Category Archives: Careers

Attracting Highly Talented Generation Y Minds

I invited Adam Nichols to write a post for us today. Adam is an Information Technology enthusiast and a business development executive. He is also a trained HR professional and writes for many blogs including Degree Jungle, a resource for college students.

Over to you, Adam…

For most organizations around the world, the task of attracting new talent as well as retaining quality employees is among the most common business challenges. Lack of loyalty on the part of talented employees and the tendency to switch to companies offering better packages often pose a major problem for most organizations. Furthermore, with overseas competition rising over the years, a good fraction of productive workforce is shifting abroad leading to a gradual shortage of skilled man-power.

In any of these scenarios, one of the best things companies can do is to try and make better use of their corporate sites to attract new college graduates and emerging talents either in this country or abroad. Corporate websites provide information to people regarding the company’s mission, services or products offered, work culture, career growth prospects, achievements and other relevant details. Added to these could be the strategy of using such a web portal to create a sense of interest and admiration among the new generation and to use the opportunity to get highly talented minds hired.

Tips to Attract Generation Y Talents

Whenever a company decides to use its corporate site to lure young and highly talented minds, a systematic approach should be taken. The following are some of the approaches that could be adopted:

Re-launch your corporate site with a press release:

The first thing could be to re-launch your corporate website with a captivating press release. The company can get the press release to as many news channels, article directories and job portals as possible. Job portals especially witness the presence of thousands of new college graduates and other prospective job seekers regularly and is therefore a great place to promote a corporate site. The content of the press release is equally important. It must be characterized by words such as creativity, openness to new and fresh ideas, opportunity for growth, etc. The idea is to make it appealing to highly talented young grads.

Launch an employee blog:

A corporate blog helps to spread news about the company’s new achievements, employee rewards, expansion/growth efforts, market positioning, its culture of openness and innovation, etc. Highly talented minds would want to work with progressive companies that have room to nurture their talents. Therefore, any company that portrays such progressiveness could win their admiration. If they see your company as highly bureaucratic and rigid, you will find it hard to attract them.

Beyond the corporate blog, a good idea is to launch an employee blog that facilitates interaction and sharing of ideas and problems among employees. With sharing of ideas and opinions, new innovations can even emerge. Talented young graduates may find this very attractive since they will know that when they join the company, their opinions will matter.

Add employee testimonials to your corporate site:

Many times, we only see customer testimonials on corporate sites. But if you could add employee testimonials that portray your company as a great place to work, you will get the attention of highly talented young grads. What you can do is to take the testimonials of fulfilled employees who have risen through various ranks in the company. You can then mix these up with young employees who are achieving and rising fast. You can even go to the extent of taking testimonials from the spouses of some employees about the impact the company has made in the employees’ lives. When highly talented graduates see this, they will be impressed with the company and will be willing to join in.

Brand your corporate site in a way that appeals to Generation Y minds:

Branding is simply how your company is positioned in the minds of people. From your products or services to colors, logo, online presence, promotions, and corporate statements, you have already created a brand for your company. If highly talented young graduates don’t find your brand appealing and in vogue, you are likely to repel them. You have to make sure your corporate site is appealing and has all the necessary web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, social networking, and the like. Your branding should be such that young people will be associating the following words with your corporate site: passion, energy, challenge, creativity, growth, bright ideas, etc.

Though your company may have existed for 100 years, you can still brand your corporate site in a way that will be appealing to highly talented young graduates.

Let it be known on your corporate site that you are seeking for the best and the brightest:

Highly talented young graduates know that they are among the best and are willing to take on new challenges. If they know that your company is looking out for the smartest and brightest minds, they will give you their attention. They also know their worth and would see it as a compliment.

Finally, you must bear in mind that while you can attract highly talented young graduates with these tips, you need to ensure your company culture accommodates such minds. Otherwise, sooner than you can imagine, they will leave.

Thanks Adam!

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 Corporate Eye

Social Media: Extending and Connecting the Recruitment Conversation

This is the third in a series of three interviews focused on careers, employer brand and social media: Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) interviews Matthew Berry, Resourcing Director at Centrica.

Often there’s a gap – particularly for graduates – between the time of recruitment, and the first day of work. How do you keep that relationship fresh?

And then again, at the end of employment: how can you keep communication channels open?

In this interview, Matt Berry explains how social media can be used to extend the conversation at both ends—and, indeed, to connect/reconnect employees with the company:

“alumni and onboarding… there’s a lot of potential, and the reason is that these networks are about relationships and communicating, and that’s what these tools are for. They’re designed to build a network and to communicate with people.

“the key in all of this: it’s about initiating a conversation. It’s still got to be a quality conversation

“with social media—and this is something that a lot of people underestimate—you must constantly turn the handle to engage”

Paul and Matthew talk about Centrica’s experience of extending relationships with candidates, employees and alumni through social recruiting techniques… do listen, this interview is crammed full of insight and information about how one of the largest companies in the UK manage social media recruitment.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Social media and recruitment

Key topics:

• Facebook, interns and graduates
• LinkedIn, professional hires and the advantages of being a direct recruiter
• targeting on LinkedIn
• importance of investing in skilled social media people

Soundbites:

“We have up to 500,000 applicants per annum… so trying to find a simple way of getting messages out to that fairly large audience is not easy, but social media lends itself very nicely to that”

“‘RateMyPlacement’, for example, is very important around the summer placement in the intern programmes because via that feedback and word of mouth via our participants we are building a reputation in delivering a great work experience. We encourage all our summer placement to leave their views on those ratings sites…”

“one of the big benefits we see in LinkedIn is that certainly half to three quarters of anyone [professional hires] that we would hire is already on it”

“when we do our executive recruitment [LinkedIn] would be the place we start no matter what”

“social media doesn’t just happen. It is an interactive thing by its nature and it needs some skilled people to really get full advantage from it”

“We have our applicant tracking system … linked in to Facebook, so you can physically tap into any job in our organisation in the UK from our Facebook page”

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-pt-1.mp3)

Length: 19:18
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 1

Part 2: Social media and onboarding

Key topics:

• social media and decision-making
• using social media for support
• control, pragmatism and the front line

Soundbites:

“it’s about trying to put information where people are already… our graduates, four or five years ago, were creating a Centrica 2007 intake Facebook page. We didn’t. And we couldn’t stop it if we wanted”

“so we just started tapping into that, giving them a framework… we’ll have induction days which we completely schedule via these groups, and they communicate, talk and support each other”

“one of the things we’ve recently built is an onboarding site, specifically for anyone that joins our business the moment they say ‘Yes, I’d love the job’. And one of the key things there is linking people into our social network”

“we can’t stop people saying what they say anyway but at least we know what’s being said, which is of huge benefit”

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-pt-2.mp3)

Length: 5:49
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 2

Part 3: Social media and alumni

Key topics

• risks and niche knowledge
• maintaining relationships with talent
• sharing internal information with alumni

Soundbites:

“We’ve got some demographic challenges where we have to think a bit more flexibly about how do we capture some of that talent”

“not to have some mechanism to keep in touch is a bit of a risk, particularly where some of these individuals have such niche knowledge that’s very hard to replace”

“we’ll always be doing projects or elements of work that will still be of interest to that professional community”

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-pt-3.mp3)

Length: 6:39
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 3

Part 4: Social media and referral recruiting

Key topics:

• social-media-enabling the referral process
• tracking and transparency
• engaging internally to get people to embrace it

Soundbites:

“social media is an underestimated tool for referral programmes”

“It’s not how do we engage the external marketplace, it’s how do we engage the internal marketplace”

“we make sure that any role we have running an internal person can look at it and within [...] two clicks they can share that job with their friends. So you could send me a link [...] and I could apply straight away, and that would also help the business track the fact that you were the person that had introduced me”

“the external team now handles all internal recruitment as well… that team is now directly talking to all of these candidates. We would have 5-10,000 applications internally per annum, so we’re making sure that we’re the hub of all that communication”

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-pt-4.mp3)

Length: 5:28
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 4

Part 5: Social recruitment governance

Key topics:

• social media policies, freedom and message control
• presenting a coherent front to the external candidate world
• avoiding the cold-call scenario
• merging of the social media and recruitment platforms

Soundbites:

“we have a social media policy of course which is a fairly straightforward thing [...] social media is part of everyone’s lives. Use it but use your common sense”.

“The big challenge with social media – or one of them – is that if you don’t keep your content relevant and fresh and up-to-date then there’s no reason for anyone to look at anything that you’re doing”

“it’s about the engagement activity that would get you interested to come in rather than pushing hard to push opportunities at people”

“Businesses will have to get more mature in the social media space, which is going to take a little bit of time. I think it’s an opportunity to make the process a bit more engaging. But I don’t think it’s going to make life easier.”

