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Downward spiral? It's a great employer brand attribute

On Monday, a new office space opens in Sheffield. Called the Electric Works, it's for media-related businesses, and its claim to fame is a helter-skelter that runs right through the middle of it.

Quite a big helter-skelter, in fact. It goes down three storeys, which is a 40ft drop, which in helter-skelter terms means 87ft of, in this instance, steel and transparent plastic.

Yes, it's a gimmick. But I love the way they've tied it into the 'values' of contemporary media business. Designer Toby Hyam apparently refers to it as a 'statement on risk-taking'.

Those of us who are in the business of advising on, or growing, employer brands will know that nothing communicates messages better than this kind of innovation. People talk about it around water-coolers. Newspapers report upon it. And every time the story is told, something is communicated about your organisational values.

It's like the woman who flew in from Benidorm every week just to work at ASDA; the desks at Amazon that are made from garage doors, just like the original Jeff Bezos used when he first set up the business; the donations Microsoft made to charity if people didn't exceed normal working hours.

Can't see many of these being developed in the current climate - but afterwards, the ability to dream them up and implement them will be a profitable tool in employment marketing.

The one with the CIPD and the dirty girl

There's an episode of Friends in which Ross, enchanted by a bobby-dazzler of a blonde (Cheryl) accepts an invitation to go back to her apartment. But as soon as she opens the door he realises the relationship is screwed. Chez Cheryl is a terrible mess. There's crap and vermin everywhere.

Of course, what's happening here is that the writers are using Ross's dating life as a metaphor for the disparities between an organisation's candidate attraction and candidate relationship materials. (Obvious when you think about it.) What they're saying is this. The attraction stuff is often very slinky, charming and sexy - more than enough to get you through the door. But once on the inside, in the imperfect and slightly stained world of candidate relationship materials, things begin to look very different indeed.

Candidate relationship materials - aka 'downstream employer branding' - include job and people specifications, letters of invitation/regret/hold, interview areas, assessment centres, online testing and offer packs. And all these are usually crap for a couple of reasons. One: most decent people in HR think the management of these materials is beneath them and two: HR clonk-heads often assume that when the candidate has applied they don't need to be sold to anymore.

CRM has historically been an additional income stream for the better rec ad agencies - re-working anything within it that isn't consistent with the employer brand or fails to promote the EVPs. I once (once) worked with a retail client who completely got it right by asking us to re-write everything including their most basic application form, to ensure that the language within it was consistent with the copy directives laid out in their new employer brand paradigm.

Anyway, now the CIPD Recruitment Marketing Awards in partnership with The Guardian has latched onto the candidate relationship management piece and is offering a new award for best practice in the area.

This is laudable in theory, but, CRMAIPWTG judges, I can't help but feel that unless you take a great deal of care, this will lead to a pedestrianisation of the awards, which should  essentially be about marketing. So by all means give an award to an assessment centre or application process that shows marketing flair and uses creativity to generate better results for the business. But if you find yourself talking about the comparative value of psychometric approaches, feedback loops which helped reduce interview drop-outs and other technical HR yada, hopefully you'll just put those entries into a big envelope and post them directly off the Personnel Today Awards where they belong? 

 

Ads suggest online market has some way to go

Anyone who's a fan of American football, or Cheezhead, or both, will have noticed that prime advertising real-estate night of Superbowl saw the two big US job boards attempt to twat each other around the heads with big, expensive adverts. These were, of course, efforts from Monster and Careerbuilder. Here's one of a series from Monster:

And the one ad from Careerbuilder:

Of course, both have good things going for them. The Monster ads are well produced, witty and arguably could (that's could) strike some chord with the dissatisfied worker. The Careerbuilder ad has a catchy rhythm to it and a healthy dose of iconoclasm. (And it's always nice to see something Antipodean getting punched in the face.) But - oh, dear. What are the underlying messages telling us about the maturity, or otherwise, of the job board market?

Well, it's telling us that market is still prepubescent. Why? Because none of these ads are attempting to differentiate their products in the marketplace, but seeking to grow the marketplace itself. A strategy not usually - ever - associated with market maturity.

What Monster and Careerbuilder are telling us is that if our jobs suck then don't worry - we can find another one by looking on the internet. (Admittedly the Monster ad has some differentiating messages squeezed in at the end, but this isn't where the main creative energy lies.) They're not assuming that the market knows this and is at the comparatively sophisticated stage of working out which online platform to use. (This is the equivalent of Volkswagen running an ad that says: 'Hey! Ever need to get from A to B? Then why not consider buying a car?' Or maybe The Sun running an ad suggesting that people who don't know what's going on would be better off buying a newspaper.)

This isn't the Big Boards fault, of course: I'm sure they've done their research and know to an inch where the markets stand. But it does rather suggest to me that the idea of the western world now entirely consisting of discerning on-rec consumers is complete arse-talk.

Finally, here is one job board  ad that does attempt to differentiate. But does it work? I'm slightly puzzled by the fact the little monsters are um, little Monsters - is the suggestion of Trumposaurus deliberate, do you think? More importantly, where does the viewer's sympathy lie at the end - with the little monsters or the big one? All v.v. confusing.

2-4-6-8, who will hire a grad-u-ate?

About twenty years ago, I graduated into something of a downturn. Whilst my economic circumstance was tricky, it wasn't catastrophic. I got three months work with a local firm of painters, washing walls. When that finished my friend Martin and I tried writing comedy for pin money.

We didn't sell much - we weren't that good - but the university careers magazine gave us £100 quid for a batch of cartoons about how terrible the graduate recruitment landscape was. I remember they printed one in which a man opened the Guardian and a Media Jobs supplement fell out, which was only the size of a postage stamp. Not the best gag in the world, but it did earn us a tenner, which at the time was enough to buy about five pints, each.

Looking at the Sunday Times this weekend, I got the feeling that the situation for grad recruitment is bad right now but not the end of the world. Vacancies seem to be down about 17%, but then median salaries are up to £27K. (Aldi are paying £40K, plus a car.) Things in Japan are similar, if this report from Reuters is anything to go by. (Thanks to John Langford for sending it in.)

Basically, the Japanese colleges are holding rallies and hiring cheerleaders to inspire students on their path toward employment, and the rallies look something like:

Perhaps some employment marketing entrepreneurs with a grasp on grad recruitment over here could find a new revenue stream by turning the tables: asking the educational establishments to pay for creatively-led sessions in which willing grads are taught properly how to apply and interview for those remaining plum jobs?