Facebook is changing, unless you want future employers to know your entire history, you need to change your privacy settings ASAP. If you are wondering what to do, here is a quick guide

First let’s see how your profile looks like to the entire world.

1. Log in. Click on your name in the top right corner.
   
2. Click ‘View As..’
   
3. If you have already enabled your Timeline view then this is how it looks to everyone. You can also enter any of your contacts name to see how your Timeline appears to them.

Fix your settings.

1. You can hide individual post from your timeline.
   
2. Always make sure you set the right visibility of your post.
   

We would be interested in hearing your comments, are you concerned by this or do you just accept that in tomorrow’s world there will be no secrets? Is this bad for job seekers or does it have no impact?

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a plethora of articles commenting on interview questions, with comments ranging from “What’s the point of these wacky questions” to observers who say that if corporate giants such as Google, who are notorious for asking questions such as “you are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?” frequently base their interviews and hiring on the answers to such riddles, then there must be something in it?

So is there something in it?
Can any of you out there shed any light on the value of questions such as:

1. “What colour best represents your personality”
2. “If you were an animal, what type of animal would you be and why?”

Does this type of questioning identify potential talent?

What type of response would classify as genius, and what type of response would classify as ridiculous?

Can these questions really provide any insight into an individual’s creativity, can they help interviewers identify how the interviewee potentially responds to unexpected scenarios, are candidates likely to panic, express confusion or go with the flow?

Your views and experiences would be greatly appreciated and if you could share with us the most unusual interview question that you have either been asked or that you have asked, that would be great.

Look forward to hearing from you

With LinkedIn on the other hand, everything that I have read in the past year or two has been overwhelmingly positive and none more so than when talking about social networking and recruitment.

So I was taken aback recently when I asked a head hunter why he didn’t accept my invitation to join my network on LinkedIn. He said “it’s for your protection, everyone knows that I am a head hunter and when you and I connect,  everyone in your network (including your employer) gets an email update telling them we are now connected and everyone will assume that you are either a client or looking for a job”. He added that the other thing he found astounding was that people did not realise that LinkedIn was one of the biggest CV databases around and unlike Monster, Reed or Total Jobs, you don’t even have to buy a license to be able to see the people who are looking for a job; as they simply tick the looking for a new job box or interested in new career opportunities and are then visible to the entire world, including their employer.

I decided to do a bit of research and came across these articles in the Telegraph & Mail discussing the sacking over a LinkedIn profile which highlight to me the exact issue my friend had outlined.

The articles cover the case of John Flexman, 34, who posted his career history on networking site LinkedIn while employed as a graduate and development manager for gas company BG Group in Reading, who alleges he lost his job for saying he was interested in ‘career opportunities’ in an online CV.  As part of his profile, he also ticked a box to say he was interested in career opportunities.

However, after discovering Mr.Flexman’s profile his employer took exception to it, saying Mr Flexman had revealed confidential information and breached company policy.Mr Flexman is understood to have been ordered to remove the profile and was called to a disciplinary hearing for ‘inappropriate use of social media’.He was using the website to advance his career at a cost to the company: “In effect what you were saying was ‘what a terrible place this is but what a great job I’ve done’,” BG Group lawyer Ian Gatt QC, is reported saying :

“Mr Flexman said he should have put more thought into the content of his profile but that he had a right to post his CV publicly “.

“But did I do it to further my career? That’s absolute nonsense.”

On his return to work he was handed a list of disciplinary charges and told he could be sacked, Reading Employment Tribunal heard.The dispute led to Mr Flexman’s resignation in June.

Employment law experts have commented that it was unlawful to treat anybody differently because they were seeking employment and looking for a job is not a sackable offence. However, employers are entitled to expect loyalty from staff and if the employee knowingly published confidential information in his online CV, the dismissal may have been justified.

Most people still believe that LinkedIn is a networking site and that’s why the CV details are required in order to find and connect with like-minded people, but my friend the headhunter says that it is rubbish, it’s a recruitment site, that’s what everyone uses it for and that is probably the major source of income for LinkedIn.

The hearing is continuing,so we will have to wait to see how it all ends, but clearly more consideration needs to be given to what information you are prepared to put online in public “networking” or CV databases and more thought needs to be given to how someone else may interpret whatever you are putting online.

