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Barkers & The Guardian launch ACE research

For a while now, there have been a lot of assumptions in the industry as to how candidates use the internet, press and other channels.  Lots of opinion, but few facts.

We wanted to change that. 

So Barkers teamed up with The Guardian in late 2008 to test some theories – through ACE Research (Assessing the Candidate Experience).

ACE consisted of three waves of research.  Two online surveys some time apart, followed by a suite of focus groups, all with the same group of jobseekers – allowing us to investigate their experiences in real time, during real job hunting.

The 3,000 candidates who took part in our research came from nearly every sector and industry, every role, every location, every age and every ethnicity you can think of. We asked them questions – lots of questions.

And they gave us a whole host of interesting answers which you can find on the dedicated ACE blog www.aceresearch.co.uk from Thursday, January 22nd.

Phillip Lane – Head of Planning

Women and ethnic minorities may be the biggest losers in 2009

Recessions are not typically good news for anyone but it seems like they may bring disproportionately bad news for women and ethnic minorities – as testified to in an article run by Ri5 earlier this week, written by our Head of Diversity, Gamiel Yafai.

Since then, new stories have broken on this by the BBC and GMTV showing the increased scale of the problem.

To read the full article on Ri5 and the BBC article, follow the links below.

http://www.ri5.co.uk/site/news/article/time-to-cover-your-assets/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7841347.stm

Hailey Lanward – Research & Planning

When is a Recession not a Recession?

How do recessions affect an employer’s ability to recruit? In the case of local government employers, the impact can be negligible, but there is some good news on the horizon.

The usual rules dictate that during times of uncertainty (now there’s a euphemistic term for recession, economic meltdown, crisis, or whatever you want to call it) two things will happen. Firstly, unemployment goes up (so the number of applications that any employer that is still actually recruiting, will increase). And secondly, good people tend to keep their heads down, lest they risk putting themselves in to a “last in, first out” redundancy programme.

And so far, the usual rules seem to be working as normal.

Which is great, if you happen to run a retail business or a bank. (Well, it would be great if all the retailers and bankers didn’t have more pressing problems to deal with). Because right now, assuming they could recruit, they would have access to a seemingly bottomless talent pool to tap into. OK, they might have to tap a little deeper (whilst recession and rising unemployment means they are getting more applications, it also means that proportionately they are getting less quality applicants) but the candidates are there. In their droves. So if your resourcing model is based on getting large numbers of candidates through with a high conversion rate, things look pretty good.

And to a certain extent, employers in the local government sector will also benefit from this phenomenon – in areas like clerical and admin roles, contact centre and other more generic disciplines.

But (and it’s a big but) as soon as they start to look at less generic, professional roles (e.g. Finance Managers, HR, Communications, Audit etc), the 2nd rule applies. In other words, good people tend to keep their heads down. That affects all employers equally, of course.  And whilst local government is not known as a sector that implements restructuring or rightsizing (or my personal favourite – decruitment) programmes, it does nonetheless happen from time to time. So your audiences are more wary that usual.  Not that it makes much difference, because the best people aren’t thinking about other opportunities right now anyway. All of which means, the talent pool at that level starts to shrink.

And the problems faced by the local government sector get worse, not least due to the fact that you compete in some areas of acute skill shortages. Take social care and health as the obvious example. Or engineering. Town planning. Or any of those skill shortage areas that any local government employer has been talking to its recruitment advertising agency partner for the last 10 years or so. What happens in a recession? Absolutely nothing. There were never enough of those people on the market in the first place, and with very few exceptions they are not working in a sector that will be hit by large scale job cuts and downsizing.

The normal reaction from HR professionals and resourcing managers, assuming they will continue to keep hiring throughout a recession, is one of relief: “at least I’ll be able to hire those people now”.  But for HR professionals and resourcing managers in the local government sector, I’m afraid that’s probably not true; it’s likely to be just as hard as it’s ever been in most areas.

