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The Supermarket of Talent

SupermarketI think we’ve got it all wrong.

Not because of stupidity or ignorance, but out of the goodness of our hearts and by wearing rose tinted glasses when looking at reality.

I am talking about the way we, the recruitment industry, treat candidates as consumers and put them at the heart of the entire recruitment process. It is no wonder that suddenly we have all these misguided initiatives, such as talent communities, based on misguided principles of candidate engagement.

At the moment, there is a desire to treat candidates as consumers. Why should there be a difference between Amazon’s shopping experience and customer service and those seen in recruitment? If the best in class are consumer centric, let’s all become candidate centric. If the consumer wants to chat, connect, follow, like, well let’s transfer it to the recruitment world and create talent communities, social referral programs, follow company features…you name it.

But does that make sense when looking at the underlying principle of job seeking?

A candidate wants to find a relevant job quickly (and relevance here is based around their personal situation, i.e., travel time, money needed to pay mortgages, flexibility to deal with outside-of-work-and-equally-as-important-if-not-more-important-things), because believe it or not, jobseeking is at best a frustrating experience and candidates have far more interesting things to do.

Delivering against this principle requires balance between candidates and recruiters, not candidate-centricity: There is only value in each one if they are both connected. One isn’t more important than the other and one isn’t equal to the other, they are unique and different yet intrinsically linked.

Candidates are suppliers of data

To achieve the best results for candidates, let’s treat jobseekers as suppliers instead of consumers:

Candidates supply us with data (resume, applications, profile updates, search behaviour, etc.). At Amazon, authors supply us with data (books). These authors aren’t the consumers, they are the suppliers. Following this logic, the recruiter/hiring manager becomes the reader/ consumer, the one that pays, the one that goes through the checkout.

Or to compare it with supermarkets, the data are the blueberries. The candidate is the supplier/farmer of the blueberries and the recruiter/hiring manager is the consumer of the blueberries.

If applied, it can lead to some intriguing consequences, with immense positives for everybody involved.

Hiring Managers/Recruiters – as the consumer, you’ll finally be treated like one. The more convenience you want in your shopping, the more you will be prepared to pay. The better the experience you want, again, the more you’ll pay.  And like a shopper of blueberries, let’s ensure that what you buy is relevant, fresh and tasty. The interactions are daily and the value comes from the loyal and returning customer.

While this is already – at least in parts – relatively common, it is often still more driven by process than customer centricity. Hiring managers are perceived purely as a business representative instead as an individual following the same buying decision making patterns as consumers. It therefore also makes absolute sense to direct more of the brand building budget towards the hiring manager and move from (or merge and enhance) a B2B approach to a B2C approach.

Candidates are suppliers of luxury items

Candidates – as the supplier, they’ll be treated like one. Without suppliers there is no commerce. Suppliers of luxury items – and that is what a job change is – are very influential and powerful. So treat them accordingly.

Marketing principles of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning, combined with the 4Cs, still apply. The mind shift is about appreciating that applying for a job is a business interaction with a very rational underpinning, driven mainly by economic desire or necessity.

Some suppliers will be able to demand higher value and services than others. At the same time, the supplier is responsible for their produce. If it isn’t selling, if it doesn’t receive the same attention and promotion as other products in this supermarket of talent, it is the supplier/candidate’s responsibility to change it accordingly. Like any other brand, there are three avenues open to him: Differentiation, Price, Niche.

It also alters the demands on the supermarket of talent: Produce of suppliers must be delivered in a timely fashion. When the product hits the shelves it should be fresh, anticipated, desired, even teased and marketed to increase the sales volume.

It also, however, becomes important that seasonality is appreciated. I can only sell my blueberries when they are ready to be picked. Yes, I can greenhouse them, freeze them, but that has an impact on taste. So trying to engage the supplier of the resume and job seeking data outside the season is irrational, a waste of energy and ultimately damages the consumer relationship and puts unnecessary and often economically unjustifiable demands on the supplier.

Seeking out the best suppliers, inclusion into the supply chain management to ensure smooth and coordinated delivery (such as picking up the goods at the farm, helping to package them in the most attractive way, sharing insights and metrics) makes good sense.

Negotiating exclusivity, offering advice on how to achieve higher sales, marketing and better shelf space for top performing items or ranges that the supermarket of talent is interested in highlighting is important. A little more B2B than B2C would go a long way. This might sound odd, but it ultimately delivers against the performance metrics set out by the candidate and would actually give the candidate a better, more important and market led standing in the recruitment process.