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-pt-5.mp3)

Length: 8:24
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 5

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Download audio file (matt-berry-interview-full.mp3)

Length: 45:39
Download: Matthew Berry interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Matthew for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Matthew Berry started his career as a chemical engineer in the steel industry covering a number of operational, technical and management positions.

With a desire for travel, Matthew moved from Australia to the UK and worked as a Search and Selection consultant for European energy and process industries.

For the past 8 years, Matthew has worked with Centrica in a number of HR roles and is currently Resourcing Director for the Centrica Group.

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 Corporate Eye

Employer Brand, Culture and Authenticity: Interview with Max Heywood

This is the first of a series of three interviews focused on careers, online recruitment and social media. First up: Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) interviews Max Heywood, former Global Head of Employer Brand at Credit Suisse, about his views on employer brand, and how employers express themselves online.

Job seekers’ behaviour on corporate websites, especially graduates, is probably not what you’d expect. Listening to the research that Max has done would lead you to re-evaluate where you focus your online careers efforts. And when the job-seeker does get to your content, the thing they really value is authenticity.

It’s a brave company that allows employees to be authentically themselves while representing the corporate brand. And yet, in this new world of social media, this may be the best way to attract potential candidates, by conveying the corporate culture in the natural voices of current employees.

Max believes that social media and networking technologies are in the middle of – or perhaps only at the beginning of – changing massively how organisations connect with everybody, especially jobseekers.

He talks about actions some of the more adventurous companies are already taking, and the opportunities for firms to steal a competitive advantage by taking the next step forward.

Do listen: the interview is full of valuable pickings gleaned from the coalface of careers communication: the way candidates view companies; how they use the corporate website and social media in practice; and the reality of recruitment pressures.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Change, choice and channels

Key topics:

• ever-increasing choice of channels
• wide-spread availability of information about people’s experiences within companies
• reduced trust in employer communication

Soundbite:

“The world has changed from one where corporate communications could control the brand, control the message… all they can do these days is really engage, participate and influence.”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-1.mp3)

Length: 3:52
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 1

Part 2: Facing the fear and doing it anyway

Key topics:

• where to start
• overcoming the corporate fear of:
  • conversational overload
  • brand-threatening conversation
• the benefits of social media for promoting employer brand

Soundbites:

“[some companies] lock their pages down so that students can’t engage… that’s actually a big turn-off and I think massively limits the power of the medium.”

“Having sat on that side, planning those activities, I know full well what the concerns are… but the reality of it is quite different”

“If you’re talking about [communicating with] university students, then really Facebook has got to be one of the primary platforms, because [of the] 650 million people [...] and all university students, pretty much, using it”

“In the year that Ernst and Young began its Facebook activity, they had a massive jump up the Universum rankings, I think they got to the top, or very close to the top.”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-2.mp3)

Length: 10:27
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 2

Part 3: Employer differentiation and corporate culture

Key points:

• importance of people in conveying culture
• using home-grown advocates to connect
• using LinkedIn to connect: know your audience

Soundbites:

“By the time [students] have seen three or four [milkround] presentations, they can’t remember who’s who, or what’s what! And what they fall back on, and this is why face-to-face continues to be arguably the most important channel, is ‘Did I like the people?’ ”

“The reality is, if you empower an employee to speak on your behalf… they’re not going to say negative things. They’re going to be positive”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-3.mp3)

Length: 7:29
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 3

Part 4: Employer Brand and Values

Key topics:

• relationship between employer brand and corporate brand
• relationship between employer brand and corporate values
• how best to use advocates to communicate values

Soundbites:

“There’s value in trying to understand who you are, and trying to express that. But there’s a real danger that it becomes very manufactured [and that is] an increasingly big turn-off to candidates who really are interested in authenticity.”

“If you let employees talk about their experience authentically… those things [values and culture] will shine through.”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-4.mp3)

Length: 6:33
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 4

Part 5: Employer brand online: corporate website vs Facebook

Key topics:

• behaviour of students in usability tests of the corporate website
• migration of the careers site towards Facebook

Soundbites:

“[On their first visit] university students pretty much didn’t go to the careers website… They did come and visit the site for one thing, and one thing only. And that’s to make an application… They wouldn’t come back at all unless they got some kind of positive response from us.”

