Category: Uncategorized

The Wisdom of Herbert : Management Insights 80 Years On

‘The anxiety which is felt in some cases when teams are threatened with the loss of their status must be almost beyond bearing. I know of one club who in their plight insisted on their star players being in their homes every Friday night at nine o’clock, and officials visited them to see that the rule is observed. Recently I have heard of the complaints of players who declare that every Friday night they are spied on, and that they are threatened with all sorts of penalties if they do not observe the club curfew. I have no patience with such supervision. If I were unable to trust a player I would not retain him. In my experience I have found that the man who is treated fairly, and in whom confidence is placed, will not let you down.’

Wise words.

If you changed the word ‘club’ to ‘company’ and ‘players’ to ‘employees’ and said that at a conference or unconference in relation to employer brand and social media you’d be a guru. It would be tweeted and re-tweeted, blogged about and quoted.

And it’s true. If you can’t trust your employees then you shouldn’t have them working for you…likewise if you treat them fairly, and with respect, you will get the best out of them.

But this quote isn’t recent. It’s not from this week, this year or this century. It was written in 1932!

It was written by Herbert Chapman, a man who was named Greatest British Football Manager of all time in a Sunday Times poll in 2004 and is widely regarded as the father of modern football. His revolutionary and pioneering legacy is long and impressive: Continue reading “The Wisdom of Herbert : Management Insights 80 Years On” →

Do Recruiters Need Representing? Or Enlightening?

Here’s a question…who sets the standards in the recruitment agency industry?

The recruitment industry isn’t a profession requiring a qualification or quality badge. It’s a B2B sales business, predominantly made up of a disparate myriad of small owner managed businesses all competing with each other and showing little appetite for collaboration or ethics.

Standards are set by company owners, and their prime motivator is often profit not quality of operation. In the ten years I was supplying recruiters to the industry no-one asked me about the standards to which individuals operated. Their main concerns were fees and transferable client relationships. I was never asked to find someone with a relevant qualification…usually just someone who could sell.

Being a thorough interviewer, or having a string of recommendations from clients and candidates, were irrelevant if there were not billing figures to back them up.

Recruiters who don’t hit their targets are labelled failures. It doesn’t matter if their clients and candidates rate their service highly, and would recommend them… they won’t get hired in the rough, tough recruitment world without those billings. A blank couple of months usually mean a warning or redundancy, no matter if you’re with a member of a trade body or attend some training courses.

So I remain fairy ambivalent towards representative bodies, particularly those who make claims to create standards and set benchmarks. I followed the brouhaha that surrounded the launch of the IOR which still seems to continue – read this insightful blog from SteveWard. Continue reading “Do Recruiters Need Representing? Or Enlightening?” →

Weak ties or strong links – it’s a question of bandwidth

Its called Relationship Recruiting!

When I started working in recruitment I was quickly told about the 80/20 rule – 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. It certainly informed my day to day relationship building as I quickly focused on a small number of deep relationships which held good for me for my years as a recruiter.

As we moved towards modern social networking though the accent was more on broadening out your network, concentrating on the ‘weak ties’, the ones that were most likely to bring new information and opportunity. Although the research that showed the strength of these weak ties dates back to 1973 they certainly started becoming more popular over the last few years, a situation exacerbated with rising usage of networking and connecting platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – as they, in turn, facilitated growing the widest network possible.

So it was with great interest that I read in this month’s Wired of research conducted by two information economists, in a white paper due to be published later this year, that found that it was, after all the strong links that delivered the most profitable relationships. The weaker ties may deliver unique information, but the nature of the connection (weak) means that the interactions are rare.

Closer links may bring less unique news, but the higher level of interaction will ultimately make them a stronger source. The contacts with the greatest bandwidth do ultimately deliver the best results.

And to test this they used an executive recruiting firm, analysing e-mail correspondence. Guess what? Those consultants relying on a tight cluster of contacts received more new leads and generated greater fees.

Whilst the ideal results may well derive from a combination of weak and strong ties, it can’t be denied that close connections really are important after all.

If you’re a recruiter then develop them and nurture them…they may provide your best route to success.

And if you’re a jobseeker building the widest network you can, then stop for a moment and think about who is closer to home and who you may be overlooking. Close friends, family, neighbours and ex-colleagues…they may be able give you that vital lead a lot quicker than the sister-in-law of the guy who sold a computer to the wife of the friend of the golf partner you just shot an 82 with!

This post originally appeared as a guest blog on the excellent Blogging4jobs site run by Jessica Miller-Merrell. If you don’t follow her…you really should!

Thank You For Your Interest. Now Go Away.

Imagine this scene

….

You’re out shopping.  There’s quite a bit you need to buy and you’re getting frustrated because shop after shop doesn’t seem to stock what you want. And if they do, then invariably it’s the wrong size or colour.

Then you spot a new shop, one you haven’t seen on your High Street before. Looking through the window, you can see that it stocks much of what you’ve been trying to find. But it’s crowded, and you can’t really identify who is serving. There seem to be a few assistants but not enough to cope with the number of customers.

Undeterred you go in and start easing your way through the crowds. You can’t get close to the stock but from what you see it’s what you need. You start pushing through, looking for someone to serve you.

Suddenly you spot someone wearing a t-shirt bearing the shop name. At last, someone who can serve you! It’s been a long day of shopping with little reward and this is a great opportunity to get what you’ve been looking for.

You move towards the guy in the t-shirt – he appears to be free – but just as you’re about to reach him a bouncer appears from nowhere and blocks your path.

He stands there, arms folded, shielding the assistant from you. He hands you a card. It says…

‘Thank you for showing interest in our shop but as you can see we are very busy. Please go and wait at the back of the store. If no-one serves you within 5 minutes you can assume that we do not need your custom and you should leave’ Continue reading “Thank You For Your Interest. Now Go Away.” →

Calling For The Voice of Reason

“I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is I need
Call up to listen to the voice of reason
And got his answering machine
I left my message but did he f*** get back to me
And now I’m stuck still wondering
How it’s meant to be”

That’s a lyric from the new Arctic Monkeys album. The song’s called ‘Reckless Serenade’ and deals with the uncontrollable emotions you feel when you’re with the most beautiful girl in the world.

Feelings of passion and attempts at understanding love.

You don’t notice distractions (Those twinkling vixens/With the shining spiral eyes/Their hypnosis goes unnoticed/When she’s walking by) you’re just consumed by what you have (The type of kisses/Where teeth collide/When she laughs the Heavens hum/A stun-gun lullaby).

He needs help, needs the voice of reason…but the voice of reason goes to voicemail and never returns the call. Continue reading “Calling For The Voice of Reason” →

Sherlock Holmes and the Curious Case of the Bursting Facebook Bubble

It may have escaped your notice but the bubble has burst. We’re falling out of love with Facebook. It’s all over. 100,000 of us in the UK have ‘deactivated’ accounts. 700,000,000 still use it but it’s clearly all over now.

The media has been awash with it. Whoopin’ and Hollerin’ the mainstream print and broadcast media have been sounding the death knell. Last night on TV two newspaper reviewers triumphantly declared the bubble burst. They admitted that they don’t use Facebook, or have accounts…but they knew it was over, that it couldn’t last.

The headlines were there – ‘Are we falling out of love with Facebook’ and ‘How to de-activate your Facebook account’. Everyone has a theory, everyone knows why. It’s the trivia, the embarrassing photos, the privacy…IT’S BECAUSE EVEN YOUR MOTHER IS ON IT                !

Except…we’ve heard it all before.

Look at this…

This wasn’t today or yesterday’s news. This was an article from 22nd FEBRUARY 2008! The bubble had burst then! It burst after 200,000,000 members, never mind 700,000,000! And the journalist who wrote that article also knew the reasons. It’s the trivia, the embarrassing photos, the privacy…IT WAS BECAUSE EVEN YOUR MOTHER IS ON IT! She added another one…apparently we were turning away from it because we didn’t like the politics of the founder.