Has anyone come across anything like this? If you are able to share positive or negative experiences, would love to hear your story.

Also any thoughts on LinkedIn: Job boards or social networks?

Finding and hiring the best talent is a key aspect of talent management for every company, large or small. Everyone should be working to improve the process. It is not just a matter of making the hiring function faster, easier and cheaper, it’s also about delivering the best-quality candidates to fill various jobs. The emergence of automated recruitment technology has helped large organizations who have both the money and resources to make huge strides in the war for talent but what about the little guy? Small to mid-size companies often can’t afford the technology to move toward this goal. Yet they are losing ground to their larger rivals.

According to a recent report from research house Aberdeen, based on more than 400 survey respondents to the firm’s talent acquisition strategies study; automation is having an impact on both the quality of hires and the quality of the hiring process. According to Aberdeen, quality of hire was rated the most valuable overall metric when assessing the effectiveness of talent acquisition. Since quality can be an ambiguous concept, Aberdeen says, respondents were also asked which elements define quality of hire.  The findings reveal that hiring manager satisfaction and efficient use of time are the top of the list.Those organizations that either fully or partially automated their recruitment process had more new hires reach their first productivity milestones than did organizations using only manual processes.

The need for a recruitment system focused on the smaller employer, that is most companies with up to 3000 employees, to automate recruitment, is acute. This will allow them to compete effectively and efficiently for talent on an equal footing to larger organisations. MyPeopleBiz aims to be the champion of the smaller-mid sizers by providing intuitive, easy to use interactive functionality to help companies forge better relationships with agencies and candidates, enhancing their employer brand and enabling them to become an employer of choice in the market for talent. In addition, there is no need to fret about cost asthe return on investment is recouped within year one.

There is no doubt that job seekers are more prepared to be creative in order to gain a competitive edge in the job market. Part of that creativity is being focused on social media which is increasingly the place for people to network, get new job leads or to promote and showcase their experience.

LinkedIn is the new hangout for corporate as well as agency headhunters, and many corporations have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. The info graphic below, based on a recent post EconMatters as well as various survey originating out of the U.SA finds some interesting statistics regarding using social media for job search. For example,

• 1 in 6 workers use social media to get hired
• Almost 90% of job seekers have a profile on a social media site
• 54% of all job hunters use Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin to find jobs
• 50% of job seekers used Facebook, 25% used Twitter, and 36% used Linkedin to look for a job in the last 12 months
• 18.4 million Americans say Facebook got them their current jobs. The numbers for Twitter and Linked in are 10.2 million and 8 million respectively

Of course, this is U.S specific but we can take some pointers as to how it may affect matters in the UK. It does not mean social media will completely replace traditional advertising or traditional recruitemnt, but rather as something to add to the job searching tool bag. Even for the gainfully employed, social media provides an open and easy way to network, being sociably cool and keep you updated on the new technology and social trend.

So it is beneficial for anybody, regardless if you are looking for a job, to be on at least one of the major social media site (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin)?

Created by: MBA Online

Europe’s largest annual online recruitment conference returns to central London on 26th January 2012. We have an exclusive discount for MyPeopleBiz readers!

The 10th anniversary conference – “Online Recruitment 2012: The Year Ahead” will focus on  online recruitment strategy, candidate attraction, mobile, online law and global social media, You’ll hear from other industry leading speakers as well as network with 500 professionals at the industry’s largest event.

1.  Google are presenting on Google+ and mobile within recruitment.
2. ITV are talking about how they have successfully implemented a new careers website and social media strategy.
3. The FIRM are talking about 3,000 FIRM employer recruitment strategies.
4.  Boots are back talking about the market a year on and how they successfully used Facebook for social hiring.
5. There’s a social media recruitment legal and compliance masterclass which should be really interesting.
6. Monster are talking about how BeKnown could change the recruitment world forever via Facebook.
7. LinkedIn are discussing their vision of the future of online recruitment in 2012.
8. Plus Enhance Media – the conference organisers – giving insight from the world’s largest piece of online recruitment research.

We’ll be there (obviously) and MyPeopleBiz readers can get a 10% discount on tickets! To find out more about the conference click here and when booking use the promotion code MPB10 to secure your discount.

