Andrew's strategic resourcing blog

Out with the old / in with the new

2005-05-04T15:29:00.000+02:00

This is simultaneously the last post on my Blogger account and the first on it's new home.

What you need to know.

First, I have decided to use my old company's url for the blog. This is www.resourcingstrategies.com. There are two reasons for doing this. First 'brand' - I wanted something which I could tell people about & that we'd both remember. Second 'corporate firewalls' - there are some big, prominent companies who have stopped access to blogspot sites as they are deemed 'personal use'. Either that or the writing was deemed too disruptive.

Second, for those of you subscribing to the RSS feed you will notice no change. Business as usual. You don't need to do anything.

For those of you not using the RSS feed you really should. If you need more information about RSS the BBC published a simple guide.

Third, if you're one of the very few people who subscribed via email I suggest that you change to the RSS. It's much better - honest.

The positive changes.

There are some technical changes that moving to Wordpress will enable. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments for example. I will also start classifying the posts by categories which should help you find old relevant posts.

The negative changes.

I will lose some of my comments & trackbacks on old posts. Over the next few days I will try and restore them. Please be patient.

Other things

If you were currently linking to the old blog please can you change the link to the new one. The old one will remain up, at least for now but it'll add one more click to get to the new content. Oh, and thanks for the links - I really appreciate them.

Understanding the people

2005-05-03T15:07:00.000+02:00

I'm not sure how many employee opinion survey presentations I have sat through or been shown. They tend to say things like '25% of people in our retail arm are engaged'. So what?

To get value out of these things we need to be a bit more sophisticated with the data. The way that the data is usually segmented (by division, sex etc) is interesting, but generally not that insightful. To get more information you need to look at creating your own segments, based on finding interesting clusters.

What you generally want to understand is the groups, the likeliness of somebody having an certain set of opinions. You probably want to drive this from a result that you are interested in - for example 'what do our high performers typically think?' or 'what behaviours do engaged staff show?' Basically, you're interested in segmenting people not by their demographics (gen X, Y etc) or division within the business but by attitude. This will give you an understanding of which organisational levers you can pull which will be most influential to your chosen group.

There are a few techniques that you can use for this, one of which is CHAID (Chi Squared Automatic Interaction Detector). SPSS's AnswerTree product is widely used here.

What have I seen? Well we've seen that high performers are generally most interested in organisational issues (leadership etc), where the average people are more focussed on their role. We have seen that people who feel underpaid generally also are keen for more work / life balance and have spent longer in their current job. What do your people think?

Bias in the interview process

2005-05-03T11:16:00.000+02:00

On a few occasions I've rolled out advanced interviewing courses. The target groups were often senior managers. Unfortunately the slides that went with those courses have long been lost.

From experience the most powerful part of the courses was a discussion of the typical types of bias that can occur. If you understand the typical types of bias you are more likely to understand when you're being biased, and a good interviewer can then counter it or ensure that you gather additional data to qualify it.

Wikipedia has a list of typical cognitive biases in it's article on Buyer decision processes. Most can be directly applied to the selection process.

Hiring Managers

2005-05-02T16:35:00.000+02:00

Johanna Rothman posts about hiring managers, saying that they shouldn't be doing their own sourcing. Agree (mostly). That is a tactical job. We can step in and do actual hires but we'll use a team of external researchers to map our competitors, provide us with backgrounds of target candidates etc. We'll do it for very senior hires. Sometimes a call from a senior company representative opens more doors.

However Johanna says we should be adding value:

in job analysis, determining the interview team, who'll ask which kinds of questions, how you'll audition, how you'll decide about candidates, what to make as an offer, checking references, and starting the person working in a way that makes sense.

Let's face it, that's about as tactical as doing the sourcing & just as open to bringing in experts. I will bring in a psychologist when needed, we'll outsource references to the sort of people who do due diligence on management during M&A deals. Other times I'll step in.

The hiring manager's job is to know when it's appropriate to be hands on. It's about knowing who the experts are, when you need them & when you don't.

It's also about setting the strategy. It's not about worrying about the 1 passive candidate when you can worry about what you can do to develop relationships with 500. It's about mobilising the whole organisation, removing blocks, monitoring the competition, understanding the changing labour markets, facilitating a liquid internal labour market, building your employment brand. It's all about connecting these and a hundred other things together.

I have the utmost respect for Heather & guess she would agree with me on most of this. There are transactional in-house recruiters out there but I'm not sure she is a great example. The smart hiring manager knows that if you are focussing at the individual sourcing level you're adding little value & might as well be outsourced 'to the experts'.

Focussing on Learning

2005-05-02T14:36:00.000+02:00

Personal development. Developing their people. Helping them learning. Helping them help themselves and each other to learn. Oh, and a bit of training.

Yes, training comes last and rightly too. Training is useful, but for many things it's one of the worst ways of helping the organisation learn. Training these days is pretty commoditised. Few providers offer anything different, well maybe apart from The Mind Gym.

Face it, your employees like training because it gets them out of the office, and they don't really like that. It is also pretty tangible - 'I had this issue so I went on a course'. Easy to measure.

Oh, and HR provides training. 'If one of my team needs to develop I can offload it to HR' - bingo (if it doesn't work it's all HR's fault)

Let's refocus this. It's not an 'HR issue' it's a business issue, and that is where is should sit. No, not booking training courses but delivering the organisation's learning.

So what does the HR provide? Well it should be encouraging things to happen. How about setting up a few interdepartmental workshops? Get them talking to each other. How about influencing the communications agenda? It's not the CEO preaching that makes people listen, it's about conversations. HR is usually number 1 or 2 user of internal comms so has a good place to start.

Why doesn't everyone use the intranet? Because it's not easy to find what you want or is explained like you want to say it, not how they want to hear it. Bring in folksonomies, put information on wikis where they can question and update. Use blogs, RSS feeds - give them the choice to publish what they're doing and listen to who they want to. Ever considered that this might raise their engagement? There is probably an inverse relationship between your control and their interest.

It's not about big programmes. it's about starting small 'learning fires' - little, easy to implement local initiatives - and then watching them fan the flames.

A new job board

2005-05-01T09:18:00.000+02:00

A new job board - so what? Well I thought that this was an interesting development as it initially seemed to be a move in the wrong direction.

Last week DirectEmployers Association, a non-profit employers organisation, announced the launch of JobCentral.com, what on the face of it seemed to be another yet another job board. A lengthy press release is available.

DirectEmployers has provided an employment search engine for some time. On it you will find all jobs currently posted by the organisation's members. It seems to be the only job search site that is truly global, though the focus is the US. It directs the job seeker to the employers website so the application process can be the same.

I have written before on why I think that job search will eventually replace job boards as search is currently replacing categorised lists. Why then could one of the pioneers of job search be moving in the 'wrong' direction?

One of the issues for a job search site is how to balance the quantity / quality issue. Job seekers are going to want to go to a site with the highest number of relevant jobs for them. So to be successful you need to have a large number of jobs (quantity) but you also need to have a low amount of 'noise' (the quality side of the argument).

DirectEmployers.com has always been very high quality, probably the highest level of any large search / job board. It has a good level of quantity but to shine in needed to raise the quantity. How to do this? Increase the number of jobs without adding 'noise'. How to significantly reduce noise? Charge, even a minimal charge. You could also ensure that posters have to be the 'owners' of the jobs (that is not a third party agency). From the site I'm not sure if this is the case.

What got my initial 'Why are they doing that?' to a 'That's a smart move' is that quickly I realised that they haven't replaced the search, they've given a way for non-members to include their listings at a very low price (around 10% of a traditional job board) so as to increase quantity but without increasing noise. This will increase the power of their search.

It gets better. Along with Simply Hired, DirectEmployers has announced a partnership with LinkedIn. LinkedIn obviously seem to get where job hunting is going. What is great is that they talk about

LinkedIn will tell you how many people in your network can help you find out more about the company and get the job.

That is, an acknowledgment that the network might be better served to help the candidate research the company rather than finding a 'backdoor' through the company's referrals scheme.

Online Candidate Behaviour

2005-04-30T21:36:00.000+02:00

Joel Cheesman discussed the importance of corporate web sites in online recruitment starting from online consumer behaviours. Whilst I think he is absolutely right comparing the consumer to the job-hunter I believe that he jumped to his conclusions too early.

What I won't disagree with is his view that candidates usually start with the search engine. This will generally throw up the main job boards and a few companies or agencies that use pay per click etc. These pages will then be bookmarked and the job hunter will next time bypass the search engine and go to the job boards (Of course this could be a vertical search such as Indeed or Simply Hired). I also suspect the top 3 listings account for the majority of click-thrus.

However, I do disagree with his assertions on when job seekers use the information that is on the careers site months before taking the decision to apply. This disagreement is based on doing quite a few behaviour studies over the last 4 to 5 years, seeing other surveys (which generally confirmed my studies) combined with a model I've developed based on a view of consumer behaviour. Let me try and describe this model.

I have stated on several occasions before that job-hunters display similar behaviours as consumers of large expenditure items such as housing and cars. This is in terms of such things as switching propensities. However the fundamental difference between most consumption and job hunting is that in consumption the consumer holds total responsibility for making the purchasing decision - car companies rarely refuse a consumer (except, for example makers of very high-end limited-edition cars) whereas in job selection the candidate and company both try and make a decision on fit. Both conduct research on the other. Submitting your application doesn't mean you've completed the 'purchase'

The second difference is all around opportunity costs. For a candidate, except maybe for the graduate*, the time cost of research is greater than the time cost of applying. In consumption it's almost always the other way around - the time cost of research is a lot less than the cost of the purchase (especially for the expensive items that the consumer/candidate behaviour seems to match). To maximise their utility the candidate is better off searching for opportunities than researching about a company who may or may not have an opening.

Do we see this? Yes. A typical path through a careers site is straight to the available jobs. They want to know if there is any point investing any more time at your site. (we're talking about the small percentage who go directly to your site, maybe because you're a prominent firm in the function they want to work in - PwC in audit for example, or you're a big local employer).

When they find a relevant job they make a decision to apply pretty quickly. Here you can encourage relevant applications by giving a great job spec, written in a language applicable to an outsider. You could even provide links to supporting information on your site. How about putting a list of useful links on the job description - sort of 'find news / more information about OurCompany's work in audit' for example with links to the relevant information on your site (it doesn't have to be the career site). This extra information will help them position themselves effectively.

With a marginal cost getting pretty close to zero, and a time cost limited to any CV revision, sending in your CV directly to a firm is similar to requesting a brochure - you're not committing at this stage, your just starting the research process.

What happens when they use a job board or vertical search? Here the evidence that I see is that they find a sufficiently interesting role and then use your on-site search to refine the search. It's rather like deciding that you are interested in a model of car and then using your site to determine which engine size you want. It might be the one they originally found on the job board, it might be a different one. The key factor is that they used the search engine or job board to find you & they focussed on using the search on your site to select the role they feel is most appropriate.

When do job-hunters look at your 'career-blurb'. My understanding is when they get an interview as part of their preparation. At this stage they will be using it in conjunction with other parts of your site & increasingly third party resources. Talking to friends or friends of friends is also used extensively here. In the vast majority of cases your career site isn't persuading them to apply, it's helping them prepare to meet you. Remember this is a valid part of the research process that both you and they are doing, but a career site focussed on this is very different to one aiming to get applications in (which I think is pretty pointless - don't think that because that's the way you want them to act it's going to be the way they will).

Some conclusions:

Are passive job seekers surfing your site? No, almost never unless they are also consumers, in which case they still go to the job search first.
Is the career site info redundant? No, but don't think it will encourage many to apply. It's for a different part of the process & the sooner you recognise that the sooner candidates will think you've a great careers site.
Is search engine optimisation relevant for the HR dept? Yes, absolutely. Vertical search, local search etc will make this even more important.
Are candidate behaviours online similar to consumers? Sort of, but you need to consider opportunity costs. Some things become relevant, some redundant.

* Why different on graduate sites? Many companies still ask graduates, through a separate application process to complete an online form. The average time taken seems to be around 2 - 3 hours. Given this hire cost graduates will conduct more research on your firm. This does not count research on career direction. See one of my earliest articles for my view on how graduate recruitment should evolve.

Talent markets

2005-04-28T16:49:00.000+02:00

I'm surprised how quickly a traditional business like private banking is open to thoughts about labour markets.

Something that I haven't gone into much detail of late is that in the last few roles been in the wonderful position of being able not only to work out how to get the people we need for our jobs but being able to change the 'product' that we take to market - what the offering is all about. Part of this is being able to challenge where work is located.

Recently I've been having conversations about where we are going to locate our front-office people. If the market for Italian bankers is stronger in Monaco than Switzerland why don't we build our team there? These are questions the business is very eager to investigate.

We're not alone. Google last year opened shop near Microsoft - it doesn't take a genius to guess why. In large administrative centres I have been able to demonstrate the link between distance-to-work and saturation of local labour markets over time. Track that and you realise when it's time to shift the work elsewhere.

John Hagel, one of my favourite writers, mentions this on his recent blogpost - Flight of the Creative Class:

Where value originates and who captures it will increasingly depend on the evolution of talent markets and the relative capability of firms (and nations) to rapidly develop and amplify the value of this talent. Product markets and financial markets will of course still matter, but the center of gravity for value creation and capture will inexorably migrate to global talent markets.

HR's value to an organisation will rise when it can start having these conversations. Unfortunately I see far too few people in the average HR organisation who can and want to have these conversations with senior managers.

Welcome home Mac

2005-04-27T18:08:00.000+02:00

I've just got one of my Macs back from repair. It had a power supply problem - we had a power cut or surge at about 2am a few weeks ago and something happened that the computer didn't like. Fortunately the local Apple service centre managed to fix it.

We had been using the computer as a hub in the house. Whilst I had thought of a back-up policy for the data what I hadn't realised were the problems that I would have if I lost lots of the ports. Most of my data was on a series of external drives (320Gb ones) linked by Firewire 800. Then there was the ipod, the iSight FW camera, the printer, scanner....... you get the picture.

My poor little Powerbook was bought because I thought I didn't need all of this stuff directly connected, I would just use it connected to the other computer and connect over the network. That presumed that I would have something with lots of ports available. In Apple terms that means a Power Mac. Without it I was lost.

It's back now so I can sigh a sigh of relief. Somebody once said that technology was there to make our lives easier. It might do but we do end up relying on it, and when it is not there we struggle.

Social Networks

2005-04-27T10:16:00.000+02:00

For anyone involved in communication, organisation design, learning (in the broadest sense) and even some areas of technology understanding how social networks are constructed is beneficial. I have written about how new tools are going to be used for external recruitment, but my feeling is that the most immediate 'resourcing' benefit is using them to look at internal employment markets, partly because you have some chance of understanding these.

Yesterday, via a PubSub subscription I came across Bruce Hoppe's blog 'Connectedness', one of the most useful collections of writings on this subject I have found to date. If you, like me, are seriously interested in this stuff I suggest you take a look.

An easy sell - Geneva

2005-04-26T11:41:00.000+02:00

Mercer placed Geneva joint 1st again in their 2005 Quality of Life survey and as the summer festival season starts I'm not at all surprised.

My wife & I are big culture fans. In London I spent an extraordinary amount of time at events, pre-show parties, post-show parties, post-post-show sessions, you get the picture.

When we announced that we were moving to Geneva lots of people cried 'you'll be bored'. Not so my friends.

Whilst we don't have the art scene that London has we do have a great choice in live music, again, not as big as London but with the benefit that you can actually get tickets.

This year we've managed to see REM, been to the Jazz festival at Cully (Seu Jorge was great), been to two modern dance productions by the surrealist Alias Compagnie we've got tickets to see Esa-Pekka Salonen at Verbier do Stravinsky, Berio and Hillborg, a few nights at the Montreux Jazz Festival and then a few nights at Paleo. Then there is more ballet with the Bejart. And this doesn't include all the free music nights sitting in the parks with a friends & a few bottles of the local rosé, the summer theatre in the Orangerie, the 30 something public museums & galleries.

The Tour de France comes delightfully close & today we've got the start of the Tour de Romandie today with cycling through the steep cobbled streets of the old town.

All of this of course is great news for the recruiter. Convincing someone to come to one of the safer cities of the world, with skiing 45 mins from the front door in the winter and summer evenings lounging around on boats on the lake and all this going on is not too difficult.

As neither of us are Swiss we don't see this as our home for ever. But it's a good base for now.

Trust, technology & employee performance

2005-04-25T15:06:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago, on the For Immediate Release podcast, Shel Holtz ranted about employee trust and monitoring technologies. I listened, smiling. Little did I know that it was going to be so timely.

36 hours later I was sitting in the office of one of the board directors and the topic of a 'Values and Behaviours' project came up - had I done something like that before? (Yes) what should they think about?

Lots of companies have published 'values and behaviours'. Most are worthless. What differentiates the ones that work and the ones that don't? Well the good apply their values to everything they do. They become checklists for everything the firm does.

Trust is almost always part of a company's published values. So how, as Shel points out, does monitoring emails & online behaviours constitute trust? It doesn't, it can't. Neither does blocking internet email access, blocking blog access because it is 'personal use', stopping personal calls...

Great workforces are ones where everyone is treated like adults. Most people, most of the time know what they should do. The best places to work often have made allowances to help staff do other 'life' activities more easily. The contract here is 'you're here to perform to the best of your ability, we'll try and provide a supportative environment and you'll be measured and rewarded for the contribution you make.

Lynda Gratton's book 'the Democratic Enterprise' - liberating your business with freedome, flexibility and commitment' offers a good summary of this. It is well worth a read.

Metrics - just because something is fashionable doesn't mean it's right

2005-04-25T12:25:00.000+02:00

There seems to be a lot of talk about metrics at the moment, mainly about how poor the current indicators are (cost per hire, time to hire) and how we should all replace them with such things as Quality of Hire and even a sort of Return on Investment of recruitment.

I suspect that I've been looking at these sort of things since my first time as a recruitment manager - some 8 or so years ago. I've debated them with others and spent far too much time thinking about them. For some years I decided that I was probably just being a bit thick but as I aged I have decided that maybe I could have been right after all. (Though of course stubbornness probably increases with age) The reason I couldn't work out how to calculate such stats is that they probably can't be calculated.

