1. Build, develop, manage, and maintain campus relationships.
The successful college recruiting program looks at the long haul, not just short-term results, and is built on strong relationships.

Most college recruiting professionals identify the career center as their “base.” These typically offer career fairs, job posting services, on-campus recruiting, and other options for connecting with students. Plus, career center staff can provide you with intelligence about their campus—its culture and traditions, specifics about their students’ attitudes and behaviors, and such—which you can use to tailor your strategy. Career center staff also can help you develop relationships with other key campus contacts, including faculty and administrators.

The reality is, no college recruiting program can guarantee job openings for new college grads every year, but organizations achieving greatest success don’t abandon campus when they aren’t hiring. Instead, they find ways to maintain their ties, such as continuing their internship program, taking part in mock interviews, or performing resume critiques, for example. This is where career center staff can be especially helpful: They can tell you what options are open, and what will and won’t work for their campus.

2. Set realistic recruiting goals.
True story: At a meeting, a group of recruiting professionals toted up their respective hiring goals for a specific major, and found that their collective goal exceeded the number of candidates available. Consider that they represented just a portion of the employers seeking this major, and you’ll see the problem with setting goals that aren’t fact-based. Base your goals on supply, demand, and related factors. How large is the potential pool? Where are the candidates? Who are your competitors? What are they offering? Do this work upfront, and you’ll be better able to set reachable goals.

3. Choose your target schools carefully.
Most college recruiting professionals say they build their target school list around majors available, quality of programs, experience recruiting at the school, and school location. This requires research and careful tracking, so you can see which schools are working best for your organization.

In researching which schools offer the majors you seek, be wary of “best schools for” rankings; it’s tempting to use these as a short cut around real research, but be aware that rankings are based on criteria that may not match up with your organization’s needs.

4. Send the right people to campus.
Would you approach a career fair booth if the booth staff looked bored? Would you be impressed by a representative who told you to check the company website to get answers to your questions? How comfortable would you feel in an interview if the recruiter asked you for a date? Unfortunately, this is how some company reps have behaved on campus.

Don’t take great pains to build a brand only to negate it by sending a “warm body” to campus. Research shows that who you send to campus is critical: Your reps have the most influence on how students view your organization. Send well-trained professionals who are equipped to answer questions, address concerns, represent your brand, and sell your organization.

5. Feed your full-time hiring with an internship program.
An internship program is one of the most effective recruiting techniques, helping you build a relationship with potential hires early in their college career (before they are “on the job market”) and gauge their fit for your organization. An internship program can also help you achieve better retention: Research shows new college hires who have served an internship are more likely to stay with the employer. (For more on internships, see “15 Best Practices for Internship Programs at www.naceweb.org/recruiting/15_best_practices/)

6. Measure and analyze your results.
Tracking how many hires you make, yes, but also track your rates for offer-to-interview, offer/acceptance, and retention. These can help you identify where you’re having the most trouble, so you can adjust. You also want to benchmark against others involved in college recruiting, to compare “apples to apples.” (For current benchmarks, see “2011 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey” at www.naceweb.org/2011_recruiting_benchmarks_survey/)

Learn more: NACE offers a variety of resources for college recruiting, including salary information, benchmarks, best practices, custom research, and more. Sample some of these resources at: www.naceweb.org/sample-resources/

1. National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2012 survey

A special thank you to Mimi and NACE for providing such great content for our blog!

I had the pleasure of watching Super Bowl XLVI and was impressed with how the NFL produces this mega-event. The NFL showed a national audience that it gets “It.” It showed that the NFL could reach new markets, engage its existing customer base and build its brand. It showed that the NFL gets diversity. The NFL scored a diversity touchdown with this year’s event. Let me explain.

According to Nielsen, this year’s Super Bowl drew a record 111.3 million viewers. Super Bowl tweeting also smashed the record for a sports event, with 12,233 twitter posts per second going out and in during the final minutes of the game. The NFL also produced the halftime performance, and its choice of Madonna for this year’s event was brilliant. Madonna’s halftime show was seen by an estimated 114 million people — a higher average than that of the game itself — and was the most-watched Super Bowl halftime entertainment show on record, according to Nielsen.

Why was this year’s halftime performance such an extraordinary success? Diversity!