See you on the 26^th Jan!

Misconception 1: “We are a small company and we don’t recruit much!”

A very small company may only recruit 3 or 4 people a year, therefore is there any point in thinking too much about recruitment and its associated costs?

The answer is that perception is key.

Small companies do not want to be perceived as small companies, it’s not good for business image, for winning large scale contracts, or indeed for hiring talent. They want to be perceived as professional and cutting edge. A Recruitment Portal would provide the same high spec functionality as that of their bigger competitors. But it doesn’t stop there – small companies would also have the ability to attract talent more economically by utilising MyPeopleBiz buying power with candidate supply channels such as recruitment agents and job boards, rather than trying to negotiate something from a position of weakness. After all, it’s no good trying to sell to an agent the concept of reducing their fees if all they are going to be offered  is a couple of roles to fill a year. With MyPeopleBiz, a small company can benefit from our collective buying power, agree terms of business, set and fix the fee. Then there is the ability to hire direct utilising our platform consisting of thousands of job seekers. If you hire a couple of your new employees direct, you will have almost paid for your Recruitment Portal and from then on, everything is a cost saving.

Misconception 2: “We are an SME, we employ around 100 people and we are not really doing anything!”

It is true that there are companies out there planning to survive by doing nothing but this in practice is not what it seems. In reality the above statement is made because it feels the right thing to say or it feels like nothing is happening; but when you look at what the recruitment plan is, often most companies will say that they are growing by an average of 10% a year (10 new people) to support the growth of the business and in most cases there is also an attrition ration of 10% (another 10 new people). Put simply, “we are not doing anything and not recruiting” may well be what it feels like when you are immersed in the day to day, but there is a need to recruit 20 people and that is expensive and time consuming. Hence you do need a Recruitment Portal.

Misconception 3: “We use a spread sheet for tracking candidates – we DO NOT need an applicant tracking system or any other system!”

Organising recruitment is not rocket science. While using an excel spread sheet is not an ideal situation, it can be maintained and managed by an administrator. You can put up with emails containing CV’s coming in at you from every angle, you can put up with the odd agency dispute caused by duplicate applications and end up paying two agencies fees for the same candidate. Not using an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) might save you money up-front but it will cost you in the long run. Yes, all of the problems of under investment can be justified, even the over worked administrators who have to put up with the day to day issues can be dealt with, BUT what about the business? Are they being served? Are they getting the best support? Are you really saving any money by doing what you have always done and refusing to update? Here is an example that people don’t think about and it’s a typical scenario. A new role arises and a decision to post the role on some job boards at a cost of £1,000 (to get direct response and save money) is taken as well as calling all the agencies on the PSL and asking them to help you fill the role. An agency sends a candidate in, admin checks to see if that candidate is on the spread sheet and finds that indeed an application had been submitted 2 years ago. This is outside of the agency exclusivity arrangement and therefore the agency that has submitted the most recent application is logged and the candidate duly gets interviewed, gets the job and is hired resulting in a fee of £6,000 for the introduction. Including the money spent on the job boards, it has all cost £7,000. That’s all pretty efficient and it has all worked well.

Now consider how the same scenario would work with MyPeopleBiz.

A new role arises and you post the role on your career portal before deciding how you want to recruit it. You press the “Candidate Match” button and a candidate that had applied 2 years ago is a perfect match and had been bookmarked to your talent pool at the time you interviewed them. You press the contact candidate button and automatically attach the job spec requesting that, if they are interested, to send you an updated CV and apply via your career portal for the job. They duly get interviewed and hired for the job, resulting in a fee of a big fat £ZERO. There has been no admin hassle, all communications have taken place through your portal and are stored in one place. A vacancy history has been stored, the business has been well served, money has been saved and recruitment has been moved into another level. Now the focus can be on the quality of hire, time to hire, cost to hire, employer brand.

You now have a professional, cutting edge Recruitment Portal, accessible from your website providing you with the same high spec functionality as that of your bigger competitors.

Misconception 4: “We want a direct only recruitment strategy!”

