Thursday 30 October 2014

Sustainable Solutions Series Edition #5: Social Media


How can you utilise digital to attract and retain talent, rather than by simply raising salaries?
In response to recent Labour Market Statistics, this series will offer some examples of ways in which recruiters and employers can keep well resourced during periods of low candidate availability. In this, the fifth in our series, we explore the value of recruiting via social media.

Recruitment magazine The Recruiter advised that word of mouth is the most effective way of promoting your business and products, but social media can take it one step further. As we know, we must take advantage of this channel as candidates become more digitally adept; 15 million people in the UK are on LinkedIn, the recruiter’s main platform, so if you promote your company and your employer brand via social media, it will not only reach more of your target audience, it will also establish you as a modern, adaptable business, in tune with the rhythms of communication of today. Currently, 29% of candidates now use social media as their primary tool for job seeking, and 92% of companies use or plan to use social media for recruiting. In the face of these numbers, recruiters need to take advantage of this tool.

By recruiting and promoting your employer brand via social media, you can make the most of:
  • The best way to reach passive candidates
  • An easy way for candidates to communicate with your company using a medium they’re comfortable with
  • An accessible resource of information
  • Access to the new online generation, who will become your future customer base
  • Personalising your business by giving it a voice
  • Reducing time-to-hire
  • Increasing both the quantity and quality of applications
  • Increasing staff referrals
  • … and it’s mostly free! Of course, premier membership of networks such as LinkedIn requires a fee, but the world of social media is probably the quickest way to post new jobs to thousands of potential applicants without paying a penny.
Consistent, attractive social media activity takes time to build and maintain, but as your online presence grows and develops, you can sit back and allow social ‘sharing’ to do its work. Social media, as an alternative method of attraction and retention to just raising salaries, has proved to be one of the most successful strategies. A company is often judged as a potential employer by its online presence; the efficiency and consistency of your online activity reflects how the business operates on all levels. Businesses should not underestimate how much their online profile says about them; if we weren’t meant to judge a book by its cover, it wouldn’t have one.

Want us to do it all for you? Call our Client Services Director Steve Phillips on 0117 312 6767 or steve.phillips@resource-management.co.uk who will be able to offer you a social media solution tailored to your specific needs and style.

Wednesday 22 October 2014

Face-to-face in the Facebook age; the multifaceted concept of modern networking


As a result of technological advances and networking’s reputation as a pivotal tool, it can be argued that the UK has become a ‘networked nation’. We develop and maintain networks socially and professionally and both have become part of the fabric of modern society. 

‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’

A phrase familiar to most and brings to life the relevance of ‘access’. Information, interactions events and groups are all examples of things individuals can gain access to as a result of (or to develop) networks. Through mediums such as Twitter, you can gain access to most people’s location, playlists, opinions and even converse with them directly. The interesting conflict is that on one hand, the innovation and adoption rate of technology means we have never before had so much access to people and information; yet networking is also thought by many to reinforce elitism and ‘tight circles’. 

London in the 1980’s embodied a fairly closed and elitist network, as there was little diversity in the nature of those running the big banks and large firms. These individuals mostly had prosperous backgrounds and attended Eton and Oxbridge, until Margaret Thatcher’s ‘big bang’ opened the city up. These ‘old networks’ were limited and rigid, as if you surround yourself with similar people, the chances of innovating and considering the wider impact on stakeholders is greatly reduced.

Times have obviously changed, but elitist and restrictive elements of networking still exist. Whilst the techniques and resources for networking are technically available to everyone, many still refer to an un-democratic ‘old boys club’ culture in many networks, where jobs go to friends and family and Directors have similar backgrounds and socialise in small silos. Background is especially relevant, as many suggest that private schools can act as a springboard, instilling a networked mind-set into pupils who often utilise this to maximise or exceed their potential through networking. 

Businesses and society must become better at encouraging networks

So how can (and why should) we ensure that everyone, not just society’s elite, adopt a networked outlook? London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton claims that “if you’re well connected, the ideas flow more quickly and you are much more likely to innovate... [in the future] easy jobs will be outsourced or undertaken by data algorithms/robots. What’s left is the hard stuff and that needs innovation and creativity". Julia Hobsbawm (Founder of Editorial Intelligence) adds that “we need to bring knowledge into organisations, because the outside world is ahead of them. We need to rebalance that and bring the outside, and it’s oxygen of ideas, in”. She also warned of “marzipan Managers”, scared to venture outside of their daily role. 

In addition, to ensure that ‘state school’ pupils also adopt this networked way of thinking, mentors and networking advocates should undertake visits to promote the benefits. These schools should also attempt to interact with their community as much as possible. Studio schools are a great example, as they place a great deal of emphasis on work experience and projects with local businesses and organisations. 