OK, some caveats. First I am of the 'no stats is better than bad stats' school of thought, especially when credibility is at stake. Second, spending my university life studying things such as econometrics gave me a love of models, but also an understanding of what makes a good one - that is, I'm a bit critical of these things but also love them.

Quality of Hire - why it is only appropriate in a few, limited situations

The first problem here is how to define quality. My Swiss friends tell me that one way of indicating quality is "does it have a 'made in Switzerland' label on it"? (The Swiss being keen of totally over-engineering things - just see what happens when they make a camera) Of course performance of people is far more complex.

You could use things such as performance appraisals, targets etc. but the problem here is that they usually don't accurately describe the contribution the person makes to the firm. The 'closer' you are to the client the easier (maybe) it is to measure contribution but add management into the mix and it all gets very hard.

The other area where you might be able to accurately measure contribution is if the person is completing a heavily process-defined role. If they are making widgets you can count the number of widgets. However, anything to do with knowledge working is very hard to identify and measure the contribution because much of the value is derived not from the individual, but their relationships with others.

So if you can't define and measure quality how do you measure quality of hire? Of course you can use the performance measures that you have but be aware that they're inaccurate and that by setting them as goals for selection you might accurately select the 'wrong' thing.

Let's presume you can define performance, then the function will probably come out as something like this:

P=fn(Tt, Ti, A, E) where

P=Performance
Tt= trainable talent (knowledge, skills) - you can test this
Ti=inherent talent - you can get a good view of this
A=Attitude - you can get a good view of this, though it changes over time
E=Environment - this is out of the control of the recruiter

Let's presume we can develop a great selection model, with measurement around a bunch of relevant competencies. You use it with a group of people that is large enough to be statistically relevant, you measure the performance after a period of time and then you use your data to constantly validate the contribution made by each competency which you accurately measured. What would be the problem here?

Well (a) few people recruit so many of the same type that you can build a good model and (b) it all presumes that the environment remains constant, and this is rarely the case. Things that could change this are management changes, process changes, technology changes, external economic changes... the list is long. If any of this changes, was the performance a factor of the environmental change or your accurate selection?

To measure quality of hire there is an inherent time lag - that is, performance is shown over time as the person learns about their new environment. The individual may deliver the most performance in later roles. They may be average in their first role but great in the second. This would be the real performance of the person, but how do you measure that?

How accurate can selection be? Well, I reckon that you can get about a 70% accuracy on selection for anything other than the most 'process' role. You will get a normal distribution from those people you do select and I guess you want this distribution to be higher than if you had no selection (which of course you are unlikely to be able to test) and that the average is higher than your existing population (which will change when the new people join)

Finally, was that performance driven by factors you selected on or the value added by development, management etc. Try convincing your managers that an individual's performance is purely a result of your selection.

Return on Investment - innacurate and worthless

Again let's consider the average knowledge worker or manager. To measure ROI you need to understand the return - the economic contribution the person makes to the firm, and the investment. The investment is possible to measure, but not as easily as you think. The economic contribution is extremely difficult.

First, value is often based on the relationships between individuals and not the individuals themselves. You would need to understand the networks accurately and measure the additional value of all those relationships. A great manager may not actually 'make' things but by coaching might release value in others. To measure the economic value you would need to identify this value.

Secondly, these models are dynamic, not static. If a department loses someone they don't not do that persons work, they reallocate it. This effects intangibles such as departmental morale which in turn impacts performance. You need to model and understand all of this.

You could try saying 'without this person we would be $x worse off' but remember facilities could probably say 'without desks we would be $y worse off'. Both would be silly.

Can you estimate all of this to a degree to provide worth? Yes you probably can, especially in a non-complicated environment. Go and hire yourself a team of economists who can do time-series analysis on dynamic models. And prepare that the model will change as the environment changes. Understand it's a 'best guess'

My take on one of the reasons that HR has a low credibility in most organisations is that it tries to 'copy' other parts of the organisation only to make a mess of it. Most senior management with any comprehension of numbers will soon see the weakness of either ROI of recruitment or Quality of Hire. Go in with a dollar value of the economic contribution that an individual makes and most will probably smile sweetly and then smirk behind your back. Either that, or want to understand how you modeled accurately a whole organisation. Remember if you had an accurate model they could then manage it perfectly.

Final word - stop worrying about things you can't measure, stop feeling you have to 'prove' your contribution and start concentrating on making your managers appreciate your contribution. What ultimately matters is their perception of what value you add.

College recruiting programmes

2005-04-21T15:25:00.000+02:00

Kevin Wheeler, writing in ER Daily discusses how to focus college recruitment activities away from the roadshow model. It is an excellent article & one that I want to build on.

His analysis is spot on. His 4 negatives are sharp. You can validate most of this stuff from your data. Look at the cost of acquiring CVs as well as the hires and compare methods. Look at your existing staff, especially experienced hires, where they studied and now compare this with where you go. At one firm we did a basic 'where did our high performers study' analysis and the top performing school wasn't even on our list. To make it even worse it was 400m from their careers office to the front door of the corporate HQ.

I've managed these programmes in several firms, in several sectors. I've operated across Europe and even into Asia. What would I recommend?

(1) as Kevin suggests go virtual. Build a database, segment, capture them 3 years before graduation, build a communications plan that focusses on their information needs. What resources does your firm have that they would want? For many firms this might be possible. At a global media firm we had a great image library & provided a tool that let them send ecards with some of the world's best images. If you are a FMCG you might be able to send vouchers, samples etc. Think about it, there's usually something that you can do that is cheap. Use targeted email (maybe even SMS, though there are some big issues here that are outside the scope of this article.) Small email shots, to highly focussed groups. I've regularly had 60% click throughs by focussing. Most campaigns get about 2%. Send the former and people won't think of it as spam. Spam is only what you don't want.

(2) Focus on how your people can help them. Give up the roadshow but don't necessarily ignore face to face contact. If you know what skills you want then the chances are some of your people already have them. How about offering speakers on topics they have experience on. The schools will love you, the brightest most interested students will turn up, it will be totally focussed on the skills you want and guess what, people will come and ask about jobs after the talk. The dynamics of these presentations are totally different and your ability to sell how great your firm is in this area is stronger.

(3) Read some of my earlier writings on this subject (here,hereand here). You probably have to rethink how your firm looks at this part of the talent market

(4) Use internships wherever possible. Apply similar selection methods (or at least the same competencies). Choose the high performers during this time. Give people experiences that they are going to rush back and tell people at college about. It's really hard to accurately select those with little work experience but you will see the high performers after a few months. Again, this often means rethinking how your firm looks at this part of the talent market.

(5) Please, please, please avoid horrible 'youth' campaigns with smiley people looking cool. It's patronising

(6) Do understand how college students use communication channels. I've used a discussion board about working and applying to the firm with great success (it significantly reduced questions sent by email). Be transparent with your process. I think blogs of recent hires talking about their work would work. Students often don't really know what work is like.

(7) I hate sponsorship of college events / sports clubs etc. It's a personal thing but I've never been able to justify the spend by the stats.

(8) Don't give pencils / notepads / beer mats etc. Do you want someone to join you because you gave them a pen? Spend on this stuff is often huge

(9) Online testing is good, but it has to be seen as relevant

(10) Back in the 80's Boston Consulting Group (BCG) coined the term 'Time Based Competition' to describe being competitive on the basis of being quicker than the competition to complete a process. It is highly relevant when applied to the college recruitment process.

Very funny, but off topic (Macromedia & Adobe)

2005-04-21T12:13:00.000+02:00

John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, has published a Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia & very sharp it is.

I'm a big user of Adobe's Creative Suite (I have the professional edition, though I have rarely used GoLive). Photoshop is really useful as I am a keen photographer, I do most of my business diagrams using Illustrator (gosh I'm lost and frustrated having to use Powerpoint to do this now at work, but then Microsoft would never claim the drawing tools are a Illustrator competitor), InDesign to lay-out most documents (I use Word as a text-editor) and the full version of Acrobat to package up documents in a format that I know most people will be able to view 'as-is' (It also does great slideshows for sending out).

Of course Gruber's post has nothing to do with resourcing, but for poking fun at corporate-speak it's wonderful.

More referrals network in recruitment news

2005-04-20T14:52:00.000+02:00

Via Charlene Li at Forrester, news of a partnership between Simply Hired and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn as most will be aware is an online network & a related tool. Simply Hired is a job search engine similar to Indeed (I posted earlier views on Indeed and job search) Charlene describes the combined offering really well:

When you do a search, you can see if any of your contacts work at the company through a link to LinkedIn. So I could see that for a marketing job at E-Loan, I had 19 connections in my network, most of them at least three degrees away.

Many people, especially those who will potentially use online networks for job hunting will already be a member of something such as LinkedIn. Users don't want to join different networks for different functions. LinkedIn, because of its existing user base certainly has a head start therefore over some new entrants in the job-referral market.

As to how it and the new referrals networks are positioned, as I wrote before, referrals work not because you give people lots of money, but because they believe in your organisation and want to sell it. This is why having a referral bonus at $5000 encourages few extra referrals than having it at $500. Splitting the fee down the network will therefore encourage subsequent levels to sell it but do you really want your 'sales channel' to be an untrained mass focussing purely on the commission? My comments on developing channels for selling a job apply equally to the referral chain as they do to recruitment firms.

My original comment on those tools was that in the long-term stand-alone referral providers will be best suited to the mid-sized firms who want to automate a process and don't have a sophisticated recruitment system. If this type of networking does take off the big recruitment systems folks will just add it to their functionality and clients will use whoever makes it easiest for them to use a network - reposting isn't going to cut it. The Hire.coms, Brassrings, Taleos and Jobpartners control the clients eyeballs and should win the battle.

This new announcement though is different. Instead of building the referral out from the recruiter to the candidate it shows the network from the candidate to the recruiter. What does the corporate recruiter therefore need to do?

(1) Ensure that your key employment value proposition is understood by your whole workforce so they can act as reliable representatives
(2) Develop your referral process so that you can handle applications from people that your staff hardly know. (They didn't originally refer their friends anyway, it was always acquaintances)
(3) Ensure that your recruitment system can handle referrals just as any other source and that they don't bypass the process. Make sure it doesn't cause you an administrative nightmare.
(4) Understand that you now have a new stakeholder in your recruitment process (employees) and consider what that means for your communications.
(5) Join LinkedIn so you can be a key link.

Who should be most worried about these developments? My take is that it should be contingency recruiters who active candidates have previously used to make approaches for them. The candidates will start to take some of that ownership back.

Text based job search in Kenya

2005-04-19T16:44:00.000+02:00

Short aside: Reuters has a lovely article entitled Kenyans Text Messaging Their Way to Jobs

Applicants Bill of Rights - should this be published?

2005-04-19T14:04:00.000+02:00

Dr. John Sullivan, writing is yesterday's ERE, discusses what he describes as an 'applicants bill or rights' - here in Europe we would probably call this an 'applicants charter'. However you describe it I'm not sure it really adds much value in the majority of cases to publish this, and is a great opportunity to disappoint.

It's not that I disagree with any of the themes Dr. Sullivan suggests - we seem to be on exactly the same wavelength on 99.9% of things and seem to have reached the same conclusions through our experiences however many thousands of miles apart. I'm not coming to his writing through aspiration, but as one who has implemented much of it and who reads it with a smile of confirmation - a sort of 'I've done that, and yes, that worked and that doesn't'.

Back to the article, he makes a great case for engineering the recruitment process from a candidate's perspective. This is rarely done, just in the same way as customers aren't really central to many customer facing process designs.

Back in the heady days of BPR I worked in a management consultancy and we spent a huge amount of time looking at process redesign, mostly in customer facing parts of retail financial services firms. We modeled lots of this stuff using electronic process modeling tools and then could run simulations showing where the bottle necks were going to be, how moving one part of the process to stage 5 instead of stage 2 could save hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was all great stuff but was almost always done from the perspective of increasing efficiency not improving customer service.

The problem with this approach is that it only looks at one stakeholder - usually the finance director. This is great in the short term but to have something really sustainable you need to consider all stakeholders. I used to frustrate some of my colleagues because I used to want to build in organisational learning into the processes. "How will Sue in level 1 support learn from passing all her difficult calls to level 2?" Great processes are ones that deliver to all stakeholders.

For a better look at this have a look at the Strategy Dynamics approach. (Wikipedia has a good summary, I am a big fan of Kim Warren's work in this area, much of it which can be found from his strategydynamics website) This stuff is probably for experienced business strategy readers.

Designing your process from a candidate perspective ensures that you are focussing on what I believe is the most critical stakeholder. If you do this you are likely to come up with a list of deliverables that look like those Dr. Sullivan notes. So what is the problem with the article? Well my belief derives from one paragraph:

However, if you are really bold, the best approach — which I recommend — is to promise them a high level of courtesy, respect, and treatment in what is known as an Applicant's "Bill of Rights."

It is all about whether you want to make the promise explicit. He says 'do' I say 'don't' (We both agree on what is to be delivered).

I spent last year coaching a manager of a very big bank about many of these issues. He thought a 'candidate charter' was a good idea. We discussed this on several occasions and he eventually decided not to do this. Why?

Every candidate starts their relationship with your firm with a set of expectations. For some those expectations are high, for others they are low. The distribution is probably normal. You can't do anything about these expectations.

A candidates charter enables you to articulate where you want to deliver. You're putting your flag in the ground. You have to be very confident that is where you are going to deliver (though exceeding your promises won't do you any harm). Let's consider the possibilities:

Your promise exceeds their expectations. For some you will raise their expectations. For some they will reject it with a 'we'll see this when it happens' sort of thought. Few will approach you because of a promise with no evidence.

Your promise equals their expectations. No effect

Your promise is lower than their expectations. I doubt that this really happens. Candidates have such poor expectations because as an industry we've treated them so badly for so long. Anyway, if this is the case you'll probably put some people off.

So let's consider you're in the tiny group of firms who are confident that they can constantly exceed expectations. Is a charter good for these? Well I'm not sure it is. Will people read your charter as 'fact' or 'marketing blurb'. Will they actually believe what you say? How can you prove it to them? Today's consumer is increasingly good at rejecting marketing messages.

What can you do if you are in this tiny group? Well you could be more transparent. Instead of publishing a charter or bill of rights how about publishing performance data? How about explaining why you do things? Candidates, given how they behave as consumers, might see this as more authentic.

You could get people to blog about their experiences. Probably the easiest group would be new hires. Blogs are wonderfully search engine friendly so use the words 'recruitment' and 'yourcompanyname' in a blog title and it will find it's way to the upper parts of a search pretty quickly. Independent blogs are likely to be seen as more authentic. Other bloggers might pick up the story.

Work with your external recruitment firms to ensure that the 'we provide a great candidate experience' is part of their message. They will be far more effective at communicating the message, especially if you can provide performance data. You will probably encourage any contingency recruiter to work harder for you.

The aim of the exercise is to get a reputation for providing great a candidate experience. Where I disagree with Dr. Sullivan is that I believe that a bill of rights is not a effective way of doing this. Explicit promises will give you a great opportunity to build up expectations only for one small hiccup to ruin it. A strong 'independent' reputation will probably get them thinking 'I was a bit unlucky' if something goes wrong.

Final word: measure who is being treated below your reputation and delight them. All processes under-deliver to some people. The trick is to turn these occurrences into an opportunity to delight. A bank might send a bunch of flowers to a customer it lets down. Could you do this? How many people would that person then tell?

Recruiting firms and the value chain

2005-04-12T21:47:00.000+02:00

Construct a value chain for recruiting and recruitment firms (whatever you call them) have a role. The aim for the corporate recruiter is not to try and eliminate them from the chain, it's how to ensure that they add as much value as possible, by focussing their role to one you can't provide, or can't provide efficiently.

Why do I write this? Two reasons: first I am currently meeting our existing suppliers and some firms that I know. Some are local specialists, some are the 'big names'. I'm asking them about how we could do it better, what our positioning in the market is etc. What can we do to make their life easier? I want to know the anecdotes and rumours about what is happening in our market.

Secondly I'm aware that many corporate recruiters seem to want to reduce or eliminate their involvement. I think that is often a mistake. For any company going direct to market is an option, but just like any other sector, it's often not the only option or even the right one. Sometimes it is better developing a strong sales channel. That involves time and energy, effectively training the channel how to sell more effectively. The only thing that is clear is that an approach without any channel development is wrong for such a complex 'product'.

The question for most recruiters should not be 'how do I eliminate recruitment firms' but 'how do I increase the value they add'. We may think that they are horrendously expensive but focus them correctly and they're worth it.

Competing on pay is a weak strategy

2005-04-07T22:30:00.000+02:00

Conversations today with a supplier about what's happening in the market. One of our competitors 'is throwing money at it'. Let them.

Being the top payer in a market is a weak strategy. To develop a long term competitive advantage in any market you have to offer something which is hard to replicate. Pay leadership is really simple to copy. Furthermore it reduces margins. Maybe it works if you really believe that your operation is better than anyone else can achieve (and you can therefore generate abnormal returns.)

It would also help if people choose employment purely on pay, but they don't. Key factors are complex, differentiated and shift with life stages.

What is harder to copy is having the greatest employee development, an exciting organisational culture, ingrained values. These things take time, commitment and constant effort to develop.

Pay needs to be competitive but you only need to pay above market rates if you can't generate advantage any other way. And all it takes is one quick conversation with the FD and we can destroy your competitive advantage in seconds.

Developing an Employee Value Proposition

2005-04-07T22:12:00.000+02:00

I'm constantly surprised at companies who can't articulate a clear, concise and differentiated message to why anyone would work for them.

On one side there seems to be those companies who really don't seem to be able to articulate anything. Ask any member of staff 'what makes working here better than all your other options' and you'll get a blank.

On the other side there are those 'employer brand' messages which derive from HR. They tend to be bland, aspirational and quickly rejected by the folks in the business. 'Another one of those HR things'.

So what do you need to do?

Well it's clear that to have something that everyone in the organisation can relate to it has to resemble reality. I describe the aim here as 'reality with a stretch' - i.e., what the individual can see with where they can see it's going. This is why clear executive communications are so important. You need everything to align.

