Pity the Child Who Has Ambition…

“Pity the child who has ambition, knows what he wants to do
Knows that he’ll never fit the system others expect him to” (Chess)

When I blogged about youth unemployment just over a year ago I pointed out that many of the traditional lower skilled entry level jobs within the economy were now being done by unemployed graduates. The level of youth unemployment had been rising since 2001 and the level attributable to 16-18 year olds (ie those leaving school at 16) was close to 50%, with the very real possibility that many of those would never know permanent, full time work.

And when I blogged about the future organisation I drew attention to the fact that the UK is a world leader in underutilising the skills of its graduates.

Well, another week another group of articles appear in my timeline all with views on what tomorrow’s workforce need to do to be ready for work. You know tomorrow’s workforce… the one whose hard work and taxes will pay for our pensions, healthcare and the like.

First up was Allister Heath suggesting that we stop encouraging kids to go to university. He tells us that only 5 of the 30 fastest growing professions in 2020 will require a university degree and 10 will require no qualification at all. The first three he mentions are retail sales staff, food preparation (including fast-food restaurant jobs) and customer service reps…all roles that graduates currently do. I’m guessing that business to business sales people don’t really need a degree either but having one has largely been a pre-requisite for these roles for years.

Unsurprisingly for a right of centre commentator, especially one who also speaks for the Taxpayers Alliance, it’s the State’s fault that graduates end up as baristas…as if the private sector never wanted better educated trainees. They don’t need further education, they need work experience and traineeships which the State has to enable and guarantee. So having got the kids to largely fund their own further education it now needs to be replaced by state/taxpayer funded work experience. “To many employers, university education has become little more than a signalling device, a means to filter out potential staff” he identifies.

And there’s also a strong recommendation for Gove’s sepia tinged longing for applied maths, Latin and cold showers…whereas I would have thought programming and communication would be much more important. Soft skills for a social world.

The view from the US was more optimistic and creative. Children shouldn’t be college ready but innovation ready – “We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative”.

No longer will they be able to ‘find’ a job as previous generations have, but instead will need to ‘invent’ a job. As Harvard education specialist Tony Wagner says:

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, but they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.

We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose”

Clearly the view here is one of optimism and opportunity. Instead of relegating much of the future workforce to a life of shifting low paid work, and turning the clock back for education, as Heath seems to suggest, in the US article they look to Finland’s innovative economy “They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing”

Back to corporate UK and we had the Homebase example. Here you had a major company recommending that store managers make use of the free labour available through workfare to do the work that may otherwise require paid employees – with an internal document bearing the message:

How the work experience program can benefit your store.
Would 750 hours with no payroll costs help YOUR store?

So is this the ultimate future for the lower skilled workforce? A variable cost, paid by the taxpayer to provide free labour to the private sector in the hope that this may help them secure a paid assignment elsewhere?

And finally we square the circle with the latest research from the New Employment Foundation. A perfect conundrum:

“Those with good graduate degrees are facing months of unemployment or free interning in order to gain access to paid work. Those with no or few qualifications are being left out in the cold”

Whilst

“Graduates who “dumb down” their employment aspirations can find themselves stuck in low-skilled jobs for years”

So there we have it. You don’t need a degree because most future jobs don’t need one…but then if you haven’t got a degree you may not be considered for the jobs that don’t need one.

And if you take any job, because work must pay…then you risk not being considered for a job that really pays.

But ultimately…it’s down to you to create your own job anyway…

Confused?

Generational Reductionism

Generation

Today is Mark’s birthday, he turned 52. He shares his birthday with his Uncle Peter who turns 70, a cause for much family celebration.

Peter has been retired for 5 years. He was a partner in an accountancy firm and is enjoying a relaxing retirement thanks to a generous pension – splitting his time between his London mews home and his beachfront villa in the Algarve. As a baby boomer he has benefitted from unprecedented property price inflation, and also from the fact that his children all went to university before tuition fees became payable. He was able to downsize his property a few years ago and give his two children a very handsome deposit for their first homes. He has little time for computers, having been lucky enough to have had someone to ‘do all that computer stuff’ for him when his accountancy practice felt the need to fully embrace technology.

Mark is also a baby boomer and also an accountant. He has worked for different companies, but has been restructured out of his last two roles. After each redundancy he’s had periods of unemployment followed by day rate contracts. His ‘pension pot’ is shrinking and this, along with the need to keep his skills up to date and worries about financing his children’s university education, help to keep him awake most nights. He happens to be pretty good with computers, something that helps keep him employable.

