Reed’s own index of vacancies fell 2% in comparison to March which was itself down against the figures supplied for February.

I’ve long been a fan of the Government’s plan to reduce the wage bill on the Public sector, however, I do feel that they need to do a lot more to stimulate the Private sector.

Visiting the Reed.co.uk website to view its homepage will itself highlight the extent of our ‘Private Sector’. We are so dependent upon  such a small number of firms to engage our Public sector workers that I fail to see how the two will marry in the middle.

I know that jobsites are not the greatest way of judging employment trends, but I think that Reed in particular showcase the problem brilliantly.

Their sponsored home page clients include:

Lloyds TSB

Churchill Insurance

Santander

Tesco

Direct Line

Nationwide Building Society

Now, I don’t think you have to be an employment trend expert to realize the problem with our ‘Private Sector’ it’s basically all linked to big, big companies who wish to grow their businesses even further. We’re talking the Big Supermarkets, the Big Banks, the Big Utility firms (Water Companies, Electricity, Gas)

Where are the great firms that we were promised would be born out of the recession? Where are the next big names coming from? Where are the firms that in five years time will be employing and creating opportunity for 5,000+ people? If we are to remain completely dependent upon Tesco and the ilk picking up our public sector fall out then surely we have to review the system?

The ex-Public Sector workforce present big problems for potential employers, in many cases the public sector workforce don’t get the Private sector, they don’t understand how it works and when you consider many people are going to be in their 40s and onwards its going to be a difficult lesson to learn.  They need to showcase commercial acumen, and embrace the values and the brand of their potential new employer.

I hope that Reed’s findings are only relevant because of the obscure nature of Easter and the Royal Wedding and we return to some normality, but I really home that we begin to see Leading Employers of the future, soon. Very soon.

I’m currently working on a number of retail related projects and came across their website and of course, more importantly their (careers website). First impressions are it’s a bit much, but that’s down to design and marketing experts.

The job search is a bit much as well. Having spoken to a lot of ATS experts recently this seems to go against the trend where ease of use and functionality should be the main driver.

And then there is the open invitation to connect via the World’s favourite Social Network – to take the 3 Employer Brand to the masses on Facebook. This is a great thing to do, BUT you have to do it right. And 3, I am afraid you got it WRONG.

You can not do this half hearted, open up the doors you have to expect that people will come flooding in, and flood in they did.

Here are some comments; you will see a complete disarray of lack of knowledge of who does the recruitment, who is responsible, store managers? The website? Auto responses? ‘Check the website’, unanswered (seemingly suitable candidates)

This does nothing other than damage your appeal to peoples desire to work for your firm, and you should act, and act fast or speak to anyone of the experts that I follow on Twitter who will have this sorted and fast!

3 you tried a great thing, but social recruiting when done badly can have long-term damage and side effects to your brand as an employer in the market and I’d recommend that you give your Facebook page the respect it deserves as you clearly have a lot of ‘unhappy’ customers.

Anyone have any thoughts on 3’s attempts at Social Recruiting?

I want to write a blog entry today about high street employers and how and why they are so important. We are facing an unprecedented problem with the country’s working population and with retail spending remaining almost consistent (give or take one or two percent) the retail firms on the high street are doing very well. They are expanding (and creating jobs), they are investing in improved stores and they are becoming real possibilities for graduates and the unemployed to build a career.

Over recent days, weeks, and months I have been working with one of the leading luxury brands within the fashion industry and have been guiding them on ‘retail’ recruitment, i.e. people who work in the stores. From my reckoning of reviewing the figures they have close to 40% staff turnover and I am advised that this is pretty much the norm.

So the question is are the Retailers doing the right thing? Are they recruiting the right people? Are they managing expectations correctly? Are they unable or unwilling to help the individual grow in the career and job? Or is it a case of the retailers are viewed as a safe way to get a ‘job’ and in fact the people are missing the very opportunity available if they invest in their careers with the high street employers?