Candidates are not valued as suppliers

You know where it all falls down?

It’s when value is being distributed. Let’s revisit Amazon: The author of a book is paid a slice of the sales value. The same happens with the blue berry producer.

But, the value that most supermarkets of talents and personal shoppers hand to the suppliers is not a real appreciation of their value, i.e. a slice of the sales value, but only a pat on the shoulder with the sentiment of “Be happy that you found a job”. Until we treat candidates like suppliers and allocate real value to their data, the recruitment process will always be uneven. That’s what we need to change.

Creative Commons License photo credit: davydubbit

 

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By Felix – June 12, 2013

The rise of the internal headhunter

It’s quite a remarkable phenomenon that audiences rave about future gazing presentations, yet rarely ever act on them when they have returned from the conference. It could have to do with the fact that many often only contain well known developments and publically available data, but it’s disappointing when those containing truly valuable and insightful information are forgotten.

However, when they do get noticed and acted upon, that’s when the magic happens.

Let’s take Mara Swan’s (Manpower’s VP Strategy) superb presentation at the recent ERE conference in San Diego. The presentation was incredibly rich with thought provoking insights. This post looks at just one part of it: the change in world population and migration that is linked to it.

Mara Swan shared the map from Worldmapper below,  showing the predicted distribution for the estimated world population in 2050. It shows that the population is moving east (which represents a big challenge for values and mind-sets – most of our companies are based on Western and Christian values, yet most of the workforce’s are based on Eastern and Buddhist values).

Worldmapper

© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

 

At the same time the working population will shrink. This will have a massive effect on migration, as most Western countries depend on immigration to supplement their workforce and to act as drivers for innovation and diversity. If the working population shrinks there are more opportunities at home, resulting in less migration. If you consider that by then we will have more stable middle classes in the emerging economies and more wealth being created in the countries, then the people who are migrating today are unlikely to do it tomorrow.

With the underlying assumptions changing, we also need to adjust our assumptions on talent supply and demand.

At the moment, if a person/team isn’t working out, the answer is to replace them with a new one. This might work at the moment, but most certainly won’t work in 2050. Overlay this with a shortening of skill cycles (3-8 years before a skill is outdated) – and we have a perfect storm, or as Mara Swan said: “The internal workforce is a key factor and a key issue: with fewer people we can’t just get rid of people and hire news ones. Re-skilling and training gains new importance.”

It’s fascinating.

Even more fascinating are the companies that have already implemented programmes and initiatives to tackle this issue.  Let’s take Sodexo, as an example:

Arie Ball, their VP of Talent Acquisition, is one of those remarkable people who takes new info and immediately implements change, way before the rest of us even wake up to it.

Sodexo is now headhunting internally. Their internal recruiters have access to succession and performance data, and use this information to help guide their internal searches. You can imagine that many of  the line managers weren’t too enamoured about this internal headhunting.  At the same time, the internal recruiter also supports and coaches the internal candidates in presentation for interviews. This is to address the issue whereby typically in organisations, external candidates come much better prepared, as the internal candidate often doesn’t prepare for the interview as they believe that the manager already knows about them. Sodexo’s approach makes sense on so many dimensions.

It works for the individual; they feel valued and feel good about themselves and about the company. Too often, the employees are passive candidates and not actively seeking out new opportunities even within the company. Getting a call from the internal recruiter underscores their value and the opportunities for growth.  That results in the individual becoming an even stronger brand ambassador.

It works for the company, as they can keep talent (because let’s face it, if the employee believes they wouldn’t be headhunted internally and sees not a chance of change and success, they’ll leave anyway), and they can now up-skill their staff not only through courses and coaches but real world experience. This in itself will result in a reduced time to hire and time to productivity. Additionally, it’s a great way to reinforce new behaviours, spread skills and enable more impactful cultural change, yet in a very subtle way.

This just makes so much sense now and even more so in light of all the future trends. I find this active portfolio management of the employees admirable, because a company’s talent pool starts and ends with the existing workforce.

Let’s build clear characteristics of the players we want on our roster. Let us be ruthless in applying these when bringing in fresh talent and appraising existing talent, but let’s then support our talent and give them the opportunity in becoming the best they can be.

 

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By Felix – May 20, 2013

Talent Acquisition: Finding the common in the unique – #ERE13

Each one of us is unique. At the same time, we share many similarities with other special and unique people, to the point where underlying patterns emerge. This became obvious when listening to all the special and unique speakers at ERE Recruiting Conference in San Diego.

