One of the re-occurring themes I come across in my experiences with employer branding and recruiting is the seeming competitiveness for IT talent out of college and shortage there of.

Employers looking for the top IT talent often times find themselves competing for a small pool of qualified applicants. If there’s been one consistent trend in Universum’s resarch, it’s that Google is winning this battle. But it may not be that easy.

I recently came across a very telling graphic from the folks at Top Prospect Blog (blog.topprospect.com). The bloggers over at Top Prospect took on the task of visually illustrating the internal recruitment battle that goes on between some of the top employers for IT Talent.

In reviewing this graph you’ll notice that each arrow represents the ratio of employees leaving one company for another. Therefore, you’ll be able to see, which IT employers are winning the head to head.

Pretty cool, huh? It looks like for all the talent Google attracts out of college, they are still losing out to Facebook and LinkedIn. It also confirms what a lot of us have known for awhile – Yahoo! is in trouble.

I really would have liked to see this graph include some newcomers like Zynga or SalesForce, to see how they measure up against these tech giants.

Anyway, as you can plainly see the battle for tech talent is fierce between these tech giants and although Google may be winning the battle of attractiveness for those coming directly out of college, they aren’t always able to hold onto them.

To check out the article from Top Prospect and get a closer look at the graph go here:

http://blog.topprospect.com/2011/06/the-biggest-talent-losers-and-winners/

I recently came across a really interesting article on Recruiting Trends about Google’s social media effect on recruiting. The article discusses Google’s failed social media attempts before and discusses what is different in their strategy this time.

Google has an ambitious plan to extend social media across the entire Internet experience. You may have noticed the +1 sign that now accompanies a number of your favorite web pages, which is used to aid in future searches and the web experience as a whole.

This would be an incredibly ostentatious plan for anyone not named Google. It was only a matter of time before the most powerful brand on the Internet would break into the social media market. But what does this mean for recruiting? How could this affect companies like Linkedin?

In the article from Recruiting Trends, Vitaly Latush says, “If Google’s social overlay covers the entire Internet people may start choosing professional branding tools that better suit their professional/knowledge profile rather than accepting the one-size-fits-all options. ”

Google’s reach extends to nearly every corner of the Internet. Thus, building your recruiting brand through Google would be the most logical move should they develop the medium to deliver it. With Google+ they may have done just that. But only time will tell if Google+ can challenge and overtake Facebook and LinkedIn, or if it’ll wind up an afterthought like Google’s previous failed attempts.

Google Buzz anyone?

You can check out Latush’s article in its entirety by going here:

http://www.recruitingtrends.com/google-social-what-does-it-mean-for-recruiting