We all know that Madonna is a pop-culture icon whose music and movies have been at the top of the charts for three decades. Even so, with this year’s halftime show it seems as no one was going to be satisfied with a show that featured Madonna getting on-stage singing and dancing to some of her multi-platinum classics. Smart! Instead of the ordinary halftime show, the producers created a performance that featured diverse acts within the larger act that appealed to a diverse audience. This performance was unique in that it brought together elements from musical genres like Hip Hop, Pop, Rock, Gospel and Soul. It offered Roman Centurions, Vogue models, DJ’s, dancers, cheerleaders, a marching band, circus acrobats and big-name performers, all on a stage bigger and better than anything ever seen. This was a super-sized universally appealing event that scored a touchdown with a super-sized audience.

By having such a diverse performance, the NFL was able to attract new viewers. It was able to keep existing viewers, and it was able to over deliver to marketers. This is where the Super Bowl halftime performance shows how the NFL “gets” diversity. It “gets” that diversity attracts, that diversity expands and that diversity sells.

It’s not enough anymore to have a superstar with mega appeal try to reach everybody. Marketers must now creatively, respectfully and meaningfully touch customers from multiple backgrounds, cultures and interests. This event showed us how truly powerful diversity is and what can be accomplished by those who understand it. They can keep their audience, expand their audience and sell more to their audience. Diversity is the spice of marketing, and since diversity is so tied to sales, it is a piece of so much more. Diversity will continue to have its powerful impact on education, employment and politics. Virtually every area of our lives will be changed by diversity. The NFL just gave us a taste of diversity, be it on a Super Bowl level.

Many thanks to Preston Edwards, Jr. for contributing this great post on diversity. IMDiversity, Inc., has been serving minority audiences, employers and career services’ offices since 1970. Through DIVERSITY EMPLOYERS, TEACHERS OF COLOR, and IMDiversity.com, IMDiversity, Inc. has built a trusted relationship with minority job seekers and diversity-seeking employers.


INDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — DirectEmployers Association, a leading HR consortium representing over 600 of the leading global employers, launched mobile functionality on its ever expanding .JOBS network of US.jobs and .JOBS Career Microsites.

In 2007, an alliance between DirectEmployers Association and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) created the National Labor Exchange. Since then the National Labor Exchange, which powers US.jobs, has been utilized by employers as an alternative to commercial job boards. According to Bill Warren, DirectEmployers Executive Director, “As more of today’s job seekers are turning to online resources to find employment, it is necessary to provide them with a tool that is accessible from all devices, both mobile and desktop.”

The Puget Sound Business Journal reported that more than 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers, or 97.9 million Americans, own a smartphone. “One of the benefits of having a mobile version of US.jobs and other .JOBS Career Microsites is the ability to reach a broad base of job seekers who are trying to access both the state job banks and other sites within the .JOBS Universe,” states Rodney Moses, VP of Global Recruitment, Hilton Worldwide and DirectEmployers Board President.

Instead of creating a second website for mobile users, the development team chose to create an intuitive version that adapts to the user’s device when the window drops below a set width. Rather than focusing exclusively on a type of smartphone or other device developers set out to create a mobile version with full search functionality. “The process of implementing a mobile platform on our .JOBS sites began with a single thought, how can we take our multi-faceted website and make it accessible in a very narrow window without downgrading the value of the site,” commented DirectEmployers Senior User Experience Designer, Jason Sole.

The New York, Nevada and Connecticut state job banks, powered through a partnership between DirectEmployers and NASWA, will now be included in the .JOBS microsites optimized for mobile viewing. Deborah Beaudoin from the State of Connecticut Department of Labor added, “We have found that more and more job seekers don’t own or have direct access to a computer making their job search that much more difficult. With the release of a mobile version of our job bank our total audience reach will be expanded exponentially.” These state sites will have full functionality on mobile browsers helping job seekers connect directly with employers. On-the-go job seekers who only have a smartphone will be able to fully access the job bank and apply, share or email job opportunities to themselves or their friends.

About National Association of State Workforce Agencies
The National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) is an organization of state administrators of unemployment insurance laws, employment services, training programs, employment statistics and labor market information and other programs and services provided through the publicly-funded state workforce system.

About DirectEmployers Association
DirectEmployers Association is a nonprofit HR consortium of leading global employers formed to improve labor market efficiency through the sharing of best practices, research and the development of technology. .JOBS Career Microsites are one of the many technologies that DirectEmployers Association provides to member companies.

SOURCE DirectEmployers Association

MEDIA CONTACT: Nancy Holland, Vice President of Marketing, DirectEmployers Association, +1-317-874-9022, nancy@directemployers.org

DirectEmployers has received a lot of media coverage for the recent launch of US.jobs and hosting .JOBS Career Microsites.

Keeping you connected, with no waiting—The Employment Line. Thank you for watching.

