Talking Game Changing Social Recruiting on #SAPRadio

I’ve not been on internet radio a lot. I have graced HR Happy Hour a couple of times and co-hosted it, whilst my session on Drive Thru HR is in the Top 50 of their most listened to broadcasts.

So it’s time to give the vocal chords another airing!

Tomorrow, Tuesday 8th April at 4pm (GMT) sees my first appearance on HR Trends – Coffee Break with Game-Changers which is hosted by the charismatic Bonnie G Graham on behalf of SAP. I’ll be joined by Will Staney, Director of Recruiting and Strategic Programs at SuccessFactors, and my friend and social media trainer Katrina Collier, who will no doubt be flying the flag for Australia as well as the UK!

The topic for discussion is ‘Social Recruiting : Art or Science’ and here’s the scene setter

“Gone is the era of your HR manager hoping hard-to-find talent would stumble upon their business-critical job postings. Today, millions of job candidates eagerly post their credentials on social media sites. Is successful social recruiting for top talent an art or a science for today’s HR?”

We’ve each already shared a conversation opener:

Will : “Social media is not necessarily a source of hire, it’s a communication channel. It’s important to remember this when measuring an ROI of your social recruiting efforts”

Katrina : “Finding people on social channels is easy. Getting a response is a different matter and that’s the art. If you ignore or mistreat social job seekers you’ll miss hiring great people”

Me : “Social recruiting is just recruiting. Forget the word ‘social’. Get the hiring process right then ‘social’ becomes no different to ”telephone’ or ‘internet'”

You can read more about the show here and you can follow/join the Twitter debate at #SAPRadio

Hope you can tune in…but don’t worry if you miss it live, as it will be available to download on iTunes later…

…and I expect to see you all download it so we can try and give Will.I.am a run for his money 😉

Froth Free HR

There’s been some banter on the HR twitter timeline recently about coffee shops. It started when myself, Michael, Emma and Anne were sharing the worst misspelling of our names (mine was Murvy) on cups from a certain chain that tries to personalise the experience. We’ve joked about trying to set up an HR Coffee Shop.

Fairly typical early morning Twitter banter but today Emma shared the above picture from coffee art and the chat turned to froth. I said that there should be no froth in the conversations at the HR Coffee Shop.

Around the same time Neil’s latest blog popped up in the timeline about big data vs big thinking and whether the rush for HR to understand and use analytics was an act of cowardice, an avoidance of dealing with some of the more pressing, creative issues by hiding behind numbers.

When a serious post meets a bit of fun banter on social media a there’s usually an interesting point to be made and it’s this…

…..to many a lot of HR’s work and concerns are seen as froth. I don’t for one minute believe they are, but many people out there do. As someone who is not a practitioner but is closely tied to the profession I hear it a lot, especially from people who aren’t (and unlikely any time soon to be) part of the Social HR echo chamber.

Recently I was lucky enough to be invited to an espresso tasting at Nespresso’s London boutique. There’s a thin layer of froth on the top of a new espresso which you push to one side to taste the real coffee.

So whatever’s on your agenda today, this week or this month – push away the froth.

Smell the real coffee and make sure everyone else does too…

#HRTechEurope – HR Is Dead! Long Live HR!

Me & OracleOscar

My previous two blogs previewed the HRTechEurope Spring Conference and Exhibition , which I duly attended last Thursday.

It was a fun day with exhibitors offering lots of swag and jellybeans, stormtroopers and a robot – you can see a somewhat blurred picture of yours truly with OracleOscar above – and I was rather excited to win cinema vouchers in a prize draw from Oracle too. Thanks guys! The conference content ranged from why HR is doing it wrong to how tech can save the day, with a final call of ‘HR is dead, long live HR’.

My friend and co-blogger for the event Doug Shaw has offered his thoughts on some of the morning sessions so in this post I’ll look at the afternoon, and in particular two well received and thought provoking presentations from visiting US commentators – William Tincup and Jason Averbook.

In my pre-event posts I was mainly concerned with capability – does HR have what it takes to really grapple with technology and use it to create the kind of experience that employees want, and produce the data that helps decisions rather than fills out barely read monthly reports.

