tool to use with your Job Postings, because you can automate your communication to candidates, but still make your messages relevant and targeted to the candidates applying to your job.

Why job seekers love it:

My Letters enable you to get necessary information out to candidates quickly, easily, and effectively. You can create letters concerning the job position, needed candidate information, interview status, to alert of next steps in the process, to thank candidates, and more. Basically, My Letters are your canvas. Automate as much communication as you need to, and organize your candidate communication — no quill pens necessary!

And better yet, you’re not leaving candidates in the dark. You may not realize how much those candidates applying to your jobs want and need your attention and your responses, but they do. While that job may not be the first thing on your mind, people seeking a new job are likely checking their e-mail a million times a day. They’re applying like crazy, they’re busy working on their resumes, they’re setting up interviews — and they’re counting on that communication from you. By communicating with them in even simple ways, you’re setting yourself apart as an employer, and you are taking a huge and important step forth in relationships with those candidates who may be your next employees.

How to get it:

• Posted by: Amy Chulik on March 30, 2009
• There is 1 Comment. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Free Tools You Can Use

With many organizations restructuring their workforces to accommodate increasing pressure to “do more with less,” Profiles International conducted a study of nearly 800 business leaders nationwide recently with the goal to identify the primary challenge these organizations face when implementing their restructuring plans.

The company released the findings of its Reorganization & Recovery Survey yesterday – with some very surprising numbers.  Its key finding was that “most executives are unprepared to properly measure the strength of their workforce and affect workforce change.”  In other words, these business seemed know very little about the hiring and candidate selection practices at their own organizations.  Shouldn’t that, um, be kind of…important?

Continue Reading…

• Posted by: Mary Lorenz on March 30, 2009
• There is 1 Comment. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Employee Engagement, Survey Results

If the business world were 80s teen flicks (and I’m not saying it’s not…), your employees may feel like Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobler right about now…especially if they’ve recently seen their benefits, bonuses or even pay taken away as companies try to save money. 

Much like John Cusack’s lovable, love-weary everyman lamenting, “I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen,” your employees may be feeling  little defeated if they’ve been putting 110 percent of their efforts into their work only to get little to nothing back in return. 

Continue Reading…

• Posted by: Mary Lorenz on March 25, 2009
• There are 2 Comments. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Employee Engagement, Employee Retention, Philanthropy

CareerBuilder recently launched an ad contest for job seekers to create their own “It’s Probably Time” 45-second spot (a la our Super Bowl ad).  Go here to view the 10 finalists and vote for your favorite one. 

Even if you have no interest in voting, it’s worth checking out.  At the very least, you’ll get a cringe kick out of watching some of these submissions; however, you might also gain a little insight into what makes passive job seekers run to – and from - certain jobs and companies.  (They say every joke has its grain of truth after all…)

Continue Reading…

• Posted by: Mary Lorenz on March 24, 2009
• There are 0 Comments. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Contest, Fun and Games

A co-worker recently pointed me to a very interesting blog post by Phil Johnson, president of PJA Advertising, who writes on Ad Age’s “Small Agency Diary” that his office recently renovated and changed from a closed-office environment to a a completely open floor plan with no private offices, with the goal of creating a truly collaborative work space.

With this, of course, came a bit of a new dilemma: With no doors and no high cubicle walls, everyone could suddenly see what everyone else was doing on the computer. Shoe shopping, twittering, gawking at Facebook photos — the works. So Phil came up with a very clear policy on employees’ Internet usage at work, and shared it with his employees.

The statement? I don’t care what you do on the Internet.

It may seem bold, but he explains his reasoning in this post. And I have to say, he has some great points.

In contrast, Helen A.S. Popkin stresses in a recent MSNBC post that “the Internet is not your BFF,” relating the recent story of a would-be Cisco employee who tweeted post-interview:

• Posted by: Amy Chulik on March 24, 2009
• There are 31 Comments. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Branding, Economy, Employee Attraction, Employee Engagement, Employee Retention, Events, Generational Hiring, Social Media, Survey Results, Technology

One more thing to add to the list of things to blame on the economy…

Six-in-ten workers (60 percent) over the age of 60 say they are putting off their retirement due to the impact of the U.S. financial crisis on their long-term savings, according to a survey released earlier this week by CareerBuilder.  According to the press release:

One in ten workers (11 percent) over the age of 60 who are putting off retirement say that the decrease to their savings may now cause them to never retire, while 73 percent think it will take them up to 6 years of extra work to recoup their lost savings. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) feels they can make their money back by working an additional year or two.

Continue Reading…

• Posted by: Mary Lorenz on March 23, 2009
• There are 4 Comments. Join the discussion.
• Categories: Employee Retention, Generational Hiring, Survey Results