“We’re sorry but we have received applications from people who
have more experience in our industry sector”

You might be familiar with the response above
or certainly something similar, there is no doubt that it is one of the most
frequently discussed topics within the world of HR recruitment and the online
forums reflect this. As a company that exclusively recruits within the HR
space, we hear professionals talk about HR being extremely transferrable
between sectors, so what is the reality and why does this view not always
translate in practise during the recruitment process?

In the majority of cases, candidates are
rejected on the basis of industry sector at CV stage. When recruiting for
accountants, lawyers or IT professionals, there is a specific skill-set
required, usually coupled with academics and a recognised qualification which
you either have or you do not but it is very clear from the CV. Recruiting in
HR is different – there is, of course, a set of skills and experience required
but the key challenge is finding someone with the right cultural fit, as many
of the core elements to any HR role are similar. It is how you deliver these,
engage with the key stakeholders and produce the results that separate the
right person from the rest of the applicants. In an environment where CV volume
is extremely high and recruitment is incredibly risk averse, the result is
often that those with industry sector experience will be invited before those
who do not.

No matter which industry is recruiting, it is
important to understand the client group; what they are like personality-wise,
their demands, their business and their priorities, as they might not reflect
what other areas of the company are like. Larger companies will have different
cultures within them, for example a sales and marketing team will be very
different to an IT team. If a bank is looking for an HR Business Partner to
support their technology team, they will often look for HR Business Partners
from technology businesses. In the same way an FMCG business might look for
someone to support their marketing function and would look within media
businesses or other creative organisations. It is in these examples where there
is the most opportunity for moving industry sector.

HR is firmly imbedded within most
organisations and, because of this, more and more people from the operational
side of the business become involved in the interview process, particularly for
senior HR professionals. This is, of course, a good thing, but it is also
another reason for industry experience to be preferred. If you are a practise
lawyer, you will have only worked in a law firm; if you are a front office
banker, you will have only worked in a bank. It is therefore reasonable for
them to ask why someone in HR could make a transition in to such a business
without experience in the sector. It could be argued that this thought reflects
a lack of understanding of the role of HR but it is for recruiters and HR
professionals to make that clear.

Bringing someone in with different industry
experience can often work fantastically well. People have moved from retail
into law firms and excelled, bringing fresh ideas and approaches to the table
and really driving improvement within the HR function. If this happens once,
the floodgates can open and an appetite for bringing in more people with
different sector experience can take place and reference made to how successful
it was last time can be made. Of course this can go the other way and as soon
as someone does not work out, this can then make the business close all doors
to people without industry experience.

We have carried out a small online poll and
the results have been interesting. We posed the question “When hiring HR
professionals, how important to you is having experience in your sector?” and
the results are shown here

This shows that opinion is divided and for
some sectors, industry experience is probably more important than others.

Article provided by:

Tim Baker,

Associate Director,

Frazer
Jones

“We’re sorry but we have received applications from people who have more experience in our industry sector”

You might be familiar with the response above or certainly something similar, there is no doubt that it is one of the most frequently discussed topics within the world of HR recruitment and the online forums reflect this. As a company that exclusively recruits within the HR space, we hear professionals talk about HR being extremely transferrable between sectors, so what is the reality and why does this view not always translate in practise during the recruitment process?

In the majority of cases, candidates are rejected on the basis of industry sector at CV stage. When recruiting for accountants, lawyers or IT professionals, there is a specific skill-set required, usually coupled with academics and a recognised qualification which you either have or you do not but it is very clear from the CV. Recruiting in HR is different – there is, of course, a set of skills and experience required but the key challenge is finding someone with the right cultural fit, as many of the core elements to any HR role are similar. It is how you deliver these, engage with the key stakeholders and produce the results that separate the right person from the rest of the applicants. In an environment where CV volume is extremely high and recruitment is incredibly risk averse, the result is often that those with industry sector experience will be invited before those who do not.

No matter which industry is recruiting, it is important to understand the client group; what they are like personality-wise, their demands, their business and their priorities, as they might not reflect what other areas of the company are like. Larger companies will have different cultures within them, for example a sales and marketing team will be very different to an IT team. If a bank is looking for an HR Business Partner to support their technology team, they will often look for HR Business Partners from technology businesses. In the same way an FMCG business might look for someone to support their marketing function and would look within media businesses or other creative organisations. It is in these examples where there is the most opportunity for moving industry sector.

