It's Talent, Stupid!

Oi! Chemistry, Put up or shut up!

A Disclaimer: I am sure there are great recruitment companies and individuals out there doing "free" stuff and more worthy stuff than I am just about to talk about, so I am sorry if this looks like a"so what" kinda piece but in my experience if we share these little things we do, then it might become bigger...so this is me sharing, if you have done bigger and better, truly i'm really pleased, 'cos our industry needs it...actually let us know about it and we'll blog it right here...

------------------------------

OK, so i am an observer and some might say active participant in the "recruitment industry needs to change" rhetoric/mantra.  The twitter feeds and blogs are full of pearls of wisdom on how the industry needs to change and how bad the world is.  Does appear that these people (and my guilty hands are up) are talking to each other and not changing a damn thing, after all they and I, like people who agree with me/us, we're only human!  But it's not the people who agree with us that we need to change but those that don't...the big question is how the hell do we change them!

Well, I believe it is by role modelling the change, by setting the benchmark and not compromising...so at Chemistry we are looking at every process and making sure that it lives up to the standards by which we preach.  It'll take time, and will probably (short term) cost us some cash  but if we are going to Twitter and Blog about this stuff we have to do it, we have to "be the change we want to see" (that's not my line, little guy, glasses went by the name of Ghandi i think).

Some of the areas we are whiter than white on, seriously if we were any whiter, i'd rename us Bold or Mother Teresa, except they wouldn't be at all catchy or on brand.

Others we need to tighten up on, our first area is candidate feedback.  

I know this because we recently cocked up and worded a "reject" email too bluntly, we were trying to be "different" but on reflection it lacked empathy...we take this seriously, so i personally worded an apology to all 103 rejected applicants and sent them 1 by 1 from my email account, it took 2 hours, it was important so it didn't matter how long, just that it got done with thought and care.

The response was phenomenal, it was an outpouring of unfiltered emotion, mostly in utter disbelief that a recruitment company would be so professional and dare i say it "caring" but also to a person, they questioned why they had been rejected as they were convinced they had the right experience?

So i reviewed each and every applicant again, my conclusion? We were right to reject all of them, based on the CV we received.  So i called a couple of them and lo and behold, these were good candidates...just with monumentally shit CVs, I mean bloody awful.  

The conclusion is that there are a lot of very good people who are being poorly served by their CVs, in most instances these CVs have been written for them by outplacement firms (must blog about them, awful :-)) or recruitment companies (god forbid).

So the question is do we "preach" that it's not good enough or do something about it...well guess what? We did and we are doing something about it.

Firstly over the last month or so I have been taking time out of an evening to give people advice on CVs, two of these people within 4 weeks of changing their CV had multiple interviews and both are now in new jobs (they had both been unemployed for months)...so the advice was working BUT how do we scale the process.

Well, as of next week, we will be running the first Chemistry CV Clinic, using Webex,  job seekers will receive free feedback on their CVs and how they present themselves, it will be a Q&A and practical session.  We will then run a follow up session with them to track progress and provide additional support if needed.  We plan to hold these every week for as long as people need it. 

We ain't doing it for the money (it's free), we are doing it because if we are brave enough to spout off about how crap our industry is, we better have the commitment/balls to do something about.  So it's not brave but it might just be Chemistry :-)

R

PS: if anyone would care to join us on this venture and scale it even further, we would love to form a gang...minus the parkas and vespas...so just a "trying to change the world of recruitment" gang...we can work out the uniform later....

PPS: If you are looking for a new role and would like to be included in one of the sessions, email Rowan, at rowanw@thechemistrygroup.com

Recruiters - What will become of us?

I recently read a blog which talked about how social media and networking sites were going to be the death of the recruiter. I disagree, if anything I believe the role of recruiter has become ever more important, but has also changed.

The argument in this blog was that the internet has enabled accessibility to candidates that would never have been possible before the internet revolution. Therefore by posting a few ads and doing some poking around on LinkedIn HR team can now source candidates directly and cut out the middle man.

This argument is sound if you accept that a recruiter is merely a way of sourcing or aggregating candidates. However, here is where I (predictably) disagree. I believe previously organisations used recruiters because they had lots of cards in their rolodex (I'm a bit young to have seen one, but I have been told about them) and could provide them with access to their networks. Now that organisations can directly source candidates fairly successfully the question becomes, as quite rightly asked in the blog I read, what is the recruiter for?