The CEO of a fast growing company decided about a year ago that they had enough of agencies and that from now on HR would be banned from using them. The resources would be directed to bringing everything in-house and managing a self-sufficient “Direct only” recruitment strategy. The Company recruits an average of 20 people per month throughout the UK. The HR team has had to grow from 2 people to 12 people to be able to manage and resource the strategy; which consists of social media, job boards, CV databases and internal head-hunters. Because of the cost of people employed, there is no budget for an ATS and the whole thing is managed on a spread sheet.

The average hire is on a base of £25k with OTE of around £40k and previously the recruitment agencies were supplying candidates at 10% on a PSL resulting in an average fee of £2,500 per hire. So under the previous agency strategy, recruiting 240 people would have cost £600,000.

Now with HR team salaries averaging £30k for 12 people £360,000 plus NI £46,800 plus factoring in desks, laptops and all other employment associated costs, which is difficult to guess but we will use the service office model and allocate a cost per desk of £300 per employee per month costing £43,200. There are 12 job boards used ranging from Reed, Monster, to specialist sales & marketing boards plus LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and a number of CV databases that are subscribed to annually in order to acquire candidate names, identities and contact details at a cost of £90,000. Total cost of the direct strategy is £540,00 A saving of £60,000, but a huge increase in risk.

We suggested a Recruitment Portal with a multichannel recruitment strategy.

The portal including the career site, ATS, communications suite, interview management system,  2 user licenses , all jobs being “socialised” to the social networks by MyPeopleBiz, all jobs appearing on job board aggregators at a cost £14,690.  We would purchase job board credits at our reduced rates amounting to £72,000

Results show that:

• 50 % of the recruits (120) will be “no-fee” candidates generated by people coming directly to the company’s Recruitment Portal, social networks and job boards.
• Referrals will account for another 20% of recruits and utilising our unique referral schemes, these will cost £147,000.
• Finally, the use of recruitment agencies for the remaining most difficult to fill jobs (72) will result in £180,000.

The total cost of a professional system and multichannel approach cost £383,690 representing a saving of £216,310.

Even if you take the view that the office space doesn’t cost you and the laptops are free, etc; you may be able to lose £43,200 of costs, bringing the direct strategy down to £496,800. You could take the view that you may need two extra administrators to the Recruitment Portal approach with an additional cost of £60,000, meaning that you increase the MyPeopleBiz costs to £425,690, but compared to going completely “direct strategy” route,  it’s still a saving £53,110 in year one.

Has the business been served? Are they getting the right or best support? Are you really saving any money by not having an applicant tracking system? The Holy Grail of direct only is not always what it may seem.

Misconception 5: “We do not have time for all of this, besides we like our agencies and want to continue to use them!”

I am never too sure what this statement means, but I guess it is saying that the team is far too busy to look at the recruitment service it provides to the business and whether that service is providing value and the quality required. I assume that it is also saying that managing a spread sheet or paper application process is time consuming and mind numbingly boring, which I understand. I guess it’s also saying that we don’t have either the time or the inclination to go outside of the agency candidate supply channel because it “fills me with dread”, which again I understand. Finally, having built up valuable relationships with certain agents, I completely understand why you would wish to maintain those relationships.

So let’s deal with some of these myths starting in reverse order.

Implementing a Recruitment Portal does not change your relationship with a recruiter. It simply means when they submit an application, it automatically goes into your tracking system rather than to your administrator to input into a spread sheet. You can use the same PSL if you so wish, you can continue to pay the same fee levels if you wish, although using our buying power you can also reduce those fee levels, fix them and agree your terms online. But you can continue to talk to your agents in exactly the same way as you always have.

Being far too busy to provide the right service to the business is an issue and we can help you to change that by providing you with a professional, cutting edge Recruitment Portal. This can be accessed from your web site, providing the same high spec functionality as that of your bigger competitors with a complete ATS, communications  suite and interview management.

You will have the ability to attract talent more economically without the hassle of having to do it yourself, by utilising our platform which consists of thousands of job seekers from social networks and job boards. If you hire a couple of your new employees direct, you will have almost paid for your Portal. From then on, everything is a cost saving and you will have more time to support the business in other ways such as development, appraisals etc.

Contact us for further information info@mypeoplebiz.com.

