We were recently contacted by Constant Contact, our newsletter software provider, with a message that stated:

Dear Douglas,
You’re using permission-based email marketing to help drive your business. You’ve communicated regularly with your customers and members. And they’re clearly interested in hearing from you! You’ve maintained sound permission-based email marketing and list management best practices.

All of these indicate to us that you made excellent use of Constant Contact last year. And we noticed!

That’s why we are proud to designate you as a 2008 Constant Contact All Star! You’re part of a special group of our customers that we want to thank for setting a great example for other email marketers. Congratulations!

Thank you again for using Constant Contact, and we hope you’ll continue to serve as a great example to others in 2009.

Best wishes,
 
Gail Goodman
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Now, I don’t exactly know what that means….but I come from a school where we celebrate even the smallest accomplishments (Actually, I don’t.  I never got a trophy for 7th place when playing tee ball).   But nonetheless – I think it is something we should be proud of.  We strive to deliver a quality newsletter each week with useful content for the human resource professional or executive/entrepreneur looking to grow their business through human capital acquisition.

We’re humbled and we appreciate the recognition.  And we appreciate our readers even more.

Nothing excites me more than recruitment marketers that “recruit outside of the box.”   And when a governmental agency does so, I am absolutely amazed.  Now, some of the new recruitment ideas and concepts like twitter …. I ‘do not get.’  However, targeting specific demographics using new media, especially on You Tube,  is brilliant.  The Air Force, and their agency of record, truly ‘get it.’  Watch this video shot in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.  The Air Force is the presenting sponsor of the series.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmgyLcZDoxA]

The younger generations spend more time consuming media on YouTube than they do television nowadays.  Whole new programming has come about of this including a series titled “TheCircuit.”  TheCircuit attracts the younger generation that is interested in technology.  The same demographics the Air Force wants to target. So……the U.S. Air Force  sponsored the video series and reaches their target demographic in a non-obtrusive way.  Brilliant!!!

Is free really free?  How much is your time worth?  In economic down times, vendors often scramble to keep their businesses alive or try to gain market share in order in hopes of charging more in the future.  In doing so, they many times disguise products as being ‘free.’  The most recent ‘free’ offering comes from our friends over at Monster.com. 

Monster.com recently announced its’ Keep America Working campaign, which will offer free job fairs to employers in some 140 markets.  Now, Monster has been hosting job fairs in Las Vegas for a few years now and have earned the reputation of being the worst job fair promoter in the market.  Employers just don’t see the value.  Beyond the hefty sign-up fee, the Monster job fair has been known to attract just a few hundred of the least qualified jobseekers.  Employers have literally packed up their exhibit booths and walked out the door in hopes of adding some productivity to their day by returning to the office….rather than stare at the few vendors brave enough to stick around. 

Today, Monster feels that if it offers free booths maybe more employers will come out, granting Monster sales reps  the opportunity to sell them their primary product – job postings on Monster.com.  The fundamental problem  – is attending a bad job fair worth your time?  The set-up, the time standing around yielding questions from unqualified candidates and the reporting of applicants but no hires?  And really…..how much is your employment brand worth to attach to an event that has never been successful? 

So, you ask …….”How can a Monster.com Job Fair be so unsuccessful when Monster operates one of the largest job boards on the Internet?”   The reason is simple - Monster only markets to their own database of jobseekers, of which the majority block or assume the message is just another piece of Monster Spam.  I have a Monster account (as well as accounts for all of our competitors) just to monitor the amount of crap that they send me that I never asked for.  Fortunately, my Outlook filter drops Monsters’ Spam into a folder that I only visit periodically.  Believe me – it receives plenty of junk mail from Monster. 

To host a successful job fair in Las Vegas, the promoter must have reach beyond just one medium.  They must partner with other community groups to attract the right type of jobseekers to the event.  Take a look at a partial list of sponsors for our Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair.  Nearly every radio & television station through our partnership with the Nevada Broadcasters Association, the majority of publications through Greenspun Media Group, Relocating job seekers through Las Vegas Publications, older workers through AARP and jobseekers of the Recruiting Nevada Network.  Each one of our partners places a crucial role in Opportunity Boulevard’s success.  If just one organization tried to hold the same caliber of event, it would not be a success. 

Now, I do give Monster an A+ for their marketing efforts.  They are good at attracting national attention.  But as we all know, employment is done at the local level.  And when a product is known to be a ‘crap product’ - does giving it away for free make it any better?

If you have not seen this video – is quite funny:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DhirLBqTag

Recruiting Nevada has never had an aversion to foreign nurses.  But we never could assemble a business case to support it.  So, we  never incorporated a foreign nurse recruitment strategy into our overall plan.  Several reasons warranted this:

• We have no experience in foreign recruitment
• We are not a staffing agency, and this model falls more in line with agency work
• We know we can effectively market Las Vegas as a relocation destination to American nurses and achieve great success
• We are uncertain what problems the language barriers  create in the overall delivery of care
• Our preliminary talks with clients showed an 18 month average conversion with a 50-75% fall-out from time of interest to time of employment.