That said, there is some good news. Every council believes it has managed to reduce candidate attraction and recruitment expenditure in recent years. The truth is, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

What’s more, given that there are a number of vacant roles in local government (and that number is set to rise – according to the Office of National Statistics, the number of vacancies in public administration has risen by 1,600 in the last 3 months, against an overall reduction across all sectors of 17,600*), we need to consider the cost of those vacancies.  (What’s the real cost of an empty role, in terms of overtime, temp fees, agency costs and bank staff, for example?).  And if the real cost of those vacancies exceeds the savings generated by reducing candidate attraction and recruitment expenditure, all we’ve really done is tick a few boxes in a procurement exercise.  But we haven’t really created value for the tax payer.

So here’s the good news.  With new practices and processes, modern technology, a planned approach and most importantly, better targeting, most councils can halve their spend in the next 2 years, all the time tackling skill shortages and reducing the vacancy count.  In other words, with commitment and support from the top, we can generate real value for the council tax payer and significant savings for local government, both of which will be vital when the long term impact of the recession hits us in two years time, and we have to rein in public spending and pay for the Chancellor’s 2008 Pre Budget Report commitments. 

* Source: Office of National Statistics Vacancy Survey, April 2001 to October 2008.

Andrew Soane - MD Regions

Blog Insight

I got some feedback the other day from someone in the industry who said that while they loved the Barkers web site they weren’t that sure about the blog. This is not the first time we’ve been given some constructive criticism.

If we were still in the old media world I’d be writing an up beat press release at this point outlining the virtues of our blog and saying that the response had been “very positive” from the industry. Well times have changed and I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say is that we’ve receive all kinds of feedback and while some of it has been positive in all honesty some of it hasn’t.

My view is that we’ve made a solid if not slow start and already have some interesting content (with more in the pipeline). However while interesting content is a vital for any blog to thrive, it’s not the whole story. Effective blogs aren’t a tool for broadcasting; they are platform for conversations to take place both on and off the actual site. This is the main point on which we’re currently falling down. These things can take time though. I helped start the Digital Recruiting Blog about 18 months ago and it took time and a lot of work to get the conversation flowing there.

Starting a blog is a challenging thing for any business to undertake and the challenges will be subtlety different each time, depending on the type of company, their marketplace and their internal culture. Our blog has a lot of evolution to go through but the important thing is that we have made a start and in the process learnt a lot about what blogging means for Barkers.

What will blogging mean for your organisation and when are you going to take the plunge?

Matt Alder – Head of Digital

Cause for engagement

Is it me, or is the emphasis in employer branding shifting subtly from talent attraction to retention and engagement?  That’s certainly the way it looked at the CIPD’s London conference devoted exclusively to all aspects of employer brands and branding.  And all my conversations with clients and prospects since that date back in February have confirmed that impression. 

Why could this be?  I guess it’s a no-brainer really.  In mainstream, consumer branding marketers are interested, naturally enough, on securing that initial purchase (getting the candidate to ‘buy’ the job offer, in employer branding terms).   But the real value in both contexts comes later, with the growth of long-term loyalty, affinity and advocacy.  You buy your first Volvo, discover that it does everything for your driving experience, comfort, safety, social status and self-image and all the other dimensions of the brand that you’d hoped for.  You become fully engaged with the brand.  So you start to tell people about it, look forward to your next Volvo (Bigger? Sportier?  A soft-top, maybe?)  And exactly the same process kicks off  – should kick off -  when that offer letter from Accenture or Orange or M&S or the BBC flutters down onto your doormat. 

