New Reitman’s site demonstrates some career page best practices

Reitman's (Canada) Ltd. has launched a new website (www.reitmans.ca) and its career pages demonstrate some best practices for recruiters. There are no earth-shattering new technologies involved, but a clean and simple focus on the things that matter most to candidates. It’s amazing how often some of these basics go missing from recruitment sites. One important shortcoming, however, is the site’s failure to clearly define a Unique Recruitment Proposition.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the site from a recruitment point of view is the high profile given to “Careers” on the home page – it appears in the main menu, holds one of three “permanent” spots on the page, and is one of the three major themes represented by the rotating feature images: “Careers” is given equal billing to “About Reitman’s” and “Financial & Media”.

The careers pages themselves are very easy to navigate and cover all of the key elements clearly. Too often, career web pages miss some of these key elements or make them much too difficult to find. Here are some of the features:

• Quick access to postings and clear delineation between corporate opportunities and in-store positions
• Testimonials/profiles with great photos of 10 employees in a wide variety of roles
• Details that focus on "what's in it for me" in terms of rewards, personal development, and work-life balance – all important benefits to students entering retail
• Easy access to a list of upcoming recruitment events
• A helpful list of FAQs that address the questions Reitman’s has, no doubt, heard many times; it’s great to see applicants’ concerns about the online process so well addressed
• A page specific to students and graduates that addresses their unique interests
• “Share” links that allow visitors to easily share pages on the site via email, Facebook, Twitter, and so on

As I said, the site covers all the basics well. One more thing that could add a lot of impact would be some videos portraying the real-life experience of working there.

Where Reitman’s career pages fall short is in defining a Unique Recruitment Proposition. The main visual space on the careers pages provide a rotating set of 8 headlines that provide details such as “over 10,000 employees”, “over 1 billion in sales”, “over 950 stores” and so on. These all hint at a Unique Recruitment Proposition, but these headlines are too plentiful (8 concepts is too many to have an impact) and too indirect – what does “multi-banner company” mean to me as potential employee? New grads should not be expected to make the leap of logic; not because they aren't smart enough (of course they are), but because they aren't experienced in the world of work. It's important to remember that, for students, all employers are the same until proven different (or better).

One of the headline statements addresses candidates’ concern that they may never progress past the retail floor: “Wide range of career opportunities”. This is important to students considering launching their careers through retail. Most of the other statements may be indicators of potential job security – which is also important to new grads – but they should be directly stated as such. If Reitman’s simplifies these messages into two or three key benefits and clarifies their immediate value to new recruits, then they will have an all-around solid recruitment website.

Canadian Students Rank Canada’s Top Employers

[This blog entry is our press release announcing Canada's Top Campus Employers rankings...]

New rankings say a lot about the character of tomorrow’s workforce.

A recent survey of more than 16,000 Canadian university and college students forms the basis of Canada’s Top Campus Employers rankings while also providing new insight into the career interests and aspirations of today’s students.

The Government of Canada tops the overall rankings, with provincial and municipal governments as well as Health Canada also making it in the top 10. Interestingly, three technology giants – Google, Apple, and Microsoft – were the only for-profit organizations to make the top 10 this year. Meanwhile, some non-profit organizations made a big showing in the rankings: the Hospital for Sick Children, the Canadian Cancer Society, and the David Suzuki Foundation came in sixth, ninth, and tenth respectively.

Canada’s Top Campus Employers rankings are one component of a larger report, known as the From Learning to Work Report, which is conducted annually by Brainstorm Consulting and DECODE. The rankings also feature six sub-groups that list the top 25 employers as rated by students in liberal arts, engineering, information technology, natural sciences, undergraduate business, and MBA programs.

“Although surprising to many,” notes one of the report’s co-authors, Graham Donald of Brainstorm Consulting, “the results reflect two trends among young people that have been growing stronger each year: the desire for secure employment and the opportunity to do work that makes a meaningful contribution to society.”

