Archive for December, 2009
Hello there!
Thanks for reading some of my blog post this year.
Have a safe, spectacular, successful, wonderful, joyful, exciting, prosperous, unique, and awesome 2010! You get the idea.
Happy New Year!
I recently read John Zappe‘s feature on the $33M for an Army recruitment video game. GameSpot reported that $33M was spent over 10 years (year-by-year budget summary is below in Chart 1).
Taking a deeper dive into the story, I learned that the military combined spent about $700 million on recruitment advertising during the President Bush years. $33M amounts to 4.7% of the $700M, doesn’t 
see so bad now. But the real question become’s what was the ROI on the $33M of our taxpayer dollars? It’s great that GameSpot was about to get the expenditure info through the Freedom of Information Act request, but when will the RIO start to be reported?
Video games are being use by organizations as another tool to generate candidate engagement. In addition, recruitment video games can test candidate’s skills, critical thinking and technical skills.
Mitre Corp. uses video games as a recruitment strategy, so does Google. For many organizations the budget for a video game is prohibitive, but using some of those “test” budget dollars could be a great way to explore recruitment video games as a way to attract candidates. There are many “video game designers” in college or that have recently graduated, consider a video game internship project for one these students.
Other tools in your tool box (like video, blogging, job boards, SEO, SEM, etc) require a better understanding a company’s recruitment goals and branding. However, a video game just needs to be remotely related to your business, so give a young video game developer the opportunity to be creative.
Chart1: America’s Army year-by-year budget summary
2000–$3,500,000
2001–$5,600,000
2002–$1,862,985
2003–$2,600,000
2004–$3,866,482
2005–$1,288,552
2006–$4,050,748
2007–$2,788,137
2008–$3,887,450
2009–$3,395,702
@ErnsTweets
Candidates make mistakes all the time – being too aggressive, unprofessional email addresses, ring tone rings, funky voice mails, bad mouthing previous employers, and the list goes on, right?
Well, I did a search for “GEICO hiring” on twitter to see what tweets have been posted this morning. I did the search not because I’m searching for a job, but because I do some work with GEICO with video SEO and social media. As I scanned the tweets I come across this status update:
“Interview with Geico again, hopefully these mofos hiring me this time.”
The first thing is noticed the use of “mofos,” cursing at your potential employer before you get the job offer, not advisable. Then I noticed the grammar mistakes. Social media users are more tolerant of spelling and grammar mistakes in social media, but those mistakes can be a poor reflection.
If a tree falls in the forest does it make noise? So you might say, what’s the chances that out of the millions of status updates out there, that someone would find that tweet. Is there anyone listening on social media sites like Twitter? I guess we can say, some trees will be seen and heard falling, other trees will be stumbled upon or searched for at some point in the future.
With regards to the “mofos” post from that jobseeker, I know for a fact that GEICO gets RSS feeds of tweets about jobs/hiring at GEICO. So, I’m 99.9999999% sure GEICO has seen it. I don’t know how GEICO will use that tweet in that candidates evaluation, but it can’t help.
Here’s an example of a new business and green jobs being created. The US needs innovation and new businesses.
Solar power when the sun goes down?
A Santa Monica, Calif., company called SolarReserve has taken a step toward making that a reality, filing an application with California regulators to build a 150-megawatt solar farm that will store seven hours’ worth of the sun’s energy in the form of molten salt. Heat from the salt can be released when it’s cloudy or at night to create steam that drives an electricity-
generating turbine.
Jobs Jobs Jobs are the focus of The Whitehouse Jobs Summit. The Summit will focus on three main areas:
- Green Jobs
- Infrastructure
- Small Business financing
Green Jobs focuses on reducing our carbon footprint, jobs in renewable energy (wind, solar, biofuels, etc), but also can include logistics jobs and “green” products made from recycled material etc… The renewable energy industry will one day be huge, but when? The “green economy” is growing but will take years to develop. The global supply of crude oil is reduced every day, so eventually renewable energy will need to play bigger part.
Infrastructure spending creates many jobs, that’s one reason China’s GDP is growing around 8% per year. In the U.S. how many more roads can we build? How many bridges can we build? Where will these roads and bridges take us? I see repair projects going and some are necessary and indeed improve traffic flow. Others projects just seem like busy work: satisfactory roads or intersections just being ‘repaired’ to create some work. I do want good roads, I just wish there was more transparency and information made available on infrastructure spending. I hate to admit this, but some of those people that want construction jobs will need to go where the infrastructure jobs are, those people may need to move to other countries. The flipside is that it is usually the person with initiative and good work ethic that leaves, that could cause a talent drain for the U.S.
Small business financing is a key to job creation. Some new businesses need large sums of capital to start others need much less. Starting a cable network (I’ve been there with The Employment & Career Channel) like Oprah will do requires $50-150 Million, starting a wind farm millions of dollars too, but a pastry shop (like a friend from high school recently did, as learned via Facebook), or an IT consulting firm (as a college and fraternity friend did recently) could require just hundreds or thousands dollars.
Business financing from government, banks and venture capital will yield the best result for job creation. The right legal, tax and financial incentives need to in place too. I hope that the most progress at the Jobs Summit is made in this area.
This Jobs Summit can yield results and all-in-all the summit will indeed help. The summit is one of many things that needs to happen; jobs jobs jobs will be an ongoing theme for years. People need to start businesses.
I’ll leave you with this thought and question. There are millions of new people joining the middle class all over the world, how can large and small U.S. businesses tap into the needs and wants of those people?
Here’s a pre summit video from CNBC with some of the key attendees at the Summit:
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White House Holds Jobs Summit
The White House is bringing together business and labor leaders for its jobs summit today in an effort to brainstorm new strategies to spur job creation. Rose Wang, CEO of the Binary Group, and David Ickert, CFO of Air Tractor, discuss the summit with … |
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