The Recruitment Ice Caps are melting...

When it comes to recruitment:

Web 2.0 (& soon to be 3.0) is polar-bear endangering climate change...compared to which the credit crunch is a mere weather front.

Recruitment may not be at the very top of many HR agendas just now - but the talent squeeze hasn''t gone away. During the noughties, candidate behaviours and expectations have changed fundamentally and for ever - regardless of the current jobs market. And that change is accelerating still...

This overview powerpoint of a recent Irish "future of recruitment conference" makes this point very well.. and is well worth a flick though...

http://show.zoho.com/embed?id=523922000000005793&SLIDE=1&P_STIME=0

Sisters are doin' HR for themselves...

Twenty years ago this week I set out on my postgrad' HR Diploma to gain IPM (now CIPD) status.

It wasn't uncommon at that time for mates to ask: "Is that not a woman's career?"
I listened not - and joined another 9 or 10 blokes on a course of around 40.
I went on to enjoy (most of) the challenges of HR enormously - only needing to handle disciplinary and dismissal cases to know it was anything other than a 'soft option.'

Roll forward twenty years to the same week... and I have just completed my first evening as a part time lecturer for the Employee Resourcing module of the self same course. Bizarre enough in itself, but guess how the male / female split looks in these much more enlightened times?

Yep, not one single male in sight, out of a class of 24.

Not a scientific study maybe, but it was a pretty surprising discovery.. As was the fact most students appeared to listen to what I had to say.

More on the still surreal development of me teaching on my old course to follow....

A whole new ball game in performance management...

Office Manager?

Struggling to motivate and manage your people?

Finding them listless and workshy?

Want to pep up the team's performance?

Simple...

Hire the Office Linebacker

You'll never look back

Enjoy >>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc9dIkWGVI0&feature=player_embedded

Are 5 minute interviews the way to go?

Life is short, certainly shorter than many interviews many of us have endured over the years.

Which is pretty much where Seth Godin is riffing at the moment (see post below) I like self-styled 'guru' Seth... a little left field, sometimes off the scale - but always thought provoking....

This most recent post of his cuts to the quick for many of us experienced in interviewing and selction.

For whilst all that competency / assessment good stuff is indeed a sound insurance policy against 'gut feel' hiring habits....

.... how many times out of 100 do we ever go against our initial assessment?

And how would we feel about widening the potential talent pool by a factor of 12 as he suggests?

It's very "twittery" I guess: "Please talk to us for 140 characters or less - and then send the next guy in on your way out please...."

It could equally be a blueprint for negotiating family gatherings and children's parties...

Blogpost: Two ways to hire (and a wrong way)

The wrong way first: interview someone for an hour. If you like them, have them interview three or four other people in your organization for an hour each.

You've invested five hours of your team's time, but really you only were looking for approval, because you'd already decided you liked the person enough to work with them for years.

All the evidence we've seen shows that this is a lousy predictor of future performance. And, let's tell the truth... if the first three people love the guy, are you really going to let the fourth, junior person veto him? Or is it just an annoying courtesy?

There are two approaches you can use as an alternative.

First, you can work with someone for months before you offer them a job. Your pool is smaller (freelancers, joint venture partners, interns) but the exposure to how they work is spectacularly different. You don't get the thrill of finding a pearl in the oyster, the "wow, I found the most incredible hire!" bragging rights. Instead, you get exactly what you expect. Organizing for this sort of hiring isn't particularly difficult, particularly in a down economy. Not surprisingly, I've had 100% success doing this.

Second, and with some controversy, you can admit that an hour interview is actually a five minute sniff test followed by 55 minutes of wasted time, multiplied by four colleagues. Tell the truth and switch to five minute interviews.

If you do five minute initial interviews, you can interview 12 times as many people for each job opening. This initial filtering takes precisely as much time as your wasted one-hour approach, but dramatically increases the chance you'll find someone you actually have good pheromone and body language connection with. After the screening, I can only encourage you to do the projects, reference checks and other serious diligence you're probably too exhausted to do after spending all those hours with one person...

This process takes a lot of work, but it definitely works. If you can interview 60 people in a day or two and then have the three best fits do projects, presentations and freelance work for you, you're way ahead of a company that interviewed only three people and fell in love with one.

The ultimate management role model....

Yes - in this of all weeks - it's big Freddie!

You can read all your Jim Collins, Tom Peters & co.. but it seems the heart of a lion matched with the thirst of a dry-throated fish is the way to go to be a great leader...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8209072.stm

Very much my kind of role model I have to say....

Hey Presto - we're all suddenly "engaged" ....

A 20% rise in engagement levels in a year - heyy, everyone's become like.. totally.. like enlightened maan.

Well maybe not, for engaged - read more grateful, less likely to be surfing amazon & ebay at lunchtime - and scared to death by the monthly unemployment figures.

I'd say that's not so much engagement as understandable pragmatism in the face of tough times.

For all those employers relying on the downturn to tackle the engagement challenge .. look out when the market turns properly and the talent squeeze starts to hurt...

Madam ZaZa predicts tears and heartbreak, as the 'engaged' jilt hitherto soul mates for new and more exciting relationships...



Here's the original source material from HR magazine:

Seven out of ten employees feel engaged in their job now, compared to 50% in November 2008, according to Best Companies.

The engagement firm set out to find how employees were feeling about the recession and discovered 33% did not feel worried about the downturn and did not think their performance had been affected - down from 38% in November.

Three in ten employers are grateful to have a job compared to two in ten back in November 2008, the survey relealed.

But in order to be more engaged, men and women both agree the things that need to change in their workplace, but order them differently.

For men it is more money (59%), more interesting work (36%) and recognition for a job well done (33%), while for women it is more money (57%), recognition (42%) and more interesting work (35%).

Jonathan Austin, CEO and founder of Best Companies, said: "With the fear of redundancy ever-present and the cost of living creeping up, money is more of a motivator for people than it might have been before. But for those organisations that do not have the luxury of digging deep into their pockets there are plenty of other ways to incentivise staff, such as flexible working which our data indicates has a significant impact on engagement levels and simply saying thank you and recognising employees' efforts can really boost morale."