Lots are written and bounded around about major retailers; from the now infamous McJob (oh, how McD’s laugh loudest now) to the recent revelation that JD Weatherspoons are recruiting a few thousand 16/17 year olds who will have their own pubs within five years but do these retailers really communicate their ability to offer a career?

Personally I think they are missing a trick, these retailers are so important to both our employment and economic stability and they need to surely recruit the best people. Stop recruiting people who can ‘do the job’ and start investing from a very early stage. In this weeks’ press Sir Phillip Green has been causing some interesting debates regarding cost cuttings and in response to Margaret Green (Labour MP) Sir Phillip stated that Arcadia pays a staggering £12,000,000 a day in taxation. It is clear that there is still a vast amount of money and opportunity within these High Street Firms.

So, how do they find the talent? Job Sites, Career Sites, Job Fairs, Stickers in windows? They need to realise that the recruitment of staff is vital to its future – great products with substandard service still means a poor retail experience and if you are relying on someone walking past your store to see the window ad for a person to join the team that you can not surely claim that you are investing the right levels of commitment to recruiting the ‘best’ person.

So, shame on you Tie Rack for this appalling method of recruiting a new member for your team in your Bristol store that I saw earlier this week. This is just awful and I hope that you are not lucky enough to find someone who happened to be walking past and who was so desperate to ‘get a job’ that they walked in off that advert.

I hope that as the retailers begin to understand their role in the recovery of our job and financial economy that they begin to invest in their recruitment as much as selling their products.

Not being one to let something go, I’ve felt compelled to have another go at it, and to question the point of it?

Having spoken at length yesterday with @alexhens (A great person to follow for those who don’t on Twitter).

What it appears to be is that these firms aren’t actually recruitment firms at all, or is that what we’ve now become? Has recruitment gone full circle back to the old days and taken all of our ‘consultative’ skills with it? 2010 Recruitment is a very different place, but the question that needs to be asked is did we just convince ourselves what clients wanted? Did they want rebates, SLA, PSLs, Account managers, prepped CVs, interview feedback?

What if they just wanted CVs all along? Did we trick ourselves into thinking that what we were doing was the right thing? Were we dictating to our clients about what service they needed?

Since the arrival of the ‘web recruitment firms’ there seems to be a mass exodus of organisations that now consider ‘recruitment’ as ‘processing CVs’, but surely that isn’t recruitment? We’re not just a bunch of overpaid CV readers, are we? Recruitment is about people, their aspirations, their fears, their hopes, their ambitions, it’s not about 75 lines of text on a screen. What about the fact that they’ve been made redundant, and don’t know what to do? What about the fact that they’ve been at their current employer for 14 years and know that the only thing to do is to leave? Will they ‘fit’; will they get on with their line manager?

Recruitment isn’t about paper its about people.

But are the new breed building a sustainable business, is it a business that has a long term future or does James Caan already have an exit? Speaking to Alex yesterday, he raised a great point…there was a well known recruiter who was furious when Freecruitment decided to charge for their service, and he wasn’t alone in his frustration. He said that his business model would not support paying for adverts on Reed and that Reed were wrong to charge for his ability to find suitable candidates for his jobs (for which he made many thousands of pounds).

So, what if the heads of the big job boards that are currently selling their soul sit around the big table and decide that they no longer want their brands sold-out? Take for example www.theladders.co.uk, who state on their website that they will take one senior job off you for £349, but instead I can just wander over to www.easywebrecruitment.com and can put the same job on a whole host of websites all over the globe for about £500 (I couldn’t find the exact price). So as a proactive HR person which would you do? £150 to go on at least 5 of 6 premium websites? It has to be the latter.

I see how they are shaping the market; I just wonder for how much longer they’ll be around and if it’s just another recruitment fad? So, what are traditional recruitment firms going to do now? Become proactive? Change their stance? Or hold tight?

