Bairdyblog

The Best Ever? (Pt II)

Just watched some recruitment films from the LAPD (that's Los Angeles Police Department, in case you've never been to the movies). There's so much testosterone flooding through my system I can hardly type.

If all LAPD means to you is the Rodney King atrocity back in the nineties, then it would appear it's time to reconsider. Because now, seemingly, joining the LAPD is exactly the same as being in your favourite, late-night, deliciously high-octane cop show.

Look at the web site and you'll feel them playing with your head, making as many entertainment references as they can, macho-ing on about TV and Hollywood's LAPD obsession and the importance of taking a 'front row seat on life'. The films themselves follow the pattern of film trailers, with visual and verbal references to the likes of 24, The Wire, Hill Street Blues, and more.

Yes, the idea's been done before, but probably not as well. And probably not in widescreen.

The production standards are pretty breathtaking - helicopters, aerial shots, roads closed for shoot-outs and a legion of pro actors. (Not the LAPD principals, though - Pablo P. Vita and Cassandra Britt Nickerson play themselves.) Wait until the animated logo comes up at the end - that alone possibly cost more than the totality of your last graduate campaign.

Still, do you feel excited? Do you feel engaged by the drawing on of shared cultural references? Do you feel impressed by its formal mimicry of the high standards of contemporary entertainment? Do you want a large popcorn with that? Course you do.

What's your story?

If you haven't been following it, the bloke in the YouTube clip below is Daniel Evans, a 38 year-old pool cleaner who's just made it to the live finals of ITV's X  Factor. 

Play the clip and you'll see that Danny looks fine, sings well and seems like a nice fella. What he isn't is a superstar in waiting. So why have the producers put him through at the expense of other, more talented candidates?

It's largely because (although they won't admit it) Danny lost his wife last year just after the birth of their daughter. And this makes Danny prime real estate in terms of story. People are both intellectually and emotionally engaged with him, and so are interested in how his flirtation with fame works out.

It's another example of the power of story. Which begs the question: how are you using story for your candidate attraction campaigns? (By story I mean narratives that engage readers, maybe using characters and certainly 'plotlines' that develop.)

When you think about it, most recruitment marketing doesn't use story but talks about static elements. We discuss fixed values, precise benefits packages and value propositions that may be striking but have no real dynamic, or movement, to them. Sometimes it's far better to - excuse the cliche - talk about the journey or story of which the employee will become part: mentally cast them into a moving picture about what they'll do and how they'll advance during the course of their role.

Specifically, this could be a story about skills development and consequent promotion; more likely it will involve a dramatic exploration of the vision and values. In other words, a decent narrative about how precisely the employer will, with the help of the new recruit, positively impact the world.

Incidentally, my money would be on third-favourite Laura, whose slightly unscrubbed appearance puts me in mind of Amy Winehouse. Only a little - very little - less mad.

An Age of Innocents

As Ri5 reports, the list of nominations for the National Online Recruitment Awards is out this week, and they place their particular attention on the Best Employer Site category. These are pretty well what you'd expect and much of a muchness - corporately toned, nice white space, sensible navigation, diversity aware. Arguably the only problem you'll have is telling the difference between Marks and Spencer, Vodafone and Mitchells and Butlers. Although how the dreadful GCS Recruitment effort, typos and all, got through is beyond me - I suppose the scheme hasn't been that well publicised.

Anyway, the clear stand-out of the bunch is for Innocent Drinks, a sparky little site that does a number of things extremely well. For a start, it has:

• A fresh take on Employer Value Propositions (via that Polaroid format )
• Videos of leadership saying important things well
• Clear demonstration of their employment-related awards
• Repeated exposition of their ethicality, sustainability and 'naturalness'
• Attention to detail where other's don't bother- the snail-mail address for sending your CV is 'A Job Would Be Nice, Fruit Towers, Innocent Drinks....'
• A truly refreshing approach to the generation and articulation of employee benefits - in the 'Nice Stuff' section they talk about extra holidays for those who are marrying or undergoing civil partnerships, and cleverly re-brand old ideas such as Employee of the Month (Lord or Lady of the Sash) and birthday treats (Circle of Death)

All in all, an impressive effort. But whoa, let's just rewind for a moment.

It's not that I hate Innocent as such. It's simply that their relentlessly chirpy tone - the look-at-me-aren't-I-cute, Bonnie-Langford-goes-to-California tone - sometimes makes me want to punch Richard Reed and his clan repeatedly in the face with a tramp turd.

Very interesting conversation on this blog about the Innocent brand. Here, professional writers (including the voice of Innocent, Dan Germain) discuss the potential irritability of the brand and suggest that it might (rather like Pret a few years ago) be in need of an overhaul. Commenters from communication agencies report how sick they are of clients wanting to 'do an Innocent' - in other words, adopt the same faux-naive voice as a means of cutting through cynicism and turning them into brands which are loved rather than merely respected or known.