Talent Acquisition thrives for exactly the same as every other function: closer alignment, better integration of the tech stack and becoming more candidate-centric.

  • Closer alignment with the overall business and its objectives but also within the teams to ensure common understanding and shared goals and language.
  • Better integration of all the different technologies that are being used in the talent acquisition process – ideally to aid the closer alignment mentioned above as this will result in meaningful integration.
  • Becoming more candidate-centric to ensure a better candidate experience and deeper engagement – which is more aligned and integrated to the overall brand experience and values of the company.

All three of these are interconnected. For example, Joanna Clark (Recruiting Leader for Community Bank’s Western Mountain Region and Shared Services at Wells Fargo) explained that social recruiting had stalled as it has been separated from overall talent acquisition.  And she is right, there is no such thing as social recruiting – nor is there mobile recruiting – it is all just one part of the jobseeker’s way of interacting with organisations. For it to flourish and become integral it requires integration into the incumbent systems as well as alignment with the overall business goals. Only when it results in gratification for the jobseeker (= finding a job), for the recruiter (= finding an interested and relevant candidate) and the company (=increasing productivity) does it become useful.

We define ourselves more often by our differences to others, instead of our communalities, but vendors, innovators and change agents of mobile, social and other cool new acquisition avenues would be advised to find the communalities and align with talent acquisition. Only then can they properly exploit changes in the external environment and in user behavior in a meaningful manner.

We differentiate to integrate. In the continuum of reputation-optimisation-innovation, talent acquisition is currently firmly focused on optimisation instead of further innovation.  Especially as there is a growing awareness that a greater focus on optimisation will result in a heighten reputation. (For more detail about the interplay, have a read of the post: The Anatomy of a company: skills, mindsets and harmony.) It is maybe a sign of the times, as I can see this focus on optimisation in many other companies and functions. There was and is a lot of innovation happening, but now businesses and people are separating the useful from the useless, often by creating useful adoptions and adaptations for their own purposes. Now profound change will happen everywhere.

 

 

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By Felix – May 6, 2013

No Fear!

Courtesy to Worldblu & John Firth

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By Felix – February 27, 2013

On/Off: Finding the rhythm of digital life

“Quien nunca está solo, ya no se conoce a sí mismo, y quien no se conoce a sí mismo empieza a temer el vacío”

Paulo Coelho, Manuscrito de Accra

When I was at university I spent a year in the Erasmus program studying in Málaga, Spain. Mobile phones weren’t common place, the internet as we know it still a distant dream. So I was cut off from immediate and instant communication with my family and friends. All phone contact was instigated by me, standing in a phone box with stack of 100 Pesetas coins, otherwise contact was limited to letters, which meant arranging a visit took several months. No texts about boarding, no apps to check any flights delay, just a lot of trust, tolerance, faith and leeway. Lots of time waiting, pondering and just living.

Being disconnected from my life in Germany, in a country whose language I initially struggled with, was scary. In those early days I would have loved Facebook. That said, not having it, not being connected instantly and permanently was incredibly liberating and empowering. Those experiences shaped me as a person, gave me a new understanding and appreciation of who I was and enabled me to build and nurture new friendships.

Compare that with our current set up, the ‘connected age’ and the emergence of ‘Gen C’. Tomi Ahonen describes Gen C as always connected, making decisions together, facing all of the difficulties and celebrating all the opportunities jointly. It’s all in all very positive and very desirable, isn’t it?

The instant communication, the permanent connection, also leads to a new and different pressure and stress: the anxiety of missing out. The latest Evenbase Mobile research shows that “Mobile is vital in a changing market but also contributes to an intensive, stressful job search experience”, because it gives job seekers an even greater feeling that they might miss out in this ever connected world. It heightens the anxiety and stress that they already feel.

Each one of us has our own example of when our behaviors, our beliefs have increased anxiety, when we check mobile phones repeatedly, refresh websites franticly, only to discover that life lacks the speed and urgency we desire.

Some German companies, such as VW, are disconnecting the email service on their executives’ mobile phones at weekends, as they want them to rest and recover (as Chris Shambrook & co will tell you one of the most important yet least appreciated phases for any high performer).  Some people take social media holidays. Now, whilst I am not a fan of these draconian methods, I completely understand the point they are making: They want to reconnect to the slower, natural rhythm of life.

We would be better off accepting and connecting to this pace of life instead of desperately trying to speed it up, intensify the feelings we have. The feedback/feedforward mechanism becomes the ever growing snowball. Some urgency is positive, too much urgency is detrimental. Or as the Navy Seals say: “Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.”