Secondly the message is going to differ depending on where you sit in the organisation. Jane the head of legal will have a very different belief than Paul in payments. You need to go through and develop a EVP for each area. Ideally they need to match up - i.e. the top level message will be shared by everyone, then you might add something for the whole of HR (for example) and then more for the payroll folk.

Finally, the EVP develops over time. What was the stretch in year 1 is ideally not a stretch in year 2. Develop a 3 year plan to start based on the business strategy.

If you can't articulate your EVP why should anyone join you?

Not writing too much...

2005-04-01T23:33:00.000+02:00

As regular readers, and especially those of you who have subscriptions to the RSS feed are aware, my writing here has slipped as I have been transitioning into the new role. I have taken the view that I am not going to write directly about the role at this stage. As this is taking up 13 hours of my day at the moment, and my wife has a genuine reason for my time, writing is a bit harder.

Why? Well it is a combination of the culture of private banking, our low profile at the moment. Blogging about work has a relevancy but it's never going to be the first strand of an online resourcing positioning.

What do I have planned? I will continue to contribute some more articles about thoughts, trends and conversations that I see. As I now have a much more active role in the whole 'talent piece' they may broaden in scope slightly. I would encourage you all to use the RSS option which will enable you to cope with a slightly more irregular level of posting.

What's currently on my mind? Building succession planning throughout an organisation, performance management and building a recruitment approach which will hopefully scare some of our talent competitors. Oh, and lots and lots of listening.

More on Application Tracking Systems

2005-03-23T22:08:00.000+01:00

Kevin Wheeler's article on Electronic Recruiting Exchange How to choose and implement an ATS is a good introduction to a very complex task.

As I have said before, I am of the belief that the technologies involved are maturing and the advantages to be gained from changing from one provider to another are reducing every month. (Let me caveat that with 'unless you're stuck with a legacy product' or 'you chose a solution which was never going to be suitable')

As Kevin suggests the majority of those issues lie with implementation. Not analysing and redefining processes, not following a controlled, systematic procurement process and not managing the implementation as any complex business change project are recipes for disaster. I would like to add 'not designing a candidate optimised process'.

If you deconstruct the value an ATS offers I believe that their are two main functions - managing and attracting applicants and managing the workflow. What too many companies focus on is the latter. There is little competitive advantage to be gained here so if this is your goal then I expect any ATS implementation is going to be a tactical solution, not strategic.

For an ATS implementation to be considered strategic it needs to give you a competitive advantage - it needs to shift your ability to position in the market. How will it help the business meet it's objectives? Cutting x% off costs is advantageous but probably a drop in the ocean as far as your firms financial outlook is concerned. The only way to get competitive advantage with an ATS is for you to be better at building relationships with your customers / candidates. You need the best people there are.

Would your ATS be considered as a best in class relationship management system? I doubt it. Was it a big part of your brief? Almost certainly not. Is it delivering the sort of value you want? No? Surprised?

So what can you do? Well you could think about 'exploding' the two components. How about a great workflow system (I know one company looking at a Siebel implementation to manage the 'sales' / workflow end) and a best in class front end? Given the sort of Webservices type approach most facilitate this might not be impossible. Alternatively focus your efforts on getting the front end right.

Indian Technology firms hiring spree

2005-03-20T18:51:00.000+01:00

via Guatam Ghosh an article in India's The Economic Times on the hiring spree at India's technology companies. The numbers are impressive, Infosys Technologes for example has been hiring 50 people a day for the last nine months.

More on 100% fit

2005-03-19T07:33:00.000+01:00

The organisation decides to go for 100% fit and managers wait until they find the 'right' candidate. For many roles you have empty spaces in the organisation.

What is the cost of this? Well putting a financial cost is pretty difficult in a knowledge based organisation. This is because the whole thing depends on complexity and interdependencies - by having someone working well in one position can increase the productivity of a whole host of others. Have a look at some of the network stuff coming out of the knowledge management community for more on this.

We can however make a simple assumption - that the value to the organisation of employing someone is greater than the total cost of doing so. To get to a more accurate number you probably need to ask the hiring manager 'what is the monthly cost to your business from not having this person' You need to look at things such as related projects which will slip and the value of those projects as predicted in the business case.

Here time to hire does become important, but not at an averaged level. What you're interested in is not the aggregate level but trends by departmental / functional level. Whilst time-to-hire stats do not adding much value trend values do and should be on your radar screens.

The leaner organisations get the more that this matters. So to get a better performing organisation you could argue that you should not be looking at 100% fit but on getting someone with the potential on board quickly. Please understand that I'm not advocating hiring low performers, just hiring based on the potential not whether the person has done the same job before. The question is 'how do I get someone who is productive in X months time?' The answer might well be 'hire without 100% fit and develop'

Of course you could build some slack into the system and over-recruit to cover for the inevitable resignations. You could use development and hiring together and hire for the future, building succession into the system. Now wouldn't that be sensible.

Is 100% fit just wrong?

2005-03-18T19:43:00.000+01:00

We live in an era when many corporate recruiters hide behind their recruitment tools. Keyword resume search is the norm, and to get to the attention of a recruiter you now have to be a closer and closer fit.

And what is wrong with this I hear you ask? Well quite a lot. If you think through the dynamics of the situation it just doesn't work.

Let's take the applicant's perspective first. HR professionals have bleated on for the last 15 years about the 'self managed career' and guess what, your ambitious young manager believes it (many at the junior levels think it just means 'we're not going to develop you any more')

So people are building their marketability. When someone sits in front of you they are thinking 'what can this job do for my CV'. Fail to answer this and they won't join you.

People are looking for advancement, new challenges, to learn new skills. Forget training courses learning is mainly situational.

So what do recruiters do? Well, we search for people who have done the role before. That's how they get those key skills on their CVs. If we're recruiting into the organisation it is typically to do a very similar job to the one they are already doing.

And you wonder why you struggle to excite them? What are you offering in terms of improvements in marketability? You wonder why they get bored quickly and want to move on?

By looking for great fit what you're doing is limiting their development. The question is not 'have they the experience to do this?' but 'have they the potential to do this?'

And guess what? Looking for 100% fit takes longer than looking for potential so you're left with big gaps all over the organisation. But that will be the theme for the next post...

"It's just people, people."

2005-03-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

Heather should be go straight to the top of the class for her post today entitled Blogging is not the "big, new thing" in recruiting...relationships are.

She perceptively discusses blogging as a new technology and whether it is the 'Big New Thing'. Her words on blogging resonate:

But it's role is as an enabler.

and then whilst sprinting towards the finish she finds that final kick (hey, I was a 400m runner once-upon-a-time)

Relationships and, more specifically, treating people like customers (shocking concept, huh?), is where it's at (bad grammar...sorry). Let's not even refer to them as "candidates" because that is very short-sighted. It's just people, people.

This mindshift change is both the most profitable and hardest change you can ever make to a corporate recruitment function. Too many recruiters in corporate HR see enquiries and applicants as a drag. Why do so many of the ATS companies sell 'process' - it's because the average recruiter with their 'internal clients' think that way.

I frequently get teams to envisage what the recruitment function would look like if it were designed by the people at Amazon (Amazon used because most have used it at one time). Treat your prospective employees (or employees because often they get an even worse deal) so it makes them feel special, listen and learn what they are wanting, treat them with respect and give them a service that makes them tell all their friends.

Does the 'if you don't hear from us in 3 weeks presume you're a not successful' do this? How hard is that courteous email?

Take every one of your processes, everything you do, and go through them asking 'would Amazon treat its clients like that?' and then 'how can I make people feel special?' There are no 'we can't do that's allowed in that brainstorm.

Of course you need to segment people and treat different groups in different ways depending on their 'value'. But here's the depressing thing - do anything decent in this industry and your average person thinks you're great. Yes, the bar is that low.

Presume that you're going to run out of people and you will need everyone one day. Now understand you get one chance to impress. That reject email has to be a call to continue the relationship.

So where do blogs fit in? Well as Heather points out it's one way of enabling relationships. Blogs work for some communication needs but not for others. You need a good strategy for them. Discussion boards are useful for other things (like customer service) and fixed websites useful for others.

Unfortunately with blogs you can't easily understand the reader profile. I want my relationship system (also known as an ATS) to tell me not only who is right for a job but who subscribes to my RSS feeds, who reads what pages on the site, the frequency they visit, have they ever commented, what terms they searched on, do we have their cv, when was it last updated, what percentage click through do you get on email. That's because it has to be a relationship system.

Why do I want this? Because I really, really want to add value to them, because if I add value to them they will do to me. I want to talk to them about things that interests them. If they are interested in a role in finance I want to send them a copy of each article in the WSJ, FT or the trade press that says what great work we're doing in that area. I want to segment them, know what they want and then I can sell the relevant messages directly.

I'm going to want to get them to give me lots of selection information when they find the right role not just send off a generic CV. Would they invest the time if they're not eager to get on board? Your dream is to get people who say 'I'm not looking but if yourcompany comes to me with the right offer I want to talk'. There's one of these companies in every sector. It being your competitor is unacceptable.

Technology helps you provide a feeling of personalisation to a large group of people and guess what - talk to any futurist and personalisation is one of the key consumer trends and candidates are just consumers of your jobs. Study candidate behaviour and consumer behaviour for major purchases such as cars or houses and they are almost identical.

But it doesn't end with technology. Relationships can be developed in a variety of ways, some online and some face to face. The good recruiter will use all available methods but calculate the real cost (including time) and provide different levels to different segments. Blogs are one tool but the strategy is still king.

In some ways I'm glad Heather is half way around the globe. I won't be competing with her for many people. Heather certainly gets it.

Fundamentals of internal marketing

2005-03-17T09:37:00.000+01:00

Quality Service Marketing has an interesting series of articles on Internal Marketing Fundamentals.

Developing a strong internal brand is fundamental to developing a strong external employment brand and the two need to be done together. External recruiters aren't always in a position to directly change the internal marketing, but they should at least have a representative at the table when setting the internal strategy. In my experience this has been a great experience for both parties. Add the corporate marketing folk in and you really have a strong team.

Well worth a read.

Appraisals damaging HR

2005-03-17T09:13:00.000+01:00

People IQ, an online performance appraisal company has released a survey suggesting that

Only 13 percent of employees and managers and 6 percent of CEOs think their organization's performance appraisal is useful. And 88 percent say their current performance appraisal negatively impacts their opinion of HR.

The survey finds that appraisals are seen as too generic (little evidence to support comments), too cumbersome and that systems don't differentiate low and high performers.

Business Week on LinkedIn

2005-03-17T08:57:00.000+01:00

A good article from Business Week discussing the recent LinkedIn recruitment advertising move.

New paid-search tool

2005-03-17T08:23:00.000+01:00

Microsoft recently launched a competitor to Google's AdWords and Yahoo's Search Marketing Solutions Group (Overture was so much easier to say) with adCenter.

Why should you keep this on your radar screens? Because in a very smart move Microsoft is combining registration data to provide much more relevant data to marketers.

Gartner G2 has a good analysis of this.

'Top company to work for' lists

2005-03-17T08:09:00.000+01:00

Way back in the history of time I took over the reins of a corporate's employment branding function. My predecessor had spent a lot of time and budget getting onto 'best company to work for' lists and as I had a tight budget and was targeted on everything but where we placed on these lists I thought that this some of this spend could be better allocated elsewhere.

In the first year I scaled back some of the spend, cleaned up our communications messages and focused the brand message. We held our position + or - a position or two. Managers were still impressed as we were placed alongside firms with promotional spend multiples of ours.

I'm not exactly sure what caused the change - probably some long beer-lubricated evening in a London pub discussing how people behave in organisations. (I'm not usually that boring... OK, not always.) That and every board member asking about how we ranked whenever I met them.

I'm still not of the opinion that these things make a huge difference in recruitment marketing, at least not for major brands. They might do a bit to existing staff who want to 'validate' their choice and they might give you a bit of brand recognition if you're small or not a household name. They're probably good if you are in an industry with a poor employment reputation where you can demonstrate you're not like the norm. However they certainly matter for senior execs and in that way can give you the license to do the stuff that really makes a difference.

There are typically two types of these surveys - ones that question a bunch of your people, picked at random and the other which question external people, typically at university of business school.

Both are relatively easy to manage, at low cost, for a focused recruitment branding team. I will stick my neck out and say the external ones are the easiest, as it is easier to persuade someone with a limited amount of knowledge what you're about than someone who meets you every day.

Here is the simple process:

1) Talk to the survey company, find out what they are looking for, when they are surveying etc. Many of them will also do other similar company-specific surveys which you might want to use so having the conversation is pretty easy

2) Plan a targeted marketing campaign. Use all your normal channels, especially the ones like email that you can alter and judge results quickly (because you measure those 'click-throughs' on everything you do online don't you). This marketing campaign will begin probably 4-5 weeks before survey date and pull out your strengths in the areas that are going to be surveyed. Make sure they are strengths or you'll end up with little integrity. Focus the messages to those being surveyed so to reduce 'noise' to the others.

3) Wow, somehow when the survey comes around the 'things that your great at' are fresh in respondees minds and you go to the top of the class.

4) Talk to internal comms and make sure that everyone in the firm knows about the success - especially senior execs.

We're not talking about brand recognition tools like those that companies such as Millward Brown produce for your corporate marketing departments, these 'best company to work for' surveys are pretty easy to manipulate and it should be in every recruitment marketers year-plan to do just that.

IIM students in demand again

2005-03-16T16:04:00.000+01:00

India's Business Standard reports that India's IIMs, the country's top business schools, have been experiencing heated recruitment activity with the top investment banks and consultancies competing for the top graduates.

A few years ago I ran a recruitment campaign in the IIMs, operating it from London with the help of colleagues in Singapore and India. I think it was the most 'eye-opening' experience of my working life.

Unlike Europe and the US campus recruitment in India is simple. You are allowed to speak to people first but from there all companies are only allowed to select from a certain date. At Bangalore we had a suite of rooms with McKinsey down the corridor and Deutsche Bank below us. You try to grab the best students, interview and make an offer on the spot. The students finish the day with a confirmed job.

I remember having a conversation back in London with a counterpart at another firm where he was complaining that 'not all companies were playing fair' and that some students had even been 'captured' so not to interview elsewhere. I am not sure that closing the acceptance, whisking them into a taxi and taking them to a very long 'welcome' lunch at the wonderful Oberoi with the head of the Indian office and head of investment banking SE Asia counts as 'captured', but if it does we were certainly guilty.

Only when you have interviewed at an IIM do you realise how mediocre too many of the students at Europe's top schools are. 6 good hires in 2 hours is good in anybody's books and even given long-haul business flights the cost-per-hire was startlingly low.

Recruitment scheme prompts hunger strike

2005-03-16T15:51:00.000+01:00

A lovely little article in today's Hindu (link to journal not article).

92 Executives of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) in the Vellore Telecom District have started a 3 day hunger strike. The paper reports that:

Their demands included implementation of non-post-based time-bound promotion, weightage for past service (in the Department of Telecommunications/Department of Telegraph Services before the formation of BSNL) and ban on recruitment of management trainees.

Spring might be here.

2005-03-16T15:08:00.000+01:00

Given that On Talent and Heather of Marketing at Microsoft fame seem to be sharing their weather experiences I thought that I would bring this 'off topic' post. (You could also claim that as I am English then weather would be a big part of any conversation.)

We had a really weird winter. Since arriving here in Geneva a few years ago winters have been grey and cold-ish. I can't remember any snow lasting more than 24 hours in the valley.

Yesterday the snow finally melted in our garden - it had been there since January. Last week we had a heavy snowfall, which in the mountains translated into 1 metre deep powder snow. Now that was fun. My wife and I skied a lovely steep bumpy black not knowing where our knees were, never mind the skis. I don't think I've laughed so much in years.

This week the temperature is about 20 degrees C. Yesterday, the 'plage' in the village had some intrepid woman sunbathing next to the lake with the last bit of snow in the shadows under the trees. We have primroses in the hedges and the first flower has opened this lunchtime in the garden.

So skiing might be over for this year. Onto cycling in the foothills of the Alps and dreaming of summer evenings spent with a good bottle of the local Rose with friends in a boat on the lake.

Geneva constantly comes in the top of those 'world standard of living' league tables and it's times like these when I sit back, smile and understand why.

JobThread - referrals and more

2005-03-15T09:47:00.000+01:00

I have been having an email exchange with Eric Yoon, the CEO of an innovative young company called JobThread Inc.

The idea behind JobThread is a simple one (aren't all the best ones?). JobThread automates the referral process, in a similar way that many of the referral modules of the big application tracking systems do, but with one big difference - the motivation is built into the chain, not just at the first point.

One of my big projects last year was designing a company wide referral system for a big corporate. Referral programmes are great when they work - they reduce cost per hire dramatically, and motivate staff. In fact there is quite some evidence to show that by just selling their employer to their acquaintances it reiterates to them why it's such a great place to work. If you can get the programme right you should expect around 35% of all hires to come from this channel.

What's more, there seems to be little evidence that the level of payment is a big determinant in the likeliness to refer. Over a certain level - let's call it an administration cover - increasing the payment won't dramatically increase the number of referrals. Let's face it, if you'll refer for £2500 but not for £250 you don't really believe in what you're trying to sell.

There is also a widely held belief that 'our senior people should just do it' or 'they don't need the cash'. I see no evidence to support this. They still have the administration cover, they still want recognition. Just because someone earns £100,000 doesn't mean that an extra amount won't be noticed. You'll find plenty of your senior staff struggling with the bills, though in their case the worries might be school fees not the electricity bill.

The key factor for making a referral programme work is not how you reward but making sure that you do. In other words it's getting the process right, making it simple to understand and resilient. The people who refer are likely to be you most motivated members of staff - the ones most eager to tell their acquaintances. If your process, both the referral process but more so your recruitment process, isn't great you'll annoy them, annoying your most loyal staff.

A new system can't force you to treat candidates with more respect, but it can automate a process ensuring everyone gets paid, which brings me back to JobThread.

JobThread is one of the first systems that I have seen which is a stand-alone referral system. As a hiring manager, or staffing manager, you put in your jobs and send them through it to a range of contacts. There is nothing to say these contacts couldn't be everyone in your firm, or even include people outside the firm. If any of these contacts recommend someone they get the payment.