Mark’s wife Jane is luckier. She is a year younger than him so is a Generation X type. Not for her the riches of the baby boomers, but being born into the digital revolution age means she has a greater understanding of digital concepts. She was allegedly part of the ‘me generation’ of the 80s (although she was already in her 20s), something she shares with her 34 year old niece, Joanna. Although 17 years apart, their adolescent years clearly shared similar ‘slacker’ style influences. However without Mark’s computer skills she wouldn’t have any idea how to pay a bill or send an e-mail.

Their 14 year old son Paul is in Year 9 and has just had a ‘business’ day at school. A number of large organisations sent their graduate recruiters in to educate the boys and girls in employability. He was intrigued by the one of the presentations from a woman who said she was 31 but then also said ‘I can help you, after all I’m a Gen Y’er just like you so I know what it’s like’. He thought it was particularly funny when she said that Facebook wouldn’t be allowed in the workplace because it was just for silly pictures of babies, weddings, parties and pets, when all Paul’s classmates use it to keep in touch with each other, to find out what has been missed at school and to help each other out with homework and research.

Paul found it even funnier when he heard that the lady had spoken very differently to Year 8 (his sister Lucy’s year) by telling them that their lifelong use of digital communication, social networking and mobile sets them apart. When Lucy got home she teased Paul about how she was a digital native and he was just part of the ‘boomerang generation’. She found it odd because without Paul she wouldn’t have the first idea how to use her iPhone or iPad nor how to download or connect…

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Barely an hour goes by without a link appearing in my Twitter timeline to an article that goes something like ‘6 things you need to do if you want to hire Gen Y’ or ’10 reasons Gen Y don’t want to work for you’ or a personal real favourite ‘Why Every Social Media Manager Should be Under 25’.

Of course it’s largely tosh. To draw uniformity of influences for people born in a 17 year timespan and then turn that in to some kind of HR or workplace wisdom is foolish. But people do it. People seem to make some kind of living out of packaging it up as consultancy.

The demographists, pollsters, and social and cultural historians know differently of course. They like to draw conclusions from the social, economic, cultural and parental influences that someone is exposed to in adolescence, particularly between 13 and 18, and I can understand this. Experiences within this 5 year age span tend to shape expectations, values, ambitions and aspirations that we carry forward in to adult life. My sons are bound to be different to mine, as will be those between someone who grew up in the 80s and the 90s.

They have different generational classifications in recognition of the fact that influences change every few years – for example Generation Jones are the ones who grew up in the 70s…though I still think Generation Bowie is better 😉 They are currently the key demographic targeted by pollsters and marketers.

One of the best research presentations I’ve seen on this came from Decode. They didn’t see age as the signifier of attitudes but life stages. Within the ‘traditional’ Gen Y age demographic they found a variety of attitudes dictated by life stage.

Taking work/life balance as an example (something that older generations think is of great importance to Gen Y) they found that it was a number one priority for students just entering the workplace. For the young independents it was of very low priority, whilst for young families its importance had increased, but not to the level of students. All of these attitudes from a sample group in the age range 21-29.

As Pew Research Center recently concluded

“Generational analysis has a long and distinguished place in social science, and we cast our lot with those scholars who believe it is not only possible, but often highly illuminating, to search for the unique and distinctive characteristics of any given age group of Americans.

But we also know this is not an exact science. We are mindful that there are as many differences in attitudes, values, behaviours and lifestyles within a generation as there are between generations.”

Just ask Peter, Mark, Jane, Joanna, Paul and Lucy…

Mozart and the Art of Content Marketing

I love the play and movie Amadeus. The portrayal of both the vulnerability yet precociousness of genius has always intrigued me, and also how it impacts on those less gifted but still creative.

My favourite scene is the one above. Everyone’s viewpoint is played out on a daily basis in our lives.

Who is His Excellency to question the creative process? The end product is exactly what the creator wants it to be, exactly what he hears in his head. The audience will have to accept it.
Why doesn’t Mozart accept constructive criticism? After all, without the receptive ‘ordinary ear’ of the audience his music will never gain its true reach.
The chance for mediocrity to triumph is to show those who are more gifted and creative to be somehow elitist and out of touch with the audience.

