Recruiting.com

1. You are the most educated generation to enter the workforce, but you are also viewed as the least prepared. Don't be blind-sided by your generation's professional reality.
2. The other generations in the workforce don't have much compassion for your situation. You are being incorrectly perceived as lazy, entitled and arrogant. Don't validate these beliefs by ignoring their concerns, instead, work to overcome them.

CollegeRecruiter.com went live in 1996 and has had a handful of major software updates since that time. We're scheduled to re-launch with our newest update the weekend of Saturday, May 17th and we're very excited.

I graduated from college way, way back in 1988. Yup, I'm 42 years old. That makes me ancient to virtually every student on a college campus. Back in my day, we walked 12 miles to school, through eight feet of snow, with no shoes, it was uphill in both directions, and we loved it. Oops. That was in the days of my grandparents. But I digress.

Most job boards seem to operate under a typical 80-20 rule for revenue generation: about 80 percent of their revenues are generated from the sale to their employer clients of job posting ads and resume searching. The other 20 percent are miscellaneous items such as banner advertising, sponsorships, lead generation, and targeted emails.

Monster founder Jeff Taylor just announced that he's spinning off the obituary classifieds section of Eons, his social networking site for Baby Boomers. The obituary site, Tribute, is intended to aggregate obituary listings placed by funeral homes much like Monster was one of the first job boards to aggregate job listings placed by employers.

I recently completed watching Battle 360, a multi-part series on the History Channel about the famed World War II carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise. Our primary contact at client Enterprise Rent-a-Car gave me the heads-up about the series and am I ever glad that she did. It was fabulous.

Many including me predicted that the U.S. economy was in a recession during the first quarter. Turns out that news of the economy's ill health was greatly exaggerated. The economy actually grew during the first quarter of 2008, albeit barely. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, the country's economic growth from January through March was 0.6 percent. Hardly great, but definitely a lot better than many feared.

I recently accepted the Human Capital Institute's invitation to join their Expert Advisory Panel for Recruitment Advertising and Communications. The Human Capital Institute (HCI) is a global professional association and educator that is advancing the science of strategic talent management.

It's been a year since Paul DeBettignies a/k/a the Minnesota Headhunter, Josh Kahn of Accenture at Best Buy, and I got together at Chipotle for some burritos and to plot strategy for how to increase the number of active recruiting bloggers in Minnesota. One thing led to another, which is often the case when you get three guys together over exceptionally good food, and the end result was the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conferences.

There are approximately 50,000 job boards in the United States and about the same elsewhere in the world. Many are essentially cookie cutter boards with little to no traffic and little to no unique job posting or article content. But all serve employers and job seekers and to survive and thrive all must therefore listen to those visitors to understand what features, functionality and services they like best on today's job boards.

I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Jason Alba of JibberJobber fame at the JobDig offices yesterday evening. For a guy working on four hours of sleep and doing the fourth of four presentations in one day, he was great. Actually, he was great compared to the vast majority of speakers so someday I'll need to see him when he is totally fresh. He must be amazing.

I'm pleased to announce that we converted another of our unpaid intern bloggers to a paid employee.

William Frierson of Florence, South Carolina graduated from high school in 2002 and earned his associate's degree in business marketing in 2005.

As young as the Internet is, blogging is even younger. Outside of Al Gore and a few folks in the U.S. military, virtually no one had heard of the Internet before 1994. It wasn't until Netscape went bonkers in 1995 that the Internet entered our everyday lexicon.

The vast majority of recruiters and hiring managers would agree without hesitation that it would be foolish to ask during an interview the same questions of a potential fast food fry cook as a financial analyst, brain surgeon, or anyone else whose qualifications, job, and work product will be dramatically different. Yet how many modify the questions they ask based upon the generation of the candidate? Many questions which are designed to elicit relevant, informative answers from a Baby Boomer candidate and perhaps do a passable job with a Gen X'er are doomed to fail with a Gen Y'er / Millennial because their perspectives, needs, wants, and way of working are so dramatically different. Not better. Not worse. Just different.

Well, not really. But the CEO of JibberJobber is coming to Minneapolis to speak at JobDig. Say that ten times fast and then we'll see who sounds like Ned ("hi diddly do neighbor?") Flanders from The Simpsons.

1. Both are flat.
   
2. Both apparently have no hope of rising.
   
3. They have no spice.
   
4. They're full of holes.
   
5. You don't want to be involved with either of them anymore than absolutely necessary.
   
6. Pretend as much as you want that they're something better than what they are but they ain't.
   
7. Even the ancient Egyptians would have nothing to do with them.
   
8. They have an seemingly endless series of ripples.
   
9. Even when consumed in small amounts they both give you indigestion.
   
10. They're both too easily broken.
    

Ryan Healy at Employee Evolution just posted a very thought provoking blog article for Gen Y employees about how they can become leaders in their organizations. Healy offers four tips:

1. Demonstrate that you're able and willing to make the decisions because leaders need to decide even when they don't have all of the information available.
   
2. Try new things. "Being comfortable and competent in unfamiliar situations is a sign of true leadership ability. So whenever you have the opportunity to do something new, try it!"
   
3. Surround yourself with people smarter than you. You don't need to lead them at every opportunity or even occasionally. But interact with smart people and learn "to hold your own in complex or thoughtful conversations."
   
4. Learn to work well alone. Leaders often have to make decisions by themselves and work through issues without the assistance from others.
   
   

We've all heard about people who marry up. I hear it all the time. From friends, family, my dog. Oh well. My win.

But how do you get hired for a job which is seemingly above your qualifications? Penelope Trunk provides five great suggestions in a recent blog article:

1. Use the informational interview as a sales pitch.
   
2. Sell yourself as a consultant.
   
3. Get people to use you as a reference.
   
4. Blog to become an expert.
   
5. Have a realistic idea of your skill set.
   

Kudos to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) for creating the All That Jazz blog to help engage their members and hopefully increase the attendance at this spring's annual conference in New Orleans. The NACE annual conferences are very well attended and offer a wealth of content, but given how the career service office, employer, and other members are so spread out geographically it must be very difficult for NACE to engage with them throughout the year.