Vote for Best UK Recruitment Blog of 2007

My friend and yours, Louise over at uk:recruiter, has had a jolly good idea and set up a vote for the Best UK Recruitment Blog of 2007. The voting list can be found here.

Yours truly is on the list, but I can say I won't be voting for myself. In fact it'd be remiss of me not to suggest that you vote for Louise herself, as her blog has been one of the highlights of the blogging scene for me in 2007.

There's lots of good blogs on there, and doubtless a great many more who just aren't on the list yet. When I started reading blogs (over 2 years ago now) there were very few I could find with any sort of recruitment bent. The growth in numbers represents both the staggering speed with which blogging and 'Web 2.0' is changing the way we do business and the ability of recruitment professionals to buck the outdated trends of their fore bearers and embrace the times.

I've had a great 2007 and hope everyone reading this has too. Here's to an even better 2008!

Apologies! (And Merry Christmas!)

I'm really sorry everybody, I meant to write a post after the Christmas party but before the Christmas break but never got round to it; how rubbish of me!

So apologies for the unexpected and overly long break and (better late than never):

Merry Christmas!!

I hope everybody had a good one, I'll be back with more content in the New Year!

Party time!

So we've got our Christmas party on Saturday. I know there's a variety of stories in the papers at this time of year about offices banning parties for fear of causing offence to non-Christians, others ranting about political correctness gone mad and so on but to be honest I'm of the opinion that the party we have every year doesn't do any harm (except to people's livers). I am aware of the offence such a tradition could cause though, and the inequities and inequalities in most workplaces regarding religious holidays and the like. I still think it would be a shame to lose our December-time shindig though, as it's so good for morale, getting to know colleagues, relaxing after a hard year etc. It's not that we don't socialise any other time (we do with regularity) but I'd say that the Christmas party is the one social event that everyone comes to.

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this though, all comments welcome or email me on james at omnirms dot com if that suits better (just trying to avoid the spam bots harvesting my email there; if you do email just remember to change 'at' to '@' and 'dot' to the traditional full stop mark, like this '.')

Anyway, our party is going to be in Manchester city centre. The place is called Manchester235 and we've got a traditional turkey dinner in one of the restaurants, followed by drinks, dancing and gambling in the casino and bars. Should be great, thoroughly looking forward to it (although, less looking forward to having to buy a new suit, as I tore the one I was going to wear so have to brave the Saturday shopping traffic!)

About Omni (Squidoo)

I get quite a few people asking me to tell them more about Omni and what we do, particularly the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) part, pretty regularly. Rather than bleat on about it repeatedly therefore, I decided it would be a good idea to have a place (other than the website) that I could direct people to. With that in mind I created a Squidoo Lens for Omni.

Squidoo is a great site set up by (amongst others) Seth Godin. It allows people to create a 'lens' (essentially a micro website) on any topic they fancy. There are lenses about pretty much everything, including (but definitely not limited to) art, religion, Humphrey Bogart and Manga.

Building a lens is easy (although creating the content is obviously as tough as creating content for anything is - for help with that see this lens). The 'technical' side of things takes less than half an hour though.

Here's the Omni lens. It answers as many questions as I could think of about Omni and hopefully should prove useful for people. If there's anything that you think should be in there but isn't, then just let me know!

New Omni client: May Gurney!

Well things have been wrapped up even more promptly than I expected them to be, so as hinted at yesterday, I'm pleased to announce the signing of a brand new Omni client!

The lucky people at May Gurney, one of the UKs most successful construction services companies, will soon get to talk to our wonderful account management team everyday! This is a fantastic client win for us and will in fact likely be the biggest on our books, in terms of numbers of hires etc.

This was also a really quick one in terms of sales life cycle, thanks to a combination of hard work from the sales team (Luci and Howard especially) and real organisation and diligence from the guys over at May Gurney (Sarah particularly helped things run as smoothly as possible). We're pleased that we managed to convince them we were the right organisation to partner with (there were a couple of others in the running) and really excited about starting working with them.

This is hopefully just one of many new clients I'll have the pleasure of announcing here over the coming months; 2008 looks like being easily our busiest year yet. Every new one we sign up is special too, as it goes some way to helping us achieve our ambition of improving recruitment for the whole world! (No harm in thinking big!)