HR is firmly imbedded within most organisations and, because of this, more and more people from the operational side of the business become involved in the interview process, particularly for senior HR professionals. This is, of course, a good thing, but it is also another reason for industry experience to be preferred. If you are a practise lawyer, you will have only worked in a law firm; if you are a front office banker, you will have only worked in a bank. It is therefore reasonable for them to ask why someone in HR could make a transition in to such a business without experience in the sector. It could be argued that this thought reflects a lack of understanding of the role of HR but it is for recruiters and HR professionals to make that clear.

Bringing someone in with different industry experience can often work fantastically well. People have moved from retail into law firms and excelled, bringing fresh ideas and approaches to the table and really driving improvement within the HR function. If this happens once, the floodgates can open and an appetite for bringing in more people with different sector experience can take place and reference made to how successful it was last time can be made. Of course this can go the other way and as soon as someone does not work out, this can then make the business close all doors to people without industry experience.

We have carried out a small online poll and the results have been interesting. We posed the question “When hiring HR professionals, how important to you is having experience in your sector?” and the results are shown here

This shows that opinion is divided and for some sectors, industry experience is probably more important than others.

Article provided by:

Tim Baker,
Associate Director,
Frazer Jones

Many people still claim they ‘don’t get’ Twitter. Nonetheless, the social networking site is a global force to be reckoned with, now claiming 100 million users. If you thought Twitter was just about those annoying updates on people’s daily lives, however, it is worth a closer look.

Whilst Twitter is often used as a marketing tool to monitor customer and candidate experience and opinions, we conducted an experiment on Twitter to see how many Tweets relate to the world that we work in: employment. Using a small number of key terms to search over a two-week period, we were amazed at how many Tweets related to employment (37,113), hire (39,772), vacancy (20,186), job (36,842) and career (33,761). Obviously there was a lot of rubbish in there, but a cursory screening pulled out some nuggets which illustrate why Twitter with other social media is important in our industry.

Firstly, we found recruiters and HR teams are using Tweets to attract not just unskilled, but very senior people, reaching audiences around the globe:

“New In-House Position Well recognised MNC seeking to hire senior level construction lawyer to be based in Hong Kong”

“Featured Job: European Head of Human Resources: London – Our client is a leading niche financial services company”

Twitter also leverages established personal networks to connect people with common backgrounds, education and interests. People with rare talent such as “An enthusiastic PhD student who is interested in the study of protein folding” hope their connections can lead them to a new role.

At the general level, Tweets are a fantastic ‘vox pop’ which highlights issues of concern to employees: “Too much stress. Hated the hours. Got another job I liked more”, or “I gotta find a job where parking is free”. In these examples, the employer remained anonymous; yet there are examples where employer brands are openly criticised: “Don’t understand how Grand America HR hires 100+ people without papers. Isn’t their job to hire legal workers in the first place?” Contrast that to the accolade another employer received, complete with a link to a Facebook fan page where comments compared them to other employers: “Great Job OPH-Addison. Here is some of what your new Associates are saying about their experience at OPH”.

140 characters. Not a lot of words, but potentially a wealth of intelligence and talent.

For more information on how to harvest Digital Domain insight from Twitter, contact Jane Kirk on +44(0) 161 927 5070 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting +44(0) 161 927 5070 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or at jane.kirk@armstrongcraven.com

Article provided by:

Jane Kirk,
,
Armstrong Craven

The chances are that if you’re responsible for recruitment or HR in your organisation, you’re frequently being asked to recruit smarter and cheaper. How can you ensure you continue to field the best candidates, whilst reducing the overall cost of hire?

Generally, the most expensive part of the recruitment cycle, by far, is candidate attraction – recruitment agencies, job boards and conventional advertising don’t come cheap. The best way to cut costs is therefore to build a “talent pool” which can be trawled whenever a vacancy crops up. Your talent pool may well comprise two distinct categories – internal and external.

External talent pools

The external talent pool will include promising candidates who were unsuccessful in applying for a previous role, or those who didn’t fit a specific job specification. Ideally, your online recruitment system will allow you to flag these candidates, in the online equivalent of “keeping their details on file”. Prospective applications, which have been pre-screened by recruiters, can also be added to the talent pool.

Internal talent pools

The internal talent pool is effectively a record of current staff, with details of who might be suitable for promotion to a different role in the future – this is often referred to as a talent map, and overlaps with succession planning. The ability to integrate this with recruitment functions is very powerful – the inability to quickly compare both internal and external candidates can waste time or even result in promising individuals being overlooked altogether.

Now, all you have to do is to search the talent pool for a suitable candidate, when that urgent requirement from the managing director lands on your desk. However, when a large number of recruiters or line managers are involved, staff training may be needed to ensure that everyone examines the talent pool first. This is where there can be real value in enshrining a workflow into your ATS or recruitment system, which forces recruiters to first search internally, before they choose higher cost options such as traditional agencies. If your online recruitment allows you to define a “least-cost cycle” in this way, the savings can be considerable.

