Last week I went along to my very first career’s fair at Macquarie University and for a HR person who loves employer branding stuff and glossy brochures, I would liken it to the Easter Show for HR people.

Yes and after a day at the show, here are the contents of my showbag.

Honorable Mentions

Ernst and Young- I am a big fan of their work. Inside their ‘Make it Happen’ brochure is all the right things. Talks about their high performance culture that recognises and rewards talent. Highlights all the different ways to get work experience or a foot in the door at Ernst and Young including vacation programs, cadet programs and the career compass program. It describes different parts of the business that you can work in, and all the various ways that they reward their people. Everything they do is seamlessly integrated with the online work they do as well. Beautifully branded.

NAB produced a very nice little notebook for students to write in, although not before clearly outlining their EVP. Branded with a space theme, it’s called ‘NAB launching exciting opportunities for success’ featuring space shuttles and stars etc. It looks really nice with plenty of photos and quotes from staff, a message from the Group CEO and outlines the specific benefits of their graduate program. I was excited by reading through it.

Deloitte. Just love everything written in this. Starting with their values, this isn’t just the usual trust and respect stuff you normally hear. The ‘Seven signals’ are pretty awesome and something people can really live by. It’s simple, but very well presented. I love the way they have presented their rewards. Get this, they give graduates $500 when they start to spend on a corporate wardrobe. Very cool, yet practical idea.

Coolest Gadgety/ Promotional Things

I personally thought this was awesome. It’s called a ‘Skoona Moova’. It’s a pocket sized, foldaway reusuable drinks carrier. Whilst everyone loves a yo-yo (and they had them too) this was something a uni student would find cool; particularly those who are regulars at the footy or cricket. Hill Rogers Chartered Accountants had these ‘Skoona Moovas’ branded and were accompanied a card which talked about how ‘Hill Rogers people are forward thinking and thrive in a friendly and flexible work place’. Nicely done.

I’m a sucker for these types of things, but I just loved this ‘D’ clip that says ‘Find a career you’ll want to hold onto’. Commonwealth Bank also had a small passport sized book called ‘Field Notes’ which looked just like some sort of travel diary including maps, photos and scribbles. Using the mountain climbing analogy (from the D Clip, and right through the field notes) they talk about the quality of the graduate program, the different areas that you can work in, and feature testimonials from CBA grads. Excellent job.

KPMG is bright and colourful, outlining what kind of people they look for, what kind of work you can do at KMPG, how they value their people and how the selection process works. Their brochure comes with a cool notebook and here comes the gadget part. I actually initially thought it was a small pen or laser, but when you project this little baby onto a wall it says ‘Live. Learn. Discover. Achieve’. Pretty cool.

Finally I’m not sure I totally fell in love with the ‘do you have an Aldi Brain?’ idea, but it leads you to their ‘think smarter’ website which is pretty cool. It has a brain challenge and its a very interactive website.

So what are your thoughts? Do you like this gimicky kinda stuff at fairs or do you think it’s a bit of a waste of money?

Here’s some more photos from the day:

So this is a guy in the U.S. and he has targeted Razorfish because he really wants to work there.

Facebook advertising is quite cool in the way you can actually target the ads on really specific data on the users. You can target people based on the standard things like age,location and gender. However you can be even more specific than that.

You can target key words so this means identifying people who are engaged, or who like the Star Wars movies. I know I never realised how in-depth this was until I did a bit of research myself. Read more on the different target areas here.

In any case, here is the ad that was targeted to Razorfish employees.

When you click on the ad, it then takes you to his resume- a funky blog that invites you to learn more about him. You think that’s pretty crazy?

This guy even has a free iphone app. Yep, now there’s an app for that.

Funnily enough, Punk Rock HR’s Laurie Ruettimann has a post today from the perspective of a grad using social media to find a job.

What do you think? How far would you go to land your dream job?

I was recently interviewed by the good people at Careerhub about my role at CSIRO and what I thought the future of graduate recruitment was all about.

Of course I mentioned Social Media because I’m a big fan- but primarily its because social media has the ability to personalize or humanize the whole experience for a candidate.

Rather than simply trawling a job board for things like location and job function, it would be much more beneficial for candidates to be able to interact with an organisation- find out how it works and what the culture is like. They should be able to ask questions that will influence their decision to join us. After all, we want people to come work with us and enjoy the experience.