The Employment Line is brought to you by DirectEmployers, a non-profit association of global employers, which provides simple, sophisticated solutions for Human Resources and Recruitment.

One of the most significant changes would require businesses with at least 50 employees and $50,000 or more in government contracts to set a single, national utilization goal of 7% for the employment of individuals with disabilities for each separate job group. This sure sounds like a hiring quota to most contractors. Taking pride in setting the 7% goal, OFCCP Director Patricia Shiu proclaimed proudly, “That’s never been done before,” in a December 9 email sent to “Dear Friends” entitled “An Historic Step Forward.” There’s no question these changes are indeed historic, and the contractor community will most certainly experience a sharp increase in the administrative recordkeeping burdens, requests for more reasonable accommodations resulting in more medical assessments, mandatory linkage agreements with partners, more aggressive self-identification and data collection requirements, and so much more.

DirectEmployers Association recently hosted a webinar for the Members of the Association on January 11, facilitated by Nita Beecher of Mercer ORC Networks and Legal Counsel to the Recruitment Regulatory Compliance Committee (RRCC) of DirectEmployers Association. Nita provided a summary of the regulations to help employers interpret and understand the implications of these new rules and how they will impact affirmative action enforcement.If you are a Member of DirectEmployers, you can view Nita’s webinar entitled, Game-Changer: OFCCP Issues its Proposed Section 503 Regulations on-demand, and download the slide deck at the Pipeline, an exclusive social community for Members.

Interestingly, on December 14, 2011, the HR Policy Association sent a letter to Debra Carr, Director-Division of Policy, Planning and Program Development for the OFCCP, requesting an extension to the original comment period deadline, but a denial letter was sent to them from Ms. Carr on January 24, 2012. Just three days later on January 27, the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce in the House sent a letter to Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, requesting information from the OFCCP on how they came up with the regulations, the proposed requirements, and the amount of time it would take contractors to comply. Congress requested a 90-day extension to comment on the proposed regulations and expressed concern with the paperwork and reporting requirements and suggested they may create an unreasonable burden on business. Finally, very late in the day on February 6, the OFCCP granted a 14-day extension moving the comment deadline period from February 7 to February 21.

Employers are strongly encouraged to respond to these proposed regulations or expect to face enormous costs and extreme burdens to comply with these overly prescriptive regulations. Of course, the other option employers have is to abandon federal contracts altogether as they question whether all of this is really worth it. To this end, the RRCC of DirectEmployers Association has surveyed its members about the NPRM and will be submitting comments to the OFCCP on behalf of the Association’s members. If you want to share your thoughts and have us anonymously include your input in our comment letter, please send me (jolene@directemployers.org) your feedback. You can also submit comments directly to the OFCCP either electronically at http://www.regulations.gov or by mail by the new deadline of February 21, 2012. The identification number (RIN) for this NPRM is 1250-AA02. If you are mailing or hand delivering comments, send them to Debra Carr, Director, Division of Policy, Planning, and Program Development, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Room C-3325, 200 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20210.

For some helpful summaries of the most significant aspects of the proposed rules, check out the following additional resources:

1. At the OFCCP’s website http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/503 you will find a short summary of the proposed rule, a fact sheet you can print and share, answers to frequently asked questions, and other useful materials.
2. Littler Washington D.C. Employment Law Update
   OFCCP Proposes Changes to Rules Governing Contractor Nondiscrimination and Affirmative Action Requirements for Individuals with Disabilities
   December 8, 2011
3. Jackson Lewis
   OFCCP Proposes Major Changes to Affirmative Action Regulations for Individuals with Disabilities – Proposal Requires Utilization Goals and Increased Recordkeeping and Reporting
   December 14, 2011
4. Seyfarth Shaw
   OFCCP Proposed “Game Chang(ing)” Disability Regulations: Redefined EEO Requirements are Extensive, Expensive and Overly Exacting
   January 3, 2012
5. Paul Hastings
   Federal Contractors May Face New Compliance Burdens
   January 5, 2012
6. John C. Fox, trial attorney and employment law expert of Fox, Wang & Morgan P.C., wrote an interesting article on January 19, 2012, reviewing “the year that was” for the OFCCP and described 2011 as the “biggest period of policy change for OFCCP in its now storied 46 year history.” He also makes two very interesting predictions for 2012 about the timing of when the proposed rules for Sections 503 and 4212 might be made final:

   “PREDICTION 1: OFCCP will take the VEVRAA proposed regulations to final in the weeks before the November Presidential election.

   PREDICTION 2: If President Obama loses in November, OFCCP will publish its Section 503 regulations in December. If The President wins re-election in November, OFCCP will relax, take its time and publish the Section 503 regulations in final in the winter of 2013 (and absent Republican control of both houses of Congress).”