Getting it Right

William Tincup was looking at the process of buying HR software from the angle of getting both satisfaction and success. His presentation was thoughtful and well structured, taking HR professionals through the sales and implementation process. I often get the feeling that there is a reticence within the community to truly challenge the salesmen and account managers from the big vendors, as if the complexities of technology are off-putting. It’s their budget, but not their own money I guess, so maybe due diligence is glossed over.

William gave a simple plan through the 7 stages of the process – product, sales, negotiation, implementation, training, adoption and support – with 5 or 6 questions at each stage that need to be asked and answered.

Some of the key ones for me:

What reports and features are really important to us?
Do I feel like I’m being over-sold? Did the demo meet or exceed expectations and have they done significant work in my sector?
Who owns the data? Am I giving up things in the negotiation that are important to me?
Can I meet the implementation team before I sign? How will we manage change and communicate it to all employee users?
Will all users be trained the way they want to be? How will new users be on-boarded?
How will we get users to ‘love’ the new software and how will we know if they don’t?
How will vendor support handle help desk items versus things that are broken?

There were two things he said that really nailed some of the issues that I think HR has with technology…

Good software doesn’t fix a bad process, it just highlights how bad the process is.

A feature is not a feature unless users use said feature.

He also urged people to ask vendors how they make their money as the answers can be very illuminating. This is excellent advice but I wonder if it might be too confrontational for many within the HR profession? The whole process of acquiring technology is a major investment for the business which has to be done well – and needs to be approached with the professionalism and determination that such a major investment requires.

Facing the Future

The closing keynote was from Jason Averbook. Closing presentations can often feel slightly lack lustre – the space many be partially empty, exhibitors are dismantling stands, some people have already left and others may be suffering from information overload – but Jason played it just right with a fast paced, high impact session.

I’ve seen him speak before and do like his style and thinking. A couple of presentations earlier in the day had lacked pace and verve, giving the Impression that the speaker had delivered them before, but Jason’s was different to the one I had seen last Autumn and, importantly, showed a progression in his thinking.

The message I took away was simple – things around the workplace are changing and HR can’t deal with new challenges by doing what it’s always done, it’s going to require a shift in attitude and thinking.

There are many examples of this. Our expectations of technology, and in particular the user experience, have shifted immeasurably. When employees use our internal software, or complain about it, they aren’t comparing it to what went before but to the experience they get from Amazon or Apple. When something changes – be it interface or new application – they expect it to be seamless, just like downloading a new app. He showed the video I’ve embedded at the end of a 4 years old’s reaction to having to use IOS7.

Innovation, and the impact of technology, is more than a redesign of payslips and needs to culturally shift the way we do things. HR has to lead this, to know what differentiates the business – new systems don’t drive differentiation.

There was talk of the changing work practices, how some jobs are beginning to disintegrate into a series of tasks, and workers to perform these tasks are being crowdsourced. ‘Do you know how you manage contingent labour in your business?‘ he asked. Some of that contingent labour may also be working for 4 or 5 other companies at the same time – potential for disruption that HR needs to understand.

One important point is that away from the workplace we don’t phone call centres or help desks to buy something online, download a new app or integrate a new Facebook function. We work it out for ourselves or search for the solution online – either video or on a blog. A lot of employees will expect to do this with their HR systems and processes, to self-solve. Do you have that in place?

There were many more examples of how shifts in technology, expectations, workplace strategies and staffing arrangements are shaping how our people feel about the business. The need for real time data (not historical surveys) in areas such as performance illustrates the importance of information in helping solve real business issues, not being inward facing or merely a tick box exercise.

The final summing up was that HR as we know it was probably dead and that a new HR approach, driven by technology and evidence (data), will be developed. People no longer want hand holding; they need to know that the information is there when they need it and that they can access it when it suits them. They don’t want self service; they want direct access.

This summary caused much debate and consternation amongst both the attendees and people following the Twitter threads from afar. The conversations and debates that it prompted were still going on a day later.

