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? 

 

Comments

[Alex Hens]

like the Friends tie-in - and, as so often is the case that I wonder whether this is now dull/appearing like I have an unhealthy attraction to you, agree.

I find working out "which ad looks best" is often seemingly so hard to get right with judging panels that I fear this new award will also get subverted or misunderstood. I guess what we need to hope for is that the right kind of activity shines out like a beacon the judges can't ignore - a beacon that rises above pure paper and stats based submissions.

:)

[Andrew Wilkinson]

CRMAIPWTG is the first Google-whack I have come across for some time. Try it! (Do I win five pounds?)