The report refutes many stereotypes that often portray today’s graduates as unwilling to work hard and even disloyal to employers. “Today’s graduates are willing to work hard, but they place a high priority on having greater balance in their lives than their parents did,” explains Eric Meerkamper of DECODE. “And to say that this generation is not interested in loyalty is very misleading. Certainly organizations have to adapt to successfully retain these new hires, but the kinds of changes they need to make also improve the workplace for all employees.”

In fact, students believe quite strongly in the concept of loyalty: 71% of those surveyed believe that their employer will be loyal to them if they work hard. Even more remarkable is the finding that more than half (53%) of all students would like to find one employer with which to spend their whole career.

“Employers that want to rank well with today’s students have to demonstrate that they can provide the kind of workplace that will remain attractive for the long term,” adds Mr. Donald. “In other words, the onus to create opportunities for loyalty lies with the employer. This means creating a workplace environment that satisfies students’ top four priorities: interesting work, work-life balance, good people to work with, and job security.”

The recession has had some impact on students’ career expectations: 62% indicate that the current economy makes them “worried about” their job prospects. However, the study also found students to be very confident in their abilities and three quarters (76%) believe that employers will see them as “good candidates for employment.” “Canada’s top employers are not letting the recession stop them from building a good brand image on campus,” notes Mr. Donald.

Other highlights of the rankings show that the major accounting firms – Ernst & Young, Deloitte, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers – perform very well among undergraduate business students by landing in the top 10. Canadian technology powerhouse Research In Motion (the makers of the BlackBerry) ranked in the top 10 as selected by students in 4 different majors: undergraduate business, engineering, graduate business (MBA), and information technology.

Often in the spotlight to provide leadership during this recession, the Bank of Canada performed well among business students by ranking tenth.

“Our primary goal with this research,” explains Mr. Meerkamper, “is to be able to help employers attract and hire successfully on campus. However, we have found that the research not only supports our clients’ efforts towards attracting and retaining new grads, but also creates better workplaces for all employees.”


Further details about Canada’s Top Campus Employers and the full rankings are available at www.TopCampusEmployers.ca

Why Campus Recruiters Should Market More to Gut Instincts

How do you make important decisions? How do you REALLY make those decisions? Do you develop a carefully calculated process to weigh various options and then select the one with the highest score? Or do you start along that track and then let your gut instincts take over? How do you imagine that students make decisions about their job choices? The truth is that gut instinct plays a far greater role in just about every decision than any of us like to admit. Effective recruiting means marketing to that gut instinct.

On the evolutionary time scale, our intellect is still in its infancy while our gut instinct is so mature that we don’t even notice it making decisions for us. Of course, “gut” is a misnomer that seems to imply that our instinctive decisions are not worthy of the brain where they are actually processed. Although we may have grown to accept that “rational” decisions are better in the sophisticated modern world, we wouldn’t last a day without our “gut” decisions to guide us. Before I get way too far outside my own expertise, I’ll simply refer you to a great book published last year by Dan Gardner, a journalist from Ottawa, entitled “Risk: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.” (In the U.S. it was published with the title, “The Science of Fear.”) In a nutshell, he asserts that although we live in a safer world than ever, our illogical fear is also greater than ever – and causing some bad decisions.

Whether or not you agree that students’ career choices are made more by gut instinct than rational calculation, chances are that you are not speaking enough to the instinctive, emotional side of the brain. I was quite impressed a year and a half ago by a student in a focus group who indicated that salary was way down on his list of 10 criteria he used to evaluate job offers. I wasn’t so much impressed by salary being low on his list (that’s true of many students), but what impressed me was the simple fact that he even created such a list and scored the offers against it. That sounds pretty rational, but what was on that list? Quite simply, a lot of things that can’t be measured or easily compared.

(As an aside, one of the reasons students often appear to focus on salary is the same reason that employers focus on GPA more than they admit: these things are easily measured.)

Our research, and that of others, consistently shows such things as work-life balance, great people to work with, and interesting work as top criteria for graduating students. Not surprisingly in the current economic climate, the importance of “secure employment” has risen significantly. But none of these things can be easily measured, if at all. Ultimately, how students feel about these things is what will influence their decisions. How they feel about you and anyone else they meet from your company will therefore be tremendously important. What they hear from friends, family, and professors will also be highly impactful. And how they imagine themselves feeling when they tell those people where they’ve landed a job will also be critical.