But that long-term engagement doesn’t just happen.  Marketers at Volvo or anywhere else know that securing long-term brand loyalty is arguably the biggest challenge they face.  And the more enlightened HR professionals know the same thing.  They also know, hopefully, that the traditional methods of enhancing engagement seldom work.  We’ve all walked down office corridors where posters exhorting us to ‘Remember the customer’ or ‘Think commercially’ have a slightly creepy, Orwellian feel to them.  We’ve all heard of organisations where employees have to carry round little cards with the company values printed on them so they can become indelibly imprinted in their minds.  Perhaps we ourselves have been asked to sign up to ‘values’ as commonplace and anodyne as ‘passion’ or ‘customer focus’.  We’re intelligent.  We’re sceptical.  This is 2008, not 1988.  We expect and demand something a little better if we’re to embrace the organisation we work for as firmly as we embrace the other brands in our increasingly brand-dominated lives.

I think there is something better, and it’s this:  if we’re reluctant to sign up emotionally and intellectually to a set of semi-abstract values, how about signing up to a cause that our organisation espouses?
People sign up to causes all the time.  They feel an unfeigned passion for them.  They spontaneously engage with them.  And if the cause our organisation has chosen to associate itself with is somehow aligned to its employer brand, then it’s just a short step from engagement with the cause to engagement with the company.  M&S has signed up lock, stock and barrel to the cause of saving the planet, and they’ve done so with a seriousness, commitment and fervour that would disarm even the most cynical.  So where’s the connection with the employer brand?  Signing up to M&S’s mission to save the planet required a real concern on the part of employees – an awareness of bigger issues and of the need to respond to the needs of others.  And a large part of the renaissance that M&S has undergone can be attributed to the way its people, formerly rooted oh-so-firmly in their cosy Marks & Sparks comfort zone, are now exhibiting real, unfeigned concern for their customers, and are quick to respond to their needs.  In other words, they’ve become authentically, spontaneously customer-focused without anyone ever having to mention that dreaded cliché.

For M&S, I’d say it’s a real cause for celebration.  And for any organisation that wants to wrest maximum value from an employer brand, it’s cause for serious thought.

Paul Walker

Self-indulgent advertising

This is – in the main – a straight-forward, unabashed rant. I know I’ll feel better for it.

I noticed that Discover Financial Services have sold their loss-making Goldfish credit card business to Barclays for a fraction of what they paid for it two years ago.

And whilst I’m sure that the consumer credit crunch has hit them hard, they didn’t make things easy for themselves with their recent poster campaign.

Rarely have I come across such unbelievably smug, self-indulgent advertising.

For those of you lucky enough not to cast your eyes on it, the campaign features long poems about ‘me and my goldfish’, written by celebs like Rik Mayall.

The typography is lovely, but the ads tell me nothing about Goldfish, what they stand for or why I should want one. And with a ton of other credit cards clamouring for my attention, why should I give it a second glance?

Moral of the tale? You need to give your audience cogent reasons to react to your communications - whether that’s re-appraising your brand, or applying for jobs. And whilst humour can be a differentiator, you need to hook them in to generate ROI.

Robert Peasnell

Let's Get Engaged

Being at the coal face of recruitment communications, Barkers people spend the majority of their time helping clients to source the best talent in the most cost effective way. But I can’t help feeling that a great deal of the time and expense taken up by recruitment could be avoided.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand the need to have a pipeline of fresh talent entering a business, but it seems sometimes that HR teams are so focused on getting bums on seats, they fail to pay heed to the reasons why they are spending so much time recruiting in the first place.

In my experience, much recruitment activity appears to be a direct reaction to high attrition rates. But rather than questioning the causes of high staff turnover, HR teams seem to just accept it as a fact of life, and plough on with their recruitment drives regardless.

In reality, the effect of high attrition is actually much greater than just the cost of high levels of backfill recruitment. It has a much deeper impact on an organisation’s ability to deliver. A revolving door of talent drives down the quality of knowledge and skill within a business, which has an effect on customer service, delivery ability, reputation and ultimately, productivity.

I really believe that if organisations invested more time into communicating their values, their vision and their corporate mission internally, as well as promoting the benefits of staying and developing within their organisation, they wouldn’t need to spend as much time and expense sourcing replacement talent for those people who have drifted away.