Which sounds to me like exactly what a good conference presentation should do – explore ideas, prompt and provoke thinking and conversation that helps us to make sense of an evolving landscape that will require new attitudes and solutions. It was also good to see Jason get involved in the online chat personally.

Something that I had observed in the morning was that none of the the early speakers had a social media presence, yet the HRTech event has a very good social outreach. Those morning presentations, as Doug’s blog had pointed out, seemed to be a tad lacking in depth and rationale whereas both Jason and William Tincup demonstrated a good understanding of the issues that HR professionals face and reflected this in what they said. Maybe it’s no coincidence that they are very active on social channels and this almost certainly helped towards their engaging and insightful presentations.

Reports of the death of HR may be an exaggeration, but there are certainly some interesting conversations to be had about adapting to meet future challenges.

HR and The Technology Issue

The recent 2014 Global HR Trends Report from Deloittes told us four things about the HR community’s views on Technology and Analytics:

They are rated as urgent issues
Of the 12 most urgent trends they are the 2 with the highest capacity shortfalls
They are 2 of the top 6 trends with the highest capability shortfalls
Amongst HR and business leaders Talent and HR Analytics was the area in which they rated their businesses least ready

And there’s more. One of the most significant emerging trends was that of the ‘Overwhelmed Employee’ creating it’s own need to simplify processes and create a streamlined, consumerist user experience.

Technology, and the resulting data, are major issues for the HR profession…issues that they feel unprepared for, with low capability and knowledge.

How can this be addressed?

With this question in mind I’ll be heading along to the HRTechEurope spring conference this Thursday (27th March) to see what the great and the good of the industry have up their sleeves. Many sessions will be about change and how to manage it within the organisation, the role technology plays in talent management and the need for developing HR skills.

I’ll be interested to see if the shortfall in capacity and capability gets a mention.

If you’re an HR professional and want to come along too then there’s still time to book. As a reader of this blog you can get a 20% too by using the code BL20 when you book.

Look forward to seeing a few of you there, and also bringing you my summary of what’s being said…

If You Tolerate This…

Regular readers (and people who follow my Twitter threads from conferences) will know exactly where I stand on generational stereotyping. For avoidance of doubt, I’ve covered it here, here and here. The categorisation of a group of people by perceived similar traits – whether you call it Ageism or Generationism in this case – is something that should not be anywhere near the thinking of HR professionals.

You wouldn’t seek out advice on how to manage women, ethnic minorities, gay people or over 60s within the workplace so why do it with under 30s.

Of course one of the major problems with any ‘ism’ is that the categorisations eventually become lazily accepted as the norm and then influence the ability to think rationally and contextually about people…leading to casual ageism and the inevitable inter-generational conflict, in turn creating further unnecessary problems

Which brings me to Kelly Blazek and the infamous rejection email that went viral and elicited strong apologies. You would have read about this a week or two ago so I won’t go into the specifics. Here’s the excerpt that nails it for me…

“Wow, I cannot wait to let every 25 year old jobseeker mine my top tier marketing connections to help them land a job. Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite.“

To me it seems that some of the apparent vitriol aimed at graduate jobseeker Diana Mekota was borne from the old cliche, and hence perceived belief, that her generation feels a sense of entitlement and needs to be taught a lesson. As I said earlier, casual ageism. Did it blind a respected business woman from showing a degree of perspective when she wrote her response? We’ll never know.

We tell job seeking graduates – and therefore our kids too – to reach out and try to connect with as many people as possible in the job hunt. Show initiative. It will help you stand out. But it’s nothing really to do with age. It’s something I did when I first entered the job market and it’s something that job seekers of all ages are encouraged to do now.

But when the young do it they seem to risk coming up against a wall of prejudice.

So once again I say to HR professionals on the subject of Ageism and Generationism – forget it.

If you tolerate it…then your children, quite literally it would seem, will be next.

(Image via mutual pensions & annuity)

4 Questions About Talent and Technology

It’s nearly time for the HRTechEurope Spring Conference & Expo. I’ll be heading in to London on March 27th joining HR and Recruitment professionals, tech specialists and fellow bloggers to try and find out what’s old and what’s new, what we need and what we don’t.

