Recruitment X Factor?

So the X factor is now done and dusted for another year and my Saturday evenings are not going to be the same for a while! However it got me round to thinking how this could apply to recruitment. What is the x factor for recruiters? What takes a recruiter from good to great?

Personally I think its about energy, enthusiasm, taking a personal pride in their work and how they manage their stakeholder relationships. I’d rather have this than raw skills any day as you can always develop those.

I’ve spoken to a lot of fellow recruiters and people’s views although wide ranging can be summarized as follows:

• A genuine interest in people, lateral thinking and the ability not to take things too seriously!

• Active Listening skills – a skill that sounds so simple – the ability to really listen to what your stakeholders/clients need. All too often recruiters feel that they need to be the advisor – of course this is important, but in order to do this successfully you need to have really listened and understood exactly where your client/stakeholder is at. Understand, question and push back when necessary to ensure realistic objectives

 • Customer Focus – To be able to partner, to really get into the DNA of the business and stakeholder, to build a strong robust relationship so that you can influence when required and gain that trust.

 • Commercial Acumen – the ability to understand how any particular role and the individual ‘doing that job’ affect and add value to the way in which a business is run. The ability to then build on this and run smart, effective and measurable recruitment campaigns is key.

• Candidate mgt. – the candidate care piece is so important as the repercussions of poor candidate mgt. are huge. A sensitive and empathetic approach is crucial – the ability to put yourself in a candidates shoes and treat them the same way you would like to be treated. To understand candidate care, to never leave a candidate wondering what is happening, to never break promises made to candidates in terms of contact/timescales and always deliver full constructive feedback

• Swanlike! Cool, calm and collected at all times, offering solutions rather than creating problems. Never appearing frazzled despite the fact your Line Manager has changed their requirements for the umpteenth time, your prize candidate has dropped out and the snow is ruining your assessment centre

 • Honesty and Integrity – The ability to build that rapport and relationship with a client it is essential that you are upfront, diplomatic and honest even if you are struggling to fill a role – just be honest and manage expectations

• A Passion for direct sourcing – Last but by no means least is a passion for networking, social media recruiting and to see every vacancy as an opportunity to unleash the powers of creative direct sourcing.

So what do you think?

Direct Sourcing 14/10/10

Last Thursday we held our first ever Direct Sourcing event for members of The FIRM. Thanks to Total Jobs and The Network who sponsored the day (without whom it would not have possible)

For me the overarching theme of the day was ‘engagement’ whether that is in terms of social media strategies for enhancing the candidate experience or simply in terms of seeing over 100 in-house recruiters networking, sharing experiences and engaging with each other on various topics.

It was a thought provoking day with some inspiring speakers. Katharine Robinson aka The Sourceress – taught us how to mine sites like event brite for information on potential candidates and also great people finding tools such as 123people.com and pipl.com. Steven Lewis from Total Jobs and The Network delivered his presentation and surprised us all with the breadth of job boards available within The Network which is going to be a really useful opportunity for many of our members in international roles. Next up Andy Headworth who gave us the low down on the whys and hows for social recruiting. For me the most prevalent point was ‘Listen’ only a few people in the room stuck their hands up when he asked how many of us have methods in place to listen to what is being said about our companies on the web.

Our very own Gary Franklin then gave a recruiters perspective on looking for a role – you can find out more via his blog www.garyfranklin.wordpress.com. As he said so himself social media didn’t get him hired, he did. But undoubtedly he used social media to work in his favour. Gary also named and shamed a few organisations where he experienced a poor candidate experience – need less to say the room of recruiters loved it!

Mark Williams aka Mr Linked In was next up and really surprised me with what I’m not doing on Linked In. His five tips were:

 1. Build a great pipeline

 2. Build an effective network

 3. Join many groups

 4. Leverage your employees networks

 5. Get involved

Last but not least was Alastair Cartwright whose main presentation surrounded the use of Google adwords but I particularly loved his tips for sorting out your online recruitment strategy:

1. Sort out your ATS

2. Then focus on your careers site (no point driving traffic through to it if its rubbish)

3. Choose one good generalist job board

4. Then a couple of niche ones (sector specific)

5. Then take a look at some other sites that could work for you: regional/ community)

 6. Linked In

 We wrapped up by asking people what they wanted the group to focus on over the next year – answers as follows:

• Employee referral schemes

• Reduction of agency spend

• Recruiter capability

 • Internal mobility

• International assignments

 • Succession planning

• New types of supplier (i.e. talent puzzle, gatzu, easyweb)

• Alumni schemes

 • How to identify potential

 • More social media!

 • ATS (choosing the right provider)

All in all a fab day – now we’re just looking forward to organising the next one! Check out the speakers slides on www.slideshare.net/firmnetwork

The graduate job formula..