2010 and beyond could be very interesting for recruitment in the UK!

he likes of Tesco and Boots are much bigger than Totaljobs and Monster but more importantly, to the job seeker, the employer is where they want to get to – not the job board.  Employers are already inundated with applications; many of which are not going to get hired.  Add to this that employers can advertise on sites such as Indeed, Simplyhired, Workhound, Jobrapido and many more for free; which do drive traffic.  Then add in Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and that’s a lot of free traffic.  And Monster, TJ et al want money for maybe nothing better!

Now, there are a few counter points to consider.  What if you are not as big as Tesco?  Well, you still have all of the free options as a minimum.  You can also consider direct CPC search options on Google, Indeed, Facebook and Linkedin which will be a lot more flexible than using a job board.  So whilst you may not get the job boards to pay you, you should at least start with all of the free options first.

So, going forward the big challenge is to know EXACTLY where your hires are coming from.  Maybe all the free sites will deliver loads of applications but no hires.  Although maybe they will deliver all the hires and the job boards don’t.  And if the job boards don’t deliver any hires, even more reason for Tesco to ask Monster to pay them.  If you want to sell your bottled water in a Tesco store, you have to pay for a position on the shelf BEFORE you even sell anything.  Likewise, job boards will have to pay Tesco to get their brand on their job board which in turn will drive more candidates to the job board which will of course have some benefit for other advertisers.  So TJ get some direct value from having Tesco on board. Tesco get some cash and maybe some hires as well; and if they do maybe they give some money back to the job board?

In the past, I was able to track from post-to-hire for certain clients using job boards and whilst some job boards did deliver; the majority did not.  So we could make some clear decisions based on fact.  Problem now, is that with all of the sites that don’t get a feed from the ATS (the list above is a good starter), or just come direct, the tracking is limited in data/accuracy.  Of course once we have all of this data together in one place, imagine how that will change the game.

Now imagine access to that data is only a matter of months away!

I’ll be adding the rest of the debate very soon!

The past 12 to 18 months have seen a steady stream of headlines barracking company bosses about their lack of feeling regarding the people on the front line – the employees. The high street employer, Jessops (the Camera shop) has recently announced that due to a debt restructuring agreement with HSBC and whilst this is really bad news for anyone that has an ounce of equity within the business it guarantees the safety and security of up to 2000 jobs.

I think, however, it is important to ask the question – how did a company get in that position in the first place? A business that amasses £35 Million worth of debts is clearly not in a great place, and whilst the jobs are safe for the short term can a firm really put its employees before the need to satisfy investors who are driven almost exclusively by Returns on Investment? A company that loses money and loses market share and who’s market moves away from them really is going to struggle to keep people employed for years to come?

Jessops sadly seems to fall in to the same category as Woolworths and Zavvi, they missed the boat with a change in their market – in Woolworths case they were trounced by the Supermarkets and Jessops missed the opportunity with the invention of the digital camera (and associated printing) and the rise of the do-it-all mobile phone generation.

Jessops has become a shop for the die hard and sadly whilst good news for the short term, I am pretty sure that this high street store will go the same way as others mentioned.

But well done for looking after the 2000 staff you’ve saved, and I for one hope you’re still around in Quarter 2 next year!

Firstly to any followers I am sorry that I haven’t been around a great deal, however, I am now back and with even more opinions on what is right and wrong in the world of jobs, employment and at the moment the role the job hunter plays.

In the UK, our biggest selling ragtop; The Sun (ironic, I know…) has developed a website dedicated to the countries ‘leading’ employers (hence why I’ve picked up on it…).

There is an ongoing battle here in the UK to work out exactly how many people are unemployed; the official statistics say one thing, the opposition party say another and in reality it could be millions more people than we actually think.

So, imagine my surprise when checking the football scores today when I saw the following article: http://tinyurl.com/myazxo

Part of me has fury; if this is the attitude of the current ‘unemployed’ or even a small percentage of said millions then we’re in serious trouble.

So, I want to ask the following questions?