It’s currently tough out there in the world of HR when it comes to talent acquisition. On a daily basis we’re fighting wars, covering skill shortages, putting a sticking plaster over long term people development and tearing our hair out over how to create the workforces our businesses need to face a future of growth and accelerating technological development.

Or so it seems. Rarely a day goes by without another report, white paper, survey or opinion piece on the huge challenges of creating the future workforce. They need to be highly skilled and motivated, locationally and contractually flexible, and ready to hit the ground running.

But this isn’t a perfect world, and people aren’t disposable goods to be chopped and changed. Instead of the constant and seemingly frenetic rush to get the best right now let’s look at some longer term issues that short term talent acquisition strategies may be covering up…

Are You Looking Everywhere?

By everywhere I mean everywhere. As I recently wrote for Monster, there’s a lot of talent right under your nose that you’re probably overlooking. Most probably…

Current employees who have skills and strengths that you haven’t recognised and can adapt to new challenges
Alumni who have moved on, had different experiences, gained knowledge and progressed
Candidates who have applied before and were not a good match then, and are now probably nestling in a black hole in your ATS hiding their very relevant talents
And remember, all the above have friends, collaborators and alumni who may be right

Is Your On-Boarding Good Enough?

We all know that if something’s going to go wrong then it will more than likely happen in the first 2/3 months so are your on-boarding and induction processes up to scratch? Is talent seeping away from the business because you’re not making the most of it when it first arrives? Think back to good people who just didn’t seem to work out with you and look at why. There may be a recurring theme.

Are You Growing From Within?

The people you’ve already invested in should be the first choice for new roles. My first job was within a medium-sized accountancy firm and we had PAs to Partner who had started as filing clerks (OK, you don’t get many of them any more) and accounting assistants who had originally joined in a clerical or admin role. The partners constantly tried to invest in developing the good, loyal people they had rather than demotivate and lose them by going outside. Do your people really feel that they have a future with you?

Have You Created the Right Environment?

To nurture talent you need a nurturing environment. One where people aren’t afraid to try and fail as part of the learning experience, and aren’t rewarded purely on achieving KPIs that preclude the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, share and provide feedback.

If the solution to filling new positions is always to go external and throw money at someone who’s performing at a competitor then this will become a self fulfilling modus operandi which will be difficult to break. And dangerous too as top achievers in a business usually benefit from a support structure and culture that enables them to do their best; there’s never a guarantee that they would achieve the same results in a different environment that offered a very different structure and culture.

There will probably be a lot of technology at HRTechEurope that can help enable this, but first it needs a mindset. A commitment to doing something fresh, an openness to new ideas and approaches.

Because to keep fighting the same mythical wars and keep moaning about shortages and expect to get different results would be insanity. Right?

(Image via SAP.info)

Social Is As Social Does

I’ve just returned from a week’s holiday which meant that I spent little time online. Just before I went away there was a short bout of ~~navel gazing~~ reflective blogging from some of my friends in the HR blogosphere about social media and HR, what it all means, is it doing what it should and is it worth the effort. Sukh and Neil had some strong views and quite a few people didn’t agree with Sukh. Richard weighed in from New Zealand and there was much angst on the Twitter timeline.

It’s a fairly regular occurrence. We’re never far away from a ‘what’s it all about really‘ post. I was ready to weigh in with one on Fear and Loathing in Social Media but then remembered that I’d already written it 4 years ago.

Amongst my wider network it always the HR community that seems to worry about what’s happening. I’m part of other communities – marketers and football fans to name but two – and rarely see a blog about whether we’re doing it right, or if we’re ever going to bring about a revolution. But within the HR community it’s a given that from time to time someone will wake up and not see the point of it all.

Maybe we expect too much.

It’s about conversation. And its about people. Both are very unpredictable and neither will consistently conform to your expectations.

