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!

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!

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.

Last year at my work we had a handful of students join us for a summer vacation scholarship program here in Sydney and also in Melbourne. Although the students seemed to have a good time, I’ll be the first to admit that there were a number of…. let’s call them key learnings.

To start with, despite advertising 6 projects on various university websites in Sydney and Melbourne we actually only managed to fill 5 of them. 1205 people looked at the positions, but only 40 people applied.

Many of the applications were unsuitable, and one of the candidates was appointed and terminated less than two weeks later for unsatisfactory conduct. The responsibility of the recruitment and supervision of this position was handed from the supervisor to a young person who had only just arrived in Australia a few weeks before.

So what did we learn? In a nutshell:

• Our advertising strategy wasn’t very effective. The project descriptions were full of jargon and possibly intimidated applicants. As a result we didn’t receive a good amount of quality applications
• Supervisors didn’t conduct proper interviews with the students and poor selection choices were made
• We didn’t promote the program while it was happening or engage students that we hope to recruit in the future
• We didn’t have any information on the experience of the students to use as advertising material for the next year i.e. no photos, videos or accounts of what happened or why others should participate
• We didn’t promote the company as a great place to work for young Australian uni students

Sounds pretty hideous and like a bit of an epic fail. So this year, I put together a plan and my management team actually gave me a workable budget to get it going.

So here’s a bit of my plan:

PHASE ONE: Awareness

The purpose of this initial phase is raise general awareness around the Program. We would achieve this by utilising low cost channels such as contacting lecturers and university staff (we would create a flyer for them to circulate), and updating the web site to announce the upcoming program.

In addition we can set-up a Facebook fan page to enable students to post enquiries and ask questions in real time to gain insights into what they can expect during the Student Scholarship Program.

Getting last year’s participants to upload photos and their experiences from the previous year and join the group would be a great way to ensure engaging content is available to entice students into applying.

Setting up an email account and ask people to register their interest would allow us to create a database of people interested in the program who we could email with information as it becomes available.

PHASE TWO: Advertising

Phase two will focus on driving registrations for the Program. There will of course be advertising posted on the Careers site, but in addition we will utilise University Career hubs and specialised graduate recruitment sites such as GradConnection to advertise our projects.

PHASE THREE: Sharing the experience

Phase three will focus on promoting the student experience while also allowing us to engage other students interested in working in the industry. This additionally creates a supply of content that can readily be utilised in next year’s efforts to promote the Program.

Students taking part in the program will be invited to contribute to a blog about their experiences and upload video/photos through this system. These can then be viewed and commented upon (comments will be moderated) by families, friends and other students.

The introduction of a blog allows the opportunity to create additional content such as Podcasts from scientists explaining what it is like to work here and why they are passionate about their jobs. All content can be promoted through the communication channels established in phase one.

PHASE FOUR: Promoting Big Day In (presentations of projects by students).

Phase four will focus on promoting awareness of the Big Day In. A Media release will announce the event publically while the Blog can push information to the existing user base. It would be great to have a live online stream from the day’s event allowing outsiders which may not be able to make it to take advantage of the presentations. In addition users could vote for their favourite presentations online. All presentations can be filmed and posted to the blog after the event (or kept as content to advertise next year’s event). Not sure how much of this is possible, but you have to dream big sometimes

Whilst this approach hasn’t been completely smooth sailing because I’m not as tech savvy as I’d like to be and there are some restrictions and processes that need to be followed when working in government, I am very excited about what’s to come.

After just one week we have already had 502 views and 17 great applications. I hope they keep coming in because it’s a fantastic opportunity to gain real work experience. I’ll keep you posted with how we go. Fingers crossed!

I was reading “Vendor View: Kiwi invasion of the Australian recruitment market” on Destination Talent this morning and was reminded of the great things that Air New Zealand are doing in the HR/Recruitment space (I also travelled with them to Queenstown on the weekend!).

Simon Pommeroy is the Recruitment Manager of Air New Zealand and he’s won various awards for his recruitment campaigns and strategies, and has worked closely with CEO and the Board of Air New Zealand to bring about a complete change to the way Air New Zealand recruits everyone – from aeronautical engineers to customer service.

He believes that many channels of communication (rather than just job ads) are necessary and uses both old and new communicative tools such as web pages, twitter and career newsletters to attract candidates. I think at the moment many of us realise we need to move away from just posting our jobs on typical job boards but are unsure of how to do it. Air New Zealand is a great example.

The recruitment strategy also focusses on the future needs of Air New Zealand with a big publicity campaign targeting future engineering cadetships (via a competition – How Far Can Your Kids Make It Fly). This campaign brought world-wide publicity (and was only 10% of the cost of previous campaigns). Similarly their careers newsletter was cheap to set up and has thousands of subscribers world-wide. It’s attracted over 1,000 additional resume registrations for their jobs.

Finally the most fantastic thing I believe is the ‘Would Air New Zealand Suit Me’ questionnaire. This on-line assessment, has helped Air New Zealand attract individuals more suited to their highly competitive environment (which requires resilience as well as customer focus). The CEO has received letters from would-be-applicants saying how much the appreciated the questionnaire, because it has saved them time applying for what would have been an unsuitable position. They could see that the highly competitive environment of the airline industry wasn’t right for them. Simon believes the rejection management of applicants is very important, because applicants talk about their experiences with others.

You should absolutely check them out- very impressive.

They also have a rather funny ad out now- “Air New Zealand have nothing to hide”

The social media world is buzzing at the moment and HR people are listening and starting to get involved; particularly for recruitment purposes. Have you dipped your toe in or still sitting back to see how others go when they dive in?

If you are hanging back you may want to have a read of this article featured on Destination Talent which suggests that the practice of using social media or networks to recruit staff, is gaining grounds.

My own experience is that advertising using print media at the moment is largely unsuccesful- so this may be the way of the future.