1. The Hero Drops The Bomb

2. The Boss and the Ex Employee
Within hours, both an ex-employee and current Managing Director of the recruitment business accused of malpractice comment and trade barbs. This, it’s fair to say, we don’t often see.

3. The Agitator
The crowd, roused by the prospect of some serious action, agitates for more

4. The Appeal To Authority
Our hero ups the ante, invoking industry body Recruitment & Employers Confederation informing them of one of their members business practice.

5. The Genius With A Solution That Everyone Ignores
It’s clear that this stage, that solutions are not required, as mob mentality takes over the thread

6. Shit – As Any Schoolkid Knows – Spreads
Accusations escalate – others come forward with corroborating reports support the initial accusation of industry bad practice. Astoundingly, it appears the REC had already been informed about this business malpractice from this organisation, with the implication that nothing had been done about it.

7. The Joker
A bit of light relief is an opportunity to good to ignore. It’s pretty good joke, and a maybe damn fine idea

8. The Philosopher
Religion was always going to come into it. Glad to see it’s Budha

9. The Smart Arse
There is always one

10. The Conspiracy Theorist
And one of these. To be fair, another good joke

11. The Escalation
Things can only go one way now….

12. The Gods Are Watching
God gives a sign to the Israelites – praise be someone cares.

13. No Cold Calls Today
It’s fair to say the UK recruitment industry has pretty much ground to halt by now.

14. The End?
Not on your life.

What have learned from this scandal in the recruitment industry?

1. It’s Brave To Be The Whistle Blower
As we’ve know already (see Manning, Bradley), blowing the whistle on malpractice carries with it the risk of uncertainty of outcome. At the moment, we do not yet know how this will unfold, for any of the protagonists, commentators, industry bodies or indeed, bloggers involved in this case. What we do know, that it’s a brave move to go public with information of the type Daniel produced. His widespread endorsement by the industry suggests that this is something we all recognize.

2. Recruiters Are Really, REALLY Pissed Off With Cowboy Bad Practice
It’s clear that there is an awareness of how our industry is perceived, and a frustration that comes from not being able to do anything about it. Until now.

3. We All Love A Scandal
‘…it’s better than War and Peace!’, quipped one industry wit. Yes, indeed it is. Nothing creates a stir more than a scandal in an industry we belong to, and it takes no more than a few names being named before we all become gossips over the fence, spreading the word through the recruitment village.

4. Mob Rules On The Social Web
It was interesting to note that the one or two updates that counseled solutions were completely ignored in favour of the foaming-at-the-mouth calls for the head of the accused. We’d become a digital lynch mob the Daily Mail would be proud of, giddy at the breaking of taboo, and continued with calls for ever more severe sanction. Perhaps, from this episode, we can all understand a little more why innocents were once burnt upon the stake.

5. Social Media Is Bad For The Bad Guys
Pretending to be a candidate in order to solicit business intelligence is not mythology in the recruitment business – we all know it, been on the end of it, seen some of us do it, and one or two, like our unfortunate friend yesterday, might have actually routinely practiced it. What is new is that social media allows for this bad practice to be captured, spread by the community and be preserved for posterity, because make no mistake, this thread and the conversations already beginning to circulate around it, are here to stay. There is already evidence that the employer in question has lost business, and one can guess that as the story itself becomes myth, that the damage to brand – individual and corporate – may be irreparable.

6. Recruiters Urgently Need To Understand Social Media
It’s not bullshit to say that social media changes the game for recruiters. We’ve seen a young mans’ career, and perhaps the company he’s employed by, ruined, as a result of what happened yesterday. Recruiters urgently need to understand that legacy practice – good or bad – can no longer be seamlessly practiced in a world where conversations and actions can be digitalized, captured and shared. There’s a reason why it’s called ‘dying in the ditch’. You die.

Let’s flip this around over the other way – what if there was good news spread today instead of bad – what impact for your business, and maybe your career? Have a think about that, and start making it a priority to teach yourself and your consultants about the socialized world we live in now.

Wise Man Say helps Recruiters, HR and Job Seekers use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

If you liked this post…….like it!

Wise Man Say helps agency & in-house recruiters understand how to use social media to find candidates & acquire clients. Strategy, Implementation, Support & Training. Call on 020 7 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk

1. Risk To Productivity

This is a classic. You’ve heard your boss say it, and you’ve probably said it or thought it yourself. If I let my guys on Facebook they will just play Mafia Wars all day.