What about if Mozart was a content marketer and not a composer??!!

On Tuesday morning I will be taking my place on a keynote panel at Social Media World Forum to discuss Social Content Strategies. I’ll be leaving the cottage industry of recruitment and HR to debate with the great and good from Google, BskyB, Adobe, New Look and Brandwatch and we’ll be talking, amongst other things, about:

Why is content becoming king in social? Why should brands become content creators?
How good content strategies can re-humanise brands and develop emotional connections between content and the customer

I’ll be thinking about Mozart as I prepare…there are only so many pieces of content the human brain can assimilate in a day.

What do you think?

The Cult of #TruLondon

Last Thursday saw the curtain come down on TruLondon7 (actually it was 8 for me if you include TruNora) and from last week’s attendees it was probably only me, Bill and one or two other stalwarts that have been at every one.

Jobsite weren’t sponsoring this time so I was able to experience the event purely as an attendee and track leader for the first time in a couple of years. And I was also able to see it through the experiences of first time attendee colleagues from the wider Evenbase & DMGT Group like Clair Bush (Broadbean) and Bethan Davies (RMS).

This event seemed quieter than previous ones. I’ll be writing about the takeaways and learning points elsewhere, so here’s what I think about TruLondon itself and how it’s evolved…and where it is now. All views my own, obviously…

The conversations may not seem to change but the people having them do.

There seems to be a (mis)conception that an event like Tru needs to push the boundaries; that the conversation constantly needs to evolve. There were tweets on the timeline along the lines of ‘are they still talking about…’ and regular Tru advocate and track leader Steve Ward had blogged about his frustrations in this respect.

I think we expect too much. Sure, there were a number of new topics discussed but then several tracks last week did contain much of the usual content. A lot of the key recruitment themes that usually get debated at #Tru – candidate experience, social recruiting, social sourcing, should recruitment be part of HR – were out in force again, most of them with the same track leaders as before, but the participants had changed. Different people were having the conversation and new people were grasping these concepts for the first time.

And with different people then the conversation is never quite the same.

It’s social.

There are people that I only get to see at #Tru events, and there’s a strong social side to these gatherings. Whilst we may have online interactions and the odd catch up at other events, it’s TruLondon that brings a group of people together twice a year to share thoughts and ideas and to generally hang out and have a good time. They come from the US and Europe, and further afield. Last week gave me the opportunity to meet Paul Jacobs for the first time…all the way from New Zealand.

It provides business opportunities.

Some of the people I spoke to go to other Tru events. Whether it’s the Nordics or the Baltics, Europe or Asia, there are quite a few people to whom these events represent a chance to develop International contacts, gain knowledge of upcoming global trends and launches, and spread awareness of what they do. It’s developed a sub-industry of its own.

TruLondon is like an academy.

Maybe the greatest strength of TruLondon is to introduce attendees to the conversations that bounce around the intersection of social media, recruitment and HR, sometimes called the people space. As I mentioned earlier, there are many who come to these events for the first time and who leave energised by the ideas they hear and the potential and opportunities that they bring to their businesses.

The unconference format of conversation and sharing over presentation and demonstration enables them to learn from others’ experiences in a wholly different way. It’s more personal and more informal, with everyone helping and giving of their time. It’s like a launchpad for the journey into social business.

It can be random and disorganised, and that can get frustrating, but it’s also part of the charm…you never quite know where the next idea is going to come from.

You get out what you put in.

If you’re going in the hope of finding potential consulting gigs or job opportunities then you may well be disappointed. It’s a global community thing and that is probably the most important point. There are opportunities to be had – I’ve written before how most of the attendees at the first events now have jobs in this space, me included – but they come from being part of a wider network. There are always new people to meet, and old friends to talk to.

The twitter stream may seem quieter that previously, as newbies aren’t quite up to live tweeting yet and the old timers have tweeted much of it before, but this shouldn’t be mistaken for there being nothing to say.

Whilst many of us have ‘moved on’ in terms of what we do in terms of social business, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that there are many who are just starting.

The conversation has a way to go yet.

The most serendipitous moment for me came during a track on video when this tweet popped into my timeline. It’s from a political tweeter, so completely unconnected with the TruLondon conversations, yet somehow sums up why these conversations will be continuing for some time yet…

Fluff and Nonsense

Fluffy

Many of you probably saw a post from Forbes last week about the 14 things successful people do at the weekend. A fluff piece if ever I saw one – you only have to look at the title to see that. But an OK fluff piece. A few contributors offer advice and it’s pulled together as a post.