With a sophisticated e-recruitment solution, this approach can be extended to follow a series of different publishing and candidate attraction methods in sequence, such as the corporate intranet, corporate website, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and of course LinkedIn. Only once these channels have been exhausted, do conventional higher cost candidate sources need to be invoked.

If you would like further advice on how to get the most out of these techniques, or details of a suitable online recruitment platform which can provide all of the above functionality, please contact Simon on 020 7489 2186 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 020 7489 2186 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

Article provided by:

Simon Woolf,
Business Development Director,
Konetic Ltd

When organisations complain that they cannot get the skills they need and are hampered by by their inability to ‘import ‘ talent from abroad, they need to step back and see how they can grow their own capabilities for long-term success. More often than not, CEOs complain to us that their bench strength is insufficient, yet many insist on promoting employees on the basis of ‘craft skills’ alone. This should be avoided as leadership requires much more than this and invariably organisational performance suffers.

Our tip is to take a futuristic approach by taking a strategic look at the future needs of the business and to identify the key roles and ‘pools ‘of jobs required for organisational success. You need to either design or review your competency framework to provide an objective basis for assessment, development and, if required, recruitment. Once a pool of potential candidates is identified, we would recommend a capability development centre is designed to assess the participants against your required competencies.

When this objective data is gathered it can be compared against actual performance and appraisal data to identify high potential. We call this a ‘Bench Strength Review.’ At the same time individual participants can be given their personal development plan from which to begin the capability development process.

Is it worthwhile in such unpredictable times? Well, without a succession plan you risk failing to identify and harness your best talent. Or worse, your competitors reach out and attract your best talent leaving your organisation back at square one!

We have prepared a more detailed paper on succession planning. If you would like a copy please call, Matthew Davis on 02380 236944 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 02380 236944 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or email medavis@ramseyhall.com

Article provided by:

Matthew Davis,
,
Ramsey Hall

When organisations complain that they cannot get the skills they need and are hampered by by their inability to ‘import ‘ talent from abroad, they need to step back and see how they can grow their own capabilities for long-term success. More often than not, CEOs complain to us that their bench strength is insufficient, yet many insist on promoting employees on the basis of ‘craft skills’ alone. This should be avoided as leadership requires much more than this and invariably organisational performance suffers.

Our tip is to take a futuristic approach by taking a strategic look at the future needs of the business and to identify the key roles and ‘pools ‘of jobs required for organisational success. You need to either design or review your competency framework to provide an objective basis for assessment, development and, if required, recruitment. Once a pool of potential candidates is identified, we would recommend a capability development centre is designed to assess the participants against your required competencies.

When this objective data is gathered it can be compared against actual performance and appraisal data to identify high potential. We call this a ‘Bench Strength Review.’ At the same time individual participants can be given their personal development plan from which to begin the capability development process.

Is it worthwhile in such unpredictable times? Well, without a succession plan you risk failing to identify and harness your best talent. Or worse, your competitors reach out and attract your best talent leaving your organisation back at square one!

We have prepared a more detailed paper on succession planning. If you would like a copy please call, Matthew Davis on 02380 236944 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 02380 236944 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or email medavis@ramseyhall.com

Article provided by:

Matthew Davis,
,
Ramsey Hall

It’s important to appreciate that what people fear most is the unknown. Consequently, they will not be motivated if they’re feeling scared or suspicious about the current climate and what it could lead to. For this reason, keeping everyone informed is key. Let your staff know what you are doing and what plans you have in place. Discuss your plan B and communicate to your team how that plan will involve making sure everyone is aligned and knows what they’re doing and then engage them by getting their ideas and input. Forward thinking companies will also have plans C and D thought out, so inform everyone that these exist to show that you have planned how you will take more control and carry out damage limitation, should the need arise. Revisit this on a regular basis so that everyone feels reassured that you have everything under control.

It’s the management team’s duty to keep everyone focussed and encourage open communication. Additionally, organisations should be aware that younger members of staff who have joined the workforce since 2003 may not have ever worked through difficult markets and may therefore find themselves in an unfamiliar, and perhaps scary, situation. Mentoring and buddy schemes are a great way of overcoming these issues and can allow employees to share knowledge and experiences to hopefully diffuse any worries that may be present. Combine this with training and coaching to arm your staff with the skills they need to work effectively, if they don’t have the knowledge in place to succeed in their role, their motivation and confidence levels will remain low.