“There’s a number of studies that show that if you’re two clicks away from Facebook, you lose half the people.”

“The web is shrinking, apart from social, which is great. And you see a trend now where you see big employers actually moving their careers site, almost lock, stock and barrel, into Facebook”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-5.mp3)

Length: 7:24
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 5

Part 6: Evolution, ethics and expenditure

Key topics:

• evolution of the employee profile
• Facebook, privacy and ethics
• where to put the corporate budget?

Soundbite:

“The single most powerful thing is campus events… this is an opportunity with social to really viralise your content and your messages.”

“So when you go on campus, and you’re going to do a campus event, for goodness sake, take some pictures, post some pictures up, get people tagging themselves. Encourage candidates to do it. And actually, because the more authentic it is, the better, actually: shoot some video. Get some vox pops saying, ‘What do you think?’ ”

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-pt-6.mp3)

Length: 6:59
Download: Max Heywood interview: part 6

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Download audio file (max-heywood-interview-full.mp3)

Length: 42:53
Download: Max Heywood interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Max for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Formerly Global Head of Employer Brand at Credit Suisse Max Heywood has spent the last 10 years running Talent Attraction programs for Investment Banks, previously JPMorgan, HSBC and UBS.

His experience is centred in graduate recruitment but also includes experienced professional recruitment, internal mobility initiatives, HR and employee communications, HR systems and HR transformation programs. He began his career as an account manager at EURO RSCG, and went on to successfully co-found his own digital marketing agency, before moving across to the client side to manage global agency partnerships and run recruitment marketing operations.

Max is an enthusiastic advocate of Social Media for recruiting, and has been active across all of the major social networks for some time.

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 Corporate Eye

With over 14 billion downloads of apps for Apple devices so far, it’s not surprising that companies are looking seriously at how apps could be used as part of their corporate communications strategy.

At the #truleeds unconference last week, Dave Martin (AllTheTopBananas) used his iPad to show me the US PepsiCo app which they’ve developed. It’s been available in the States since late January, and will be launched here in the UK within a fortnight.

And I thought it was excellent.

Click to enlargeIt’s a recruitment app, and it includes video , blog posts and tweets, so the visitor can find out more about PepsiCo; and it is possible to interact with the company from within the app – tweeting, for example.

There is also – crucially – a job search feature. This search can be done by keyword (e.g. ‘manager’); there’s a map showing where the current job vacancies are; and the visitor can set up alerts to get notification of new jobs based on the chosen keywords.

Found the job for you? For the Pepsico app, the visitor expresses interest and is then emailed a link to apply (routing them to the central application system). Other companies enable application right from within the app itself.

Nice.

The content for the app is taken from the corporate site (though I imagine you could create app-specific content), and auto-updates: so it doesn’t necessarily create an additional hungry mouth calling for more content.

And these apps can be integrated with your applicant tracking system. If the visitor has already registered, then they will be able to log in to see the status of their application and make any necessary updates to their details.

Thinking that no-one would ever find your app? Obviously you’d advertise it on your corporate site, just as Pepsico do (the page shown above is available from their main Careers navigation) but it would also be findable via the iStore / apps-search functions. Plus, just as your site currently ‘sniffs’ to learn what device your visitor is using, to present them with tailored content (it does do that, doesn’t it?), if they are on an iPhone/iPad, then they could be presented with notification that the app exists, and the opportunity to download it.

Naturally, the company can see statistics about what the visitors are doing with their app. And it seems to work: Pepsico have filled 12 posts through the app already.

AllTheTopBananas have created 35 apps for job boards so far, and 40 for corporates. There have been 550,000 downloads of their apps to date, so there’s clearly a demand, and a growing one:

• by 2013, there will be more internet access from mobile devices than from desktops.
• Google searches conducted on a mobile device show different results than those conducted on a desktop: for those searchers using a mobile device, mobile optimised sites are presented first.
• And interestingly, the top keywords for job searches using these apps are: manager, driver, warehouse. It isn’t just white-collar job seekers using these tools.

So if you aren’t working on optimising your site for mobile – at least, and possibly offering mobile content via an app as well – then you’re at risk of falling behind, no matter who you are trying to attract.

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The fifth annual Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) “assesses 134 countries on how well they divide resources and opportunities amongst male and female populations.” The report measures the gender inequality gap in four areas:

• Economic participation and opportunity
• Educational attainment
• Political empowerment
• Health and survival

Good news: The United States has finally broken into the Top 20, after hovering around 30 for the first four years of the report.