My firm, Brainstorm Consulting, in partnership with DECODE, recently presented our clients with the 2009 edition of our “From Learning to Work Report” based on a survey of 16,000 Canadian university and college students. (Note to U.S. readers: I work and correspond work many U.S. experts and I am confident that these findings would be consistent on both sides of the border.) In our research, we analyzed dozens of criteria that influence students’ employer choice and job decisions. This resulted in the development of 6 groups of co-related criteria that we refer to as the 6 drivers of employer attractiveness. With almost all students, the number one driver is something we call “livability”. In a nutshell, livabililty is all about things that can’t be easily measured such as great people to work with, work-life balance, and a comfortable work environment. Marketing your livability means marketing what it feels like to work in your organization.

So how do you market such things as livability to students? How do you market to students’ gut rather than just their intellect? Well, of course Coca-Cola, Apple, VW and all the big brands create loyalty through massively expensive campaigns that consistently connect with our “heart strings” through mass media. So if you’ve got a great consumer brand and your target recruits love that brand, then you may be way ahead (although not everyone who loves a brand wants to work for the company).

Whether you have a great consumer brand you can leverage or not, the key here is to realize that although choosing an employer is a much bigger decision than choosing a soft drink or ketchup, employers must speak to the gut to create a powerful employment brand and have a profound influence on students’ decisions. And the way to do that is through simple true stories told in a personal way that create an image of work and a workplace that students can get passionate about and proud to be a part of. You may not have the budget to produce a heart-wrenching ad campaign, but if you work in a place worth working in then you are surrounded by stories – many of them your own personal stories – that will get students excited, even passionate, about joining you.

How, where, and when you tell those stories is a whole other matter…

Address students’ three “trigger questions” to engage them in career development.

Every campus career educator would like to engage more students in their career development. Put simply, the goal is to: 1) involve more students in the programs and services available; and 2) get those currently participating to engage more deeply.

But how?

Every year I ask thousands of students across North America a wide range of questions through surveys, panel discussions, and focus groups. I ask about their career interests, how they evaluate employers, what they expect from their career services office, who influences their decisions, where they gather information, and much more. I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to decisions about job search and career development services on campus, students have some questions of their own. Consciously or not, these are the three make-or-break “trigger” questions in the back of their mind:

1) Is it good?
2) Is it relevant?
3) Is it here and now?

These questions are the key to understanding what your “customers” value – and what they value is really all that matters when trying to engage them. But before discussing these in detail, let’s look at how career educators usually try to get students to use their services.

The mandate to deliver more career education to more students usually leads to the conclusion that what is needed is better marketing. The assumption is that if you develop a strong brand with a great logo and a compelling tagline, maximize your impact through social networks, launch a shiny new website, and print massive quantities of posters, thousands more students will come to you for help. Effective marketing is certainly important (and a clear, simple message delivered consistently is crucial), but at best, this is only a partial solution.

Reaching and engaging more students has far more to do with the programs you deliver and how and where you deliver them than it does with marketing.

The first step in marketing any program or service is quite simply: fix the service! I don’t care how witty the advertising is, or how bold the branding is, for a new ketchup – if it tastes like pickle juice then I won’t be buying it again. More importantly, rather than recommending it to others, I will tell them how awful it is. This last point is especially important to career educators. The risk to a customer when buying a product is relatively low: I can almost always return the product for a refund. But when I use a service (even if there is no fee), I am taking a bigger risk because I can never get back the time I invest in using it.

This is why referrals (word-of-mouth) are such a critical part of marketing career education on campus. Your customers need to know in advance that what you are offering will be a valuable investment of their time. So the first step in your marketing is to fix your service. You must fix anything you do that is less than excellent to stop the bad word-of-mouth which always draws far more attention than the good. Chances are that you can’t bring everything up to the “excellent” level or you would have done so long ago, therefore you must eliminate it.

