Kangarooster

Hi all,

David Manaster of ERE.net (promoters of the Global Expo 2007 in Amsterdam in November) just pointed out a new video on YouTube about Blogging.

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, ERE, kangarooster

This has been a very very interesting few weeks. Bringing a new site (or any other software development project) to completion or “go live” is always an intense period. It takes incredible commitment, teamwork and belief to get past the final 5% of fine tuning. We have all of that and more with the team behind Kangarooster. The development team have been working 20 hour days, sales and marketing have been pounding the pavement to ensure that new clients will be ready and the rest of us have been doing everything we can to pitch in on delivery.

Even more exciting to me has been the robust discussions we are already having about future generations of the site and the platform for the ‘white label’ corporate prospects. This is a real sign of company development and maturity, when you can realistically examine your current offerings and plan out 2-3 years.

Stay tuned.

Al

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster, online matching

Hi everyone.

First of all, massive congratulations to Luis and Arturo and the rest of the technical team for the Beta launch today of Kangarooster. Our baby has been in gestation for a while - but this is really the first step in delivering a truly innovative experience for the candidate. As we move forward, I am sure that our technology will power many many career sites, enhancing companies’ capability to engage directly with the IQA (interested, qualified and available) candidates.

This has led me to think about Talent Pools again. Well, actually, I recently helped out some US colleagues who are preparing a paper on the topic. What came to me was how little academic research or industry literature exists on the topic. The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) in the UK refers to Talent Pools only for existing employees. Most companies that think of the Talent Pool as a place for external candidate info only really have a static database.

If you want to make it a real Talent Community, then you have to engage with candidates, communicate regularly and treat them with respect. If you look at Keith’s posting over the weekend, you will see yet more evidence how little companies do understand about this aspect.

Over the next few articles, I will return to the themes of Talent Community.

Let the fun begin with Kangarooster as a starting point.

Alan

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster

A great survey was released this week in the UK and it backed up the results of a survey I did at Totaljobs 4 years ago. Bad recruitment practices hit a companies balance sheet.

Treat jobseekers badly and guess what; they won’t refer the job to others, they will talk badly about you as an organisation and worst of all they will be less inclined to buy your company’s products or services.

The Survey by Capital Consulting high lights that One in four jobseekers have been badly treated by a prospective employer.

• 53% of job seekers will not purchase products and services if they have been badly treated
• 55% tell at least three people about their bad experience

So you spend all that money  marketing and  building a brand, HR invest in building an employer brand and at the point of ‘purchase’ they get a poor experience.

The study by Capital Consulting indicates that companies are not handling the recruitment process as well as they could, with one in four job seekers saying they have been badly treated when applying for a job.

So what are the key results;

• 31% of people tell between three and five people about their bad experience, and 24% of people tell more than six people. A very vocal 10% tell more than ten others, and 1% will go as far as venting their spleen on the Internet by blogging about their bad experience.
• 53% of job seekers actively avoid buying products and services from a company that treats them poorly, with almost a quarter of those (23%) declaring that they will never purchase any product or service from the company again, even if it means going without.

So at a time when more businesses need to attract more talented workers than ever, companies are alienating exactly thise people they so desparately need. 

So what are the issues that upset the jobseeker:

• One in two (53%) people were aggrieved that no reason was given for not being offered the job. 
• 51%of people said the lack of feedback following an interview was their main irritation.  
• Almost half (49%) of all job seekers find the lack of acknowledgment of their application the most annoying part of the recruitment process
• 34% say they are asked irrelevant or stupid questions at interview
• 30% are asked to do irrelevant tests
• 26% of job seekers don’t like dealing with third parties and recruitment agencies – men (30%) dislike this more than women (20%)
• 32% of people say they are sent details for jobs that do not meet their skills or salary expectations.

So poor communications, poor interviewing techniques, 3rd parties and lack of relevency all seem to be key issues. Those who read our blog at Kangarooster know these issues are our passions.

So great research…but will boardrooms listen…the jury is still out.

The Rooster

So another series of Blogs that adopt a “musical” analogy. In the last month I have been training the staff in a UK recruitment advertising agency. One of the areas covered is to look back at at where we have been to look forward to the future

At 47 years of age there is a lot to look back on!! But it also highlighted to me that at one level we have come so far and yet at another little has changed.

So in this series I will give a Rooster’s potted history of the last 27 years and some observations on this period. Usually for me I will inject some humor into this. At least, my sense of humor.

So where to begin; one upon a time a wide-eyed fool walks into to the office of the Thomson Corporate for a job in Classified Sales, having sent much of the previous 4 years as a punk, in squats and running a fanzine called Alternative Music. So suit on and spiky hair straight, safety pins out, in I walk. Interesting questioning technique!!! asked to sell an ash tray, yes Geraldine O’ Conner I’ll never forget. So the ash tray and got the job. Corporate Life here I come.

