Bairdyblog

Boats left alone on choppy waters

I had brunch with an old work colleague last week, who's now a senior director at a well-known employment services firm. He was talking about a recurrent image that comes into his head whenever he sees the launch of a new recruitment web site.

In that image, the client and the project director are carrying the new web site, in the form of a toy sailing boat, carefully down to a pond in the park. They gently put the boat into the water and let it sail towards the centre of the pond, where it becomes just one amongst hundreds of similar boats, and then the client and the project director turn their backs and walk away.

This, let me explain for the hard of thinking, is about the fact that most recruitment sites, once launched, are simply not managed or updated. At all. (Well, maybe there's some 'Hot Jobs' button, but that's it.) This is particularly bizarro now - the economy is going to hell in a nuclear-powered handcart and no careers site appears to have noticed.

As I write Radio 5 live are reporting further closures at lumbering entz emporium Zavvi. Today's news will mean another 295 job losses. But what's this? The careers site is still wittering on about 'growth both in-store and online'. (Hmm - that'll teach 'em not to build job sites in Flash.)

A random sample of the week's other casualties show similar stories. Barratts the shoe store - actually in administration - is still blithering on about a 'fast growing multi site retailing channel'. (The absence of hyphens is their error, not mine.) Thames Water (300 job losses) and Corus (3,500) don't seem to have bothered to update their recruitment messaging either.

Ulster Bank tells us: 'Our ambition is to be the Number One banking group on the island of Ireland. We're not there yet but we're progressing fast along our journey.' It also stresses the organisation's believe in work-life balance: with around 750 of their jobs about to go, I'd suggest the balance is definitely tipping towards the life rather than the work side. (Funny picture on that site, too - perhaps the girl on the parapet is thinking of jumping.)

So, what can we learn from this? That web sites need editors and need to be updated. And if you carry on spouting rec ad platitudes in times of grief and pain, how can you expect candidates to take you seriously at, well, any time?

Are there any careers sites out there that have directly addressed recession, possibly by contextualising redundancies in their organisation or even by adding content about how they, and/or their industries, are particularly resistant to downturn?

Cryptic Crossword, Answers

Did you try the crossword? Ah, but you should have done. Anyway, here are the answers. (The hidden phrase was 'credit crunch'.) The lucky winner has asked that the £50 prize go to the NSPCC.

 

Return to the real

I shan't bang on about the RADs. There's been plenty of coverage on Ri5, Digital Recruiting and MyLongLunch, etc. I shall, however, briefly cast an eye over the winning entry from Work Communications for the National Graduate Development Programme (NGDP).

 

It's a pretty parable, with much to recommend it. The voiceover is by Josh, a management trainee himself, and is, given his amateur theatrical status, surprisingly un-selfconscious. The sound - often overlooked with this kind of thing - is thoughtful and well-produced. The animation itself is witty and zippy throughout. (I particularly enjoyed the neighbours resignedly tossing their speech-bubbles in with the rubbish, and the way the little fellow goes all cross-eyed when the tenders go into his head.) 

Admittedly, parts might not be to everyone's taste - I didn't really need the 'war' footage metaphor and the site beyond the film seems a little sparse.

Looking at it from a wider perspective, I also believe that this film is representative of a new (ish) trend in employment. To borrow a phrase from a commentator referring to - what else? - the Obama era, this trend might be might be called a 'return to the real'.

What does that mean? That the new vogue in employment will be for jobs which employees understand, and can properly comprehend the positive consequences of. In other words, jobs where you fiddle around with obscure financial or technical products, and can't really explain to your grandmother, will be out of fashion.

Carpentry and child-minding, for example, will be the new bond trading and systems integration. People will more happily embrace occupations which are lower-tech, more local and have more of an obvious, tangible benefit to their communities.

Why? A host of well-documented reasons. Environmentalism says we shouldn't travel too much. Threats of global terrorism suggest we should enjoy our families and communities while we can. The recession has brought with it distrust for the people who invent spurious, almost meaningless products for personal gain, the effects of which have blighted entire industries.