I was amazed that they found 14, and thought they’d stretched it a bit with a few of them. The key points were to make time for friends and family, socialise, get exercise, take in some sport or culture, switch off from technology, relax etc. And to avoid chores (number 1 on my list every weekend). I’d had a fairly chilled weekend myself, a bit of a home alone one, and had managed to do pretty much all of those, and I didn’t really give it much thought beyond that.

When I wrote about lists a few months back I made mention of this type of content. It’s subjective, not to be taken too seriously and passes a few minutes. As someone who curates content for others I have learned that these fluff piece do seem to engage and to get people interacting – hard as it may be for the social HR/Recruitment commentariat to stomach, but some less social savvy followers enjoy it.

And so I shared the Forbes post on LinkedIn, not to everyone’s approval. The overall view was that the post was patronising, and we didn’t need Forbes to tell us how to spend the weekend. Which is true…except I’m not sure how many readers would have thought that the article was a checklist of things they ought to be doing.

As I said at the time of the HR Power Tweeters list furore, I think some are in danger of over intellectualising the thought processes behind this type of content. There’s a place for all of it – the navel gazing posts, the think piece posts, the humorous posts, the photo montage posts, the list posts…and the fluffy posts.

And, of course, even the cat photos… 😉

With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival

Valentine

It’s my honour (you’ve got a Brit this time so it’s my blog, my spelling I’m afraid) to host the HRCarnival in this week of love, champagne, chocolates and…pancakes! OK…Mardi Gras 🙂

I put a call out for love themed blogs, but in amongst the incurable romantics some of you HR people just can’t leave the business alone…so I’ve some proper work ones too!

And there’s also a final section from me.

So here goes…

Spreading the Love!

First off I’m extending a warm HR Carnival welcome to first time contributor Jane Watson, an HR Manager from Toronto whose Talent Vanguard blog is a personal favourite of mine. Jane and HR are in a long-term relationship, though here she tells us about one or two things that she wished she’d known at the start!

Next we have Emily Jasper from The Starr Conspiracy telling us about the things she loves and why it’s important that Work Loves The Things You Love too. Even the moose!

Ian Welsh will get the pulses racing with his blog Love in the Filing Room – a cheeky Valentines look at his first job. OK, it’s not quite 50 Shades of Admin…but then I didn’t want to have a parental guidance sticker on this post!

From HR with Love is Shauna Moerke’s post. And our loveable, huggable HR Minion (without whom these carnivals wouldn’t happen!) doesn’t disappoint in this call out for all HRs hopeless romantics 🙂

Nancy Saperstone from Insight Performance offers us 5 tips for increasing the love in your company. ‘Engaged employees are happy employees, and happy employees feel the LOVE!’

”Do what you love, and do it often” says Anna Lettink. She’s spreading the love and in this blog – This Is Your Life – is talking about love for our place of work.

Ben Eubanks’ Upstart HR blog is sending thanks to the great managers who make our day special. He still hearts his last boss and in A Tribute to Great Managers he tells us why.

Here’s Steve Browne, an HR blogger and engager par excellence, and who gives us Eat. Sleep. Do HR. – do you do HR or rock it? I think we all know which one Steve does!

At TribeHR they’re bringing the love in to HR. Feline love. There’s a great visual on their HR and Open Lines of Cat Stories blog too!

Business as usual!

I’m sure not every reader wants to get slushy and lovey dovey just because its V*l*nt*n*s Day, so they can just skim through the last section and get down to business… Continue reading “With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival” →

Time to End Talk of This Phoney War

And so the dreaded expression ‘War for Talent’ rears its head again on my twitter timeline. You know some of the context…

Salaries at some levels are increasing, it’s because there’s a war for talent
Companies can’t find the skills, it’ll create a war for talent

Never mind that there’s abundant talent out there waiting for an opportunity; a willing workforce only a few days or weeks’ training away from filling that ‘skills gap’.

I’ve given my opinion on the gratuitous use of this phrase before here and here but there seems to be a never-ending need to talk up a lack of creativity and vision in talent acquisition as a phoney war.