Some people have agendas
Some are good self publicists
Some are good at not being self publicists when they really are
Some of us are really clever
Some of us think we’re really clever
Some of us think we’re not clever at all
Some of us take offence easily
Some of us give offence easily
Some of us have more followers because we’ve been doing this social malarkey a lot longer
Some of us like to converse
Some of us like to broadcast
Some of us want everyone to know what we’re up to
Some of us are a bit private
We all have opinions
Some of us like to shout our opinions
Some of us like to disagree
Some of us talk all day every day
Some of us like to dip in and out
Some of us will think everyone’s talking about us
Some of us will worry that no-one’s talking about us
Some of us want the first word
Some of us want the last word

But beneath it all we’re just people. Being ourselves.

And some days it will all make sense…and some days it won’t.

Remember it’s social…all human life is here….

Talking Talent & Potential at #HREvent14

I’ve just returned from an interesting 2 days in Birmingham at the HR Directors summit. It was well run – fast paced, varied and lively with a strong stream of case studies and masterclasses topped and tailed with keynote speakers who were largely from outside the traditional HR sphere. Kudos to Clare Dewhirst, Nicole Dominguez and the rest of the WTG team for organising.

There was some excellent live blogging from Ian Pettigrew and Gemma Reucroft whilst the hashtag #HREvent14 managed to reach number 1 in the trending list once or twice over the two days.

A few observations on some of the things that were talked about….

Talent is an asset

But what is talent? Quite a few sessions looked at this subject, both from the angles of finding it and identifying it, with a focus oh high potential programmes and thinking outside the box. Many key points across the two days:

Current top performers are not necessarily the same as your high potentials
The key attributes for potential are aspiration, ability and engagement
46% of leaders moving in to new roles fail to meet business objectives through a mixture of wrong promotion criteria and unclear objective setting (CEB research)
Strengths based recruitment for those with little or no work experience significantly improves quality (Nestle case study)
Don’t just look outside for talent, create from within
A lot of talent gets wasted through a mix of poor management, disengagement and lack of proper workforce planning
Look beyond certificates and the CV, find people who have overcome obstacles and interference to achieve
Putting it another way, we overrate certificates and underrate attitude
Recruit for individuality and capability to innovate, don’t just focus on past experience
Companies need to transition mindset from owning the talent to the talent being with the individual

Recruitment woes

Much of the talent points arose from recruitment. Certainly many of the breakout discussions were around the folly of hiring to rigid specifications and failing to spot people with attitude and ability who may have been unable to fulfil their potential elsewhere or in difficult circumstances – a failure to assess skills or performance within context.

On the second morning Rasmus Ankersen (by far the most inspiring keynote speaker) produced a slide containing a quote from the CEO of Capital One Bank saying:

“Most companies spend 2% of their time recruiting and 98% of their time managing their recruitment mistakes”

This quote was well received by the auditorium (full of HR Directors and senior practitioners) but was met with dismay from recruiters following online. I don’t know where the figures came from, they may have been a CEO embellishment or just a personal view, but many attendees (the ones who inevitably do some of the 98%) felt a ring of truth, something that became apparent during a panel session later in the morning.

Tellingly the quote was also endorsed by Facebook (no slouches when it comes to finding talent) during their afternoon presentation.

I’m guessing that a lot of the 98% didn’t represent recruiters failing to do their jobs properly, but hiring managers poorly scoping the role or looking for the wrong characteristics and capabilities.

Leadership and the people agenda

We had a fair few CEOs amongst the speakers and panellists (pretty good for an HR conference) signalling a shift in the people agenda. Some of it was to do with social, though more was about leadership. Some nuggets:

If you want great things to happen don’t worry about getting the credit
Leadership isn’t about what we are now but about what we can be, what we can do and where we can go.
I need bad news. I don’t shoot the messenger but need to act on what I’m told to put it right.
If you deal with people for a living you have a much harder job than those who deal with predictable things. (HR isn’t easy!)
Leadership isn’t about a handful of people. It’s about everybody.

Question time!

In a first for an event of this type there was a daily panel to discuss the themes being talked about. Placed in the main exhibition hall, with capacity for 70 attendees, it was a mix of discussion and questions from the floor.

I’m proud to say that I was on the panel both days and really enjoyed it. The reception was good – standing room only on both days – and between myself, Perry Timms, Mark Ellis and Peter Reilly we got some quite lively debates going.

