Mobile, Video & Social Media in Recruitment

Cadbury Schweppes Graduate Recruitment Introduce Online Chat Room

The Cadbury Schweppes Graduate Recruitment team have been at it again!

In addtion to introducing a Blog in 2005 and mp3 downloads in 2006 they have now introduced a dedicated Online Chat Room for their 2008 Graduate Recruitment campaign. The chat room opens again this Friday 9th November at 12.30pm (UK time).

You can see the full story via the Personnel Today web site by clicking here.

A good example of using Web 2.0 features to "connect" with their target audience.

Mike

www.Web-Based-Recruitment.com

News International Buys Milkround.com

News International have bought the graduate recruitment job site Milkround.com for an estimated £20 million.

It was rumoured a couple of weeks ago that the Milkround.com job site was being sold and at that time there was talk of interest from Daily Mail & General Trust and the Trinity Mirror group.

It could turn out to be an ideal fit as the demographics for Milkround.com would seem to compliment those of MySpace.com, another News International online site, particularly well.

Mike

www.web-based-recruitment.com

Student Minority Admit To Cheating During Recruitment Process

There was an interesting piece of research released in the UK this week by Cubiks (an international HR consultancy) showing that there is a small minority of students who are prepared to use a variety of different cheating methods when going through the recruitment process.

For example, 15% of respondents said they would be prepared to gain an unfair advantage using their CV, 13% using an application form, 11% via an unsupervised ability test and 10% via an unsupervised personality / competency questionnaire.

The research survey captured the views of 500 undergraduates and postgraduates from across the UK and you can see the findings here: http://www.cubiks.com/aspx/content.aspx?sectionid=38&articleid=4884 .

Interestingly, in a separate study of employers (also carried out by Cubiks) they found that 86% of employers think that the CVs and application forms they receive contain lies and exaggerations!

So it looks like even if you don't cheat, the majorty of employers probably think your CV is not 100% accurate?

Mike

www.web-based-recruitment.com

MySpace.com & Google

Google won an important battle this week for the right to serve web search and advertising listings to the members of MySpace.com and the majority of Fox Interactive Media properties owned by News International.

Google will pay $900 million based on Fox Interactive achieving certain traffic and other commitments. Considering News International only bought MySpace.com last year for $580 million it looks a good deal.

As a Recruiter, if you are looking to recruit school leavers, college or university graduates then some serious thought should be given to using Google to advertise on MySpace.com.

Mike

www.web-based-recruitment.com

Association of Graduate Recruiters 2006 Survey

The latest AGR (Association of Graduate Recruiters) 2006 survey results were released this week.

Some of the highlights of the survey (based on 235 leading employers) were that:

- Graduate level vacancies rose by 16.7%

- Median starting salaries climbed to £23,136 – an increase of 2.9%

- Recruiters received an average of 28 applications per vacancy

One figure that surprised me was that there were only 28 applications per vacancy? Given the growth in the number of graduates over the last few years I thought that figure might have been higher, especially as it is so easy to apply online versus paper applications?  Maybe more graduates are putting off appying for jobs straight away after finishing their studies?

You can view more highlights from the survey at:
http://www.agr.org.uk/news/agr_in_the_news/id.55.html

Mike

Web-Based-Recruitment.com

Virtual Graduate Recruitment Fair

One of the leading generalist job sites in the UK, www.Totaljobs.com, have just published the results of their first virtual Graduate Recruitment Fair, known as GradU8.

During the six weeks the virtual fair ran on MSN.co.uk it attracted 170,000 graduate visitors. In total 40 recruiters took part and between them they received over  20,000 job applications.

The idea of running the fair in May was to see if graduates started to think about job hunting as soon as their exams were finished. The high number of visitors and job applications confirmed that the demand for a graduate fair was there.

“We wanted to test the idea that graduates would actively search for jobs during May and the response was overwhelming,” says Sophie Relf, Head of Marketing, totaljobs.com . Totaljobs.com plans to repeat the virtual fair again next year.

Mike

Web-Based-Recruitment.com