So, we stuck to our core competency….marketing Las Vegas and Nevada as the greatest place to live, work and nurse.  Our solution provides over leads annually of health care professionals who opted-in and expressed an interest in wanting to relocate to Nevada. 

Come to find out, the biggest problem has been the language barriers.  LasVegasSun.com, a sister website of recruitingnevada.com, recently published an article going into the details of the issue.  It can be read here - “Foreign nurses can slip into communications gap.”

According to comScore, online job searches saw an increase of 51% between 2007 and 2008:

Keep in mind, this is national traffic, not local.  If you were to do a comparison on Job Boards in Las Vegas, I am confident RecruitingNevada.com would be at the top of the list (of course). 

Adult Industry Thriving in Down Economy

Well, I am not sure if “thriving” is the right word, but it seems like the adult industries’ War for Talent has been reversed.  According to several recent articles, many young women are changing their careers to be an adult industry professional.  Check out these stories:

• More women needing cash go from jobless to topless
• Pole position:  Strip club holds job fair
• Women desperate for work turn to strip clubs, brothels

We all hear about recruiting on Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn (heck – my last post was about LinkedIn).  But what happens when what is ‘tweeted’ …is too much.  Or the tweet is exposed to the wrong audience? 

Cheezhead, one of my favorite blogs, uncovered a great example – Destroy your job prospects with one tweet.

Basically, a jobseeker shared her recent job offer and uncertainties if it was a job she would truly enjoy.  An employee of the employer (Cisco) read the tweet and sent the entire situation viral!!  Needless to say, Cisco will more than likely rescind the offer.  Probably not the smartest thing to ‘tweet.’

Nevada’s unemployment rate continued to escalate in February, hitting the 10.1 percent mark, 0.7 percent jump from January, announced Bill Anderson, chief economist for the Nevada Department of Employment, Training & Rehabilitation (DETR). Nevada’s unemployment rate has nearly doubled since last February when it stood at 5.5 percent, Anderson said. The unemployment rate is quickly approaching the highest rate recorded, 10.7 percent, reached in December 1982. Nevada’s unemployment rate continues to surpass the national unemployment rate, which was 8.1 percent in February. In the Las Vegas-Paradise, an estimated 102,500 workers were without a job, pushing the rate to 10.1 percent, Anderson said.

“Since the start of the recession, in December 2007, the unemployment rate has increased every month, nearly doubling over the period. Since September, the economy has shed over 50,000 jobs, suggesting the economy decelerated markedly during the final months of 2008 into 2009.” Anderson said. “Nonfarm employment increased for the first time since September, as higher education employees came back from winter break, though the end of the seasonal shut down at the State’s colleges and universities merely offset job losses in other sectors in February.”

Regional economic conditions around the State were unimproved in February. Unemployment increased in each of the State’s three metropolitan areas. Thirty-four hundred workers found themselves unemployed in the capitol city, where unemployment climbed one-tenth of a percentage point to 11.3 percent. Reno-Sparks saw their unemployment rate increase to 11.2 percent, up two-tenths from January. The Elko Micropolitan area’s unemployment rate was unchanged from January. At 6.4 percent, the region continues to benefit from high gold prices and production. (Unemployment rates for the State’s metropolitan areas are not adjusted for seasonality. For comparison purposes, the State’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 10.3 percent in February.)

“Statewide employment increased by 300 from January to February thanks in large part to an influx of seasonal, education sector workers, and gains in the healthcare and social assistance sector,” Anderson said.

The combined 5,300 job-increase offset losses of 2,400 in retail sales, 1,000 in leisure and hospitality, and 1,200 in professional and business services over the month. Overall, job losses were contained to the Las Vegas-Paradise MSA where employment declined by 1,400 from January to February. Employment in the Reno-Sparks and Carson City MSAs increased by 1,100 and 500 over the month, respectively.

“The healthcare and social assistance sector continues to defy recessionary pressures,” Anderson said. “Employment has increased by 3,100 since January 2008, reaching an all time high of 89,100 in February. Despite recent losses in wealth and income, Nevadans continue to demand increased services, likely due to a historical gap in service availability caused by rapid population growth.”

If LinkedIn is not in your arsenal of recruiting tools yet, it should be.  Traffic on LinkedIn has more than doubled in the past year with all of the massive layoffs.  LinkedIn is experiencing 7.7 million new unique visitors each month now.  That is a lot of activity.

Read this article and you will understand the power of LinkedIn. 

If you have not registered for the first Nevada Recruiters Association meeting yet, you should do so now.  Our first speaker,Dave Mendoza, was recognized for his networking and blog achievements as one of the top 20 networkers worldwide on LinkedIn and for his contributions as an Affiliate Partner to JobMachine, An Arbita Company.  RSVP today.

Make sure we connect on LinkedIn when you establish your account – http://www.linkedin.com/in/douggeinzer

Forbes.com has published Layoff Tracker –  a running list of layoffs at America’s 500 largest companies since November 2008. 

They actually have the Las Vegas Sands laying off 11,500 people on December 23, 2008.  MGM-Mirage listed 400 layoffs on November 6, 2008.  IGT had 200 on January 29, 2009.   Many of the other companies on the list have a Nevada presence, and many jobs in Nevada were lost.