And in true ‘Question Time’ tradition we had a range of topics raised by the delegates to discuss, including Kevin Pietersen’s dropping by the England cricket team and the impending strike by Tax officials!

We got some great feedback and I hope this kind of participation becomes regular at similar events.

Generational myth making and myth busting

When I wrote my preview for the event I observed that this was one conference that seemed to avoid the usual generational stereotyping presentations. Unlike certain others, there had been little of the ‘why Gen Y are different‘ content and when the topic had been touched on it was from a different angle, using research that avoided the usual suspect cliches.

Anyone following my twitter feed over the 2 days will know that, sadly, this year was different. The cliched stereotyping of the attitudes, behaviours and aspirations of people under 30 cropped up in many presentations, culminating in a bullshit bingo full house during the Facebook presentation.

I’ve blogged on this before so will not go into depth on it here – I may deal with it another time. What I would say is that the Facebook session also included many supposed stereotyped traits of Gen X and Boomers and in closing, the speaker Stuart Crabb admitted to (and kind of apologised for) using stereotypes. He also observed that all generations are represented in the Facebook workforce, and all of them embrace the ‘Gen Y‘ culture that the company work so hard to create. Which does make you wonder why he didn’t just describe the culture and approach to work without having to resort to representing it as something designed to appeal to a certain age group.

And as I’ve written many times, the defining of a group of people by perceived personality and behavioural traits is not something that should have any place in HRs thinking. No-one in 2014 would host – or attend – a session entitled ‘How to get the best out of the over 60s‘ or ‘How to manage women‘ so I don’t know why it seems acceptable for consulting firms (it’s always consulting firms) to do this type of research and then present it as insight.

Maybe I should paraphrase (misquote) Mr Einstein – not everything that matters can be researched, and not everything that is researched matters.

The future’s bleak

Unusually for a conference, the opening keynote was a bit like the grim reaper coming for our global labour market. David Arkless, founder of the Future of Work consortium, had few moments of optimism or positivity for us with many global problems of a social, work and financial nature being aired. There was a strange passage in which he seemed to praise dictatorships as they tended to got their workforces productive and operating efficiently whilst democracies hindered talent management (cue blogs on 5 things HR can learn from Kim Jong-un) and then offered a stark visualisation of the world’s inequalities.

It was a downbeat and, frankly, quite worrying message for a conference opener, which may not be a bad thing as it did get people thinking, but overall seemed a bit incongruous with what followed.

HR in the headlines

The final conference session was a Q&A with Lucy Adams – still, just, HR Director at the BBC. Needless to say the questions, put by business TV presenter Juan Señor, were about the media storm that followed her appearance before the Commons select committee last year.

She handled herself well and spoke with humility and honesty, talking of the need for visible leadership when morale is low. The questions weren’t exactly probing (fairly standard TV business interview fare) but the audience did get the opportunity to ask questions. I wanted to ask her if she thought that the reaction she got was worse because she was a woman, and that a male HR Director at the BBC may have got an easier ride. I nearly put my hand up but have to say that after a couple of days of criticising the Gen Y stereotyping I though better of raising something that may have looked sexist.

I did manage to spend a couple of minutes with her at the end though so asked the question one to one. I got the impression that she wished I’d have asked it during the session, and had expected the question to come up at some stage. Next time I won’t be so timid. And yes, needless to say, she did seem to feel that gender played a part in her situation.

Overall messages from the two days? Talent and potential…recognise it and nurture it – use it don’t waste it. And people like to be treated with respect at work…whatever their year of birth…

Job Applicants Have Feelings Too

I spent Thursday at the Enhance Media ‘Year Ahead’ Online Recruitment Conference. Now in it’s 14th year this event is a must-attend for those with an interest in online/digital recruitment and goes far beyond the usual job boards/mobile mix.

Once again Giles and the team pulled together an agenda that was interesting and provoked much thought and discussion during the break out sessions. Speakers from Google, Glassdoor, BT and KPMG were joined by specialists, practitioners, commentators and bloggers from the online recruitment world to look at emerging trends and some future developments.

