We would like to welcome Tamya Lemke to the Recruiting Nevada family.  Tamya joined us a few weeks ago and will be assisting us while Chelsey Kuzyk is out on maternity leave (I think they are putting something in the water here).  Tamya will assist us in managing accounts and developing new business.  Many of you already know Tamya, so feel free to give her a call at (702) 948-2786.

I have had the pleasure of working with Tamya over the past few years on the Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition (SNMIC) Recruitment Task Force.  In her previous role as managing director of the Las Vegas office of JWT Inside (Recruitment Advertising Agency), Tamya and Recruiting Nevada shared many of our health care clients….so her transition onto our team will be an easy one. 

With over 10 years of recruitment advertising experience, as well as experience in hospitality marketing, Tamya is a perfect fit with our team.  She is one who ‘gets it.’  We have been very fortunate to have built a team of professionals who understand not only recruitment advertising, but what makes campaigns successful in Las Vegas and Nevada.

We look forward to Chelsey returning from maternity leave in a few months to make our team whole again.  And with Chelsey and Tamya working together, we will certainly be able to handle any recruitment advertising needs our clients have.

My good friends over at Arbita recently released some results from the Recruitment Genome Project.  The results are very fascinating for those of you who like to follow trends and analyze numbers and statistics.  For recruitment marketers (really every employer), this document will provide great insight as to where success is being found and satisfaction levels are on everything from employment branding efforts to corporate career web sites.

Here are some highlights:

• 90 percent advertise on job boards
• 45 percent are dissatisfied with their overall job board performance
• Only 38 percent feel they are using the right metrics
• 53 percent are dissatisfied with their current sourcing methods

There is a ton more in this invaluable document.  Download a copy of it here.

Get involved with the Recruitment Genome Project!!

Here at Recruiting Nevada, we kind of ‘pool’ applicants for many of our clients.  The applicants we ‘pool’ have not yet moved to Nevada, but are strongly considering making the move and want our assistance.  The applicants are typically for hard-to-fill positions where there is a workforce shortage caused by a supply-demand issue.  And we view our ‘pooling’ efforts as a way to correct the shortage at a regional level.

A new effort has surfaced where applicants are being pooled by top employers.  AllianceQ is a consortium of many of the top Fortune 500 companies such as Starbucks, Best Buy, ADP, Baxter, Wachovia, FPL Group and Entergy.

This is a bold and confident move for these folks.  They obviously have faith in their employment brands and do not view each other as deep, deep competition.  They are even soliciting new members.  I don’t expect the consortium to grow too large.  It would take away the prestige. 

Congratulations to Wyndham Vacation Ownership for being named “Employer of the Year” by the American Resort Development Association. 

At the ARDA annual convention held in Las Vegas on April 15, Wyndham Vacation Ownership received a Circle of Excellence Award for their creation of the iGo orientation program. 

Las Vegas demands unique talents.  Not everywhere in the world are ‘entertainment engineers’ needed.  As the Entertainment Capital of the World….. Las Vegas needs plenty of entertainment engineers.  Enough that our local university, UNLV, has created a program of its’ own.

UNLV has stepped forward to teach the technological trickery of hoisting stages high into the air, making lakes disappear and then reappear, getting areas of the stage to twist at angles unknown to most. 

UNLV’s new program merges engineering and creativity to deliver future generations of entertainment engineers.  You can read all about this unique program on the Las Vegas Sun website.

Las Vegas — Greenspun Media Group (GMG) continues its growth with the acquisition of Recruiting Nevada, a local Internet company that publishes Nevada’s largest network of employment Web sites.

For the past two years, Home News Community Newspapers of Nevada has partnered with Recruiting Nevada on a quarterly basis through the Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair.  This strategic acquisition will immediately introduce new career opportunities to a significantly larger audience of job seekers while also offering employers increased response rates as Recruiting Nevada’s online presence extends to Greenspun Media Group’s local, regional and national group of award-winning publications.

A substantial amount of classified advertising has moved online, and this new addition  uniquely positions GMG to take advantage of the two growing areas of online employment classifieds including niche job boards and regional or local job boards.

“In the near future, the Las Vegas market will see tremendous job growth in key categories including healthcare, gaming, construction and education,” said Michael T. Carr, president of Greenspun Media Group.  “Recruiting Nevada positions our company to meet this demand and complements our existing publications and their Web sites.”

Recruiting Nevada delivers the most cost-effective, results-oriented recruitment advertising solution for Nevada employers and is working to solve the state’s critical workforce shortages from a supply-demand perspective. RecruitingNevada.com is a nucleus job board attracting the largest audience of local and relocating jobseekers to Nevada. It powers the employment sections of most of the chambers of commerce, professional associations and educational facilities, ensuring target audiences are reached.

