Recruiting Futurology

Very few things make me angry. For those that read this blog regularly you’ll know there are many things that cause me to jump on my high horse and climb on a soapbox however if you know me personally then I hope you’ll agree that there are very few things that make me genuinely gut wrenchingly angry.

A company called Etsio and their business model though are one of the very few exceptions to this rule. For those of you who have missed out on hearing about this spectacularly unscrupulous company I suggest you take at a look at these links:

http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1779/etsio-pay-to-work-for-free/

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/interns-willing-to-pay-for-work-experience/1011919.article

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/internship-company-etsio-targets-recruitment-industry/1012090.article

For those of you who haven’t got time to read about them in depth, a quick summary. Etsio acts as an agent for companies who want to charge unemployed graduates for internships. Yes you read that correctly Etsio’s clients are happy to charge desperate young people up to £200 a day for the privilege of working for them. Etsio justifies this by claiming it is “training” and not employment but the copy on their website and actual “jobs” listed paint a very different picture

It would seem that that legality of this enterprise is down to the legal semantics of the words “training” and “employee” however I think most people would agree that the morality of such an operation is slightly more clear cut

I’m writing this blog post because I’m worried that this could be the thin end of the wedge and feel very strongly that our industry needs to make a stand against such practices. Bill Boorman has set up a petition here and I hope that if you feel as strongly as I do about this you’ll sign it and encourage others in your network to do the same.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to take part in a social business round table organized by IBM and involving several other bloggers including Peter Gold and Jon Ingham. It’s really good to see the whole idea of social business being taken more seriously by more companies and at a higher organizational level. As I say in the video which IBM made as part of the event, (embedded below) essentially every company is a social company because companies contain people and people are by their very nature social! Social tools and technologies offer a fantastic ways to unleash the power of people and collaboration within businesses and I feel very strongly that it’s time for HR to step up to the mark and start facilitating rather than blocking this.

With that in mind I’m really looking forward to chairing the CIPD’s first Social Media in HR conference on the 7th December. There is a fantastic line up of speakers and I’m sure there will be much interesting debate on the day.

A few weeks ago Joey quit his job. Nothing unusual so far, I’m sure lots of other people did as well, however I bet that Joey was the only one who took a marching band in with him to accompany him handing his notice to his boss! Predictably the YouTube video of said event has already racked up nearly 3 million views and Joey has been hailed as a champion of the recession.

Perhaps the most interesting thing though were the very specific reasons Joey gives on the video for leaving which are certainly unambiguous in terms of sentiment . He clearly mentions his employer and says “they treat us like shit here”. Although this is an extreme example,  the whole episode shows how stories about employers now spread and  how easily reputations can be damaged. Not everyone resigns on  YouTube with their own band but every growing Facebook networks mean many people’s resignations are similar if slightly less spectacular “social objects”

So what was Joey’s employer doing to defend themselves against this kind of reputational damage? In a word nothing. Whatever they have done since, at the time the video went viral they were nowhere in social media or on YouTube. A visit to their corporate recruitment website reveals some stock photography and general corporate jargon about what a great employer they are. The key issue is that there is no proof. There are no videos of their employees, no authentic stories, nothing at all that could possible counter balance Joey’s video

The sad thing is having spent a great deal of time auditing corporate recruitment websites this year I can tell you this is a situation that is common to the vast majority of large employers. Very often modernizing the corporate website or embracing social media is seen as unimportant or too difficult or something for which resources are not available.

I’m sure this hotel will probably have some local recruiting difficulties that may or may not be reflected internationally. All of this will cost time and resource to fix and that time and resource will be significantly more than it would have taken to make sure their employment communications were doing what they should be doing. More than anything this shows that social media isn’t something companies can opt in or out of and the risk of ignoring how the very notion of an employer brand is changing is enormous.

Last week I spoke at the excellent UK Recruiter end of year conference and shared some of my thoughts on the forces shaping the future of the recruitment industry. I’m not going to go into any detail about the four forces I identified in this particular blog post as I’m working on a whitepaper to be published in January that will cover them pretty comprehensively. However as part of the presentation I also talked about what I believe is going to be the “Megatrend” in recruitment over the coming weeks, months and years:

I’ve always been very interested in the plethora of discussions taking place round the candidate experience topic but have been somewhat underwhelmed by a lack of tangible action that companies have taken to address the real issues. With that in mind I’m delighted to finally talk a little bit about the really smart start up I’ve been helping out over the last few months.