If you are an employer and these recently proposed regulations don’t completely overwhelm you, I don’t know what more would. I’d love to hear what you think!

Angie is also a member of the DirectEmployers Recruitment Regulatory Compliance Committee, Director of Talent Delivery at UnitedHealth Group and a mother of four girls. She masterfully balances her commitments and was kind enough to sit down for a great in-depth conversation about her career, what her team does well, how she benefits from DirectEmployers and the hopes she has for her children.

Nancy: Tell me about how you got to your position at UnitedHealth Group.

Angie: HR was a fairly new program when I was in college. I sought out an internship, which ended up being unpaid at a local hospital in the human resources department. That eventually led to my first job at the same hospital doing administrative duties. After a couple of years, I moved into recruiting position at retirement community. UnitedHealth Group was expanding in Ohio at the time and I got my third job out of college within a 2-year period – now I’ve been there for 16 years.

Nancy: What differentiates UnitedHealth Group’s approach to finding talent?

Angie: Not many people know UnitedHealth Group’s mission is to help people live healthier lives. We need to find people who can really resonate with our mission. It’s not necessarily about finding someone who can work on the benefit services side of the house and pay claims, it’s about that person fitting within that idea that we’re really here to help with a system, a healthcare system as it were, for that purpose and mission.

We’re really looking for candidates who demonstrate 5 core values – performance, integrity, innovation, compassion and relationship development. I feel like our talent acquisition team absolutely demonstrates those values every day in how they treat candidates, how they work with our hiring managers, how they think about innovative ways to find people and how they interact with candidates in a social media space.

Nancy: What do you feel your team does really well?

Angie: First of all, I think our talent acquisition team is best in class. We’ve looked at ways to really build almost an internal search function, especially for our executive-level placements.
Our talent acquisition team is great at developing relationships, building a pipeline of talent and knowing where the talent belongs within the organization. Our recruiters are actually aligned by function as opposed to business segment. The beauty of being functionally aligned is that all of our recruiters can work together to figure out, “If I have an IT professional, what part of the organization really has the need?” There are many ways candidates can interact with our recruiters. Even on the very front end of the process through recruiter chat and social media, we look at the candidate as our customer. I think a lot of recruitment teams look at the hiring manager as their primary customer. And of course, we have both, but the candidate is a key customer too and could be a current customer of our business or will be in the future, so we really have to think about our interactions.

Nancy: What would you say are some of the key benefits of DirectEmployers that you and your team utilize on a regular basis or that you find the most valuable?

Angie: Initially our partnership with DirectEmployers was really about finding a solution to post all of our jobs with the state job services. That’s been wonderful and we’ve been able to meet our compliance needs. Last year was my first DirectEmployers Conference and I was so pleasantly surprised on the networking ability, to find people in other companies who do similar roles as myself. It’s not like I don’t have other ways to network with people, but I was just surprised at the level of people who are focused on compliance within a recruiting function and the number of people from a staff perspective who are really focused on some of those diversity initiatives.

With the veterans outreach for example, it’s not just about “Oh, how many job boards can we make sure your jobs are going to,” but rather “How do we build partnerships and testify on Capitol Hill to make sure that we’re really shaping the future of policy as a representative of the employers?” For UnitedHealth Group we’ve seen value in getting our voice heard through an association, without needing to do that work internally ourselves.

We’re just now starting to get into the idea of the .jobs and are we going to put together some microsites.

Check out some of UnitedHealth Group’s rankings and awards:

• Earned a top rating of 100 percent three years straight on the Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation
• Ranked #1 for “Innovation in the Insurance and Managed Care” category on Fortune Magazine’s 2011 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies

Nancy: Given your role professionally and as a mother, what are your hopes for your girls in terms of the job market and how they’ll progress as they enter into their careers?

Angie: I think about a lot of different things. First of all because I have four girls, I’m amazed at the world of work difference now. During the 2008 election for example, I found it fascinating that none of my kids were surprised that an African American and female candidate were going head to head in the primary. For them it was just normal and it made me reflect on the progress we’ve made as a country. And I think a lot of credit can be given to human resource professionals out there who have helped drive that idea of diversity in the workplace. That gives me a lot of hope that there’s not going to be a glass ceiling, or that phrase is won’t even exist in their vocabulary as they are going through college.

Thank you so much Angie for taking your valuable time to share with us. You can also catch Angie sharing some wise words for job seekers in the following video made for the Social Jobs Partnership: http://vimeo.com/33534439.