I'm honored to have been selected by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to again present at their annual conference and to also be part of this group blog effort.
For those who don't yet know me, I'm the President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading job board for college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs. Our business model is much like that of Monster or Careerbuilder in that employers pay to advertise their job openings and the students and recent graduates use our site for free. Unlike some of our college job board competitors, we don't provide job board software to individual career service offices so we're set up more like sites such as Monster and less like sites such as MonsterTRAK or NACELink.
The origins of CollegeRecruiter.com date back to my senior year in college in 1988 when I published a campus map for my undergraduate school, the University of Manitoba. That's right. I'm a Canuck. Actually, I'm now dual as I moved to Minneapolis later that year and became a U.S. citizen the same day that O.J. Simpson was acquitted. My guess is that the connection between those two events means more to me than it does to him but that's okay.
After moving to Minneapolis I attended and graduated from the University of Minnesota School of Law so I'm a Golden Gopher fan and also a lawyer. Well, I'm actually a fully recovered lawyer as I only practiced for a year and then got out to enjoy my life. In 1991, I re-started the undergraduate business and in 1995 we added an employment magazine called College Recruiter.
The magazine initially was only distributed by University of Minnesota career service offices to their students but due to employer client demand we expanded the distribution metro-wide then state-wide then to the five state area in the Upper Midwest. We then added similar publications for Chicago, Illinois; Phoenix, Arizona; and Columbus, Ohio. But in 1996 a career service office director at the University of Minnesota told me that there was this thing called the Internet. She'd never been on it but she was hearing from her students that they were doing job research on it so she thought we should get a site. Later that year we went live and we gradually moved our business away from campus maps and employment magazines and to CollegeRecruiter.com. By the fall of 2000, we were only on-line.
Those who know me know that I'm an avid blogger. I write almost every day and often multiple times a day at CollegeRecruiter.com Blog about issues mostly related to college recruiting, social networking, and occasionally unrelated topics for which I have a personal passion such as retired hockey star Mark Messier.
Another passion that I have is how social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace can and should be used by candidates and employers. I've been fortunate enough to be quoted about these issues by a number of local and national publications and been a guest on some radio shows and television broadcasts. The NACE conference selection committee was kind enough to allow me to speak about this topic at this spring's conference in New Orleans. My goal is to show employers how they can destroy their brand by misusing the social network sites. I hope that you'll attend and help spread the word that employers should use but not misuse Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking sites.
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