Valpak Launches Facebook Fan Recruiting Page

A strategic advantage for any organization over its direct competitors is to have innovative products. We believe that we have consistently rolled out new products a little ahead of the curve and that allows us to provide our clients with better products, service, and pricing.

An example of one of these new, innovative products is our Facebook Fan Recruiting Page development. In short, we consult with our clients to better understand their needs and then create a home page on Facebook for them so that they can better communicate with the millions of students and recent graduates who use Facebook almost continuously.

GPA: How Important Is It?

College students searching for internships and recent graduates applying for entry-level jobs often ask whether to include their grade point averages on their resumes. There are essentially two considerations:

1. 
   
2. Grade point average is often, but not always, important when applying for internships and entry-level jobs. Some employers will refuse to consider candidates whose GPA's are below some cutoff point such as 3.0 or even 3.5. But the vast majority of employers use GPA as merely one of many factors when considering candidates so if your GPA is low but your other qualifications are exemplary then you still stand a good chance of landing an interview and being hired.
   
3. A good rule of thumb for deciding whether to include your GPA on your resume is that you want to include it if it is good as that will increase your chances of landing an interview but you want to leave it off of your resume if it isn't good as that will decrease your chances of landing an interview. But that rule of thumb also begs the question: what is a good GPA? That depends upon the employer and position. If you're trying to land an interview with a top management consulting or investment banking firm then anything less than a 3.5 is not going to be regarded by the employer as being good. But if you're trying to land an interview to work in customer service for a travel or hospitality firm then a GPA as low as 2.5 for many firms would be regarded as being good enough to increase your chances of landing an interview.
   

Students Use Email for More Than Just Social Networking

A number of recent studies have reported that the use of email to reach college students is a dying marketing channel because the students are primarily using email to sign up for email alerts from sites such as CollegeRecruiter.com and to sign up with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Our targeted email product is our biggest product by revenue so this is an area that we know a lot about. We've long questioned the validity of these studies as we've seen no drop-off in the response rate to the employment-related emails that we deliver to candidates who opt-in to receive the emails. A new study by eROI supports our experience and refutes the theory that students only use email for alerts and to register with social networking sites.

College Not the Refuge from Recession It Used to Be

During past recessions, many high school seniors elected to go to college and many college seniors elected to go to graduate school rather than face almost certain unemployment. This recession appears to be different.

Maureen Sharib, Telephone Names Sourcer/Trainer, drew my attention to a recent survey of 371 private institutions by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. According to the survey, two-thirds of the schools said they were greatly concerned about preventing a decline in enrollment. There are several reasons for the drop-off:

Mobile Web is About to Boom

Is there any doubt by anyone that the way that Gen Y communicates is fundamentally different from the way previous generations communicated? I don't believe that the ways that Gen Y communicates are better or worse but they certainly are different. For example, this is the first generation to have grown up with cell phones.

Think about it. When did you make your first cell phone call? If you're like most adults, it was sometime in the mid-1990's. A small percentage made their first call in the early 1990's. Back then cell phones were typically hard wired into cars or were "portable" in the sense that they were in bags and you could unplug them from one car and plug them into another car. Big deal. Hardly a reason to describe a phone as being mobile.