It’s an easy picture to imagine – valued employees abandoning their objectives and getting sucked into a wormhole of status updates, photo tagging & online chat. Thankfully, it’s also propaganda, or at the very least, a failure of imagination. There is simply no evidence to back up the case that allowing access to social media sites degrades ‘productivity’ – not in the wider economy, and not in the recruitment industry. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary.

Think about it in terms of our business. Do you know of another industry that is more results driven than ours? We are obsessively concerned with sales objectives – so much so that it actually a problem for us when we need to think laterally or retool to adapt to change. We are so concerned about hitting our numbers because we literally depend on them – you know, for food – and it is preposterous to assume that any but the most demotivated of employees would be sidetracked in this way by access social media sites.

Workforce productivity is a management & hiring issue, not a social media one. Restricting access to some of the most relevant information sources for recruitment is communicating a message that you do not respect or trust your staff, or, in fact, give them the tools to do the job. Recruitment is a simple game, and, whilst it’s certainly not easy, it is relatively simple to manage. Make placements, make money, keep job. No placements, no money, no job. Where is the risk?

2. Risk of Bad PR

We’ve all heard the horror stories. In fact, we’re still hearing them as companies of all stripes continue to under-invest in training staff on the use of social media, and / or palm off the management of it to its most junior members or interns that probably aren’t even on the payroll. The technical term for this type of corporate approach is……..half arsed. Companies want all the benefits of social media – increased buzz, greater customer engagement, ‘free’ PR, Marketing & Inbound sales – but without the work required to understand and organize around it. There is no great technical solution to this; if you want social play, you have to put the time in – get outside help if you need it – and train yourself and your staff on what social media can do to, and for, the business. The only way you can mitigate against Bad PR is to raise your staff to an acceptable level of competence or hand the keys over to people that have bought into your business and have already built that expertise elsewhere. I’ll give you a hint: that’s almost never the intern

3. Risk To Corporate Data Leakage

Information that recruiters have traditionally held close is bleeding out everywhere
as candidates, contractors & clients tweet who they are, update what they are doing and share what they want or need next. You can argue that Socializing Your Recruitment Business is simply going to contribute to this ongoing leakage of corporate data. I wouldn’t disagree with you if you did. However, the idea that you can capture and lock data into a database that no one else can access is rapidly losing it’s resonance with reality. That information is already out and it isn’t going back any time soon.

We return to investing in staff and training them to understand which topics are in or out of bounds for social communication. As a business, you also need to review your contracts of employment and ensure that your standard clauses cover social media usage. In the long run, it’s not feasible to keep information off the web when the real owners of that information – the candidates. contractors and clients – are not bound by any legal contracts that you design. Our industry business model has changed in quite a fundamental way, and we recruiters need to move up the value chain and trade on something more than just knowing where the jobs are and who might be available to do them.

4. Risk of Social Media Ownership

Who Owns Your LinkedIn Connections? I once asked, in an earlier, equally unread post. I didn’t have the answer then and I don’t have it now. Legal precedent has already been set in the UK by a court case won by Hays in 2008, but it remains unclear how the ruling was enforced and how practicable it would be to work out it’s implications.

Like the leakage of Corporate Data, this is happening whether you Socialize Your Recruitment Business or not. At some point in the near future, you will come across a situation where there is a conflict between Employer & Employee over ownership of social media content.

As a manager of a recruitment business, it is absolutely critical that you allocate the appropriate resources to the tasks, especially when it comes to creating online identities to the business. A classic example might be your LinkedIn Company Group – who owns that? The company the group is about, or the individual you tasked to create it, who – of course – has now left to work for your main competitor? A quick glance at LinkedIn’s terms of usage might scare you shitless.

So get your house in order and take this seriously. Spreadsheets can be looked at by accountants & your holiday can be booked by your spouse. Your priority for now is to secure your digital assets and ensure that they belong to your business – you’ve got most at stake, so guess who needs to do it?

5. Risk of Doing Nothing

It must be pretty obvious by now why so many recruiters prefer not to deal with Social Media – it’s a real headache. With all these risks attached, it seems safer to live the cautious life and have nothing at all to do with it. But the price we pay for peace is a heavy one, because the risks outlined above are not contingent upon your action or inaction. They will happen whether you like them or not, whether you see them or not, whether you deal with them or not. Your only choice is to be an actor or be acted on.

