Youth unemployment rate down to 14.3 per cent

With more youth dropping out of the labour market and ceasing to look for work, the unemployment rate pushed down to 14.3 per cent from 14.8 per cent in June.  Overall, the Canadian economy lost 30,400 jobs in July,  but employment is still 0.8 per cent higher than last year. “The pace of job creation clearly slowed in the period from May through July, however this followed very large increases in April and March,” said Dawn Desjardins, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada. Employment fell across a number of sectors including wholesale and retail trade, public administration, natural resources, as well as professional, scientific and technical services. On the flip side, employment gains have occurred in the field of information, culture and recreation. Article
News Date: August 10, 2012

Video provides the greatest opportunity to tell compelling stories about your company

According to an infographic created by HireRabbit, recruiters that are not utilizing video as part of their recruitment strategy may be overlooking a key resource for attracting top candidates.  YouTube is the “third largest” internet site with the average user spending “15 minutes per day” on the site.  This infographic illustrates how companies that attach video to their job postings experience a 34 percent higher application rate than those that do not include a video icon when posting positions. Other stats include, “people are over 2x more likely to visit a site upon seeing a video” and “videos are 53 times more likely than text pages to show up on the first page of search results”.  In order to “humanize” your company using video, the following three suggestions are provided: demonstrate company culture by showing what it is like to work at your company; use employee videos to share experiences and testimonials; and create video newsletters to keep candidates up to date on your company. Article
News Date: August 9, 2012

Small start-ups band together to flex collective recruiting power

A group of small start-up companies are banding together in order to recruit computer science and engineering students at 25 top campuses across the United States.  HackerTour 2102 will be using customized tech talks, career fairs and an Airstream bus in order to find top talent across the nation and compete against some of the bigger, well-known companies “that are prevalent and super-organized on campus”.  The goal of the tour is to expose students to the opportunity of working for a start-up and reach up to 20,000 students.  Tour organizer and Readyforce’s VP of client relations, Anna Binder, says that “being part of the start-up dream is this opportunity to really make it big.” Despite rising unemployment rates amongst an audience that will soon have to pay back student debt, those that focus, commit and choose well, “have the opportunity to build a billion dollar business”. Article
News Date: August 7, 2012

Creating a streamlined application process is an important part of a mobile recruiting strategy

In this video, Gautam Godhwani, CEO & Co-founder of Simply Hired, discusses the importance of mobile in recruiting and what employers can do to simplify their job application processes.  Here are some mobile facts from the video: world-wide mobile subscribers have now crossed 5 billion, doubling the number of people on the web; 21 percent of searches from Google come from mobile devices; and 1 out of every 5 users are coming to a site via a mobile device.  These figures are important for recruiters to know so that they can take stats like these into account and “maximize their recruiting efforts.”  Godhwani suggests that companies start spending “15 percent of their efforts focused on mobile” making both the experience of visiting the mobile site and the application processes as smooth as possible.  Simplifying job processes on mobile might include employers asking for an expression of interest or leveraging assisted application functionality.  In the end, job seekers are looking for ways to ensure that their job search process moves forward whether that be on the web or using a tablet or smartphone. Article
News Date: August 7, 2012