Bad news: The United Kingdom has tumbled from a ranking of 9 in 2006 to #15 this year.

Great story: The tiny Kingdom of Lesotho has advanced from #43 in 2006 to (drum roll, please) #8 in 2010.  Lesotho has just two million people and only a modest economy—but its literacy rate is among the highest in Africa.

More good news: Looking across the board at progress made since the first report, it turns out that gaps are closing in health and education, with current data showing that (in the 134 countries covered) 96% of health gaps and 93% of education gaps have been closed.

More bad news: Only 60% of economic participation gaps have been closed.

WEF also publishes a Corporate Gender Gap report, which is based on a survey of HR execs from 600 major employers in twenty countries, representing sixteen industries, and ranging in size from 1,000 to 30,000 employees.  The survey’s 25 questions assessed companies on:

• representation of women within their establishments
• the use of gender-equality practices such as measurement and target-setting, work-life balance policies and mentorship and training

The survey also gathered respondent opinions on:

• the biggest barriers to women’s leadership
• the probable effects of the economic downturn on women’s employment in their countries and industries.

The resulting report is not only informative but actually very interesting.  It provides detailed summaries of the findings by country and by industry.  From the report website you can download the whole report or a summary chapter.

High-level observations from report co-author Saadia Zahidi:  ”The findings of the report are an alarm bell that the corporate world is not doing enough to achieve gender equality. While a certain set of companies in Scandinavia, the US and the UK are indeed leaders in integrating women, the idea that most corporations have become gender-balanced or women-friendly is still a myth. With this study, we are giving businesses a one-stop guide on what they need to do to close the corporate gender gap.”

My favorite factoid: Averaging all respondents, the top two “barriers to women’s rise to positions of senior leadership in your company” were identified as

• General norms and cultural practices in your country
• Masculine/patriarchal corporate culture

And amazingly enough—those were the top two choices in the US, and two of the top three in the UK.  Something to think about . . .

(That snow-covered landscape is the Afri-Ski resort in Lesotho!)

• A Ten-minute Tour: Ideas and Info on Timely Topics
• How the giants measure & manage human capital

I usually make time to watch MSNBC’s early morning weekend show Your Business.  And just about every week, I see something interesting and think “I should blog about that”—but then I think . . . small biz/SOHO/entrepreneurial ideas aren’t very relevant for a corporate audience.

Now that I’ve turned it over in my mind several times, though, I’ve decided that some “small” ideas really do apply well to “big” companies.  Two of the regular features from Your Business that provide useful ideas for recruitment and corporate communications are Elevator Pitch and Top Five.

To see videos from these (and other) segments, scroll down the web page and select from the Features dropdown list.  A couple that are worth viewing:  Top Five Apps for Monitoring Social Media and the IndiCustom Elevator Pitch.

It’s really fun to see what the Pitchers come up with, and how the volunteer venture capitalists respond to their presentations.  But beyond the entertainment value—what I’ve realized by watching these segments is how much the Careers website is like an Elevator Pitch!  Basically, there’s a very limited amount of time to capture a visitor’s attention and persuade him/her to “take a meeting” (i.e., find out more about your company).

For a speedy refresher on the elevator pitch, try this classic Fast Company article.  Rule number one for crafting the perfect pitch?  “Assume short buildings.”

Speaking of Fast Company–it’s not very corporate, but it is full of ideas about getting things done creatively in business.  Why not just flip through it occasionally?  Ditto for Wired.  Yes, it’s (almost) terminally techie—but if your company ever hires anyone under thirty or needs a steady supply of IT wizards, then it’s worth a few minutes every now and then to check out what the target group might be reading.

And here’s a blog that’s chock-full of interesting news and information, but you might miss entirely because of the name:  Small Business Labs.  FYI:  It’s future-focused, wide-ranging, and sometimes surprising, so . . . what’s not to like?

(Thanks for the scales, Mysid.)

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Last week Katherine Ratkiewicz, a Senior Research Analyst at the Human Capital Institute, published a thought-provoking post on one of the HCI blogs.  Ratkiewicz recaps recent events in the U.S. that have prompted a national discussion about civility, and suggests the discussion should extend to workplaces as well as political institutions.

