Sirona Says

Nice idea Monster, but a dangerous 'promise' to job seekers!

Yesterday an email arrived from Monster, promoting their new Monster Virtual Jobs Fair later this year on the 1st October. Great idea, and certainly a good way to go to try and innovate the job board market place.

That is until I saw the 'promise' message that it gives you (as a job seeker) when the page is loading......

Is this just Monster stupidity or negligence (or both)?  Access more that 120 job offers? Maybe they thought that people wouldn't watch the 'loading page' ?
There must be a better way to convey that message - maybe they have a trainee copywriter that they recruited from their own job board?

"I will work for a month for FREE" - Recruitment Managers!

Yes it has finally happened, although I thought it would be a while yet before these 'dramatic' measures started!
In conversation with a company this morning, he made me aware that several household name high street retailers have been recently approached by multiple professional level job seekers offering their services for free.
They offer to work for a month for free, to try and prove their worth to the organisation and therefore generate a job out of it. The difference is that these job seekers are professional Corporate Recruitment Managers!!
Has the corporate recruitment sector sectors really got it that bad from an employment perspective, that they need to resort to this?

Should we applaud the 'bravery' and boldness of these individuals, obviously desperate for a new job?

For me it is certainly a creative idea, but not one that I would condone for a job seeker, as it gives off desperation signals, and can put the individuals on a negative footing from the start.

Are you shocked or have you already seen this happening in your workplace?

Innovation or Madness? New Recruitment company, Playfair and Noble, pay 50% of their fee to the successful candidate!

Do you ever get emails from companies looking to 'sell you' their company? Probably like you, I get a fair amount arriving in my inbox each week. So you could probably say that I am a little sceptical (too long in the recruitment world, I am afraid!!)

So it was a really pleasant surprise to see a recruitment platform (from non-recruitment people I might add) that is daring to be different and placing its big kahuna's right there on the middle of the recruitment table to be chewed at!! (Metaphorically of course!)

Now before you think I am over dramatising this a little, let me tell why it is so different - This company actually pays the successful candidate  50% of the fee they get paid from their clients!!  And before any of you recruiters say it won't work (like I did before I spoke to them), they have done their maths, and they believe it will.

Now that I have your attention let me tell you the company - Playfair and Noble - and with a name like that, and the offering they are proposing, it won't surprise you to guess that ethics are a HUGE part of what they stand for.
Basically they have a real issue with recruitment agencies.

Who is actually helping the unemployed find a job?

Every single day in the media there is news of more redundancies - even the BBC have put a job loss tracker on their website - but have you ever taken a minute to think who is actually helping these people find a job. And when I mean helping them get back to work, I don’t mean assistance in filling in a form at the local Job Centre!

What I mean is proper and honest advice from professionals that can actually help and advise these people that have lost their jobs - people that can actually add some real value to helping the unemployed find work.

This post came about from an article of Fistful of Talent that I read earlier today concerning the trend in the USA for people to charge circa $2000 to write CV’s for executives looking for work. This particular post started my cogs going and I then started to think about the UK, and how people are actually going to find work again.

So what are the ways that people can get help in writing a CV, interview skills, using the internet job boards as well as many more areas of job hunting? Where do they go and what chances of success should they expect?

So who is helping the unemployed find a job?

Schools/Colleges career advisors
Suffice to say that, in my opinion, the majority of these people are just way off the mark. I have seen the advice they have given out to a good number of people and quite frankly, it is mostly common sense and a waste of time. They are usually too far detached from the real world and the harsh realities of the working world. There will of course be some very good advisors out there who care passionately about their students finding work, and if you have been exposed to them then you are very lucky.
Chances of them helping you with finding your first job – Nil – zero. (But they can recommend a nice university course that will put you £15k in debt though!)

Are Job Seekers wasting their time with Recruitment Agencies?

Every day now there are seemingly endless amounts of people ending up in the queues at the Job Centres. Even today, the Government are trying to help the middle classes who have found themselves out of work in this recession, with special initiatives to help them find work.

So, as someone who has spent their career in the recruitment sector, I find myself asking questions of the industry and whether there should be some evolution in the way that job seekers are advised to find a job. 

I have recently questioned if it is right, to pay a career consultant to help find a job, which prompted some interesting discussion.

Today, I want to focus on recruitment agencies - are they a waste of time for job seekers?

Fixed Fee Recruitment RPO providers - shouldn't they actually be called recruiting FARM's?

 

As part of a large recruitment audit I am currently working on, I have had cause to look at the fixed fee recruitment providers, such as Webrecruit, Networx, Net-Recruit, Websearch and EasyWebRecruitment.

The first thing to try and do was to understand what they are actually called and what they do. They are not really full RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) companies, although they have the capacity to be. They are not true recruitment agencies, but again they do some of the process.
They all charge a fixed fee for a recruitment management service, whether that be job board advertising, CV database searches or response management.

So, I have created a description for them that I feel is both appropriate and effective as a description of what they do - recruiting FARM's.
F - Fixed fee
A - Advertising jobs
R - Resourcing vacancies
M - Management of the process

I actually think that it describes what they do very well.

What do you think? Does it suit their service? Can you come up with a better one?

Does Your Business need a Recruitment Pinch Hitter now?

I am sure that many of you are not fans of Baseball, so first let me explain what a pinch hitter actually is:

They are simply defined as a substitute for another person, especially in an emergency or a moment of need.  This expression comes from baseball, where it is used for a player substituting for another at bat at a critical point or in a tight situation.

So to put into a business context, it would be someone with specialist skills being called upon to go into a company and solve specific needs of that company, for problems or issues they are experiencing.

