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May The Best Person Win

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:00:00 GMT

By Jason Collings.
However you source candidates for a job there comes a point when you have to decide who to hire. How this is done can vary, from the traditional: CV, interview, references, to the highly ‘scientific’: application form, skills tests and psychometrics. But which is best? The answer is that all have their strengths and weaknesses, and may be appropriate dependent upon your needs and how skilled your hiring team is.

With that in mind let’s take a look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches? And please bear in mind, this is not a definitive study, just my opinion based on almost twenty years in recruitment and HR services and using these various methods many times for my own companies and for clients.

CVs or application forms

Some form of initial documentation is vital, but is it best to leave it to the individual or have a set format? The CV or resume can tell you a lot about how the candidate thinks, do they use a lot of bullet points, facts and figures? If so they are likely quite detail focussed and technical. Do they prefer narrative, in which case they are more likely to be creative and better with interaction. A long CV suggests poorer organisational skills while a too succinct one suggests inability to effectively task resolve, after all the CV is a sales tool, if they haven’t worked that out they really haven’t got the point! Other details, such as if someone has included photo’s, long lists of hobbies and colourful page décor can start to paint a picture of the character of the individual. However it usually requires an experienced recruiter to be able to sift the messages from the page, the average line manager or inexperienced recruiter rarely spots the information in front of them, or worse, misinterprets it.

So what about the alternative, a set format application form? It limits the freedom of expression, cutting down the potential to interpret, but this is exactly what makes it simpler to understand, and so in many cases more suited to an inexperienced recruitment team or individual. Also, with an application form the hiring organisation can include set questions, such as the always interesting: ‘Why do you want this job?’ and the answers can be compared on a direct like for like basis.

In either case you need to be aware that the data on the page must always be treated as suspect, over 90% of CVs in our experience have some factual inaccuracy, whether by omission, exaggeration or outright fabrication. That vital first impression should be just that, a first impression only.

Testimonials and references

For many companies the last step before hiring is the reference check, but why is it always so late? The obvious answer is that current companies won’t be happy to learn that their star performers are looking around and get upset, threatening the candidate’s current position. True, but that’s just one referee, most companies ask for three or more. The earlier they can be taken the better.

However, there are weaknesses to references, under UK law at least a company cannot give a bad reference, the worst they can do is decline to give one. So what’s the point? Indeed some companies have stopped bothering with reference checks since they have become so anaemic, whether formally, by not asking, or informally, by never bothering to take them up. I feel this is a mistake, there is still useful information to be had, but it’s important to ask the right questions; questions about how the referee thinks the candidate might address an issue, not whether they’re a good employee, for instance. This can be a bit of an art form and is usually best left to experienced recruiters, otherwise the nuances in the answers are often missed.

The alternative to a reference is the testimonial. A written statement provided by the candidate from a third party is sometimes very interesting… but rarely for what is written. The content is usually generic and full of praise, otherwise why would the candidate submit it? The interesting element is usually who wrote it. If it’s someone at the candidate’s level, a colleague, friend or worse family, it suggests an issue, whereas a spread of testimonials from management, executives, notable persons, former academic supervisors etc suggests they have made a strong and lasting impression on people higher up the hierarchy, a definite good sign.

Skills tests and assessments

Particularly for technical roles tests can be popular, whether a trading game for a bank considering a new trader, a sample document to review for an analyst, a coding test for a programmer or a public speaking test for a public figure. Testing can show how the individual performs under pressure, doing the role you want to hire them for, clearly an excellent guide as to whether they can do the job. However, although testing has clear benefits, it has pitfalls too. It is time consuming to set up, and to review. The answers need to be assessed, and by someone better qualified than the candidate and neutral. If the tests are conducted online or remotely there is the potential for the candidate to take longer than expected, use reference materials or even get someone else to take the tests. The alternative of adjudicated assessment days may seem a little like a return to school exams, and certainly has a burden or organisation, but will return ‘clean’ results.

Psychometric tests

There is little in the recruitment industry more divisive than the question of psychometrics, some swear by them, others class them as corporate voodoo. I’m not going to make an argument either way here other than to say that there are a huge variety available, covering everything from basic verbal and numerical reasoning to in depth personality profiling. In all cases to gain any benefit they require professional interpretation and benchmarking against other people in similar roles, ideally in your organisation. It’s no good knowing their profile of you don’t know what good looks like.

Interviewing

The old standby, and the essential part of any recruitment process is the interview. Traditionally it is conducted face to face, although these days often done via video conference or phone, at least at an initial stage. A good interview can tell you a huge amount and should ensure a solid hiring process, but many people and organisations fail to meet the criteria of a good interview process in the first place. A robust interview should be prepared in advance, with key questions identified. If there are to be several interviews with different interviewers they should ensure that they know what each will be asking, to avoid not only covering the same ground, but also looking foolish to the person they’re trying to convince to join them. The questions should be based around key competencies needed for the role, with the candidate asked to provide examples of what they have done, or would do, in those circumstances. The interviewer must take notes, don’t leave it to memory, it’s eminently fallible. Also time should be left to answer their questions, as an interview is a sales exercise as well as for information gathering. Finally all the interviewers should meet afterwards to compare notes and debrief, this is all too often not done and only the notes or a one line, or even one word judgement, are submitted to HR.

How the interview is conducted, individual or panel, is just a matter of taste and scheduling, provided the candidate isn’t facing half a dozen people and being intimidated.

The biggest weakness of interviews is the interviewer. Everyone thinks that they can interview, just like most think that they’re a good driver… it’s simply not true. It’s a skill, and one that even after twenty years I’m still learning. Good structure can help an inexperienced interviewer but cannot save a bad one. All too often unskilled or just bad interviewers make the wrong decisions, sometimes not hiring the right person, more often hiring the wrong one. This tendency is massively exacerbated when the hiring team is under pressure to make a hire.

Furthermore an interview is a snapshot, some people may have an off day, or just not interview well. Introverts often fair badly in interviews, especially panel ones. That may be fine and useful if you’re looking to hire an all guns blazing salesperson, but if you’re looking for a programmer or analyst a bad interview may not be the end of the world. Remember to review the interview in the context of the role and the requirement.

Background checks

There are a bewildering array of checks available to the prospective employer, including CRB checks, Identity checks, Employment History confirmation, Education verification, Professional Qualification checks, Directorship checks, DVLA checks and Financial checks. All should reveal any hidden bear traps in hiring someone and are usually only a few hundred pounds. Another popular, if controversial, form of check is of media, including online presence. This can cover industry journals, court papers, local, national and international newspapers, as well as social media including Facebook, Linked in, Twitter etc. This type of search can reveal all sorts of useful and often potentially embarrassing information which many employers might wish to consider before making a hiring decision.

In all cases the checks deliver information which can inform a choice, but at a cost of time to perform, from a week or two to several months, and can leave a candidate feeling resentful at the perceived intrusion and distrust.

Conclusion

All in all there is no perfect way to make a selection decision. You could do all of the above, giving yourself all the information, but that could cost a small fortune, take a long time and you’d probably be left with an upset and unreceptive candidate. The best approach is a combination chosen according to the needs of your company and the skills of your recruitment team. For a skilled team CVs, reference checks and interviews, the traditional triad, is probably fine, particularly for non-technical roles, but only if they really do have the experience and ability required. For many the creation of a more structured format, whether to replace the traditional elements or supplement them, can greatly aid a successful hiring process, reducing the pressure on the hiring team and delivering the results you want.

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News: UK Unemployment Up to 2.56 miliion

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:00:00 GMT

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed that unemployment in the UK has risen by 70,000 to 2.56 million between December and February. This means an unemployment figure of 7.9% for the quarter. The ONS also announced that the number of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance fell by 7000 to 1.53 million and that average regular pay had risen by 1% in the same period.

Read more on the figures released by the ONS via this BBC report.

SMEs and Recruitment Process Outsourcing: Is RPO only for big business?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:00:00 GMT

By Dave Evans.
I have noticed a widespread belief that Recruitment Process Outsourcing is only for big business. People aren’t thinking and talking about the benefits that it can deliver to SMEs, especially SMEs that are growing rapidly. Frankly, this is a very one dimensional view of what RPO can do for a company. In fact, smaller businesses are often better placed to benefit from RPO services than the large multinationals.

The perception seems to be that RPO is just a ‘big machine’, a large scale beast that thrives solely on economies of scale and is wholly concerned with driving down costs. Now, these are typical characteristics of many examples of RPO that can be found in the wild, but that doesn’t mean that this is all that RPO is or can (should) be.

In some ways this thinking is a result of the commoditisation of RPO, and of how RPO is both bought and sold. The primary buyers of RPO have been big businesses and their focus has generally been seen to be on hard, topline costs. Consequently, this shapes the way that RPO providers tend to talk about RPO as a service, and often also shapes how they are able to think about the service. This is a very narrow view of RPO.

Outsourcing can be about getting the same quality of service, but at a reduced cost. However, it can equally be about getting access to capacity or expertise that you otherwise don’t have yourself. For example, a company might well outsource manufacturing to reduce cost, but it might equally be because they don’t have room at their site for the production line. Or maybe they don’t have the specialised skills or machinery needed to make that product. Or perhaps they are only going to be making the product for half of the year, so don’t need the line all year round. All good reasons, and similar considerations apply to recruitment process outsourcing.

This combination of expertise and capacity is where SMEs really stand to benefit from recruitment process outsourcing. SMEs often don’t have a HR team, so the task of running the recruitment process remains in the hands of the line managers. It is always going to be the responsibility of the line manager to make the decision about who to hire, and that is right and proper, after all, it’s part of the job of management. But doing all of the process management that gets you to the point of hire? Sourcing candidates? Dealing with agency suppliers? Writing job adverts? All of that is time consuming and takes the line manager away from their day job of delivering the end product or service to your clients.

Even if you’ve got a HR team to support your managers, the fact is that recruitment is a skill. It takes time, effort and expertise to do a good job, and a small team rarely has the required expertise, and almost never has the time, to develop that skill. The reality tends to be that even with a HR team, the bulk of the work ends up back with line managers, but with the added impact of them resenting a ‘lack of support’ from HR. This isn’t really anyone’s fault, just an inevitable consequence of resource limitations.

This brings me back to RPO and why it should be of particular interest to SMEs. Recruitment takes time and effort to do, and that means people dedicated to doing it. Very few SMEs can afford the overhead of a full-time recruitment specialist, less still a team of specialists. The time needed to do the recruitment has to come from somewhere, and for an SME the cost of it coming from a line manager’s day can be highly disruptive. Many, if not most, SMEs will tend to run very lean in terms of headcount. Staff are often very adaptable and used to multitasking and taking responsibility, to getting things done without a big support network around them. Recruitment is a time-consuming activity, so throwing that into the mix as well can create real problems as people get increasingly thinly spread.

Outsourcing means that you are buying in the time from elsewhere to deliver your recruitment, but effectively on a ‘pay per use’ model. Thus you avoid the overhead costs of hiring and retaining your own recruitment team, and at the same time avoid undue pressure on the valuable time of your operational management. You can even flex the usage based on actual need, so if you’re hiring like mad for 6 months and then doing nothing for the next year, your provider can and will manage their capability to match that.

Once you’ve managed the capacity issue, you have to address the question of expertise. Recruitment is a skilled activity, from identifying candidates, through attracting them, selecting them and on to managing the process of keeping them interested in your business long enough to join you. Line managers are often skilled at the key part that impacts their team, selecting the right person at interview, but are much less experienced at most of the other aspects of hiring. This is all important stuff, because it is what determines how good the people you hire are, and how good they are is what drives your company performance at the end of the day. Outsourcing means you are bringing in experts, people who work in recruitment all day every day and very likely have done so for years. That means your recruitment is going to get done better than you are able to with limited internal resources whose primary skill and focus is not recruitment. As a result, you will be hiring people better, and probably better people as well, and who doesn’t want to do that?

So, what can Recruitment Process Outsourcing do for the smaller business? It lets you do a better job of recruitment than you can do today, and with less impact on the day-to-day work of your business. Oh, and you’ll hire better people as a result. As I said at the start of this piece, SMEs have a lot to get out of RPO. Larger businesses can sometimes miss out on these benefits due to bureaucracy, inertia or the politics inherent in bigger organisations. SMEs really only have gains to make, and very little to lose.

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News: Zero Hour Contracts Hit 200,000

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:00:00 GMT

A total of 200,000 people were employed on zero hours contracts in the UK in the final three months of 2012, a figure that has been steadily rising in the last seven years.

This accounted for 0.67% of the UK’s near-30m strong labour force. The figure for the final part of last year was nearly double the 110,000 seen in the period April to June of that year, Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows.

Under zero hours contracts, workers are employed by a firm but not guaranteed any work, and instead are on call and asked to accept work whenever it becomes available – or turn it down.

The ONS data points towards more use of such contracts in the run-up to Christmas, a time when large users of such contracts, such as at retailers, and the transport and logistics firms serving them, take on extra casual or temporary staff.

The Recruitment & Employment Confederation’s chief executive officer Kevin Green tells ITV that such contracts are key for keeping unemployment down, and businesses afloat. In a news piece on the TV channel yesterday, he said: “You could be saying this is keeping 200,000 people in work who may not have been in work if it wasn't for these sorts of contracts.”

Meanwhile, several unions have renewed condemnation of the practice.

ONS data only records people employed on zero hours contracts for the period April to June (Q2) and then October to December (Q4) – with the other six months of the year not measured. The ONS was not immediately able to clarify the lack of data for 2010. The data shows the number of people in zero hours employment contracts as:

Q2 2005: 55,000
Q4 2005: 75,000
Q2 2006: 81,000
Q4 2006: 134,000
Q2 2007: 96,000
Q4 2007: 147,000
Q2 2008: 124,000
Q4 2008: 125,000
Q2 2009: 104,000
Q4 2009: 164,000
Q2 2011: 106,000
Q4 2011: 161,000
Q2 2012: 110,000
Q4 2012: 200,000

From Recruiter.com

The True Cost of Recruitment

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Jason Collings.
How much does recruitment cost? Most HR and recruitment professionals will talk to you about agency fees, advertising costs and the salaries of in-house recruiters, but is that it? Most companies underestimate the cost of recruitment by 90-95% not least when they are looking to cut costs, this often leads to terrible decisions that not only fail to reduce costs, they can even drive them up. So what are these costs, and more importantly, what can you do about them?

Headline Costs

The number most people talk about when they are discussing recruitment costs is the external expenditure on hiring. In organisations reliant on recruitment agencies this is typically 15-30% of salary, higher if they use executive search companies. Other costs include advertising, subscriptions to social media and database aggregators, attendance at recruitment shows and the cost of any in-house recruiters. Many companies seek to reduce their headline costs by taking recruitment in-house, reasoning that if they hire recruiters they can cut out the agencies. As a result they often deliver 8-15% costs compared to salaries, this is often less of a saving than they hoped for, but nevertheless looks significant. However it’s worth noting that over 70% of in-house solutions fail to source all, or even 90% of their vacancies themselves and therefore need agencies to help, driving that average cost up to 12-20%. Another supposed money-saving approach, the typical Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution, offers similar savings to in-house recruiters.