There was some excellent live blogging from Alan Whitford – check out his RCEuro site for posts on several of the presentations.

I tweeted a lot of the content on the #EMConf2014 hashtag, so here are some of the things that were talked about…

We’re Only Human

Opening keynote was from the charming DeeDee Doke, Editor of Recruiter Magazine. She talked about the alarming disparity between the often exemplary client/customer experience and the, frankly often appalling, candidate experience that many businesses offer. She urged recruiters to look beyond the application to the person who had put a lot of effort into that application and to treat them with respect. She expressed concern that technology was dehumanising the recruitment process “Let’s make technology work right. Get the basics right then explore the potential”. She wanted every application acknowledged properly, not an automated email response.

There was little to disagree with. Recruitment is a people business, that helps bring real people into businesses to enable that business to meet it’s goals and objectives. Yet the process by which we do that is becoming ever more mechanical and pays little regard to the emotions, hopes and aspirations of the people.

I’ve written before that the recruitment agency industry largely operates to a transactional business model that has been untouched for probably 50 years (how many other sectors can say that) and whilst there’s money to be made it’s unlikely to change. To an agency there is little money in the candidate experience, unless that candidate is liable to be a client in the very near future.

We can only hope that somewhere in the room were recruiters taking heed to DeeDee’s call for humanity. For now it looks like recruitment technology is a lot more about the recruiter than the applicant.

We’re Always Mobile

Google made the prediction that by 2020 the entire global population would be online. I doubt this highly but can accept that their multi device world – laptop, mobile, tablet, TV, wearable, in-car – will impact on they way we do nearly everything. Including job hunting. Their figures showed that 88% of job seekers had used a mobile device at some point last year to search for jobs, which is in line with other research that I’ve seen. Interestingly their tracking software threw up the factoid that 87% of people who had searched for a job also went to Youtube shortly after (either in the same browsing session or an adjacent browsing session). Clearly an opportunity that too many recruiters miss out on.

Mixed in to all this was some ‘end of the CV’ stuff – sorry Google but even though my digital footprint tells a future employer all of what they need to know about me, very few will be looking for it and all will still want a traditional CV into their ATS – and a call to arms for companies to get creative in the recruitment process, to challenge the status quo.

We’re Under-skilled

‘Recruiters aren’t just recruiters anymore, they’re marketers, copywriters, strategists, social media experts amongst many other things‘ we were told by Giles Guest of Enhance Media. And he’s right. We were also told that you can’t successfully direct source if you haven’t got the right capabilities, which is very true.

All in all this talent acquisition business needs a bit more depth than we’re used to. The days of telephone jocks and super slick sales guys are becoming a memory and we need proper investment in capabilities if we are to rise above the post and pray mentality into some real sourcing. Some businesses are getting good at it but too many don’t even try.

I have to say that I don’t see this coming yet. Most recruitment presentations that I see are rooted in cost per hire and time to hire reductions and not in quality. To many recruiters a role like ‘Social Media Manager’ isn’t one that they actively source the channels for but one that they advertise and let the technology do the parsing.

We’re Looking For The Wrong Things

Those presentations that centred on social media and digital optimisation were clear in the message that we look for the wrong things. This manifested itself in different ways:

Too much ‘noise’ not enough engagement
Volume of links and likes not the quality of them
Obsession with large traffic not relevant applications
Continuous pursuit of new candidates without converting or properly assessing the ones we already have

Glassdoor told us that 90% of job seekers find company information and perspectives on social media useful in decision making, whilst 61% of new employees say that their new job is not what they were expecting. Conclusion is that many companies oversell and under-deliver on their roles. They also showed how real social engagement (proper conversations not robotic interactions) improves candidate flow.

We’re Facing Big Changes

So what are my thoughts from the day?

