Steven Rothberg's Page

Inc.com, which bills itself as the daily resource for entrepreneurs, each year releases its list of the 5,000 fastest growing, privately held companies in the U.S. This year, CollegeRecruiter.com made the Inc. 5,000 list as the 1,403rd fast growing company, 17th in the fast growing education companies (apparently job boards fall into the education category), and 23rd in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area.

According to Inc.'s analysis, our rapid growth is due to two primary factors:

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• In 2004, we added new products and candidate-friendly software. Our innovative products include:
  
  • Pay per click job postings;
    
  • Pay per lead job postings;
    
  • Targeted email campaigns to our double opt-in database of 10 million college students, recent grads, and alumni; and
    
  • Cell phone text messaging (SMS) campaigns to the same database of 10 million college students, recent grads, and alumni.
    
  
  
• We found new ways to advertise its site to job seekers by creating CollegeRecruiter.com Facebook applications and even a Youtube channel with more than 350 career-related videos.
  

A question from several of the 500+attendees to our free webinar last week on how employers can and should use Facebook for recruiting was whether employers would encourage negative comments about their organizations if those employers started blogging, using Facebook, etc.

My advice was that the negative comments will be made whether the employer has a presence or not so they should blog, actively use Facebook, and otherwise participate in Web 2.0 sites. To do otherwise would be to allow the negative comments to be posted without the employer's side of the story. Don't get personal. Don't post comments saying that the blogger is an idiot. But do give your side of the story. If your organization could have done something better, admit it and provide details on what you'll be changing and when in order to rectify the situation.

A number of recruiters and other human resource professionals asked what might seem to be a stupid question both during and after last week's free webinar on how employers can and should use Facebook for recruiting. The question was how can they create a Facebook Fan Page for their organizations so they can have a corporate rather than personal page on Facebook.

You'd think that Facebook would make it easy for people to figure out how to create Fan Pages. If so, well, you'd think wrong. I've been to dozens and perhaps hundreds and it is always amazing to me how hard Facebook makes it. Go to any Fan Page and scroll all the way to the bottom. You should see the link there or just go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php.

My daily newspaper reported this morning that Barack Obama's campaign is using cell phone text messaging (SMS) to better connect and motivate his supporters. Want periodic updates on the campaign? Text "obama" (without the quotes" to 62262. Want to know the identity of his vice presidential running mate before the media does? Text "vp" to 62262. Brilliant.

Obama is using an SMS keyword campaign to recruit, retain, and motivate his supporters. So why aren't employers? Well, some are and many more will soon be.

One of the tenants by which I try to run CollegeRecruiter.com is not to make strategic decisions based upon tactical problems or vice versa. For example, if an employee is taking an lunch break that is too long, don't fire her. The excessive lunch break is comparatively minor and therefore tactical. The termination of an employee is comparatively serious and therefore strategic. Tactical issues tend to be those which most influence an organization in the short-term while strategic tend to have the greatest influence over a long period of time.

Another example would be the auto manufacturers. Just months ago Ford was adamant about shutting down the Ford Ranger light pickup truck manufacturing facility in Saint Paul,Minnesota. By all accounts the product was high quality and so were the workers. But Ford wanted to get rid of the Ranger because they wanted to sell more of the monster pickup trucks from which they could make big margins. That despite Ford's claims that it was an environmentally focused company.

Well, $4 per gallon gas sure turned them around. Now they're talking about expanding the Ranger production because so many buyers of pickup trucks are tired of spending their entire paychecks on the gas it takes to get to and from work. But is the problem confined to Ford? Hardly. Take a good look at the vehicles and advertising coming out of the other manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota, which won't make the fuel efficient Prius in nearly the quantities demanded by the marketplace.

Message to the auto manufacturers: stop trying to solve the strategic environmental and energy problems facing all of us with tactical solutions like advertising and pretending.that you're green when you're anything but. Your customers can smell that nonsense a mile away and the nonsense smells even worse than what is spewing out of the tailpipes coming out of the rear ends of your monster trucks.