The answer (in my humble opinion) is about selection rather than sourcing. Recruiters need to become experts in selecting candidates, they need to be better than the client at predicting which candidate will succeed in each role in each company. Sounds ridiculous?

It shouldn't, the recruitment processes of most companies (CV based interview) is about 25% accurate (according to research conducted by the CIPD). The job of a recruiter is not to find the candidates but to help the client select the right person for their business. The British Psychological Society has shown that by using the right psychometric tools and behavioural interview techniques hiring accuracy can be raised above 75%.

Therefore if you're a recruiter and you want to stay ahead of the game you need to up skill big time. Recruitment consultants of the future will not be the salesman of old flogging candidates to anyone who'll have them; they will be a mix of occupational psychologists, management consultants and project managers.

If you are an organisation currently using recruitment consultants, you may want to have a chat with them about what tools and expertise they are using to select candidates. If the answer is 'I've been doing this for years, I know a good one when I spot one' then I suggest you go looking for a new one!

Anyway back to my original point, I don't believe the increasingly easy access to candidates the internet offer will be the death of all recruiters, however, as Darwin so aptly figured out years ago, it will kill off those those who don't adapt and quick! As Rupert Murdoch put it "The world is changing. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow."

Rowan

Chemistry are Hiring - Part III - We'll Snog You!

Say “hello” to the best consulting job on the planet...

£35-£55,000 + Bonus + Benefits

Binfield, nr. Bracknell (not too near)

OK, so let’s get specific...you will be currently today working for PA, Accenture, Deloitte or similar, you will be an analyst or consultant in an HR practice. You will be wearing a dark suit, white shirt and back pack to work and be at the beck and call of the Partner, Directors and Senior managers above you.  You would have started life thinking this is the dream job, with the dream company and are probably now thinking either:

1. I’ll be dead soon if I keep going at this rate!
   
2. I never have time for a good snog, let alone a relationship
3. Actually, what do we ever really change?

If that’s not you and you still love your job, brilliant and good luck.

If it is you, ring Colin on 01344 418300 or email him on colinm@thechemistrygroup.com.  

We can promise you eternal life (possibly) and consulting work that matters (definitely) and if you really need it...a snog :-)

Chemistry are Hiring - Part II - Swiss Army Knives

Analyst x 2 (i.e. bright, driven swiss army knives!)

Salary £27,500 + Bonus + Benefits

Binfield, nr. Bracknell (just not too near)

“They are like McKinsey but they do people stuff and the return is immediate”, is how one client described Chemistry’s services.  Given 70% of our revenue is from management consulting fees, we work globally, our people are bright and our multi-national FTSE 100 client list find us an essential partner, we kinda get the McKinsey comparison.  Then again we don’t have any oak paneling, we prefer our Wii, XBox and Mac kitted out, yet rurally chic offices in Binfield.

We are looking for razor bright graduates (fresh or a bit of wear) to join our business.  For a clue to the environment read this blog entry http://tinyurl.com/ykmoc36 

Our expectations are that you will:

• Work like you are possessed, on the right things
• Treat our customers like they are the centre of your universe
• Treat your colleagues like they are your blood kin
• Enjoy every minute of what we believe is the best place to work on the planet

Our expectations are that you have:

• A HUGE BRAIN, seriously immense, one caveat you need to be able to tie your own laces
• Cool TECH skills, one finger typing and “what’s Twitter?” like questions aren’t allowed
• You are a SPONGE - not a deep sea type, but an information absorbing one
• HUMILITY - to listen, learn, improve (and repeat)

For more information on us go to www.thechemistrygroup.com

To apply call Colin on 01344 418300 or email him at colinm@thechemistrygroup.com

Job Advert - Chemistry are Hiring

Having a spot of bother at the moment, on a couple of counts!  Firstly I appear to be blogging for everyone else but us..:-( And secondly we are starting to look at hiring for ourselves...always a case of cobblers children.

Good news is, I am rectifying the first problem now!  The second is interesting, so I pulled the team together on Friday and asked them, what is it about us that makes us tick...the result was quite interesting.