That the industry is going through a lot of change as working patterns, workforce planning and employee expectations all evolve
There’s too little investment in our recruitment teams. Some really are becoming a low cost automated, process led function and are in danger of becoming low skill too.
Candidates are ahead of recruiters on mobile, digital and social and their expectations of being able to use these in their job hunt are not being met
Some rays of hope. The tools are there and the data (small not big) is there to help recruiters and job seekers better align, to help expectations be better met on both sides and to help companies and job seekers avoid any nasty surprises in the hiring and on-boarding phase
There was a room full of recruiters eager to learn…let’s hope they go back and practice what they heard

And one final observation…

…it wasn’t until 2.32 in the afternoon that first mention of Google+ was heard…

Brand New Year. Same Old Recruitment Content?

In each of my many years working in and around the recruitment industry it’s always been the same old story as you put the Christmas presents away and turn your attention to all the different things you resolve to do in the new year – recruitment businesses in almost every sector dust down the ‘New Year, New Career‘ message.

It used to be print adverts, created in October and November and booked to appear in the first issues after Christmas. Then it was by email – actually I still got a few of those between 27th and 31st December this year. And now it’s on social media channels thanks to hashtags like #NewYear #NewCareer.

More of that later, because now we also have #MassiveMonday – the first Monday of the New Year when record numbers of people supposedly visit job boards and other digital recruitment sites. And hasn’t this hashtag taken a hammering this year – here’s just a few minutes worth of Twitter…all summed up with the ‘are you getting bored yet‘ tweet from an award winning digital marketing recruiter. Great message to their community!

So where does #MassiveMonday come from? Certainly in my years as a billing recruiter there was no surge in applications on the first Monday of the New Year. In fact the main things bothering recruiters straight back from a Christmas break were usually – Which clients are recruiting now? Who’s looking to interview straight away? Have the new starters all started? Has any client or candidate changed their mind over Christmas?

A quick search of Google to trace the origin leads you to a press release from Reed.co.uk as the primary source of all the #MassiveMonday stories in the print and digital media. They usually get more traffic on the first Monday of New Year. Not surprising really as in recent years that’s been the day on which most of the main job boards have started TV campaigns…which is the reason they get increased traffic.

No new insight, nothing of any real interest to candidates – they want an increase in job openings not CVs!

So what about #NewYear #NewCareer??

Well, what is a career?

An occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress

Now this can be a vocation or trade, or it can be a series of roles (possibly all in one or two companies) which should attract increasing levels of responsibility and rewards at each stage. Sorry guys, people don’t spend their Xmas break planning a new career.

A quick look at Google shows that the tumult of recruitment firms and sites that are gratuitously using this hashtag are clearly not attaching them to any roles that seem to imply progress, development or skill enhancements.

Of course people rarely change careers but they do change jobs. Now #NewYear #NewJob may not have the same ring but may be more accurate. After all, we call them JOB seekers and JOB hunters, not career seekers.

Amongst the plethora of New Year predictions for social business, the one constant was that 2014 is the year of story telling and content. The year of effective content that energises and engages, enchants and enlightens. The year where all businesses (and that includes recruiters) ask themselves what their candidate journey is, what are the pain points, where can they add value? What problems do their candidates have and how can they solve them.

Content is a big issue for recruiters this year. As the REC says in it’s 2014 industry forecast:

The challenge in many managerial and professional markets is the growing shortage of skills and talent…we are re-entering a candidate driven market. Successful recruiters will need to develop content that attracts this scarce talent whilst building meaningful relationships that keeps the talent close.

And what do you need to think about when producing meaningful, engaging, shareable content?

Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them
Content that gets highly shared is content with heart
Take time to engage with your online community

So recruiters, let’s get 2014 off on the right footing. Let’s engage our candidates and job seekers with what they want to know and read about. Stuff that addresses their concerns and doubts. Stories that they want to share and be part of. Let’s stop selling them nonsense like #MassiveMonday and #NewYearNewCareer because it adds nothing to their search and says very little about your understanding of their situation.

Fact is, if you got to ask them if they’re getting bored…then they most probably are…

…and there’s no such thing as a boring industry…just content creators who aren’t very creative

If you want to find out more about what good content looks like and how recruiters can use it to source and attract the best talent through social channels then book your place on this one day workshop when ace social recruiting trainer Katrina Collier and myself will tell you how

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Getting it Right

Facing the Future

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