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Skillter strongly believes in the value of corporate culture and a positive workplace attitude.

Attention bosses, managers, supervisors: managing employee attitudes is as important as managing ‘bottom-line’ drivers. Instill a sense of ownership and pride, and you will be jawdropped to see the impact on morale, productivity, turnover… and yes, the bottom-line as well.

It is nearly impossible to push a positive environment if you are a ‘constantly-negative’ person. Lead by example… smile, work hard and inspire your team to put bring their ambitious personalities to work!

When hiring, or managing employees, it is important to keep in mind that your attitude is contagious… what attitude do you want them to catch?

We learned a lot during the road trip… after meeting with over 30 colleges and universities in Canada and the US, we came to a few concrete conclusions:

1) Every single school has different methods of running their career services office. They often use the same tools and offer similar services, but the organization as a whole is completely different. They all place a different emphasis on the combination of: # of counselors, online vs offline help, mentor groups, resume critiques, alumni help, mock interviews… and the chosen emphasis very clearly shapes students in different ways.

2) All schools are having a hard time getting students into their career services office. It is clearly the best way to get a job, but when talking to students it became clear: a large portion of people have NO IDEA where the office is, and those who do would rather spend an hour searching online than in an office with someone critiquing every word in their resume. For this reason, in the US and Canada, less than 30% of students ever step foot in their career services office.

3) Career Counseling is tough, because every student is different. It is nearly impossible to meet with every student, and thus counselors are left to create ‘buckets’ of students and prepare resources for each bucket (ex. marketing students, finance students…). This is great, but in the end it seems like everyone within each bucket turns out looking the same on paper… using the same key words and action verbs on their resumes, building the same kind of experience as everyone else.

4) One of the main focuses of the Career Services office is Corporate Relations. It is their job to market their school in a way that makes them attractive to potential employers. The problem with this? It is tough to realize that every student, and every class is different when you are trying to build a ‘clear brand’ around your school and its graduates. This creates huge mismatches that in turn create huge inefficiencies.

5) Did you know that 75% of schools use the Myers Briggs (MBTI) Personality Assessment? This is a great tool to understand if you are outgoing or not (hmmm, tough question right?), but is it really the best use of the school’s tight and dwindling budgets? Statistics have shown us that the use of this assessment (unless enforced), has decreased every year… students demand more, they need something that is more relevant.

6) Career Services is the best resource a student has. It is the best place to land a job (based on success metrics), and it is the best place to be prepared for that job. Is it a problem with communication and awareness, or a problem with the students’ evolving lifestyles and the fact outdated nature of most of the services offered?

We love Career Services. Skillter is fighting to find a way to make sure that Career Services aren’t left behind, because in the end, nobody will fight harder for students than everyone in that office.

When it comes to interviews, the real question you need to ask yourself is: Who is interviewing who?

We have written about this before (http://blog.skillter.com/?p=29), but it is definitely worth elaborating on based on everything we have seen in the past few months.
In past generations there has been a widely accepted imbalance in the job world. We even see it today, where there are plenty more applicants than there are jobs available, and thus job seekers put themselves in a ‘pleasing’ mode; aka they act the way they feel they should, as opposed to the way they really should. It’s true that a job is a job, and when you need one you are willing to do whatever it takes to get one… but when looking for a career, NOBODY wins when you don’t act like yourself. This mentality lets companies walk all over you in the interview process. Companies can see how badly you need them, and they tend to treat you as a subordinate instead of as a respectable, potential co-worker.

We are in no way suggesting you ‘drill’ your interviewer with questions, but asking a few interview questions of your own can be very important to your happiness and confidence when starting a job. There are certain questions that are really great to find out BEFORE you accept a job, and might even make you stand out as a candidate who ‘knows what they want’ (which is always a good situation for employers!).
Next time you are about to go through an interview, line up a couple questions you can whip out when they ask “Do YOU have any questions?” We recommend some simple ones that can tell you a lot about what you will be going through on a day to day basis.
- What is the management style in position ____? (potential styles can be commanding, mentoring, lead-by-example…)
- Is this a ‘head-down’ kind of work environment?
- How do most people communicate at work? (email, face to face, phone, notes…)

Keep in mind, you have to be ready to answer why this question is important to you!

Until next time, Happy Hunting!

This topic is one that has been top of mind in the recruiting world for a few years now. With the growing influence of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, it was just a matter of time before the recruiting world found ways to put them to use. Through numerous startups, Facebook for example, has become somewhat of a lead-generating engine (no surprise, there are over 500 million people with accounts). There are obvious pros and cons of using social networks to source, or even hire new employees. Some love it, while many think it should be illegal… what do you think?

Apparently job seekers and HR professionals are not the only ones to think social media recruiting should be illegal… so does Germany! Germany is attempting to make it illegal to search Facebook for information about candidates (or even to use it at all for other purposes than social). They are even discussing Google being illegal (to check up on candidates), although it looks like that will not pass, as long as information that is too old or outside the candidate’s control.
It is no surprise that there is pushback on this as there is so much personal information on sites like these. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, and what it will mean for companies who adopt this practice in the short term.

