I had a wonderful day yesterday and at the end of it meet with some old friends from a mid sized HR communications Agency (has to remain nameless as does the client at present). Sitting with them late PM with my cup of tea and they said to me "take a look at this report we have just done". I picked it up and it was headed "Views and Opinions from the Social World" it was a report they had produced for a client and it was all about them as an employer.
Holy ....was my immediate response, as those that follow some of my stuff know for me "listening" is a passion and is in my opinion going to be a big part of the Employer Branding future. It's the new Black.
So I read the report and it was excellent, they had used a professional "listening" device ( more in a future blog) had used all the appropriate search words/terms including ; Careers, Work at, Jobs at, What's it's like plus any negative terms plus many more and then "listened" to what was being said about them.
Lots of data, time lines, high and low "buzz periods" (great for tracking what other "activity" might have created the buzz) and over a defined period. You could analysis by period, by channel e.g. a blog, a social medium etc and most inportantly, what was said and by whom, when and where.
Blown away, but then maybe I am just getting old and all organisations are doing this and I just have missed it.
This article appeared on Staffing Industry Analyst and dovetails neatly into my last blog about "social recruiting" diversity and some future legal perils for recruiters.
Given social is normally a very "visual" experience would this mean therefore that in France using social media as part of any recruiting strategy would be prohibited? Would love one of our French community members to share with us their opinions on the implications of this and, will this be acted on or ignored.
BUT if this and the other issues raised gather pace will be see the death of social media as a recruiting channel?
The article highlights the fact that "50 French companies and local governments have agreed to take part in the French government's testing of recruitment via anonymous CVs in order to prevent racism, ageism and other prejudices".
But what I found facinating was this comment "the anonymous CV is designed to open the door for job seekers. It can therefore only be regarded as a first step in the recruitment process. Information such as names, age, sex, date and place of birth, nationality, marital status and photographs are banned in order to avoid prejudicial reactions".
What suprised me even more was that this was already a legal requirement. But as the article states "even though the French parliament made the anonymous CV a legal requirement more than three years ago, it has never been enforced. Management has been remarkably reluctant to promote this way of recruitment and the government took the view that voluntary participation by companies is far more sensible than enforced recruitment by anonymous CV".
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Workforce Management a US magazine ran an article which has raises an interesting issue for those who have a passion for using social media to recruit and check candidates.
The driving force of the article is the potential discriminatory nature in networking sites and the fact that this may leave the recruiter at peril.
The article comments "According to the latest data from Quantcast, only 5 percent of LinkedIn users are black and only 2 percent are Hispanic" the article goes on to say "Sourcing from professional network sites such as LinkedIn carries a risk that the method could be challenged on discrimination grounds. It represents a hiring pool that is not open to the general population. Using a limited network may have a disparate impact. If hiring through these networks can be challenged, it will be."
Now in an ever legislative UK recruitment sector which is mirrored in Europe and the whole debate over "diversity" are we likely to see our own first case for discrimination by an organisation using a social media channel and what are the implications for our huge spending (on recruitment) public sector?
Revelation - Your Employer Brand Is No Longer Owned by Your Firm
This is the headline from a piece written by Dr.John Sullivan at ERE In it, he admits that "Despite many successes, it's time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image".
He adds "the premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived".
At the heart of his article he suggests "it was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now."
Dr Sullivan's article focuses on the issue that technology is now empowering/allowing all of us to comment on all things relating work, employment, job seeking etc . With "opinion sharing sites" like Glassdoor.com, Vault and others whose business model is to encourage us to post comments about the organisations/people we work for and they allow others to see our reviews is it hardly surprising that the company has lost control of the message.
Below is a full release from the CIPD and it does not make for good reading.
I try to be Mr Positive and the glass is always full and right now as I write this I am listening to the news and hearing that the recession is over but as Vince Cable has just said "it has had a serious heart attack".
As I meet those in our industry I am getting positive signals and boy I hope we are going to see a pick up but I worry. Why?
The dreaded W or double dip recession -
- We still have huge personal debt which is not factored into the banking sectors "toxic debete".
There has been in recent weeks a lot of debate about the future of job boards, the impact of social media but some recently released statictics would indicate that job seekers are voting with their feet.
Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.
But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn's visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).
According to that data, the average LinkedIn user is 2.4 times as likely as the average Internet user to be looking for a job. A full 28.5% of LinkedIn's users are looking for a job
Using Comscore's data from the graph above, we get that compared to the average Internet user, LinkedIn users are:
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
11 Aug 09
I posted the full release of Monday's CIPD/KPMG employment survey, the reason, because I had read 3 different media and each had put a different spin on the results.
Some talk about a recovery, others a challenging time ahead. So I decided to run the full release.
My take, I found it worring for the recruitment industry particually the Advertising/HR Communications agencies and some "more traditional"media AKA print/Public Sector job boards. Why? - because Public Sector recruitment is traditionally 50% plus of the UK recruitment media market and for many regional media has been a major revenue line plus some nationals ( Guardian) and many business to business groups.
During this recession "at least the public sector has remained boyant" is a cry I have often heard. But it looks like that particular "gravey train" is about to end.
Not a shock given the debt we have built up in the UK. Something has to give and one thing the government can control directly is public sector spending. From everything I hear every authority and department is being asked to find savings today. But going forward these will be much deeper and this is bound to have an inpact on public sector recruitment spend.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
11 Aug 09
Private sector employment improves - but weak economic recovery could trigger second wave of redundancies by year end
The pace of deterioration in UK job prospects is starting to slow this summer as private sector demand for staff begins to stabilise following a surge of redundancies earlier in the year. Not only are far fewer employers expecting to make staff redundant but the scale of planned redundancies has also reduced.
This is the key finding of the latest quarterly CIPD/KPMG Labour Market Outlook (LMO) survey - involving more than 900 employers and covering all sectors of the economy - results of which are published today.
However, signs of improved employer optimism in the private sector are offset by mounting pessimism in the public sector. And the CIPD accompanies today's survey results with a warning that a weak economic recovery could trigger a renewed burst of redundancies in the private sector if corporate profits continue to be squeezed by fast rising unit labour costs.
The summer 2009 LMO survey finds a negative balance of -10 per cent between the proportion of employers expecting to employ more staff (in the three months following the survey) and the proportion expecting to employ fewer staff. This compares with a negative balance of -19 per cent in the spring quarter.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
05 Aug 09
New "Beta" site gets $3m in first round investment. Good to see US VC backing recruitment start up's BUT question would they have raised that kind of money in Europe? see ERE news story.
It seems to me that in Europe it is much tougher to get funding for new "recruitment innovations" is this true?
Over the years I have seen so many well backed US start up's come and go. Some succeed and some fail. But at least they get the chance to try, in Europe we seem to find it much tougher to get investment for recruitment technology start up's.
European investors seem to prefer to back "media acquisitions", "staffing and recruitment consultancy takeovers/start ups" is this me or is this the experience of others?
My worry is that without the right funding and therefore investment in sales and marketing infrastructure, we have some great "local" business but will not breakout of a "local market" and achieve the critical mass needed to survive in an increasingly global market.
All opinions welcome, particularly those from the investment community.
Thanks
Keith
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
05 Aug 09
Yes that staggering fact was revealed by TechCrunch yesterday. Facebook is growing at an astounding rate, it added 24 million new unique visitors worldwide last month alone for a new record total of 340 million unique visitors.
Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009). Source: comScore
- Google Sites: 844 million
- Microsoft Sites: 691 million
- Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
- Facebook: 340 million
- Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
- AOL: 280 million
- eBay: 233 million
- CBS Interactive: 186 million
- Amazon: 183 million
- Ask Network: 174 million
With this level of growth a debate must be "where do we really make our money?". What I mean is how does this impact on us in our world of recruitment?.
It is clear that Linkedin is seeing recruitment as being a key revenue generator. But the scale of growth would indicate to me that for Facebook the aim is the be a "media business" and it's target will be to take Google on.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
05 Aug 09
If "recruitment advertising is dead" what should we call it in the future. It is more than just an advertisement on a job board or in a newspaper. Engagement advertising - NO - but what?
