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.

Late October is always a fun time of year, between Halloween, colorful landscapes and the World Series. And even though the Red Sox are busy making plans for the upcoming winter instead of facing the Phillies in the ultimate contest (not that I’m bitter), it’s been a blast watching the fall classic unfold – especially this year, with the election, the economy and everything else clamoring for our attention. Baseball is just what the doctor ordered! Rain, not so much. But I digress.

On that note, recruiting – like baseball – has its own “power hitters,” and we’ve been taking a close look at select industry verticals and how the players are stacking up with Gen Y. Last month, we drilled down into oil and gas companies. This week, employers in the technology industry are on deck – specifically those companies that are actively seeking entry-level talent through Experience.

Looking at technology employers, specifically focusing on entry-level opportunity applications, five companies in particular – Dell, Motorola, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel – are above average and at the top with their success with apply rates on Experience.com. The technology industry on a whole is batting with nine applies for every job found through search results.

Even with the cold economic climate, technology is hot. As independent surveys indicate and our own data validate, tech-minded job seekers must take notice that employers in this space are hiring. Case in point: last week I dissected entry-level placements in 2008, and the technology industry scored a close third in the number of jobs started by recent graduates. In “The Job Function Search Spectrum,” we found that the IT/systems job function was popular in job searches. Even my “Hot Cities” post identified San Francisco and its pool of technology companies as top post-graduation destination for young talent.

On the flip side, to attract major league entry-level candidates, technology industry employers need to move beyond only offering compensation packages. Like a good sports franchise reaching out to top athletes, recruiters will be successful when they meet Gen Y on their terms. And it’s not that hard – consider using internships as extended interviews, facilitating job shadowing and/or information interviews, leveraging  your commitment (or embracing a commitment!) to “being green” and emphasizing other work/life benefits such working from home, volunteering for social causes, etc.

Welcome to our inaugural Talent Insights post! Every week, we’ll be providing employers, professionals in career services and career-seeking candidates with relevant and actionable data-driven insight, covering all things Gen Y, to help you do your job better – whether it’s setting recruiting strategy, helping others or looking for a new career.

With Labor Day behind us and the back-to-school recruiting season officially off and running, we thought we’d take closer look at the general assumption that college students look for and pursue job and internship opportunities most actively in the fall. As we sliced and diced our data on total Experience Network page views over the past year, we found out some pretty interesting things. The most significant observation: though the “fall is crazy busy” assumption did hold true, there was a substantial activity boost in early spring that we must consider as we plan for 2009 and beyond.

Starting with August 2007, and then tracking each and every month through this past July, you can clearly see there was a bump in Experience Network page views in the back-to-school timeframe. Interestingly, the most significant peak was not in the fall – it was in the middle of winter. Looking at the trends, nearly a quarter (24%) of our traffic came in between January and February 2008. This more than doubles the numbers from last December, and it’s a jump up from September-October 2007 (which represented 21% of our annual traffic over this time frame).

It’s pretty clear that following a two month downward trend leading into the holidays and winter break, students returned to campus recharged for the spring and most likely focused on their goals at hand: to either find internships for the summer, land full-time jobs by May and/or use all the industry content and career resources available in the Experience Network to help them find success.

There are probably a host of reasons why the page view ups and downs are what they are. Regardless, we can extrapolate the numbers to consider the bigger question: should employers seeking Gen Y talent recalibrate their efforts to better reach candidates when they’re most actively engaged throughout the year?

On that note, welcome once again and happy fall!