Graduate Recruitment Blog

Hi, I’m Rob, studying full-time at UNSW and I don’t drink coffee, unlike everyone else in here.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending days in the office of GradConnection and it’s been a really (really!) cool experience. I first found GradConnection in Google, when I was searching for graduate job application deadlines in 2010. And when I was looking through the Graduate Forums on GradConnection, it turned out that the boys were searching around for an intern. So I gave @davejenkins a call and we met up for coffee (I had orange juice).

Digging into Facebook

I’ve always had an interest in social media and as business start to figure out how to monetize Facebook and YouTube in the new decade – I wanted to see what all the buzz was about.

So with some whacky Photoshop skills and a spluttering laptop, I had a crack at fixing up GradConnection’s Twitter Account and Facebook Fan Page. I had play around with the cosmetics… and it turns out that personalising a Facebook Page ain’t that hard.

When you click on the GradConnection Facebook Page, you now land on the “Boxes” tab which shows off pretty graphics to engage the user rather than a text wall. In addition, I we fixed up a few things here and there, put images and links to GradConnection’s Twitter and YouTube on the “Wall” tab as well as touch up those photos that Dave took on his Blackberry.

All this…

• Took me 10 minutes to learn FBML.
• Took me 1 hour to make the images.
• Took me 1 minutes to show it to the boys.

Then I went to investigate how Facebook users interact with these company profiles. I did a bit of research, and Facebook touts that their average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on “fb” a day, has 130 friends and only fans 2 pages a month. I distilled a lot of great research from Social Media Examiner, give it a read if you’re interested in the mechanism of consumer behaviour on social media!

Market Research – Guerrilla Style

I found out that Facebook advertising space is quite well fought over. The demographics that Facebook users reveal have specificities that marketers drool over. I wondered what the CTR for such specific advertising was, so I ran some searches and apparently (anecdotally) it sits somewhere around 0.04% to 0.2%.

Then I did my own guerrilla market research and I ran my own test.

I promoted GradConnection’s Facebook page to groups of my friends — through Facebook’s “Suggest to Friends” — that I thought would benefit from the service, i.e. soon to be graduates (this is not just meaningless promo spam!).

So I sent out to (some of these users overlap) the following users: 302 UNSW, 102 USYD, 27 UTS, 12 Macq, 50 High School Friends

There was no methodology behind the sample set. But it was roughly around 400 people that I sent a suggestion to.

• 4PM Wed 27 Jan 2010: GradConnection’s Facebook Page had 534 page.
• 12AM Fri 29 Jan 2010: 604 fans (at time of writing)

And a very quick headcount shows that 57 GradConnection’s fans are my friends.

That’s roughly, a 14% click through rate and a 10% increase in fans in 52 hours, pretty impressive for just one advocate of a website.

[Thanks sis for the correction, I'm still maths dummy].

Why?

Because personal recommendation may be better than just faceless advertising (that’s me in the picture above). There is still no doubt that word of mouth is the most effective form of promotions. But how do you inspire evangelists to personally recommend your product/page to their friends?!

Another contributing factor could be because the demographic of the people I was targeting and the students I know. Most of them are career orientated and are willing to respond to attempts at conversation between corporations and students (I bet a lot of these students are also fans of the Ernst & Young and Deloitte pages). Either that or – as I would like to believe (and self deluded I am) — my friends regard me as a valuable source of information. And while I do repost things that are quality — job opportunities and career-enhancing posts — I also post a lot of videos of Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Silence. I KILL YOU!!

Snowball effect.

I think there’s a significant snowball effect. While users who receive the suggestion may reject it initially, once their friends start ‘fanning’ it, they might be interested in why they chose to fan it.

Put it in front of your user once, they’ll forget it. Again, they might take note again. Third time, they might actually look at it! I’ve been keeping an eye on my social feed (and while Facebook aggregates news stories dependent on what I find engaging…) I saw the story that “X and Y number of friends became fans of GradConnection” consistently on my wall throughout the week.

And while I don’t want to take credit for the other 14 new fans – I think there’s a chance it may be a 2nd degree (therefore indirect) relation to me; they saw their friends fan it – and they checked it out.

So what does this all prove?

• targeted marketing WORKS! You will have a much better ROI on people who are interested in your message.
• social media, grown organically – is great engagement.
• people are mobile on Facebook – so fickle are the GenY!

PS: The day after Australia Day…
The great thing about public holidays is that it gives everyone a conversation topic, “so what’d you get up to yesterday?!” and “gosh it was hot wasn’t it?!” and more importantly — “do kiwis even celebrate Australia day?!” The 3 founders of GradConnection are from a special corner of Australia we call, New Zealand.

We have been getting asked about Twitter more and more this year by a number of grad managers and grad teams. It seems that the concept of tweeting for employer brand promotion and networking is not as foreign as it was in 2008. That being said, most grad managers in Australia still do not know where to start with twitter.