I checked the newspaper’s online archive and the article was no longer there. Every other one from 22nd February 2008 seemed to be…but not that one.

I’m sure there will be more theories. Ignore the fact that the next generation to enter the workforce, and the media, barely know any other way to communicate…it’s over. You choose the reason.

What do I think?

I think Sherlock Holmes had it right…not once but twice

‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.’

‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’

What do you think?

 

Where Are You On The Social Media Super Highway?

I’ve had the opportunity recently to hang out with some really great thought leaders in the social media space (Scott Stratten and Amanda Hite at the Jobsite Fresh Thinkers series) and also to attend a couple of presentations from digital agencies who have been looking at how big brands approach social media.

It’s always interesting at the breakout and networking sessions (coffee breaks are so passe) to chat to attendees and find out where they are in terms of social media adoption and usage, both on a personal and professional level. Because of the job that I have there is an assumption that I’m one of the ones who ‘gets it’ and conversations inevitably move on to how I got started and what is holding others back from taking the plunge.

On a personal level there always seem to be three recurring themes:

Is Technology Driving Us To Distraction?

A recent survey from harmon.ie, the social e-mail and collaboration software company, looked into workplace interruptions and found that 57% are digitally derived. This was a wide ranging classification covering everything from processing e-mails to Facebook and personal web searches, but as a headline finding it got many in the media (social and traditional) excitedly pointing the figure at social networking.

To put into context, these workplace interruptions lead to over half of us losing an hour or more a day, which in turn costs businesses £3,277.50 a year per employee.

I downloaded the full survey (it’s free, you can do it here) and found that for all the furore over social networking wasting our time only 9% of people felt ‘Facebook and personal webs searches’ were a distraction.

So putting aside distinctions between digital, electronic and traditional, what actions cause the bulk of distractions? Which tool really is the baddie? Continue reading “Is Technology Driving Us To Distraction?” →

The Quality of Thinking

When new bloggers ask for advice, I often say ‘it’s not the quality of writing, it’s the quality of thinking’ – I’m sure that people read blogs to be enlightened, to see something that inspires them and gets them to look at things in a different way.

Regular readers of this blog joined me on the journey to find a new job earlier in the year, and I often wrote of my frustrations with companies within the recruiting industry who weren’t looking beyond the traditional methods and ways of thinking. With the challenges that our industry faces to source, attract, retain and develop the right talent, and to service the demands of shifting organisational models, it always struck me as strange that so few owners, directors and managers embraced the possibility of doing things in a different way.

It was the ability to look at the new and unchartered that so excited me about the opportunity with Jobsite UK. I sensed during my talks with them that there was a real passion and desire to bring fresh and innovative thinking to the recruiting industry, whether that was through written or live content, and to be not just the conduit of this but to be at the very heart of the conversation. Continue reading “The Quality of Thinking” →

Punk Rock and Spangles

It was always better in our day. The music was better, the football was better…even the sweets were better.

This blog post from Speccy Woo has got me all nostalgic for the good old days. He makes some good points about modern parenting paranoia; our parents did rather let us get on with it and write the consequences off to experience. Those were more innocent times, before the culture of accountability and ambulance chasing no win no fee lawyers.

Somewhere between our parents and us something changed…someone had to take the blame if it went wrong. Someone was accountable and therefore responsible. The council, the school, police, shop owners, bus drivers….everything could have been prevented, someone was at fault.

We can’t deny this shift as it partially informs all the parenting decisions we make. That and environment.

I liked Speccy’s sepia tinged image of children running amok, kicking cans and climbing trees. My childhood wasn’t quite the same as I grew up in a London suburb and there wasn’t much greenery around. It was more cars and concrete than cows and conifers; hence some of the freedoms that were enjoyed by those away from London weren’t really available to me. Continue reading “Punk Rock and Spangles” →