This is no small feat for career educators who by nature say “yes” to every opportunity to help. There is also a tendency to continue offering anything that requires very few resources or minimal effort. But this is because we vastly underestimate the damaging effects of less-than-excellent programs or services. In the networked world, this damage can grow exponentially.

So let’s assume you have award-winning marketing and nothing but excellent programs and services. Problem solved? If that were true then there would be career offices across the continent engaging 100% of their students in comprehensive career exploration. Great marketing may get students’ attention and quality programs will support positive word-of-mouth referrals. But these only address the first of the “trigger questions” that hold the key to students’ decision to participate.

Here is an explanation of the three questions and some suggestions for how career educators should explore them further:

1. Is it good? Quite simply, students want to know if the program, workshop, advice, or event you are offering is high quality. They are wondering: how do I know it’s good? What are the qualifications of the organizers or presenter? Where is the proof? Who said so?

Career educators need to brainstorm their answers to these questions and develop a plan to address them. What credentials can we boast about? What track record can we draw attention to? What testimonials can we offer? Who are the influential people (professors, student leaders, employers, advisors, etc.) who can recommend us?

2. Is it relevant? Now that I know it’s good, is it targeted to my needs? Is it relevant to me as a graduating kinesiology student or is this just another workshop that’s better for business students? How does it fit the stage I’m at? Is this about summer jobs or starting my career? Is it going to repeat the stuff I already know or take me to the next level? Will I really find it useful?

The big question that career educators need to ask themselves here is: how can we be more relevant to individual students with our limited resources? How can we have the greatest impact with the least investment in customization? How can we segment students into manageable sub-groups to increase our relevance? What partners can help us be more relevant to these students?

3. Is it here and now? Is it here where I spend my time – in my Faculty or campus hangouts? Do I really need this now? Do the venue and facilities reflect quality and give me confidence? Is it easily accessible? Is it available only in person or online too?

This is not about reinventing your programming in 30-second MTV-like sound bites or YouTube videos. The “here and now” factor is really about two things: 1) making it convenient and accessible; and 2) reinforcing the first two triggers with a time and a place that supports the messages of quality and relevance. How can you get your programming out of your career centre and into departments and faculties so that you not only increase participation, but also create opportunities to develop new partnerships and alliances?

It would be hard to imagine a better activity for a retreat day for career educators than to take on the task of addressing these questions. Ultimately, your work is about achieving positive change for your students. Engaging them in that change demands understanding what they value and responding in creative and innovative ways.

Is “centre” the new dirty word in career services?

The old dirty word in career services was “placement”. It was a remarkably tenacious word: when I first got involved in this field twenty years ago it was already blacklisted. And yet it still holds on by a fingernail in a few dark corners. It lurks about feeding the myth that students can go to a “placement office” and be handed the job of their dreams.

Once upon a time, the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers (CACEE) was the University and College Placement Association (UCPA). It dropped that name about 25 years ago (we won’t discuss the strange interim name ACCIS which didn’t stand for anything). And in the U.S., the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) was the College Placement Council (CPC).

But despite these name changes, it has taken forever for the word to die. Most career advisors have dropped the “placement officer” title and most career services offices have dropped the word from their names. Many rested on the word “employment” (“Student Employment Service”) before leaping onwards to “Career Centre” or “Career Services”. Not wanting to lose the brand equity in the name “CAPS” which used to stand for Career and Placement Service, the University of Alberta recently rebranded it’s office “CAPS: Your U of A Career Centre” – but now “CAPS” is just part of the name and no longer an acronym. Are McGill’s or Concordia’s CAPS offices next? (Recommendation: if you must keep the acronym, go with “Career Advising and Planning Services”).

But now, in the age of social networks and virtual worlds, the word “centre” may just be the new dirty word, a word of the past. “Centre” implies a place, an office somewhere on campus. But where is the centre for the job seeker? In the networked world, isn’t the centre the job seeker herself? The reality is that students don’t want to visit a “centre” – except perhaps for a personal appointment.