However, what is innovative with JobThread is that if one of your contacts sends it to someone they know, who then sends it on to one of their contacts and the hire is made then both referrers share the fee. It motivates down the chain as well.

At the moment using JobThread is free. You will have policy issues to overcome but given this is I would suggest giving it a go. It will work as well, if not better, for senior level talent as well as junior roles due to the deeper professional networks these people often have.

In the future there is even the real possibility that JobThread could charge on success, making it the only pay-for-performance online recruitment tool I can think of.

Why else do I think this is a great tool? Well one reason is that unlike many other network based tools it does not depend on a huge installed network to start being useful. The network effect is important, but it is the individual's network, not the tool's.

Who do I think will get the most out of this? My guess is that the big users will be staffing firms and medium sized organisations. Getting large organisations on board could depend on how it links to the big ATS - the reality is that an organisation with 2500 active roles won't want to re-post on two systems. However Eric has indicated that he's eager to set this up as necessary. Again, the advice would be to get in there early and negotiate to be a test user if you're interested.

For a medium sized firm JobThread could offer a very simple way of implementing the process automation needed by a referral programme.

Application tracking systems

2005-03-14T21:44:00.000+01:00

A conversation with the resourcing director of a very large European company late last week about staffing systems, and why so many firms are unhappy with their choices.

We both agreed that fundamentally they are all 'much of a muchness' (we're talking about the enterprise level) however there are a few parts that few corporates consider when selecting a system, the prime being usability.

What I mean by usability is how easy it is for a candidate to use the system. This doesn't just mean how nice it looks when the sales guy demonstrates it but how easy it is for the average, system illiterate user to use it.

Another of my complaints is that all too often systems seem to be built around Internet Explorer and users of other browsers struggle. Try using a small laptop screen (yes, I hate frames, especially when you have to scroll back and forth in a frame to get to the controls)

A good way of looking at how users are using the system is to look at your statistics. Look at how many complete the process, where they fall out etc. Several systems require the applicant to fill in an online 'CV' form which can take 30 minutes. Is that 29 minutes longer than your competitor requires?

You also need to think about what are the most important things to know about an individual before bringing them in. Is that CV the only thing? Could you get more value from job specific questions? Does your system allow this? How about integration with external testing (again job specific)?

Overall, however, similarities are more common than differences. So why are so many firms considering changing?

Well, it's not the systems (in general) it's their users. How many firms contracted with a clear strategy of what they wanted from their information - that's right, information not the system. How is the information that they store delivering competitive advantage?

What they've bought is a big contact system. Sure it lets you process applicants but it really adds value when used as a relationship building tool. That's where you get the value, and guess which part is overlooked?

And who is using the systems in these ways? Well it is all-too-often the recruitment outsourcers who, on average, are a few laps ahead of the main corporates (because they often come from competitive recruitment company backgrounds with the mentality this develops?) Push a ATS provider and they will probably concede this.

So, before you've ditched your current system for another one consider this - will the change actually help, or would you be better off using what you have better?

Search as the job board

2005-03-04T07:07:00.000+01:00

About a month ago I wrote an entry on search engines and job boards - the simple summary being that I thought that job-specific search would become the dominant way of finding jobs.

I was not the only one thinking this way. Have a look at Indeed.com and you'll see it's based on much that I discussed.

A few other reasons for checking this one out. First they have developed a simple stats page which they indicate is only the start.

Secondly, they have added personalised RSS as a way of being informed about new jobs matching the search criteria.

Finally, they have an interesting Blog called Blog Indeed.

How long before one of the big search firms follows into this area?

Recruitment Advertising - an employee experiments

2005-03-03T21:28:00.000+01:00

One employee is experimenting with recruitment advertising to attract people to his employers employee referral scheme. What is most interesting is that he is blogging his findings - comparing an identical advert on LinkedIn and Craigslist. Craigslist is miles ahead.

He describes his activities as 'grassroot recruiting', a term I think works. Getting this sort of activity by staff is something many companies could benefit from. However, for it to really work you need to prepare them. I will presume that by now you will have identified what your differentiatiors are in the many 'segments' that your company competes for staff in. Tell your staff. Get them to sell their own personalised version of this message. Provide 'support packs'. Of course, because the messages came from the staff in the first place they are unlikely to reject them. Make them seem like they are from HR and you'll get the 'yes, whatever' response (rightly so.)

Research suggests that people don't refer their best friends, they go further down in their networks, or even, as in this case, outside it. I have encountered someone using this form of 'grassroot recruiting', though in my case the individual was paying for adverts in his local paper. HR of course started discussing this behaviour, even whether to discipline the individual. Fortunately common sense ruled and we decided to support him. Our biggest worry became that he was making more in referral payments than we paid him in salary.

College recruitment teams often promote this type of behaviour by getting alumni to build relationships with their old schools. You should be thinking how to mobilise the whole organisation to think about grassroot recruitment.

On Talent

2005-03-03T15:53:00.000+01:00

As part of catching up on the last manic two weeks (sorry for the lack of posts - work and skiing took over) I came across On Talent, Doug Miller's (of Hire.com) new blog.

Doug and I share many of the same interests so there are a lot of overlaps between our blogs. We even seem to share many of the same interests including photography (see here for how I woke up yesterday). Most importantly he writes some great articles on how to approach talent.

Certainly one to add to your RSS feeds.

Another survey on what causes people to move

2005-03-03T11:10:00.000+01:00

Today's Daily Telegraph has an article entitled There's more to life than pay which discusses how managers judge their roles. The survey which the article is based on is interesting because it is not conducted by a recruitment firm, therefore it doesn't just survey active job-seekers.

Commenting on the research Andrew Platt-Higgins, planning director at recruitment firm Barkers believes

state of the housing market is largely responsible and points to the fact that 53 per cent of RCI respondents say the location of a job would influence whether or not they applied for it.

I am not in total agreement with this, as I wrote earlier. The way families organise childcare, and the growing importance of two-career families at the managerial level increasingly determine the likeliness of relocation, not the state of the housing market.

For more information on judging what influences career choice see this earlier article: Understanding what matters to the candidate

Recruitment Networking goes niche

2005-03-03T10:57:00.000+01:00

Not the first, and no doubt not the last - Danish company Networking4People has launched it's first 'social' network aimed at recruitment in the SAP market.

Just as in the job-board market going niche has advantages (it's a classical strategic evolution - just think about how many different categories of cars there are now than 15 years ago) however, unlike job-boards it does presuppose that SAP people network mainly with SAP people.

Take two instances:

Person A wants to contact person B. Both are SAP specialists

For a niche network to work then all the intermediary contacts are SAP people.
For a larger network to hold the strength then an intermediary between A and B could be none-SAP. However there will be more 'noise' and the intermediary will likely be in less of a position to determine the 'quality' of the approach.

Niche networks are worth watching but should sit on the periphery of any recruiters channels. As always it is worth measuring time spent on these activities to get a true understanding of cost-per-channel.

On job boards

2005-02-16T09:41:00.000+01:00

ER Daily has published a great article by Raghav Singh on job boards, and why they have yet to meet their promise. It's worth reading

For the most part I think he is spot on, though I am not quite so pessimistic regarding their potential success. I believe that there are a few contributing factors which serve to lessen the benefits for both employers and candidates.

First, most job boards don't provide decent job search tools. Whilst geography searching is possible it is rarely well done. Why not give weighting to search results based on accurate distances from the candidates home address to place of work. This would be pretty easy to implement. Even better would be 'time to work', but my guess is that this would require too much server load at the moment.

Better still would be adding information such as salary and enabling search by that as well. In many countries recruiters rarely put salary on jobs. I think that this will change over time. The more information available the more preselection the candidate can do.

For employers more automatic or semi-automatic selection will aid coping with large numbers of applications. I am yet to be convinced that the CV is the most useful piece of information that a candidate could provide to help selection. Some recruitment systems allow the recruiter to ask several job-specific questions. Ask the killer questions and you get a good view of suitability. Link with external testing tools if this is part of your process.

The dream for employers would be that all their jobs get viewed by the largest possible number of applicants but they are presented by a short list of highly qualified applicants, presenting information in a way to help the decision making process. Technology can certainly help here.

For candidates the dream is to be served only the most relevant jobs. A job board type system that could learn which jobs interested the individual would be beneficial. One with much greater opportunities to search, using defined fields would be a significant help.

Searching is a huge cost to both groups and a key factor making the process inefficient. I cannot see the current job board model changing. I stand by my earlier views on new players coming into the space bringing new business models. Better acceptance of HR-XML format documents would dramatically increase efficiencies.

Monster users in Europe

2005-02-11T15:46:00.000+01:00

Interesting data from the OECD Observer.

Monster users registerd in Europe

click here for larger image

Career Insights

2005-02-11T14:12:00.000+01:00

A few days late I know, but a recent Harvard Business School "Working knowledge" newsletter has a great interview with Monica Higgins based on her forthcoming book "Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry"

What is career imprinting? Well she defines it as:

Career imprinting refers to the process by which individuals pick up or cultivate a certain set of capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition due to their work experiences at a particular employer.

Career imprints are associated with particular organizations; they derive from patterns in the career experiences that people share as a result of working at that organization. Therefore, we can talk about certain capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition that might be associated with having worked at GE during a particular point in time—this would be a "GE career imprint."

Why is this important? Well, certain companies (at certain times) are more likely to generate traits that lead success later on. Prof. Higgins highlights this:

I have collected career history information of the approximately 3,200 executives who took biotech firms public between 1979 and 1996; these data show that almost one quarter of these firms had someone on their IPO team who once worked at Baxter. Even after accounting for Baxter's size—Baxter was smaller than firms such as J&J that also spawned executives into biotech—Baxter generated a disproportionate number of leaders in the biotechnology industry.

This obviously has implications for recruiters (many will tell you they have used this technique for many year) but also to a company's talent management group. Of course just because someone is from X doesn't automatically mean that they are great, but getting a better understanding of the background of your top talent (compared to others) would be beneficial.

The use of geographic data

2005-02-11T11:29:00.000+01:00

John Sumser in the Feb. 10 edition of the Electronic Recruiting News discussed geographical issues with web Recruiting.

Geography is highly relevant when considering recruitment. Most candidates do not wish to relocate, and research shows that this is going to become more likely as in the future. John discusses using databases and recruitment systems to identify roles within particular areas and whilst this would be a great start there is more to it than that. As he suggests, the postal code (zip code in US) is key.

Geography in recruitment strategies

Understanding the people living in your locality is hugely beneficial when planning expansion, looking at retention & predicting sustainability of workforce etc. The underlying question is 'given our catchment area is this strategy implementable?'

There are a few data sources that you should be considering. I will consider this in the UK perspective but similar data is available for all major economies.

In the UK the official labour market data is provided by Nomis, which is based at the University of Durham. The Nomis site provides lots of great information for free which makes it the perfect starting point. If we look at the area where I grew up, Sefton (link to Nomis information), you can see information about the size of the workforce, the number of people looking for work, the split between male and female, the types of jobs that they are doing etc. This gives you an idea of your total available population.

The second source you should look at is your HR database. The three bits of data you are interested in are:

Postcode of residence (home address)
Postcode of workplace
Postcode when they applied to you - shows if they moved since starting work, indicating relocation. This last bit of data might come from your Application tracking system, however it is less likely that these were linked to your main HR system.

By combining the first two you can understand how far people have to travel to work. You can use this data to understand where it is likely people are going to be living for recruitment purposes. At lower levels recruitment is highly locally based.

You can also look at retention and recruitment difficulties by geography. Given that time spent commuting is a major factor in retention it can be useful to understand the probability of someone resigning based on distance to work.

Another aspect to look at is the distribution of travel distances over time. As the local market becomes exhausted you start to see distances travelled increasing as people are sourced further away. This is a great predictor of recruitment difficulties and can even be used to determine when larger offices should be reduced in size and new centres created.

The final information source you can use is household databases used by marketing companies. This information will often give you a very detailed overview of the types of people who live in an area. If you know for example the distribution of incomes you can get a more accurate view of the relevant labour market size. This is useful when considering using location based advertising (such as posters). One large retailer found that their second most successful advertising channel for the majority of their jobs was bus shelters (after a notice in the branch). Given the marketing information it would be possible to work out which bus routes would be the most successful, or potentially even which bus shelters.

Back to online recruitment, what would help? Well my personal view is that the adoption of the HR-XML format for the resume would provide us with a more accurate way of understanding geographies. Given that the data format tells systems which bits of the resume (or CV) contains the geographic data searching by geography becomes very simple. Searching for candidates on geography becomes much easier.

Making a successful graduate recruitment site

2005-02-10T16:02:00.000+01:00

Australia's Business Review Weekly has a short article about Swedish consultancy Potentialpark Communications review of Australian careers sites. It says that the vast majority of sites fall short of being great (article for subscribers).

BRW notes:

The study also found that many sites were not effectively targeting people they wanted to attract, which can result in large numbers of online applications from unsuitable candidates. What many company web sites fail to do is respect job seekers' time. The best sites, such as Coles Myer, are able to tell potential recruits how their job application is progressing.

Failing to explain the company's culture was also seen as an issue with many sites.

Google's recruitment struggles impacting expansion.

2005-02-10T15:55:00.000+01:00

The Wall Street Journal today ran an article describing how Google's expansion plans were being slowed by its recruitment process.

"Can we hire the quality and quantity of people we want to? No," said co-founder Sergey Brin, speaking before several hundred analysts at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. "We're underinvesting in our business because of the limitations of hiring." Google said it has more than 3,000 employees, up from 2,292 in June.

The article appears to be for subscribers only.

Little Britain

2005-02-07T19:13:00.000+01:00

A very sad announcement in the UK today on the tightening of immigration to the UK.

Immigration is always a hot subject, and one where economic reasoning rarely seems to match the country's mood. But mostly governments hold a delicate balance - they talk tough and recognise the need, giving out visas quite liberally.

The UK seems to be reversing that, and, for a Brit that is very sad. Why? Because I truly believe that the country should be encouraging immigration not discouraging it.

The UK scheme seems loosely based on the Australian one - a points based one to encourage the 'right' skills. Student visas and low-skill visas will be reduced.

What is the reality?

First the demand is not just strong at the top but also at the bottom (I wrote about this before). This is not just in the UK but many other developed countries. Localisation of low skill labour is increasingly needed as an economy grows more wealthy, or old. What happens when you make visas harder for these people to acquire? Well the ILO quite correctly states that you don't cut immigration, you just cut legal immigration. My own Canton recently asked for an amnesty on illegal immigrants - Walk around Geneva, talk to it's residents and you realise that the area depends on a large influx of (illegal) immigrants. By cutting this you also increase the cost of living and reduce economic growth for all.

Secondly, the UK seems to be having a net emigration of young men according to official statistics. It is hard to accurately assess this but given both anecdotal evidence (I know quite a few, me included) and the fact that they have gone to other economies with strict visa controls for qualified labour it would suggest that the UK has a drain of highly educated young men.

Given that many students stay where they graduate does a policy of discouraging students seem a good one? The UK is losing its educated young and blocking one of the best potential solutions.

Third. Is modeling your immigration strategy on a country with an overheated labour market such a great one? Australia's economy needs more workers in many sectors.

Finally, companies are being faced with a very simple choice. Import in workers or export jobs. Stop immigration and guess which it will be?

I could go on but I won't. It's a very sad day.

Search engines and recruiting

2005-02-07T19:10:00.000+01:00

The Online Recruitment Blog (via Recruiting.com) has a good set of articles on online marketing. Worth a look includes HR, meet Marketing

The article covers recruiters using AdWords or similar to ensure that they are well placed on searches. I have both designed these programmes and worked with a very capable web team at a large ad agency to manage other programmes. A few lessons learnt include:

1) Buy your company's name. Sounds obvious but you would be surprised how many firms when you search "jobs companyname" are delivered the result "companyname to outsource to India" or similar.

2) Keep your AdWords tightly defined (for specialist skills)

3) Monitor results and change words regularly.

Why use AdWords? Well there is quite a lot of evidence showing the jobseekers go to their favourite search engine when looking for a new job. This points them to the job-boards, companies etc that they will often use later on. Get them at the search engine stage and you will capture them at the beginning of their campaign.

Often, job seekers will then start to go directly to their favourite job boards (a big one or two and some niche ones) thereby missing the Googles of this world out of the equation. AdWords (or any other Pay per click advertising) is less good at this stage, therefore you cannot rely just on PCP, but it is a very cost effective tool to add to your job search.

There has been a lot of talk about niche job boards. Whilst I agree that their time has come I am not convinced it indicates a long-term trend.

Job boards make their money from providing a useful function, namely bringing together lots of jobs at one place, thus enabling the user to use one site rather than searching many. Niche boards work because the search functions on the big boards isn't terribly smart and the user is delivered a lot of noise. Going niche cuts this.

The cost of advertising on a board brings benefits. First it reduces the noise and secondly of course the board benefits with revenue. Some of the larger ones tremendously.

Why do I not think therefore that niche boards will be the big story in the future? Because I think it will be a search engine, and given its stance on independence of search results (or at least transparency) I wouldn't put any money on Google not entering the space.

If you are a large organisation the chances are you use one of a pretty small number of applicant tracking systems to post jobs onto your site. Most of these sites use an HR-XML structure to communicate their data with other services. Having the data in this format gives you far more accuracy when you are searching - it would be pretty easy to do geographical searches for example because the XML makes it clear which part of the data is about geography.

Let's consider a scenario, one that I don't think is out of the question.

1) someone with a relatively large power decides to compete with the job boards with great search technology, based on HR-XML and not charge for inclusion, at least not for the basic functionality (of course they could add PCP advertising alongside search results)

2) To get the major firms to include all they need to do is contact about 10 companies (the major ATS providers) to ask for a feed. Given that the ATS providers want their clients to have the maximum success from using their systems I can not see a reason why they wouldn't want to link.

3) Build this together and, if you believe in such things, you probably have 80% of the available jobs by going for the top 20% of firms (most using 10 or so ATS providers). This will create the demand by others to also link thereby putting pressure on the smaller ATS providers. As inclusion will be free the service will capture a large proportion of users quickly.

4) The biggest disadvantage would be noise, but this could be managed, not least because the large firms could have better ratings and rank higher than the others. It's how search engines already deliver quality results.