For me, it is not about going on social media holidays or being forced when to stop and start, that’s just like extreme yo-yo dieting and binge drinking.  For me, it is about about striking a balance between all the good things of social and mobile – such as the direct and instant person-to-person communication that brings us all closer together, experiencing the vitality across the world, sharing our knowledge, accessing the phenomenal richness of information and knowledge and the unrestricted flow of information – and the times when we are connecting with the present, the Here and Now, the people and places in our presence. The latter doesn’t signify being disconnected, but being connected in a different, often deeper, unconscious manner, finding one’s own rhythm and ultimately internalising the social/mobile connectedness at a different level.

So, if I choose to answer your email tomorrow instead of today, if I choose to update my blog only every 4 months, if I use Twitter more erratically, it isn’t a reflection on the importance of the sender or the usefulness of social media, it is just because I have chosen to integrate the digital world properly into the rhythm of (my) life.

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By Felix – January 20, 2013

Turning a global pandemic into recruitment success

Amelia Merrill is one of the most creative recruiters I know. She is right there at the outer edge of innovation and possesses the creativity of transforming ideas into workable solutions that deliver results. Amelia is the VP Talent Acquisition for Risk Management Solutions (RMS) who are owned by DMGT, the same company that owns Evenbase.  At last year’s HRTech Conference, Amelia and her team won the candidate experience award for RMS.

And she does need to be creative, because RMS is based in Silicon Valley and therefore competes for talent with the likes of Google, Facebook, and a multitude of cool and colourful start-ups.  RMS obviously doesn’t have the same brand awareness and brand recognition or the apparent attractiveness of their competitors.   So RMS has to contact a lot of people before they get one to bite.

RMS is offering sophisticated products and services for the management of catastrophe risk associated with natural perils such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and windstorms, as well as products for weather derivatives and enterprise risk management for the P&C insurance industry.

Today, RMS also leads the market in risk modelling for man-made disasters associated with acts of terrorism, and recently released the first infectious disease model to quantify and manage the risks associated with pandemic disease on the world’s population and economy.

So to build some serious brand recognition in their key recruitment market segments, Amelia and the team have come up with an ingenious solution. RMS is featured in the game “Plague Inc.” Plague Inc. is not any old game, but one of the most played games on iPhone and iPad. And RMS isn’t included in the usual advertising ways, but as a character in the game.

Have a look yourself. This video was used for the internal kick-off and explains the “Plague Inc.” to the current employees:

It is cool, isn’t it? I especially like that it is so closely linked to the actual RMS brand and its business. As Amelia Merrill explained:

“The game is challenging, fun and educational just like RMS. We could never get in front of this many people this quickly.  Over 1 million games have already been sold and they are finishing up an android version right now.  While playing the game people will see the RMS brand pop up at least 4 times and not in a cheesy way.  We are a character in the game…an expert advisor.  Lastly, our LifeRisk business actually builds similar, much more complex of course, models.  So this gives us an easy fun way to explain a part of our business to people inside and outside our industry.”

The real beauty besides the creativity is the understanding and building on some key principles of recruitment and marketing.

  • It is a great, real world example of the fact the employment branding is only a facet of the overall company brand (instead of a weird, loosely connected, separate entity)
  • It follows the traditional marketing principles of Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning & shows an in-depth understanding of the target audience.
  • It is built on the knowledge that the internal and external audience are intrinsically linked and uses this initiative to enhance and reinforce RMS’ culture – after all your employees are your most important brand ambassadors. 

But it doesn’t stop with the release of the game. Amelia Merrill and team have already planned further steps to deliver against their objectives, both internally…:

“People who have played are really excited about it.  We are about to give out free games to anyone in the company with an iPad or iPhone so they can play.  We will also be having an internal contest where an employee will create a situation which will cause the virus to react differently during game play.

… as well as externally:

“We created a game card with a code (which we just got from the printer this week) that we will be giving out at all kinds of events.  Some will be given to customers, some to employees and a lot to candidates. In addition, when anyone comes to a meeting in one of our offices they will be able to play a game while they wait for their meeting in our lobby and can of course pick up a card to download it later. “

This is smart and creative recruiting. I’m especially impressed by the stable yet flexible approach, by the understanding of the fundamentals and the multi-dimensional impacts it will generate. In time, I’m sure, it will also generate the results and deliver against the objectives Amelia Merrill and the team are aiming for.

