When software fails and what to do about it
November 9th, 2018 | Industry News
One topic dominates the blogs and industry publications this month – diversity
Over in the USA, the advertising industry is battling with its engagement with the #MeToo movement. It’s not just the problem of an obvious lack of women and people of colour in senior positions in advertising – with the PR problems this brings. It’s also that this can cause some notable backfires in major advertising campaigns, for example Pepsi’s appalling campaign that used Kendall Jenner as a ‘peace maker’ at a Black Lives Matter rally… by offering a police officer a can of soft drink. Described as ‘trivialising’, ‘tone deaf’ ‘dangerously complacent’ the ad was quickly pulled and cost the PepsiCo president Brad Jakeman his job.
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Disability and Brexit – failures and opportunities for recruitment
October 22nd, 2018 | Industry News
According to the UK’s Recruitment Industry Disability Initiative, 70% of employers don’t know where to find disabled talent and only 11% of HR professionals are ‘confident’ that they can locate and recruit disabled candidates.
As our next piece reveals, this is a major failure of recruitment for two different reasons:
- Ethically – the failure to recruit and utilise talent, regardless of ‘ability’ weakens an organization, can damage confidence of employees (particularly Gen X and Z, who are much more inclusive and non-abilist than their predecessors) and weakens brand reputation
- Economically – as the UK struggles with talent acquisition in the run up to Brexit, failure to identify talent and to retain it, particularly at the senior level, leaves businesses open to a reduction of their skills and experience base and a diminution of the competitiveness in the marketplace.
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Recruitment fails and why they matter
October 11th, 2018 | Industry News
A recent study produced by University College Dublin reveals that companies that give candidates a poor experience may actually be helping their rivals to succeed.
It’s related to a psychological phenomenon called The Immutable Law of the Ex, which is the process in which footballers outperform their usual standards when they are playing against their former club. So what does this mean for employers?
People who feel badly treated or overlooked by a potential employer are twice as likely to share that information online as those who have a good experience – not only that, but then they go all out be a total winner in the next job they do get, to prove the ‘bad’ employer wrong. The recruitment industry is barely aware of this phenomenon, but it’s likely to have a huge social impact on the reputation of both employers and recruitment agencies. When assessing what makes a ‘bad experience’ in recruitment, three key issues stand out:
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Creative hiring and untrustworthy recruitment agencies
September 26th, 2018 | Industry News
How to find good candidates in a buyers’ market
Every HR department knows that recruiting is getting more difficult. While recruitment software can help sift through the available candidates, it can’t magic suitable candidates out of thin air! So how can recruitment agencies and HR teams find those elusive ‘suitable candidates’?
One way is to move from job descriptions to position personas. The standard recruitment outline describes the job and the person required to do it in terms of skills, qualifications and experience. In a shrinking candidate pool, persona descriptions look at softer skills, empathy, resilience, self-propulsion, sociability etc. – they enlarge the candidate base by allowing organisations to use their web based recruitment software to identify people who could be up-skilled or re-qualified to fulfil the job description.
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Rules for new recruitment agencies and recruiting for e-commerce
September 11th, 2018 | Industry News
The recruitment sector is often said to be one of the faster growing industries in the UK – which ignores the fact that as many agencies close as open. It’s certainly true to say that the industry is one of the fastest-moving; agencies come and go with lighting speed! So what gives a new recruitment agency longevity?
1. Knowing how the sector operates – ‘disruptors’ have ideas about how to make recruitment faster, more reliable or less labour intensive. Good for them. But when disruptors don’t actually know how recruitment works, they have a one-dimensional view of the sector. The reputation of an agency depends on:
- matching demand with supply
- sourcing high calibre candidates
- building great client relationships
- securing a recruitment package that suits both sides.
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Tech, diversity and visas – major impacts on the recruiting sector
August 21st, 2018 | Industry News
The recruitment industry is impacted by many factors, but none has been so significant as technology. Recruitment management software fulfils a variety of needs today: search tool, process management system and database.
The best recruitment CRM is now proactive in the various search and management processes that an effective recruiter undertakes. For example a recruitment consultancy can interrogate a CV in a variety of ways, as well as looking at a candidate’s former employment roles and even their social media trail to help establish if a candidate is a good cultural fit for an employer as well as being well qualified to fulfil the role. Companies are using recruitment database software to create the parameters for background research into candidates – in fact
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Recruitment agencies as data collection hubs?
August 7th, 2018 | Industry News
In a major new development, MPs are thinking of asking recruitment agencies to take responsibility for collecting data about the exclusion of older people from the UK workforce. This is the result of a report from the Women and Equalities Committee which says that over a million fifty-plus people are unemployed and willing to work. Members of Parliament are hoping that using recruitment software UK wide, will show them were there are gaps in recruitment that could be addressed.
Not all recruiting software will be equal to the task, and the idea of ‘reporting age profiles for the work force’ would have to be handled sensitively. There are three areas of concern: prejudice, unconscious bias and ‘casual ageism’, all of which are not only unlawful but can limit the candidate pool for vacancies, depriving the employer of the most diverse range of candidates.
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Recruiting undercurrents – the things that aren’t being talked about… but should be
July 23rd, 2018 | Industry News
This time we’re focusing on two blog posts that highlight different aspects of the recruiting industry that often go undiscussed. First Pilita Clark writing in the Financial Times about the ‘ghost’ candidates appearing in every industry. Ghosting is the act of disappearing from somebody’s life without warning and without leaving contact details and while it used to be a behaviour related to romantic relationships and friendships, it’s turning up in the workplace too.
But let’s take a step back. Even with employers having the best applicant tracking system UK wide, candidates have often the experience of not hearing back about a job, sometimes even after they’ve been interviewed. Now employers are having facing the same response from candidates that they’ve given to them, it could be seen as poetic justice. But the why of it happening is interesting – there are two different forms of ghosting:
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Recruitment software as an aid to the economy
July 12th, 2018 | Industry News
Hard on the heels of the announcement that the UK Government is to set up a fee-free portal for teaching vacancies, research by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) reveals the pressure that recruiters are under to find supply teachers. Most recruitment firms are given less than two hours’ notice that a school needs a temporary teacher, the survey reveals. Given the speed with which recruitment agencies must find a qualified and vetted temp, online recruitment software makes a substantial contribution to this process.
This rapid and demanding recruitment turnaround is set against some DfE statistics showing that over a quarter of teachers left the profession between 2013-2016, the highest departure rate since records began in 1996 and further information from the REC stating that three quarters of recruitment agencies have had to persuade a teacher to remain in post in the past 12 months. To meet these needs, 92% of recruitment agencies say their consultants get to work between 6-8am.
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Recruitment tensions in the UK
June 29th, 2018 | Industry News
One good word to describe the current position of recruitment in the UK is prickly – here’s some evidence!
Teaching recruitment
When Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds announced that he was going to cut down on schools using agencies to find staff, he described the agency fees as ‘unnecessary costs’. According to Mr Hinds, “… agencies charge schools costly finder’s fees if head teachers want to make supply staff permanent.”
His solution is to offer a new national deal for head teachers – a list of agencies that don’t charge fees if staff go from temp to perm after 12 weeks. These will be preferred suppliers. There is a degree of misunderstanding about how agencies work implicit in this approach. The best recruitment software for agencies actually does a lot of the work of sifting CVs and shortlisting candidates. It requires a couple of things though: online recruitment software needs to be regularly updated and recalibrated so that it remains contemporary and sensitive to the trends and requirements of the marketplace.
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