Because search technology is accurate it is better to use one big search engine rather than small ones. By using decent searches you cut down the noise. The same could happen with job boards. Free listings with accurate search would be a very hard model for niche boards to compete with.

Seth Godin on hiring

2005-02-03T14:18:00.000+01:00

Seth Godin has an interesting set of articles (1st,2nd,3rd) on his blog about the current method of staffing, and the differences between small, entrepreneurial firms and large organisations. He is almost spot-on.

He is right in how small companies recruit. They do go to market, advertise etc. but they are less concerned about the job description. The managers haven't had to go through endless procedures to get the job signed-off, job evaluated etc. The hiring manager is often part of the management team, they can make real decisions.

Way back I was head of recruitment in a fast growing professional services firm. I reported into the MD. We would discuss not only the recruitment pipeline but what projects were coming up, where the demand was being created. I knew the business inside out. We would have roles we would like to fill (a senior public sector specialist for example) but we were never recruiting to fill a role, we were recruiting to build the business.

On most occasions senior staff members would make the hires, but I always had the ability to go to the MD. I remember several occasions when I did that. We may see someone who wasn't what we were looking for but we knew would be a good fit, and enable us to develop the business. We knew that one great hire could reshape the direction of the firm, not just at senior levels but anywhere. One of the founders' rules was 'all rules are there to be broken.' We broke 'rules', we became the fastest growing firm in the sector.

In many cases senior managers in big firms want to act like this, but they can't. Big firms have processes they have to go through, and structures where responsibility isn't clear (or where formal structures don't show how the business really operates). They are populated by people who know where the rules are (or at least the boundaries) and manage within the rules. As Godin rightly points out recruitment in these firms 'is totally demand based'.

Those who can make bold decisions in these firms rarely have strong relationships with those close to recruitment. They therefore don't have an ear to the market.

Here's my suggestions (and yes, I've seen it work in a big investment bank so I know it can happen).

1) Take one of your best managers, a senior high flyer, and tell them it's their full time job to worry about getting great people (hint, you probably won't find this person in HR)
2) Give them the authority to break rules
3) Make sure they know the business and it's strategies. They probably need to be very close to the CEO
4) Make getting great people a priority for all (yes, that probably means changing the reward structure)
5) Communicate to the market that you're always looking for great people & build the infrastructure to validate the claim. Ask speculative applicants why they are great - get them to sell themselves, don't just rely on a CV
5) Accept mistakes, but ensure you learn from them. Have a culture where if you make a bad hire you can part amicably.

I remember one of the senior members of the bank saying to me "I am not sure he's what we want at the moment, but I certainly don't want him as a competitor". We hired that person.

As demand becomes restricted this will start to happen more and more. However, there is a great opportunity for a big firm in each sector to gain first-movers advantage here. Question is, is it going to be you or your competitor?

Too much working

2005-02-02T10:43:00.000+01:00

A funny article on the latest version of the Onion "180 Trillion leisure hours lost to work in 2004"

Worth reading to lighten your day.

Engagement - it's not all about resignations

2005-02-02T10:41:00.000+01:00

We're living in an era of engagement - well that is what you might think if you spend too long around HR managers these days.

Engaged employees are more productive, happier and are less likely to be active job seekers. But how do you measure engagement? Well the answer is not all in the resignation figures.

As I've explained before people change jobs for a variety of reasons. Understanding what drives people is important, but the answer isn't all about your firm.

Employee opinion surveys usually measure two categories - those who aren't engaged but are unlikely to do anything about it and those who do expect to enter the labour market. What differentiates the two? Well it has a lot to do with three factors - their expectations, the costs of changing and their attitude to risk. Let's consider the three.

Expectations

People are constantly making choices about their work, and those choices are usually based on their expectations of how work will be in the future. In this way expectations and engagement are linked, but not in such a way that engagement is the sole determinent of the desire to change jobs.

When people are looking at how they expect the job to perform they are measuring what economists call utility, that is how much they expect to get out of performing the job. Whilst this obviously includes their salary it is far more complex than that.

Utility includes such things as how they feel their marketability will improve (through training, doing that project, having another year at X on their CV), the enjoyment that the get from being with the colleagues, how easy their commute is.... a whole range of things.

When someone is looking at their life they try to maximise this utility given a fixed amount of their resource, in this case their time. They compare all choices they know about and look at creating an ideal mix. Do they expect that working for X will give them more utility than working for Y? Would working for X 60% of the time and having more leisure increase their utility (given that X might want to pay them 60% of their salary).

For someone to be engaged they are feeling that working for X gives them more utility that working for anyone else, or any other option. They can however be disengaged but still working for you. How?

Costs of changing.

One factor is costs associated with changing. These could include cost of relocation, cost of leaving that wonderful pension scheme, cost of leaving their stock options. We see lots of reasons that suggests that people believe that the grass is greener on the other side in the future but they have too much invested in X. These people are likely to stay, disengaged but taking strategies to ensure that they get future benefits of these 'ties'. Think of the resignations the day after bonuses are paid or the people who 'keep their heads down' in the years before retirement and you can see this in action.

Ultimately if you add these sort of factors to your high performers you are more likely to keep them. Unfortunately so are your average performers - you might create an army of disengaged attendees.

There is also a cost associated with the job search it terms of emotional strains, time associated to searching when you could be doing more enjoyable things. The longer you expect the job search to take the more cost you expect.

Risk

How you view the future utility of working at X is relatively certain. The utility associated with working for Y is less certain and the way you view it will depend on your attitude to risk. Put simply if you're more willing to take calculated risks you're more likely to change.

This will also include your confidence in your value in the market. If you think that you have a strong market value you will feel more confident entering the market - after all, if you enter the market, go somewhere else and the reality isn't what you expect you can always re-enter the market.

So why aren't resignations great indicators of engagement? Because engagement only looks at the internal reasons for changing roles. Let's consider a few examples.

X is the biggest employer in the area. However 10 miles away Y opens a new office, and wants similar skills. This gives your employees new opportunities and they will think what working for Y could offer them. Maybe it's a shorter commute. You would expect your resignations to increase even if your people were equally engaged.

The economy changes and your staff see their are more (or less) job opportunities. Their expectation of their worth on the market changes and at the same time their willingness to risk a change or invest the time in their job search changes. You could find staff less engaged but few resign if the employment market is cooling at the same time.

Ultimately resignations will only be a good indicator of engagement if you can 'freeze' your external environment. Few of us can do that.

How teens use the web

2005-01-31T17:59:00.000+01:00

Jakob Nielsen's most recent usability alertbox focuses on how teens use the internet. It would make excellent reading for all who design recruitment websites targetting this group.

His recommendations include:

What's good? The following interactive features all worked well because they let teens do things rather than simply sit and read:
• Online quizzes
• Forms for providing feedback or asking questions
• Online voting
• Games
• Features for sharing pictures or stories
• Message boards
• Forums for offering and receiving advice
• Features for creating a website or otherwise adding content

Whist maybe not all of these are appropriate (remember they go to you because they are interested in a job, not for interactive features about not related topics) some of them certainly are.

In one firm we implemented message boards staffed by a young intern. It was both hugely popular but also dramatically reduced our support costs. We could get back to everyone within our ambitious 1 working day service aim (often much quicker) and we didn't have to answer the same questions over and over again. What's more we were given a free 'improve your website' tool - if they ask the question the chances are they can't find the answer.

A second instance we used a game (well a competition) to increase awareness in a particular activity the company did (very well) but wasn't known for. The multiple choice competition asked 5 simple questions, the answers being available on the public corporate website. We built a great database and what had historically always been a trouble area became oversubscribed overnight.

These techniques can be effectively translated to recruitment sites. The trick is understanding the behaviours and how you can use this to your advantage.

CSR and Recruitment

2005-01-31T13:53:00.000+01:00

Workforce Management have published an article entitled The recruiting payoff of social responsibility which detailed the first survey I had seen on the effects of CSR on recruitment. To quote:

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara (in 2003), surveyed 800 MBA students from 11 leading North American and European business schools and found that 94 percent would accept a lower salary--an average of 14 percent lower--to work for a firm with a reputation for being environmentally friendly, caring about employees and caring about outside stakeholders such as the community.

Of course this sort of information has been known from internal surveys for some time. Ask staff what they value about the organisation and they will often respond about CSR related themes, especially if they involve active involvement from staff.

Many companies have a CSR section on their site. Recruitment department would benefit from linking to it from directly.

Nokia's use of voice on its recruitment website

2005-01-31T13:08:00.000+01:00

(Via Bowen Craggs regular BC Tips email)
Nokia these days is about communications. It even uses the line 'Connecting People' in its advertising.

What is worth looking at is the People at Nokia section, a common element on many careers sites. What makes this site unusual is the use of voice where selected staff answer selected questions in an online 'interview'.

As Bowen Craggs noted:

Careers sections are the most-visited area of many company sites, particularly by students and new graduates. Combined with the jobs market going through a ‘seller’s’ phase, especially for the best-qualified talent, this puts an extra premium on getting the pitch right. Nokia shows how creative thought and execution can achieve that .

Lots in the news today...

2005-01-27T15:30:00.000+01:00

Lots in the news today. A few useful things below:

Australia's Business Review Weekly published an article called "Head-hunters picnic". Unfortunately you need a subscription to read it online however the article focuses on Seek.com.au, which it says has 60% of online recruitment and is considering a float this year.

It also looks at tightening labour markets with comments on how recruitment companies are becoming stronger and the ability for clients to lower fees is becoming weaker.

Finally, it has a list of 'How to keep staff'. Here it is:

* Start a retention strategy at the beginning of the employment cycle, not when someone says they are thinking about leaving.

* Managers need to stay in touch with the workforce. No workplace is perfect, so there is an enormous need to listen and respond.

* Get the right people in the right job in the first place.

* Extend maternity/paternity leave and allow employees to buy more leave.

* Offer flexibility.

* Ensure the workplace can effectively manage the different generations and their working styles.

* Try to offer career mobility within the company for those likely to get restless.

* Offer real, effective career planning.

* Make all employees understand, and feel a part of, the company's direction and offer challenging and satisfying work opportunities.

* When someone leaves, speak to them and find out why they are going.

Remember that these measures can apply to some people more than others and that you want to know which people you want to keep and which ones you are less upset if they leave.

The Orange County Register (link to journal, article not online yet at time of writing) has an article on a ruling yesterday that First American Corp has to pay Fidelity National $43.2m for recruiting a James A Magnuson and 30 of his team from Chicago Title, a Fidelity subsidiary. Magnuson had signed a non-compete agreement.

The UK's Independent has several interesting articles on recruitment. First a look at why refugees are struggling to find work,one on the staffing issues in the UK nursing sector, and the 'unethical' practices of some recruitment firm, and some other less interesting articles about graduate recruitment, mostly written for graduates.

Richard Donkin writing in the Financial Times discusses the latest report from the Saratoga Insititute Key trends in Human Capital, A Global Perspective. He notes:

In 2003, for example, it estimated that in Europe some Euros 1.5bn were invested in leadership training. However, its research has produced little evidence so far to demonstrate that these investments have produced any significant return.

Another surprise, given the strengthening commitment that companies claim to be making in diversity programmes, is that the proportion of women in managerial posts across European companies covered by the study, fell back between 2001 and 2003 by 1.9 percentage points to 24.6 per cent.

The proportion of women in professional posts during the same period fell even more markedly from 33.6 to 29.3 per cent.

In the same period the proportion of women in the total headcount remained stable at about 39 per cent.

Finally, the South China Morning Post has an article about Oracle's recruitment practices in China (not online at time of writing).

The article talks about the 'cultural fit' tools the firm's Asia-Pacific organisational design team designed, how the interviews are conducted in English, how it sets out it's expectations openly at interview (how many firms miss this one?) All new hires are assigned a buddy.

The article goes on to note:

While Ms Woo (HR Director) is aware that staff retention is becoming a key issue elsewhere, it does not concern her too much. "Oracle realise they must pay competitively and regard this as a 'hygiene factor' - one of the first things you must clear up," she said. "We have found, though, that the crucial thing in attracting and holding on to good staff is how much they believe in the company and its future direction. The 'techie' people admire the products and management vision and want to contribute to the company; others enjoy working in a competitive environment where new things are coming in every day."

Decrease in staff loyalty in Canada / Phychological testing

2005-01-26T15:40:00.000+01:00

A Watson Wyatt survey, reported in Canada's Globe and Mail finds that 46% of employees said they would consider moving companies if a comparable job was available, up 9% from two years ago.

The survey found that only 40 per cent of employees feel they have opportunities for growth, development and advancement with their current employers and only 27 per cent believe there is a clear link between job performance and pay.

The article discusses a few companies responses, and further Watson Wyatt comments.

A second article in the Globe & Mail looks at Psychometric testing in detail.

Techniques from Direct Marketing

2005-01-26T13:09:00.000+01:00

DM News have an article on '24 Key Database Marketing Techniques' which makes great reading for those involved in attraction strategy, employment brand work or recruitment marketing.

Replace the word 'consumers' with 'candidates' and most of the techniques become viable. When was the last time you analysed the quality and value you have built up in your various databases?

ChevronTexaco - almost great

2005-01-19T20:19:00.000+01:00

Catching up on a copy of the FT I picked up at Schiphol on Monday night I see a striking, full page ad from ChevronTexaco:

Where do we find our most talented employees?
Pick a country

The advert read with a well written 10 line copy about how 96% of their employees globally are hired locally.

The last time I recall such employee based corporate brand advertising was in the late 90's when I was at JP Morgan. At the height of the 'War for Talent' era the corporate ad slogan of 'I work for JP Morgan' was extremely powerful. Whether it was in Milan, Helsinki, Paris or Bangalore everyone knew it. It was a powerful recruiting tool.

ChevronTexaco had a link at the bottom of the page so I followed it. Another well written page explaining in more detail the localisation efforts. I was impressed at this stage. Not only is such advertising a great internal moral booster but it also sends a clear message - we believe in our talented individuals and are proud of them.

The page had two links for further information - both to corporate and social responsibility info. I would have thought a career page would have been useful, but as the Careers tab was still on the left menu I could forgive them this. (Note to their marketing people - read 'Linking the corporate and employment brands')

I click on Careers and then look at 'Why ChevronTexaco'. Have a look, you will find the following

Global opportunities
We have operations and employees in more than 180 countries. You may want to travel and work in different locations around the world. Or, you may want to stay and grow in one location. Whatever your path, as part of ChevronTexaco, you career will have an impact. Globally.

Now tell me, is building one of your key employment brand messages 'Global opportunities' when your corporate marketing team are promoting localisation policies such a great move. (I acknowledge that it doesn't say everyone should have a global career but we know that only 4% of their staff get to work outside their country)

Come on guys - HR, Marketing - talk to each other.

HR trends for 2005

2005-01-19T19:01:00.000+01:00

The UK's Personnel Today recently ran an article entitled Market Trends for 2005.

An interesting note from Zoë Lewis, of Odgers:

"The term 'business partners' is becoming over-used," she says. "While a lot of people describe themselves as this, they lack the exposure at senior level to actually influence or advise."

Well said!

The article goes on

Some predict this will lead to HR hybrids. "HR/marketing roles will use marketing's experience with customers to tap into and make sense of employee insights, says (John) Ingham (of Penna Consulting)

You read it hear first ;-)

Emerging role - Human Resources/IT programme manager

2005-01-19T18:49:00.000+01:00

The Boston Herald ran an article on 17 Jan (sorry I can't find it online) about an emerging role in organisations - the Human Resources/IT manager.

The paper defines the role as

For the most part, Schafer said, the human resources/IT manager will be part of the IT department and report to a CIO or to someone who reports directly to a CIO. In smaller companies, though, the manager will report to human resources, but the support piece of the job will remain in IT.

Among the tasks assigned to the human resources/IT manager is assuring consistency in the way people-management processes are implemented and used, Schafer noted. For example, the manager would ensure that incentive programs are administered consistently across the group.

Technology is obviously becoming a more and more important part of HR as HR wants to deliver more personalised services directly to the employee, especially in the form of shared services and for the smarter, intranet delivered services. Managing the implementation of this is of critical importance.

I am not entirely sure that this is SO new. HRIS managers are common in most large organisations. The change is probably the scale and impact of the technology.

Job security in UK public sector

2005-01-19T18:38:00.000+01:00

The Financial Times reported yesterday that equal numbers of public sector employers expect to cut and increase staff over the next year.

The article notes

the findings also point to a tight labour market throughout the economy but in the public sector in particular. More than 40 per cent of employers surveyed at the end of last year said that one or more of their vacancies attracted not a single candidate. In the public sector the figure rose to 60 per cent.

Technology driving job trends

2005-01-18T23:23:00.000+01:00

A short article on Reuters noting that the reluctancy of employment to grow in the US has been due to companies gaining the productivity improvement of the large investment in IT made in the late 90's.

Linked article: Technology advancement and the demand for labour

Europe's immigration policies

2005-01-18T18:49:00.000+01:00

Christopher Caldwell's article in Saturday's FT (subscription needed) examines several issues which face companies in Europe, and the states in which they operate.

The article discusses last week's EU green paper on economic migration which could give some workers receiving an American-style 'Green Card', a permanent work-residence permit.

It argues that without a plan to attract more immigrants Europe will not have fewer immigrants, it will just have less legal ones. The International Labour Organisation has recently predicted that Europe could face a 22% drop in per capita income unless measures are taken to reduce the forthcoming labour shortage.

Many companies have started to gain from the newly expanded Europe and the opportunities brought by a larger pool of talented workers, but whilst this is significant geographic mobility of labour is still quite strong and the solution is probably most successful at the margins.

I see no reasons to expect Europe to become more open to immigrants, if anything an aging population could be expected to be less welcoming. Given this it seems likely that companies will build more of a network of interconnected centres around the world, attracted to areas where there is a strong supply of talent. R&D will be a prime candidate for this type of approach, as will any area which is not directly dealing with customers.

What will this mean? Due to the increase in demand for services as a population becomes older or more wealthy and the increasing localisation that this promotes we can expect to see a larger proportion of customer-facing roles in many societies. This does not suggest that roles such as design can depart as great design is usually seen serving local communities, especially of early adopters. Being near the customer can be beneficial.