About Greenspun Media Group
Greenspun Media Group is managed by The Greenspun Corporation with headquarters in Henderson, Nev. Its primary businesses include the newspaper and magazine publications, In Business Las Vegas, Las Vegas Home & Design, Las Vegas Magazine (LVM) and LVM2Go, Las Vegas Life magazine, Las Vegas Weekly, The Home News Community Newspapers of Nevada, Ralston Flash and VegasGolfer magazine. GMG is also the parent company of Niche Media Holdings LLC, publishers of luxury magazines, which include: Art Basel Miami Beach, Aspen Peak, Atlanta Peach, Bal Harbour, Boston Common, Capitol File, Florida Inside Out, Gotham, Hamptons, Los Angeles Confidential, Michigan Ave, Ocean Drive, Ocean Drive Espanol, Philadelphia Style, Style the magazine of the Venetian and Palazzo resorts, Trump, Vegas and Wynn.  GMG is owned by the Greenspun family, which also publishes the Las Vegas Sun daily newspaper, owns the Web sites VEGAS.com and LasVegas.com; Vegas TV, KTUD TV 14, Las Vegas’ number one independent TV station and Las Vegas ONE, a partnership with KLAS TV-8 and Cox Communications on an all-news cable channel.

We always hear about the stories of teachers moving to Las Vegas and becoming cocktail waitresses or strippers.  As much as we do not want to acknowledge this fact, it is true.  I know several teachers who still work in the casino and make more money ‘cock-tailing’ than they would teaching.  However, this is not the norm.

There are other stories like those recently published in the Las Vegas Sun about students who work on the Las Vegas Strip in order to pay for their education.  And the reality is, they graduate from college with less debt than the traditional college student and have ‘real life work experience’ to boot!!  Heck – my wife put herself through UNLV law school while ‘cock-tailing’ at Mandalay Bay.  Today, she has been practicing for 4+ years and doesn’t regret how she paid for law school. 

We need to accept that life in Las Vegas is different.  And we need to collaborate more as a community to leverage our differences.   

Las Vegas provides a great opportunity for a younger demographic to earn an exceptional living while putting themselves through school.  As human resource professionals, we need to accept that and reinforce the fact that they will not be able to cocktail, valet, tend bar (or dance) the rest of their lives, and that education is important.  When they are ready and able to make the transition, they will. 

Economic slowdowns drive up unemployment levels.  We saw this with the recent ‘Pink Slip Party’ on the Las Vegas Strip a few weeks back.  Room vacancies are up so there is not a need to maintain a larger workforce.  So casinos lay off some employees and cut back hours of others.  It is just part of business. 

Our last career fair had a drop in employer participation.  Why?  Because when there are more unemployed folks on the streets, there is not as much of a need to advertise.  Candidates are applying for jobs not even advertised…because they need the work.  This validates my jobseeker~employer marketplace analysis.

Those that are financially able, will utilize this slowdown for training.  It is a great time to sharpen skills for when the economy does rebound.  It will make those candidates more marketable when job creation surges. 

Smart employers also leverage these slowdowns to train their own workforces rather than lay them off.  Strangely enough – I have heard about many layoffs within the ‘training and development’ departments.  Go figure??

Someone in California is starting to ‘get it.’ Watch this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqz4IlMT3ns]

Just as a company is only as good as the workforce it employs…. A state is only as good as the talent it attracts.

In Nevada, we have understood this for years (well, at least at Recruiting Nevada we have). We don’t ‘attract’ talent solely because of good jobs. Yeah – that helps. But today’s generation wants a ‘cool place to live.’ That means selling our quality of life. And in Nevada, we offer a great quality of life.

If you removed the excessive taxes from California, I think most of Nevada’s population would rather live there. But, I don’t see that happening.

Attention Governor Gibbons – we should follow this tactic as a state.

Many people just put ‘too’ much into understanding diversity.  Diversity is not that difficult:  People are different.  We are diverse.

And people are different in more ways than just ethnicity, which is what many first think of when they hear the term ‘diversity.’  We differ from gender to religion, age to wealth and so on.  

In Business, a publication of Greenspun Media Group, did an awesome job of simplifying what ‘diversity’ is in their most recent issue with a special section titled “Guide to Marketing to Diverse Audiences.”  I suggest reading it.  There is a lot to learn… or just understand.

I look forward to when we all accept and understand diversity.

I anticipate Unity will be the next big thing.