The merit of face-to-face interaction

A final consideration is the importance of face-to-face interactions. These are often proven to be the most effective, and real world and cyber networking can co-exist without cannibalising each other. Facial cues and expressions make communication much more effective; after you have met face-to-face, non face-to-face interactions are improved as people feel they understand their recipient and their personality more thoroughly.

Networking is more than just coffee shops and conferences and the UK, both as an economy and a society, should attempt to instil a networked way of thinking into our future generations.

Thursday 16 October 2014

Sustainable Solutions Series Edition #4: Home Grown Talent

How can you nurture and develop your entry-level workers, rather than simply attracting new talent by raising salaries?

In response to the recent Labour Market Statistics, this series will offer examples of ways in which recruiters and employers can thrive during low candidate availability. In this, the fourth in our series of articles demonstrating how you can manage the dwindling talent pool, we explore the value of home growing your talent.

Promoting from within and investing in Learning & Development can root your business in experienced and engaged employees. In particular, investing trust and time in young employees who are just beginning their career has numerous benefits, developing those with the potential to grow into key business leadership positions.

The benefits of nurturing young talent are:

  • The opportunity to shape entry level workers into just what your organisation needs. New starters offer your employer/employee relationships a new start; they have comparatively few preconceived ideas of how they should do their job and are willing and keen to learn.
  • Taking on and nurturing young talent encourages loyalty to your organisation.
  • You can enjoy the immensely rewarding feeling of fulfilment in seeing someone you have nurtured grow into a valuable and independent member of the organisation.
  • It reinforces the importance of learning within your organisation.
  • Instigating a culture of development vastly improves your employer brand.
  • Establishing this culture will create an environment in which, as Forbes put it, ‘employees can seek out challenges where they can develop without feeling like mistakes will set them back in their career or jeopardize their job’.
Of course, organisations are understandably wary about this approach, but ‘despite the considerable financial risks of investing in employees when they could then simply up and leave, advocates such as Sir Richard Branson promote that a company should ‘train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to’.’

In the next edition of Sustainable Solutions, we explore the uses and benefits of social media, demonstrating how you can utilise the digital world to attract and retain talent.

Intelligent Consulting's parent company Resource Solutions Group (RSG), in association with The HR World, facilitated a round table debate in September, entitled ‘The Myth of Talent Management’. The white paper following this round table will be released in November. In the meantime, please help yourself to previous white papers, free to download!

Friday 10 October 2014

Speaking in Code - are we ready for Big Data and People Analytics?

RSG Director Adam Meadows isn’t quite sure…






A recent BBC article on the benefits of big data and social profiling in the recruitment process really got me thinking about what this brave new future holds for all involved when selecting the right people for the right job.
I admit, I’m usually skeptical of anything that is called the ‘next big thing’ in recruitment – especially when it is IT-based. This is because the ultimate test of people is, well, people, and quite frankly the development of this new ‘people analytics’, as it is known, only proves this fact.
Don’t get me wrong – I remember the painful days of hundreds of files and sifting endlessly through piles of paper trying to read and define what they contained. The advent of social media has changed this in recruitment, mostly for the better, and it’s right that systems should continue to develop and enhance these benefits.
However, it’s hard for me to believe that software will replace humans in selecting the best candidates for jobs in my lifetime.
This is not because humans don’t make mistakes. I’ve witnessed countless excellent candidates, with a variety of exciting attributes, being excluded via human screening functions. As a simple statement of fact, a CV cannot accurately reflect a candidate, causing many to be overlooked.
It’s rather that, given that these people-based mechanisms can be flawed, how can we expect a computer to do it any better?
The whole issue makes me think about two extremes of computers trying to represent humans – one designed to compete in a highly-structured game of chess, and one designed to imitate human interactions (those computers trying to beat the Turing Test). The Turing Test, named after one of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians, Alan Turing, was developed to see if software could fool human beings in to thinking that it was itself a human.
Chess has been a target for computing enthusiasts for a long time as the game has a finite number of possibilities, albeit an inconceivably high number, and a number of clearly defined rules that need to be followed. The most famous example of this is the 'Deep Thought' computer by IBM, which later became 'Deep Blue'. On the other hand, we have software trying to imitate human beings and defeat the Turing Test. 
Most years there are contests to see which software is performing best in this regard. In 2014, the University of Reading ran one such contest, with the winning software fooling 33% of the human interrogators in a text based conversation which lasted five minutes. Such a short conversation cannot account for all the nuances of physical conversation and body language.
While elements of these two examples are successful, the comparisons only further convince me that a high-quality interview technique, combined with experience and sound emotional intelligence, are the only way to ensure that your recruitment process is the best that it can be and to minimise failure rates. People analytics will no doubt go on to play a major role in all our futures; their development demonstrates that HR, in conjunction with the business, needs to be involved in long-term strategy as opposed to fulfilling a process-led function. But to enable a world where the skills, personalities and jobs are matched, the actual issue that needs to be addressed is how the whole process happens culturally. There are no ‘quick fixes’ for this, no matter how technologically advanced it may appear.