So hi again to May Gurney, and here's to a fruitful and fun relationship for all concerned!

Exciting client news...

I'm pleased to say that I should have a great, client-related announcement to make soon. As I've mentioned before, we've been busy on the new client side recently and although I won't count any chickens etc right now, we're confident that we'll be saying hello to someone officially very soon.

Watch this space!

Creativity, Copyright and Presentations

I want to point you to something today that aptly illustrates 2 things that I can frequently be found ranting about: the woeful state of our arcane copyright laws and the prevalence of terrible presentations. Whilst both are worthy of a standalone post of their own, that will be for another day. Here, I'm relying on Larry Lessig to effectively combine the 2.

This video is of a recent TED talk by Lessig on the effect that copyright laws are having on creativity. Lessig asserts that creativity is being stifled and that we are moving from a 'read-write' culture (i.e. creative) to a 'read-only' culture (where people simply 'consume'). I think he's spot on with this and the law is falling way behind the times. If it fails to catch up soon we are essentially criminalising the majority of people born after 1980 (Gen Y) who are IT and web savvy and keen to express themselves via social media, blogs, user generated content (UGC) and the like. Lessig's comparison with the common-sense approach taken to repeal outdated property laws in relation to land is effective and apt.

That brings me nicely to the second part of my rant; that you just don't see a lot of good presentations. I must have seen 40+ presentations from potential suppliers and many more at conferences, university etc. Yet I could count the number of good presentations I've seen on one hand (in fact only 2 stand out of real note - Noam Chomsky when I was at university and a talk by Jeff Pfeffer on Evidence Based Management at a Chicago based HR and IT conference). Even my colleagues are inclined to give bad presentations (despite my frequent desperate pleas to change things) because it's just the way things are done. My argument that your typical PowerPoint, death by bullets presentation is boring and ineffective is met by the counter-argument that everybody does it that way, so it must work.

Yet in this world of terrible presentations, poor presenters and horrific slideware, there is hope. Not many people embody that hope as well as Larry Lessig. Watch his talk; I promise it'll be time well spent. He is passionate, articulate and funny. He has great slides (his style of slideware is in fact famous, and there's a presentation method named after him, The "Lessig Method"). He commands the room and steers the audience to his way of thinking, whilst as a viewer you take a tonne of information away with you, surely the ultimate goal of any presentation.

I promise I'll put up some separate posts on presentation and copyright more generally, when I get round to writing them! Also, here is probably a good time to point out that despite the lack of widget on the subject, anything you read here is under this Creative Commons License. That means you can copy it, print it out, link to it etc with appropriate attribution. Basically you can't take it and charge for it, or alter it. For more information about Creative Commons check out the site.

Quote of the Day

The most important thing a leader does is set the example. In many ways that's the only thing a leader does.

Wally - on it, as ever.

Motivating Generation Y...

(Pic credit: gapingvoid.com)

Generation Y, or Gen Y, are the youngsters in the workforce. It’s a bit of an Americanism (often the worst kind of business-speak anachronism) but it’s becoming common parlance, and therefore worthy of some attention.

So to break it down, here are some definitions to start with if you're not familiar with the term. First up we have the Baby Boomers, then Generation X and now Generation Y.

Born in 1981 myself (I’m 26 in a couple of weeks, 17th December if you want to send a present…) I’m in Gen Y, just! I should therefore be fully up to speed with my own generation and emotionally intelligent enough to understand my elders too, if the definitions are to be believed. There’s been a lot written on the subject and whilst some of it is accurate (common sense you might even say) some is as out of kilter as you can get, not totally surprising given that all 3 terms are seriously sweeping generalisations. I read an article today though that came to me from Reuters, via Wally Bock. It lit a bit of a creative fire in me, so I decided I’d tackle the subject myself briefly.

First up, the Reuters article.

From that we glean some useful tips. Younger workers want positive engagement. They need praise, recognition and “patting on the head”. Older workers couldn’t care less about that apparently; the boomers want “clear direction” instead. Apparently they’re “past” looking for praise.

Anecdotally this may well have some backing too. Ask around your office and see what people think (particularly any emotionally intelligent managers responsible for boomers, X-ers and Y-ers).