So I decided the best way to get people started, is to comprise a list of my favourite tweeters in the graduate space and the reasons why you should follow them!

My Favourite Graduate Recruitment Tweeters

@JessicaBooth – Jess is a Senior HR advisor at CSIRO. She is very active on twitter and is also behind @HRClubSyd, a group for HR professionals in Sydney.

@ManthaUKinOz– Samantha is the graduate manager at Deloitte NSW. She is reasonably new to Twitter herself, but a great person to talk to about the accounting industry, careers fairs and universities.

@KoShaughnessy – Kelly has helped us out a lot, especially when GradConnection was in its first few weeks. She is very approachable and is a close monitor of the bleeding edge research being done on the HR industry in Australia.

@JaredWoods – My twitter experience would not be complete without @jaredwoods. He is the head of employer brand at SKM Consulting in Melbourne, we have since caught up with Jared a number of times after meeting on twitter (called a tweetup ). Originally, Jared is from an advertising agency background and has great insights on where this industry is going and a great example of inhouse employer branding, check out http://www.domoregofurther.com.au/.

@pauljacobs4real – I had a tweetup with Paul for the first time over a long awaited Wellington Coffee. Paul is from New Zulland and is the head of Recruitment 2.0 Asia Pacific, a great social network for HR professionals. Paul is also an entrepreneur, working to on tribeHQ and has quantities of experience in internal graduate recruitment.

@DanNuroo – National Recruitment Manager at DWS – Dan loves hassling the fact that we are all from New Zulland. He is always interested in online channels for recruitment and does an amazing amount of recruitment using methods “other than job boards”. If you want to become a bleeding edge recruiter (social media, web 2.0, <insert buzz here>) he is the man to follow.

@DavidTalamelli – Principal Recruiter at Oracle – David is in charge of Oracle Recruitment in the Asia Pacific Region. He blogs regularly at Jobs at Oracle and is a good example of a senior HR professional on Twitter.

@RachBeebs – Account Manager at The Face in Brisbane. She is well connected in the employer branding space and is a must-read tweeter on employer branding and digital advertising.

@OneSteelGrads – One of the most organised grad teams on twitter. One Steel grads is a great example of using a twitter account for graduate interaction and attraction.

@SKMGraduate – A novel approach and a great idea. A random graduate from SKM regularly posts about his life as an engineering graduate. A great employer brand exercise. Brainchild of @jaredwoods.

@GradConnection, @MikeCasey, @DanPurchas, @DaveJenkins, @TimWattsNZ, @RJCMilne– that’s us!

I intend this to be a running list, in that if you are new to twitter, or would like to suggest yourself or someone else please feel free to contact me (@MikeCasey).

Well there has been a huge amount of hype this week about the Oz lotto $90 million lottery draw and we thought we’d combine graduates, facebook and a 24 line mega pick Oz lotto ticket to see what would happen.

The Offer

We’ve been slowly chipping away at the GradConnection facebook page during the year and as at midday 30th June 2009 we had organically grown to around 115 fans. We decided that morning to use the massive $90 million Oz lotto draw to see if we could attract some new fans so we walked down to the news agent and picked up a ticket.

The offer we had on the table was that every person who became a fan of the GradConnection facebook page would be eligible for a share of the prize money should we win a major prize. With the ticket bought and the promotion created we then pushed out the link to our facebook fan page through twitter, facebook and youtube intensively over 8 the hours before the lotto draw.

The Results

Well to start off with we didn’t end up winning a cent from our Oz Lotto ticket which was disappointing. By the end of the day we had grown our facebook fans by around 330 to a total of about 450 fans which would have worked out to $200,000 each if we won the prize. You can see Dave making our official video announcement here:

Some Lessons

Running the promo campaign was a great learning exercise in a number of areas.

Firstly it showed us how hard you have to work to grow an online community and the amount of interaction is not huge and maybe around 2% of people will interact with you on your page. We initially had our fan page wall set to only display posts made by GradConnection and this did cut down on the number of fans who were posting to the wall. We changed this setting mid afternoon and it did increase the amount of interaction from our new fans.

The key lesson is that when you are running a page about your organisation’s graduate program you need to regularly push out updates and new content like pictures and video even though you may only see minimal responses from your graduate audience. By generating this content and making the page look like there is regular activity you actually provide a compelling reason for graduates to become fans and check back regularly for updates.

These days if you are generating social media content it is a good idea to cross reference all of your social media streams with each other. In our campaign we were using twitter to refer people back to facebook and posting videos on youtube which we then posted to our facebook fan page so our fans were coming into contact with use via 3 different channels.

The Pay Off

With the increased activity and fans on our facebook page we’ve already been able to publicise some IT development positions for a midsized .com based in Sydney and they’ve made a number of phone interviews with interested graduates.

The downside of the day was a fan that we attracted who after we made a post asking our fans to put in suggestions for our next campaign he suggested we kill ourselves, to make matters worse his profile picture shows him brandishing two very realistic hand guns.

If you’re interested in seeing some other examples of good graduate focussed facebook pages check out the IBM and Bovis Lend Lease graduate program facebook fan pages.

If your organisation is running a facebook page let us know so we can sign up to become fans and our GradConnection page will become a fan of you too. Also now is the time for you to claim your organisations facebook friendly URL for example here is the GradConnection friendly URL http://www.facebook.com/GradConnection which you can then use on your printed marketing materials.

P.S. hello to our new Japanese readers!

Deadliest Catch the TV Series

Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of the ‘Deadliest Catch’ lately but, with careers fairs finishing up two months back and many of the larger graduate programs currently completing assessment and making offers, it made us think about how seasonal the graduate recruitment process is in Australia and it has some good parallels with the short and intensive crab fishing season. To satiate our curiosity we have done some digging on how many graduates are still out there looking for jobs.

It’s not an easy question to answer, surely if the majority of graduate programs have closed then why are graduates still looking? It seems that due to the highly competitive nature of Grad Recruitment in Australia, careers fairs are very early in the year and application closing dates can be too soon for many would be graduate job hunters. If you compare Australia to New Zealand, many of the larger companies in New Zealand have only just started their graduate recruitment campaigns in the last month (May).

Graduates are still looking online

It has been interesting to see that traffic to our site has only reduced slightly from the peak job hunting times of the year in March and April and from what we have seen there is still a huge amount of activity on the search engines from grads looking for jobs. 100,000 job related searches in a Month when many of the major graduate programs have closed their applications means many organizations missing out on extra good quality candidates as well as a lot of grads picking through a diminishing amount of graduate programs.

Careers fairs may have been a catalyst that has sparked off the interest for grads to start thinking about jobs potentially due to the fact that a few grads out there are regretting finding out about them too late to take action. I think we are predicting that after the current exam period is over there will be a large spike in the number of grads out there searching for jobs.

Do you want these grads?

You may think ‘if they aren’t organized enough to follow my organizations recruitment process throughout university or attend their university’s careers fair than they’re not the sort of candidates we’re looking for anyway’, but that’s probably a bit harsh considering the grads aren’t graduates yet and still have a whole year of university to get through in what is considered their most important year. Put yourself in the graduates shoes for a minute, it’s not easy to kick off the year by getting into your classes and simultaneously thinking about next year’s job options when you’ve barely opened a text book.

The trends in the graduate job hunter space are extremely interesting and we will be keeping an eye on them closely and reporting back with updates throughout the year, there are some awesome new tools coming online such as the Google Zeitgeist suite so get on and check it out and see if this is going to allow you to change the way you do things at your organization or whether the crab fishing model of graduate recruitment is the one for you.

Contact GradConnection

Well last week we ended up catching up with Richard McGowan who has had a diverse career starting out as a journalist with a small paper in rural Australia. We got to talking about work experience and he brought up an interesting point between his days as an entry level journalist and today’s work environment.

Richard had an interesting point about what it was like when he started working as a journalist compared to how they are these days. His first role was working as a crime reporter in Newcastle where he would write stories and then dictate them by phone to typists in the Sydney office. When back at the office there was a lot of activity with runners zipping messages to different parts of the organisation, the manual processes, and lack of technology means that there was a lot to see and experience in the work place.

Today’s Graduate Working Environment

These days most offices are a lot more generic due to the wide spread use of computers in the modern office. This means that generally graduates across industries will start their careers in very similar physical environments regardless of whether they’re an engineer, accountant, IT specialist or a journalist. This means because everything from a graduates work to communication both internally and externally is often done in one form or another by their computers, whether it be Outlook, Word, instant messaging, etc. Therefore a big differentiator for your organisation over your competition is what your organisation allows employees to do on the internet while at work.

Social Networking sites used by Graduates

Banning sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail is becoming common in today’s workplace and the usual reasons are to protect sensitive data and reduce anything that impedes productivity amongst staff.

Almost 3000 graduates told us the social networking sites that they would like to see in the workplace as shown in the graph below:

Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing

There have been some interesting studies that have shown that ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ or WILB as it is now known has been believed to actually increase productivity in staff who are able to use these leisure sites while they are at work. There is an interesting article you can read about this from the daily mail here.

From what we’ve seen, the graduates visiting our website have overwhelmingly outlined that they value the use of websites they use socially outside of work. This is an area worth investigating to inform your graduates on how the internet can and should be used at your organisation and why these rules are in place as the grads come on board, as up until this point they have no doubt been able to do whatever they like online whenever they want to.

Internet access may seem trivial, but to your average gen-yer graduate not having access to your Facebook, gmail and Twitter accounts can feel like losing your 6th sense.