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The term "recruitment advertising" seems outdated today, it conjures an image of a beautiful advertisement in a newspaper. Today is "social" it is engagement, it is about authenticity, it is about relationship and the brand is defined by your employees, the candidate experience ie by others not you It is the "user experience".
So what therefore does the term "recruitment advertising mean?", is their still such a thing?
I will take all replies and repost and let you decide.
Keith Robinson
Posted by: Keith Robinson in social media on
04 Jun 09
Was at the ONREC conference this week and the old thorny topic of a companies approach to "social media" usage came up.
I found three excellent articles on the topic, all authored by Sharlyn Lauby, they cover;
Should your company have a Social Media Ploicy?
10 must haves for you Social Media Ploicy.
How to deal with social media conflicts
Matt Alder has started a great debate on his blog Recruiting Futurology about the issue of "job sites" charging candidates for "services".
This follows the recent beta launch of Worthing+ from TMDR. It has brought attention to other models such as Ladders.com and the whole concept of charging candidates for a suite of premium services.
I must thank Gareth at TMDR for giving me a login and I am looking at the site at the moment. Interestingly I believe that these won't be the first or last of such business models.
It makes sense, but not because of the current economic conditions. Actually launching now can be viewed as being exploitative. Why? Because we have focused on monetising the recruiter for 10 years, providing them with "better and better solutions." To me it makes sense today to develop "job seeker toolkits".
Again why? Well better planning by the candidate, finding more relevant jobs, better matching, better CV's/profiles and better testing should equal reduced CV spam in the recruiter's inbox. More relevant candidates who have researched the company and are prepared for the interview....it might just answer the recruiter technology issue!!
I was traveling back from Holland Friday evening and picked up my free newspaper (and yes I still read print!!) . The article on page 4 by Brian Groom suggested that " Britain's job market may be able to bounce back faster than in the past".
This positive piece of news came from Nigel Meager , director of the Institute for Employment Studies , He said " I think the labour market is in better shape now than in either of the previous recessions. For any given fall in economic activity we are likely to be able to survive it better that we were in previous recessions and we are likely to bounce back slightly more quickly."
Wishful thinking? Well both the CIPD and the Sunday Times also feel that we may be coming out of the worst, so who knows.
What I do know is that my friends in Europe are begining to feel the heat. In Holland the volume of job posting are down 40%; in Belgium activity is almost at a standstill and in France it is a similar story.
We will send a note to all our friends across Europe getting their first hand experience of what is happening in local recruitment markets across Europe.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in technology, strategy, social networking, Recruitment, online recruitment, On-line job hunting, Netherlands, media, Keith Robinson, Holland, Global recruitment, global, future, erecruitment, blogs on
15 May 09
It's been some time since I last blogged as Alan and I decided that we needed to rebuild and re-brand the Beta of Recruitment Community Europe and at the same time build our Pan European members and marketing database.
This week I was fortunate enough to be a speaker at the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam. It was also great to spend a couple of days at the conference with fellow speaker, Paul Harrison from Carve Consulting, a true thought leader in this space.
The event was put on by Thys Spragers and his team at KREM , one of Holland's leading consultancies in this space. With over 190 attendees in this current climate, it shows the interest in the topic and also reflected the quality of the speaker line up KERM had put together.
The morning saw two true visionaries in the social media space. The first speaker was Jeremiah Owyang , Senior Analyst at Forrester, blogger and commentator on the sector. Second was Urs Gasser , Executive Director Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
I am sitting today at my 2nd MLL with Mr MMLL himself so before my speed pitching escapades I thought I would take the opportunity to talk with Jamie about MLL and how he came up with such an original idea.
Q; How about a thumbnail view of your career?
A: Hardcore recruitment background, Stated out at Northcliffe Newspapers as an agency sales recruitment rep selling to the London agencies our regional newspaper portfolio, moved to Monster in 2003 and over the next 4 years built out and headed up their RAA channel. This ended up representing 15% plus of Monster's UK revenue. Moved to Fish4 in 2007 to do a similar job.
Q: Where did the idea for MLL come from?
A: A US road trip!! "as one does". True...I went with some mates, hired a car and off we drove. This gave me lots of time to think and my original idea was to create a community around the recruitment industry, bringing together the media and agencies, but based on "last minute advertising space".