On the flip side I also mentioned GradConnection. I was a fan of GradConnection before I met the boys there but I just think its an awesome concept.

The GradMaker is an online tool for graduates to rank graduate employers based on what they value in an employer. So it does rank your traditional fields like industry and location- but it allowed us to further promote the benefits of working here like heaps of free parking, surrounded by green grass & trees, the freedom to access social networking sites on the internet and flexible working hours.

I think sites like this will be hugely popular for Gen Y graduates, and it means that employers will employ graduates who have really thought about what they value in a workplace before they join.

If you want to take a look at the article, jump online to the Careerhub blog.

Last year at my work we had a handful of students join us for a summer vacation scholarship program here in Sydney and also in Melbourne. Although the students seemed to have a good time, I’ll be the first to admit that there were a number of…. let’s call them key learnings.

To start with, despite advertising 6 projects on various university websites in Sydney and Melbourne we actually only managed to fill 5 of them. 1205 people looked at the positions, but only 40 people applied.

Many of the applications were unsuitable, and one of the candidates was appointed and terminated less than two weeks later for unsatisfactory conduct. The responsibility of the recruitment and supervision of this position was handed from the supervisor to a young person who had only just arrived in Australia a few weeks before.

So what did we learn? In a nutshell:

• Our advertising strategy wasn’t very effective. The project descriptions were full of jargon and possibly intimidated applicants. As a result we didn’t receive a good amount of quality applications
• Supervisors didn’t conduct proper interviews with the students and poor selection choices were made
• We didn’t promote the program while it was happening or engage students that we hope to recruit in the future
• We didn’t have any information on the experience of the students to use as advertising material for the next year i.e. no photos, videos or accounts of what happened or why others should participate
• We didn’t promote the company as a great place to work for young Australian uni students

Sounds pretty hideous and like a bit of an epic fail. So this year, I put together a plan and my management team actually gave me a workable budget to get it going.

So here’s a bit of my plan:

PHASE ONE: Awareness

The purpose of this initial phase is raise general awareness around the Program. We would achieve this by utilising low cost channels such as contacting lecturers and university staff (we would create a flyer for them to circulate), and updating the web site to announce the upcoming program.

In addition we can set-up a Facebook fan page to enable students to post enquiries and ask questions in real time to gain insights into what they can expect during the Student Scholarship Program.

Getting last year’s participants to upload photos and their experiences from the previous year and join the group would be a great way to ensure engaging content is available to entice students into applying.

Setting up an email account and ask people to register their interest would allow us to create a database of people interested in the program who we could email with information as it becomes available.

PHASE TWO: Advertising

Phase two will focus on driving registrations for the Program. There will of course be advertising posted on the Careers site, but in addition we will utilise University Career hubs and specialised graduate recruitment sites such as GradConnection to advertise our projects.

PHASE THREE: Sharing the experience

Phase three will focus on promoting the student experience while also allowing us to engage other students interested in working in the industry. This additionally creates a supply of content that can readily be utilised in next year’s efforts to promote the Program.

Students taking part in the program will be invited to contribute to a blog about their experiences and upload video/photos through this system. These can then be viewed and commented upon (comments will be moderated) by families, friends and other students.

The introduction of a blog allows the opportunity to create additional content such as Podcasts from scientists explaining what it is like to work here and why they are passionate about their jobs. All content can be promoted through the communication channels established in phase one.

PHASE FOUR: Promoting Big Day In (presentations of projects by students).

Phase four will focus on promoting awareness of the Big Day In. A Media release will announce the event publically while the Blog can push information to the existing user base. It would be great to have a live online stream from the day’s event allowing outsiders which may not be able to make it to take advantage of the presentations. In addition users could vote for their favourite presentations online. All presentations can be filmed and posted to the blog after the event (or kept as content to advertise next year’s event). Not sure how much of this is possible, but you have to dream big sometimes

Whilst this approach hasn’t been completely smooth sailing because I’m not as tech savvy as I’d like to be and there are some restrictions and processes that need to be followed when working in government, I am very excited about what’s to come.

After just one week we have already had 502 views and 17 great applications. I hope they keep coming in because it’s a fantastic opportunity to gain real work experience. I’ll keep you posted with how we go. Fingers crossed!