Cost of Recruitment

Assumes £40,000 average salary

Agency led solution (22% average)	£8,800 per head
In-house solution (12% average)	£4,800 per head
Typical hybrid solution (17% average)	£6,800 per head
RPO solution (12% average)	£4,800 per head

This is as far as most companies look, and so when costs need to be controlled they look to an in-house solution or perhaps to outsource, relying only on agencies if demand swamps their capability. But is this the whole picture?

Time to Hire

Most companies track how long it takes to hire people, but completely ignore it as a cost. But it is a huge overhead. Given the typical reactive recruitment environment, the average hiring time is 10-12 weeks (from job opening to accepted offer), during which time the role is unfilled. For that period there is either no productivity, or productivity is provided by diverting someone else, likely the manager, or by using contract labour. All these options have a tangible cost, and if the hiring timeline slips the cost goes up. It’s important to note here that in-house recruitment teams generally have longer hiring times than agencies or recruitment process outsourcing solutions, on average 12-16 weeks, due to a lack of extensive databases and wider industry contacts. This has a significant impact on the cost line.

Cost of Dislocation due to Hiring Time

Assumes £40,000 average salary, productivity of 3x salary, contractor rates £50 p.h.

Average time to hire - Agency or RPO	11 weeks
Productivity loss	£28,085
Contractor cover	£22,000

Average time to hire - In-House	13 weeks
Productivity loss	£33,191
or Contractor cove	£26,000

These are big numbers, dwarfing the headline costs and, as is clear, the in-house solution is looking far less attractive: The loss in efficiency that is typical of in-house solutions, more than wipes out any headline savings.

There are a couple of ways you can impact this cost, though. Firstly, by moving away from the purely reactive model and understanding your recruitment demand, you can plan your recruitment pro-activity, which makes a significant difference. This can reduce the typical times by another 4-6 weeks. For the best results, you can take this further and operate a Talent Warehouse. By pro-actively sourcing candidates before they are needed and actively managing them you can cut hiring times to 3-4 weeks on average, with a huge resultant saving.

Cost of Dislocation due to Hiring Time

Assumes £40,000 average salary, productivity of 3x salary, contractor rates £50 p.h.

Average time to hire – Planned Hiring	7 weeks
Productivity loss	£17,872
or Contractor cover	£14,000

Average time to hire – Talent Warehouse	3 ½ weeks
Productivity loss	£8,936
or Contractor cover	£7,000

Management Time

Another major cost is the time the management spends in the recruitment process, specifying roles, reviewing CVs and interviewing, and, as over 50% of offers made are rejected, then repeating the process. This cost is the same whether candidates are sourced by agency, in-house or RPO, only a Talent Warehousing based approach really alters this, cutting management time spent recruiting by 70% on average.

Cost of Management Time

Assumes £65,000 average manager salary

Agency/In-house/Typical RPO
Cost of management time (10 days per hire)	£2,600
Productivity loss (10 days x (3xsalary))	£7,800
Total Cost	£10,400

RPO with Talent Warehouse
Cost of management time (3 days per hire)	£780
Productivity loss (3 days x (3xsalary))	£2,340
Total Cost	£3,120

Quality of Hire

We have already discussed that almost all recruitment solutions are reactive, sourcing candidates when the need arises. The immediacy of that need means that companies are entirely reliant on candidates already in the market: signed up with agencies, looking at ads, on job sites or on databases. But studies have shown that this only represents around 20% of the qualified candidates in the marketplace, and even then to access all of that 20% you have to use every agency, database and advertising medium. The reality is that companies are on average accessing only 2-3% of the available talent pool to fill any given vacancy.

Limited access, to only people who really want or need a new job, has a dramatic impact on the quality of hire. If a company is able to access the wider pool of talent, as is achieved by Talent Warehousing, there is a demonstrable improvement in quality of hire, and as a result a demonstrable increase in productivity per head of between 10-30%.

Equally important is that Talent Warehousing typically halves the time it takes new hires to achieve optimum productivity in a new role, from an average of six months to three months.

Benefit of Higher Quality Hires

Cost from Productivity impact of 6 month ramp up (Agency/In-house/typical RPO)	£30,000
Cost from Productivity impact of 3 month ramp up (Talent Warehousing)	£15,000 (unadjusted productivity)
Total Productivity boost in year 1 (Talent Warehousing)	£21,000

Example:

Total year 1 productivity (Agency/In-house/typical RPO)	£90,000
Total year 1 productivity (RPO w/ Talent Warehousing)	£126,000
Relative benefit of RPO w/Talent Warehousing	£36,000

Access to wider pools of talent delivers dramatic benefits to the company, bringing better, more productive people and getting them up to speed faster.

Attrition

Finally up to half of new hires leave within the first twelve months, and the average is over 20%. The reasons are simple, the 6-8 weeks of contact with a company of a standard recruitment process is not enough to develop a cultural rapport between candidate and company. In short, the new hire starts and only then finds out if they ‘fit’, any concerns are amplified by the pressure of the new job. Of the methods of recruitment we’ve looked out only an approach employing Talent Warehousing tackles this, by having longer to engage with candidates, allowing them to get to grips with the culture and for concerns to be addressed. The result is a reduction in twelve month drop-out of up to 90%.

Cost of Attrition

Figures assume £40,000 average salary, average hiring costs of 12% per head, 20% attrition in first 12 months. This is the additional cost per head to cover attrition.

Cost of repeating hire	£960
Productivity loss (11 weeks)	£5,617
Management time	£1,456

Total cost per head of Attrition (Agency/In-house/RPO)	£8,033
Total cost per head of Attrition (RPO w/Talent Warehouse)	£955

Review

In short, the true cost of recruitment is not just how much you pay for your recruiters, agency fees and ads, indeed this is the tip of a sizeable iceberg that impacts every facet of your company performance and productivity. A fairly typical £40,000 hire can cost well over twice that in combined headline and hidden costs, even based on average figures, and whether you use agencies, in-house recruiters or an outsourced RPO provider the bottom line is the same, hiring costs approximately double salary. Only by using proactive sourcing and Talent Warehousing to drive down time to hire, management demands and attrition whilst bolstering productivity can you really address the fundamental issue of recruitment costs.

Comparative Example Costs Per Hire

Comparative total per head recruitment costs for various recruitment methods (assumptions as above):

Agency Led Solution	£85,318
In-House Solution	£86,424
Typical RPO Solution	£81,318
In-house or RPO Solution with planned hiring	£71,105
Talent Warehousing based RPO Solution	£38,811
- Productivity gain from Talent Warehousing (20%)	(£24,000)
- Adjusted cost of RPO w/Talent Warehouse	£12,811

About the author:

Jason Collings is a founder director of Quarsh, specialists in proactive sourcing, RPO and Talent Warehousing. The statistics used in this blog are based on analysis of over sixty outsourced implementations across every industry sector and organisations from SME to multinational.

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Infographic: The Relationship between the C-suite and HR

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The relationship between the C-suite and HR is sometimes undervalued. Here is the infographic from Oracle Taleo to present the statistics that prove why this partnership is vital to business success.

HR Infographic

Employment Law: Collective Redundancies Changes in April

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The employment law surrounding collective redundancies will change as of 06/04/2013.

The 90 day consultation period where 100 or more employees are to be made redundant is to be halved to 45 days. Employees on fixed-term contracts that are due to expire are exempt from the consultation period with ACAS aiming to bring in new guidance in this area.

For more information on these changes see this update from ACAS.

What? A CFO Passionate about Coaching?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Stuart Pickles.
A CFO Passionate about Coaching?
That might sound like a bit of an oxymoron!
But a CFO who is passionate about coaching has the potential to make a dramatic impact on the bottom line profit and cash performance of the business.

Why? Because it’s normally the CFO who blocks it. “What’s all this fluffy stuff? Where’s the ROI?” Yet anyone who has benefited from good coaching themselves, and have seen the impact of a performance coaching culture change, just know it’s true.

This will be familiar to many of you HR professionals and Finance managers. Maybe you are a CFO who is still not convinced – and it’s understandable… it’s a high risk strategy to put your name behind something where it is difficult to demonstrate a direct and causative link to profit. Even if we believe it intuitively, it’s harder to nail the logical numbers analysis.

But the paradigm has to change, because there is significant performance potential being held back in business cultures where coaching capability and leadership style has not yet truly taken root.

Over the past several lean years, most organisations have cut back to the bone and they are really beginning to scratch their heads now – how can we get even more with less?

Given adequate talent and capability, we all know it’s the motivation and discretionary effort of our people that is the difference between average and really exceptional performance. That’s where coaching can really make an impact.

So how do you implement a performance coaching culture? And how do you demonstrate the ROI? There is an increasing number of organisations that are doing this, and a growing body of evidence in many organisations of the bottom line impact of coaching. One I am very familiar with: I was CFO for Foster’s EMEA business. The implementation of a coaching culture led to a dramatic shift in bottom line profit first as the leadership team benefited from coaching (individually and as a team) and stepped up to new level of effectiveness. This was a significant investment in external coaching, but the impact and payback was rapid and dramatic.

As CFO, I was converted by this experience, and I was determined to see the benefit rolled out across the business. I became qualified as a coach, became coaching champion and led the implementation of a coaching culture programme.

This was about developing coaching capability through training, workshops etc., developing internal capability with constant support from external coaching consultants who understood what was critical to embed a sustainable culture change.

Perhaps even more important, it was about the role modelling of coaching leadership behaviour from the top.

As the programme spread out across and down the organisation, cross-functional collaboration led to the identification of several multi-million pound strategic initiatives which were delivered because of coaching support and alignment from leaders across the organisation.

I must admit I did meet quite a bit of resistance – from global stakeholders and from some sceptics around the business: why is the CFO spending his time doing this? But I just knew it was getting results, so I kept speaking out as an advocate to maintain the focus on the time and hard cash investment required in the coaching, training and culture change programme. I kept finding examples of where performance improvements were happening, showcasing these and encouraging people to capture the impact of their successes on profit and cash. Gradually more people became convinced and the profit and cash numbers of the business as a whole were the ultimate proof that this was working.

And not surprisingly, our engagement scores were the highest in the organisation globally. But this was not for the faint hearted:

getting wider stakeholder buy-in and silencing the sceptics takes time and personal risk.
as a leader, coaching also means letting go. It’s the shift from tell to ask, from knowing all the answers to helping others find them, from doubt and criticize to trust and delegate
Coaching does not mean you challenge less – in fact, effective coaching generates more challenge not less, but it requires a lot of investment in time and effort to provide the support that people need to succeed, as well as the cash investment for external support to get it started and maintain momentum.

In the end ROI was clear: when leaders start coaching effectively, and where coaching is demonstrably a fundamental part of leadership culture, organisation behaviour starts to change. The payback is bottom line profit and cash. Now that’s what a CFO can get passionate about !

Stuart Pickles is the former CFO of Foster's EMEA. He is a speaker, writer and runs AimHigherLeadership.com providing leadership coaching and consulting to deliver bottom line profit and cash.

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Article: Skills shortage ‘biggest challenge’ for oil & gas jobs boom

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A new report from Lloyds Banking Group suggests that up to 34,000 new jobs could be created in oil & gas firms in the UK in the next two years, but skills shortages will make expansion difficult.

It will come as no surprise to those involved in recruitment that skills shortage will be an obstacle to growth, but significantly, a third of companies name it as their biggest challenge, making it the largest obstacle on the horizon.

As Recruiter found last year (See Sector Focus, Recruiter, December 2012), there are signs that companies are beginning to invest in training and alternative talent sources, as reported by the Lloyds survey.

The survey also showed that 77% of industry firms were planning for growth in 2013-14, with Scottish firms marginally more optimistic (83%) than companies elsewhere.

Paul Flynn, managing director of energy recruitment specialist Earthstaff, says: “There needs to be a long-term plan in place to ensure the best talent is cultivated and kept within the UK to provide the calibre of people required to compete on a global scale.

“It also needs to raise the identity of engineering within the UK and ensure that its importance and credibility cascades down to grass roots level, so that when a child starts school, instead of wanting to be like Alan Sugar, they are talking about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sir James Dyson and James Watt.”

As reported by recruiter.co.uk in January, Dyson himself has expressed concerns that UK graduates are too easily “distracted by the glamour of web fads and video gaming” and less likely to become involved in heavier industry.

Sourced from Recruiter.co.uk

News: Shared Parental Leave Survey

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Businesses and families have been invited to add their views to the debate on shared parental leave via a survey released by the department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Business Innovation and Skills Survey on Shared Parental Leave and Pay Administration Consultation

Currently, mothers are entitled to 52 weeks maternity leave and fathers just two weeks (since 2011, fathers can take 6 months leave in one block after the child is 20 weeks old) but the new regulations, which are due to come into play in 2015 look set to alter how paternity leave can be used. The Children and Families bill of 2013 will allow parents to share the leave entitlement and request flexible working arrangements which in practice will allow women the option to return to the workplace sooner and allow working fathers to take a more prominent role in the child's early development.

There has been some opposition from businesses and government areas about the potential costs and administration issues the proposals might cause, and in particular the potential effect on small businesses but the Government has been quick to dismiss opposition suggesting that businesses will benefit from the changes.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg said: “It’s high time that the existing system of maternity leave is overhauled so that it’s easier for women to get back to work earlier if they choose. A new system of shared parental leave is not only good news for parents and parents-to-be, but for employers who will benefit from having a workforce that is more flexible and motivated.”

Employment relations minister Jo Swinson said the proposals will help to remove the perception that the mother should stay at home and look after the children which could drive a positive cultural shift in both the home and the workplace.

The Confederation of British Industry and the TUC have backed the proposals but there is opposition remaining that will need satisfying before the introduction of this bill, the results of the survey will provide an interesting insight on the matter.

You can read Director of HR Outsourcing, Jackie Scarfe's blog on shared parental leave here. As always, get in touch and let us know your thoughts.

Employment Law: Parental Leave Directive 2013

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The EU Parental Leave Directive comes into force on 08/03/2013 meaning that employees with at least one years service will now have the right to take unpaid parental leave beyone the first year of the child's life. Current legislation states that an employee (qualified by one years service) can take up to 13 weeks unpaid leave per child with no more that 4 weeks taken off in one 12 month block. The leave is unpaid unless the contract states otherwise.

For more information on this change visit the Government's Official UK legislation website on the link below.

