It is with absolute pleasure that I’m able to give away two tickets to RecTec today!

RecTec stands for Recruitment Technology Evaluation Convention. It is the only event dedicated to recruitment technology in the Australasian region.

If this were a festival, people would be talking about the awesome lineup. Check it out here. Each delegate also receives a free copy of ‘DIFFERENT THINKING‘ by Nicholas Beames. It’s a book on 20 of the most inspiration recruitment leaders in Australia.

If you’d like to snap up one of these passes, just leave me a comment on this post with your name and email address and I can liaise with you from there.

If you miss the free tickets from HR Club Sydney, jump online and check it out. Tickets are pretty cheap and it is also a great opportunity to meet other people.

22 Nov. Sydney. Be there or be square!

Happy Friday!

I’ve never worked in specialist recruitment before, but when you sit in the generalist seat you realise just how crucial having the right people in the right place at the right time is. It’s not just about bums on seats; its the start of something big in your talent management process.

Now we all know how to place an ad on seek, and what questions to ask (or not ask) in an interview, but how many of us really know how to source the best candidates for our business?

It gives me great pleasure to provide information to you about the first Australasian Sourcing Summit, on 11th August 2011 at the University of Technology.

Bringing together sourcing innovators from Australia and New Zealand, the Sourcing Summit will highlight the important role of sourcing in the region. The Summit will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn from thought leaders, practitioners and organisations who are deeply involved in the local industry and are at the forefront of sourcing excellence.

Whether you are a sourcer, researcher, recruiter or HR professional there is something for everyone at the summit.

Here’s the exciting part. All HR Club Sydney members (you must be a HR Club Sydney subscriber and a member of our LinkedIn group) have access to a 15% discount off the ticket to the Australasian Sourcing Summit. Simply go to http://sourcingsummit.com.au/register/ and enter the code HRCLUB11 to receive your discount.

If you can’t raise the moolah to go along, or want to contribute to a research study on the sourcing profession please also consider filling out this survey http://sourcingsummit.com.au/sourcing-report/. There is currently a lucky draw for the chance to win a free ticket to the Sourcing Summit- you’ve got to be in it to win it!

For those of you who might not know (get on LinkedIn already!), I’ve just started a new job in a law firm in Sydney, and yes it is a big change. I’ve worked at Sara Lee, then Vodafone, BOC and most recently CSIRO- and the cultures couldn’t be more different. Sara Lee (and yes we did eat cakes while we were there) was relatively young and passionate about what they did. For me it was a mixture between talking to office staff about performance management, and then going on a road trip up the coast to talk to factory workers about the same thing. Good learning experience.

Then I moved to Vodafone which was very fast paced, passionate and full on. There was a race car in reception, everything was red (even filing cabinets) and the values images were plastered across everything you can think of. Things moved so fast sometimes you felt like you didn’t have time to breathe. The culture there was very young, trendy and fun (most of the time). I remember when I was there and hearing them talk about how the internet was going to go mobile- so I’m glad that it did

BOC produces most of the gas that you encounter in your life. Its the gases that bubble your beer or your softdrink, the gas that fill up the tyres on your Qantas plane and even the oxygen you might receive in an ambulance or hospital. Here I worked in the Contact Services part of the business so again it was a different challenge talking to call centre staff about performance management and career development.

Then came CSIRO. Wow, working with scientists and in the public sector. I was in for a challenge. It took me some time to understand the way they work (yes, scientists and academics can be a little different) and what was important to them, but I got there and managed to get over 90% participation in the Annual Performance Agreement which was big news.

Now I find myself in Professional Services, and working in the city. How will these challenges be different? What will the staff be like here?

Well at the moment obviously I’m doing a lot of research into the firm (what they do and who they work with), but also about how HR works in the legal industry.

Here are some of the key takeouts for me from a report produced by Beaton Consulting called “Improving attraction and retention of talent in PSFs“.

• Attraction and retention is still one of the biggest challenges and ‘our research indicates that the direct cost of replacing a senior professional is about $130,000′.
• Over the last five years, firms believe they have achieved greater acceptance by senior practitioners of the role that they play in retaining and attracting staff. But there has been more limited success in actually translating this into behaviour change.
• The top features that candidates are looking for is challenging and engaging work, career development, learning and development, and sweetners (think gym memberships, childcare etc).

