The turbulent 2009 economy has not deterred college students and recent grads from pursuing their goals. In its fifth year running, the results of our annual Placement Survey shed light on some of the employment trends surrounding the Class of ‘09 and their plans for the real world.

More than 630 Gen Y’ers completed the 2009 Placement Survey (dubbed “Share Your Success with Experience”) between the beginning of June and the end of September, and 63% of respondents said “yes” when asked if they were on their intended career path. At nearly two-thirds in the middle of a recession, that’s good news.

So what about the other 37%? Some just had change of heart and others (16%) modified their career paths due to the economy. Forty-three percent of students chose jobs because it was their field of interest and other reasons that followed were advancement opportunities (12%), company culture (9%) and lack of other offers (12%).

What made certain young grads stay on their original tracks and others switch? Obviously, the economy is a major factor—even though we’re finally seeing the light as the recession lifts, students are still moving away from fields such as Finance, which is down when compared to the results of our 2008 Placement Survey. Interestingly, industries like Accounting have seen an uptick in hires. Also in the same vein as last year’s survey, Education was one of the top industries young grads are gravitating toward with 8% of the total respondent base.

We all know that internships help the next generation workforce get experience and exposure to help them decide which career path to pursue. Interestingly, in 2009, roughly two out of five grads (42%) told us they never held an internship during school. On the flip side, nearly three out of five (58%) held at least one internship and, in some cases, more than that. Of those who held internships during school, close to half (44%) landed a job in their desired field.

Now more than ever, there is a direct correlation between students who take on internships and receive jobs and those who don’t. Bringing on interns for full time entry level employment is a great way to fill your pipeline with the right kind of talent in the most cost effective manner. If you hired an intern (paid or unpaid) and they ultimately applied for a full-time position within your company, odds are you’d lean towards your intern vs. other candidates.

One last thing to keep top of mind as you are looking for entry-level employees is that those students who will be graduating in 2010 are looking for positions NOW.  Top candidates are not waiting to get themselves set up for life after college. Follow their lead: promote your internship programs and entry-level openings to help position your company in the right place in the Gen Y world.

To get more insight, check out our Gen Y Insights whitepaper – Internships Becoming a Very Effective Sourcing Strategy – for tips on how to use internships to bring on the best new hires possible.

Raytheon has jumped full bore into social media this year with two Twitter accounts @Raytheon_Jobs (experienced hiring) and @RTNCollegeJobs (college hiring).

This innovative initiative was spearheaded by Jeff Goodman, Talent Acquisition Manager at Raytheon. With over 2,000 followers, they are now one of the leading companies using Twitter to drive interested candidates directly to their employment web site. Their goal is to brand Raytheon and to engage candidates in conversations and then leverage those conversations into applications.

Having posted 600+ jobs, they are able to track conversions off of Twitter - over 23,000 people have gone from Twitter to directly to a job. Very impressive!

Raytheon offers this advice to other recruiters looking to jumpstart social media in their organizations:

• Expect that this will take a fair amount of effort and it will take time to see results
• Don’t think about social media in traditional terms - you will need to keep it up and offer new content often
• Try to go for a one company approach to focus your audience building
• Get buy in from all areas of your company so no one is surprised and all areas can benefit from a consolidated approach

If you’re using social media to attract talent, please email me. We’d love to highlight your experiences so we can all keep moving up the learning curve!

In the Gen Y space, social media recruiting (aka facebook, twitter etc) comes up in just about every conversation we have with recruiters these days. It seems everyone, I mean everyone, is jumping on the bandwagon.

As a new media company that strives to connect employers with Gen Y talent using innovative methods, we just had to find out for ourselves.

For starters, we polled our audience and found out that most Gen Y still rely on school resources, job boards and company web sites to find out about open positions (our survey runs until mid-Oct so these results are preliminary; stay tuned!) .

If that’s the case, then why all the hubbub about social media and recruitment?

One aspect that we discovered is that social media, in this case Twitter, is good for maintaining relationships. We used our @hiringbeat Twitter feed. With ~250 followers and approximately one tweet per day, we are getting as many as 20 clicks on some tweets. That’s equivalent to an 8% click rate, which is pretty good. Average email marketing open rates hover around 13% (according to Mailermailer) and click rates are a fraction of that (say 13% open an email and 10% click, that is equal to a 1.3% click rate).

What we also seeing is that our tweets, if they are good, are being retweeted by our followers, further extending our reach, touching people who may have never heard of us before.

So if you get your Twitter following up to 1000, then each time you tweet you could have hundred people or so viewing your jobs and finding about your events - a great way to maintain relationships with candidates!

To learn more about Gen Y using social media, download our whitepaper.