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 increasing 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 you 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

The Blind Men and The Elephant

In the process of designing a training course to help develop strategic thinking and develop greater understanding of the strategic resourcing agenda, I happened across the following poem. Quite simply, despite its age, it summarised beautifully how we can so easily miss the point when looking to design the most appropriate resourcing strategies to meet existing and future looking business need.

The Blind men and the elephant

(John Godfrey Saxe (1816 – 1887)

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the elephant
(Though all of them were blind)
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
‘God bless me but the elephant
Is very like a wall.’

The second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, ‘Ho! What have we here
So very round and smoothe and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear,
This wonder of an elephant
Is very like a spear!’

The third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
‘I see,’ quoth he, ‘the elephant is very like a snake!’

The fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt around the knee,
‘what most this wonderous beast is like is mighty plain,’ quoth he;
‘tis clear enough the elephant is very like a tree!’

The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: ‘E’en the blindest man can tell  what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an elephant is very like a fan!’

The sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
‘I see,’ quoth he, ‘the elephant is very like a rope!’

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each of his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an elephant
Not one of them has seen!

(Re-produced in Strategy Safari – Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel. FT Prentice Hall.  1998).

Lisa Monteith

Taxonomy

In many digital arenas, you hear the terms, accessibility, usability, interactivity and scalability bandied about all the time.

But one word that isn’t used as freely is – Taxonomy. A nice, useful term that isn’t widely known or understood outside of the web world but is a core part of what constitutes a good site from a bad one.

‘The practice and science of classification…composed of taxonomic units known as taxa (singular taxon), or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure’ is what Wikipedia states as its definition.

So, in a digital context it refers to the way a site is structured and how easy it is to use. It is also acts as a useful guide along the often rocky road of deciding what content should appear and where.

So how does it work in practice?

We all have experience of getting lost in a websites, where we are left scratching our heads when after managing to locate the unlinked recruitment site of a large company and trawling through trying to locate the current vacancies listing, you are presented with nothing but dead ends with no idea what part of the site you are sitting in and having forgotten what role you were trying to find in the first place.

Statistics show that many users give up at homepage when they can’t find what they are looking for – not good when you are trying to attract candidates to engage with and apply to an organisation.

Ideally, a site should be structured in an intuitive way, allowing the user to find the information they need in the least amount of ‘clicks’ possible. ‘Classifying’ content in a simple manner and placing it where users expect it to be is half the battle.

For example if you went to a library and looked under the ‘cookery’ section you wouldn’t expect to find books on how to build a cooker, would you? You expect it the section to be ordered around cooking styles and in alphabetical order.

This applies to websites also.

The use of clear and meaning full words to signpost the content area reduces guess work and increases engagement. Breadcrumb trails act as markers for where you are in the site (i.e. Home/Apply/Application form) and reassure users that there is a route back to where they started!

Navigation and search conventions also act as landmarks along the ‘usable site’ road. We expect to see primary navigation along the top or on the left hand side of a site, with copyright notices sitting in the footer.

Accessibility and Usability best practices help to enforce this.

Site maps that should feature on a website is a good starting point at understanding how taxonomy works and the wider and complex subject of Information Architecture (IA).

You could argue (and I would!) that a site structured with careful consideration will go along way in being successful, in more ways then eye-catching design or clever copy ever could.

Angela Bird

Barkers Events

Following the success of last years HR knowledge sharing events, Barkers is in full swing getting dates in the diary all over the UK. As always we will be covering a huge range of topics and helping the HR community to make informed decisions.

In March we have two complimentary employer branding events in Scotland and our specialists are speaking at the CIPD conference at Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London to present employer branding research.

To keep on top of up and coming events and to ensure you get a place reserved (they fill up quickly) please go to:

www.barkers.co.uk/events.htm

We look forward to meeting you at the next event!

Employer reputation – a plea for substance over style

I eavesdropped recently on a focus group amongst graduates with a year or so work experience.

Here we had bright, engaging people with a great education, who – in the main – were thoroughly underwhelmed with their first year in the workplace.

And listening to their comments, it was clear that most of this was due to over-magnified employer promises that didn’t match the reality of the job.

Whilst the possible loss of this new talent is enough of a problem, social networks, blogs and other forums are ensuring that poor workplace experience is communicated more widely, more quickly than ever before. Just check out the blog "fed-up-at-fedex" for an example of toxic employee behaviour.

Employers need to take a leaf from travel operators. With the increased popularity of customer driven content on sites such as tripadviser, there’s increasing acceptance that companies need to display a new level of transparency – even if it might deter many people. So 10 minutes from the beach needs to be an accurate experience for all – not just Olympians.

So what can employers do? Firstly they need to address the fundamentals of the employment experience – as opposed to relying on gloss and spinning a story. For example, quality of management, respect, workplace environment, development opportunities all need to be measured, benchmarked and tracked. And investment should be focussed on adjusting elements of the core EVP that are uncompetitive.

The best communications will then amplify the essential ‘truth’ of these qualities – and how they differentiate the organisation from other organisations.

And clearly the benefits go way beyond improving retention. With the long-established link between employee engagement and sales widely accepted and yet the CIPD reporting on only 35% of UK staff are actively engaged, the bigger rewards are clear to see.

Robert Peasnell

Launching Today

Welcome to the new Barkers Blog. This is where we'll be publishing all our latest news, up to date details of our events programme as well as thoughts and insight from leading industry experts. Please subscribe, link to us, check back regularly and above all feel free to comment