And finally,

Our research last year into 1000 professionals in Australia PSFs showed that the main reasons why people stayed were that:

• The firm’s leadership was effective
• They were excited about where the firm was going
• There were opportunities to learn and develop
• They had a good relationship with their supervisor
• Their values matched the firms

Hmm.. sounds like this could apply to almost any organisation. I agree there are different challenges depending on what industry you work in, but its important that the same core things are important to people no matter where they work.

Last week I went along to my very first career’s fair at Macquarie University and for a HR person who loves employer branding stuff and glossy brochures, I would liken it to the Easter Show for HR people.

Yes and after a day at the show, here are the contents of my showbag.

Honorable Mentions

Ernst and Young- I am a big fan of their work. Inside their ‘Make it Happen’ brochure is all the right things. Talks about their high performance culture that recognises and rewards talent. Highlights all the different ways to get work experience or a foot in the door at Ernst and Young including vacation programs, cadet programs and the career compass program. It describes different parts of the business that you can work in, and all the various ways that they reward their people. Everything they do is seamlessly integrated with the online work they do as well. Beautifully branded.

NAB produced a very nice little notebook for students to write in, although not before clearly outlining their EVP. Branded with a space theme, it’s called ‘NAB launching exciting opportunities for success’ featuring space shuttles and stars etc. It looks really nice with plenty of photos and quotes from staff, a message from the Group CEO and outlines the specific benefits of their graduate program. I was excited by reading through it.

Deloitte. Just love everything written in this. Starting with their values, this isn’t just the usual trust and respect stuff you normally hear. The ‘Seven signals’ are pretty awesome and something people can really live by. It’s simple, but very well presented. I love the way they have presented their rewards. Get this, they give graduates $500 when they start to spend on a corporate wardrobe. Very cool, yet practical idea.

Coolest Gadgety/ Promotional Things

I personally thought this was awesome. It’s called a ‘Skoona Moova’. It’s a pocket sized, foldaway reusuable drinks carrier. Whilst everyone loves a yo-yo (and they had them too) this was something a uni student would find cool; particularly those who are regulars at the footy or cricket. Hill Rogers Chartered Accountants had these ‘Skoona Moovas’ branded and were accompanied a card which talked about how ‘Hill Rogers people are forward thinking and thrive in a friendly and flexible work place’. Nicely done.

I’m a sucker for these types of things, but I just loved this ‘D’ clip that says ‘Find a career you’ll want to hold onto’. Commonwealth Bank also had a small passport sized book called ‘Field Notes’ which looked just like some sort of travel diary including maps, photos and scribbles. Using the mountain climbing analogy (from the D Clip, and right through the field notes) they talk about the quality of the graduate program, the different areas that you can work in, and feature testimonials from CBA grads. Excellent job.

KPMG is bright and colourful, outlining what kind of people they look for, what kind of work you can do at KMPG, how they value their people and how the selection process works. Their brochure comes with a cool notebook and here comes the gadget part. I actually initially thought it was a small pen or laser, but when you project this little baby onto a wall it says ‘Live. Learn. Discover. Achieve’. Pretty cool.

Finally I’m not sure I totally fell in love with the ‘do you have an Aldi Brain?’ idea, but it leads you to their ‘think smarter’ website which is pretty cool. It has a brain challenge and its a very interactive website.

So what are your thoughts? Do you like this gimicky kinda stuff at fairs or do you think it’s a bit of a waste of money?

Here’s some more photos from the day:

In case you haven’t heard of Destination Talent by Phillip Tusing, it’s a blog which professes to cover “Musings, riffs, rants and insights on everything talent”.

Phillip is an experienced Australian Recruiter, but has worked in a number of different roles over the last nine year including analyst and marketing manager. Currently he consults to recruitment firms, job boards and talent solutions providers.

On his site you’ll find Job Board reports, reports on understanding the source of talent in Australia and hot off the press today: Understanding the behaviour and intention of executives in Australia.

Destination Talent is well worth subscribing to so you get the latest in the area of talent sourcing delivered straight to your inbox or reader. If you don’t have the time to go through the report, at least check out a few of the key findings.

Happy Monday Reading!

So this is a guy in the U.S. and he has targeted Razorfish because he really wants to work there.

Facebook advertising is quite cool in the way you can actually target the ads on really specific data on the users. You can target people based on the standard things like age,location and gender. However you can be even more specific than that.

You can target key words so this means identifying people who are engaged, or who like the Star Wars movies. I know I never realised how in-depth this was until I did a bit of research myself. Read more on the different target areas here.