Legislation.gov.uk

How Inbound Marketing Tactics Can Improve Your Employer Branding and Social Recruitment Strategy

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Matt Thomas.
The employer brand is becoming increasingly important and increasingly digital. It has become a sophisticated offering that aims to persuade and guide the talent that your business needs into your workforce, and keep them there. Employer branding partners both traditional and social recruiting and it should help to increase qualified applications both immediately and long term.

We are fast reaching a time where organisations need to make online employer branding and social recruiting part of their HR strategy to ensure they are not left behind. Those that do not will run the risk of leaving an ageing and increasingly less effective recruitment process to carry all the weight, meaning increased cost and time to hire and lower quality of candidate.

Modern inbound marketing techniques that play a key role in identifying, qualifying and nurturing B2B sales leads are now becoming an ever present part of the online employer brand and social recruitment idea. The goal of inbound or content marketing is to produce marketing content that provides a genuine, sales-free, problem solving/value adding piece of advice to the desired end user. This content can take many forms and is distributed through social channels, referrals and PR but also requires a level of SEO and copywriting understanding for effectiveness. The goal of this content is to gain exposure by solving a problem and adding value in your area of expertise. Ideally, interested individuals will share this with their peers which generates further exposure. This long term strategy is designed to encourage return visits and promote affinity and trust with a brand. The content should also follow a path that allows a person to take their own route through the buying cycle and at their own pace.

Online employer branding should be doing the same, overcoming the communication obstacle whilst enhancing reputation and increasing chances of further contact and a buy-in. The first port of call is the employer value proposition. It must be of quality to justify anyone wanting to buy in to it, too many companies are jumping in to social recruiting and employer branding without a solid environment and offering to market to their candidates. Many organisations have different EVP’s for different business areas and roles depending on four main questions to provide the framework with which to plan:

Who would be successful in this role?
Why will this person be successful in this role?
Why would they join us?
Why would they stay with us?

The use of social channels for recruiting is not a new development but it is still evolving all the time as new social media trends are discovered. The content marketing theory is effective for a number of reasons, primarily it builds trust over time through transparency but can also have immediate impact with a call to action. The same needs to be applied to the social recruitment and employer branding.

Inbound marketing focuses on supplying prospects with the information they need and to keep them gently moving through the sales funnel by providing more and more personalised content. The same ethos can be applied to social recruiting by making use of a number of different channels and techniques to increase engagement and prompt candidates to determine that your organisation is an ‘employer of choice’. The main corporate website or social feeds are a good place to start, as are employment shows or on-campus recruitment events that drive people to the social recruitment channels of the business. Content, competitions, staff, social engagement, your corporate site and search engines will drive more potential candidates to your social channels. A little spend on promoted stories and tweets also helps get the ball rolling!

New and innovative methods of improving employer brand awareness and engagement with social channels are surfacing all the time. Twitter’s recent development of Twitter cards, for example, provide a great way of displaying videos and story snippets prior to re-directing through to the main site. Jobgram is another new and interesting tool which uses static infographic designs and video to advertise positions (thanks to Andy Headworth for showing me this). Expect these highly shareable and unique methods to do very well in attracting the socially savvy candidate.

Documenting the day to day working environment with video and pictures is an increasingly popular method of showcasing the benefits of a workplace and the engagement of staff within the business. This relatively simple practice has had some great effects on building and engaging with talent communities via social channels. Starbucks, for example, found success with an employer branding initiative using Instagram to document the day to day duties of their Baristas, including training and engaging with customers. LinkedIn’s new company pages are a great way to share company material, including pictures and video, to prospective candidates.

If an organisation has built a great working environment, it goes a long way to creating engaged employees, and engaged employees will talk about their work and share what they do online (more so as generation Y is an increasingly large workforce component). This is possibly the single most powerful method of reaching a network of prospective candidates who are likely to be similar in character and qualification to your current employees. If you look at a B2B website, you will regularly find testimonials from clients highlighting the good work of an organisation (unless they are rubbish!), and there is a reason for this, people are naturally more trusting of individuals than they are of corporate logos. The exact same is the case with social recruitment. Video interviews of staff, a company blog where employees are invited to contribute, Q and A sessions on Twitter or a Google+ hangout, all are powerful tools in social recruiting. Case studies of work translate directly into case studies of successful hires.

The beauty of social media and recruitment is that it is not solely one-way traffic. There is value to be gained from listening to those who talk to you and about your organisation. By networking and engaging your followers in conversation a company stands to gain a lot of understanding into many factors affecting the recruitment process including helping people with applications, candidate experience and feedback as well and pretty much whatever else you want to discuss with them. Candidate experience is an area I think is often overlooked, and as Emma pointed out in her recent blog, poor communication in the recruitment process is often a cause of brand damage.

Building a talent pipeline, or database of candidates is an age old technique that can be further enhanced by social recruiting when applying some marketing principles to the process. Sift and refine this data with personalised content marketing distributed via email and you can soon establish who within the database is genuinely interested in and suitable for your organisation. You can filter prospects through your various social channels to deepen their affiliation with the brand before creating an online talent community (perhaps via a LinkedIn group or protected Twitter feed) to further engage with these potential candidates. Not only do you increase the chances of a swift hire (at a much reduced cost) when the right role becomes available but the continued engagement with them will mean they are invested and up to speed with the business by the time they apply, meaning a more efficient onboarding and faster time to reach optimal productivity. This could be considered the ‘lead generation’ (to borrow another marketing term) of the social recruiting and employer branding efforts. Cosmetics brand Sephora appear to have done this particularly well, even incorporating a friendly suitability test into their social recruiting strategy.

Inbound marketing is a primary focus of many B2B marketers at the moment because it is effective. Outbound techniques such as advertising and cold calling are continually providing smaller return on investment and the same can be said for recruiting with job board effectiveness declining and the supposed ‘talent war’ pushing up wages. To make social recruiting a success for your business, you need to consider the positioning of your brand and target who you want to find you. A culture and environment that is custom designed to cater for the needs of your current workforce as well as the one you want to hire is becoming ever more important. Showcase your business with transparency and have the confidence to allow staff and candidates to see and share it and your organisation’s recruitment process will prosper.

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Employee Wellbeing - More Than Just Workplace Health

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Jackie Scarfe.
Employers used to think of the wellbeing of their employees as a health and safety issue limited to the management of injuries and ill health experienced or acquired at work. It is well researched and documented that a poor physical working environment is linked to high levels of sickness absence and turnover, along with poor performance.

Traditionally, especially in a number of industries such as manufacturing, hospitality and retail, employee wellbeing tended to be approached on a reactive level. However, both the Government and employers alike now advocate a more holistic approach, in which the employer takes measures to improve the way in which work is organised and manages the physical and psychological aspects of the job. This has changed the way employee wellbeing is viewed.

Employers have also recently begun to realise that staff engagement and health at work are closely connected and that many initiatives designed to boost levels of employee engagement such as flexible working and improved job design also have spin-offs for wellbeing. The corollary is that better employee health boosts commitment and productivity. Furthermore, the working environment and organisational attitude to employee wellbeing is playing an increasingly important role in employer branding and talent acquisition.

Additionally, with the UK workforce becoming older, more women entering and staying in the workplace and a growing pressure generally for workers to be as productive as possible (due to, for example, fierce competition from cheaper overseas labour and the global economic downturn), wellbeing initiatives have an increasingly important role to play within the workplace.

Employers that want to invest in employee wellbeing should look to adopt an organisational approach through a well thought out wellbeing strategy. Such a strategy is likely to be embraced and successful if employees of all levels of seniority are involved in its development and implementation. Many companies have chosen the ‘champion’ approach which allows those employees who are already generally enthusiastic about health, fitness and wellbeing to drive the initiative.

In order to develop a wellbeing strategy which works and delivers results, employers should first determine what their employees are interested in doing. Different groups of employees will have a different set of needs and varying interests and it is usually the case that one size does not fit all. Additionally a mix of on-going initiatives such as subsidised gym membership and stress awareness training for all managers combined with targeted campaigns to keep interest alive, for example giving up smoking, healthy eating or taking up a new sport are usually the most successful strategies. Sometimes, simply removing barriers to exercise and health can go a long way, for example, installing a bicycle rack.

All organisations have something to gain from embracing employee wellbeing and with a little innovative thinking and the buy-in of an enthusiastic few, even the smallest and most ‘strapped for cash’ organisations can improve the health and happiness of their workforce. The subsequent knock-on effects for the business will be a more engaged workforce of higher performers which is why we build employee wellbeing considerations into our Recruitment Process Outsourcing and HR services. A healthy workforce means a healthy business, so what are you waiting for, start thinking about how you can improve employee wellbeing for the benefit of both your staff and your business?

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News: Employment Growth to Continue

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Two separate reports indicate that employment growth is set to continue, despite lack of growth in the UK economy.

The CIPD/Success Factors Labour Market Outlook, which measures employers’ intentions to take on more staff or decrease staffing levels, recorded a net positive balance of +5 in the first quarter of 2013. This is the fourth consecutive quarter in which hiring intentions have been positive.

Employers remain optimistic in the private sector, where there is a net balance of +16. However, sentiment has deteriorated sharply in the public sector where the balance is -29 compared with -17 in the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, the latest Bank of Scotland Report on Jobs indicates a further strong rise in permanent placements in January. The Bank of Scotland Labour Market Barometer, which provides a snapshot of labour market conditions, was 53.9, down from December’s 19-month high of 56.0 but above the equivalent index for the UK as a whole.

Recruiter.co.uk

Candidate Experience – The Value of Communication

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Emma Humphrey.
No news means good news, is that really always true in the recruitment process?

You are probably wondering what I mean by this statement? Well as a seasoned recruiter I know the famous last words are (or at least one lot) “I will let you know the outcome, whatever”. How many times have you been left in the lurch?

The days and weeks pass by and still no feedback from your CV submission, the conversation you had with the recruiter or even the interview you had with the client. It makes me mad, and some of our fellow in-house recruiters are the worst culprits (yes you know who you are!). The trick to beating this thing is C O M M U N I C A T I O N. Its meaning is as follows:

Communication – a Noun

The imparting or exchanging of information or news.
A letter or message containing such news or information.

We all have busy lives and find ourselves relying more and more on email and text. It is also becoming more acceptable to use these methods in order to communicate with out candidates, and even our clients, rather than picking up the phone as we used to do. Candidates are always the ones who get left out in the cold, having no clue as to whether the client has any interest in them. A lot of the time they really don’t even know if their CV has been downloaded off the latest all singing all dancing candidate tracking system. All it takes is a few simple words and communicating is oh so easy.

Communication is a vital part of a good recruitment process. Its effective use can make or break relationships at all stages. We use it to make contact with candidates and clients. We keep them all posted with updates throughout the process. We say ‘thank you for your CV’ or ‘thank you but not this time’. We communicate to arrange interviews. We tell the client when the candidate is no longer interested in the job, or when the client is no longer interested in the candidate. We give feedback after an interview. We communicate the offer details, and we tell the team that there is someone new starting. All these tasks require some sort of communication. Some forms of communication are better suited than others, or several different forms of communication may be used to deliver the same message. A phone call and then an email to confirm the details; this is now very standard practice in recruitment. Whichever you use, you are imparting or exchanging information or news with others. As they long as they are clear and concise and deliver the required message, then you can be assured that your method of communication has been successful. So, why is it that so many of us fail to communicate properly? Are we lazy, do we not want to pass the latest update to the candidate, do we not have the right information to pass on, and so the list goes on. Select any one of these, and it really does not matter. What is important is that we communicate either way when we know something, or we still communicate - even when we don’t know something.

The saying “no news means good news” is never that simple in recruitment; usually it means negative news, or something that your candidate or client probably do not wish to hear. Either way, it is our job to deliver that message by communicating. With the added bonus of all this wonderful technology around us there really is no excuse not to communicate. I have recently sent out a number of emails, or called individuals with negative news – i.e. thanks but no thanks, on this occasion. The number of thank you’s that I have receive always amazes me, but it makes it all worthwhile, as I know that I communicated with that person, so they know exactly where they stand. Timing is also massively important. Why delay telling a candidate that they didn’t get the job, or they won’t be getting an interview. The longer you leave it the worse it gets, and really all that our candidates or clients want is some good old fashioned communication. I always try to work with one principal on this, (other than communicating to everyone in one way or another) and that is to communicate before I am asked to, i.e. get there first! Don’t do tomorrow, what you can do today.

The benefits of communicating will pretty much always outweigh the detriment. Firstly it is only courteous to give your candidate an update on where they are, especially if you have promised it. Secondly, even if you give someone news that they would prefer not to hear, then they will respect you for the fact that you have given them something, and you will have a candidate you can contact again in the future, thus creating your talent pipeline.

Communication is a great way to protect your brand. If your candidates have a great experience and you have communicated all the way through, then they are almost always going to say good things about you. They won’t even worry that they didn’t get the job, or even the interview, but they will remember that you communicated with them all the way through and will not think twice about praising your brand. It doesn’t matter whether you are a locally based business or one of the FTSE 500, it is all the same. The detriment of not communicating with clients and candidates alike is that they will then come to their own conclusion about you as an operator. Your employer brand could easily be damaged, after all we all know how quickly bad news travels and sticks especially in the social media age. Candidates become very disillusioned and will never want to hear from you again. Clients will feel undervalued and the damage caused will be much harder to repair. Fortunately it appears some organisations are aware of the value of improving communication.

In the increasingly demanding recruitment environment where talent is becoming harder to identify, we as recruiters need to ensure that communicating is at the heart of every client and candidate relationship, for the benefit of future business and for the sake of being courteous and fair to our candidates. Identifying talent and formulating a talent pipeline takes time and to allow it to lose its value by communicating poorly in this way should be criminal. Be courteous and communicate efficiently and you will have happy clients and happy candidates who want to talk to you again and again.
So then, no news is not good news.

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News: Business confidence hits new low

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Accountancy firm BDO has published the findings of a survey into UK businesses and says that confidence amongst British business is at the lowest point for at least 21 years. The results paint a picture of businesses that are wary to invest in growth plans and higher risk strategies whilst the economy is so unpredictable. The result of this could be that the first quarter of this year may see a reduced economic growth rate, the firm warned. What does this mean for the UK job market? Well, this news comes in spite of signs that the labour market is improving, particularly in the manufacturing sector, and whilst this is a positive sign that points to recovery, these latest findings suggest that UK business does not yet have confidence that the return to widespread growth is imminent. Read the full report.

The Five ‘C’s of People Management

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Jason Collings.
Traditional management models stress the development of detailed project plans and the rigorous observation of disciplined models. Developed by engineering and manufacturing organisations they assume workflows with controlled variables and fixed inputs, in short they assume that you are managing machines, not human beings.

Any experienced manager knows that you can follow the Gant Chart and spreadsheet every element to the finest degree, but the human factor will always be the element which bites back.