Yet it is clearly a simplification. Rather than just requiring ‘praise’ per se, I would argue that Gen Y are the group most likely to want to do meaningful work that adds value (sweeping generalisation and simplification in itself I know, but bear with me!) This need for ‘meaning’ can’t be fulfilled in all roles; not everyone can have a job that gives them that warm fuzzy feeling that an assuaged social conscience can. So the praise and recognition can act as a replacement for this.

Additionally, Gen Y is the teamwork generation. Y-ers are more likely than boomers or X-ers to embrace collaborative working and the possibilities that the hive mind offers. This team ethos is predicated on praise and recognition, a team can’t survive and succeed if everyone is busy working away for their own benefit and never stopping to say well done to others in the group.

So whilst the article may broadly be reporting an accurate picture of the generations, I can't help but feel it's missing a trick by not looking at why Y-ers want praise (the article seems simply to point out the trend and suggest that boomer or X-er managers should be exploiting it). My biggest problem with the article though, is the following line:

Generation Y are portrayed as self-centered and demanding in the workplace -- and it's all true

This isn’t the case to my mind. In reality Gen Y believe in endless possibilities and are inherently optimistic. This optimism could be perceived as selfish (trying to change the status quo, seemingly for their own benefit) but in actual fact it’s massively egalitarian. Gen Y wants to change the status quo for sure, but they have a bigger picture in their sights; Gen Y truly wants to change the world! There’s a guest post on Penelope’s blog that expresses this confusion a lot better than I can, so have a read of that.

As a Gen Y-er I’m naturally inclined to defend my peers, so apologies for the natural bias there. But I truly believe that the new trends in business for collaboration, transparency, trust, happiness at work, creativity, innovation, social responsibility and so on are going to define the coming years. These trends are most associated with Gen Y, but there’s plenty of X-ers and boomers who buy into them too. So in true Gen Y style, I’m keen to work with these people to make these modern methods the norm.

The Reuters article raises an interesting point, but misses the crux of things for me. Rather than pointing out differences for the sake of it why doesn't it instead highlight how the gaps in each generations skill set could be negated by co-operation. Surely the ideal team is driven by relentless Y-ers, grounded by realistic X-ers and guided by experienced (open-minded) boomers?

As the cartoon above (by the imperious X-er Hugh) attests, change isn't what you should be afraid of.

3 Recruitment Tips

Today I want to put my 3 best recruitment tips out there for people. These are the simple ones; there's a tonne of other stuff you could do. However if you start with these 3 you'll be on the right track.

1. Focus on 'direct' recruitment. That is, rather than relying on recruitment agencies and search and selection companies (headhunters) to provide you with potential candidates, find them yourself. You can do this by giving the job to someone in HR (make it their main role though), or by engaging an RPO like Omni, AMS, RPO Solutions etc. There should be adverts on the major job boards (like Monster, Jobserve etc) that you put out there, branded with your logo and driving candidates to your site and your info, not an agency.

2. Improve your recruitment selection process. Even if it's good, it can be great. Make sure that screening is done properly (again, either by an appropriate HR or recruiting partner, or by an RPO) and that CVs are reviewed efficiently. Then make sure you have a clearly defined process including telephone screening, any testing and face-to-face interviews. You should not have more than a 3 stage process, maximum. That would be 1- telephone screen 2- testing 3- face-to-face interview. If you can get your testing process online you can add a second face-to-face stage. Otherwise you just annoy candidates.

[Note: it should go without saying that your selection process should fall into line with all relevant employment legislation and HR mandates on things like discrimination etc]

3. Build your Employer Brand. This is very different from your corporate brand. Your corporate brand (i.e. the one you sell to customers) might be of tradition and authority. But your offices might be fun, creative and vibrant places. If you sell to potential employees that you're traditional, authoritarian, grey, when in actual fact you're cool, innovative and bright red, then you're missing a trick (and probably a heck of a lot of potential superstars).

This is a really brief post of something that is a much bigger story. If you're interested in improving your recruitment process across the board (and no it won't require you spending hundreds of thousands on 'consultancy' and revamps and the like) then I'd love to hear from you. I'll either be able to help myself, which will brighten up my day no end, or I'll be able to point you towards someone who can. This may be a colleague here at Omni, but it may just as likely be a 'competitor' or other brand; I get a kick out of helping however I do it.