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By Felix – September 24, 2012

Mobile recruitment: Morning Mind Control

HighBy now everybody who is interested in mobile has hopefully read David Armano’s post  ”The Future Isn’t About Mobile; It’s About Mobility“.  In it he writes:

“It’s not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility. Mobility means information, convenience and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices. Mobility is radically different from the stationary ‘desktop’ experience. In some cases, mobility is a ‘lean back’ experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be “lean forward” – like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the part. And in many cases, it’s ‘lean free’ when your body is in motion, or you’re standing in line scanning news headlines or photos while you want for your turn to be called.”

As part of a highly interesting qualitative research comparing some internet properties that we have conducted at Evenbase, mobility also made an appearance when looking at candidate behavior. Job seekers have three key pressures:

1.            Doubt, uncertainty, lack of confidence

2.            Time & effort

3.            Staying on top of the search

So all in all, it boils down to the known components of relevancy and speed (convenience) overlaid with an ineffective emotional state.

When looking at a day, the research concludes that the majority of the jobseekers, be they passive or active, are concentrating their efforts at home in the evening.  Let’s divide the day into three parts, before work, at work and after work and look at the different behaviours displayed by jobseekers in the UK & US:

Before work, mainly in the morning, is the most common time to check email alerts. Many rely solely on alerts to learn of opportunities – saves having to check the source repeatedly. Reviewing alerts often takes place on the move using mobile or tablet devices to bookmark interesting roles and positions for further research at a later time.

At work, it’s all about covert searching in downtime/lunch. Interestingly, mobile wasn’t mentioned, but LinkedIn is seen as a safe way to job search at work. Water cooler discussions can also inform the job search.

After work, this is the point when more in-depth job search is done at home in the evenings. It is also the most popular time with passive searchers who search in conjunction with recreation, such as watching TV. Passive searchers are less likely to have email alerts or feel compelled to look when they are otherwise busy.

So, depending on how you target, there is some “lean back”, “lean forward” and “lean free” mobility happening during the job search.

So when talking about mobile in the jobhunting context, as David Armano states, it really is about ‘mobility’ and not  ‘delivery via a mobile device’. It’s a matter of looking at the user journey and working out how to minimise the frustrations of the individual while in their different job hunting mode.

For example, our study showed in-depth research and job seeking happens in the evening at home. Therefore a mobile offering does not necessarily need to include the option to upload and/or alter neither CV/resume nor the ability to write a covering letter.

We also know that individuals use their commute to check job alerts, which means, in order for a busy commuter to make full use of the alert, they tend to expect details of the jobs available within the email on the move.   As internet connection might be patchy, the results need to contain enough information to allow the decision to skip or save without having to click through to a website.

Another alternative is to release an app that integrates well into job seekers’ daily behaviour, especially if users can view stored content without an internet connection.  After all the commute is used to decide ‘is this job worth more consideration in the evening’?

But beware of local differences: In the UK there is a heavier use of mobile in job search than the US, possibly as communicating on public transport is more common. And as highlighted in my last blog post, mobile in many emerging countries is mainly about SMS. So whilst the underlying principles still stand, the interface may differ significantly.

This point brings me neatly to the delivery mechanism. Instead of talking about “mobile” I find it much more helpful to refer to “touch”.  That way, we separate mobility and its part in the actual user behaviour, versus the delivery of our service via mobile devices and actually also hone in on a much bigger trend, the move away from mouse-clicks.

When designing and developing, let’s not ask “how does it work for mobile”, but “how does it work for an individual using a ‘touch’ device” (the best interface I have seen for a touch device is by CVgram.me – an Argentinian start up).

Or maybe (echoing Lee Shupp’s ‘path to singularity‘) we should already be starting to think about “gesture” – how would your service be delivered to individuals that interact with their device via gesture.  Google Goggles anyone?  Perhaps we could even go a step further and work out how to take “mind control” into consideration.

However we look at it, we will see new ideas and uses that are utterly different from those available through the internet in its current form.   In assessing the likelihood these changes will be taken up, it is especially important to remember that successful adaption relies on acceptable change – and this will always be linked to current user behaviour (sometimes this edges forward slowly, sometimes it leaps).

For the jobseekers in our study, it will involve new ideas that allow them to feel confident in achieving their objectives and which make everything so much more convenient.  At some point these new ideas will go from, as Jason Fried and David Heinemeier put it, “cool to useful”. At that point underlying behavioural principles meet with new technology developments to deliver a meaningful, even empowering service to the people. That’s what it’s all about.

Creative Commons License photo credit: h.koppdelaney

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By Felix – September 17, 2012