In any case, here is the ad that was targeted to Razorfish employees.

When you click on the ad, it then takes you to his resume- a funky blog that invites you to learn more about him. You think that’s pretty crazy?

This guy even has a free iphone app. Yep, now there’s an app for that.

Funnily enough, Punk Rock HR’s Laurie Ruettimann has a post today from the perspective of a grad using social media to find a job.

What do you think? How far would you go to land your dream job?

I’m very excited this morning to publish this guest post from AER Head.

Aer Head is a Sydney-based blogger, analyst and commentator on trends in the attraction, engagement and retention space in Australia. He is currently GAD at TMP Worldwide, Sydney, (and takes no credit for any of the work mentioned below which was managed from Adelaide- but read on, it’s great stuff).

It seems everyone is predicting 2010 as another year of change.

Kevin Wheeler is foreseeing a greater movement to non-traditional employment (temp, contract, consulting, etc). Michael Specht is advising employers to focus on workforce planning and increasing metrics. John Sullivan is imploring employers to act swiftly to plan and prepare for the changes ahead.

But in reality, the trends that our industry has been banding about for the past year or so have been evolving for decades. The GFC has merely been the catalyst for an explosive change of pace and investment of resources.

One thing I’m seeing right now at my place is the more advanced organisations planning long-term in determining the talent and skills they’ll need to be competitive, and then assessing and choosing the tools and strategies to develop, engage and/or attract them.

While today’s financial climate means much HR work is focusing on existing talent, it did remind me of a piece of work that readers in Sydney will have missed unless they were travelling through South Australia last year. It was significant to these trends because:

1. The organisation was acting now to respond to future needs.
2. The organisation was willing to conduct research to establish what the problem to be solved actually was.
3. The organisation had determined what success meant and how to measure it.

The organisation in question was the Department of Trade and Economic Development (DTED). For those unfamiliar with them, this is the South Australian Government’s partner agency, responsible for – no surprises for guessing here – economic development.

DTED had some research that demonstrated an alarming trend: so significant was the decline in students undertaking school math and science, technical degrees and apprenticeships, the future viability of South Australia’s Mining, Defence, Advanced Manufacturing, and IT/Communications sectors was under threat.

We couldn’t have that.

So, without taking you through every detail of the campaign, our brief was to close the skills gap in these industries. We needed to compete for the attention of 14-17 year olds – closing the gap between school subject choices, and the career options ahead.

As teenagers generally don’t like being told what to do, we decided to promote the idea that they could turn the interests and passions they have now (skateboarding, computer games, camping), into a satisfying career in the future. And the thinking and planning stage starts now.

We used a range of approaches including TV, online, print, DM, radio, outdoor, competitions, speakers, and PR some of which you can view here.

And we drove people to a bespoke online environment that you can find here.

Some readers may be interested to hear that in the first two months of the campaign we drove some 16,700 unique visitors to the web portal (representing 24% of the entire SA 14-17 population). But at the end of the day, you could easily claim, volume is a very limited measure of success.

After all, so what if we get visitors? If there is no real change in beliefs and – ultimately – decision-making behaviour, then surely we’ve failed?

And that’s where it gets even more interesting. Because DTED engaged independent market research agency Square Holes to research and analyse the effect of the campaign. This demonstrated a number of things:

Recall of the campaign was high among students (92%), teachers (70%) and parents (86%).

And:

“[S]cience, maths, physics, chemistry and computing are more interesting [to students] since 2008”. (Chemistry up 10%; Maths and Physics up 6%.)

And:

“Two in five students [40%] were encouraged to find out more about subject choice, study and careers as a result of the advertising.”

However:

The “likelihood to consider work in defence, electronics and mining and resources has remained fairly consistent among students since 2008. A quarter would consider work in defence [24%, 2009], or electronics [23%, 2009] whilst few would consider the mining and resources industries [12%, 2009].”

So patting ourselves on the back will have to wait. While this campaign won a number of industry awards, the goal was to increase employment in the sectors above and there is clearly work to be done. So it’s time to revise our strategy and move forward from there.

But the lesson for all HR plans is clear: plan ahead, measure diligently, and refine and rework your goals religiously.

And, if all else fails, make like a 15 year-old and go skateboarding instead.

We’ve all watched something on youtube (ok perhaps not for work reasons) and we’re seeing a big shift from print media spend in recruitment advertising to the use of video online. Instead of trying to build brand presence by buying ad space in prominent newspapers, companies are giving people insight to the organisation and what they are about using videos. Recruitment Directory does a great job explaining these videos and highlighting some good ones.