To bring it back to NGDP, hedge funds will be less important than hedges on bin-yards.

'Real' has long been one of the most abused words in the employment marketing lexicon. 'You'll get real responsibility from day one', 'a chance to make a real difference' - have all made us want to upchuck at one time or another. Perhaps with the NGDP and their 'Real Life, Real Work' camapign the word is beginning to be rehabilitated.

You only sing when you're working

I was in the pub with Melanie Hirst from Aussie shop ReAgent last week, who reminded me of this oddity from Ernst & Young, which did the email rounds a few years ago.

Clearly, it's an artefact from days long gone, when HR departments were prepared to drop squillions on projects with no discernible practical benefit. But it's by no means an isolated example - the web is full of comparable misdemeanours. Spend ten minutes searching on YouTube and you'll find it hard to believe that the heads of E&Y, KPMG and PWC were not consciously vying with each other to discover who could make their organisations look like the biggest bunch of complete tits.

Corporate anthems - bad lyrics, bad synths, bad performances, great entertainment. You can find a load of them here. There's an OK piece of web journalism on the truly aw-ful/-esome KPMG song here. (I like it best when the funny foreign man says 'innowate' and 'wision'.)

I wonder if anyone ever held an international contest for corporate anthems? I imagine the irony quotient in such an event would have made Eurovision look like a state funeral.

Anyway, years before the internet, TV and dogging were invented, organisations would often encourage their workforces to star in industrial musicals. On this page you'll find an example written for Xerox employees in 1963. It's wonderfully produced and tremendously evocative, as you can probably guess from the album sleeve.

In our over-cynical world, laden with work-life balance, Gen Y professional promiscuity and the alienation of distance working, this could almost certainly never happen. But doesn't it make you just a little nostalgic for a better, more secure world; a time when men were company men, and practically all employees enjoyed the notion of a job for life?

It's a boss of a web site

Most of you will have seen it already, but it's worth putting on record what a pleasant thing studo recruitment telly-fest Here Comes The Boss actually is.

In particular, I'm enjoying the Hanson TV slots where site bossman Hanson, a puppet with a delightfully quirky sense of humour, gets up to all sorts including (in this instance) allowing Neil Harrison from TMP to spout on about employer branding. (Presumably Neil didn't tuck his shirt in to demonstrate just how down with the kids they are at TMP Towers nowadays.)

 Anyway, things that HCTB does well:

• An original site persona and tone that gives it real stand-out. The funnies are just on the right side of alternative to not alienate the big corporates or the more serious-minded of students.
• An intriguing breakdown of barriers between editorial and paid advertising - the spots where Hanson is interviewing the Enterprise Rent-A-Car mob are much fresher than any over-produced corporate schlock might have been.
• The site actually looks quite pretty.

There are some things that rankle: the writing on the business feeds could be better (there's a difference between 'new readers start here' and patronising - 'Rolls Royce Win Big Piece Of Work' is clearly the latter). And there are usually a handful of typos that one assumes should be picked up by elementary spellcheck. But generally, HCTB is probably the bossest of the grad sites right now.

Its heavy use of video raises some issues of interest to creatives. Firstly, how do you grab attention in the first ten seconds? (I find myself clicking on the next link, as with YouTube, unless something grabs me immediately.) And similarly, how good are we - really - at writing for broadcast? There's little doubt that recruitment is increasingly a broadcast medium, and perhaps, when this crunch thing becomes more of a light gnashing, we'll see more of an influx of broadcast-literate creatives in what remains of our leading agencies.

Whilst everyone else is predicting what might happen in the year ahead, I'll go one further. The RADs 2010 Best Employer Web Site gong will be won by what is effectively a TV channel, where the home page is a weekly-updated news desk, and incisive, non-flabby streamed content will be effortlessly available on both online and mobile platforms. And it'll be fronted by Philippa Forrester. Probably.

Happy 2009. Hope you don't have reason to use the 'New Year, No Career' gag anytime soon.