So we believe we are a fun bunch, very open to newcomers...turns out we aren't.  Well, we are fun but we are horrendously difficult to gel with, according to those we asked (this included people who had left our business and one who came back), the traits of the group are:

Confidence - our people exhibit a sense of control, around their subject matter and expertise that can be intimidating...got to come in punching :-)

Pace - our people work at a pace that is 100x faster than anything people coming in to our business have seen before, the analogy used was "it's like trying to jump on to a speeding train".  The truth appears to be that if you can not hit the ground running at the pace we need, the train doesn't slow down and you never end up getting on :-(

Intolerant - Crikey, this was a rough one...apparently as a group we are highly intolerant of anyone not able to "keep up", we are religious when it comes to the brand (like that one) and fanatical about the quality of the deliverables to the client.  Two impacts of this one, we are consistent but uncompromising and consider communication and output that is not 'brand" coherent as criminal offences.

Open - by this I mean we discuss everything, nothing is secret or sacred.  The view is that the frenetic pace dictates that we don't have time or the inclination to "flower" anything up or "couch" feedback...it comes full on and as naked as it gets, if we are thinking it, we say it....again when you are struggling to jump on to the speeding train and you get swiped by a piece of "honest feedback", the impact can be twice hard.  Makes the humour round the office, oddly dark :-)

Caring - OK, so it all sounded a bit harsh and then, "caring" came up...once you are on the train, you are in the "family" and when in the "family" the business is generous, listens well and is protective

Hard Working - 65+ hours a week is the norm..., go online at 9pm at night and you will find Chemistry guys, IM'ing each other, writing up proposals, candidate profiles...no one switches off, last night I received emails from 4 of the guys...there are only 8 of us!  I question whether this is a good thing but these are bright people who have families etc...I am convinced they are doing it, because they love what they do.

Technology - there are 8 of us doing the work of 16...we embrace technology to help us with the workload, if you aren't typing fluently, using social media naturally, pulling together proposals and powerpoint together in minutes, not hours and not able to understand the different "bonus elements" in Mario Kart for the Wii...you are not going to get on the train...

Total Belief - Chemistry people totally believe that we are on a mission, to challenge the status quo, in recruitment, in consulting, in short, in everything we do...they believe that we can "make a dent in the universe"...this makes them, what's the word..."high maintenance" :-)

So there you have it, our job advert...call any one of us on 01344 418300, it may not be a normal job but it might be Chemistry

R

Diminishing talent pool in the Caribbean can make senior hiring and recruitment decisions difficult in local businesses

The Caribbean has been losing it’s best people since the advent of the slave trade. This outward movement of its most talented people has continued through to the current day. Currently, 12% of the population of the Caribbean emigrate to OECD countries and of the 20 countries with highest emigration rates in the world, 11 are in the Caribbean. So, lots of people are leaving, but who is leaving? 

This efflux becomes progressively worse as education increases, with Caribbean countries losing 60-85% of their tertiary educated population to OECD countries. This is  costing the Caribbean 3.2% of it’s GDP. Perhaps even more shocking is that 18% of the Caribbean GDP comes from emigrants remittances i.e. money sent back in paper envelopes! So why are the people, that the government have spent the most money educating leaving?

The top talent is leaving for very simple reasons; there are better educations, better paid jobs and better working conditions in OECD countries. Most of the highly educated workforce is travelling to receive further education or work abroad, predominantly in Northern America or the United Kingdom.

This exodus of talent causes a contraction of the talent pool available in the Caribbean, which in turn can have severe effects on businesses when they wish to fill senior positions within their businesses. As there is a limited resource of talented individuals locally businesses often either hire local people who are not capable to do the job, or they bring in western managers who can’t relate to the Caribbean markets.

So, what’s the solution? Well, it appears they either have to keep the best talent before they leave which will require some serious changes and intervention by governments, or find a way of attracting talent back from the likes of North America and the UK.

One of our clients has found themselves in this position and short-term attracting talent back from the diaspora looks like the best solution, but we will have to work this through. We will let you know how it goes. Stay tuned to our news page on the Chemistry Group website for regular updates or watch out for the next blog!

Intuition in Recruitment - A £Multi-million gamble!

How often do we do things that just feel right? We don’t know why we do them, we probably can’t explain why but we just know it’s right.  It’s been the same in recruitment for years.  Recruitment consultants will tell you they get a gut feel when meeting a candidate; that they somehow know when they find someone who is right for their client, but  how reliable is ‘gut feel’?

I must admit, I definitely do experience gut feel.  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a woman – after all aren’t we supposed to be the intuitive sex? Or, if it’s because I’m a Scorpio or maybe it is because I have high emotion in my psychometric profile.  Maybe it’s just an innate sense left over from our evolutionary past where we had to make quick decisions about people and rely on only our instincts. In fact, it’s probably a mixture of all of these things.