If you shop in Sainsbury’s, and you like Sainsbury’s, and it was your dream job to work in Sainsbury’s, why didn’t you go to Sainsbury’s and ask them for a job? – A job they were clearly recruiting because a national recruitment manager put it on the sun.co.uk website.

I really think we need to start to empower and educate the job seekers, there is clearly no good having hundreds or thousands of vacancies in leading employers if people aren’t prepared to get off their backside and walk to their local shop!

The ability to use ones initiative, to be proactive and to do more than sit down at a PC and send (to quote another Sun.co.uk/jobs user) ‘so many applications I’ve lost count’

Now I am glad I have that off my chest!

Today’s papers are filled with references to the ‘unusual’ step of a major employer who has asked their staff to help with the burden of the turndown. 30,000 workers have today been asked by Willie Walsh to volunteer to work for, in effect free. Yes, you heard it right! Free!

BA have announced losses of in excess of £400 Million and Mr. Walsh has asked for help from his staff as the World’s Favourite Airline ‘fights for its survival’.

I suppose, more than anything this opens a debate. I’ve worked for smaller companies in the past, and when cash flow has been difficult it is not unusual for an employee to be asked to help the company out, but perhaps what is unusual is that a company the size of British Airways can not undertake such a task without people like me getting hold of it (and of course the general, paying public.)

The debate will, I am sure rage and a quick glance at Middle England’s favourite (The Daily Mail) ensures that the opinion is most definitely divided!

“Willie Walsh should give up all of his salary, he won’t starve after all!”

“I’ll never fly with BA ever again, my last flight was awful, my seat broke…” (Interesting one, that I’ll return to shortly!)

and, of course the old favourite ‘STIKE!’

So, here is BA having to wash its private linen in public about its short-fallings, and people start to jump on the ‘BA are rubbish’ bandwagon. BA’s employer brand is making mainstream news, indeed the dailymail.co.uk website have had in excess of 150 people who are keen to share their views with the World.

I, for one support what BA are doing and I applaud people like Willie Walsh who front up to the issues and deal with them head on, I just hope it means that BA won’t go to the tax payer for a bail out.

I just hope that their incredible brand and their employer brand don’t end up in the same dirty hole.

Earlier this week, Personnel Today produced an article that has appeared to have been lost in cyberspace, when it should have in fact sent shivers down the spine of the entire recruitment industry.

Surveys/Reports/Investigations are often not worth the paper they’re written on, however, this one seems to have an element of common sense behind it.

The headline reads: “Use of Recruitment Agencies won’t resume when recession ends.”

Human Resources and Recruitment experts have been forced by budget caps to source new methods to recruit new talent to their business. Many recruitment based professionals are confident of an upturn, and indeed some people I’ve met with recently seem to think that things will return to levels last seen in the ‘licence to print money’ era of the late 90’s. However, this suggests that not only is that not likely to happen, we may in fact struggle to see a recovery at all.

So, if you are gearing up for a new career move some time soon, you may have to be a lot more creative than speaking to your local agency. After all, companies are now looking to source the best people via the most cost effective methods around.

Stay tuned for more exciting news!

James.

Once again, Employers and Employees are making headlines. Today it’s for a very good reason and I think that Kellogg’s should be applauded! Not only has this already been in place for six years, but due to the increase in use of Employer Branding, some bright spark in Public Relations has decided to share the news!

The owners of one of the World’s most prized recipes has made what is actually a token gesture and made it to Sky News’ front page! Kellogg’s allow their employees to take Friday afternoon off during the Summer months of May to September. So, 12 Noon every Friday their 660 strong workforce clock out and take a long weekend!

I am not necessarily into the science behind this, but one of their ‘experts’ has shown that output doesn’t decrease and unauthorised sickness is not an issue for them!

I am not sure if an afternoon off a week is quite deserving of Sky News’ home page, but anything that brings Employer Branding to the furore is good news by me.

After all, as one Kellogg’s worker said “They’re G.G.G.G.Greeeaaaat”