And this isn’t just a question of online versus in person. Students are looking for career development support and education throughout their institution. They were told that a post-secondary education would get them a job – and a better, higher paying one at that. Therefore, their school should ooze career education through its pores wherever they go. I don’t think this is an unrealistic expectation. Students are the customers and the customers are demanding a job as the #1 outcome of their education – so let’s give them what they need to get it. Understanding that “the customer is always right” is a basic tenet of successful customer service, this means that we must give them what they need on their terms (not ours).

This is not about placement and may not even be about an in-depth career development experience. It’s whatever level of career education they need to get the result they came for. Many career services offices have already discovered what may just be the Holy Grail: the power and reach possible by connecting with students through their faculties and departments. Next stop: professors who recommend career development workshops.

So perhaps it’s time to discard the word “centre” and the implication that career education should happen in a obscure office somewhere – or even on the career centre website. I’m not saying we don’t need an office for the career services staff. In fact, I would put the career services office right up there next to that of the VP Academic. After all, the customer wants their education to lead to employment – so career education needs to become an integral part of the post-secondary experience.

Of course, “centre” sometimes has another meaning. It can refer to a place of “influence”, “action”, or “leadership” as in “the centre for public policy” or “centre for innovation in…” If career education is going to spread throughout the institution and be embraced by administrators and academics alike then it will need leadership. Campuses will need something with a name like,… well, a name like the one they have at the University of Windsor: “Centre for Career Education.” Hmm. “Centre”: now there’s a word for the future!

10 reasons why campus recruiting today is a lot harder than it looks.

What is the true state of campus recruiting today? Sure, we know that the hiring numbers are down for most big employers – way down for some. But what is it actually like to be hiring on campus right now? Students should be “desperate” for jobs, right? And employers should be swamped with great applicants?

While meeting and talking with recruiters at the NACE Conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and the CACEE Conference in Vancouver recently, it was obvious that things are not as they seem. So I posed two questions to the hundred or so employers who attended my presentations at these conferences.

First, I asked if they had colleagues back at the office who had the impression that hiring on campus must be an easy task these days. The answer was a resounding “yes”. Those who aren’t on campus, think it must be like “shooting fish in a barrel” (sorry for the poor analogy, that’s what one recruiter actually said to me). So my second question was simply: is it true? Not surprisingly, the answer was a near unanimous “no”.

Given all the media stories about this being the worst possible time to be graduating because of the lack of jobs, it is understandable that some might think this makes hiring a simple task. But in conversation after conversation, I have learned just how challenging hiring in this market can be.

Why? Here are ten reasons that I have observed:

1. Budgets have been slashed for advertising, sponsoring campus activities, career fairs and other events. Some are even unable to pay career center job posting fees!
2. Fewer staff available – many recruiters have been laid off or assigned to different roles; people are being stretched the limit (and are often feeling demoralized by the “slash and burn” approach to business)
3. Planning is impossible – nobody will commit to the required hiring numbers and roles to be filled; it’s a moving target.
4. Some are required to hire “under the radar”: they are trying not to be detected when hiring on campus on the one hand, while laying experienced people off on the other.
5. Students are asking tough questions like, “why should I trust that you won’t lay me off too?” Students are wary of certain employers and industries no matter how reassuring employers may try to be.
6. Wading through masses of poor applications: many students are “blanketing” the market with applications to every opportunity without bothering to customize their cover letter and resume. Filtering down to the great candidates is far more time consuming.
7. Wading through masses of excellent applications from inappropriate candidates. Similar to the above point, except in this case students who are not right for the role are doing a great job of making themselves appear like a good fit. Again, this creates a burden on the filtering process.
8. Research says: students are no more likely to accept an offer this year than last. According Ed Koc’s research at NACE, students are no more likely to accept an offer in 2009 than the were in 2008. The good candidates are still very demanding.
9. Research says: the good candidates are still very confident. Our upcoming research report on the Canadian market (the From Learning to Work Report) indicates that although students are aware of the hiring downturn, they are still confident that they will get a great opportunity.
10. Future retention hell: hiring a “star” candidate that you couldn’t normally attract may create a retention nightmare later. This means employers have to take a long close look at whom they are hiring before making an offer.

