branding

First impressions count. Not just at uni, but for years afterwards.

We’re big fans of the focus that employers place on hiring future talent. And why wouldn’t we be? We work with some of the world’s best-known employers to build their employer reputations. Graduate recruitment marketing – especially in the UK – is amongst the most competitive, most innovative, most dynamic and fun areas of employer marketing to be involved with.

Good news then that research released this week by HighFliers points to a resurgent graduate employment market in 2014. Hundreds if not thousands more roles will be open to those coming out of UK universities looking to start work in the autumn.

More good news. This time for those new graduates who just invested in paying tuition fees and living costs for the past few years and need to begin paying off that debt.

Some interesting changes have happened over the last few years however, suggesting that all may not be returning to the status quo as the economy improves.

The same research suggested that more than one in three of those vacancies will be filled by candidates who’ve already completed a placement of some sorts with their future employer. Good news again for the proactive, career minded student. Not so good if you’re less inclined toward planning your career and more inclined towards studying for your degree.

Just think. One third of all vacancies that are not open to application. What does that mean for graduate recruitment? And, what does it mean for those of us tasked with recruiting graduates? It’s clear that the future leaders we’re aiming to hire and develop (that’s why we hire graduates rather than those from earlier in education right?), are as keen as we are as employers to try out the working relationship before making a commitment.

So it seems that graduate recruitment through the milkround is not as tied to the concept of finding the next generation of leaders as it once was. And, if the annual autumn milkround circus is less important in finding the people that end up getting hired, what is all that marketing for? Come to think of it, if the decision to hire is made way before degrees are awarded, what is the purpose of recruiting graduates? Why not just hire earlier?

As one of our clients said to us recently it’s a bit more complicated than that. Graduate recruitment (and the associated marketing effort), serves many purposes.

It is partly about filling actual vacancies of course. Those people hired may or may not choose to stay with that employer for the whole of their career, if they do it’s a good investment to pay more in attracting, training, paying a higher salary and associated benefits. Unfortunately, statistically they’re more likely to move in a few years time. In which case it’s not. The investment simply serves to get people ready for their next job – perhaps in a competitor organisation.

However, as a means of providing early insight into the reasons to join a business, the process of the marketing of graduate vacancies is difficult to beat. If we are seen as a great place to work in those formative years then this memory of our offer will stay with the people we need for the whole of their career- irrespective of whether they join us or not immediately.

The future leaders we hire are influenced by their first impressions and do remember the good and the bad. I’m certain that we all can recall from our own experience who we’d work for if we had the chance. How would you respond if that company approached you now? Do you feel any more positive or negative about them?

Graduate recruitment is changing. We have to think both ahead of the curve and for the long- term if we are to maximise our ROI. Very little of our energy should be focused on being part of the final year application fest that happens each autumn. We won’t hire the best people that way.

We’re going to start exploring the traditional and contemporary models of graduate recruitment over the next few weeks – which is better and why. We hope you’ll enjoy the blog series over the next few weeks and hearing what you have to say.

Don’t forget to follow our blog to keep up to date with the latest thinking and pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com to get in touch.

+Tonic Agency Ltd

How can you use Google Circles to be more personal?

In the first edition of our five part blog focusing on G+ we asked if employers could afford to ignore what’s set to become the most used social media. In this, the second part, we’re going to talk about Google Circles and why they’re a really useful feature when it comes to delivering truly personalised content to your audience.

Quite simply a Circle is a group of friends, followers or contacts. Much like Facebook or Twitter, but with a difference. Unlike Facebook or Twitter there is no limit to the number of circles you can operate – each receiving a unique content feed. This offers endless opportunity to segment and personalise your messages and conversation to each of the communities you’ve built.

This allows you to be much more specific about what you share with each group. Facebook offers a single stream of content as does Twitter – G+ however, allows you to share engineering content with your Engineering circle, Marketing content with your circle of marketeers and information about what you’re planning to do at St Andrew’s University with your St Andrew’s University circle. You get the idea?

In context everyone wins. Your community get more relevant content – relevant posts that mean your message will be heard. And that’s a good thing – in a world where our attention spans are getting shorter and we’re demanding tailored content delivered faster, the ability to deliver information that is interesting, relevant and insightful is key to building brand advocacy.

So what’s our recommendation? Here are some ideas:

Treat your Public circle in the way it’s intended – give broad-brush information that is designed to engage and attract. You need to attract followers too.
Sub-divide the people that follow you into circles based on your target communities and develop content plans for each group
Use the opportunity to add value – see our blog on HelpMarketing for more about this
Think for the long-term. The objective here is to build engagement and then hire. Don’t simply broadcast a long list of vacancy announcements. This serves no-one and is a sure fire way of turning the people that you want to hire off.
Content is king, and delivering the right information, in the right way at the right time is something many employers find difficult. G+ Circles make that easier.

If you want to have a quick look at Circles being used intelligently, then I’d recommend looking at what Cadbury achieved with their ‘Tasters Circle.’ It’s a great example of a community that was quickly built and united by the same passion.

Cadbury went on to further engage this community using another of Google’s handy features – the Hangout. We’ll be looking into those in more detail next week.