Mystery Applicant will be launching at the end of the month and will be providing employers with real time information and benchmarking tools that will allow them to understand and improve the experience they give to candidates throughout the recruitment process.

As part of their launch the Mystery Applicant team are running a survey aimed at anyone who has applied for a job in the UK during the last six months, in order to get a sense of how people feel they are being treated. They would be really grateful for any help in spreading the word so here is a link to pass on to anyone relevant in your networks:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22DKYZCMBQ2

If you are actually a recent job seeker or are going through the job seeking process at the moment why not give yourself a voice in the debate and fill it in as well

Finally it would seem that one of the major job boards has blinked and properly joined the social recruiting revolution. Monster pre launched a Facebook recruiting network called BeKnown this morning and on first glance it certainly isn’t a token effort. It looks like a very serious play to get into the Facebook recruitment space, a market that has been taking off recently with some interesting successes in terms of both audience growth and client case studies from companies such as Work4labs and dare I say it Branchout.

Monster’s strategy seems to be driven by a desire to capitalise on a differing audience between Facebook and LinkedIn and there is a great blog post here that goes into this in much more detail. This really isn’t surprising, as despite robust denials to the contrary, LinkedIn’s massive growth and significant monetisation of the professional network recruiting market has been a major concern for many job boards.

Inevitably I’m sure today’s launch will see the old arguments about people not wanting to use Facebook to find a new job being reiterated, particularly here in the UK. As I’ve always said though social and professional networks are just platforms and the way people use them varies massively from person to person and in recruitment terms from industry to industry. I’m currently researching Facebook recruitment case studies at the moment and there are enough out there and enough interest from the audience for Monster’s move to be a sensible one.

So is BeKnown any good and will it work? Well on first glance there is a lot I like about it but I’ll do a proper review after I’ve seen Monster on Tuesday to find out more. It is very early days though and it would be churlish to predict any kind of success at this point. Regardless of the eventual outcome though Monster have shown they understand more about social recruiting than I gave them credit for and if I was one of their traditional competitors I’d be watching BeKnown with a great deal of interest!

Well know recruiting legend Matthew Jeffery caused a bit of a stir last week when he published his vision for Recruitment 3.0. A highly abridged version appear here on ERE but it doesn’t do much justice to the full version of the article which was published in the subscription only Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. To me it is one of the best blueprints I’ve read for the future of recruitment.

So if you want to know more and want to know how to get hold of a copy of the full version of the article I suggest you watch the interview below!

About three years ago a wrote a post with the above title on the Digital Recruiting blog. You can read it here. Just to give some context, at the time LinkedIn had only just hit 1 million members in the UK and it was nowhere near as well known as it is today! Lots of people have also said the same thing with this excellent post from Hung Lee being just one example of this kind of thinking

I’ve just spotted this post on Mashable a part of which I’ve pasted in below

LinkedIn will launch a button for employers’ websites called “Apply With LinkedIn” that allows job candidates to submit their LinkedIn profiles as resumes, according to a report.

Twitter and Google have both launched new buttons this week, and now it seems LinkedIn will also introduce a new way for third-party sites to integrate its services as well.

A “source briefed on the feature” told GigaOm that the new feature, which will be displayed alongside job descriptions on partner sites, will launch later this month.

Aside from making it easier for candidates to apply for jobs, the plugin uses applicants’ data to automatically sort candidates for the employer. If a company wants more than a LinkedIn profile to vet candidates, it can use additional questions from a template (i.e. Are you willing to relocate?), add customized questions or request a cover letter. Submissions can be sent to an email address, a URL or JavaScript callback.

So definitely time to reopen the debate, what do people think? Will it catch on? Will recruiters be prepared to move with the technology or do old habits just not die? Will this effect the way people write their LinkedIn profiles and in so doing reduce its power as a non recruitment networking tool? What does this mean for Job Boards?

So many questions and I’m sure lots of opinions to go with them. There is one thing I’m sure of though, if it happens as reported this is a very significant move!