Office politics can be just as intense as any election campaign, and there’s no doubt that once toxic talk gets started in an organization, it can easily spread.  As Ratkiewicz points out “nothing is worse for an organization’s productivity and effectiveness than toxicity”–yet all too often there is no plan in place for recognizing and reshaping problematic situations.

For example . . . what happens when a project is behind schedule, or a particular unit is underperforming?  If the response is blame-shifting, finger-pointing, and/or scape-goating, the result is likely to be harmful to morale, and not particularly productive.  When this is the norm within an organization, there will be a lot of unhappiness.

These days, social media can alert job-seekers—and desirable passive candidates—to toxicity in organizations.  If there is negativity in the company environment, HR may or may not be able to surface the problem, and may or may not be able to foster a solution.  But if your company has a positive environment . . . how can the Careers website communicate that?

Just proclaiming that you have a happy workplace may not carry much weight.  Even employee testimonials, video diaries, event snapshots, and similar online promotions won’t convince most visitors that your company is a little slice of Eden.  In fact, it’s important to avoid the impression of overselling the environment, lest it appear there is something to hide.

A better strategy is to ensure that everything on the Careers site maintains a pleasant, respectful tone.  And design also sends subtle signals—a frenetic look (too much color, needless motion, etc.) can suggest a nervous environment.

For more thought-provocation about workplace communications, check out a new book from experts Vincent Waldron and Jeffrey Kassing: Managing Risk in Communication Encounters: Strategies for the Workplace. Despite the somewhat daunting title, this brand-new text is practical and readable—and it covers territory that is often left out of happy-talk manuals.  The focus here is “risky interactions that threaten identities, relationships, and sometimes careers, including voicing dissent, repairing broken relationships, managing privacy, responding to harassment, offering criticism, and communicating emotion.”  Worth a browse!

(Thanks to the Yorck Project for this image of Giovanni di Paolo’s fifteenth-century painting Paradise.)

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Are you focused on Valentine’s Day or apprenticeships this week? In case it had passed you by in the all-pervasive wash of hearts and flowers, I’ll just point out that this is Apprenticeship Week here in the UK, and apprenticeships are back in fashion.

Click to enlarge

Providing apprenticeships is a great way of demonstrating social responsibility in action, by providing training for the young, the future workforce. A few companies explicitly draw this connection out, such as Mulberry and Rydon, who do so on their corporate websites, and Asos, where the Head of Corporate Responsibility commented in a press release on their new apprenticeship programmes.

With reportedly 280,000 Britons joining apprenticeship schemes last year, and another 100,000 places anticipated over the next three years, I thought I’d see how well this was typically conveyed on the corporate website, starting with those of companies reported in the press to be increasing their apprenticeship options this year.

I looked at a range of corporate websites, including several of those identified in the news as providing apprenticeships; disappointingly, some didn’t capitalise on the publicity by providing information about apprentices on their site, still less on the home page.

I also did a Google search to see what came up in the UK if I searched for ‘apprenticeships’. The top result (at least for me) was to the Apprenticeships site, a helpful site covering apprenticeships in general. The first corporate to come up was BT.

Click to enlarge

The Google result was for BT’s corporate site, but in fact this is a single page, leading to a separate dedicated minisite about apprenticeships, BT4Me. This site has a very different design style to the main corporate site, as such recruitment-minisites often do, and includes video diaries and other films. Unusually, this site leads to a Facebook page for BT Apprenticeships: a good place to promote apprenticeships.

A very different approach is taken by BAE Systems, which headlines Apprentice Week on its home page (they’re training over 1,000 apprentices in the UK), and the link on the hero image goes to a dedicated multi-page section within the corporate site.

This section contains an extensive range of content, from a foreword from a senior member of staff and details of the apprentice programmes, to profiles of apprentices, benefits and how to apply. It’s well done, and mirrors the quality and quantity of material usually assigned to a graduate section, with strong impact. BAE Systems clearly take the apprenticeship option seriously.

Jaguar Land Rover (also focusing heavily on apprentices) has a separate careers site, with a dedicated Apprentice section within that site, with videos about the apprenticeships and lots of information about the programmes, benefits and application process, including hints and tips and FAQ explicitly for apprentices. Here the design of the apprentice section mirrors that of the site as a whole (unlike the BT minisite), so looks more corporate. Look out for the video filter, which means the visitor can identify the apprentice videos out of the entire set of careers videos: a neat little extra.