Q: Can you expand?
A: Well I was amazed as I got to know the agencies and how they operated how much ad space can be left to filla s print gets near to deadline. All the reps hit the phones and try to use their agency contacts to take up this space, the agencies in turn will contact clients to see if an ad the previous week worked etc. This seemed hugely inefficient, so we came up with the idea of a site "Latespace.com" (working name) to speed up the process.
When we took the concept out to the market to road test we got a "big fat thumbs down". What we forgot is that no publisher wants to admit they might have last minute space to fill.
Q: What nexr?
A: Well the site was being built and we still wanted to be in the community. And to be honest the money for the site was running out. I had been to all the major UK recruitment events, I knew that getting in front of agencies can be tough, but also thought that the usual 30-45 minutes was becoming time inefficient. we put two and two together and bingo, MLL.
Q: Where do you go next?
A: We did our first Recruitment consultancy event with Louise from UK Recruiter last week and got positive feedback from both media and those attending in a "buying" mode. We are getting more requests for niche events such as the one we did focused on the Public Sector sponsored by JobsGoPublic. Also building out the community on-line via the site is a big part of our future.
For those that know me this is not a reference to a my days as a media director, or my size, but a very neat event founded by Jamie Leonard and which I am off to today for a second time.
So what is MyLongLunch? Simply put, it is speed pitching. You are at a good venue, each participant has a small booth in a room packed with HR comms agency people. You get 10 minutes with each to pitch your business or service.
It is time efficient for both parties. There are no "how's the golf, pets" etc - conversations. You have to get to the point and it s a great way to fine tune your "elevator pitch".
I am attending wearing two hats; to interview the founder Jamie (should be fun) and to discuss the launch of a new site www.careersiteadvisor, which aggregates career sites and job boards in the UK into an easy to search index. This will provide the job seeker and, soon, "industry professionals" the ability to review the sites they visit; therefore it will become a career site comparison site.
The site links to the embedded careers page of over 1,300 corporate career sites today( this grows every week as more sites come on board) and all basic listings are free.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in Untagged on
27 Feb 09
How to use Twitter to recruit the right talent
In these difficult times, hiring managers are realizing the huge benefits of Twitter as a recruiting tool. This micro-blog helps you find key candidates, and is a highly efficient way to post job opportunities.
2/26/2009 6:30:00 AM By: Michelle MacLeod
Read More
OK so I was wrong ....2 years ago one of my Dutch pals Gordon Lockenberg, who blogs for us told me about this new way of communicating, getting information, micro blogging concept called Twitter...oh another bloody web 2.0, social networking, got lots of money, coming from the US, idea that will be adopted by recruiters and will find it's really revenue coming from recruitment rant Followed from me.... so funny the rant was right but for the wrong reason.
It was a rant of oh here we go again yet another industry changing technology and a off course the fear factor...can I keep up/seen it all before.
So wrong on one count...it's working and recruiters seem to like it. Right on one count....50 next month and the fear of can I keep up with it all.
We at RCE have known Mike for a long time and he delivered as usual a great presentation with some excellent simple tips;
Mike has also just published an update version of his book "How to find a job using the internet". You can see a review at CareerSiteAdvisor.
What is online marketing?
Mike then gave some key statistics showing the growth of on-line media, most off which we have been covered in other blogs on RCE, see Internet Advertising Bureau.
One of the real transformations has been the growth of paid search a sector now dominated by Google with 88% share followed by Yahoo with 4%.
Jeremy Mason from Revenue Science delivered an excellent presentation on Behavioral Targeting, a term well discussed amongst online marketeers and more information on the topic can be found on the IAB site.
For many publishers this has become a key issue and one which they are investing in to give greater value to their advertiser BUT it is as important to understand who their audience is and what and where they have been and go after they touch your site.
Jeremy defines what behavioral targeting is; "targeting groups of users with ad and content based on anonymous previous activity and attributes".
Why is this becoming a "boom"business" ;
- We have a pyramid issue when it come to online content- at the bottom is the huge chunk of advertising led content BUT at the top is contextual search which has far more limited content.
