I am so pleased to be hosting an upcoming webinar called “Engage Gen Y with Social Media” with my two co-presenters Kim Allenbach from Verizon Wireless and Carrie Dulay from Accenture.

We’re all been adding social media strategies to our recruiting practices to brand, attract and interact with Gen Y. Below are details of the webinar, I hope you can join us!

Webinar Invite

In 2010, those who set a clear social media strategy and leverage new channels effectively will build robust talent pipelines for their organizations.

On Thursday, November 19th at 1:00pm – 2:00pm EST, Experience’s Janet Sun will host a live, no-cost webinar on social media recruiting trends in the Gen Y space. Kim Allenbach from Verizon Wireless and Carrie Dulay from Accenture will share how they are using social media today to recruit, brand and maintain relationships with college students and young alumni.

Attend and learn…

• Key research and trends covering Gen Y and social media
• How best-in-class companies leverage Web 2.0
• Opportunities social media offers to innovative employers
• How to manage risks, downsides and gotchas
• And much more

Spots are limited – register today at socialmedia.experience.com

Searching job listings is a core part of every career exploration process, so we set out to learn how Gen Y conducts their job search to help employers recruit them better.

For starters, the top resources Gen Y turns to for opportunities are company websites (73%), university or alumni career centers (70%), career fairs or events (69%) and job board sites (60%). Students tend to use career fairs and university career centers, while alumni rely more on company web sites and job boards.

To narrow their online job searches, Gen Y typically uses two to three criteria , most often job function (65%), type of job (53%), and experience level (50%). Location is also regularly used.

In the job description itself, students and recent graduates agree on three “must have” requirements: location (77%), qualifications sought (76%), and roles & responsibilities (74%). Students, however, have two additional “must haves” - majors sought (53%) and start date or estimated time to hire (50%). They want more information so they can see how their skills align with the job.

While there are lots of ways to find out about job opportunities, respondents say they primarily stay informed through emails from their school (73%), search agent emails (52%) and updates in their school/alumni portal (47%), indicating that email is not dead!

Employers, for tips on how to position your company well in the Gen Y job search, download the whitepaper.

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.

How do Gen Y make decisions about their careers? In our most recent survey, we found one significant influence - role models. 72% of Gen Y would have chosen different schools, majors or careers if not for their role models - underscoring the influence that role models have on Gen Y.

Sixty percent said their role models influenced them in “selecting career paths and opportunities, while 45% said that role models helped them with “choosing a major.” Other areas where role models played a part were: “undertaking a project or challenge” (32%), “decision to attend college” (30%) and “choosing college courses to take” (30%).

Role models, drawing upon their own experiences, clearly have the ability to shape and guide Gen Y through a period of their life where major decisions are being made.

Most Gen Y had role models who they had frequent contact with. Many cited ”teachers or professors” (46%) or “parents” (41%) as role models. Less common role models included “friends” (19%), “family members” (15%) and “manager from job/internship” (15%).

Employers, for tips on how to support the Gen Y guidance process, download the whitepaper.

Gen Y is known for being gurus at social networking so even we were surprised by the results of our most recent survey which revealed that 53% of Gen Y is intimidated by networking when searching for jobs and internships. It turns out most are intimidated by in-person networking (62%) and telephone networking (50%), both forms that are not electronic and require contact with people they don’t know.

When it comes to employers using online networking, Gen Y told us which employer behaviors they find acceptable: they agreed “invitations to connect” (67%) and “invitations to join employer-hosted groups” (62%) were appropriate, but they drew the line at “poking,” which some equated to “flirting,” and found “friending” less acceptable.

If you are looking to network with and build relationships with Gen Y, keep in mind a couple of notions: (1) as newcomers to the workforce, they may not be as comfortable with career networking as your more experienced hires, so go easy on them! and (2) as social networking mavens, they are leaps and bounds ahead of us and we need to follow their lead on social media conventions.

Employers, for tips on how to network with Gen Y, download the whitepaper.

I spoke last week at the Future Workforce Solutions conference hosted by ITT (one of the best forums I have been to on workforce development), on the topic of social media and recruiting. We’ve all seen the numbers, the adoption of social media is astounding. Facebook hit 200 million users worldwide this year.

