Sirona Says

Reed's Recruiting Emergency is behind the times!!

Anyone seen this offer from Reed today (it arrived in my inbox)? They have tied their summer advertising campaign into the 'old'  999 emergency services dialing number - pricing the package is £999.

Come on you Reed marketing department isn't our government telling us that we are part of the European community? If you didn't already know the European wide number you dial for the emergency services is now 112.

So as a business within the European community I would be more than happy to have the same deal, based on the 112 emergency number, at £112!!! .........chances of that happening .............slim!!!   (It would be a great bargain though!!)

Japan's idea of a work/life balance

In the western world we are all complaining about talent shortages, and are already starting to plan to recruit the younger Z generations. But in Japan the government are taking their future shrinking workforce to a new level!!

They are trying to convince women that the work/life balance actually involves having more children AND staying at work!!  They have already failed in many attempts to get women to work in the first place, and combined with declining birth numbers and more people retiring  this has contributed to a forecasted shortfall of 20million+ workers in future years. So now they have moved on to try and convince women to have more children and either go to work or stay at work! Baby bonuses will be next, or commission schemes based on the number of babies you have! And what happens if they don't play ball with the government? Let's not go there.........

New Job boards - are they a front for massive ID theft?

This post started out as a flippant remark made to someone yesterday, but it made me think further.
There seems to have been another influx of new job boards coming into the already crowded space recently. My question is simple and worrying at the same time. What would stop a foreign owner (doesn't have to be foreign of course) setting up a job board? Then building up a database of CV's quickly, with some fancy promises, only to disappear to 'farm' all the personal information they have collected and commit massive ID theft?

As far as I am aware there is nothing to stop them doing just this. All they have to do is set up a company, fill in the Data Protection Act form (which they will obviously abuse), build an appealing website and off they go!!

Slightly worrying thought isn't it?

Banks being innovative with Web 2.0 - surely not?

The usually conservative banking industry is starting to wake up to the fact that Web 2.0 is changing the way their employees and customers interact with each other. It is two Canadian Banks that have taken the lead - Scotiabank and Royal Bank of Canada.

Scotiabank is using technology from Microsoft to introduce an internal Web 2.0 social networking platform aimed at encouraging information sharing and collaboration among its staff. This platform enables employees to share, store, organise, search and manage information using blogs and wikis. As part of the programme, the bank is creating online user profiles for staff members. Commenting on the move, Robert Fournier, SVP, enterprise architecture and methodology, Scotiabank, says: "By leveraging the knowledge and experience of the Scotiabank team with a business focused social networking platform we are enabling staff to better serve customers by sharing best practices and identifying experts and skill sets regardless of geographic and organizational boundaries."

Royal Bank of Canada has  launched a financial advice blog written by students that can be accessed via its fan page on social networking site Facebook. They have selected six full time post-secondary students at Canadian universities to write daily blogs on money management, which along with videos, are available through the bank's Web site as well as the "RBC Bankbook" page on Facebook.

I wonder how many other banks will be taking the same innovative steps, and moving with the times. Living in the UK, with our ultra conservative banking community I fear that these 'innovations' will take many years to filter through!!

Alison Wright the departing Chief Marketing Officer at EGG gets free industry CV promotion

Is it me or does the marketing world like to look after their own? I have just had my weekly news email from Marketing Week, and one of the headlines is, "A marketer looking for a new posting is Alison Wright, who is leaving her position as chief marketing officer at Egg". Now obviously it is a shame that Alison has lost / or is leaving her job (likely due to the merger), but Marketing Week don't stop there!!   In the headline content of this email (sent out to 1000's in the marketing industry, probably including many recruiters), Alison Wright has been given a big favour with some 'availability' promotion, and some marketing of her career. Not her fault I know but does it have to this blatant?

Cities beginning with letter 'B' are not good places to work

If you are looking for a new job, don't go to Brighton, Bristol or Belfast to find one. Thats the message from Badenoch & Clark’s latest quarterly Happiness at Work survey. Apparently, office workers in these cities are the least happy at work - I find that strange having worked in two of them, they are not that bad, honestly!!

The survey goes on to say that the unhappiest profession is HR (again!) with nearly a third of them unhappy in their jobs. Maybe that is why so many HR people give recruiters a hard time then - if they are not happy in their jobs, they could be taking it out on recruiters! (Maybe it's just me who has experienced this??)

The staggering figure the survey does highlight is that 48% (yes, nearly half!) of workers want to change jobs in 2008!! There is certainly a few retention AND recruitment issues  to be addressed there then!

Facebook - the quickest way to becoming a millionaire!

Forget normal jobs in the real world - the answer is to concentrate on finding products that people want in cyberspace!!  There is a product called Adnomics that analyses, ranks and values Facebook applications. What becomes very obvious is that creating and developing applications to run on Facebook is much more lucrative than any normal job - there are many people that have already made their creators millions - Funwall and Superwall are two good examples. The thing is that some of these applications have been created in less than 7 days!!

Get the Flock out of here!

For all the people who simply cannot live without their social networking and the many sites that they subscribe to, there is salvation for you in the form of a new web browser. So if IE and Firefox are leaving you wanting then try Flock. It's the first browser built specifically to work with the socially networked world.  So all of you Facebookers, YouTubers, MySpacers Twitterers etc etc etc and socially connected friendly people will find it the must have for 2008!!

Enjoy being classed as a happy little flocker now, won't you!!

No Employment Brand? .....forget it then!

So much for all this marketing hype around employment brands, it does seem that as an employer if you want to have a chance of recruiting the best for your company, then you are going to have to take your employment brand very seriously!! According to a recent survey by jobs.ac.uk , a massive 86% of job seekers rate an employers brand important when applying for jobs - only 2% said it was unimportant!

So it is something recruiters have known for a while (and have actually been advocating for years), that job seekers are increasingly researching prospective employers' brands before deciding whether to apply for a job with them! So, before you even get to see a cv, job seekers have already made a decision about whether they want your company to see it!! In this talent driven marketplace that means you will be losing talent even before you start recruiting unless you start evaluating your employment brand and what it actually is!!

10 Things you need to know about Employer Branding

As this subject is such a hot topic at the moment I thought I would share this article that I recently wrote for another blog. As a starting point on this subject, we had first better define what an employment brand actually is -  the CIPD define it as a set of attributes and qualities (often intangible) that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform to their best in its culture.

However like all brands, employer brands are essentially marketing concepts and constructs.
The tools and methodologies of employer brand development are substantially the same as those for consumer or corporate brand development. Below are listed the 10 things you need to know about employment brands: