"Ideas wont keep. Something must be done about them."
- Alfred North Whitehead
Exciting times! The first idea to come from StepStone Ideas has been planned into the i-GRasp product roadmap following a flurry of votes. A number of others have also made it into the planning process and we are waiting to hear when they will become part of the product.
It has been an interesting 3 months since StepStone Ideas launched. The sign-up and participation rates have been very positive and community members have been enthusiastically posting ideas and voting and commenting on the ideas of others.
We’re looking forward to the use of StepStone Ideas really maturing over the next few months as we introduce members from our ET Web and EasyCruit communities and make improvements to the site so that we can continue to enhance the experience of engagement between customers and product managers.
A few months ago I was at an event listening to a speaker from YouTube telling us how important video is in recruitment - not just to differentiate but also to really communicate and reinforce the essence of the employer brand.
Of course video has been used as part of recruitment communications for a long-time before YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo and the plethora of video sites existed.Prior to joining StepStone I worked for a well known recruitment advertising and communications agency when video, distributed to (mainly graduate) candidates on DVD, was common place.
Over the years I've seen some great video produced (by my previous employer and other agencies) in the pursuit of recruitment but I have also seen some terrible wastes of money where the glossy output with silver-screen production values (and costs) completely missed the point.
The speaker from YouTube made some very strong points about the use of video sites for recruitment purposes:
Its a rich medium - use it to communicate more than just your vacancy
Keep video clips short – attention spans are
The clip should reinforce the brand
The content should reinforce messages in other media
Dont 'over produce' the clip - quality should be in keeping with your brand but also be authentic
This final point really struck a chord with me.The other points are good but number 5 is what video sites are all about.Easy to produce, quick to distribute, fast to access, valuable, rich content consumed in a familiar, comfortable format.Why write anything again?
I was surfing through Google Video today and found this clip of a Southwest Airlines Flight Attendant rapping the pre-flight safety instructions.Its great – it’s fun, it’s authentic and it’s original.
I’m not sure if it was produced by the firm or if it is a personal video, then I found a few other similar clips featuring other Southwest employees so I checked-out the Southwest Airlines recruitment site.Interestingly the words on the page and the style of the site validated what I saw in the video – the clip reinforces tenets of the employer brand.
The site content and the video clips on Google Video work in complete harmony with each other.In many ways it doesn’t matter if the video was produced by the firm rather than by the employee – it just feels real and that is POWERFUL.
Recently an Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) found a firm of solicitors had indirectly discriminated against candidates from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) that applied for its training contracts on the grounds of race because they were screening candidates on the status of their work permit.
The firm claimed to be acting on grounds of proportionality or on the basis of a belief that an application for a work permit for a trainee would be unsuccessful on the basis of UK Border Agency ("UKBA") guidelines. However the EAT highlighted the lack of any clear evidence that the firm had ever submitted an application for a work permit for a potential trainee.
The EAT stated that initial applicant selection criteria should be based purely on merit, and work permit issues should only be considered at a later stage of the selection process. In particular, employers should not try to second-guess the UKBA or to assume that the UKBA will not grant a work permit.
Its an interesting position - organisations are under pressure to recruit as cost effectively as possible, and, in Europe, on the basis that anybody within the EEA has freedom of movement. Further, equality legislation broadly refers to 'Race' as ethnicity rather than nationality, as interpreted by the EAT.
This ruling now suggests that there are further criteria to contend with and that organisations should take a chance on candidates being able to obtain a permit and only if the candidate is unable to do this at the appropriate point (to be defined), the employer would then need to go to their second choice candidate.
Is this workable?
The firm in question are considering an appeal and, the result of which will hopefully clarify working practices. In the mean time organisations ahould consider their position on screening questions that automatically screen-out candidates on the basis of working permit status.
Over the past few months I've posted a few times on the need to base workforce planning decisions on accurate factual data.
Dr John Sullivan has blogged extensively on this topic over the past few weeks. In his most recent posting to ERE, Dr Sullivan has neatly summarised some techniques for workforce planning that give organisations agility in terms of flexing headcount to meet changing demands.
I particularly liked the idea of what he referred to as the 'Shamrock Strategy' - grouping employees into 4 categories:
Those that are contracted on a contingent or temporary basis
Those in roles that can be outsourced
Those in key roles with the requisite skills and perform at a satifactory level
Those under performing individuals that can be substituted by other higher potential colleagues or new hires.
However in order to to implement this strategy organisations need to know which individuals sit in each category before taking action.
Today I had 15 minutes to spare between calls and went back to StepStone's recent white paper 'Clarity Amid the Crunch'.
There are 10 great tips that organisations should consider such as turning outwards to understand changing requirements of customer, retaining key contributors, appraising and rewarding differently and training and mobilising exisiting talent. The final section deals with the 7 things that organisations should avoid during the downturn:
Paralysis - doing nothing is not an option
Knee-jerk reactions in managing change - consider all the options available to you
Pure instinct-based management - gather intelligence on each of the options before making decisions
Despondency - turn worries into proactive plans
Keeping employees in the dark - its impossible to do in the Facebook age. Fill the information vacuum before rumour and speculation fills it for you
Unpleasantries - if you need to make redundancies action them as quickly and as surgically as possible
Training cuts - a false economy, train to retain key staff and prepare them for the upturn rather than having to recruit and orientate replacements when you are already desperate for them.
I think these are useful points to remember if you are planning your organisations response to current economic climate.