Failure to effectively engage with people management repeatedly causes projects to underperform, miss targets and fail, leaving managers who adhered to the traditional management models confused and frustrated. But effective people management actually relies on only five key skills, the Five ‘C’s:

Create

Build a team which is fit for purpose. Don’t try to use the wrong tool for the job and then complain that the hammer won’t make the screw work! This involves making the correct decisions on three elements.

The first is recruitment, the fundamental basis of the success of any business. If the right people aren’t coming into an organisation how can you expect the results to be successful? Hire the best people, hire the right people.

The second element is training. It is vital that you give people the skills they need to do a good job. If you have people who aren’t quite right, develop them. They will not only be better suited and more productive, they will be grateful for the investment and commitment.

Thirdly and finally a good manager must create the right team structure and set the boundaries. A robust set of measures for success, clearly explained and tracked with discipline will give your people the framework for success, and just as important, tells them how to succeed.

Comprehend

Understand the people in your team, their personalities, their motivations and personal goals. A good manager needs to be empathetic, not a slave driver. One person may be a natural completer-finisher, another could be great at concept development. By understanding the individuals, rather than treating them as identikit simulacra, you will find better ways to communicate, motivate and understand them. How do you do this? By spending time with them, the classic ‘management by wandering around’ pays dividends here. Invest in your people and you will gain the benefit of understanding. Once you begin to understand the people in your team you will be able to make better judgements as to where they will be most effective, how to get the most from them and how to develop them.

Communicate

It is essential that you can convey your thoughts, concerns and needs to your team. You must be able to motivate them and lead them, tell them when you’re not getting what you need, explain when changes are made and congratulate them when they are doing well.

All of this requires effective skills in communication. This need not even be overtly verbal communication, influencing them through a simple smile or cheerful ‘hello’ can create a positive frame of mind. By ensuring that you always come across as positive you make your team feel positive about you and themselves.

When a more detailed communication is needed your message must be succinct and clear, getting to the heart of the matter and reinforcing your goal. To do this it is vital that your communication is planned: what is the best approach, the best time, the right media? The key is invariably to keep it as simple as possible. Planning not only makes communication more effective, it also saves time; by spending a little more of his/her time planning the manager can save a lot of both their and the team’s time in clarifying what was meant.

Communicate clearly and often. If things are going well it’s important to say so, and if not so well it’s doubly important. A good manager should never shy away from addressing issues as soon as they are identified. This doesn’t mean aggressive confrontation, but instead engaging with an issue collaboratively.

Give feedback, and when you do make sure you open with a positive and close with a positive. By telling someone what you value and admire in them they can more readily accept a criticism, and acceptance is the first step to resolution. Finally, make sure you ask for feedback as well as giving it and you will win yourself support and loyalty, and may well learn something of value about yourself.

Collaborate

A manager is not an island, he/she should be at the heart of the team. Ensure that you share and delegate to get the best results. People will respond to being given responsibility, they step up and by allowing them to develop into doing something that previously only you could do you free yourself to do something else and add value to the entire process. In short you multiply the effectiveness of the team.

Of course not everything is plain sailing and issues will occur, but by taking joint responsibility for any failures in the team (after all it is your team) you show everyone that you are all in it together, engendering respect, loyalty and commitment.

Confront

People are different, they see things differently and engage with issues differently, and where this happens there is invariably conflict. This can be overt, where two or more people argue over the best way forwards or, often more dangerously, it may be hidden when someone disagrees but does not feel empowered to criticise. Conflict can kill a team, it can create resentment, undermine cooperation and drive great people out. When conflict appears it is vital that the manager spots it, by having a good understanding of the people in his/her team (Comprehend), and then engages with it. Good communication, bringing the various ideas to the table and looking at them openly, can turn a threat into an opportunity. A team can walk away understanding each other better, feeling more cohesive and possibly having discovered a better way forwards. The manager’s role is to communicate and engage, and never be defensive, even if they are the subject of the criticism. By taking on the mantle of management you set yourself up for criticism, and a good manager can take it and learn from it.

Of course there are times when there is no resolution. Entrenched contrary opinions may not see a middle ground. In these instances a good manager must be able to not only walk away themselves, but lead others to walk away too. If a decision must be made it must be the manager’s decision. They must act as the lightning rod for any ill feeling; never let it remain within and between the team.

In the most extreme cases an individual will not back down and cannot be managed. Their actions undermine the team and threaten the project. Early and decisive engagement is vital. The manager must be robust and unswerving, bringing clear and irrefutable evidence of the negative behaviour and its impact on the project. The meeting with the individual should never be aggressive, but always be robust, explaining the issues clearly, using the evidence to back the manager’s assertions. The manager should be supported by higher management and HR, to reinforce to the employee the seriousness of their actions. Finally it must be accepted that not everyone is right for a role or a team, and sometimes the right thing to do is to move someone out. This is never easy, but if it is right it should never be shied away from. For a good people manager the team must always be more important than any one person.

These five elements; Create, Comprehend, Communicate, Collaborate and Confront, form the basis of an effective people management approach. Whilst each element is important in its own right they all interrelate with and support the others. By employing this approach effectively a manager will not only deliver the project goals they are tasked with, but in doing so he/she will be creating more rounded, effective individuals, developing a flexible and motivated team and cementing their own reputation as a manager not only of projects, but of people.

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News: Manufacturing Sector Growth to Return?

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Eurozone manufacturing sector is on course to return to growth according to a recent survey. Although the sector is still on an 11 month decline, the Markit Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) rate shows that January was by far the slowest month for contraction indicating that growth predictions for mid 2013 may be accurate.A PMI rate of 50+ is a growth indicator, the Eurozone has climbed to 47.9 for January from 46.1 in December. Read the BBC report here.

In related news, China's manufacturing sector growth has slowed slightly in the new year according to the Purchasing Manager's Index. Read more about China's PMI here.

Employee Engagement - Why You Need to Listen

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Dave Evans.
People are the key asset that a company has. People have the ideas; people win the business; people deal with the customers; people make things happen; people fix the problems. Companies succeed or fail due to the quality of the people they employ.

A lot can and has been said about the black art of identifying, selecting and securing the right people for your business, but that really is less than half of the equation. Once you have found them, you have to keep them engaged in the business and giving their best, not to mention making sure that they stay.

Plenty of companies monitor retention rates and try to understand why people leave them, but in practice this is rarely systematic and thorough until it is already too late. All too often exit interviews don’t happen, are perfunctory, or are carried out by inappropriate people. If people are leaving due to a problem manager, what it the point of an exit interview carried out by that same manager? Quite frequently, even when exit interviews happen nothing is done with the outcomes and the information is simply filed in a drawer somewhere for posterity. At best, an exit interview only closes the stable door after the horse has bolted. To really deal with retention as an issue, you need to be understanding whether or not people want to stay with your business long before they’ve handed their notice in.

This is where retention intersects with employee engagement, and why getting employee engagement right is the best way to manage retention. Don’t be fooled into thinking that ‘employee engagement’ is just some kind of corporate jargon suitable only for laughing about during a game of buzzword bingo, it’s a new name for a very sensible and pragmatic way of doing business.

Employee engagement is a conversation, you need to both talk to your people and listen to them. Firstly, you have to make sure that your people understand what you’re doing and where you’re going with your business. People, or at least good people, like to feel part of things and that what they do matters. They are loyal to a business, and they care about it doing well. Help them understand what you’re doing and why what they are doing is important to that goal. You need them interested in what is going on around them and how what they do fits into that wider context. Most importantly, you need them to understand that you care about what they are doing and that it makes a difference, no matter how small. That’s the talking part. It isn’t a lot of use, though, if you don’t back it up with the listening.

Listen to what your people are saying about your business goals and about what is going on around them. If they aren’t happy, then you need to know about it, and you need to do something to make it better. Find out why they aren’t happy and take steps to change things to address the root cause. That might be as simple as explaining things about the business direction more clearly, it might be about training, or even about salaries and compensation. The important thing is that you need to do something about it, don’t just hope it will magically go away of its own accord. Getting back to talking again, you also need to tell your people what you’re doing about whatever it is. Even if it an issue you cannot do anything about, you need to acknowledge the issue and tell your people why you can’t fix it. Not doing anything about it, or not responding simply suggests indifference, and who wants to work for a business that is indifferent about them?

That is just part one of listening. Part two is listening to what they say about themselves and the business, not just about what is making them unhappy. They have insights into customers and operations that can be invaluable in making a business work better. They will be happy to tell you about they want to do with their careers, what training they want or need and what they think they can do in the future, as long as they think you’ll do something about it. Understanding these issues and responding to them positively is a huge factor in keeping your best people in the business and engaged with where you are going. It helps you understand who your high achievers are, too, which is vital to keeping a business healthy and developing. Perhaps equally important, you will also be able to see the people who have goals and dreams that don’t match up to where your business is going. You can’t retain everyone, sometimes you have to let them go rather than trying to hold onto them and turning them into a nexus of negativity and resentment that will infect those around them.

Everyone talks about how social media and associated technologies are changing the face of recruitment, but look at how much they can change your employee engagement strategy. It has never been easier to communicate with your people and for them to communicate with you. Blogs, forums and effective use of social media makes this simple and easy, and incredibly immediate. Equally, getting it wrong is just as immediate and highly visible. Sites like Glassdoor are becoming more widely used as people share their experiences about what it is like to work for businesses. More and more candidates are starting to look at those sites before they apply for jobs, so it impacts the quality of the new people you bring into your business as well.

You need to care about employee engagement because you need your people to make your business work. If you don’t engage with them and understand what makes them tick then they won’t stay, and they’ll tell all their friends what a lousy place to work you run. Where do you think that will leave you?

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The 5 Biggest Mistakes Made when Buying Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Jason Collings.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is one of the most common forms of outsourced service and when done well is often one of the most successful, delivering greatly improved performance compared to in-house solutions. Yet there are all too many anecdotes of failed projects and delivery issues, indeed almost half of all Recruitment Process Outsourcing projects last only a year or less, so why is that?

The answer is that all too often mistakes are made at the opening stage, errors that poison the potential of the project to succeed and deliver the undoubted benefits on offer. So if you are considering outsourcing your recruitment, or have a solution in place and are having issues, what are the five biggest mistakes made when buying RPO?

1. Poor Preparation

Thousands of companies around the world have shown major benefits to adopting Recruitment Process Outsourcing solutions. However, for an RPO to succeed requires more than a supplier to be called in and handed the proverbial ball. A buyer must define what it is that they want from their supplier. What services do they need? What will success look like? What KPIs and metrics are going to be used to measure success? If this is unfamiliar to you, or you’re calling in the RPO company because you don’t know what to do don’t despair; good RPO providers can work with you in the early stages to help define the parameters and goals. Indeed bringing an RPO to the table at the definition stage, to help review your needs, perhaps auditing your current processes, can give external clarity and expert input into the vital definition stage.

Whether you do it alone, or with external support, make sure you have a clear scope for what you want your prospective partner to do and how they will judged, otherwise don’t be surprised if they fail.

2. Poor Management of the Relationship

This is one of the most common issues and causes of RPO failure. Outsourcing recruitment is not an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ solution. Whilst RPO can and does improve the quality of your recruitment process, delivering better people faster and more motivated, it cannot do it in a vacuum.

At the highest level successful Recruitment Process Outsourcing requires clear leadership; executive sponsorship and support. Even with this in place many, if not most, companies fail to ensure that they have defined and effective governance relationships with their RPO provider. For an RPO to succeed there should be an established account manager who is responsible from the client side for the maintenance of open dialogue and interaction. There must also be clear KPIs and metrics, an approved schedule and format of reporting and reviews, and a defined path of escalation.

A good RPO provider can help provide the structure for governance, such as suggesting KPIs, but it is up to the client to put in place the people and the will to make the programme succeed. After all, the introduction of an RPO will be new to the client, and the client will be new to the RPO provider; leaving the relationship to chance is one of the surest ways to see it fail.

3. Too Much Focus on Cost Savings

A survey of over 800 US and European executives reported that the key driver for outsourcing across all areas was cost savings. Certainly this is usually high on the agenda when speaking about RPO. But client companies should look beyond top line savings at the bigger picture. The cheapest way to recruit is to trawl databases and run cheap online ads, delivering access to only a shallow pool of candidates, many of whom are desperate for work and do not represent the highest quality. If you choose an RPO provider purely on price, this is the type of solution you’re likely to get. In contrast, proactive sourcing solutions, which target people not otherwise looking for work, can deliver large numbers of fresh candidates who are not in the open market, are presented only to your company and are highly motivated and skilled. As these candidates are not currently in need of work they can even from the basis of a Talent Warehouse, reducing future time to hire by up to 80%.

The resultant benefits of looking at the bigger picture include faster speed of hiring, higher quality of candidate, reduced time to new starters getting up to speed and consequently increased productivity and profitability.

In short, if you focus on the big picture an RPO can deliver a multitude of benefits to your company, and even then cost no more than an in-house solution. In contrast if your focus is on cost savings alone the result is likely to be limited numbers of candidates, of questionable quality, under heavy competition.

4. Poor Internal Communication

Between a quarter and a third of all failed outsourced projects fall down because of poor internal communications. Companies bring in their RPO partner and expect them suddenly manage everything without people in the company knowing anything about it. This is simply unrealistic. Your organisation has established lines of communication and reporting; an outside party, no matter how experienced or skilled, cannot break into that structure without support. This means clear and open communication to all affected members of staff, explaining who the RPO team are, what they are there to do, how they will do it and what is expected of the client staff to make the project a success.

If good and effective communications are used, both at the start of an RPO and during its delivery, everyone involved will understand what is expected of them, why their support is necessary and the benefits to the company and individuals. With everyone on the same page an outsourced recruitment solution is established to succeed, without it is doomed to fail.

5. Selecting the Wrong Partner

It seems obvious, but if you choose the wrong partner/supplier a project is unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless over half of RPOs surveyed report issues arising from suppliers not being appropriate to deliver the solution required to the client.

Many recruitment firms, from boutique agencies to major blue chip brands, claim the ability to provide RPO. However, in truth most do little more than co-ordinate agency response or put a consultant on site, offering their client first refusal of candidates on their database. Many clients adopt such offerings from agencies based on familiarity and the perceived strength of their understanding of the client needs and culture. Their reasoning is tempting, but all too often flawed. A good agency supplier is rarely a good outsourcer, the skills sets are simply not the same. Clients should ask themselves if the prospective partner has experience of outsourcing, of improving processes and optimising returns. Can the RPO partner proactively source candidates from a wide range of locations? Do they provide processes and systems which can manage and improve your recruitment? Are they also working for competitors, as many agencies must to maximise their returns on candidates received, meaning that the benefits of your investment will be shared with your competition?

An expert RPO company brings to the table proven methods, experienced staff and a laser focus on your needs. Furthermore, if they are good at what they do they will not even ask you to exclude the best of your agency suppliers, giving you the best of both worlds; a great process for day-to-day recruitment and the fall back of tried and tested agency suppliers for those one-off needs.

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News: Tribunal Case Fall but Out of Court Settlements Increase

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The number if employment tribunal cases fell in 2012 to 186,300 in the UK according to figures released by the Ministry of Justice yesterday. The fall is anticipated to be due to an increase in the number of out of court settlements being made by companies fearing the spiralling costs that tribunals can cause.

Another factor thought to be influencing the figure is employee's increasing reluctance to take employers to tribunals at a time of low wages and high unemployment, perhaps fearing future career implications. Whilst figures may suggest that businesses are more protected from claims than in previous years, when factoring in the level of out of court settlements and the average time frame for a claim still being far too high at 35 weeks, there is a lot of change still needed to afford both employees and business the right level of protection.

News: Oil and Gas Jobs Growth

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The UK's Oil and Gas Industry is set for a jobs boom. Oilandgaspeople.com, an energy recruitment site has forecast that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs are set to be created in the North Sea offshore sector. The firm was quick to point out that the implications of the rapid growth of the sector is likely to cause numerous problems for employers as a global shortage of talent in this sector pushes recruitment costs and employee wages up.

Read the full story from BBC Scotland

Achieving ROI from Your HR

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Jackie Scarfe
HR, as a support function, should, like any other, ‘earn it's keep’ and with budgets increasingly being squeezed during the economic downturn and with MDs, FDs and HR professionals themselves keen to be able to demonstrate value for money from the function.

Here are some top tips for ensuring HR delivers a return on the investment made in it. None of it is ‘rocket science’ but if your HR team is not engaged in the activities listed below, it’s time to ask why not.

Your HR team should always be fully up to date on and conversant with employment law. This will ensure not only that the risk to the organization of any claim is mitigated but should also help to reduce expensive legal advice costs
Encourage your HR team to actively network with other HR professionals and those in associated disciplines. Ideas and advice are then readily available and usually free , both helping to avoid expensive consultancy costs and allowing your team to discuss solutions with other organisations that have experience in that area.
Make sure that your senior HR staff are included in key management communication relating to any decisions which are likely to affect, either directly or indirectly, the employees. HR can then be better prepared to either maximize the potential for employee engagement or minimize any negative reaction or ‘fallout’.
Aim to engage your HR team as a proactive and strategic partner rather than simply as a reactive and process owner. Whilst the ‘housekeeping’ and data management side of HR is important, it won’t, on its own, generate improvement and benefit to the organization. Data capture and information gathering should be the first step in a process to ensuring the knowledge gathered is then used to lead improvement.
Encourage HR to use IT to its advantage as budget allows. Even the most simple of IT improvements can not only save time but enhance the quality and timeliness of information gathered and of communication disseminated.
Continuing on from the above, excellent communication both up and down through the organization is essential for a motivated, aware and interested workforce. HR should be a key driver in ensuring timely and quality communication both vertically and laterally within the organisation
HR as a discipline must ensure it continues to address the needs of the organization and adapt to change both internally and externally and therefore, as with other professionals, your HR team should keep abreast of upcoming trends and practices. Nowadays with information readily available via numerous websites and through professional social media groups, there is no excuse for your HR team not to be aware of ‘cutting edge’ practices.
It is critical that HR have an excellent working relationship with the various layers of management if they are to act in a true Business Partner sense. Your HR team should be fully conversant with the various team/departmental strategies, of the particular challenges and strengths within the teams and of the support that HR can lend to ensure the development, improvement and success of each team.
Ensure that your HR strategy focuses on improving the business through its people and processes and that it isn’t merely a list of isolated targets that won’t add real value to the organization and the bottom line. Your HR team should be fully conversant with the business strategy and be using that to formulate its own key objectives.

Finally, if you invest in your HR team or an outsourced HR provider, and manage that investment in terms of your expectations and the needs of the business then some evidence of a return of your investment should be seen, within months, on that bottom line.

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9 Tips to Improve your In-House Recruitment Process

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

By Lucy James
With a new year comes a new wave of employment openings and initiatives, ensure the procedures and components of your in-house recruitment team are up to scratch with this guide which covers some of the major points that you can address.

Get the Brief Right

This is a matter both of having an appropriate job specification and making sure you’ve a clear understanding of what is appropriate for your business at this stage in your evolution. The job spec itself should clearly reference the ideal candidate’s technical skills, character and potential for development. You need to offer a salary appropriate to the market. If the salary you are offering is not competitive, consider what you are prepared to compromise on in the candidate, such as where your internal capacity is to train and develop a candidate.

Character Fit and Scale of Ambition is Key

Top talent isn’t the same for every business. A small growing company needs entirely different people to a large and more stable one and different types of people are needed throughout a company’s evolution. When it is small and growing, a company needs people who will take on different tasks, pick up skills quickly, work well in a disparate team, do their own tasks and someone else’s without objecting, and most importantly will share the vision for the company’s growth. As a company grows its needs change and often the people that are needed are entirely different. Responsiveness gives way to processes and procedures which can make “small company” people feel restricted.

Looking in the Right Places

Advertising is critical as it attracts people who are actively looking for a new challenge, but proactive methods are increasingly important to create links with people who are not actively on the market. It is a generalisation, but one that usually bears out – these are the people who are most likely to be the movers and shakers. They are too busy doing a great job to be on the job market. They are also less likely to turn down your offer in favour of another and they are more likely to recommend your role to other people if it isn’t right for them. Social Media can play a very important role in finding both active and passive candidates, dependent on the type and level of the position, although this is a large enough subject to leave for a future post!

Employer Branding

Employer branding will become critical in 2013 and behind employer branding is the employee value proposition, or EVP. How you design and present your EVP, and business to the market has a very real impact on whether candidates want to work for you. We have worked with an extremely well-known e-tailer whose working practices and environment are stressful, to say the least, and which systematically fails to reward its employees adequately, both in financial and non-financial terms. People moan and groan about how hard their lives are, but their affinity with the brand is such that it remains a magnet for potential employees. No matter how badly they are treated during the interview process, people at all levels of seniority still accept jobs with the business. At the other end of the spectrum are small businesses with very little employer branding, such as management consultancies, who continually struggle to hire good people because no-one knows who they are, despite excellent working conditions and pay. It is one of life’s unfair equations.

Talent Warehousing

Creating your own talent warehouse can provide the key to reducing your recruitment costs by a significant margin. Think of all of those great people that you met who weren’t quite right for your business when you first came across them. They may have been a bit too junior or had a slightly different technical focus, but from a character fit perspective they were absolutely right. Keep in touch with them, check in every now and again and make them feel part of your business. They will accept a role with you much more quickly the next time you have a vacancy that would fit them.

Interview Effectively

We work with a wide range of hiring managers with an equally wide range of interviewing skills. Sometimes less experienced hiring managers ask us to interview alongside them and help them to improve their interviewing skills. Often, though, we hear the words that we dread… “I make a decision based on my gut reaction.” After fifteen years of interviewing candidates from the most junior logistics assistants to seasoned CEOs running FTSE 30 companies, I listen to my gut, but I certainly don’t decide who will make a shortlist on that basis alone. It might inform my judgement as character fit is so critical to an appointment, but even then I make sure I understand what my instinct is telling me and why. Having a list of competency-based questions is not necessarily the answer, but knowing what you want the person to deliver in the role and what core skills the candidate needs to have should form the bedrock of an interview. After that is satisfied, take your time to get to know the candidate. Aspirations, ambitions, how they relax, working style, management style and so on are all a key part of how people will behave and get along with the rest of the team.

Don’t Forget to Sell

A close friend was recently contacted by a previous client to consider a position with their business. This is a board level role, one that attracts a serious salary and that will have a significant impact on the strategic direction of the business. He received the offer, which was generous, after two interviews, one with the hiring manager and the other with the MD. He was no wiser about whether he wanted the job, though, as neither interviewer had told him much about the role, his influence in the business or what the company’s strategic objectives were. I advised him to request a further meeting so that he could understand more about the role, the company and how he could contribute. After that meeting my friend was extremely excited about his future with the business and took the role without hesitation. It is really easy to forget that candidates are buying as well as selling, and there needs to be a reason for them to join you.

Get the Offer and On-boarding Process Right

The first step in talent retention is making sure that when a new employee joins your business they are excited about doing so and remain excited at the end of their first week. This means getting contracts out promptly, talking to them after they have resigned (a stressful process in itself), making sure that they don’t have any second thoughts, keeping in touch throughout their notice period. It also means getting their desk ready and briefing their team and/or colleagues on their background so that when they arrive they are welcomed. The first few months are critical. Pay attention to them. Are they settling in well? Do they have everything they need to be productive? Is there a plan for their future development? Look after your new recruits and you will develop a stable, happy, productive workforce that becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

Mine New Employees for Future Talent

Ensuring that a new employee’s potential skills are maximised is really important, but don’t forget that new employees are a wealth of information about other people who might be a great fit for the business as it expands. Talk to new hires about their network. You might find the next business leader, technical champion or process guru who will set the platform for another phase in your own development.

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Absence Management - Reducing the Impact of Absenteeism

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

By Jackie Scarfe
The CIPD’s Absence Management Survey for 2012 showed a slight fall in the average number of days’ absence per employee across all sectors to 6.8 days per annum. Of all absence, just one fifth relates to long term absence of four weeks or more with the remainder, for the most part, related to absences of just one or two days.

The incidence of both short and long term absence does not appear to have been affected in any way by the abolition of the DRA (default retirement age), expelling the fears held previously by some that absence would increase within the 65+ age group. Neither has absence been impacted either positively or negatively by the introduction of the ‘fit’ note, again expelling any hope that the latter would be a valuable tool in supporting a faster return to work for many and hence reducing absenteeism.

Whilst long term absence is undoubtedly of a concern to businesses, in general it is less debilitating to the business than the more frequent shorter absences given the possibility of accessing professional support by way of occupational health, the ability to plan cover, access to critical illness insurance schemes etc. Obviously any ‘patterns’ related to long term absences need to be investigated carefully as they may be symptomatic of underlying issues with the company. 2011 saw stress become the number one cause for the first time ever of long term absence and any company witnessing a higher incidence of long term absence through stress should be taking a close look at its processes procedures and culture to establish if the root cause is internal.

Short term absence, as mentioned above, accounts for 80% of all absence across all sectors. The most common reasons for short term absences are colds, flu, stomach upsets and migraines with musculoskeletal complaints, back pain and stress being the second most common group of conditions. Manual workers, generally, take one day’s additional sickness absence in comparison to their non-manual counterparts, with musculoskeletal and back complaints being unsurprisingly more common within this group.

Managing absence, particularly short term absence, is still an area where many companies follow an ad hoc rather than a more process driven approach with a surprisingly high percentage of companies, particularly amongst SMEs, not even logging or monitoring absence. Of course, form filling, the updating of personnel systems etc can be seen as unnecessarily time consuming but without robust and consistent processes in place, organisations are effectively ‘blind’ to the true cost of their sickness absence and also risk not identifying key ‘problem areas’ within the business which may be having a negative impact on absence levels. These ‘problem areas’ may include, for example, bullying, an inherent ‘blame’ culture, poor management style, excessive work-loads or perhaps problems linked to the physical working environment such as a poor functioning air conditioning system, badly designed seating etc. There is also the danger that left unaddressed certain issues could also result in serious claims against the company in regards to perhaps discrimination or health and safety breaches.

Of course, even with an excellent reporting and monitoring process, there is only so much organisations can effectively do to reduce short term absenteeism. Particularly in the winter months, cold, flu and stomach bugs are rampant and can spread quickly through the community and staying off work is usually encouraged given the ability to spread the bug throughout the rest of the workforce. However, in the 2011 CIPD survey, 40% of employers reported that stress related short term absence had increased within their organisations over the past year with the four main reasons being given as workloads, management style, organizational change and non-work factors. The recent economic down turn may have had an impact on this increase particularly with many companies undergoing headcount reductions, restructuring, changes to established work patterns and a high level of uncertainty about the future, but putting recent events aside, there has nonetheless been a general slow increase in the incidence of stress related absence over the past decade. This may simply be due to the fact that mental health generally is less of a taboo subject than previously and employees feel much more comfortable in admitting that they are suffering from stress, or it may be that work place cultures and expectations of employees are becoming more demanding.

Whatever the reason, short term absence and particularly where it is stress related needs to be considered by the management of companies of all sizes as an essential part of the people strategy, not only from an operational effectiveness point of view but also given the duty of care that all organisations have towards its employees.

There are some simple mechanisms which can be put in place by organisations of all size which have been shown, if used effectively, to have a positive impact on absenteeism. Return to work interviews and the training of managers are frequently cited as the two key components to both understanding and reducing absenteeism. Obviously if an employee has been off for two days with a stomach upset a return to work interview will, on the surface, be of limited value, but certainly such a process, if followed consistently, is likely to act as a deterrent to those employees who are tempted to take time off due to feeling a bit ‘under the weather’ due to a few too many pints the night before. Return to work interviews are also key to picking up recurrent patterns of sickness which may be symptomatic of a more serious health issue where occupational health can be involved or of, as discussed above, a more deep rooted problem within the work environment. A trigger mechanism, indicating an employee who has reached a certain level of absence within a rolling or fixed period of time, can also be useful in highlighting the aforementioned possibilities, and will also assist in keeping a tighter control over sick pay in line with company policies.

Staff surveys, flexible work options, health and wellbeing and employee assistance programs are all useful tools if used effectively to manage employee absence, but require resources and often not viewed as an option for many smaller companies. However, even for those companies without dedicated HR departments or other resources, a little innovation can go a long way. Regular staff meetings where culture and working environment are a fixed agenda item can replace staff surveys. Nominating an enthusiastic and creative employee as health and wellbeing champion responsible perhaps for a quarterly or 6 monthly initiative can reap huge rewards in terms of employee motivation and overall happiness which could positively impact absenteeism.

Of course, investing time and resources into the above must be supported by a robust and consistent monitoring process as already discussed for maximum impact and also by pro-active management of unacceptable absence, whether this be frequent short term or longer term absence. For many organisations, both large and small, this is often the ‘weak’ spot. A fear of ‘difficult’ conversations, appearing unsympathetic and of an assortment of claims often results in unacceptable absence being allowed to drift, often with a serious impact on the organization. Again, training is the key to addressing this problem, with HR professionals, line managers and senior management all needing to be aware of how to approach this issue and importantly being prepared to do so.

With 190 million working days lost in the UK during 2010 at a cost of £17 billion pounds (direct costs only) with 30.4 million of these being down to non-genuine sickness, according to last year’s CBI/Pfizer annual ‘Absence and Workplace Health Survey’, it is clear that absence management needs to be a key focus area within its wider ‘people agenda’ for companies both large and small.

