Last time I suggested some ideas to help your prospective recruits find out something about what your company does.
Their next step will be to decide whether they would like to work for you.
Step 2: “Would I want to work for this company?”
Answering this question is a chance to sell your corporate culture. What is so special about your company? Why would someone want to work for you, rather than for your competition?
[Read more…] about 7 steps to Yes: do I want to work here?
Yes!
The letter from Princeton is an old standard now, but I mention it again to emphasize that the goal of a recruitment process (from both points of view) is to get to Yes.
Or perhaps Yes-Yes, because the goal is to get to Yes on both sides. (Yes-No or No-Yes are both mismatches resulting in disappointment. No-No is usually less of an issue).
To get to Yes, the prospective recruit has to find the answer to a number of different questions, and go through 7 steps:
[Read more…] about 7 steps to Yes
Have you considered using podscrolls to communicate more detail about you?
Podscrolls are like presentations, or brochures, and are composed of a series of images, but they are read using an iPod or other personal media player with a colour screen rather than on paper. These were first used by travel guides (Rough Guides), but potentially have a lot of different applications.
Accenture are using them in their Careers section to enable prospective candidates to download brochures for reading later – on their ipods.
I can see that this might work for documents or presentations that you’d like people to review, re-read, and think about, and it is certainly convenient – no need to carry about a document in case you’d like to have another look later.
However, the pixel size is small (320*240) so you probably wouldn’t want to put your annual report or financial statements on podscroll.
But do you have manuals – either for your end customer or for your staff – that it would be helpful for them to have available in a size that would fit in a pocket? Or price lists? What about other presentations that people could download and read on the bus without having to get out their PC?
I’m going to be looking out for interesting uses of podscrolls, so if you come across something, do let us know.
I have now managed to get onto Coca-Cola’s new mini-site (launched on Wednesday, apparently). I couldn’t find it before because the link from the press release didn’t seem to work – now there’s something that should always be checked – but Google found it for me. Of course.
Do you think this site is designed only for the British? It has a UK URL, and the audio clip used of their focus group contains some quite strong northern British dialects, which maybe people coming across this from abroad may struggle with. It reminds me very strongly of the Nick Park adverts for electricity … and if it is UK only, why?
[Read more…] about Want to talk to Coca-Cola?
What unexpected partnership could you develop to support your brand?
Expecting to see a link to the heralded new Coca-Cola Lets Get Together site, I went to their corporate site again today, and was intrigued to see a link to a sub-site about polar bears. This has been live for about a month, according to their press releases.
I don’t immediately see the connection, though apparently polar bears have been part of the Coca-Cola brand for years. I guess I’m not their target market; for me, polar bears mean Fox’s Glacier Mints.
But the idea – and the mini-site itself – is a good one. It’s a collaborative effort, linking together the CSR section of Coca-Cola’s corporate site and the World Wildlife Fund’s site, and is clearly designed to demonstrate that Coca-Cola are concerned about global warming, and are doing their bit to help protect the environment. I particularly enjoyed the wind-noise – it made me check my windows …
Polar bears are very popular with children (is this the link for Coca-Cola? I suppose the connection with ice/ice-cubes helps too), and are a high-profile high-status animal in danger of extinction, so pull at the public heart-strings. The mini-site contains some educational material and e-cards, but is chiefly a vehicle for confirming polar bears as part of the Coca-Cola advertising and of their corporate social responsibility commitments – and is a very clever association with WWF, whose brand has involved polar bears for years. (Also, of course, it plays well with The Golden Compass ice-bears which are currently popular).
Coca-Cola are donating part of their profits from sales of toy polar bears during December 07 to WWF, and ask that visitors to the site also donate to WWF.
This seems to me to be relatively small-scale donation on the part of Coca-Cola (donating a tiny percentage of the profit from each can of coke would result in a far larger sum), but – according to the WWF site – Coca-Cola and WWF are working together to 1) reduce the water used to produce its beverages, 2) recycle water used in manufacturing processes, and 3) replenish water in communities and nature. This will of course have a far larger impact, and is part of a multi-year partnership announced last June.
So: a clever way of bringing together two organisations to the benefit of both. (And, one hopes, to the benefit of polar bears). Question is, which organisation could you work with in this way?
No doubt you know that you can monitor what bloggers are saying about your company, either by buying a tailored service (say from Cyveillance, or Magpie) or by simply setting up Google Alerts.
But here’s a slightly different slant on it: what are your potential recruits saying about you to each other? What brand message is your careers site conveying?
[Read more…] about What do your job applicants say about you?