Hosking’s feature has a slightly different angle, more to do with the frustration of people trying to find a job:

But there is one modest, virtually costless, way that employers could soften the misery and frustration of unemployment. They could trouble to reply to all job applicants

I could not agree more, what’s the point of spending all that effort on nurturing an employer brand and then not bothering to communicate with jobseekers?

We all know the answer and so does Hosking:

Over the past few years it seems to have become acceptable for employers to solicit for potential employees but then not bother replying to them if they don’t like the look of their cv’s…

This practice seems to have become the norm. The CBI acknowledges the problem but excuses it on the grounds of the sheer volume of applications.

Clearly the CBI have never heard of applicant tracking systems, recruitment portals that can at a low cost, solve the problem of volume, where every applicant will receive a response to their application. It’s quite staggering that employers are happy to spend money driving the applications but are then prepared to throw them away, if they do not at that stage meet the exact requirement. Hosking goes on to say that:

Today’s CV toting teenager is tomorrow’s customer, supplier or shareholder

He could have added that the CV toting candidate could also be someone that with 2 years more experience, could turn into a star candidate who will no doubt recall their earlier treatment or that the CV toting candidate could be best friends with a star candidate who may be appalled at the treatment that his/her friend suffered at the hands of the “lazy approach” to dealing with applications.

For larger employers, if cost is not an excuse, then perhaps ease of use of the systems that they employ could be a factor and that is why we focus on the simplicity of our recruitment portal because if it’s easy to use, administrators will get more value and get through more volume in less time. For smaller employers where cost is an issue, our aim is to provide a scalable and affordable platform for them to ensure that as they grow, their employer brand grows with them and does not suffer from its treatment of applicants.

In HR circles there is much talk about best practice, but talking doesn’t get things done.

A great deal of harm is being done by the approach and its quite scary that excuses are being allowed to kill off the employer brand or reputation which in some cases has been nurtured carefully over many years and destroyed at a furious pace.

Less ford thinking CEO’s, simply don’t care or don’t understand this issue. The average stay of a CEO is under 3 years and this can lead to there being more interest in maintaining the status quo rather than changing anything, too much focus on improving the margin by 0.01% before the next job comes along, gets in the way of making real change. The sad thing is that this kind of “lazy” approach is stopping any real innovation, any real improvement in the people aspects of the business. Snap decisions such as to “go direct” to save costs or cut PSL’s or whatever else is flavour of the month are harming the employer brand as well as making it difficult in many cases for the internal recruiters or HR to actually deal with the applications issue properly.

Hosking’s assertion that “there is one modest, virtually costless, way that employers could soften the misery and frustration of unemployment – They could trouble to reply to all job applicants”, would be a good start in saving your employer brand from ruin.

MyPeopleBiz create Recruitment Portals, yes I am biased……

Do:

• Keep your portal up to date – if filled jobs remain on your system or new ones do not appear then you will lose visitors and you will miss out on direct candidates as well as lose credibility with recruiters. If your recruiters get off side they may bypass you and go directly to the hiring manager, which only creates more work and less clarity.
• Keep your portal simple – let candidates register in a couple of clicks and allow recruiters to send a CV in seconds.
• Make navigation easy and obvious – particularly if you have multiple sites; make sure that all your roles across all your sites are easy to find and clearly distinguished.
• Use the analytics use the management information to work out who/what is working effectively for you.
• Get your career site updated – attract talent directly by providing additional information on your company’s culture and use it to keep people up to date of their progress through the recruitment cycle.

Don’t:

• Don’t think it’s the solution to everything and you can now put your feet up – recruitment portals are a means and not an end.
• Don’t give in – when the  “dead against” brigade come along and try to persuade you to ditch your new portal and just use them and in fact why not pay them more money than you would otherwise pay them through your portal – stay resolute – don’t do it.
• Don’t give in when agents tell you they can’t give you that information, of course they can! You should expect to receive applicant information and not just the most basic data that is what your analytics are there for!

Katrina has been a recruiter for many years and has experienced many different recruitment portals, from both sides, and she has even used our portal. She is adamant that they key message when it comes to getting a recruitment portals right is ease of use. It should provide everyone with smoother processes, more pertinent information and less hassle. She says that a great back end in terms of coding should provide a really simple to use front end, basically get it right and “less is more”

Contact MyPeopleBiz

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