2 weeks training and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), sound like a punk song, I am assigned to sell Recruitment Advertising on Construction News or as my father who was a builder would call it “Jackers Journal”. At this point I felt a level of fear never felt before. I walk from the traing room to my desk, through a sea of smiling faces, I sit at the desk, my client base in a box, on index cards allocated alphabetically. I’m meant to pick the phone up and sell, oh my god, the silence is deafening, they are all listening, they are waiting for me to pick the phone up, they will listen, they will laugh… I’ll wait for the coffee break, no one around. I made the call and started a 27 year love affair with this industry.

Lesson 1: Don’t worry about what others might think since most of us are in the same boat. Today I speak at recruitment conferences around the globe and every single time I’m still petrified, but like that first sales call once you take the step there is no going back.

Much like what has happened in recruitment, we are electronic, there is technology, there is no going back.

Next time, the client, the ad, the printer and where’s the money made then.

I met with a couple of great guys last week in Holland to talk about developing some training programs for recruiters and it got me thinking. I know that is a worrying sign but it just happened. And I thought: who or what is a recruiter?

I think it is easy to understand that those working frontline in a staffing firm, recruitment consultancy or a search firm are, or can be, defined as “recruiters”. But today in the client world who or what is a recruiter?

Lets look at the internal process to identify those who recruits:

• Line Management/Department Head/Supervisor. These are the individuals who do the real recruiting in many organisations. They often have the budget to handle there own hiring needs, will contact a staffing firm and brief on their requirements/needs. They can contact a recruitment advertising agency and get the ad produced and placed. They can even handle that first phase communication with a candidate.
• HR professional. In many organisations it is an HR professional who is the first line of contact, whether it be taking a paper based CV or an electronic one, looking at candidates who have registered on-line or taking a call they interact with a potential future employee. But do they always interview the candidates? And does that make them any less a recruiter?

So these would be the traditional definitions of those who recruit. In my next series I will look at the challenges these groups have today when hiring. And I will be asking myself: are they really equipped to handle the recruiting needs of the 21st century?

I have still one bigger question when defining who or what is a recruiter. In any organisation should not everyone be a recruiter? The actions and comments of the CEO can have a greater impact on an organisation than one “rouge” hiring manager interviewing badly. A board director saying something inappropriate at a industry conference and then being quoted, can do more damage to hiring into that company than we often expect.

We live in a world of constant communication, a world where with so many channels for news or opinion the need for content is unrelenting and everything we say or do can potentially create news. With blogging we even become the creator and sometimes the news itself.

So in this environment from the top down we are all recruiters.  What we say and do impacts on the jobseekers perception of us and our organisation. Brand reputation is a word often used in Public Relations. Just put the word Recruitment in front of Brand and that is the reality we face today.

But what has all this ‘thinking’ got to do with training?

Because it is important to develop courses for those in the HR/Recruiting. But let us not forget the line managers for it is there that all the great work that happens at the attraction stage goes to waste. And lets educate senior management on the impact they can have on recruitment.

The Rooster

So in the final part of this series, where do I believe recruitment should sit in and organisation? 

For me the answer should be simple, where the organisation has significant hiring needs to justify a stand alone team, then this should report into Marketing with a strong dotted line into HR.

For a medium sized company with one recruiting professional in-house it should sit in HR with a very strong dotted line into Marketing.

With organisations without in-house recruiting professionals this function should be handled by an HR generalist and therefore left within the HR function. But ensure that this individual gets some recruitment-related training.

So why Marketing? Well, to me recruitment today is Marketing, when you look at the core attributes:

• Research consumer/jobseeker opinions of the organisation
• Identify the values, attritutes, positives, and message that reflect both reality and resonate with the audience
• Build the brand
• Identify the channel to the candidates
• Create the message and attract- reflecting both the audience and the channel/medium
• Manage the response- treat the jobseeker as if they are consumer
• Build a two way relationship with those candidates you may wish to hire in the future
• Sell- yes the interview is as much a sell as it is an interview. It is a 2-way sales process, they sell to you and you sell to them
• Close- yes again you need to close, get them to commit
• For those that don’t make it look after them, they may be a customer or future customer. Or simply remember they are people and therefore deserve your respect

So to me recruitment is about a skill and competency set that already exists in the marketing function; therefore why re-invent the wheel?

But ultimatly in an organisation there should be alignment between the Corporate goals of finding great talent and the internal key functions; HR, Marketing and Corporate Affairs.

Getting these functions working together and you can have a great recruiting team!

The Rooster

Dat was toch echt wat we, niet eens zo lang geleden, vertelden. Een marktleider geeft niets weg; geen gratis abonnementen, geen gratis proefperiode. Niks gratis want dat paste niet bij je imago als kwaliteit merk.

Wat is de wereld toch veranderd. Tegenwoordig gaat het niet meer om of je iets gratis weggeeft maar hoe je daar je business van kunt maken. Het viel me op toen ik een paar weken geleden de colum las van Thecla Schaeffer in Marketing Tribune. Zij wees op Brandchannel.com.