If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime, or simply want to keep up to date with our latest thinking then why not add us to one of your circles at +Tonic Agency Ltd? Alternatively you can visit http://www.tonic-agency.com for further contact details.

Where is recruitment’s Higgs Boson?

You may have seen that CERN held a press conference on Wednesday (4th July’12), to announce that as near as is ‘absolutely’ certain (at the 5-sigma point), they’ve identified that the Higgs Boson does exist. This is important because it means that all the things we thought we knew about how the universe works are still, as far as we can tell, true. There’s no need to rip up the physics rulebook and begin again. This is a good thing.

So, what’s that got to do with recruitment – an inexact science at the best of times – and what can we draw from it? How are the two linked? Well, perhaps more than you might think.

Link number one: At the end of 2011 I visited CERN for the first time. What an amazing place. Aside from meeting Robert Cailliau, who co-developed the www with Tim Berners-Lee (Robert’s now a bit of a hero of mine and no fan of Facebook let me tell you because at its heart it’s not open source), it was a great opportunity to rub shoulders with other people from around Europe, all interested in the future of recruitment and prepared to share their thinking. You see, that’s the great thing about CERN. Collaboration and sharing are in their DNA – their basic tenet is that we can achieve more together, and they’re absolutely right.

The people attending the conference were there at their own expense to talk about the challenges of recruiting, and to outline their approaches to solving the problems they’d encountered. I think it’s fair to say that we all walked away inspired and informed about how to tackle the new recruitment world.

The presentation I gave (with Marcus Body from Optimal), had four main messages: that there’s more information available to help make the right careers decisions; that employers control very little of this detail; that candidate behaviour is changing because of the availability of information; and, that this new recruitment paradigm has more in common with the way in which recruitment worked before the advent of push messaging. Which only really began as print media came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The future, we suggested, was based on conversation and community, rather than telling (or selling to), an unexpecting audience about a role that we have vacant, and then expecting the most talented people to believe our every word.

Link number two: This one is a bit more tenuous re: the Higgs, I’d grant you, but it’s had recruiters scratching their heads for just as long. What is the one thing that holds the recruitment universe together, but has until recently been just as difficult to measure, see and prove that it exists? Your answer may be different to mine but to my mind it’s candidate sentiment. We’ve spent so many years working out what it is that we (as employers) want, and what we (as employers) want to offer, that we’ve forgotten to ask what it is that the people we need to attract, engage and excite are interested in.

Conversation is as much about listening as it is talking, and if we begin our employment communications by listening to the voices of the people we need to hire or retain, the output of our efforts will be better quality a lower cost and ultimately better ROI from those people.

Social media is of course the route to holding the conversation, but if we carry on just putting out messages that we hope are right, we’re really just creating another monologue. We now have the opportunity as employers to begin to listen, to understand what people think about us now, and what we need to talk about to change opinion or to interest the right people in our offer. This also has the benefit of dissuading those without the right value, competency or skillsets. We can be much more targeted in our talent attraction strategies – less like a random particle collision.

Link number three: Physics is an inter-linked discipline and so is your employer brand, or more specifically, your brand in general. The way I feel about your organisation is based on a combination of factors. If I visit your careers site I’ll also see your main site, reading information about what you do, and how well you do it – so there’s an easy link there to your corporate positioning and your products or services. If I’m still open-minded and engaged, I may well get the opinion of other people – and importantly that’s not just my peer group or those people who advise me about my career. I’m equally likely to go to a place where I can get independent views about you and your business. What will I find there?

Link number four: Knowing that the Higgs exists allows scientists to proceed with greater certainty toward the future. An environment where the ‘dead-ends’ and inaccurate results that might have be reached are less likely. It takes away any doubt. The same applies to your brand and the conversations you may have using it.

By better understanding the community you need to engage with, their needs and preferences, you will be better informed about what your employer brand should be achieving for you – and this will allow you to be much more precise in measuring its effects, and its impact.

Link number five: The absolutely almost certain discovery of the Higgs has been a collaborative process that’s taken many years to achieve. By working together the scientists at CERN and other installations around the world have created a working environment that allows for the long-term benefit of all concerned.

If we begin by looking at the way in which people make career decisions – again starting with the audience rather than we want to get from them – recruitment actually works in the same way.

Logically, people, especially those at the beginning of their career, cannot possibly have a preferred employer. Career decisions begin by deciding that they like the look of an industry or sector or job type – and then they begin looking at the biggest or best employers that match their criteria. Some employers – like those in the Power sector – are beginning to group together to build sector value propositions to address this, a trend we see growing over time. The have committed to a longer-term approach to solve some big demographic challenges. But, by acting collaboratively they are increasing the visibility of an industry, allowing greater engagement with the people they all need. This has the potential to grab the attention of difficult to reach groups, converting opinion toward the sector and increasing the attractiveness of them all. By working together, sharing budgets and effort, they will all benefit.

So what has the Higgs Boson got to do with recruitment? What can we learn? Arguably more than you might think.

TC2012

Find out more about Tonic – at www.tonic-agency.com or call for a conversation on 020 3651 2337