The Tata Steel (UK) website has a dedicated apprenticeship section within the corporate site, with the same type of explanatory information about the programmes, benefits and so on – but also has some older employee profiles, not just recent apprentices, showing the career progression for those individuals after their apprenticeship, which could be reassuring to prospective employees.

Rolls-Royce have a dedicated section too, on the corporate site, at the same level of hierarchy as graduate programmes and general careers. The landing page for this section includes a persuasive quote from an apprentice, explaining the benefits of an apprenticeship over university study. An extensive range of programmes are explained, along with details of benefits, profiles of apprentices and video diaries, and details of how to apply. Most apprenticeships seem to be in the technical industries: this was the first site I looked at where business and finance apprenticeships were offered.

Of course, it isn’t all technical apprenticeships: McDonalds (UK site) has an apprentice section – and I expect that if you’re UK based, you’ll have seen adverts for the McDonalds training. And just below BT on my Google search results page was the NHS, offering a range of health-care, hospitality and catering apprenticeships. Tesco offers apprenticeships in retail. And of course there are apprenticeships in many other fields of work – including new media.

In summary, I’d say that if you are offering apprenticeships, these should be given the same weight as any other type of candidate in your corporate careers section – and certainly, it should be possible to find some information about them, and the more the better. These sites listed here all have good ideas about how to attract potential apprentices, and what information they need to provide.

But the site of the week award has to go to BAESystems, for including a link from their home page in this, Apprentice Week.

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Today we have a guest post from Lauren Bailey offering advice for college students wanting to get started in corporate comms. Lauren Bailey is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about online colleges. She especially loves hearing back from her readers. Questions or comments can be sent to: blauren99 @gmail.com – though we’d love it if you commented below as well!

Over to you, Lauren.

What College Students Need to Know About Launching a Career in Corporate Communications

Corporate communications is a specialty field highly sought after by numerous businesses today. It deals with all of the communication an organization makes internally and externally, blending coherency with the company’s goals and ethics. This ensures that every message being sent from the company to an audience is as accurate and positively reflective of the business as possible.

College students who desire to launch a career in corporate communications will find the field challenging and rewarding, but they should keep a few things in mind in order to secure a successful future in the field.

Most college students pursue corporate communications as a specialty during a public relations education. Public relations is a quickly growing field where students and graduates can flex their communications skills and knowledge. Public relations specialists in corporate communications may work with businesses as corporate communication officers, directors, managers, consultants, human resources, and marketing. In fact, employment opportunities for public relations specialists are expected to increase 24% during the 2008-18 decade, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

Those who work in public relations have the primary objective of making sure that the image of their business or brand remains positive. They handle press releases, media contacts, public meetings, and other situations involving interacting with the public. This is why a specialization in corporate communications can be immensely beneficial. Thanks to recent business scandals, corporate communications has leapt back onto the radar for businesses across the country.

Competition for corporate communications positions is high, so college students may do well to go beyond the minimal requirement of a bachelor’s degree in the field and earn a master’s degree instead. A master’s degree in public relations and corporate communications may give recent graduates the nudge they need to stand out from other job seekers. Students should plan to take courses in communication law and ethics, media relationship maintenance, effective public writing, research and analysis skills, and strategy development. Most programs in both undergraduate and graduate studies also require students to complete a final real-world project in order to demonstrate their understanding of corporate communications and management.

Gaining plenty of in-field work experience is important as well for those looking to launch a career in corporate communications. A degree, even a graduate degree, is often not enough by itself to gain employment. Students can gain work experience by participating in part-time internships while in school, whereas graduate students may benefit from a full-time internship.

Networking is crucial as well. Most large companies do not advertise job openings for public relations positions, so it pays to make as many meaningful connections as possible to others in the industry. This way, if you make a good impression on someone, they may remember to contact you or recommend you for an unadvertised open public relations position. Go to your college’s career fairs to network, and stay in touch with your professors and fellow corporate communications classmates. You never know who may help you gain entry into the field.

Corporate communications is an exciting and prospering field. However, it can also be tough to break into due to the high level of competition for entry-level jobs. In order to stay ahead of the competition and catch the attention of employers, college students should study hard, consider earning a graduate degree in the field, participate in internships, and network with other professionals. With these tips in mind, students can almost guarantee that they will secure a successful career in corporate communications.

Thanks Lauren!

Agree? What advice would you offer to someone considering this as a career?

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