We asked some of our specialist trainers for their top tips too.

• Helen Harvey recommends making the working environment a more pleasant one and concentrating on making the workplace somewhere that people want to be. “Send the team weekly update emails on successes and publicly thank, acknowledge and praise people for a job well done. These things may sound small but they can have a big impact. In the same way, make sure your team feels valued – ask people for their input and give them your time, it doesn’t cost anything! It’s also important to make an effort when it comes to matters that aren’t work related – sending birthday cards, organising team outings and taking an interest in people’s lives outside of work can help both retention and team motivation.”
• Angela Cripps agrees that praise is important. “Give recognition loudly!” she advises. “Make sure everyone knows when someone’s done a good job, but especially make sure that the right person gets the recognition. And celebrate the minor victories as well as the major ones. It’s also important that if you ask someone to do something, you follow it up. There’s nothing more de-motivating than being asked to produce a piece of work or achieve a certain target, only for no-one to notice that it’s been done. All that goes through that person’s head is ‘What was the point? I won’t do that again’. Remember, it helps you too, as people do what you inspect… not what you expect!”
• Toby Buckle takes an alternative approach and says that it’s necessary to re-assess how you motivate yourself. He comments “There are two forms of motivation. One is getting away from the negative and the other is looking towards the positive. The key is finding out which works better for you. For example are you motivated by the fact working harder may help you keep your job or by the fact that you want a promotion? If one isn’t working, look to the other.”

Even when times are hard, lead by example; try to maintain an upbeat attitude – keeping morale high is one of the ‘vital signs’ of a healthy organisation.Your team will feel reassured and motivated to know that their company is investing time and effort in communicating with them and is confident and ready to deal with any potential problems. With clear and strong leadership in place, people will know that the senior management team is aware of any potential problems and is handling them effectively. All of this will combine to create a tight, dynamic and motivated team.

Article provided by:

Fiona Lander,
,
Lander Associates

I am meeting more and more highly talented HR professionals who are seeking part-time employment. While many organisations extol the virtues of work-life balance and buy into flexible working practices, it seems that the reality of seeking part-time work can be challenging.

One group that often seeks part-time work is parents returning to work after parental leave. It would appear that the majority of organisations are open to parents returning part-time but that individuals frequently find themselves in a different role to the one that they left. Sometimes, this role will be less challenging or less strategic than the previous one, which can be a cause of frustration for the employee.

On the part of organisations, they may feel that business-facing or strategic roles are full-time by commercial necessity.

Some organisations and employees reach a compromise, perhaps offering the same role on a reduced hours basis. The danger is that this can lead to individuals trying to do five days work in fewer days and becoming a slave to the blackberry. Clear boundaries need to be identified.

One solution is to consider job sharing.

There are a few things that the organisation will need to consider when introducing a job share. During the recruitment process (internal or external), you should aim to choose candidates that can work together well, and have complementary skills and experience.

Once the job sharers are in place, you need to ensure that:

work is divided fairly

there are clear lines of responsibility

the job sharers have clear lines of communication between themselves to ensure continuity

There are several benefits to the employer:

Retention of high performing employees who can no longer work full-time and may otherwise leave

A wider, and often complementary, range of skills, experience, views and ideas

Increased flexibility to meet increases in demand

Greater continuity during absences, eg holiday or sickness

A potential reduction in sickness, absenteeism and stress

For the individual, the benefits are the ability to perform in a challenging role at the appropriate level on a part-time basis.

Employers are under increasing pressure to find new and more flexible ways of offering employment and the introduction of job sharing arrangements can add so much.

The recruitment industry can play a vital role in this by encouraging part-time workers to consider finding a job-share partner and by helping them partner with individuals that complement their own skills, experience and aspirations.

Article provided by:

Alison Hughes,
,
Higher Talent

Demand for staff slips back

Demand for new staff fell by one point in September, with a Reed Job Index reading of 121.

However, this is a year-on-year rise in demand of 16% compared to September 2010.

The Salary Index, reflecting pay rates being advertised, remained steady from August at 97 points, three points below its December 2009 level.

With more and more companies bringing recruitment in-house, the importance of having a well-designed and functionally rich recruitment website has never been so important. Here are some tips to help make your recruitment area shine:

1.In order to attract the best candidates, make sure your website is not hidden away within the main corporate website. To become an employer of choice you must strengthen your image in the marketplace. Invest as much time and money into developing your recruitment website as possible. It is just as hard to attract traffic to your recruitment pages as with your commercial pages, so you need to dedicate the same amount of effort.