On this last point, I am convinced this will be the real challenge of the future. Soon enough hiring will pick back up and when it does the coming battle for talent will be further complicated by all those recent hires who jump ship to the job they really wanted when they were hired during the recession. Now is the time to focus on retention by making your workplace a great place to stay.

Have you experienced any of these 10 challenges? Do you have others to add? Please click “Comment” below to add yours.

All employers are the same.

At the Campus Recruiting Forum in LA, Sabine Gillert of TMP Worldwide led a great workshop on employment branding. At one point, she divided the attendees (made up of campus recruiters from about 20 companies as well as some college careers office staff) into two groups of about 15 people each. She asked one group to brainstorm out their impressions of Chevron as an employer while the other group did the same for Qualcomm. (The Chevron group included a couple of recruiters from Qualcomm and vice versa.)

The groups quickly put together a good list that included things such as "good benefits package", "secure employment", "innovative", "attempting to position itself as 'green'", "cool technology", and so on. The two lists were shared and the recruiters from those two companies verified that the lists were quite accurate. They included the key elements that those two companies were trying to convey with their branding as well as a few things they hope that prospective candidates will ignore.

But what struck me most was this: nothing on either list could convey in the slightest way what it would feel like to work in one of those companies. Are all employers with good benefits, some bureaucracy, a nice logo and a healthy balance sheet the same? To a very large extent, in the eyes of a candidate (especially a young candidate), the answer is YES! Here was a group of people in their twenties, thirties, forties and up who work in recruiting (as well as some in campus career services who have a long familiarity with these companies) who knew next to nothing about what it would feel like to work in either of these major corporations.

Why? Simple: because we don't know these companies' stories. Only stories can give us the feeling of working with innovative people or under tight timelines. And only stories can convey the most important elements that attract us to an organization: the comraderie, the companionship, the sense of belonging, the feeling of working with like-minded peers. And the only truly believable stories are the ones we get directly from the people they belong to; told by the current employees in an authentic way.

Without these stories (about everything from the company softball team to the feeling of completing a great project to the charitable community work to the inspiring company founder...) employers can only appeal to the candidates' intellect, if that. By ignoring the importance of the gut feelings that are stimulated by true stories, employers are recruiting with at least one hand tied behind their back. Possibly both. Without stories, all employers are the same.

Boy, have student attitudes changed!

At the Campus Recruiting Forum in Vancouver a couple weeks ago, we held a panel discussion with a dozen university and colleges students from a variety of programs. Nobody could fail to notice the sea change that has place in the students’ career outlook. Of course, I wasn’t terribly surprised, but it is remarkable nonetheless how quickly the hunted have become the hunters. I think that perhaps a few employers in the room were pleased to see students getting a little “taste of reality”, but most were sympathetic.

On the bright side, several employers commented during discussions that the students they were meeting at career fairs and other events appeared to be better prepared to meet with them and ask good questions. On the other side, however, some commented that students are approaching them with that “I’ll take any job you’ve got attitude”. While students are wise to be flexible, there is perhaps nothing less appealing than a candidate that values their abilities so little. What most employers hear when students say that is “I don’t know anything about you, but I’d like a job with you to hold me over until I can find a good one!”

I am struck by two thoughts related to this change in the campus recruiting environment.

The first is that for many employers the search for great candidates is still a challenge. This is especially true in the consistently competitive markets such as health care, municipal government, or policing. But even for organizations in less competitive industries, finding the right candidates — with the right fit — still takes hard work. It also takes resources for travel, sponsorships, special events and so on. But most employers have slashed budgets for these — which means recruiters are having to make up for this with more leg work. I suspect that most will be pretty worn out in short order.

My other thought is about the students. First of all, the job market on campus is not nearly as bad as they may think. Despite the huge layoffs across the country, many employers are filling gaps with less expensive new hires from campus; others are increasing their hiring because they believe the talent they are looking for is more easily available now. My fear — and we’ve seen this in past downturns — is that students will lose hope and not invest appropriately in their job search. Already, many graduating students are making plans to go to grad school (whether or not it’s the best choice for them) to avoid the job market.

So some employers may actually find themselves competing with grad schools for great candidates. After all, students don’t have to worry about layoffs at grad school!