There is more:

What about the capabilities your company loses by not socializing? Your consultants need to know how to build Talent Networks, how to use Location based sourcing techniques, how to build Attraction Marketing strategies. By ignoring social media, you run the risk of deskilling your staff on the skills they need most to stay ahead of the competition in a constantly evolving space.

What opportunities are not getting because you are not visible on the social web? Experienced buyers of recruitment services are not waiting by the phone for your fortuitously timed cold call. They have other means of sourcing suppliers, conducting due diligence, and making decisions on evidence they see on the social web. By not being visible there, you run the risk of missing this potential business, and worse, not even knowing that it was ever there in the first place.

What about your competition? Have you thought how they may harm you if you leave your digital assets unclaimed? Brand jacking is a phenomenon that has yet to gain traction in the UK recruitment industry, but it will soon and once it takes off, there will be a corporate war in which the reach of the law is uncertain, and the consequences for currently successful businesses may be profound.

Conclusion
Understand this: Socializing Your Recruitment Business is risky. It will move you and your business well out of your comfort zone and for recruiters especially, it will involve business practice that is in many ways counter intuitive to what we have always known. However, the risks of doing nothing far out way those of getting involved and joining the conversation on the social web. In the end, the biggest risk you can run is to do nothing at all.

Want to know more?

Wise Man Say helps agency & in-house recruiters understand how to use social media to find candidates & acquire clients. Strategy, Implementation, Support & Training. Call on 020 7 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk

If you like this post…..like it!

Dogma is an opinion or a belief that is not to be disputed, doubted or be divergent from it’s accepted form by it’s practitioners or believers.

One theme was a recurring motif throughout the days of TruLondon 3. And I believe that the idea is in serious danger of becoming dogma: this is the notion that the application of social media to recruitment has to be about engagement.

I think we are guilty of overstating the case. Here are 5 reasons why I think Engagement Is Overrated:

1. We are a clique and do not represent

A quick scan down the delegates list would reveal to anyone with a passing familiarity of the social web that what we had at TruLondon 3 was the gathering of an elite. Make no bones about this – this is exactly why we all paid up and turned up – but when you get people with the same interests, in the same place, saying the same things, there is a massive danger that conclusions will be drawn in a bubble of our own making. And sometimes those conclusions do not map at all well onto the experience of those in the outside world. I enjoyed immensely the contact and communication with thought leaders in the space, but at the same time, I was acutely aware that the people ‘in here’’ were nothing like the people ‘out there’. Those outsiders – by and large – do not tweet. They do not know about, think about or care about, ‘Personal Branding’. And their attitude to ‘engagement’ is largely unknown because they never touch us and we never touch them. Can an unrepresentative elite – a clique of experts – really make generalisations about what the outsiders want or need?

2. Case studies are idealized & flawed by sampling

There’s nothing like a good idea illustrated by real life examples. Let’s chain that hypothetical down to concrete e.g’s on what actually happens. No dispute from me. However, illustration is not the same as representation. Case studies, are, after all, preselected on the fact that they worked; I’ve yet to go to a conference where I’ve seen a company rep step up and say, ‘well, we fucked this right up’. Yet it must of happened. Perhaps many, many more times than we know about. Sampling is the problem with case studies as a rule because we look for success, polish it up, and present it as the case from which to draw conclusions. And the slow accumulation of these examples ossify into the collective subconscious, further strengthening the dogma that engagement is key.

The pattern is familiar and the effects are the same; it is the practice of indoctrination. It’s the reason why no one anywhere, at anytime has ever been able to predict anything, unless they are iconoclasts or exiles from the community.

3. We ignore the fact that job seekers are often pragmatic

As the great philosopher Dave Martin once said, ‘work is an unfortunate interruption to the weekend’. A joke of course, but it contains a kernel of truth recognised by everybody. Certainly it’s been the case for many of jobs I’ve ever had, and I don’t think my experience was in any way unique. The essential truth to a lot of work is that it is a practical exchange of time + labour for resources. Obsessive focus on ‘engagement’ ignores this reality, and leads to an overestimation as to how important engagement is to people looking for work. For every job seeker that needs to be ‘engaged’, I suspect that there are 10 more who might just need a fucking job. People find themselves on the market when they don’t want to be and, typically, want off that market asap. They know it’s no joke out there. They have bills to pay, And they are prepared to compromise. We forget this essential pragmatism drives a great deal of job search, and that the average job seeker journey is often very unlike that idealized by those who (over) subscribe to the talent community ideal. In the end, I suspect engagement might mean very little to people if they don’t get a job at the end of their effort.

