Christmas, New Year and new horizons for recruitment

December 14th, 2018 | Industry News

This year’s daft December story goes to the recruitment agency Logical Resources which has decided to publicise its 2018 Christmas party by hiring a PR agency to puff it. And it’s worth puffing, as the company’s UK and Australia teams re going to be flown to Phuket for an all-expenses paid seven night ‘blow out’. Wow.

Now there’s no way that even the best recruiting software could help a company make decisions about this kind of activity – but perhaps it would be better if it could. While meeting targets should definitely be rewarded, we’re wondering if recruitment is starting to look like the city traders of 2000 – and we all know how that ended!

There’s another reason that big Christmas and New Year parties aren’t always a great idea in the recruitment sector and that’s because the New Year is when many candidates start to look around.

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Recruitment engagement and salary gaps

November 27th, 2018 | Industry News

A LinkedIn survey shows that once again, the UK has the most socially engaged recruitment agencies. LinkedIn found that four out of the top ten socially engaged agencies were British, with 20 of the top 25 socially engaged recruiting consultancies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa located in the UK.

Why social engagement matters for recruitment

Recruiters in the UK clearly recognise the value of social media integration in building strong brand identities – which in turn boosts their ability to engage both lucrative clients and high calibre candidates. The best recruitment CRM draws upon social media engagement to identify networks of interest that can then be explored when creating recruitment strategies. Not only that, but strong social media engagement feeds recruiting software, giving recruiting consultancies a chance to recognise change and to spot social trends that can give the agency’s consultants a chance to inform and educate their clients about developing workplace issues, concerns and opportunities.

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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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