What is certain is that companies and individuals will adapt. The doom merchants won't be right, economies are dynamic.

Making the case to the CEO

2005-01-11T17:10:00.000+01:00

An interesting email arrived today from an old acquaintance:

Hi Andrew,

We're putting together a presentation for a major multinational to convince its chief executive that he needs to invest more in the website. From the point of view of recruitment/HR, what in your opinion would be the 'killer' argument / fact/ example to put before the king?

Is there a killer argument? I am not so sure but here goes:

Thanks for the email.

Before you can convince the CEO to invest more in the HR and recruitment parts of his internet site you should be confident that they believe that they should be communicating to all stakeholders more effectively. Employees and job candidates are one very large group. The internet is one channel.

Each stakeholder group needs to look at company information in a different way. Let's think about the CEO announcing they are opening a new factory, then the shareholders will want to know predicted returns, the customers how this will cut the waiting list for the products, suppliers how this will change their supply chains and candidates if this creates new opportunities. Each stakeholder group needs the information with a different emphasis.

You can get an understanding of the size of these groups by looking at where people go on the existing site. Of course this will give you an understanding of the size of the group, not the importance of it.

Research that we've done shows that there is considerable overlap between the stakeholder groups with customers also likely to consider employment with the firm. Therefore giving candidates a great experience could aid building stronger customer-loyalty.

Recent reports show that online is the largest channel for recruitment communications and advertising (even if the CEO still expects to get his next role from a call from one of the big search firms). It can be effective, efficient and timely. It is a channel in which it is possible to build loyalty with a large number of individuals.

The great news for the CEO is that the HR / recruitment part of corporate websites is one of the most neglected. If they move quickly and with intent it will be possible to build something which competes aggressively with their competitors for the best talent, and to take a leadership position in this market.

It is not necessarily the investment that you need to get, it's their commitment and energy. A good start would be to take one of their brightest marketeers and get them to focus on this stakeholder group, building content and improving the experience. If they create a user-focused site candidates will tell their friends.

I hope that helps

Andrew

What do you think? Add a comment and we'll use the best.

Update

Shel Holtz posted a follow-up to this on his blog.

Bob Lutz on managing change

2005-01-11T14:57:00.000+01:00

I've been fascinated by Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of GM's new FastLane blog. Like many bloggers I have been impressed by this demonstration of building community with GM's stakeholders.

His views of managing corporate change (a transcribe of a recent presentation) are well worth a read.

One of my favourite bits:

One of the more disturbing features of our current preoccupation with change is the presumption that all change is good. Look at the language that the human resources people put on employee review forms today: 'Does the employee embrace change?'

I conjure the image of fast trackers desperately looking in every nook and cranny of the company for some undiscovered and unembraced dollop of change that they can put their arms around and squeeze.

That's silly, of course. Change has no inherent normative value at all. Some change is good. Some is bad. People ought to be evaluated based on whether they can tell the difference, not on whether they obediently and mindlessly embrace unexamined change.

This week the job of a 'change agent' is top of my priorities, given that I am presenting on the subject to a senior group next week. What are the issues? How will the change agent's role change over time? How do you measure their contribution?

In times like this there is nothing better than a bit of experience.

Why new communication channels fail

2005-01-11T13:20:00.000+01:00

Shel Holtz has posted an article about why some new communication channels fail within companies. He notes that:

Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. "Here you go everybody. We've installed e-mail for you. Godspeed."

As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative.

A good summary from a leading commentator on corporate communications.

HR struggling with metrics

2005-01-11T10:20:00.000+01:00

A survey by The Conference Board looks at the shift towards implementation of HR metrics that link to company strategic targets, but points out that there is a long way to go. It notes that:

The survey shows that companies are still struggling to mesh people metrics with overall corporate goals. Only 31 percent of survey participants say that HR executives in their companies have a strong understanding of strategic key performance indicators. Even fewer (25 percent) surveyed consider their HR leaders capable of linking people measures to such indicators or (16 percent) believe that HR professionals receive extensive training to connect people measures to strategy.

While 51 percent of survey participants say that the HR professionals in their companies are partially capable of identifying talent critical for implementing strategy, only 22 percent say these executives are fully able to identify strategic talent pools.

A full report is available to buy.

Having more than one boss

2005-01-11T09:44:00.000+01:00

The Guardian had an article about the stresses of having multiple bosses for PAs and secretaries in the UK. Job design and clear communication, of course, seem the solution.

When to use cost per hire

2005-01-07T15:51:00.000+01:00

There are many voices saying cost per hire is a poor target, most of them saying quality per hire is a more important aim (there are issues with this, especially in the accurate valuation of something which is often partially subjective)

Well, cost of hire does have a place, but that place is unlikely to be found in the overall aggregate.

Aggregate cost per hire figures are poor indicators or success and focusing on them is likely to have detrimental effect. Cheap hiring is often slow, without a customer focus.*

Another reason cost per hire is usually wrong is that calculations are often poor. Too often the cost of a recruiters' time is ignored (or aggregated over the whole year). What you need to do is define a 'cost per hour' of each recruiter and assign this. Probably your largest cost stops becoming invisible.

Where cost per hire is more valuable is tracking at the micro level, especially at describing the costs of sourcing applicants.

Start coming closer to the real cost of each source and 'cheap' sources suddenly stop being cheap. Proactive sourcing (using web searches etc.) is time intensive. You want to assign a true cost to each channel.

When you do this you can start measuring the true cost of using each channel and therefore determine the most effective ones. Get some great data and you can split it a multiple of ways.

Measuring cost per hire is like measuring GDP - it will get revised over time. Say you run a national ad for a role and the ad costs USD 10,000. You hire from this and your cost per hire takes the full USD 10,000 into its calculations

Two months later one of your colleagues takes on a role, does a resume search and finds someone that applied to the earlier role. They were wrong initially, but for this new role are spot-on. The hire is made.

The USD 10,000 charge is now split over two roles and that ad becomes better value.

Whilst you might not be interested in knowing how much Bill in purchasing cost to acquire, you are interested in knowing costs of each sourcing channel. You really need to be thinking of each marketing thing you do and determining how to track this spend. You need to understand how marketing for one role impacts the costs of another.

Looking at cost per hire this way is useful as it enables you to make decisions that will influence the efficiencies of the marketing mix of future roles. Aggregate information won't help you run a better department, it will only tell you what you have done and history is something few of us can change.

* Of course, if you were being really smart you could look at the cost of not having someone in the role for the period of the search, and then the slow hire becomes very expensive, very quickly.

The shifting face of HR

2005-01-07T14:03:00.000+01:00

David Kippen, whose blog I referred to recently, has posted a comment to one of my earlier articles which I recommend all in HR take time to read.

Redeployment - great hires on your doorstep

2005-01-06T11:34:00.000+01:00

Why do we all miss some of the best solutions because they are staring us in the face?

I have yet to meet a company who is truly great at redeploying its people. Not just the ones on the 'talent list' but the whole workforce. Successful hiring is about getting the right person into the right job at the right time and many firms simply don't do this.

I have also to meet a firm who devotes as much money, resource or energy to redeploying its people as it spends on hiring new ones.

Why should this be so high on your agenda. Well a few things:

Redeployment saves money.

Do the sums, even count in time involved. Significant savings is another way of looking at it.

Redeployed staff are more productive

The time it takes for someone to become fully productive in a job is reduced if the person already knows the organisation. They have a network in place, know where to find information, know some of the history. These things take time. The ability to 'hit the ground running' if far greater if the individual only needs to learn the new job, not the organisation as well.

Redeployed staff are less likely to leave.

There is a simple relation between time spent in the firm and chance of leaving in most firms - the longer you are there the less likely you are of moving on. Results such as 35% of staff leave in their first year but only 2% of staff leave between their 15th and 16th year are common. Given that many surveys show the cost of replacement is somewhere in the region of 150% of salary then hiring staff who aren't likely to leave should be a high priority.

Redeploying staff helps staff feel that they are being developed

Challenge and staff development usually come very high to the most important factors of job demand. Development isn't just about a training course, it is about situational learning, new challenges. This sort or development is more productive for the firm and ultimately more firm-specific.

focusing on the internal labour market means you lose less to competitors

One of the most stupid HR policies, but one that I see over and over again is 'you must be in your role for X months before you can move on' or 'you must ask your manager's permission before applying'. Do your staff need to ask permission or be in a role X months before applying to a competitor?

Everyone has roles that don't pan out the way they expect (see those 35% leaving in first year figures). As a firm you need to accept this and make it as easy for your staff to move onto something where they are the right person.

How about targeting managers on how many of their staff move on within the firm?

What does this mean?

Well just posting an ad on your corporate intranet won't work. It will get the active seekers but hiring is about getting the best person, and that person might be passive. Have you built an internal CV database? Does the hiring team know what people want to do next? Be active. (You will need a good process here but it is possible).

You should be thinking of job publicity. How about your internal audit team having an open day (or evening) with an explanation of what internal audit is all about? Get them to meet the team, chat with people who have moved on to great things after a post in the department. Create some buzz.

Bring in technology. Build employment related stories and send them to interested parties. Create 'good news' which is targeted towards a future hire and let people subscribe to these channels. How about RSS for that? Do your colleagues really know what other departments do, where the opportunities are? Build interest communities.

Not only will this mean you redeploy people better, but they will start to refer people they know. Ask them if they know someone suitable and remind them of your referral programme.

So, what are the problems?

Well, first is to get over the traditional HR mentality and starting seeing it as a great opportunity. You need to communicate that you want to help them manage their careers (yes, take some of that responsibility back, just like you have done for that talent list already). There are decisions to be made, many will be highly political. You need good sponsorship for this.

Second, there is often a perception that your own staff aren't as good as external people (where are the stats to prove that all new hires are better than existing staff?). This happens because of what economists call 'Asymmetric Information'. The Economist describes this as:

When somebody knows more than somebody else. Such asymmetric information can make it difficult for the two people to do business together, which is why economists, especially those practicing GAME THEORY, are interested in it. ... This kind of asymmetry can distort people's incentives and result in significant inefficiencies.

In this case you know far more about your internal candidate than the external one. The external one presents only their best aspect so there is an impression that they are more talented. Better selection data can help reduce this, as can standardising the process for internal and external candidates. Either way, you need to know it exists and deal with it.

Getting deployment and the internal job market to work could be your most valuable contribution this year.

Wage inflation especially for manual workers

2005-01-06T10:23:00.000+01:00

Further evidence of the polarisation of labour demand emerged today when the UK's Daily Telegraph published an article on wage inflation.

It reports that

Basic pay rises hit 3 per cent in November, up from just 2.2 per cent in September, with particularly strong rises among manual staff. Total pay rises, including bonuses, remained steady at 2. 8 per cent, and stood below the latest ofﬁcial ﬁgures for October that put the growth in average earnings in both the public and private sector at 4.2 per cent

...manual staff saw their basic pay jump from 2.6 per cent to 3.6 per cent between September and November, compared with a rise from 1.9 per cent to 2.7 per cent for clerical staff and from 2.3 per cent 2.7 per cent for managers.

Andrew Walker of Croner who conducted the research commented

Basic pay rises hit 3 per cent in November, up from just 2.2 per cent in September, with particularly strong rises among manual staff. Total pay rises, including bonuses, remained steady at 2. 8 per cent, and stood below the latest ofﬁcial ﬁgures for October that put the growth in average earnings in both the public and private sector at 4.2 per cent

Related previous article: Technology advancement and the demand for labour

The internal brand

2005-01-05T16:52:00.000+01:00

David Kippen on his Thought Strategy blog has posted a wonderful article on what he describes as the 'internal brand'.

This is a man who certainly 'gets it'. Well worth a read.

Need for accessible recruitment websites - for all

2005-01-05T15:55:00.000+01:00

This time last year I was involved in an industry group setting some guidelines for recruitment websites. It was quite an exciting project with organisations such as McKinsey & Company and Macromedia advising the group.

I would love a US reader (& I know that is most of you) to give me a perspective of the US perspective, but from a European, and especially UK perspective it is clear that many firms are failing in this area.

Why should you be worried about disability access? I think that there are two main issues:

1) Disabled people make up a significant part of the workforce, or at least working age. There are 6.9 million in the UK, about 386 million worldwide. Missing out on these people is foregoing a large number of highly talented individuals. You can't be serious that 'we want the best people' unless your market is as broad as possible.

2) In many countries, a company relying on web-only applications with an inaccessible website and system is breaking the law.

There is a great website which discusses this more than I ever could called barrierfree-recruitment.com I would recommend reading it, sending it to all your colleagues and your IT department with a 'do we comply?' message. Your IT department can download Macromedia's excellent white paper.

What prompted me to put this on? Well it was Nestlé's statement on their recruitment website that:

please note you will not be able to access this system if you are using a MAC or any other kind of Internet Browser software apart from Microsoft Internet Explorer (eg. Mozilla or Firefox).

Call me cynical but I would imagine a company as large as Nestlé could afford to get their site tested (and hence usable) by most of the main browsers. This site gets about 25% of users using Firefox, but is probably unusual. Even so given designing to web standards costs little and makes absolute business sense. On the subject they could also have tested to ensure that when you progress you don't get a 'SAP Internal Server Error' message. At the moment Nestlé is a great example of 'how not to do it'.

Being able to read using a screen-reader such as Window-Eyes or JAWS should be a high priority. Given that Apple has announced system level screen-reading support into it's next version of the operating system I predict Apple will pick up a large proportion of the disabled community quite quickly. Screen readers are expensive.

Finally it is worth having a think about how people will use your site. Will smartphones be a good channel, or even gaming consoles. You should be asking your designers to think about viewers other than standard computers.

Update:

US sites worth reviewing include business-disability.com; hirepotential.com; jobaccess.org; justonebreak.com. A great online tool to give you an idea of how well your website performs is available at the Bobby site from Watchfire.

Work becomes more demanding / less certain

2005-01-05T13:47:00.000+01:00

Canada's Globe and Mail has surveyed several prominent HR commentators on changes in the world of work in 2005.

Among the findings are a concentration on office productivity through redesign of roles and an increasing use of temporary and contract staff.

What leaders really did

2005-01-05T13:26:00.000+01:00

A wonderful article in The Daily Telegraph entitled Captains of Industry tend to be good sports. It is worth reading the full article, especially those of you involved in graduate recruitment. Highlight - 95% of top business people had leadership roles at school.

Update:

The survey form which the article is based is also commented on in The Independent, BBC News and the Financial Times

84% would leave for more flexible hours

2005-01-05T13:18:00.000+01:00

A report in the FT says that a survey by recruitment consultancy Woodhurst has found that 84% would leave their company for a job with more flexible hours. 88% would leave for more money.

It is worth noting that many recruitment company surveys survey the people that they know, thereby asking people already interested in leaving (and hence getting very high figures). The similarity in the figures matches my early findings on the links between desire for more money and work-life balance.

Thinking of the customer

2005-01-04T17:04:00.000+01:00

Gretchen on the Technical Careers @ Microsoft threw in one of my favourite themes recently in a wonderful post on the success of her blog:

I've said this many times, but often when corporate recruiters think about their 'customers,' they consider their company as a whole, their hiring managers, the VPs they support, even the individual interviewers. But all too often, they place a lower emphasis on what I consider to be one of the most important customers... the external applicant. Besides being committed to ensuring external applicants have a positive, smooth experience, in-house recruiters need to understand the importance our external applicants play in the livelihood of our company. You buy our products. You use our services. And a recruiter serves as a key ambassador of the company. Treating an external applicant with deserved respect can make the difference between a future customer ... or an ex-customer.

You can see my findings about treating the candidate as a customer in a few posts; in 'Understand what matters to the candidate', in 'Do you know more about your customers than your staff' and in 'Linking the corporate and employment brand'.

Recruitment managers pandering solely to the desires of the hiring manager is rather like a marketing manager thinking their only client is the head of manufacturing. Sure they need to act in a professional manner, providing relevant feedback and responding promptly but those should be taken as granted. In the short term it is unlikely that they have an alternative channel.

Far too often HR folk think that employment brand (which is after all a subset of the corporate brand) is a question of working with an ad agency to make their advertisements pretty. It isn't. It's about working through all of your recruitment activities and saying 'how would I feel if I was a candidate going through this'. Few do this really well.

So, get rid of those 'if you don't hear from us presume we don't want you' messages (is it really too much for you to figure out how to reject someone so they will want to come back again for another try). Would you buy from Amazon if it took 1 hour to go through it's buying process? No, so why do you make candidates go through a similar time to apply? Do your competitors?

External recruitment companies on the whole have a much better attitude to the candidate. They realise that they have to be sold to, and the best ones will do so in a sustainable manner (ie so they get referrals because they are professional). And guess what - that is now what you the internal recruiter are benchmarked against. If you take 2 weeks to respond to a CV and the agencies take 1 day at most guess who they think is smarter? In fact the 24 hours is now what they expect and your 2 weeks is seen as poor performance.

The customer is king, and in a tight labour market your candidate is your main customer.

Recovering from a 'break'

2005-01-04T16:17:00.000+01:00

I'm starting to get back from the prolonged Christmas / New Year break, ploughing through the emails, catching up on news etc.

The break was good & a great time to do some relaxing (never very good at that one) and spending some quality time with my wife and family. Skiing started to get better after a late snowfall here in the Alps. Megeve on Boxing Day was lovely and it was great skiing with my father again. Since then we've skied Megeve again (busy but enjoyed a very fast 2km piste and some 'between the trees in the powder' fun) and The Grand Massif / Flaine area which was a bit stony (and all the blacks were closed).

Over the coming days I will publish a few articles that I have been thinking over. Of course, if you have any suggestions please drop me a comment.

A short explanation about predicting recruitment levels

2004-12-21T14:12:00.000+01:00

It’s that time again. My daily trawl of HR and talent related news is increasingly dominated by survey after survey saying that the job market will boom in 2005.

It is also the season in many firms when budgeting happens. Managers are asked about their forecasted recruitment for next year. My advice would be – take these estimates and expect increases.

It’s probably worth looking at what causes recruitment. A simple way of looking at recruitment demand within a firm could be:

Recruitment demand=population * turnover + expansion demand

Where Recruitment Demand is the number needed
Turnover is the rate of staff turnover (between 0 and 1)
Expansion demand is the how much the company wants to grow by (of course this could be a negative).