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News: £1billion Oil and Gas Develoment Given Go Ahead in Scotland

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Dana Petroleum have been given the green light to go ahead with a £1billion development of nine oil wells in the Harris and Barra fields located approximately 100miles from Shetland. With estimated reserves of up to 45 million barrels in these fields alone, Aberdeen continues to prove its importance in the Oil and Gas sector and wider UK economic climate.

The Economic Secretary to the UK Treasury, Sajid Javid said: "The North Sea is a vital national asset, with oil and gas production supporting a third of a million jobs."

Scottish Energy Minister Fergus Ewing had this to say of the announcement: "Scotland is a world leader in oil and gas and has been for five decades. Today's announcement that Dana Petroleum can take forward their £1bn North Sea development demonstrates the continuing growth of Scotland's energy sector."

5 Ways to Get HR Heard by Finance

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

By Sarah Ambler, Cezanne OnDemand
HR people often complain they struggle to get the budget they need to implement their plans. Part of the problem is that those who hold the purse strings often see HR as the ‘soft and fluffy’ stuff and don’t always appreciate the value people initiatives can add to the bottom line.

These top tips will help you get the ear of your finance team so that you can secure the funds you need:

1. Get Finance-savvy

HR people are often criticised for not being up-to-speed on the financial front. If you want to be taken seriously by the finance folk you need to demonstrate that you can read and interpret a set of corporate accounts and have a full understanding of issues like cash flow and profit and loss. If you speak to finance people in their own language you will stand a much better chance of winning their support. Know how much your people cost you. For those of us in HR, it doesn't always feel comfortable talking of our people as "human capital" but that's just what they are. If you know how much absence, poor performance, retention or simply inefficient working practices is costing the business, you'll have a much better chance of getting the investment that you think the business needs.

2. Demonstrate Business Insight

Make sure you know the business inside out and have a good understanding of the issues and trends in the wider external market it operates in. Be prepared to demonstrate how your people strategies support the wider business strategy and can help the organisation achieve its objectives and growth targets. Network with your peers in similar industries or tap into specialist groups to help you to build the bigger picture.

3. Develop Internal Alliances

Work closely with colleagues in other departments when you are developing your people strategies. Talk to line managers about their pain points - the things that are stopping them delivering revenue or retaining customers - and develop a joint action plan that's directly related to the bottom line. If you can demonstrate that others share your vision and fully buy-in to your plans, you will have more influence internally, a network of people who are prepared to lobby on your behalf and an increased chance of winning financial support.

4. Demonstrate Potential ROI

Soft HR initiatives are notoriously difficult to evaluate. It’s a real challenge to prove, for example, how an employee engagement programme has had an impact on productivity and profitability. Perhaps establish trust by focusing on activities that are easier to associate with cost. If absences are high, put in place measures to monitor and address them. If retention is an issue, do the research to understand how much it's costing you and what the underlying cause is and use this to inform your strategy. If finance people are to allocate funds to your plans, they will want a clear line of sight between your planned intervention and the bottom line. Make sure you set clear and measurable objectives so that you can demonstrate value-added as your project progresses.

5. Benchmark Against Others

Try and find examples of HR initiatives that have made a measurable difference in other organisations in your sector or a similar field. If you are planning to introduce HR Technology, for example, look for case studies on the web or ask your supplier to help you put together a business case which demonstrates how best practice has helped other clients streamline services and cut costs. Talk to other people in your industry about their own experiences. If you can show finance people how HR initiatives are having a real impact in other companies they are more likely to sit up and take notice.

About the Author:
Sarah Ambler is a member of the Cezanne OnDemand HR Software marketing team. She is a regular contributor to their HR blog and manages Cezanne’s social media presence.
Twitter: @CezanneOnDemand

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HR and Flexible Parental Leave - A Win/Win Situation?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

By Jackie Scarfe
The latest government proposals in respect to encouraging a ‘family-friendly’ workplace seem to have met with general approval both from business and employee groups. Under the proposals, unveiled last week by the Deputy Prime Minister George Osborne, from 2015, after the first two weeks of a mother's maternity leave, the remaining 50 weeks can be shared between her and her partner.

This leave can be taken in turns or by both partners at the same time, and will run for a maximum of 12 months, nine of which will be at statutory pay as currently.

The proposal would replace the system that has been in place since April 2011, under which parents could share some leave, but this had to be taken in single blocks and could only be taken from the 20th week after the birth. In addition, the mother had to have returned to work for the father or partner to be eligible to take the leave. The new rights will be offered to parents of adopted children as well as biological parents.

It has long been argued that the current arrangements are too restrictive on several counts. They do not allow fathers or partners to share the burden of childcare in the earlier weeks of the child’s life (apart from the 2 weeks’ ordinary paternity leave), and they encourage women to stay off work for longer than perhaps desired, thus potentially holding back careers and depriving businesses of key female talent for up to a year at a time. Also, there is the additional argument that the current arrangements also work against women of child bearing age when they apply for jobs or promotion.

So, it would seem that the new proposals will produce a win/win situation.

However, for every upside, there is inevitably a down side, and these new proposals are no exception. Some businesses offer enhanced maternity pay and those that offer particularly good packages could be hit especially hard by new fathers, (as well as new mothers) opting to take the larger proportion of the statutory leave instead of their partners whose employer may offer a less generous option. This could potentially have the effect of companies choosing to restrict their enhanced offering or even offering statutory pay only which would of course, be a step backwards in the overall ‘family friendly’ agenda.

Another headache for companies may come from trying to find temporary replacement staff for just a few months. It is difficult enough currently to find good staff to cover 9-12 months, but if more couples decide to share the leave more equally, then it will mean a lot more companies are trying to source staff to cover for shorter periods.

Some commentators on the subject also fear that the new proposals could negatively discriminate against young males in their late 20s and 30s. It has generally been accepted that females of this age regularly face discrimination when it comes to hiring and promotion for fear that they will, within a year or two, go off on many months of maternity leave. The new proposals may spark a rise in similar situations against young males if they are known to be in steady relationships.

Clegg has committed to a review of the new rights in 2018. Many will be watching however, from their very introduction, both with curiosity and some trepidation, as to whether the impact will be as positive to both business, equality and women’s career development, as is being promised.

Please feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts on the Flexible Parental Leave proposals.

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News: UK Jobs Outlook is Positive

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Ahead of official employment figures this week expected to show further positive momentum in the labour market, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development jobs forecast says that the number of people in work will continue to grow steadily this and next month, continuing the trends recorded over the last six months.

Although the number of private sector companies intending to hire staff over the period is down compared to the previous three months, public sector hiring intentions have improved dramatically, leading to a positive employee outlook overall, the CIPD said.

Read the full news story here.

Article: The Intelligent Buyer - Outsourcing Strategically

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The FD must help managers really drill down into what they do to identify what is core.

Businesses have had to cut deep when it comes to cost reduction over the past five years.
Many organisations have removed the fat in the business and have often have had to cut in to the muscle to achieve the savings needed.

Outsourcing can undoubtedly support a cost reduction agenda, but equally can increase efficiency, deliver better service and provide an opportunity to leverage investment - allowing you to focus on your company’s core business.

However, there is a lot of work to be done before the benefits of outsourcing can be realised and the FD has a key role to play in making it a success.

Read the full article at Director of Finance Online.

Services: Locational Talent Analysis and Salary Surveys

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Talent Analysis

Too often business overlook the importance of assessing the talent attributes of a geographical location when choosing where and how to expand or re-locate business sites. The decisions are often clouded by a necessity to control the cost of the site and the logistics involved which, although may result in a short term costing benefit can result in a longer term and highly detrimental requirement to inflate wages and offer future employees relocation rewards in order to staff the location.

Quarsh can perform Locational Talent Analysis to asses the availability of suitable talent for a specific project within a geographical area. This can be done as a standalone report for one specific area or as a collection of comparative reports where a choice between locations needs to be made. This can be an invaluable guide to where to site new operations and assess the likely future talent challenges that could be faced.

Typically undertaken before starting a project or business unit a location. A comprehensive report is delivered to determine whether the talent is available in that location. his is done by assessing the local infrastructure such as education establishments and local competitors, and also assessing local workforce skills and the cost of employment in the area as well as any other relevant geographical factors.

Salary Surveys

Salary Surveys are a review of specific roles or job families against competitor companies to assess current salaries and packages. This type of survey ties in very closely with a Locational Talent Analysis to provide a geographically based salary survey of current and potential areas of business for the business and the competing organisations.

Tailored target lists ensure survey do not rely on generic industry data but ficus on direct competitor and adjacent companies. Each survey is generated specifically by direct interview and includes detail on salaries, overall packages and historic data on salary movements as well as taking into account additional factors.

Article: SME Business Leaders are Spending a Third of Their Day on Non-Core Business Activities

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

One in 10 spend up to 90% of their time on activities not directly related to driving business growth, research finds.

New research finds that on average small business leaders across the UK are spending almost a third of their day on tasks that aren’t core to business operations. One in four SME business owners and managers spends 50 per cent of the day on non-core activities and one in 10 is guilty of spending up to 90 per cent of their time on activities that aren’t directly related to driving business growth.

The research launched by Ingenious Britain also found that SME business heads see retaining existing clients as their number one priority and winning new business and growing their organisation are the biggest challenges they face. But rather than freeing up their time resource to work on the core activities, which deliver maximum return on investment to their business, they are drawn into operational aspects of the business such as HR, IT, finance and training.

Originally posted on See the full article at SMEweb.com

LinkedIn's Top 20 Employer Brands

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Matt Thomas
Yesterday LinkedIn announced the UK's top 20 employers that candidates want to work for. Taken from measurable interactions from the network's members and cross referenced with a survey of thousands of UK users, the list was announced at a LinkedIn Talent Connect Event in London.

It revealed that, perhaps unsurprisingly based on similar trend in other areas of the world, Google had topped the list with the BBC and Unilever making up the top three. Interestingly the UK based employers on this list such as the BBC, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Tesco have not yet adopted LinkedIn's new company page opportunity which focuses heavily on employer branding. This is in comparison to the likes of Google, Shell, BP and Microsoft who had all embraced the new company page ideology very quickly.

LinkedIn have been promoting the Talent Branding opportunities available to business heavily over recent months and results from the UK market would suggest a positive reaction from users of the professionals networking site. A host of positive effects from effective Employer Branding can be taken from an organisation such as Google achieving the top spot in this demographic, a company which employs less than 1500 people in the UK and around 40,000 globally compared with Tesco which employs around 260,000 people in the UK alone and ranked 16th in these results. Google spends a great deal of time and money ensuring that it's working environment is the most employee friendly in the world and doing as much as it can to let people outside of the business know about it.

Admittedly, the two companies operate in such a different space that it is hard to really compare their placements in this table but Google's ability to dominate the Employer Branding scene and engage so many people's interest in careers at Google is very impressive and stands to highlight just what can be achieved by building and promoting the right environment for a workforce.

LinkedIn's Director of Talent Solutions, David Cohen said of the research "This is the first time that we’ve found a unique way of measuring a talent brand on any fairly consistent metric.” This statement would be reassuring however this metric has not been released yet. Conclusions of the table and of other research data released alongside it are all pointing strongly in the direction that employer branding is more than the fad it has previously been dismissed as and while we at Quarsh agree with this, it is worth considering LinkedIn's vested interest in promoting employer branding as a product at this time. The highlighting of a lack of action to engage Employer Branding activities

Some interesting statistics from a survey released alongside the table reinforce the UK's understanding of the value of Employer Branding as a commodity is increasing. Not only that but a wider scale of organisations are prioritising employer branding with 67% of organisations of less than 500 employees agreeing that Employer Branding is now a top priority.

A company’s employer brand is twice as likely to drive job consideration than its consumer brand.
Stronger employer brands contribute to the bottom line: up to 2x lower cost per hire and 28% lower turnover rate.
67% of organisations of less than 500 employees agree employer branding is a top priority.
75% of UK TA leaders feel Employer Branding is a top business priority.
56% of UK organisations have increased their spend on Employer Branding in 2012 with 93% saying they want to increase the spend further in future.
UK amongst the worst for measuring Employer Branding impact with 33% of companies conducting any form of assessment.

UK InDemand Employer Branding Rankings Table:

1.	Google	11.	GlaxoSmithKline
2.	BBC	12.	Marks & Spencer
3.	Unilever	13.	Goldman Sachs
4.	Shell	14.	Barclays
5.	BP	15.	Accenture
6.	Microsoft	16.	Tesco
7.	Apple	17.	BAE Systems
8.	John Lewis	18.	ITV
9.	Burberry	19.	Asos.com
10.	HP	20.	Diageo

See the results at Talent.LinkedIn.com

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News: New Business Partnership

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Quarsh is pleased to announce a new partnership with a multinational defence technology company.

The Owner-Employee Employment Contract. Curse or Cure?

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Jackie Scarfe
The onset of Autumn has seen yet another batch of government proposals in regards to employment law, intended to make it easier particularly for small and medium sized businesses to grow and invest in human resource without having the ‘burden’ of legal red tape.

George Osborne’s enthusiasm for the proposal was evident, when at the Conservative Party Conference he urged "Get shares and become owners of the company you work for…owners, workers and the taxman, all in it together. Workers of the world unite”.

The idea behind the proposals is that in return for giving up their rights around unfair dismissal, redundancy, the right to request flexible working and time off for training, along with maternity leave returners having to give 16 weeks' notice of their return instead of the usual eight weeks, employees would get between £2,000 and £50,000 worth of shares in the business they work for and would be exempt from paying capital gains tax on any profit made from them. Whilst the new ‘owner-employee employment contract’ as it is commonly referred to will be optional for existing employees, firms will be able to choose to offer only this type of contract for new hires from April 2013.

The initial reaction to the proposals has been, as expected, very mixed, with the TUC unsurprisingly viewing this as a step which will undo many years of hard work fighting for and establishing a robust legal framework for employment rights, with the private sector, particularly the smaller business often without dedicated in- house HR or legal support, seeing it as an opportunity to operate more ‘nimbly’ in regards to hiring and firing and to potentially cut employment costs enabling a greater opportunity for competitive growth.

As is normally the case, however, if you look past the rhetoric and frenzied commentary, it quickly becomes evident that all is not as simple as it may first appear. This is certainly not a win/win or a lose/lose proposal. There are also many questions which as yet, remain unanswered and which the Department for Business Innovation and Skills as part of its consideration and response to the proposal this autumn will hopefully address.

The proposals suggest that a company will have the option to offer a new employee the new contract or not and to decide to which employees to offer the option. Does this mean that certain groups of employees who are considered a ‘higher’ risk will be forced to accept the new contract if they wish to be employed? Certainly those employees with young children or care responsibilities for whom flexible working is almost an essential could be targeted whilst younger groups of workers with a particular interest in developing skills and knowledge could be seen as potentially more costly as they are more likely to want time off for training.