4. Social media can be great for post and pray

There is no doubt that broadcast techniques can be effectively, creatively and ingeniously used in recruitment. What made me realise that we had segued from evangelism into dogma was that these techniques were routinely dismissed for no other reason than they did not put engagement at the heart of what they do. They were criticised not because they ineffective, or that people did not get jobs, or that employers did not get hires. It was simply considered wrong because ‘engagement’ wasn’t core to the project. No explanation ever seemed to be offered why this was the case, other than the tautology that……‘it wasn’t engagement’. I thought it was great that foursquare pioneers like Craig Fisher uses guerilla advertising tactics to lure candidates in for his clients from their direct competitiors. I don’t see anything wrong with AllTheTopBananas producing ever more intelligent ways to distribute vacancies to users of their mobile application. I’m pretty certain there’s plenty wrong with Gordon Lokenberg, but nothing at all wrong with his innovative use of Augmented Reality as a metaphorical lighthouse for those Engineers with the skillset to see it.

Sure, we’re not using geo location or augmented reality or mobile to ‘engage’ with candidates, but so what? Broadcast is still OK. Broadcast with social tools is also OK. Nothing is abuse if the players in the game agree that it isn’t. And yet we have developed a very real sense that ‘non social’ use of social media is somehow….wrong. That feeling is an emotional response to an idea that we have allowed to embed into ego, and subsequently removed from the jurisdiction of sober assessment.

5. We mistake presence for participation.

Once ideas become embedded, they spread like fungus. And like fungus, they often appear in places where you might least expect them. Nothing brought this out more clearly than when an assertion was made on one of the tracks ‘that most people are on LinkedIn are there in order to engage’. Not so. Not at all in fact. This assertion not only didn’t feel right, it’s also not backed up by the facts – facts produced by LinkedIn themselves. It took one of my sourcing heroes – Irina Shamaeva – to summarize the counterpoint that, ‘most people are on LinkedIn.…..because think they ought to be’. In essence, setting up profiles when they need to look for work, and then, more or less forgetting about it when looking for work became less important. We’ve all the seen the figures and the graphs of social media sign up – they are spectacular – but it is a mistake to assume the hockey shaped curve represents greater participation or engagement. The 80/20 rule still applies – the vast majority of activity on two of the three major social networking platforms comes from a small and shrinking (in terms of overall share) percentage of the ‘community’. There may be more people there, but it’s more people doing very little. Indeed, it would seem that most people sign up because they feel they should, then don’t see the point – or maybe don’t like the point – and in fact, disengage.

Conclusion

Understand this: I am not criticising Engagement. Engagement, conversation, dialogue is what makes the social web the transformatory force it is, in recruitment as well as in other places. It creates a new space, with fuzzy parameters, giving room for the sorts of experimentation that is easy to get passionate about. It is what makes social recruiting special, and I’m glad I’m in it. But we need to remind ourselves that we are playing with models, no more. These models do not mesh very closely with the reality of job search for the majority of the people who are looking for work, and the engagement we have conditioned ourselves to see as ideal may not always be what job seekers want, expect or need. Social media, used for recruitment in ‘non’ social ways is not any worse for the fact that it doesn’t have ‘engagement’ at the core of what it does. We should simply applaud when it works. And there is nothing wrong with looking at LinkedIn as it might well actually be – a giant database of self updating information, to be mined for candidates, by recruiters, looking to fill jobs.

For an individual recruitment agent, the benefits of networking tools like LinkedIn are obvious – it is a portable CRM, a constantly expanding database of candidates and a self updating business development tool. The traditional downside of leaving an employer – the loss of a network of carefully cultivated contacts and therefore, sales opportunity – is largely eliminated by the portability of a LinkedIn account. What is to stop a recruitment agent joining a firm, building a network of contacts and then simply moving on with that enhanced book of business? He becomes a much higher value employee in the open market due to his expanded contact book, and is likely to command added market value as a result. What’s more, he’s free to repeat again and increase his value with further moves down the line.