OK, so that in itself doesn’t help you much. What you need to do is understand the factors that will indicate future changes in turnover and expansion demand.

Turnover
Turnover changes quite predictably during an economic cycle. When there is a slowdown fewer people enter the labour market but as confidence increases many of those who were dissatisfied start to come onto the market. Turnover increases as market supply increases, however salaries remain stable as the increase in supply is greater than increase in demand (wages are pretty sticky otherwise you might expect a slight decrease). We are pretty much at the end of this period, unless you are in countries such as Germany or Italy.

As the market continues to heat up the pent-up supply is used and demand then starts to exceed supply. Wages start to rise. The prospect of increased wages start to bring more onto the job market, though as I described before people tend to make trade-offs when deciding to leave so increased wages will affect some more than others.

Finally, as most recruitment is reactive, and few businesses build surplus into their staffing levels more people leaving causes those that stay to work longer hours. This has a negative impact on morale which again leads to higher staff turnover

Many businesses will therefore see an increase in staff turnover in 2005

Expansion Demand
There are many, many factors that could determine this but I am going to recommend that you look in particular to some lead indicators.

The number of contractors and consultants is an excellent lead indicator of future staffing levels. As the markets for these workers is more liquid than for permanent staff the number in your workforce will increase in advance of permanent staffing hires. Depending on who you believe businesses in the US and UK are running at about 15% up on the number of contractors compared to 12 months ago.

Expect your managers to come to you enquiring about increased staffing levels, and pay particular attention to parts of the business where the number of contractors has increased the most.

Another similar indicator is the level of hours worked within the business. This can be quite hard to measure accurately unless your business has a culture of timesheets. Maybe you want to build an index based on a regular questionnaire. It will also give you a way of judging morale.

Finally it is worth having a look at some business confidence indexes (also quite common in the press at this time). This presents a slightly different picture with some surveys suggesting demand has gone flat.

The dynamics of this system are quite complex, but given this you should be able to ask the relevant questions of managers when in discussion about next years’ recruitment targets.

More dumb things

2004-12-20T13:03:00.000+01:00

In an excellent summary entitled The 17 dumbest things in recruitment on Electronic Recruiting Exchange Dr. John Sullivan gives his pet hates about the world of recruitment - very apt they are.

In the spirit of the article I would like to add:

18. Failure to create a transparent, open internal job market
How many firms do you know where jobs are badly promoted internally (they are put on some page deep in the intranet) and capable, known staff miss out on great opportunities. Adding to this how many firms do you know where there are rules such as 'you must get your manager's consent before applying' or 'you must have been in your current role for 18 months'? Do HR departments really think that candidates have such rules when applying to a competitor?

19. More on measurement
Far too few companies use the information that they already own (what's on their HRIS or even ATS) to analyse trends, gaps, segments, behaviours etc. How many of those poor websites could be improved just by looking at how people use their websites?
Not only don't HR departments put financial impacts to their metrics, they rarely put information that is useful for forward looking decision making.

20.
Failure to build relationships
If someone has invested the trust to give a company personal details they are already warm. Companies rarely use this relationship (with permission) to keep them informed on upcoming projects, internal news etc. Not 'junk' mail, targeted information about the company that they will appreciate. Just been in the press talking about a great new technology development? Do they think that their technology pool might be interested in this?

21. Failure to manage the Press
How many recruitment departments do you know that sit down with the company press team to discuss how to build reputation in areas where there are skill shortages. Cheap, easy, quick. The media are calling out for interesting stories, especially at a local area (where most staff come from).

What have I missed?

More on retention

2004-12-20T11:12:00.000+01:00

The Akron Beacon Journal today has a Christmas themed article on retention and companies approaches to combating it.

It notes that

Between September 2002 and August 2003, the rate was 19.2 percent across all jobs in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it has gotten worse.

Eighty-six percent of executives say turnover has stayed the same or increased, according to a recent study by the employee retention consultancy TalentKeepers.

The article notes that trust and respect are primary reasons determining retention rates.

Online is now prime channel for UK jobseekers

2004-12-20T11:04:00.000+01:00

In a comprehensive article in the Financial Times a YouGov survey is noted as revealing that online is now the prime way for UK jobseekers to find a new job.

Spend, however, is still going towards traditional media with approximately GBP200m per annum compared to GBP100m on online advertising, partly because of the much larger costs of traditional advertising.

The article discusses the strategies that the media companies are taking and that several large online companies are combining online advertising with recruitment agencies as a way to get large numbers of CVs.

Reference checking

2004-12-17T11:05:00.000+01:00

The Globe and Mail has an article about reference checking that contains some interesting points.

It notes that reference checking is not an activity that is done thoroughly in many firms, though that this is increasing. When it is done it is too often of the 'get a letter from the HR department of the last firm' type.

The financial services and professional services firms often look at other issues, such as legal history, but this is being done mainly for regulatory reasons. What else can be done?

My view is that this is an activity that is best done externally, and a good place to look would be an executive search research firm - they probably know who that person will have worked with in the past. A good reference search should take about 1 day of a researchers time.

You're not looking for a perfect background - there are few saints in this world - but for a common theme. A high performer might have made enemies, maybe you speak to someone that they beat for a key job, but if you get the same 'development issues' time and time again it's worth questioning it.

Another way of reducing the likelihood of finding issues is to be upfront that you are going to perform thorough checking. The articles quotes Microsoft Canada's national recruiting manager Paul Hamilton.

Candidates are made aware from the beginning of the interview process that they can expect complete reference checks as well as a scrutiny of academic credentials and past job performance, he says.

"We want to make sure we can substantiate the information they give during the interview. If there is any key area we identify in the interview process, we will probe deeper."

In the year the company has been doing the scrutiny, 85 candidates for management jobs have been hired and none have had to be rejected because of problems with their background, he adds.

As noted it is better to use someone not involved in the recruitment process to do this activity, as after a long and difficult exercise the last thing many wish to hear is that their choice is not all they believe they are.

When companies spend so much time and money identifying high performers isn't it time they should do background checks more thoroughly?

Retention is an issue, but not for us

2004-12-17T10:28:00.000+01:00

Interesting article in Legal Week on recruitment and retention in the UK legal sector. Based on a survey of industry HR directors regarding key strategic issues facing their firms.

One part caught my eye:

The R-word is no longer redundancy, but retention. However, there is the rub. The research indicates that while 86% of respondents cite retention as an industry-wide issue, just 40% of them believe it is an issue for their firm.

Why only 40%? Well my guess is that they are all using the same HR benchmarking data which lets them compare themselves with industry averages. So just under half think that they are 'doing better than our competitors'.

Like most other industries much of the effort is being done at the top, with programmes for partners. This was type of approach was commented on by The Work Foundation in their excellent report Managing Careers in Large Organisations (PDF). Programmes focus on the top level of staff.

I absolutely agree that programmes should include the top level, but companies should be rolling them out, even in a watered down version, to all levels of staff. It is not just senior management who impact organisation performance, no matter how much our media like to jump on the myth of the superstar CEO (who on his own turns a business around overnight).

The Legal Week article also notes:

Certainly the costs of not getting this right are now being measured - more than 50% of the respondents claim to measure attrition costs, the most popular methods being through the measurement of replacement costs and training fees.

If you then look at cost per staff and multiply this up by the number leaving at that level you quickly get to some very big figures. If you look at the probability of staff leaving you will see that it is significantly higher if the person has only been with the firm a short time- one recent client lost 35% of all hires in the first year, but less than 1% of staff who had been with the firm for 20 years resigned.

In many firms new hires, especially the 'graduate population' gets great mentoring and development whilst they are on the programme then get nothing (other than a yearly review) when the programme finishes. And you are surprised that they leave?

Who the recruitment marketer should work with

2004-12-16T17:29:00.000+01:00

Recruitment marketing is one of those jobs where to succeed you need to pull lots of people from within the organisation together. This is meant as an open list of who should be part of that team:

Marketing
There are lots of people in the marketing function that you need to work closely with. You’ll need to speak to your brand reputation people to understand external perceptions of the corporate brand (most companies subscribe to a survey).

You should speak to the marketing research team to help you understand how to acquire and use all of the data that you’ll both need and want.

Given the evidence that I found you should probably be speaking to the advertising people to be informed of any big campaigns

Corporate brand will be wanting to speak to you so that any advertising fits within the corporate guidelines (you need a set for recruitment advertising.

Corporate Relations
A two way one this one. First you need to be informed of what the press are writing about the firm. Corporate Comms also should be briefed on your recruitment activity – they should be thinking about the impact of any announcement on your ability to hire.

Secondly, it is worth discussing with them about developing a plan to get you in the press. Stories about interesting projects do wonders to get candidates interested in the firm.

Web Team
Why is dealing with the web team so often so frustrating? Your site, and the way candidates move through the corporate website to and from it will often determine how a campaign works. You should be sitting down with this team to look at understanding web stats including career related search enquiries, making it easy for candidates, ensuring your site is accessible by all. It is good to keep informed of what stories are going up on the corporate site as often you will want to link to these as they have an employment angle.

Internal Communications will get your message across to the maximum number of staff as quickly as possible. Work with them. They understand the channels available and will discuss how to time and place communications so they get read, and don’t conflict with other corporate messages. Remember, the more staff you can get into roles the less you need to recruit externally (making opportunities more transparent increase retention. Don’t be fooled into thinking your colleagues are checking out your intranet site all the time.)

HR
I can’t think of a part of HR who you shouldn’t have on your list. You will probably find that they are really interested in what you are doing. Try and get a good set of two way conversations.

The only other group I can think of are your staff. Use collaboration with the staff to help test messages (you probably want to build teams in different parts of the business for this). I describe them ‘listening posts’ – if you want to recruit developers then test your advertising on well briefed individuals from that area. Get them to tell you what is happening at the ground level.

Recruitment is best when the efforts are spread within the firm. Leading a collaborative company wide effort is very powerful.

Video on CVs

2004-12-16T11:11:00.000+01:00

There was an article yesterday in the Edmonton Journal about a company - seeMyInterview who have set up a service offering video on electronic CVs.

The paper reports Larry Hill, president of seeMyInterview as saying

"It's a 11/2 minute elevator pitch on why you should hire me"

adding...

"I found that many employers did not get a good understanding of a resume just from what they read," he said. "As a recruiter, because I had interviewed the candidates I would propose to them, I saw elements that would only be evident if they came face to face.

"We have a culture that evaluates just by paper too quickly."

and

"Usually with interviews, one of the biggest areas is body language and your verbal skills. This video features all of this and it makes a difference."

The final point is interesting. Most good interviewers will try to get past this initial impact and onto the content of the interview. Sure, first impressions matter but in my experience the interviewer goes into the interview expecting the candidate to perform (or they wouldn't have called them in). Negative first impressions are more likely to be remembered.

Faced with a pile of, let's say, 100 CVs for a role, am I going to spend 90 seconds per candidate watching a video which isn't focussed on the questions I want answering? The recruiter isn't looking at the CV for the candidate to present themselves - they are looking to find evidence of the experience needed. Write your CV to focus on the role you're applying for (using the same sort of keywords used in the job description, constructed into meaningful sentences) and you'll catch the recruiter's attention.

The article reports that the fee for the service is $150 and the company is offering it to colleges, universities and other educational institutions.

UK employment at all time high

2004-12-16T01:37:00.000+01:00

Statistics released by the UK government suggest that UK employment (the percentage of those of working age who are in employment) rose last quarter & that the total number in employment is at an all time high.

Summarising, National Statistics reports

Labour market statistics published on 15 December 2004 show continuing stability in the labour market. There is an increase in the employment rate, more people are in employment, and fewer people were made redundant but the number of job vacancies is down. The unemployment rate is lower, there are fewer unemployed people and the claimant count has also fallen. Growth in average earnings, both excluding and including bonuses, has increased.

It is worth noting that overall figures often hide structural shifts - some sectors always do better than others. For example, vacancies in Finance and Business Services have risen 22.6% on the year with vacancies in Transport and Communications falling by 9%

It is also worth looking at Deloitte's December Survey on Jobs which reports much the same, but goes into further detail on specific areas where the labour market is overheating.

Better recommendations in candidate selection

2004-12-15T16:46:00.000+01:00

Two related items came to my attention recently. First was a great (but quite technical) article from 3 German academics – Färber, Weitzel and Keim entitled “An automated recommendation approach to selection in personnel recruitment” and then seeing information on isdd’s OmniQ products in recruitment.

Both seem to tackle the same problem – most HR departments have far too many CV’s and finding the relevant ones is difficult and time consuming.

There are, as I see it, two main ways of tackling the problem – first you can ask job specific questions which can rank applicants for a particular role (of course you might have numerous types of tests which give you further ranking data) or the system takes a previously provided CV and uses analytics (hopefully a lot more intelligent than Boolean searching) to rank the applications. From what I can see isdd and Färber, Weitzel and Keim have seeked to do the latter.

Without seeing the isdd product in action I am not going to be as bold as commenting specifically on it. However the website suggests that it is used instead of a dedicated front-end system. Their phrase “OmniQ will automatically collect all emails and attached documents sent to the company from prospecting graduates” (taken from the PDF on it used in the graduate market) fills me with horror. I suggest it may be better to have the technology built in to existing applications.

Alternatively the industry could press for the adoption of standards such as the HR-XML resume schema that would enable far more accurate searching within CV’s.

This area is one to watch.

Understanding what matters to the candidate

2004-12-15T14:58:00.000+01:00

This is the first in a series of posts of a 'how to' nature - in this instance how to get a better understanding of what matters both to your staff and your candidates.

Let me start by again discussing the job. I like (well some would say am obsessed by) the comparison between a product and a job, and as such your firm has many 'products' that it sells to candidates, some which will appeal, others less so. Just like any product there are many factors, some of which will matter more to some people than others. You will get a great fit if what your 'product' (the job) offers matches what your 'customers' (the candidate) wants.

But how do you do this? Well it is relatively simple, though will take some time. I assure you the results are worth the effort.

First you need to define what the factors you want to measure. I have always found that a mixture of gut instinct and a few workshops is a good way of defining these. You will have factors and subfactors - eg a factor could be 'non salary package benefits' and subfactors could include 'car scheme' or 'health club membership'. Getting these right is important. Get lots of colleagues to 'stress test' it - have you missed anything.

Next you need to survey people. I might be tempted to speak to someone in marketing about this as it is a complex issue. You want to get people to rate each factor on a scale in their ideal job. I will come onto this again later after I have shown you what you are going to do with the data.

Usually you arrange these items in what is described as a comb chart. I have used some factors as examples (this is not based on data or any other analysis - it's for example only) an example is illustrated below

Back to more data that you'll want. Next you want to understand what they think of you - you are going to compare the two. You might be able to ask candidates this, however you may get a good result by asking them on their first few days with the firm (before they're influenced by reality.) Here you could ask 'before you came to interview what was your view of us'. I would also suggest getting some who have been with the firm 3, 6 and 12 months to complete this as well.

From this you will get the following:

What you can see is that for some factors what they want (the blue) is higher than the yellow (what they feel you offer), and for other factors it's the reverse. For those elements with high scores these are the things that they really want and therefore you want to sell on. For those (like international travel on this example) you have sold this one, but they don't care about it (for this one you might want to look at the opposite also, like how they view you on work / life balance). Publicising or promoting such items will be unproductive.

You can use this analysis for a whole range of things:

* Redesigning your 'product' - changing the package, what the work involves etc
* focusing your recruitment advertising to things that will be influencers (get these factors reiterated at all stages of the recruitment processes)

There are some more ways you might want to look at the data:

* You should look at this by segments in your workforce - hey it will even help you identify these. What do high performers value that others don't (clue, look at their desire for strong leadership & organisational success compared to importance of the job). You could then sell those factors that will attract the high performers
* Looking at staff views later on will give you an understanding of the differences in views from when they started to after they have found out what you really offer. If they think you are great in one area, it's important to them and after they have spent time with you they think you are weak in this area you probably have identified a reason that they leave.
* Finally, you might want to ask them what they think of your competitors. This will enable you to get a view of your comparative strengths as perceived in the market. Again great information for making a great pitch. Wouldn't it be great to give the interviewer information such as 'they come from A & we have found that we are stronger at x, y and z so you might want to mention our great programmes in these areas'.

This has been a pretty basic overview but I hope it gets you thinking.

Identifying high performers

2004-12-15T13:32:00.000+01:00

Heather, on her "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog wrote a great piece recently on the work she was doing to define a recruitment strategy at Microsoft. Specifically it discusses how she is working to identify the top performers from the average ones so they can focus on identifying and attracting those.

Given some previous experience I decided to add a comment. I republish it here to share some of those ideas:

I've done this sort of exercise in several firms over the last 5 years - let me show several interesting hints.

1) Often the best place to start is your corporate HR database. The more information here the better but given your size, even if the data is not complete you can generally get some statistically relevant results. One measure is to track rate of progress over time (who gets promoted the quickest, constantly). CHAID analysis on big groups can produce interesting results (you will have someone in market analysis with the tools and knowledge how to do this)

2) For recent hires you may well find referrals perform the best though looking longer term might reduce this impact. This is due to the initial process (often called socialisation, where the psychological contract is cemented). Referrals often have the referrer as a 'buddy' to help them through this process increasing their initial performance

3) Many of the 'best places' for hires will also produce the most average hires (sorry, no easy answers). You don't want to ignore the poorer performers - you want to identify what were the differences between the total population and the population of hi-po.s

4) Ensure that you really understand how you will classify talent. A good team depends on a mixture of people, and performance is often due to the environment that people work in (team dynamics etc) rather than the individuals (there are lots of sports examples to show the teams full of the best players often aren't the ones who win). 360 review data often shows interesting information. Are you promoting people because they are great at managing upwards yet their reportees don't rate them well.

5) Analyse your selection data over time. Is what they are tested on really a good predictor of success? Do regression on review data with selection data.