Additionally, none of us have access to a ‘crystal ball’ and very few new employees will have a clear idea of a company’s longer term plans or financial stability and particularly for older workers whose options in relation to jobs and career prospects still unfortunately tend to lessen with each year, to sign away rights to redundancy or a claim for unfair dismissal is putting an awful lot of faith into the future.

For the company too, it may not be such a win/win solution as Mr Osborne would like us to believe. The idea that share ownership will engage and motivate employees and drive growth and success is certainly a laudable one and of course, the model does have some success stories, John Lewis probably being the best known. However, for businesses to think that the new contracts will be an end to all of their employment relation issues would certainly be premature and somewhat naive.

Other questions surround the application of TUPE to the new proposals, where the proposals stand in relation to certain elements of the Equality Act, its impact on the right to claim constructive dismissal and so forth. Of course all new employment legislation has an essence of uncertainty around it and it’s often the case that many of these uncertainties are only clarified once a situation has reached tribunal stage. For businesses and future employees alike, therefore, the question still remains whether the new proposals will be cure or curse.

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Article: Logistics Firms Need To Invest In Talent and Training

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Matthew Marriott, commercial director of Hellmann Worldwide Logistics UK, looks at the current issues facing the logistics industry in terms of recruitment, skills, and investing in talent, and what methods can be employed to effectively attract and retain new recruits.

When asked what they want to do when they are older, children normally say things like ‘footballer’, ‘astronaut’, ‘actor’ or ‘ballerina’. They invariably aspire to professions that offer a glimpse of glamour, a frisson of danger or the opportunity to be widely recognised in a variety of professional and personal contexts.

See the full article at SHD Logistics.

Fishing, not Hunting

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Jason Collings
Accepting that there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ it is claimed that over a third of the people in the world are registered members and users of social networks. In developed, highly networked regions such as the US and Western Europe that figure can approach eighty per cent.

Furthermore, once you have accounted for outliers due to age ranges (the very young and old tend not to be heavy users of Facebook or Twitter), you rapidly reach a position little short of ubiquity. In short, almost everyone a potential employer wants to reach is socially networked, so the question must be asked; how do you reach them?

There have been numerous efforts to harness the power of social networks, to access them like a self-moderated candidate database, with varying degrees of success. For example, for most executive search firms Linked In (or Xing in Central Europe) is now regarded as the primary source of candidate contact information, replacing the old-school ‘little black book’ of contacts. Employers too have sought to use social networks by creating pages on primarily social sites such as Facebook. Yet by and large these are all too often mere extensions of their corporate website, and to the fast-moving cognoscenti of the networked world, have the vaguely pathetic feel of a parent trying too hard to look cool to their offspring. Certainly attempts to capitalise on the growth of social networking as a tool for recruitment have been much lauded, but in most cases have not delivered on their promise.

The truth is that social networking gives the power to the consumer whilst at the same time being fundamentally about being entertaining. With the exception of the purely business networks, like Linked In and Xing, social networks are there mainly for fun and the fact is, companies desperately trying to appeal to you to apply for jobs isn’t fun; it’s work… it’s dull. Even the business networks are not the happy hunting grounds many would like you to believe. They are typically overused as a sourcing tool, meaning that many users simply remove themselves from open access and even those who do not begin to see enquiries about jobs as spam and move them straight to the ‘trash’. After all, they are on the network to further their contacts, not for your convenience. All of this is familiar to the poor frustrated corporate recruiters attempting to coax interest from the apparently boundless, but infuriatingly disinterested online community.

So what is the answer? For many, belief in the potential of social networks as a recruiting tool has mirrored confidence in their share prices. These jaded users see nothing more than a white elephant, a mirage which promised much but delivered little. Yet there is still enormous opportunity in the space, but to capitalise on it requires a fundamental shift in mentality. The corporate masters, used to being in charge of their destinies, to being the hunter, not the hunted, must learn to accept that in the social networks that dynamic is gone. Instead of hunting, one must learn to fish…

The secret to attracting talent, like with fishing, is to not try too hard. Potential candidates do not want to be chased and pursued, they want to make their own choices without being sold to. The very aegis of being sold to is now attracting a stigma, leaving the impression that if it’s being sold it must be a lie, or at least not all it appears. In this negative atmosphere the only answer is to stop selling. Indeed the secret to success is to give the user what they want, to use the right bait if you like, which is content.

As we have said, social networking is about entertainment, interest, having fun, or in the case of business networks, making contacts and furthering one’s career. The savvy corporate needs to embrace this reality. They need to move away from a sales led approach, towards marketing, attracting interest through content designed to appeal to the target audience. They need to make their social network presence a ‘go to’ environment for those in their space, a place others in the same field will want to go. This begins by having information, blogs, discussions and news, all relevant and interesting to your target audience. It then grows by acting as a forum for those interested in the field(s).

By establishing one’s site as a place of authoritative information and useful contacts, where you can discuss matters of interest with like-minded people, without the fear of attracting rapacious recruiters, you will create an atmosphere of inclusion. This in turn has a demonstrably significant effect on your employer brand. In this environment a simple button on the site directing interested parties to current jobs, or better yet an interactive environment where they can talk to someone about working at your company, is all you need. By allowing the candidates to come to you, you have differentiated yourself, you have marked yourself out as caring about them, not just about their CV, and you have embraced the user-defined power of the social network. Happy fishing.

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Article: Oil capital 'lacks skilled workers'

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT

A shortage of skilled workers is threatening Aberdeen's future as a global energy capital, according to an accountants firm.

Around 120,000 new recruits are needed by 2022, the equivalent of the city's current workforce, to realise its potential as a worldwide energy hub, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said its analysis shows.

See the full article at MSN Money.

News: Human Resources Outsourcing

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Quarsh will soon be adding Human Resources Outsourcing to it's service offering. Due to demand from current clients and following a successful initial implementation, Quarsh will be utilising the experience of it's staff in this area to provide a full range of HR services. As with all the services offered, Quarsh will be providing these services with our flexible and on-site implementation practices and is very much looking forward to offering these services to our current and future clients. Further details are due shortly.

Babies in the Workplace

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Lucy James
Recently Addison Lee featured in a BBC documentary about bringing babies into the workplace. Mothers who would otherwise be on maternity leave brought their babies to work with them.

Successfully piloted in the US, the objective of the documentary was to understand some of the pitfalls and benefits of such a scheme and ultimately see whether it is feasible to roll out as a long term solution. The trial worked so well for Addison Lee that they decided to implement the scheme permanently, citing a number of benefits including “increased staff loyalty and retention through to elevated morale resulting in improved productivity”.

As a (pregnant) working mum of a one year old myself, and with members of staff with children whose ages range from six months to 12 years, this is an emotional subject in our office. All businesses, small and large, have to consider the impact of employing women and men who have young children or are of childbearing age. Quite rightly, there are laws to prevent discriminating against people on these grounds, but that doesn’t mean that decisions aren’t made about promotion or hiring with this issue a factor in the back of a manager’s mind. Does bringing a small baby into work address this issue?

Consider the benefits. A new mother is entitled to up to 12 months maternity leave, and new paternity laws give men much more flexibility. By the time a mother returns to the office she may be out of touch with recent developments in her sector and in her working community, and she may no longer be quite as committed as she once was. By allowing a mother to bring their new baby into the office, she is in theory able to develop the vital close bonds with her child over the first few months while still contributing to the company; she is less inclined to stop work altogether and the company retains valuable intellectual property.

However, babies are not convenient. They do not cry at acceptable times, in between telephone calls. When they are not asleep they need constant attention. They are often exhausting, so when they do sleep a worn-out mum who has been up breastfeeding five times during the night can have a break, too; if not to sleep herself, then at least to put a load of washing in. Mothers who are looking after young babies talk about “baby brain”, which in our experience is a facet of exhaustion and pure blind fear at not knowing what they are doing. Trying to function effectively at work would surely be impossible.

On the other hand, some mothers lose their sense of identity when a baby comes along, in particular those who strive to climb the corporate ladder. For so many years they have been defined by their work. At a stroke, we become someone else entirely, taking on a full time job doing something we have absolutely no training or skills for. That connection to something familiar, that we know we are good at, is extremely important and in my case kept me involved and grounded in the real world. I know many mothers who loved those early months and bitterly resented going back to work after such a complete break. A slower re-entry may have been kinder to them, and certainly would have been kinder to their babies who found nursery incredibly difficult to adjust to.

But what about the babies? Don’t they deserve undivided attention, whether from mum, dad or a nursery nurse? What if their carer is in the middle of an important call that can’t be broken off? All they know is that they are UNHAPPY and something needs to be done NOW. Babies need constant stimulation to help in their brain development; a boring office with grey walls and cubicles surely can’t provide that. You can’t shove a bottle at a baby and expect it to rear itself.

I write as one who had the best of both worlds – an extremely rewarding professional life, the ability to work from home during those early months and flexible hours. In fact, I lived the theory in a very real sense. But there were some days when I didn’t manage to write a single email or make a single call, and others when my son’s world collapsed (in his mind) just as I was negotiating the finer points of a contract. I cannot imagine how it would be possible for anyone else to get anything done to any degree of efficiency or with any form of targets in mind with that racket going on, much less when we have no clue when the baby is about to erupt. When there are multiple babies, all in the same room, it really must be bedlam, and for those who don’t have a baby under their desks it must be frustrating.

As a working mum, I hope I strike the balance by making absolutely sure that my son gets my absolute, undivided attention whenever I am with him, and while I am in the workplace I focus completely on doing the best job I can. I find I get a lot more done during a working day (more quickly and with fewer breaks) and my son always sees me happy to see him. It’s not ideal and I am wracked with guilt when I think about how much time my stay-at-home-mum friends spend with their children, but the only way I could have it all, I worked out long ago, would be to clone myself.

Working from home, for your own business, is one thing. Working in an office, with targets and deadlines to hit and colleagues to consider, is quite another.

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News: New Business Partnership

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT

New Business Partnership 070812 Quarsh is delighted to announce a new partnership with a multinational oil and gas services provider.

Advice For Early Career Stage Candidates

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Matt Thomas
The early stages of your career play a key role in defining the path you take and too often candidates are applying for any and every role with little success.

The current approach fosters desperation and as the fruitless search continues, the quality of applications drops due to time-saving multi-application platforms sending generic CVs and cover letters. This approach is ineffective. I am sharing my experience of online job applications from both my time as a candidate in the early stages of my career and from a recruiter’s viewpoint, in the hope that it encourages people to be selective and reduces the number of applications being sent that are destined to fail before they have arrived. Here are my five top tips that can help you to negotiate the online application process and improve your chances of getting an interview. I certainly have been guilty of these at some points. Have you?

Apply for jobs that you are qualified for. You are wasting your time and the recruiter's time if you’re not qualified, you will get disheartened by getting a rejection email (at best) and recruiters really don’t need to spend hours reading and responding to that many CVs. If anything, it just shows you didn’t read the job post.
Carpet bombing multiple roles with the same CV and letter is impersonal. Sometimes this might work, but the recruiter could think it lazy that you didn’t personally address the role and industry. Improve your chances by customising each application, using the key words in the job spec and writing a cover letter that shows you have already done some homework and explains why you want to work for the company.
The CV. There are a number of errors I have been guilty of and have witnessed friends and candidates do too. These include spelling and grammatical errors (so important), addressing the wrong person; not attaching the CV and not supplying contact details. List your achievements on the CV, don’t just list where you have worked. Also, use a professional-sounding email address. Anything that was designed to be humorous is not appropriate. Double-check everything before you send.
Your CV presentation should be short, clean and crisp. Minimal is best with clearly headed sections so recruiters can find the info they need quickly. For the recruiter's sake make the title of your CV simple but descriptive. Jobs boards are not user-friendly on the recruiter side from what I have seen, so if you can make their life easier it will do your application no harm.
Good title: DaveJohnsonPRAssistantCV.docx.
Bad title: MyCV124521.docx.
If you are applying through a job board that has a candidate profile of you on there, ensure it is consistent with your CV as both get sent to the recruiter. Although the profiles of the job boards seem pretty widely un-used, if these are checked and don’t match then it’s going to be a problem. Also ensure your LinkedIn profile matches (this one will be used!).

I think the overall summary of the advice I can give as a candidate is unfortunately not the easiest. You need to put a lot of effort into applying. You should be fully aware of the scale of competition for jobs. We had over 300 applicants for a single junior position earlier this month. Every single CV was read but 85% were rejected at first read, mostly over the above reasons. There are jobs in the marketplace and there will be more as the economy recovers. You need to ensure that your applications hit the right pile and to do that you have to take time and care over how you go about applying.

Put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes and imagine what the perfect CV and cover letter would be, look at the keywords used in the post, and address them whether you have those specific skills and experiences or not. If you do not have those skills or experience and want to apply, you need to still answer why you could and want to do this job with even more conviction than someone that meets the requirements whilst demonstrating you bring different but relevant skills to the table.

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Social Media and Employer Branding

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Matt Thomas
An interesting topic of conversation came up in the office last week of how companies are becoming more and more aware of the effects of having a strong employer brand, an area Quarsh has been specialising in for some time.

Employer branding can be viewed as the sum of the total efforts of an organisation to attain a reputation of being a great place to work. To understand employer branding and why it is now so important I think it is best to take a step back and examine consumer branding and its application in the digital era.

Social media has long had a place in the marketing portfolio of large companies, and much more so with business to consumer companies rather than business to business companies. Facebook pages, being one of the most common, are utilised as not only an advertising medium to compliment standard advertising but also as customer support areas that can be used for feedback and dealing with customer issues. The importance of social media to brand building has grown significantly since social media took off and doesn’t show signs of stopping any time soon.

Behind both consumer branding and employer branding comes an age old question of “who is the most important stakeholder?” Although Peter Drucker may have you believe it is the customer, more and more research seems to push the employee stakeholder group further up the chain. Of course this argument has no right answer and anyone’s answer to this question will naturally sway towards the group that they can claim membership with. What is re-assuring to see is that employer branding as an exercise is finally claiming more attention from companies’ HR departments than ever before. Employer branding has been recognised by many larger companies as an integral part of business strategy and since the term was coined in the 1990’s has continued to grow in importance.

I was very pleased to read an article recently about how Starbucks has been improving its employer brand through the use of Instagram, a social media photo sharing application owned by Facebook. The app makes photography amateurs seem professional through the use of clever filters and effects (h/t to socialtalent on their post). The innovative idea has seen a large following of the companies Instagram account and simple pictures of the workplace the employees and the products have painted an image of the company that prospective employees are intrigued by. This idea is so simple yet so effective, I think this is because:

The increase in picture sharing applications presents a new platform, one that has rarely been used in employer branding efforts.
The scale and success of the consumer branding had previously been detrimental to the employer branding and the forward thinking and innovative Instagram efforts portray that employees are high in Starbucks stakeholder chain.