2.It is important to develop an exciting website that shows candidates what it is like to work for you and promotes the benefits and culture. Candidate testimonials, blogs, galleries and video are some of the great ways to do this. However, there has been a tendency over the last few years for websites to have great content but offer little in the way of candidate services. Sites need to be balanced, with actual recruitment features that you would often associate with job boards or agency sites.

3.To aid that balance, build your website on a strong applicant tracking system (ATS) or recruitment platform. The website will operate a lot better than self-built portals and will provider a higher level of recruitment functionality to improve the overall candidate experience.

4.A good website should be designed to maximise accessibility, usability and be optimised for the major search engines. You might also want to consider combining a content management system into the website so that authorised employees can upload and edit content themselves. These pages can often also be maintained through your ATS.

5.Ensure your corporate brand is protected. Make sure any ATS powered career pages perfectly match your brand guidelines and existing website. Every detail should be looked at including the URL used for the career portal. You do not want to put candidates off registering and shake their confidence by making it obvious they are registering on an external system or site.

6.Managing the overall candidate experience is key to ensuring candidates return to your site. Even candidates that may not be suitable should come away with a positive experience. Intuitive navigation (the ‘3 clicks’ rule) and easy-to-use tools will ensure an enjoyable recruitment experience for both applicants and hiring managers. Your chosen ATS should enable you to deliver powerful and intuitive self-service portals to candidates, hiring managers and agencies (on your PSL) alike.

7.The registration process should be simple and allow for speculative applications as well as direct applications. Incorporating CV parsing into your portal makes life easier for candidates and dramatically reduces drop-off rate while increasing your talent pool organically. When a suitable position then comes available, you can use the searching technology in your ATS to identify suitable candidates and send them a personalised message via email or SMS. Plus by having a searchable talent pool, you can reduce recruitment costs such as advertising and agency spend – this will also shorten time to hire and ensure business continuity.

8.You should introduce automated processes such as allowing job seekers to sign up for intelligent job alerts matched to their profile, or SMS alerts of upcoming interviews / events. Online scheduling for interviews and assessment centres should be available through the career portal as well as useful information and downloads.

9.If you choose to develop a mobile (touch) version of your website, make sure it will work across all smartphone platforms. When developing mobile sites or apps, many companies choose to offer a smaller version of their main website, but this does not offer the mobile user the full experience. Being truly web-based and browser-independent, an Eploy® powered recruitment website for example can offer the candidates and hiring manager’s full access and often negate the need to develop a cut-down app version at all.

10.Feed your Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and blog pages into your website via live RSS feeds. RSS feeds from your ATS can also be used in reverse, to add content to your social channels. Encourage candidates to promote your jobs through their own social channels, all tracked through your ATS. Make sure that any social networks utilised are monitored for negative feedback so that you can respond quickly and rectify any issues.

Finally, remember your website is not just a shop window – it is a communication tool for candidates and staff. If it is designed well, it will work hard for you. The site will help to reduce administration procedures and allow recruiters and hiring managers to conduct most of the legwork involved in recruitment online in an efficient and coherent way.

To discuss how Eploy can help streamline your recruitment website, please call 0800 073 4243 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0800 073 4243 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or visit www.eploy.co.uk

Christopher Bogh,
Technical Director,

HR recruitment remained steady throughout the summer. There were fewer new roles coming on to the market in July and August as many people enjoyed a well-earned rest with the family. We have found the first couple of weeks back slightly quiet and suspect that many City folk have taken their summer holidays a little later this year.

We anticipate an active autumn with many of our clients looking to fill roles on a permanent and interim basis. However, we foresee the interim market becoming a little more active than the permanent market for the end of 2011. Our thinking is formulated by the following:

• The seasonal nature of the corporate event cycle ensures there is a steady demand in Q4 2011 and Q1 in 2012 for HR interim help
• HR Interims continue to play a vital role as temporary replacements in cases of maternity or unpaid leave situations
• HR Interims have a vital role, as subject matter experts, in leading specific corporate agenda projects such as major change programmes and establishing businesses in new countries for our international clients
• The lack of overall confidence in the recruitment marketplace means that companies are more inclined to employ someone on an interim basis rather than permanently, at this time
• This has in turn led to a proliferation of fixed term contract roles, for various reasons, which can be unhelpful from a fiscal and legal point of view, to those already formally established as career interims

On the permanent side, we anticipate more senior level HR searches on the market, seeking both Heads of HR and appointments one level below. It is still a candidate-driven market at this level, with many talented HR professionals staying put and, in particular, waiting for anticipated bonuses as we approach the end of 2011.

Article provided by:

Alison Hughes,
,
Higher Talent