Office Professional Plus 2010 blog 2004-for-jobsbl

Wow … what a year! As 2004 draws to a close, I want to take a little time to reflect on my experience of co-founding the Technical Careers @ Microsoft weblog … and send a big thank you out to all our readers. Back in 2003, our team (which at the time included Zo"e,Windows 7 Home Premium, Heather, me … and a few others) held a brainstorming session to discuss how we could better reach our target audience / ideal candidate pool. I had recently launched (and soon scraped) my first attempt at blogging … a blog focused on recruiting for the technology and client group I supported – which at the time was Microsoft’s business intelligence initiatives. I found it difficult to write posts about recruiting for one specific technical space, and I think my blog only lasted for about four posts. (Some of you have since told me you stumbled across it back in those early days. Pretty bad, huh?) ;) We were sitting in this brainstorming meeting, and I suggested we needed to figure out how to better leverage blogging to enhance our candidate generation strategy. At the time, I think I was the only person who knew what the word “blog” meant so, after explaining the term to my team, we all agreed this topic was something interesting to explore down the road … and then promptly moved on to the next idea. A few months later, Zo"e and I were experiencing the Northwest spring doldrums. She stopped by my office and said, “Hey, remember your blog suggestion? Let’s do it!” And within 30 minutes, Technical Careers @ Microsoft launched. We didn’t ask permission. We didn’t even run it by our direct manager. We just jumped into it and decided we’d beg for forgiveness later. And while we have taken a defensive stand with our legal and PR departments a couple times, our bet largely paid off. Also, to my knowledge (and I could be totally wrong),Microsoft Office 2010 Key, we were the first in-house recruiters to create a blog about recruiting at our own company. I’m very proud of that. Within an hour, we were Scobleized, and the madness began. A few days later, Heather launched her Marketing at Microsoft blog, and the energy continued to grow. Soon, Heather agreed to speak at the Electronic Recruiting Expo (a premier conference in the recruiting industry), and we were all fielding questions from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Building upon the momentum first created by recruiting blogger pioneers like Jason Davis and Anthony and Michael, the Canadian Headhunters, and other popular Microsoft interviewing sites like Chris Sells' Interviewing at Microsoft, we were on our way. This past autumn, our Microsoft recruiting counterparts in Australia started their own blog, and I’ve heard rumblings of other Microsoft recruiting blogs potentially sprouting to life in 2005. Zo"e, Heather, and I all have future speaking engagements lined up to continue the dialogue of infusing “community building” into the recruiting process. Rob McIntosh, my and Zo"e's manager, is even speaking at the upcoming ER Expo on our efforts to improve the candidate experience. And our blog is just the beginning. We hope to spend 2005 connecting with you in new, interesting ways. A lot of people have asked Zo"e and me why we decided to create JobsBlog. I have to be honest … our first intent was purely to increase the number of hires we were making for the company. If we could brand ourselves and make our names or titles highly searchable on the internet, more people would approach us looking for employment. But as we got deeper into blogging, our goals changed, and I think that’s when JobsBlog began reflecting our true passions. I’ve said this many times, but often when corporate recruiters think about their “customers,” they consider their company as a whole, their hiring managers, the VPs they support, even the individual interviewers. But all too often, they place a lower emphasis on what I consider to be one of the most important customers … the external applicant. Besides being committed to ensuring external applicants have a positive, smooth experience, in-house recruiters need to understand the importance our external applicants play inside the livelihood of our company. You buy our products. You use our services. And a recruiter serves as a key ambassador of the company. Treating an external applicant with deserved respect can make the difference between a future customer … or an ex-customer. So now our goals with JobsBlog are more complex. We still want to brand ourselves and get our names out there. But we also want to be a two-way street to ensure we connect with our external customers. Often, Zo"e and my hands are tied in the amount of influence we have in changing behaviors and processes within our recruiting organization … but I think that’s evolving. We also want to provide a “safe” yet “real” place for potential applicants to find information about our application process, interviews, and open positions. Zo"e and I have a combined 10 years of Microsoft recruiting experience, and I can not tell you how many great candidates we’ve seen barely miss a chance to work at Microsoft because they didn’t polish their skills in the right area … maybe it was resume writing … maybe it was interview preparation. In the past, if we caught those situations on a one-off basis, we worked 1:1 with those candidates, and more often than not,Windows 7 Product Key, those candidates eventually got hired. But if we can provide rich, insightful, timely, and true information on how we feel you can best succeed when approaching the microsoft application experience before you apply, we feel we can help more “almost hires” become “strong hires” … today. Here’s the “thank you” part … While we may be driven by increasing customer satisfaction and helping ease the recruiting process for external applicants, Zo"e and I are still accountable to raw numbers at the end of the day. We still need to prove how our customer-connection efforts directly correlate back to increased hiring numbers for the company. We’ve offered our readers three ways to apply to jobs at Microsoft: Forward your resume to Zo"e or me, and we’ll ensure it is routed to our database and other recruiters. Click the “Send your resume to Microsoft today!” link on the side our blog. Select “Technical Careers @ Microsoft weblog” within the drop down of “What prompted you to visit the Microsoft Careers site today?" when submitting a resume via our careers site. (I recommend this one.) Since launching our blog in March 2004, I’m happy to report that over 6000 unique external applicants have applied to US-based jobs with Microsoft via one of these methods (thereby tracking an “application source” back to JobsBlog.) And here’s the really cool part … As of today, 55 of these external applicants have been hired into US-based roles. We have heard from many new employees in such countries as India, Canada, and Australia, and these readers have attributed part of their interviewing success to our blog, but we are not able to report on those numbers. 55 US-based hires may not sound impressive … but trust me,Office Professional Plus 2010, if you work inside the recruiting field or at Microsoft … 55 hires in nine months from a single source is huge. So,Office Professional Plus 2010, thank you, thank you, thank you! These 6000 external applicants and 55 hires will ensure Zo"e and I can build upon this base and continue our efforts in new and exciting ways in 2005! And remember to apply via one of the above methods if you haven’t already. Make sure we make it to 2006! Happy New Year! gretchen