Read more about here: “Germany to outlaw employers checking out job candidates on Facebook…”.

Eager Beaver does Chicago! Check it out! http://bit.ly/cwMcIm

Well it’s that time again… campuses are getting ready to welcome back their students for another great year. On the Road Trip we have been meeting with a number of people at each school, from Deans to Career Centers, to professors and students.
In hopes of learning as much as we could about the school-company relationship, we asked everyone about their experiences. We found out that in general, 1) students feel ‘used,’ and 2) schools feel that it is their duty to ‘protect’ their students from businesses targeting them…
The institutional-corporate relationship is a mess. Something needs to be done… ESPECIALLY when it comes to hiring. How can you hire, or get hired, effectively if there is a predator-prey relationship?

This is where Skillter is trying to make a difference. Students need to be empowered to rebalance the recruiting world. Companies on the other hand, need to respect this new generation in the workplace and get rid of the “anyone would be LUCKY to work for me” mentality… it is quite the contrary. Any company would be LUCKY to have these students as employees, as long as the fit is right.

Very excited to introduce the newest member of the Skillter team: Eager Beaver. Eager Beaver has joined us on our College Road Trip covering over 12 universities in 5 states in under 2 weeks. He has been very busy meeting students, career counselors, professors and anyone else that has been on campus during our visits.

If you haven’t seen his updates, join our Facebook group (http://bit.ly/9Mtlx8) to see what he’s been up to!

Why a beaver? Beaver’s are known to swim against the current when they’re at work. They set their mark by building a home that literally redirects the elements around them. They can topple a tree despite being a small fraction of its size. Quite simply, they mirror the personality of Skillter.

Learn more about Eager Beaver on Facebook, he’s excited to share his stories with you!

The Skillter Team is heading on a College Road Trip in a few weeks! We are very excited to be meeting with Career Centers, frats, sororities, sports teams, professors and companies catering to colleges in Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan! We have a great list of colleges and are pumped to Skillterize so many great campuses!

Interested in having Skillter roll up to your campus? Head to our Contact page and let us know!

We will be updating you along the way, so get ready for some great pictures, videos and general news!

Inefficiency #5 – Adding flair to the resume. Once the right words are in, some people like to add personality to the resume hoping this will help them stand out. This is a great approach because it really can make a difference (although most accounting firms won’t care to see your photoshop skills). The issue is that this takes a lot of time, and can become overwhelming for certain organizations and people (you don’t want to start designing a new template to target every job/company you go after). If you choose to go this route, have fun with it and get creative.

Inefficiency #6 – Now that the resume has been critiqued and is ready to go, it’s time to use the internet’s to its full potential (yea right) and head straight to job boards. This is epitome of the ‘shotgun approach.’ I’m not saying it doesn’t work, but even the best of matching services (like Monster’s new 6sense technology), relies solely on the resume and the experience you say you have… which is highly subjective. Searching and sending out resumes takes up a lot of time… the average student spends over 2 hours a week on fruitless job searches online.

Inefficiency #7 – The courting/interviewing process. It is a harsh reality that most people who interview Generation Y candidates have never been trained to do so, and often get thrown into the situation because their manager wants an ‘initial’ screen and some feedback before they spend their valuable time. What do these interviewers usually rely on? That’s right, the one document they have in their hands… the resume.

To conclude, I want to outline that I am not against the resume. It is an amazing marketing document that gives people insight into what you have done in the past. My issue with it relies on the dependence everyone has on it, because in the end, I believe companies should hire people and not carefully crafted 1 pagers.

I have written briefly about it before, but I wanted to focus an entire post on 7 inefficiencies I see with the resume. Sure it’s a great marketing document, but the fact that people use it as the sole basis for making hiring decisions is beyond absurd (THE dictating Inefficiency – suitable to be #1).

Inefficiency #2 – Everyone knows that job seekers edit their resume for specific positions… I used to have 4 resumes and depending on what kind of job I was going for I would send a specific one out. If you don’t believe me, just ask any Generation Y job seeker how many resumes they have.

Inefficiency #3 – Especially when it comes to Generation Y job seekers, people have experience they don’t particularly like. For example, I have had many internships in my day, at one point internships were all I had on my resume. The last thing I wanted was to be hired based on that experience. This also makes it very tough to change industries, because you are then seen as having no experience. Hiring seems to be a practice that is based on backward-looking scrutiny, instead of forward-looking potential, why does it have to be this way?

Inefficiency #4 – Colleges and Universities have great career centers, filled with fantastic resources and very knowledgeable people ready to help in any way they can. Career counselors can be invaluable to your job or career search as they have built out great relationships with companies that hire from your school. At my school for example, the entire counseling process started with a ‘resume critique,’ which is a half hour sessions where you are asked what jobs you want to land, and are fed key words and action verbs to include to help you ‘stand out.’ How can I stand out if everyone is getting the same keywords? Unfortunately, that meeting alone turned me off of the career center.

more to come…