Starbucks is no stranger to branding and it is very refreshing to see a company effectively produce an employer branding campaign that shows a clear transparency to the company and paints an image of the business culture to prospective candidates. Their efforts to be viewed as a trendy workplace are demonstrated by their use of this trendy app.

Starbucks are not alone in the use of social media to promote themselves as an employee friendly brand, a quick Twitter search uncovers the companies that have embraced social media as an employer brand advertising tool that goes further than social recruiting but also posts many other aspects of what their company is like to work for such as employee interviews and success stories.

From this we can establish that employer branding is actually not so different to consumer branding. Whilst the efforts are aimed at to different stakeholder groups, the principles are very similar. An organisation needs candidates to buy into its workforce as it needs consumers to buy into its products. And if a company does not look after existing employees then they will leave just like mis-treated customers. It is actually that simple. So therefore if the two are the same then should they be done by the same department? Is employer branding a HR activity or a marketing activity?

These questions have a different answer in every company but what is clear is that it must be done. Companies such as Apple, Google and Starbucks are all very aware of the benefits of employer branding and have clearly seen the benefits that can be achieved from creating a happy workforce and you do not have to search for long to see the activities they have carried out to build their Employer Value Proposition or EVP. The benefits are clear to see and as awareness spreads then the trend of creating transparent and employee focused workplaces will continue with social media being an important string to the bow of those charged with managing the employer brand.

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News: New Business Partnership

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

New Business Partnership 210712 Quarsh is delighted to announce a new business partnership with an online retail organisation

Article: Employer Branding - Attraction and Retention

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Employer Branding | EVP | Quarsh RPO

How to use employer branding to attract and retain staff

Effective employer branding can considerably enhance your success rates for staff recruitment and retention. Employer branding is mainly about earning a reputation as an employee-friendly organisation that recognises and encourages talent, innovation and loyalty, with a culture based on empowerment and underpinned by a solid, respected corporate image, both in the marketplace and the wider world. The benefits of an effective employer brand are no secret:

You will reduce the time and cost of hiring talented people, because they will aspire to joining your business
You will increase the retention of key staff, because employee-friendly organisations inspire loyalty
You will improve the productivity of your organisation, because contented staff are more committed

The employer value proposition, or EVP, is a vital principle in improving an employer brand. An EVP can be defined as the offerings of a company beyond compensation for employment. The EVP must identify the uniqueness of a company compared to others by highlighting the commitment to future talent management, employee development and community spirit of an organisation. Once the reasons for why employees would want to work for an organisation have been defined, the effective communication of the EVP builds the strength of the employer brand.

Companies such as Apple, Deloitte, EDF Energy, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Visa focus strongly on effective employer branding because it ultimately enables them to attract and retain the talented people they need to stay ahead. You can emulate their approach and become more employee-friendly by:

Being transparent with your staff (and customers, of course)
Engaging your workers as much as your customers
Looking after and nurturing your employees
Rewarding extra effort
Ensuring a good, pleasant, safe working environment
Offering flexible working hours, and home working
Creating a solid, future-proof pension scheme
Providing worthwhile benefits and perks
Enabling and facilitating career development
Promoting primarily from within
Taking seriously corporate responsibility

If you create a happy, loyal workforce, it will go a long way towards making your organisation a compelling one to work for, ensuring a much improved talent-centric future for your organisation.

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News: New Business Partnership

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

New Business Partnership 190712 Quarsh is delighted to announce a new partnership with a global certification business.

Article: Graduates - Focusing On The Candidate Experience

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Source: HR Review - 03/07/2012

At Roast, tucked away in Southwark’s Borough Market, TARGETjobs succeeded in attracting the usual packed house for their latest Breakfast News session on the morning of Thursday 28th June.

With the candidate experience as the event’s general theme, speakers approached the topic from a variety of angles. First up, as usual, was Bryan Finn from Business Economics, who was once again unable to provide any particularly cheering news on the macroeconomic front. Having slipped back into double-dip recession, the UK’s GDP is currently flatlining, with predictions of overall growth now pared back to around 0.3% for this year and not much more than 1% for next.

The continuing problems of the Eurozone and a slowing of growth in the emerging economies of India and China have further conspired to hamper the UK’s prospects of recovery. Despite all this, recruitment markets are probably holding up somewhat better than expected. Unemployment has fallen slightly in recent months, although levels for recent graduates are still rising while youth unemployment as a whole remains a significant problem.

AGR chief executive Carl Gilleard was able to draw on two decades of experience in offering his reflections on the evolution of the candidate experience and the associated development of candidate management processes. The graduate market has obviously changed hugely over this period: one of the most significant shifts has been in the supply and demand ratio, with employers now firmly in charge of the situation. (A recent AGR survey records some 1.5m applications for just 21,500 graduate jobs.)

Processes have become much more automated, though at the risk of focusing more on rejection than selection. Internships are now relatively commonplace, with one recent survey suggesting that more than a third of available graduate vacancies go to candidates who have already gained previous experience with the employing organisation.

In Carl’s view, best practice is likeliest to occur where organisations’ processes accurately and consistently reflect their values. He advocates giving graduate candidates adequate time to decide on offers, using available technology to keep them informed about their progress, providing them with meaningful feedback, and continually evaluating processes to ensure their effectiveness.

He also recommended “looking beyond the 2:1” (a grade which some 40% of the graduate talent pool will not attain, incidentally), as well as broadening the recruitment focus beyond narrow groups of traditional institutions. In terms of what to look out for, he cited the Wilson Review (looking into the links between HE and business), Alan Milburn’s report on fair access to traditional careers, the introduction of the new HEARs, and the potential impact of the candidate experience on an organisation’s brand.

From Breakfast News sponsor Work Group, principal occupational psychologist Susanna Wells and head of research Marcus Body co-presented a session on the cost of bad hiring. Susanna began by itemising the direct and indirect costs of getting hiring wrong, and listed some of the mistakes that organisations frequently make when attempting to hire graduates. She also noted that fewer than half (46%) of employers succeed in retaining all their graduates for just a single year.

Marcus then took over to focus on the reputational costs of bad hiring, having calculated that some 98.8% of applicants going through the average graduate recruitment process won’t be successful. Having also surveyed the views (though GTI) of some 1,600 people who were about to apply or had recently been through the process, he came up with a number of recommendations, including defining the target audience more clearly, establishing a process to find such people, and checking that this works properly.

Finally, Santander’s graduate & early career resourcing manager Lorcan Seery delivered a case-study on the practical benefits of enhancing the candidate experience. Thanks to more personalised communications, better mentoring and the introduction of feedback, Santander had received “fantastic” feedback from candidates as well as boosting its offer acceptance rate to 95%. The company had also gained a first-time nomination for the TARGETjobs best graduate employer award and significantly boosted its Times Top 100 graduate employer ranking. The results have also increased the business’s appetite for more EiC (early in career) hiring next year.

GTI Media director Simon Rogers brought proceedings to a close by reminding the audience that deadlines for GTI’s media products are now “imminent”, and that the next Breakfast News session is due to take place at Quaglino’s in London’s St James’s on Thursday 13th September.

Original Article: HR Review

Services: Talent Communities - Spreading Your Employer Branding Message

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Talent Communities

Talent Communities are a relatively new concept in the world of recruitment with many industry experts tipping this practice to become more important to companies as the world of recruitment continues its evolution into the digital world. The early adopters of this process seem to be experiencing a high level of success with it and it is certainly a pioneering methodology that offers great adaptability and has a great benefit to the ever more important 'employer branding'.

What is a Talent Community?

Talent Communities are more than a simple talent pool. Talent Communities are made up of a network of people who communicate to share information, conversing and working together to solve problems, achieve objectives, share ideas and opinions. This social engagement makes people feel involved and included, encouraging them to contribute positively to the overall benefit of the communities at large.

The most successful relationships take time to develop. Imagine a convenient place where departments within an organisation and individuals outside the company can meet, get to know each other, share knowledge and ideas, and gradually build relationships that could lead to working together on a permanent basis. What you’re imagining is a talent community.

What are the benefits of a Talent Community?

It enables both your organisation and individuals to learn and develop
It helps both parties to get to thoroughly know and understand each other
It is a forum for sharing sector-specific knowledge, news and opinions
It makes it easy for prospective employees to understand your company and the opportunities within it
It lets you optimise your employer brand and build relationships with candidates who share your values
It lets you communicate informally with existing employees

How does a Talent Community work?

Forward-looking people interested in your sector and company join and engage in the community, creating a rich environment where shared interests are explored, and the skills, talents and specialist areas of knowledge of individuals soon become apparent.

You can use the community to develop your employer brand, showcase opportunities, attract talented people and build relationships with prospective candidates.

The community can be set up as a channel on your website, easily accessible via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and other relevant social networks. There should be a moderator who oversees everything and liaises with you closely – but you always remain in the driving seat, because it’s your talent community.

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Why Process Matters

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Dave Evans
Hiring someone new to join your business is a process, and it is a process that every company has to think about, from the largest corporations with global policies and procedures right down to a sole trader recruiting their first ever employee. In some form or other, each and every business goes through the same steps:

Deciding to hire someone (and who it is)
Looking for candidates
Assessing and selecting the right person for the job
Getting the chosen candidate to take the job

Clearly, there is a lot of variation in how effectively different organisations perform each step, but the basics are common to all.

As a business grows, there is a move from a process being just an informal checklist to more defined and documented procedures. Often there is tension and resistance to this move, though, and ensuring compliance with established procedures is a perennial problem for many companies.

Why is getting everyone to follow the process so hard? Well, it is invariably a result of how the process is built. A recruitment process has to play to three different audiences at all times:

the business (as an entity in the abstract)
the hiring community (line management)
the applicants

The business, speaking broadly, cares about control and risk, ensuring that budgets are met and that nothing illegal or actionable happens. The hiring community cares about filling the job with the least effort and expenditure of time. The candidate cares about finding and applying for the job, getting communicated with and getting hired.

There is an eternal tension between these three sets of concerns, and often it is the unenviable task of a HR function to find the compromise that satisfies them all. To take the extremes:

If business concerns take charge, you often find bureaucratic, impersonal processes where documentation is everything and the actual filling of a job is an occasional accident.
If the hiring community is overly dominant, there is a lack of process and control and no real central understanding of legal or budgetary compliance, let alone any control of quality of hire or even number of hires.
If applicant concerns take precedence you end up with a process that is hugely labour intensive and a huge number of people spend all of their time talking to people who are wholly unsuitable for the jobs they are applying for.

Clearly none of these are ideal. However, the concerns which these illustrate must in some way be taken into account when designing and operating a recruitment process, and a balance that is right for your business must be found:

The business needs to manage risk, headcounts and budgets to make sure that they align with overall business needs.
The hiring community need to be able to get approval to hire, obtain the right applicants and assess them effectively.
The applicant must be able to find and apply for jobs with the company, and communication channels to them for feedback need to be effective and efficient.

Finding the happy medium between these concerns is always a challenge, and a task that HR find themselves at the heart of. Not only do they need to design and develop a process that works for right now, they need to stay aware of how the company and the world around it changes and ensure that the process stays current and relevant by continually improving and developing it. So, not only is it a challenge to find this balance, it is a challenge that you need to keep engaging with on a regular basis to maintain it.

So in summary, why does recruitment process matter? Well, if you don’t get it right:

The business can’t effectively manage its financial and headcount budgets, or have the data needed to plan for the future.
The hiring community can’t get the people aboard to deliver work, leading to a workforce that is wrongly sized or wrongly skilled.
The right applicants won’t be able to find your jobs or join the company, so you won’t have the best people in your business.

None of these are the hallmarks of a successful business, which is why getting the recruitment process right is vital to every organisation.

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The Candidates View

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:00:00 GMT

By Matt Thomas
Having been a jobseeker, I have from time to time been in contact with recruitment agencies, often multiple agencies at once vying for attention and seemingly with little care for candidates or the roles they are trying to place.

The structure of the recruitment industry seems to dictate that the list of priorities for an agency begins with placing a candidate to the specified role at maximum speed for the sakes of making a return on investment. The satisfaction of the client company comes second along with the candidate’s suitability to the role. Third in the priority list is the satisfaction of the candidate. This order may vary slightly but I would say it is generally universal.

Having a number of friends in the recruitment industry (hearing them rant from time to time about candidates dropping out and other day to day annoyances) and now having joined the industry, albeit in a digital marketing capacity, It is clear that a necessity to place candidates outweighs a desire to provide a long term solution and build a longer term client relationship for the current agency model. I would go as far as to suggest that in fact, if done poorly, recruitment agencies could increase future time/ cost factors such as attrition and productivity. From a candidate point of view, there are most certainly jobs ‘out there’ but I personally felt a great deal of frustration at the number of spurious job descriptions that when researched turned out to be glamorised and the attempts of numerous consultants to sell a role to me. Having always been sure to make clear on my CV and online profiles the type of role I was searching for I found it irritating for recruiters who know nothing of me as a person to try and explain to me why the roles I desire are not suited to me but surprisingly, that they had a role to put me forward for that was perfect for my experience and qualifications.

I must be clear, I am not talking about an executive search here, I am talking about low level 1-3 years postgraduate recruitment. Is it seen as an inferior category in terms of the low finance high volume involved and relatively low stakes to the recruiter and the client, especially given the high unemployment figure at the moment? It is certainly not seen this way by the candidate. I fear too many desperate individuals are taken advantage of in their willingness to secure a position, any position. The most harmful factor though, is that the reputation of recruitment within this category of future business leaders could very easily be tarnished (further) by poorly implemented recruitment being rushed by highly pressurised agency staff.

It must be credited to agency recruitment professionals, they act very quickly and in my experience have generally all been professional and polite. I have had applications sent and returned in a matter of hours whereas direct applications to firms have taken over 3 weeks for an initial response, perhaps due to tougher screening or perhaps poor processing. Is the structure of the recruitment agency model the reason for its success in becoming an integral part of business in this country? Or is the structure the reason it so often fails as a long term recruitment solution and seems an unattractive industry from the outside looking in?

So it may come as a surprise then that I can now call myself a member of the recruiting industry, albeit in a digital marketing capacity. My lack of experience here is the reason I will write posing questions rather than making statements as in all honesty my opinion is only relevant as a jobseeker at this time. In my four weeks working in this industry I have learnt as much as I can about the methodologies and practices in recruitment, some good, some questionable. In my capacity writing his blog over the coming months I will discuss the opportunities that this industry might embrace in order to change perceptions and also to become a more consumer driven environment. Also, I will be talking to colleagues and external recruiters to discuss their points of view on the business.

It is said that the majority of business sectors are becoming more consumer focused as organisations must value their clients and customers ever more to ensure their heads remain above the water, the difference with recruitment is that it must exceed the expectations of two consumers at once, the client and the candidate. Please feel free to comment and discuss.

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