I have to admit I love these videos because it can really go a long way to getting potential employees excited about a career at your organisation and convey your employer branding message to the market.

Here are a few examples that I really like.

This one is actually CSIRO, and I like it because it hits all the key touch points about what it is like to work there.

This ones from Google and talks about the great benefits of working there and gives you a feel of the working environment. It’s a little bit corporate and scripted, but overall I still think they’ve done a great job.

I like this one from Atlassian because it’s honest, down-to-earth and gives you a great insight to working there.

I’m not really a tech expert, but I do have a lot of friends who are able to help me with my questions as they arise. I recently gave video a go on a blog that we created at my workplace for our student scholarship program. This is the first time I’ve ever created a video and it took me a while to work out how to edit the content, but I was really pleased in the end. While you might not understand some of the content (a bit sciency) I found it kind of interesting to listen to a student explain what they are doing and what the impact in the real world will be.

If making videos just isn’t for you, you still might enjoy watching them for personal pleasure or as a source of inspiration for work. Good friend and awesome guy Michael Specht has now launched Inspecht TV which is a site that he’ll be finding videos that will be of interest to HR people like us. Already there is a video on employee engagement and social media on there. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the videos to get this info delivered to your inbox.

I was recently interviewed by the good people at Careerhub about my role at CSIRO and what I thought the future of graduate recruitment was all about.

Of course I mentioned Social Media because I’m a big fan- but primarily its because social media has the ability to personalize or humanize the whole experience for a candidate.

Rather than simply trawling a job board for things like location and job function, it would be much more beneficial for candidates to be able to interact with an organisation- find out how it works and what the culture is like. They should be able to ask questions that will influence their decision to join us. After all, we want people to come work with us and enjoy the experience.

On the flip side I also mentioned GradConnection. I was a fan of GradConnection before I met the boys there but I just think its an awesome concept.

The GradMaker is an online tool for graduates to rank graduate employers based on what they value in an employer. So it does rank your traditional fields like industry and location- but it allowed us to further promote the benefits of working here like heaps of free parking, surrounded by green grass & trees, the freedom to access social networking sites on the internet and flexible working hours.

I think sites like this will be hugely popular for Gen Y graduates, and it means that employers will employ graduates who have really thought about what they value in a workplace before they join.

If you want to take a look at the article, jump online to the Careerhub blog.

Recently I’ve been doing some work at my organisation on; I guess you could say a diversity project.

There is much emphasis on embracing diversity in today’s working environment and more specifically, there has been a prominent focus recently on gender diversity. Although it is about endorsing equity and equality for all, promoting gender diversity in the workplace should involve much more than monitoring the ratio of women to men in organisations.

It should be about monitoring recruitment and attrition to find out how many women come in, why they stay or leave and what company practices can foster a positive working environment. It is also important that there is diversity at all levels of the organisation, from entry to senior level.

Talk about empowering your people- 2 Microsoft marketing sites. First One is the U.S./English version, the other in Polish. Can you spot the different #badphotoshop

Source: TechCrunch

Why is diversity so important? (and its not a HR buzz word that you can feel good about. There are proven reasons as to how diversity impacts your business!)

· Studies indicate that diverse teams often outperform homogenous groups on problem solving and completing complex tasks

· Diversity can lead to better quality decisions and solutions, through differentiated approaches to problem solving and decision making processes

· A Catalyst Survey of 353 Fortune 500 companies revealed that companies with the highest representation of women in their senior management teams achieved a 35% higher return on investment and a 34% higher total return to shareholders than companies with the lowest women’s representation (http://www.australianwomenonline.com/?p=431). Hence gender diversity can have a bottom-line impact on company results.

· Overall a gender diverse workplace is more effective because it reflects an organisations full range of stakeholders, hence a better connection and understanding to what needs to be delivered.

· It can lead to a positive public image as an employer and strengthen your brand, which can contribute to the successful attraction and retention of the best talent

So if we now understand that diversity is important- how do you attract and retain key female talent in a typically male dominated industry?

Keen to hear some organisational examples from you, but my first project was to investigate the experience of women who take maternity leave within the organisation. I haven’t had that experience myself yet, but I did get a great insight in speaking with women here.

A lot of it depended on the employee’s manager, but it was clear that a consistent approach and tools were needed. I’ll tell you a bit more about this tomorrow!