6) Try and track the high performers opinions. The employer opinion survey can produce some great information though you will need an identifier - for example 'have you been on X training', where X is provided to high performers only. One thing you'll notice is that high performers have a stronger interest in corporate performance and leadership whereas many will have more interest in their immediate team and what their role is. My guess is that it is the attitudinal stuff that is a good indicator - do their values match Microsoft's

7) When you find something drill down. Why is that occurring? Develop stories and test them. Eg, with one firm I found that their best recruits (based on speed of progression) came from the London School of Economics (it wasn't on the firm's list of schools they presented at). The reason? The LSE has 70% or so overseas students (as well as a great academic team) and it was the intercultural experience that was the key factor. We then looked at other high-performers and found many were the sons / daughters of families who had changed countries many times in their childhoods.

Book suggestion - Complicated Lives

2004-12-15T11:39:00.000+01:00

I am firmly of the belief that if you understand how people live their lives you are in a much better position to understanding how work fits into that life and ultimately how you can attract and retain those you want.

Complicated Lives: sophisticated consumers, intricate lifestyles, simple solutions by Willmott & Nelson I believe is one of the best places to start to understand modern life (it is based on the UK but will probably give you a good insight into other cultures – we are rarely as different as it first seems – anyone who has done international HR or recruitment can confirm this).

Based on a large three year survey & numerous academic studies it explains the increasingly complex choices that people make in their lives, dispels lots of modern myths and gives some great examples of opportunities that businesses can follow to take advantage of the changing environment.

Let me give you but one example on how this can shift the issues for recruiters. The authors find that family ties are no less strong, but that they have become ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’. The role of grandparents looking after grandchildren has become stronger than ever as mothers return to the work force. Being close to grandparents is becoming increasingly important.

Why does this concern recruiters? Well, if families want to cluster around grandparents then the traditional geographic mobility, especially of skilled workers declines. Your local community matters more than ever before. Companies need to think about dispersing their workforce into potentially smaller centres. Visas might be hard to get but convincing someone in the same country to move might be even harder. You might want to consider increasing your presence as recruiters in your community, and trying to keep those that you have even more – you probably don’t have that many people in your relevant target pool.

Unlike many business books these days this one is more than a ‘one idea spread over 250 pages’. It will get your mind racing and give you the data and insights to make better decisions and policies. One of my favourites of the last year.

How people come to leave

2004-12-15T11:04:00.000+01:00

Most of the reports and studies that I had seen on the reasons people leave an organization were very much concentrating on the reasons that people give when they leave, not on the process that they go through to get there. Given this I wanted to do some research to develop an understanding of the dynamic process underlying their decision.

Now for the caveat – this understanding was done by doing some statistical analysis understanding several linked components and what the fit was between them. It was an analysis using a large population size (n=65,000) employee opinion survey. As such it didn’t track individuals through the dynamic process but tried to identify a trend by looking at fit between a large number of variables with the large number of responders. A relatively simple pattern is observable.

Let’s visualise one hire (for the sake of the explanation let’s call him Peter – there seemed little difference in the pattern between male & female though there were some differences in the numbers at each stage).

Peter joins the firm as an experienced hire. He does so with a certain expectation about what it is going to offer him – not just in terms of the ‘hard’ bits of the offer like salary, pension etc. but also the ‘soft’ bits – what his new boss is going to be like, the social aspects of working in the new team… Let’s make the assumption that Peter is happy with this package of ‘benefits’ that he is going to get from the job (ie it was the best that he saw on his job search)

During the first period of time he researches actively the ‘soft’ stuff trying to understand his new environment. He probably focuses on what the job really is about (the challenge) first followed by what makes the organization tick. This process in what is often called the ‘socialisation’ period is one of the key factors in determining his retention.

Let’s say he is initially content (he still thinks that he has made a good choice). Over time however something always changes, not least the challenge (it always gets easier over time to do a job, unless of course the job changes) – of course he could find that he and his boss don’t really click. Anyway something changes.

When Peter joined he felt that the pay and time he has to put in were ‘fair’ (he wouldn’t have accepted the offer if he didn’t, given our assumption). In fact, if you ask someone about pay and they say ‘pay isn’t the most important thing’ what they mean is that ‘I think the pay is fair to balance the other positives and negatives of the work’.

As people spend longer in a role the balance how they perceive positive and negative aspects changes. We found a strong link between the time people spent in a role and their desire to move on (either internally or externally).

As this happens something else occurs – their feeling of being ‘underpaid’ changes and so does their desire for ‘more work / life balance’ (ie more free time or less time demanded in other ways to do the job eg commuting, working after hours etc). The linkages between feeling underpaid and desire to have more work / life balance were startling and they were very closely linked with people who either were actively planning to leave their role or were thinking about leaving.

Why does this happen. Well let’s consider when Peter joins. He is initially happy with the job – the positive aspects (pay, other hard benefits, the ‘soft’ benefits) either are equal, or better than the negative aspects (the time he has to commit to the job, commuting, the negative aspects of his boss, any lack of challenge..) Over time this balance changes, either from things he learns on the socialization period, the challenge of the job dropping, something changing the job (a restructure for example, or just someone key leaving the team). What can Peter do about this?

Well, very little. However he still wants to balance the positive and negative aspects but to compensate for the increased negative aspects he now wants more money or to work less (or likely both to some degree). What becomes top of Peter’s mind is that he is not being paid enough to put up with all the bad stuff. So when he leaves the money is quite high up on his list, though it hasn’t changed since he joined (or has been increased inline with the market). When he resigns he tells HR in his exit interview ‘I felt I was underpaid’ or ‘I want a better quality of life’. The money or work / life balance becomes ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’

For this reason fighting retention on money is a short-term strategy – it neither cures the underlying reasons for the unhappiness and is far too easy for your competitors to copy.

On alternative advertising media

2004-12-14T09:48:00.000+01:00

Sometimes they are the bane of the recruitment managers’ life – the words ‘can we do something creative / different’. The manager sees them as liberating; many recruiters see them as an opportunity to pour good money down the drain.

The results generated by such ‘alternative’ methods can be disappointing – why?

To really understand how your advertising is going to work you need to think about how people view advertising and use these behaviours to your advantage.

Most recruitment advertising is like the classified ad. You have something that the viewer wants and you need to communicate this in the most effective manner. They are usually looking at the ads for this information (it's not like a TV ad which you watch because you were watching the programme - here the ad watching is a consequence, not the reason for looking at the media)

There are two main sorts of people who will respond. Those who are active job seekers and those who are passive. The active may even have bought the paper because they wanted to look at its job ads. There is a purpose in the way they read through the sections – they go to the relevant pages, they scan the pages looking for the relevant information and only when it looks like they are going to be lucky do they read that copy that went through 7 iterations between ad agency and hiring manager.

Guess what – the easier you make this process the more likely you are of having success. What are they looking for? What the job is (scrap those useless internal titles), where the job is, who is it working for, how much it pays… Use creative images, but only if it’s the norm in the publication you are using. Your ad won’t win awards but it is likely to get the best response.

(Note: you can also use creative style ads if you are advertising for a role that people associate with your brand, so a retail chain wanting sales staff can lead with something creative because by having the brand on the ad you attract the interest of those looking for a retail job.)

The passive job seeker will be looking through the job papers in much the same way, but their scanning might be quicker. Here the information really needs to jump out, and so does your USP. If you believe that you can attract people with a great work / life balance (knowing that this is a common complaint with other firms in your sector) say it in the top of the advert, probably in a sub-heading.)

For both of these users they will be looking at the job pages because they have an interest – it’s just their level that differs. What happens with ‘alternative media’?

Let us consider the example of a marketing manager. We think about our marketing manager, how they live their life, what they read etc. and our marketing team suggests that this type of person is likely to read the Economist. We know that the Economist has recruitment ads – why don’t we place an ad there?

Well, who you are looking for may be a subscriber but when they get to the recruitment ad pages they skip through to the next set of pages. They don’t even scan the pages. They expect to get no benefit from what is written so they just miss them out. That is one expensive ad, which is likely to be seen only by those seeking the sort of jobs that are advertised in the Economist. We all are really good at missing adverts, especially those that we think will hold no value. (There is a great story that one of the UK banks placed an ad in their window offering free cash to anyone who came in and claimed it (to demonstrate that nobody looked in the windows) – they got maybe one person in a whole day. Thousands of people must have walked past, programmed not to look at advertising).

So what does and could work? Well the best ‘alternative’ location are where there are a lot of potential applicants all with some free time. Placing an ad in the store works for store assistants, but is less likely to find success for someone for a senior finance role in head office. Bus shelters and train stops work, especially on the routes to your office as people stand around with time to waste when they read ads that are of little interest (they have time to kill). Just make sure you have a clear and easily to remember next step (www.yourcompany.com/careers is hard to beat)

What can work for large recruitment campaigns is creating it into a story and then using PR – ‘BigRetailer opens in town – creates 200 new jobs’ is just the sort of story local press love. Again, think about how your target market will interact with the media.

Finally, what I haven’t discussed is alternative channels such as the internet, relationship management etc. These are more than likely to come up in the future but the same principle applies – understand how your target ‘consumes’ the media and you’ll be close to understanding how likely you are of succeeding.

Tracking reasons for joining and leaving

2004-12-13T15:47:00.000+01:00

Lots of companies do exit interviews. Sometimes they are done by the managers, often by the HR manager. This takes time and effort. However, rarely is this data used in a meaningful way. What does it really tell you?

Getting to the stage where someone has resigned and then asking ‘why?’ is rarely the best time to use the information productively. Getting someone who that person associates with the problem to conduct the interview is also not a great way of getting them to open up. Finally, what happens to this data? Is it measured? Are trends developed? Are you making decisions on a few, statistically insignificant opinions?

Exit and entry interviews can be one of the most powerful ways of getting information on what is happening in the organization, but it needs to be done correctly. What can we find?

• The reasons that people join you, and why they leave gives you an understanding of the company’s reputation and its reality. Consider asking ‘why have you decided to go to X?’ as well as ‘What were the reasons that made you consider leaving?’ The first will often give you an understanding of what they thought wasn’t right about your firm.

• Who did they go to? Who did they come from? What was it about their offer? Knowing who your competitors are and why they are attracting or losing staff gives you an idea how to compete. So your local competitor is losing staff because their training scheme isn’t well regarded – why not run an advert promoting the strength of your training, you’ll be surprised how many who were thinking of leaving make an effort. You can also track competitors pay schemes this way

• What did they think of your recruitment process? How could you make it better? Who was also competing against you for that person?

The list could go on.

What you do with this information is probably the most important part. You need to capture this in a way that enables you to report on it, and identify trends quickly. This is probably easiest done if you can get it automatically scored, eg by using a scale for each response. From this you can then measure the answers, and as importantly, see how they change over time.

Surveys can be hosted over the internet, the data automatically populating a database. You might want to consider some incentives to encourage people to fill it in, or you might make it a policy decision. The costs of these are usually far smaller than the cost of the traditional interview.

Designing and implementing such a questionnaire takes time and considerable thought, however the information will give you powerful information to strengthen your employment offering and develop your employment brand.

Do you know more about your customers than your staff?

2004-12-13T14:18:00.000+01:00

Most businesses know a lot more about their customers than their staff. For retailers loyalty cards have provided masses of data about basket composition, shopping habits, even likeliness to take up offers. For companies selling directly to a smaller number of customers there are feedback programmes, customer research, the list goes on. Ultimately it’s all about one thing – know what makes your customers tick and you are far more likely to be able to add real value.

This value is not just a nice-to-have but an essential. In real terms it can mean more brand loyalty, great spends, better planning of product lines. Lots in fact that can drive higher margins and profit.

So, what does your firm know about its staff. Well, it might know average age, the take up for the pension scheme, the retention rate. Oh, and they probably told you lots of stuff about how they felt in the last employer opinion survey. But my guess is that this does not really tell you much.

What you should be focusing on is WHY they act and think this way. How does work fit into their lives? What gets them up in the morning to come to you, rather than your competitor? What would cause them to leave, or just as bad to mentally bailout?

Generalisations can be worse than no information but this doesn’t mean that you have to understand everyone individually – this would take far too much time and energy and they probably would resent it. What you need is to be able to group these people into groups who share similar behaviors. Marketers call these groups segments

Knowing the behaviors of these segments, and the size of the segments gives you great insight into how your staff are going to behave. You can segment in numerous different ways, and none is ‘right’. Segmenting by attitude to work is one of the more popular ones.

How could you use this information? Let me give you an example. Retailer X offers a competitive salary and a range of benefits that equate to about an additional 30% of salary. It is justifiably proud of its pension scheme.

Retailer X attracts young, fashion-orientated people to work in its stores. The turnover is high, but not uncommon for the industry. Let’s call one fictional employee ‘Sarah’ (the majority are female).

Why does Sarah work? Well she needs the cash, or potentially wants the cash. She still lives with her parents, though she is saving for a deposit for that first flat. She really would like a small car, maybe a Ford Fiesta and once a year Sarah goes to Ibiza with her closest friends. You’ll find Sarah spending quite a high proportion of her salary on nights out with the girls.

Does Sarah really care about that pension – no (although she probably should)? What Sarah would really value is ways to help her realize her ambitions.

Knowing this information the Compensation and Benefits teams speak to Ford and extend that great car-purchase scheme designed for middle managers to enable Sarah to get the great rate on her Fiesta that the company can get. This costs the firm almost nothing, but gives the Sarah lots of reason to stay with the firm. Maybe they do a deal with a travel firm.

Sarah is excited about these new benefits and tells her friends. She encourages two to apply and one joins in a nearby branch.

Once you know about your Sarah’s you can design a whole range of policies that help them. And if you know that 48% of your staff are like Sarah you can predict uptake on policies, likely effects of reorganizations.

Building this thinking into your high performer data will enable you to understand what policies to give to everyone which will specifically appeal to high performers. Or you could use it to help you attract more older workers to your firm.

Just remember, these segments aren’t fixed – people do move between them, usually after significant moments in their lives. However understanding your workforce will give you considerable power to predict and design interventions.

Graduate management schemes and the questions candidates ask

2004-12-09T14:29:00.000+01:00

Graduate training schemes typically fall into two broad categories - ones that aim to develop functional related skills, and those who seek to find potential future general managers for the firm. Of course there is overlap between the two - most typically that a functional scheme may also want to develop those who lead in that functional area (e.g. accountants who manage other accountants) and there are many instances of those on general management training schemes wanting to specialise in certain business areas following their rotations. The question that I will raise here is whether we can use information on information seeking as a guide on motivations of candidates without commercial experience.

Research on information seeking during the early months of employment shows that those candidates who wish to develop towards technical expertise will be most interested in exploring issues around employer support for development, training etc. and those with a more general management interest will typically be more interested in HR policies such as appraisal, performance measurement, career mapping etc. Also, surveys on what concerns employers points that those graded as high performers (generally with a desire towards developing as managers) are generally more interested in organisational issues - e.g.. performance of the organisation, belief in management - whereas others focus more on issues relating to their jobs and those around them.

Graduates without employment will often have a strong desire towards employment with a reputable and well regarded firm. Many will have some idea about which direction which the want to take their career, though this will develop and for a large number change over the first 24 months. Given the cost of development, and for general management schemes the degree to which value added by the graduate is biased towards the medium to long term, there is obviously a desire to recruit those with a deep desire towards management.

Candidates at all levels will tailor responses to fit what they believe the interviewer is looking for - 'the right answer'. This applies especially in the areas of motivation. What becomes telling though is what sorts of questions the candidates ask of the interviewer, or seek through the process.

Given that the candidate asks questions that they are interested in (instead of ones they think will impress the interviewer) classifying these questions can add an extra level of data to ensure fit with the role. One would expect that those with a natural desire towards management related work would be more interested in the mechanisms that will enable them to achieve promotion, and those with a natural desire to become functional experts will be interested more in how the company will support them develop skills.

Two ways of getting this information; first, after a generic presentation as part of the selection process (common amongst many firms during a selection day) or even by asking a generic question on 'what attracted them to apply' information can be gathered on motivations and areas of interest. This may be best as perceived smalltalk at the very beginning of the interview and as such should help the candidate relax.

The second is at the end of an interview during the candidates questions. It should be relatively easy for an experienced interview to classify the questions without the candidate feeling they are being scored.

As with any data identified during the selection process this should be validated with other ways of assessment, but the questions that a candidate asks might add considerably to your understanding of their potential fit to the scheme.

Linking the corporate and employment brand

2004-12-03T10:29:00.000+01:00

There has been much discussion recently about developing the employment brand, ranging from the superficial - 'what style / colour / layout our recruitment advertising is going to be' - to the insightful - considering employment brand in all its components from compensation, work environment, non-financial benefits (eg work-life balance), company culture, how the candidate views the recruitment process to the company's or its products' brand positioning. I will be discussing some of these issues in the future but what few have discussed, or researched in great detail is the linkage between the Company's brand positioning and it's employment brand.

I have been fortunate to be able to look at some of these issues in a variety of firms and my anecdotal evidence to date suggests that for many firms the corporate brand is possibly the major element of the employment brand, especially in the early stages of job search.

With hindsight this is not so surprising - we all would ideally like to work for companies we believe in - but what the data suggests is that for 'consumer facing firms' (as opposed to strict Business to business providers) it is highly likely that your job applicants will have decided to buy from you, and will probably do so in the future.

Let's take the example of a major UK retail bank. With the competition for retail banking in the UK one would expect somewhere in the region of 20% of job applicants to be customers. In fact the actual figure was more like 50%, though this depends on grade / position. There was also a 100% increase in speculative applications after generic corporate advertising, such as TV adverts.

Extending this it suggests that those brands who target certain groups in society will find it easier to source those employees who fit within these groups. A retail bank seen as 'approachable and fun' will find it easier to attract candidates than one seen as 'serious', at least at the cashier level. Aspirational brands find it easier to recruit.

Of course, this relation between the two brands is two way. How you treat your candidates will directly affect your corporate brand reputation, and given the number of job applicants a big firm gets (100,000 per year?) think of all the opportunities to damage the corporate reputation. Given that job seeking is an emotional experience then bad experiences (and great ones) are going to be magnified.

Unfortunately HR departments aren't, on average, the best brand ambassadors. Too many recruitment departments are inwardly focussed rather than 'customer focussed'. Many do far more to damage the corporate brand than they do to build it.

There are a few firms I know who understand this linkage. It is hardly surprising that employment brand in these firms often sits in the marketing department.