Good, consistent, top-down internal communication not only reduces recruitment costs by reducing attrition, it creates employee engagement. And there’s clear evidence that an engaged employee is not only more likely to stay with a company, but they are also more likely to improve business performance.

Management Consultancy Towers Perrin estimates that for each 1% rise in employee engagement, an organisation should expect to see a 0.1% rise in sales. So, whilst businesses will spend millions on Marketing and Recruitment to improve business performance, it strikes me that very often the same result could be achieved much more simply and cheaply, by creating better internal HR communication.

It would appear that sections of the HR community are cottoning on to this. Many of our more forward-thinking clients are increasingly wanting to talk to us not just about their recruitment needs, but also their internal engagement strategies. They want to make sure that that "feel good" engagement a new joiner experiences doesn’t fade and taint over time. They are recognising that internal employer branding is every bit as crucial, and every bit as fruitful, as external employer branding.

So, my advice to any HR professional would be to spend a bit more time creating a "flag to rally around" within your organisation. There’s plenty of evidence to show that if you do it well, the return on investment will be great.

David Thompson, Barkers Bristol

Guide to the perfect Pitch

Pitches are funny things. They always create a buzz and sense of anticipation amongst everyone in the agency, and more often then not, the late nights, early mornings and hours spent calling in favours eventually pay off. But whatever the result, you can be sure that behind the polished team, amazing creative work and researched strategy that appears in front of you on the day, there’ll be a series of anecdotes, mishaps and curve balls that conspire to give everyone involved a few more grey hairs.

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

It’s the BDM’s job to plan every detail of the pitch. To make sure that everyone knows exactly what the client requires and when the deadlines are. But it’s also very true that there never seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done, most BDM’s will happily testify that in the run up to a pitch, someone always feeds the clock with red bull. Whilst it’s all part of the job to be here until the wee hours, bribing weary colleagues with pizza and beer to get them to stay, working late can also make you very unpopular with friends and loved ones! One such evening, a very good friend had decided to play ‘matchmaker’ by organising a dinner party so I could meet one of her single friends, unfortunately it was arranged for the night before a tender deadline and my fellow diners were less then impressed when I turned up five hours late, brandishing half a bottle of tepid rose wine (it was all I could find at short notice) before sitting down to a thoroughly dried out meal! Needless to say invitations to dinner since then have been few and far between!

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

When there’s so much going on, the little things in life can often be overlooked. That was certainly the case late one night before an early morning pitch when we realised that the leave behind document (12 copies 50 pages each) had returned from the printers as a jumbled stack of papers. Seven of us spent a good couple of hours putting it back in sequence before starting out on a 90 mile trek up the A19 to our hotel close to the pitch venue. It wasn’t until we reached the A19 that we realised how scarce 24 hour petrol stations can be and with only 13 miles of fuel remaining between us and totally insanity, the Texaco star loomed low in the horizon to save the day! We eventually arrived at our hotel at 2am but went on to put in a sterling performance at 9 a.m. the following morning and won the account!

Damn those curve balls!

More often then not, a warped sense of humour that allows you to laugh when things go horribly wrong is the best tool in the box. And when you’ve been diverted off the motorway onto narrow country roads en-route to pitch for a University in the wilds of Cumbria – only to be brought to a standstill by a heard of sheep determined to share the carriageway too, there is little else to do but laugh and film the whole episode to remind yourself that no matter how well you plan, you never can tell what might happen!

Paul Ainley

The Future of IT Recruitment

This week Barkers are running an event – “The Future of IT Recruitment” - organised in conjunction with the IT Job Board. Matt Alder from Barkers, Mark Brooker from Microsoft, Adam Stokes from the IT Job Board and Geoff Inns from CNet will be looking at the issues and initiatives that are shaping the IT recruitment marketplace in 2008. Central to this is the presentation of a new piece of research that has asked thousands of IT candidates what they think of the market and what they are looking for in a potential employer. Unsurprisingly the event is fully subscribed but we will blog a full report along with more details about the research next week.

Barkers Event Team