We also know that Gen is all over social media, the question is will they use it for job search?

In Experience’s 2009 Social Media & Job Search Survey, we polled Gen Y about social media and their willingness to look for jobs and make connections via social networks. We found Gen Y plans to use social media to:

• Find out about opportunities (79%)
• Get introduced to employers, hiring managers, and recruiters (61%)
• Maintain relationships with network of contacts (69%)

Characteristic of Gen Y being open and willing to try new technologies and applications, 30% said they were very receptive to employers reaching them via social media and another 51% were somewhat receptive. Some of this willingness to engage may be related to the current economic environment, but we also believe this is a natural extension of these platforms into more essential applications.

Employers, for tips on how to engage Gen Y using social media, download the whitepaper.

Employers often tell us that they have found Gen Y to be less skilled or prepared than other generations. An earlier study by the Conference Board, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families and SHRM, titled “Are They Really Ready to Work?” supports this notion.

So we asked Gen Y the same set of questions posed to the 400+ employers in the original study - which skills do employers value, what skills do you excel at and how well have you been prepared? Our findings revealed:

· Gen Y identified 9 out of the 10 skills employers identified as being the most valuable

· Unlike employers, Gen Y did not feel they were deficient in any of the top 10 skills

· Gen Y believed their undergraduate education prepared them well in the top 10 skills

While both groups are in synch on the set of valued skills, there is a clear disconnect on proficiency and preparedness. In addition, we found 54% of Gen Y is fuzzy about the type of skills they should be acquiring for their desired career paths.

At the same time, Gen Y said if they were made aware of these requirements, 97% of them would take action to get the needed skills either through classes or work experiences.

For tips on communicating skill requirements to Gen Y to build a more prepared workforce, download the whitepaper.

We asked Gen Y about whether they believe they are getting a good return on their education. 88% see real value in going to college, and here’s how the numbers stack up.

How much does college education cost today? According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), average tuition, fees, room and board cost approximately $13.4k per year and $30.4k per year to attend public 4-year and private 4-year institutions, respectively. Assuming most go for 4 years, that comes out to between $54k and $122k.

To pay for undergrad education, the average student incurs cumulative loan debt around $20k to attend public 4-year and $27k for private 4-year colleges (NCES).

What’s the payback? According to the US Census, workers with a bachelor’s degree earned about $26k more on average than workers with a high school diploma, which comes out to approximately $1M over the lifetime of a worker. Still worth it.

82% of Gen Y go to college for an advantage in the job market and 81% go to obtain specific skills.

How does this impact employers? So far this is good news, that there is tangible value associated with going to college, and that students see the value. The real problem emerges if tuitions continue to rise and the payback falls. Already we are seeing increased enrollment in public institutions and community colleges, indicating students and their parents are looking for greater ROI.

In need of a skilled workforce, employers can help by providing professional training, tuition reimbursement, loan forgiveness, subsidized education and loan repayment programs to ease the loan and cost burdens of Gen Y looking to add to their skill base.

This is a perennial question employers ask when hiring slows down. Should I go to campus, continue with college or local career fairs? Is there value in maintaining my brand and connection with potential recruits? Will candidates want to engage with us even though we’re not hiring at this moment?

The answer is a resounding YES! YES! YES!

In a recent survey of Gen Y, we found out a couple of things:

• 1 out of 5 of Gen Y respondents would be less likely to apply to jobs simply because the company ceased to have a presence with candidates. So invest in your brand.
• 67% of students want employers to come to campus for info sessions and speaking events, even when not hiring.
• Majority (78-81%) want employers to be upfront about whether they are hiring or not. Be transparent.
  
• 94% of students and grads said they would like to maintain relationships with employers through virtual means. Gen Y clearly wants to keep the dialogue going.

So go and be present, if you can. If your budget doesn’t allow for face-to-face this year, find other ways to engage opportunistically, leveraging your interns, online. For tips on how to build and maintain relationships virtually, download our Gen Y Insights report. Whatever you do, just don’t “go dark”!