Its that time of year. As we close in on 2009 and look ahead to 2010 this week's Three to See has plans, predictions and cultural trends.
My first pick this week is StepStone'srecent Pan-European study of recruitment, involving 1,600 organisations and almost 2,500 employees. The research has revealed that that nearly two thirds of organisations surveyed are planning to increase recruitment within the next year and one fifth will be creating new positions. At the same time, employees are also planning their next moves.
Some of the headline findings include:
91 per cent of StepStone candidates surveyed said online job boards were the most important tool for them
More candidates used search engines (51 per cent) than agencies (30 per cent) when looking for a job
Too few advertised positions and out of date job offers were cited as the main reasons for not using traditional media during the job search
I found the comparison between what candidates want and what recruiters provide in terms of information about jobs interesting:
Candidates want information about:
Salary
Diversity of tasks
Size and stability of the organisation
But recruiters provide information about:
Image and brand of the company
Diversity of tasks
Work environment
How do your job adverts compare?
My second pick comes from Sharlyn Lauby, the HR Bartender. In her post A Bartender's Predictions for 2010, Based in the US, Lauby makes six predictions for the year ahead that I think travel well.
Below I've highlighted the headlines but its worth visiting the post to see the rationale for each:
Outsourcing and contract work will gain momentum
Professional development is going to look different
Corporate training will change in the upcoming year as well
Time will trump money
Management coaching will become a key retention tool
The buzzword for 2010 will be 'trust'
With buzzwords in mind I go slightly off-topic with my third pick: Trends in 2010 from Trend Hunter. Do you want to know what rental culture, simpletising and crowsourced campaigns are? What does unservice and exposed vulnerability mean to the workplace? The clip below describes 20 trends for 2010:
I look forward to your comments on this week's Three To See.
Today started with an interview with Jac Fitz-Enz, CEO of Human Capital Source. In the video below he shares his views on the conference year's conference, the priorities for employers over the next 12 months and how HR should approach them.
Next-up was the Industry Analyst Panel: Today's Technology Trends and Predictions with Lisa Rowan, Naomi Lee Bloom, Jim Holincheck and Josh Bersin participating in discussion chaired by Bill Kutik. This was a great session starting with the panelists talking about Software as a Service as an important architectural decision for HR departments as it ensures that the newest functionality is always easily available to end-users and means that organisations are able to respond rapidly to changing business conditions.
The panel went on to talk about the trend toward less siloed HR functions and predicted the rise in demand for consolidated end-to-end solutions for acquiring and managing talent - either through systems integration or single platforms with modular capability - but issued a warning that organisations would be unwilling to sacrifice functionality to integration.
At the end of the panel I rushed off to meet-up with Josh Bersin, CEO of Bersin & Associates and asked him for his opinions about how HR should approach the challenges of the coming year. The video of this interview will be available shortly.
Rounding off the day was the very entertaining Recruiting Technology Panel:2010 and Beyond - A Corporate Perspective on the Promise, the Hype and the Reality moderated by Gerry Crispin from CareerXroads.
The panelists shared their experiences of using technology to recruit, identifying changing the mindset of practitioners and (internal) customers as the biggest challenge to successful implementation and adoption of new methods.
Interestingly the panel also agreed that one of the gaps in the tool set available to them was a way of gaining visibility over external labour markets: Current tools are concentrated around demand-side data to identify what the organisation needs but there are few tools for assessing supply-side data that enable employers to compare their own current strength in areas of the business to the external market and provide information about that market's profile e.g. size, location etc. Tools like this, the panel concluded, could reduce sleepless nights for many a practitioner with responsibility for Strategic Workforce Planning.
StepStone can be found in booth #315 at Human Resource Executive's 12th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition.
I spent yesterday at StepStone’s UK leg of its global seminar series ‘HR’s Time to Shine’. It was a good day with a mix of informal networking, round-table discussion and presentations kicked off by Bettina Pickering of PA Consulting Group who shared some of her experience of organisations putting talent management on the agenda of the Board and at the centre of operations by demonstrating the link between human capital and financial performance.
The session was followed by StepStone’s Scott Morton who presented on the dilemma faced by many organisations going through restructuring at present – to retain and train or make reduce headcount. “Organisations are facing unprecedented challenges and need to weigh up the financial and reputational cost of making redundancies now and then hiring in the upturn against maintaining headcount and developing people to take on the challenges of the next economic cycle. In reality many organisations are doing both at the same time – a finding of the EIU’s report, The Cold War Talent says Scott.
Ruth Mundy, HR Director with Mouchel and a long standing customer of StepStone was next up. Ruth ‘stole the show’ with her frank descriptions of Mouchel’s approach to managing talent, the challenges of implementing policies, processes and tools and how she and her team have overcome them. In the panel discussion later in the day Ruth provided great insight and shared some of the learning from her experience.
The presentations were finished off by Robert Symons’ passionate speech on the ‘Power of Information’. Robert, StepStones Sales Director for UK & Ireland, echoed the sentiments of other speakers when he talked about the downturn presenting HR with a golden opportunity to demonstrate it relevance and importance to the Board and other stakeholders he went on to suggest that this could be achieved by providing predictive (not just lagging) indicators to support organisational decision making, repositioning HR practitioners as Critical Resourcing Officers - an exciting term based on the often used phrase that ‘people are our most important resource’.
People and their contributions are increasingly recognised by Chief Executive Officers as the most important factor in determining organisational success. We’ve all read articles about how its keeping them awake at night and its not surprising given that is has been proposed that having your ‘A team’ rather than ‘B team’ on the field can improve contribution to the bottom line by 40%, if you’re fielding a ‘C team’ that gap increases to 80% a disadvantage that no organisation can afford.
I'm interested in whether organisations understand why some candidates apply repeatedly for roles that they are not suitable for. With less and less time in the recruiters day and more applications per vacancy wouldn't it be useful to know why some candidates are frequently adding to your work load so that you can take action to manage their application effectively and courteously?
For example, do serial applicants understand the minimum requirements that they must satisfy to be considered for employment in your organisation? Do they have the relevant skills and experience for the job? Are they so bowled over by your brand or benefits package that they are desperate to join?
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.