I read a fab new book the other day by Dr Paul Redmond Head of Careers and Employability at the University of Liverpool ‘The Graduate Jobs Formula’

His view on the secret formula to getting a graduate job is as follows:

E=Q+WE+SxC

Employability equals Qualifications plus Work Experience plus Strategies multiplied by Contacts

In other words the formula means that for you to become employable you will need to make sure you possess the right qualifications, relevant and up to date work experience, strategies that employers value and want to hire and, most of all, a group of proactive and appropriately placed contacts.

A really useful view and an accurate one I’d say.

The proof is in the pudding they say so a great example is @employkyle – an innovative website set up by a creative and talented graduate looking for a role www.employkyle.com

I’m sure it won’t be long before he gets snapped up!

                                                                                                                                      

Making the move from Agency recruiter to In-house recruiter..

I’ve had many people contact me recently who are currently working within an agency environment but are looking to move into an in-house recruitment role and have requested some advice. I thought I’d draft a few pointers which may help people make the move as it’s not difficult but will take some time and attention.

Firstly make sure your reasons are right for wanting to move in-house – if it’s just to avoid the targets, the pressure and the cold calls then think again – in-house recruitment is not a soft option just a different one and although you will not be making the sales calls you will have equally demanding targets. You’ll be managing the full recruitment life cycle for a number of roles (an average of twenty to forty at any one time depending on the company you work for)  from supporting Line Managers with their manpower/ succession planning through to attraction, sourcing, screening, selection and on boarding all the while managing projects such as diversity, cost per hire, supplier reviews, whilst not forgetting the candidate experience, building your talent pools, employer branding initiatives and of course managing your stakeholders.

If this sounds like the sort of role you would enjoy doing and you already enjoy the stakeholder/ candidate management and sourcing and selection of candidates then read on!

First thing is to adapt your cv so that it is not just displaying the amount that you have billed, targets hit or volumes of candidates placed but you’ll need to also ensure you have the following:

- make sure you highlight the area that you have specialised in i.e. marketing and communications - many in-house recruiters are aligned to particular business areas so it can help if you show your expertise in recruiting for a particular function and can show knowledge of market trends etc.

- Stakeholder management – really important as this is a big part of an internal recruiters job. If you are liaising with clients at board level or if you work really closely with your clients (frequent on site visits/ interview with them)/ have acted in an advisory capacity then make sure this is outlined on your CV or in your covering letter

- and not forgetting candidate management – how you’ve turned your passive candidates into active candidates, built your talent pool etc

-  Also ensure that you have highlighted any creative sourcing strategies whether it’s through the use of social media or just great networking!

-  Selection – demonstrate the various screening and selection methods you’ve used, if you’re SHL trained for example then say so. If you use telephone interviews/ competency based interviews then again ensure this is clear on your CV

All sure-fire ways to put you ahead of the competition!

Then make sure you’re looking in the right place for your in-house recruitment role - the following job boards are great : www.changeboard.com www.totaljobs.com and you may also find roles listed on www.personneltoday.com www.jobs.recruiter.co.uk/internal  and occasionally on www.monster.co.uk too. You can also try to access recruiter groups on Linked In although this can be harder as not all accept agency member applications but some might.

The following recruitment agencies are also recommended for in-house roles: Oasis Search, Robert Walters, MDH, Napier Wolf, Aspen Partners, Frazer Jones, Carr Lyons, Digby Morgan, Hudson, Green Park Interim, Michael Page

If you have good links with the in-house recruiters you are working with then its worth letting them know  that you’re looking to make the move if you have a good relationship as they may well have an opportunity cropping up in the near future or can keep their eyes peeled for you.

You may also need to consider interim/ contract roles as there are quite a few around and many organisations are more flexible with requirements for contract roles especially if you have an in-depth knowledge of the particular market area that the role is required to recruit for. It is also worth looking at RPO organisations as it is also often easier to make the move initially into RPO and then in-house..

Check out Hyphen, Accenture, Alexander Mann, Hudson, and Kenexa to name a few

So I hope this helps and last but not least good luck! Most in-house recruiters started off agency side so it can be done!