Yes it's not brilliant out there, but it's NOT THAT BAD

We all know the state of the economy, it is something that everyday the media seem to taking great pleasure in telling us because they think people want to hear about it!
But what is more significant, is that all this bad news and the continual overkill of doom and gloom  (in my opinion, anyway) that comes out of the British Chamber of Commerce is ever-shrinking the confidence of recruitment and employment in UK businesses.

But let me be clear here, yes there is alot of bad news out there, but it is not effecting every company in the same way, as many are still recruiting staff at all levels. There are still big recruitment problems out there for some companies, as the quality and availability of candidates is becoming very limited.

A large retailer I spoke to last week, told me that their usage of recruitment agencies has actually increased since the credit crunch took hold!! Is that so surprising?
They now receive ten times more CV's, and the quality has dropped dramatically, so for this retailer to get to speak to the skilled individuals they need in their business, they are needing to use agencies to source them.

Why don't the Government understand what Job Centres are really there for?

It is funny what gets your blood to boil isn't it? - especially while on holiday and supposedly 'chilling out'!
Well for me it happened a couple of days ago, while reading The Times with a very nice fresh espresso coffee. So what was the cause of the anger?

Strangely, I was getting annoyed by simple agreeing with an article written by a journalist called Melanie Reid, entitled 'Close encounter with planet Jobcentre.'

Here are some of the highlights:

• Gill was one of six directors recently made redundant by a well-known UK consortium. Once she'd recovered from the initial shock of losing a post that she had held for 18 years, Gill set out to find another. She knew it would take time and someone advised her to register as unemployed so that her national insurance contributions would be paid.

• She was given an interview slot at a local centre and told not to be late.

• There follows a tale of such humiliation, misunderstanding and Stalinist bureaucracy

• The young woman who interviewed her was ignorant but condescending in manner and kept asking Gill why she was there. She was told that in order to get her national insurance paid, she would have to apply for job seeker's allowance, which she did not want.

• The official asked Gill what she used to earn, and then - unbelievably - repeated the figure to nearby colleagues, exclaiming: “Hey, I've never had anyone in here with that salary!”

• Gill's circumstances did not fit any of the boxes on the official's computer screen. And if she defied classification she could not exist. “Tell me what your job was and I'll do a job search for you,” said the official. “Operations director for a Footsie plc,” said Gill. “It's not coming up with anything. What about ‘area manager'?” “Yes,” sighed my friend, by this time a broken woman, “area manager will do.”

• “Then she told me that she couldn't really do anything for me and I was told to report back ten days hence,” said Gill.

This is something that I have experienced first hand a six years ago, following a redundancy. At the time I just needed to register with the Job Centre to be able to trigger my insurance payments on my mortgage for a couple of months, before I found a new role. But the process I went through six years ago, was exactly as described above - it just shows they way behind the times!
The woman that was my 'contact' in the Job Centre, had no recruitment experience, no understanding of the job market, and absolutely no commercial experience at all!! She told me she had been drafted in to that team from admin because someone had gone on maternity leave!

Let me be crystal clear with my argument here. I am not criticising the whole benefits piece ( I don't need to - there are plenty that are going that!), I am specifically referring to the jobs piece of the jigsaw - as in the name of the service - the 'job centre'.
Why do the government think that unskilled, uncaring and totally unmotivated people are actually going to be able to give support, confidence and help to people who have been made redundant and simply want to get back to work??

Now these results may surprise all you hardened online recruiters!

As part of a project to look at and examine the recruitment process for a large employer, we commissioned an external market research campaign based around employer brand. The survey was targeted at 1000 16-35 year olds in the UK, and was conducted by one of the UK market leaders in consumer research.

One of the questions, has provided some very interesting - and surprising - insights into how this age group looks for a new job.
When asked what medium they would use to find a job (from a list of about 12 choices) these were the top answers:

1. Job Centres - 54%
2. Online Job Boards - 47%
3. Local Newspapers - 43%
4. Company Websites (Direct) - 38%
5. Word of Mouth - 33%
6. Recruitment Agency - 32%

Has that surprised you, because I was not expecting the top answer to be the job centres! But should it be a real surprise? Maybe we do underestimate the role they can play in recruiting staff?

The only problem I have with them is the calibre (most of the time) of staff, that are in charge of the recruiting interface with clients. They usually have no experience of recruiting , and are there just to -seemingly - process numbers to interviews, whether they are right or wrong. Because of  the threat of having benefits cut, many job seekers from job centres are only interested in attending interviews to maintain benefits.

I guess that's why so many companies have had bad experiences with job centres previously. BUT is it time to revisit them and try again? Over half the survey sample of 16-35 years would go to the job centre to look for jobs - maybe it is time to reconsider?

The other surprise, is the number of people that would go direct to company websites to look for a job. This must definitely be a change in the marketplace, as more people have become more web savvy, and (maybe) less trusting of recruitment agencies?
It does highlight the need for companies to put some work into their websites, and to start to make them functional and appealing to job seekers - a good one that has just launched is the new Sky website.

So overall, job seekers between the ages of 16-35, use a mix of sources to find a job. Is that really so strange? I guess not, but the mix certainly is!!

This is a great way to add a recruitment video to your career sites

I have to say thanks to Jim Stroud for putting me on to this. What I am talking about is the website Animoto. It uses photographs, combines it with a soundtrack - it can be music or stuff that you have recorded, and then mixes the two together with its clever technology. This means that no two videos are the same. As they say on Blue Peter, here is one I made earlier as a demo.

This is truly excellent product, and it gets even better, because if you choose the 30 second video clips (which uses a minimum of 10 images) it is totally free! You only pay for the full length video's that are produced. It is simple and fun to use, so there is no excuse (not even for you Peter!) about not having a go. And as with other social media sites, it is hooked up with YouTube so you can just simply export the video with ease.

Go on have a go, and get those videos online!!