The question is, would I gamble £80,000 of my own money on my "gut feel", would you?  The truth is most of us wouldn't, but if you could validate your "gut feel" with objective data points, well it would throw a whole new light on the daily expensive gamble of hiring senior people!

As an experienced recruiter, who understand and knows her clients intimately, I do believe I get an instant intuition as to whether a candidate is the right fit for my client, I just know.  However, I am not prepared to bet my clients success and the candidates future prospects on my "intuition", rather I let it guide me to spend time with the right candidates, to assess them comprehensively and make in the end the more accurate decision. 

Chemistry are proven to be 75% accurate in predicting the future performance of a new hire, my feedback rating is significantly higher than even this, I have a gut feeling, it's my intuition at work :-)

Lorraine

International Recruitment - It's A Question of EQ

So, you have a requirement in one of your remote territories, say India, Singapore or as in our case at the moment the Caribbean.  Let's just say it is a Western organisation looking to expand, usually is and this is usually why they engage a Western based recruitment organisation, mistake?  Well probably not, our experience of agencies within say India, is poor and the traction you can get is sometimes just as easy from outside.  The more sophisticated agencies that do exist within the Asian market are usually (as is the case in Australia) just exact replicas of the agency business within the UK, hmmm, need i say anymore!

Let's use an example, Chemistry undertook some recruitment in India for senior level vacancies for a FTSE 100 technology business.  We were a trusted partner in the UK market and I guess they thought, that we were better the devil they knew. Hey, good enough reason for us!

We successfully filled all our vacancies in a short time frame by doing two things:

1. Partnering on a fixed fee (something like £2,000) with an Indian recruitment business for sourcing of Indian based candidates

2. Building talent maps of Indian talent that was working within large corporates outside of India and then approaching them to see if they would be tempted back with a "big" role in Mumbai? Funnily enough they were and some really cracking talent too.  We found both our "returning" placements in California.

The search was not difficult, it just required some "out of the box" thinking in terms of the how and who.

Actually the big challenge was finding Executives of an Indian origin who would work well and be successful in a business run by slightly arrogant (or you could say confident), incredibly bright (or you could say lacking in Emotional Intelligence), white, middle aged (or you could say in their prime) anglo-saxon men (none of them were called Harold). And herein lies the big challenge with International recruitment, it is not the sourcing (although you may have to do something different) but the selection that is the key.  Invariably Western business expanding their sales, marketing, operations, finance etc. in to new markets do not understand the cultural implications of hiring senior people who are not from the same ethnic group, blimey we still struggle working with the Europeans (exceptions clearly are the Dutch and Scandinavians who are just too cool for a bit of cross-border fisticuffs).

What Chemistry found is that the most crucial factor when hiring indigenous Executives for a Western business is their degree of Emotional Intelligence.  In the same instance, the most successful Western expats and managers of outsourced businesses are those with a vast toolkit of management styles, brought about by higher than average Emotional Intelligence.  It is this innate ability to control and manage their emotions whilst reading, understanding, controlling and managing others that enables them to work cross-culture.

So, when hiring Internationally, actually use who you like, in-market recruiters or UK based recruiters, as with all recruitment businesses the experience will be down to consultant you engage with.  The "bang" is not in the sourcing, this is fairly easy.  The "bang" is in the selection, ignore Emotional Intelligence at your peril, understand what you need in the role, measure it and if the individuals do not possess it don't hire them!

It's not rocket science, it never is, but it might be Chemistry :-)

R

Creating a referral scheme that works

Every recruitment company you turn to seems to have a referral scheme, most of them offer a cash incentive if their friends or colleagues get placed. We were looking to start our own referral scheme but offering cash for referrals just didn't seem very Chemistry, to be honest, it seemed like exactly the stereotypical recruitment agency behaviour we avoid at all costs!!

So, we were thinking about how else we can encourage candidates to recommend Chemistry to their friends freely of their own accord and then reward them for doing so. After getting our heads together and thinking about what we recommend to our friends we came up with a frighteningly simple answer; people never truly recommend something unless they have had a great experience using it! Groundbreaking, we know :)

Now, some of you reading this may think I am stating the obvious, but sadly in many cases this is a realisation yet to reach the recruitment industry.

The question then becomes so what can we do to make the experience for candidates as enjoyable as possible?