Daar werd de bezoekers gevraagd wat hun favoriete merken zijn. Dat werden: Google, Apple, YouTube, Wikipedia en Starbucks. Drie hiervan zijn gratis voor de consument, dezelfde drie zijn behoorlijk jonge merken.

En voor de reclamewereld op zijn minst interessant: diezelfde merken geven relatief heel weinig geld uit aan conventionele reclame. Dat geldt trouwens ook voor Apple, waar je de enorme merkbeleving kan toeschrijven aan geweldige ideeën, prachtig design en uitstekende apparatuur. En die daarnaast geen mogelijkheid onbenut laat om gelikte presentaties om te zetten in PR.

Is het dan gedaan met de reclamebranche, moeten we ons echt zorgen gaan maken. Of moeten wij ook onze business modellen veranderen. En zo ja hoe dan? Kortom, lekker wat om over na te denken.

Een visie, een onderzoek, kennis van jouw bedrijf, product of dienst, een wijde blik op Nederland en/of de rest van de wereld, een mening en kennis over jouw doelgroep. En vanuit dat alles een hele goede partner voor jouw reclame/communicatie bureau; dat maakt alle verschil.

Gooi je ‘troep’ het bureau in, dan krijg je ‘troep’ uit het bureau terug. Met een beetje geluk in een mooie gepolijste buitenkant. Maar dat mooie buitenkantje doet waarschijnlijk helemaal niets voor je, want inhoudelijk klopt het niet.

Voor die inhoud ben je als opdrachtgever namelijk zelf verantwoordelijk. En de kwaliteit van die inhoud bepaalt het niveau waarop je als bureau start. En dat aanvangsniveau bepaalt weer in belangrijke mate, op welk niveau je als bureau eindigt.

Scan management consultants publiceerde in de afgelopen weken de resultaten uit onderzoek dat zij hield onder ruim 80 Nederlandse reclame/communicatie bureaus. Hierin werd de kwaliteit van de opdrachtgevers tegen het licht gehouden. Omdat, in de communicatie wereld, de opdrachtgevers meer co-producent zijn dan ‘klant’. En daarom een grote invloed hebben op het eindproduct van de bureaus. Aldus een artikel in Adformatie.

De onderzochte bureaus beoordeelden de inhoudelijke aansturing van klanten als behoorlijk slecht. Het verbaasde bureaus, onder andere, dat opdrachtgevers zo weinig belang hechten aan onderzoek en daarmee in feite hun desinteresse aangeven voor effectief campagne voeren.

Uiteindelijk is de conclusie dat maar 7 opdrachtgevers door de bureaus worden gezien als rolmodel. Omdat je in totaal praat over zo’n 1000 klanten, bij de 83 bureaus, is dat maar 0,7% van het totaal aantal klanten. En dat is wel heel erg weinig.

Is dat nou erg anders in de wereld van arbeidsmarktcommunicatie? Ik ben bang van niet. Het gaat nog steeds veel en veel te vaak over snel even een advertentietje, voor in de zaterdagkrant. Het belangrijkste criterium blijft vooral: als ik die interne klant maar van mijn rug af heb.

Dat er vervolgens niemand reageert ligt natuurlijk aan de opwarmende economie en de schaarste op de arbeidsmarkt.

Dat klop natuurlijk voor een deel. Maar er is nog zoveel te winnen door een (kwalitatief) betere, gepassioneerde aansturing.

Dus klant zet je schouders er onder en maak je bureau, en je eigen organisatie, en je zelf, eens blij!

Toen ik een half jaar geleden begon te bloggen voor Expand had ik geen idee wat de impact van dit fenomeen zou kunnen zijn. Ik ben, zacht gezegd, zeer positief verrast.

Toen we met Kangarooster begonnen, wisten we al dat een blog een integraal onderdeel van de site zou moeten worden. Door de brede kennis en diepe ervaring van de partners zou een blog een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan de kennis van online recruitment in al haar facetten.

En nu is er een bevestiging van deze gedachte bij monde van John Sumser. In een uitstekende post over het belang van blogging in de recruitment arena beschrijft John op zijn onnavolgbare wijze de waarde, de beperkingen, de risico’s en de toekomst van blogging in onze industrie.

John blogt niet, nooit. Al zo lang als ik me kan herinneren publiceert hij zijn e-mail nieuwsbrief. Toen ik hem in november 2006, tijdens de ERE dagen in Amsterdam, vroeg naar het waarom had hij geen duidelijk antwoord. Maar hij houdt ervan zijn boodschap te controleren. Dat, en de onwil om op allerlei commentaar te moeten gaan reageren, zijn waarschijnlijk de belangrijkste redenen waarom we John in (nabije) de toekomst geen eigen blog op zullen zien zetten.