New hires want more than a paycheck!

According to a survey by Experience.com “It’s Time for a Job Description Makeover," 70% of job seekers value company reputation and ethics in a new employer. This often translates to finding a career where employers demonstrate a commitment to improve the local, national, and international community. There is no one model for how employers should do this, but with the increasing altruistic tendencies of this younger generation (volunteering is up 20% among college seniors), it seems like this is one generational trend that will carry well beyond just this group of students.

How do you see this in your line of work? Are students on your campus asking about how to find a job that is more than just a paycheck or making it a priority in their job search? Do you field questions about your corporate ethics and social responsibility from recruits or their parents?

How and Whether to Make a 22 Year Old Your Leader

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.
   
   

That all said, what should organizations be doing to help 22 year old, recent college graduates and other Gen Y'ers learn how to become leaders within their organizations? College recruiting is strategic because it is used by organizations to recruit their next generation of leaders. But if those organizations don't teach their future leaders how to lead, then their college recruiting programs are doomed to failure.

So folks, how do you teach your Gen Y employees how to lead?

Going Green In New Orleans.......and in your everyday life........

As you may know, one of the NACE initiatives for the upcoming conference in New Orleans includes a focus on being "green". This concept of looking for ways to make an impact on the environment include a number of initatives at the conference including reducing plastic waste by eliminating individual bottled water, using post-consumer recycled materials such as an eco-friendly tote (51% recycled materials), badge holders that are made of 51% recycled material, having recycle bins in place of traditional trash cans at the conference, using post-consumer recycled paper for any printed materials including the conference notebook, and overall limiting the amount of printed materials by providing session handouts electronically. In addition, excess food from the conference will be donated to a local food rescue program.

These types of initiatives may seem small on the surface, but if we all make a commitment to small changes in our work and personal lives, we can make a difference.

As one of the largest recruiter of college grads, Enterprise has seen college students asking more questions about a company’s environmental and social practices. Employers who want to connect with the socially and environmentally conscious students are making their "green intiatives" a part of their recruiting efforts and marketing to college students as part of the company’s environmental or social platform. We are als seeing more employers are using the recycle logo on their career fair giveaways or using giveaways made from recycled materials.

At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, having been in business for more than half a century, we know that leadership is not a short-term proposition. For us, environmental stewardship is a long-term approach to addressing those parts of the world that we touch with our business, and involving ourselves with those issues over which we have some influence. It's an approach built upon a commitment to ensure the sustainability of our business, as well as the sustainability of the world we all share. Our environmental platform includes the following intiatives:

• Empowering our customers to offset the CO2 of their rental by funding projects that work to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• Operating the world’s largest fleet of fuel-efficient cars, including more than 440,000 vehicles that achieve 28 mpg highway or better.
• Embracing New Clean Technologies by taking advantage of existing alternative technologies, such as FlexFuel and hybrid vehicles, and helping expand the availability and use of alternative fuels, such as E85.
• Funding the search for renewable fuels by donating $25 million to one of the world's leading plant science centers to develop renewable, reliable fuels from plant sources.
• Funding the planting of 50 million trees over the next 50 years with The National Arbor Day Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service.

Sharing our environmental platform is important to our college recruiting efforts because it ties to our corporate values and ethics. With a fleet of more than one million vehicles, we understand that we have an impact on the environment. This initiative allows us to demonstrate that we're positively impacting change and we highlight our initiatives on our careers website and through our new website highlighting our environmental platform keystogreen.com.

I'd love to hear what others are doing either from an organizational level or a personal level to make a positive impact on our environment. Does your university or company have any formal "green" initiatives? What tips to you have for NACE members to support this cause?

Student attendance at Career Center Programs

Has anyone else noticed this trend? It seems like there are fewer and fewer students attending programs or workshops that Career Services offices offer. Is your campus experiencing this too? Perhaps your campus is noticing it not only with Career Services programs, but many other programs as well?

Any ideas as to why? Maybe students are just too busy. Maybe they'd rather look up the same information on the internet? Maybe they don't see it as valuable at that moment. Maybe they just don't even know about these programs?

Obviously there are a lot of factors that contribute to student attendance (or non attendance). But what do we do with the fact that this is a reality? Do we not offer low-attended programs anymore? Do we go to on-line only career centers? How can we market programs more effectively? How do we plan around students' schedules?

I'll be looking for ideas in the sessions in New Orleans. I know there are a lot of sessions that highlight great programs going on in Career Centers, and I'm sure they've confronted the student attendance issue to make their programs successful!! I'm ready to soak up all these ideas!

Young Professionals?

Ok - I'll admit it! I am a boomer (mind you on the very back end but still there ). I read a great article today about engaging younger members at meetings and was wondering if this is an area that we should be exploring?

Do we need to have a group for young professionals to network and engage at the meeting? How should such a thing or area be set up? Should we have a forum for young professionals? Is it different for Career Services and Recruiters?

Wow, I am full of questions....anybody want to comment?

Exploding Offers: Here They Come Again

Less than a week ago I wrote that there have been exploding offers this year and will be more but there won't be as many as there were in the 2001-03 recession. An exploding offer is a job offer which an employer makes to a candidate, which the candidate accepts, and which the employer later rescinds usually because of changing economic conditions.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal included an article about how a year ago law firms were falling all over each other to recruit and retain entry level lawyers for their summer associate programs (sort of like internship programs) and as first year associates (entry level lawyers). Now some of those same law firms are cutting back:

• Some law firms like New York-based, 800 attorney Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP shrunk the duration of their summer associate program from 12 to 10 weeks. That effectively cuts the pay of their summer associates / interns by almost 17 percent.
• Other law firms are delaying the start date of some of their first year associates. In addition to Pillsbury cutting its summer associate program, it is also delaying the start date of its first year associates.
• Chicago-based, 700 lawyer Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP is taking an even harsher approach. It admits to exploding the offers for two summer associates and two first year associates who had accepted offers to work at its Charlotte, North Carolina office.

Exploding offers are not confined to law firms. Over the next couple of months we'll see many more examples emerging from employers large and small, public and private, urban and rural.

I get why these employers believe that they should not pay money to employees whose work is not needed. But what I hope that all employers get is that their long-term viability depends upon these interns and entry level hires for college recruiting is strategic and without college hires entering the employment ranks, an organization is doomed to a lack of managerial and executive talent within a decade. If the organization manages to survive it will need the success of some very highly paid headhunters to acquire the talent that the organization could have brought on board at much less expensive rates through its college recruiting program.

It will be interesting to hear from the experts in New Orleans about this issue. When potential presenters were submitting their proposals last summer, the economy was humming and exploding offers were about the furthest thing from anyone's mind. Today though, the situation is quite different as virtually all lay people and many economists believe that we're in a recession and with recessions come exploding offers. I suspect that the The 2008 NACE Graduating Student Survey: Student Perceptions and Approaches to the Current Job Market session will be quite informative on this topic. I'll be in the audience. Will you?

Developing Global Citizens

What do you think about this article from cnn. com yesterday? A good idea? or not so hot?

There is a session at the conference called Give or Take? on helping students become good citizens. Interesting concept? And is it a part of your mission in career services? How about recruiting? Do you expect the same thing in your new hires?