Well, quite a lot actually, at Chemistry we have introduced a 'welcome' pack for candidates which is crammed full of useful information including an invitation to the process, the Chemistry story, great interview tips, information about the client. We have been piloting this for the last few weeks and everybody is loving it so far.

We have also invested in a LexisNexis login so that our candidates can really research the clients they interview with and their markets. No other recruitment companies in the world are doing this!

Then there is all the great stuff for candidates that we have been doing for years e.g. every candidate gets a full feedback booklet from the profiling we do with them.

In summary, we have been making every effort to ensure that candidates are noticing the difference in service between us and other recruitment agencies.

But then what happens if people do refer their friends and we place someone, they need to be rewarded somehow!!!!

Again, we believe it is all about the experience you give people. Therefore instead of a quick cash prize, we decided to give people something that will last, that they will use over and over again - a great experience they will constantly associate with Chemistry.

We decided one years membership to the Quintessentially concierge and private members club was the perfect reward.

So, there it is, our views on what a referral scheme should be, a reward not a bribe and the recommendation should be deserved not paid for!

Rowan

Attracting Talent, It's All In the Story...

Employer of Choice, EVP (Employee Value Proposition) call it what you will but attracting talent to your business is a serious business and give it any cool name or anagram you like, it's also bloody hard!

So why do most companies suck at attracting talent and end up spending huge sums of money with recruitment companies, as usual, the answer is a leadership one.  Those organisations who are phenomenal at attracting the best talent, have as their best talent guy/girl, their CEO.  Couple of examples, Asda (in Archie Norman's day), HBoS, now I know he is much maligned now but back in the day Andy Hornby sucked in the best talent.  GE, Jack Welch a phenomenal Talent Manager.

Put simply the ability for a company to attract talent is firmly and directly linked to the active participation by it’s leaders, as with most people stuff as soon as it comes becomes an HR driven initiative it is doomed to failure, notice I said HR driven not HR implemented!

So before we roll out the online funky stuff, the twittering, the blogging, what practical no cost steps can we implement.

1. Make hiring the very best talent a perogative for all your business leaders, they should prioritise interviews over any other meeting, they should be available for interviews at the drop of a hat

Bit of a story to illustrate this, when we doing our gig at Energis, they had an amazing Head of Marketing, called David Shaw now David attracted amazing talent…one day I was interviewing a stellar guy for an accounting role, half way through the interview it occurred to me that d’you know, his background may be accounting but he could do a great job for us in propositions.  I stopped the interview and rang David Shaw, the conversation was short:

“David, hi.  It’s Roger, I am interviewing a guy for Eamonn (CFO) but I think he’s perfect for your team, where are you?”

“I am in the building, what room are you in? I’ll step out of this and join you”

5 minutes later, David was interviewing the candidate, 24 hours later the candidate had accepted our offer and signed his contract.

Did you see it?

2.Nail Your Hygiene Factors - 24 hours and signed his contract…there’s another factor in attracting great talent, you have to have the hygiene factors nailed down, contracts need to be available immediately, get the salary range you can offer negotiated upfront so there’s no “sign-off” delays

3.    3.GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT! – great people sign up to missions, not pensions…what is your organization doing that is compelling, how do you treat people, do you empower them or control them…really it doesn’t matter which just get the story straight, be honest and exacerbate the “bad” bits.  The Energis story went like this…”everything is broken, no matter how bad I tell you it is, when you come in you’ll say it’s worse, however we are building the brightest, most capable team in the history of telecommunications.  You will be intellectually challenged by the size of the task and your peers.  There is nowhere to hide, if you don’t deliver you will be fired, however everything you do will affect the company by 20% up or down every day, if you want to make a difference then you need to join us on our journey”…this story was not so much an attraction strategy as a selection one, like Marmite, you either thought it was amazing or a load of rubbish…guess who we wanted to hire.  My point is this, you have to be honest, but find the mission, it can’t be money (you’ll hire the wrong people), it can’t be security (you’ll hire the wrong people), what is it?  Are you changing the world, saving lives or like Energis just trying to achieve the impossible.

Attracting great talent is nothing to do with a slogan or an online campaign or advertising, you can start right now by doing 3 things:

• Measure your senior leaders on how good they are at recruiting, make hiring great people a strategic imperative and therefore their priority
• Make it easy for the business to hire great talent and the experience for candidates tough but swift
• Get your story straight and make sure everyone who touches a candidate is on message, everyone! 

Attracting great talent, it's not rocket science but it might be Chemistry :-)

R