Blogs Could Become Newest Recruiting Tool from the SHRM website (membership required):

Blogs offer businesses an excellent and interactive communication tool. For example Microsoft has close to 3,000 blogs posted by the company’s employees. Blogs can give an insiders view of a company’s work environment to potential job candidates. This is extremely important with the younger generations (ed.-see our article), it is as important to understand the culture as it is the responsibilities of the position. For this reason companies that don’t have employee blogs could find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting.

Honeywell Corp. is a good example of a company that uses blogs as a recruiting device. The company launched blogs of three employees who began working for Honeywell last year after earning their masters degrees in business administration. All three of the bloggers participate in Honeywell’s Pathways Leadership Development Program. The intention of the blogs is to show the career opportunities and growth potential that Honeywell offers to students who have earned a masters degree. The idea of using the blogs has tremendous potential that could give Honeywell an edge in recruiting the best and the brightest from masters degree programs, according to Adam Forbes, global university relations manager for Honeywell. Right now, its just too early to tell exactly what the ultimate effect of blogs will be and how many employers will create recruiting blogs.

Blogging certainly isn’t for every company. The corporate culture must be conducive to allowing open communication from their employees to the outside world. The article also states that the companies that seem to be doing it right have found that the best bloggers choose themselves, instead of the company choosing them.

Creating compelling and engaging blogs seems to work best with a certain type of personality and clearly an ability to write good copy (don’t overlook this fact). That last point may explain why there are so many marketing blogs! Anyway, the people who do it well while making their companies look good in the process are easily identified through their blogging.

One last point from our experience – it takes a commitment to posting on a regular basis. There is no quicker way to terminate traffic to your blog than to simply not post for an extended period of time. There are many blogs that piqued my interest and I started reading them but soon unsubscribed from my RSS feed since they rarely posted new content.

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