So I’ve turned to source material – the book that the original authors of the ‘War for Talent’ report published in 2001. In it they put forward the case that winning the war for talent isn’t about frenzied recruiting tactics but the principles of attracting, developing and retaining highly talented managers, which will be applied in ever evolving ways.

Next time you think of using the phrase read this and think again…

“Excellent talent management has become a crucial source of competitive advantage.

Companies that do a better job of attracting, developing, exciting and retaining their talent will gain more than their fair share of this critical and scarce resource and will boost their performance dramatically.

Our War for Talent research shows this. The companies that scored in the top quintile of our talent management index earned, on average, 22 percentage points higher return to shareholders than their industry peers. The companies that scored in the bottom quintile earned no more points than their peers.

Certainly, many factors other than talent management are driving return to shareholders but this data provides compelling evidence that better talent management results in better performance.

Clearly, having more capable people isn’t the only thing companies will have to do to win. They will also have to set high aspirations and enact the right strategies and performance initiatives. They will have to energise and align all their people so they deliver their best performance. But talented leaders are needed to make these other performance drivers happen.

As companies respond to the war for talent, they will develop more powerful and more sophisticated approaches to talent management. Over the next decade we believe talent management will advance as far as marketing did in the 1960s and quality did in the 1980s. Some companies will advance in building this capability; others will fall behind.”

It’s a mind-set not an act. It’s about creating a business that aspires to give the best a place to thrive and be happy. It’s not about throwing money at people and it shouldn’t be an excuse for a lack of training and up-skilling.

A recruitment campaign devoid of strategy, creativity and transparency isn’t a war. It’s a resounding defeat.

So, What Do You Do?

I have just returned following a few days away. A short break usually means some random conversations with fellow holidaymakers and travellers, and at some stage in each conversation there will be the inevitable question…

‘So what do you do?’

In days gone by a quick ‘I work in recruitment‘ or ‘I recruit HR and Marketing people‘ was usually enough to ensure a change of subject but over the last two years it’s been slightly different.

‘I work in digital marketing’ will often induce glazed eyes but sometimes I feel quite bold and fess up with ‘I’m social media manager for a large digital recruitment business’

The conversation will then go something like…

Them : What, you mean Twitter and that stuff?

Me : Yes. It’s a bit more than that (insert quick explanation about creating content, brand monitoring and community engagement)

Them : Don’t get the point of that Twitter stuff. Or Facebook. Just another fad if you ask me.

Me : We’ll, I think it’s probably gone beyond the fad stage (insert an overview of the numbers and reach of the platforms, the rise of social business and peer recommendations etc)

Them : Sell it to me then. Why should I use it?

Me : Well I don’t like ‘selling’ it to people, but what line of business did you say you were in (insert examples of how social media impacts their industry or job, find out hobbies and interests and attempt to show the value of connecting with like-minded people)

Them : Well I can see that you’re passionate about it but I’m not convinced. The wife does Facebook. She spends all her time looking at photos that her friends put on there. Who can be bothered I ask myself.

Me : (thinking that I should be talking to the wife) Think of it as communication…

You get the picture. The conversation can sometimes go on quite a while with me increasingly adopting an almost exasperatingly apologetic tone as if I’ve got an embarrassing addiction that I need to defend. (Maybe I do)

So tell me…how do you guys explain what you do…

A Bad Candidate Experience Can Come Back to Haunt You

I wasn’t at the RAD Awards 2013 on Thursday but I gather there was a moment when the host, comedian Jack Whitehall, gave a company the impression that they had won an award, only to cut short their joy by saying that they hadn’t. Someone else had won it.

The reason he gave for doing is that he had applied for a job at the first company he mentioned ( the one he teased in to thinking they had won before letting them know they hadn’t) but he never heard back. It was his moment to get back at them for being ignored.

When I was at CIPD12 I wrote about the findings of their Our Young People research which included:

“Young people remember how you treat them for their whole lives, as customers, consumers and employees. In particular many spoke of their frustrations at not getting any replies or acknowledgements to job applications…seeing it as rude and damaging to confidence and aspiration”

Jack Whitehall is 24. Clearly his bad experience stayed with him, even though he’s found success in another field.

Mind you, the link between candidate experience and consumer/customer perception is nothing new…we were talking about this nearly 3 years ago and will no doubt be talking about it for years to come.

If you’re ignoring candidates then expect more embarrassing Jack Whitehall moments until something changes.

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Spreading the Love!

Business as usual!

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