Of course, this has happened a fair bit in recruitment circles.  But like the fellows on that blog say, there's no point adopting an Innocent tone unless (a) the realities behind the brand will support it: management style, internal comms and what the organisation actually does, and (b) you are confident that the vast majority of the population you're addressing won't vomit at the sight of it and decide to put their careers in the hands of grown-ups instead.

Gen Y: Three Recruitment Tips

Now, I'm not really a big fan of all this Gen X, Gen Y, General Zod malarkey.

It seems to me that once you start bandying these terms around then you're likely to assume all individuals within a generation have the same interests and attributes. They don't. Gen Y aren't exclusively MySpacing, YouTubing, FaceBooking treehuggers, in the same way that the eighties generation weren't all mobile-toting, braces-wearing  entrepreneurs who snorted coke in trendy wine bars off the back of Phil Collins LPs.

But there are some tips worth bearing in mind when it comes to recruit marketing to Gen Y. By way of introduction, here's a recent film from the Onion News Network that highlights generational differences in the workplace. (If you haven't seen Onion videos before, you're really missing out.)

Study Finds Young People Remain Apathetic About Office Politics

Office politics? That's not what turns Gen Y on. The slow burn of long-term employment in an apparently socially worthless role is anathema to these conscientious, sceptical speed freaks.

To recruit them, consensus is that it's good to remember the following:

1. Peer networks are the best channel. Gen Y rarely listens to - and even more rarely believes - paid for marketing messages. Rather, it talks amongst itself for personal recommendations (hence the explosion of social networking). If you can use networks, preferably via an evangelist from your organisation who is themselves Gen Y, without artifice or top-down clumsiness, then do so.

2. Worthwhile work is the best message. These people want work that is important to the world. So think about your employee value proposition and what ultimate positive function the product/service of the organisation performs. (How does the organisation make the world a slightly better place?) Also consider corporate social responsibility: explain what you do in this area, but don't exaggerate.

3. Suggest rapid and meaningful advancement. These greedy little Y-ers won't hang around waiting for Buggin's Turn. They fully expect to be leading the organisation by ten o'clock tomorrow morning, or they'll be packing their beanies and heading off somewhere with better prospects. Make sure you tell as good a story as you can about how careers can develop, and at what pace.   

Come in creatives, your time is up

Those of you in - or roughly adjacent to - Generation Y may be familiar with Current TV, a web site launched a couple of years ago by Al Gore, among others. It's a channel (available here on Virgin & Sky platforms) in which the content is created almost entirely by viewers.

Intriguingly, this includes advertising. How it works is simple - a 'sponsor' (ie advertiser) posts a very brief brief on the station's web site and then viewers produce commercials (or VCAMs - Viewer Created Advertising Messages) which are posted onto the site. Those which are broadcastable and receive the approval of the website viewing public get broadcast on the station, meaning their creators get a payment of at least one thousand pounds, and more if the ad gets syndicated.

Generally, 'sponsors' are currently hawking products of obvious interest to Gen Y (L'Oreal, games producers, Toyota Prius, and so on) which inspires content like this:

No obvious recruitment messages as yet, but it can only be a matter of time. (This would work well for graduate recruitment, clearly.) Not that recruitment-oriented UGC is a new concept, but frameworks such as this could make it cheaper and technologically easier to manage.

There's a sense that most VCAMs are generated by aspirant agency creatives and film directors, but that's no bad thing in itself - a recruitment strand here might serve to bring bright new talent, which has never heard of employment marketing, into the industry?

TMP & ReAgent break FEMAs

By the magic of the www we go to Australia, where at a lavish ceremony in Sydney the FEMA (Fairfax Employment Marketing Awards) have been magisterially doled out.

 

These are the closest the Aussies get to the likes of the RADs and CIPD/Guardians, but they're not quite up to those heady standards - the official website doesn't carry images of the winning work; the evening is a double-header with recruitment consultancy awards; all entries have to have run in a title run by the (admittedly mighty) Fairfax Media group.

Anyway, big winners of the ten or so gongs were TMP Australia and ReAgent, the agency established by ex Euro RSCGers Mike Beeley and Melanie Hirst (also ex of MSL, TCS, GMBM, WDAD). TMP won three for their work for ASIO (the Australian version of Mi5) and one for the Western Australia Department of Corrective Services. These wins are nicely displayed in the awards section of the agency's website, together with their 23 nominations. (Can't believe I overlooked the chance to make a gag about Aussies and Corrective Services, but there you go.)

Three awards too for ReAgent' s work for IBM graduates, including a video-led site in which people called things like Jordana, Kathleen and Xavier chat about their careers to date. This campaign won the coveted 'Most Creative/Most Innovative' category, and so looks like the benchmark against which most Aussie efforts should be judged.

Shoosmiths: not entirely cobblers

Imagine a weird version of Just A Minute where, rather than asking contestants to talk about a given subject for sixty seconds, they have to recycle every rec ad cliche they can think of. Actually, don't imagine it - just take a look at the first Shoosmiths video on job telly web site my-ijob.com.