Employee Referral Schemes

I had a most productive day last Friday as we held one of our FIRM focus groups at one of our members offices in Canary Wharf. At our last breakfast meeting we asked where our members would be focussing their attentions this quarter - unsurprisingly employee referral schemes came up as one of the most popular topics. Therefore it seemed quite pertinent to use this as the subject matter for our July focus group. We had a diverse mix of attendees from organisations ranging from media through to financial services and oil and gas. It was fascinating to see the differences in people’s schemes with monetary payments ranging from £500 to £10,000! However it was also fascinating to see how similar people’s challenges were; particularly centering around diversity and continually keeping the scheme front of employees minds. From a  diversity perspective it was concluded that great people know great people and as a result ERPs work brilliantly as a cost-effective sourcing initiative as long as they form part of a well-balanced attraction strategy. They should ideally form around 30% and no more than 50% of hires. As long as recruiters keep a track of their diversity metrics and can run reports on diversity referrals then they are a great sourcing tool used in conjunction with other methods.

From a continuous marketing perspective it was agreed that quarterly refresher messages should be sent out as well as some more innovative ideas which can be found via the presentation below.  Interestingly amongst the group Referral rates ranged from 5% to around 30% with Sales, Call centre and New media being very popular amongst employees referring their friends and Finance being the least popular.

Our core principles for running a succesful scheme were as follows:

•Clear goals

•Fit for purpose

•Simple and clear policy and process

•Senior Stakeholder support

•Flexibility and Scalability

•Continuous marketing and communication strategy

 •Reward should be realistic, competitive and timely

•Measurement

•Target 30% of source of hire to be referrals

For a full summary of the session please see below the following link to our slideshare presentation of the outputs.

www.slideshare.net/firmnetwork

Social Media in Recruitment – joining the conversation

It may be a strange post title as so many employers have forayed into the social media space but just how effective have they been? For example I have seen many abandoned corporate twitter accounts (my own included!) as people have struggled to get to grips with it. At a recent FIRM event the great Paul Harrison from Carve Consulting and Ben Nunn and the team at 33 gave a fab step by step guide to in-house recruiters on how to get started with social media for recruitment purposes. I appreciate a lot of you reading this may be well ahead of the game and have fully fledged social media strategies but if you have then I haven’t found you so please let me know!!

The core stages Paul went through are as follows:

1. Plan/ Identify your challenges – What is your aim? Positioning? Reputation? Reducing agency reliance?

2. Listen – Find out what people are saying about you

3. Implement – choose your platforms/ decide how you will use them/ build your team of community managers

4. Engage – your influencers and advocates/ crisis management and portable content

5. Measurement – Review and KPIs

Don’t forget your strategy will always evolve and change and we all learn by our mistakes – a few years ago I once set up a Facebook account for a Nottingham university campus team to allow them to engage with the students – instead it became a hub for all of the company’s Nottingham uni alumni to catch up and connect with each other. Not what I’d intended at all!

For the full presentation slides by Paul and 33 check out the following link

http://www.slideshare.net/firmnetwork/firm-presentationthirty-threeslidesfinal1#

If you don’t want to read all of it then just check out slide 49 as that pretty much encapsulates what you should be doing

In terms of organisations that have got it right then I think Sodexo USA are pretty spot on (thanks to Peter Gold from Hire Strategies for bringing this to my attention)

In summary Sodexo US have:

• A YouTube page.
• A Facebook profile.
• A Linkedin profile.
• A blog.
• A newsletter.
• A Twitter account
• And provide a job widget.

And I have just noticed they are even on Four Square! Well done Sodexo but do we have any great examples of companies with fully fledged social media strategies in the UK?

In-house Recruiter Focus – next six months

On June 10th we held one of our most popular FIRM breakfast meetings which focussed on the recruitment life-cycle and explored how different organisations ‘do’ recruitment. As part of the round table discussion afterwards we asked the room of 57 in-house recruiters where they were focussing their efforts from a recruitment perspective over the next six months. The following are the hot topics that arose from this discussion:

•  Direct Sourcing (reducing agency reliance/ building the talent pipeline)
• Employer Branding (including building social networks for recruitment purposes)
• Employee Referral Schemes
• A greater focus on manpower planning and succession planning
• Redeployment of employees/ internal recruitment
• Candidate Experience
• Recruitment team (upskilling/ dept. branding/ individual workloads)
• Assessment Validation
• Diversity
• Onboarding and Integration

There were a number of others but these were the most popular – when we ask the question again in six months time it will be interesting to see how these have changed…

My seven A’s to running a successful attraction campaign

I learnt this from a consultant in my Unilever days – really useful to help you plan the stages of any large-scale attraction campaigns that you are about to run..

•Approach – make sure you define your proposition and plan your strategy

 •Awareness – create a teaser to encourage awareness before you go straight into the job specific advertising

 •Attract – On and offline advertising depending where your target market is

 •Advice – Take a consultative approach to your candidates throughout the selection process

 •Apply – Give assurance and manage expectations during the process

 •Accept – Instill excitement, make sure your candidates cannot wait to join

 •Advocate – Use your successful candidates to act as ambassadors for you (both internally and externally)