Back to Shoosmiths in a moment. First, if you haven't seen this job site yet, you should, because it's (kind of) the future. Basically it's a job board dedicated to video. Some clients are using it and just uploading commercials and other bits of generic film they have knocking around their offices, whilst others have actually taken the trouble to do something specifically career-related.

Shoosmiths, the 'unstuffy' law firm with what looks like a rip-off WHSmith logo, have three videos which aren't that bad. Yes, there are cliches and strange bits. The guy with the pink shirt and tie saying it's all 'fun' doesn't work, and there's never any need to talk about 'really making a difference'. The final tracking shot of a penny farthing stuck on a wall made me smile; it's probably where they got the idea for the production budget.

But what's encouraging is the fact that it's there at all. The organisation has clearly prioritised the importance of making it and has done so with refreshing honesty. It's always good to see employers recognising that yes, at times and without a following wind, working days can be a little bit crap.

The problem remains the same as other online recruitment videos, which is that when people have a video camera and editing suite to play with they seem to forget the importance of determining what the recruitment message should be and articulating it in a consistent, compelling way.

I'm not saying that these things should be scripted. I am saying that (fewer) propositions should be agreed first and that interviewees should be roughly following the same lines.

Anyway, other video on this site that's worth a quick gander comes from Nokia, Astra Zeneca and Morgan Stanley.

'Little Gordon' shows the f&*^ing way

Picked this up from Sinead Bunting's post on Digital Recruiting.

It's a good example of how to make an intelligent, funny, inexpensive viral. Not beyond the ability of any the usual rec ad creative departments (although there are some elements to the content that wouldn't be supported by a conservative client.)

Whilst the last shot is probably my favourite, I can't help but think that they missed a trick by not delivering a killer line at the end. ('Some people have their futures mapped out. For everyone else, there's caterer.com', or something like it?)

YouTube also has Parts 1 and 3 (this is 2) which are almost as good.

Diverse and worse

Diversity advertising. In anybody's language, it's usually crap.

The problem, of course, is finding an execution - particularly a visual execution - that isn't predictable, patronising or already done to death. Most attempts to portray organisational commitment to diversity choose to use group shots: one male, one female, one Afro-Caribbean, one with a skull-cap/wheelchair/Judy Garland album. If it ever did work, it ain't working now.

The US ad blogs enjoy finding the worst offenders. You can find some of these being intelligently disparaged at multicultclassics. If you have any truly deplorable examples of your own, I'd like to see them - perhaps we can hold a ceremony in which we celebrate the truly di-verse-abolical. (The Di-Worse-ity Awards, anyone?)

Anyway, to get the creative juices flowing for your next diversity brief, I've found some online that aren't entirely rubbish. I'm not saying they're brilliant, but the puke factors are relatively low.

Try this internal poster from the IT department at Penn State University:

Or this web banner from US law firm Bingham:

And this pleasantly objectionable explosion in a fairy tale factory from the Association of American Advertising Agencies:

On second thoughts, that last one has put me right off my tea.

Second-class posts

Candidate attraction now largely means job boards. There must be eleventy squillion postings on the UK boards alone. (Citation needed.) So why can't I find one that's properly written?

Last week I was looking at totaljobs - which isn't a particularly bad example, they're all much of a muchness - and browsing through the postings of a globally-recognised London retailer. Every single one read badly. There are few spelling errors as such, but plenty of mistakes that simply shouldn't be there, particularly for such an illustrious brand.

What mistakes? Hmm. Question marks bang in the middle of sentences. No spacing between sentences. No understanding of where hyphens should go. Clumsy repetition. Run-on sentences (in a posting for a Copywriter). Clumsy repetition. The same job title capitalised differently in consecutive posts. Errant capitalisation generally. Cut-and-paste laziness (which means some, but not all, postings begin with 'Job Description'). One opening paragraph which is - amazingly - 210 words long. (I counted them.)

I understand that the person writing these postings is not a dedicated copywriter. I'm sure they're a brilliant HR admin, recruitment manager or RPO consultant. And many of these errors might be down to posting systems. But things must be improved. It's not just a question of aesthetics. It's a question of your message being sufficiently compelling to lure, and secure, your ideal candidate.

Ways to improve the situation, if you're an employer:

• Get a writer (agency or in-house) to edit your copy if it's not your strong suit.
• Write to a firm template.
• Use more bullet points. (Less room to make grammatical errors.)
• Arrange for an expert to create a 'Style Guide'.

More laterally, I wonder what copy-polishing services are offered by the job boards themselves? Volume may prohibit it in some cases, but it could prove to be a USP  in an increasingly tight market.

Years ago, when we poor agency copywriters wrote 38 ads a day for the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph print recruitment sections, we had something called the 5 Paragraph Structure that would keep us on the straight and narrow if we were tired, bored, hungover or just generally incompetent. I'll dust it off and adopt it for the current era in a future post. (Particularly because I've just googled guides to writing job postings, and they're all crap.)