TAKING THE HELICOPTER VIEW

What do you think about this service which is offered to job seekers by “Ask a Manager”:

Interviewed for a job and then never heard back? No rejection, no anything? Let your interviewer know how rude that is - without burning any bridges.

Now here, presented to you by Ask a Manager: a service that job seekers can use to generate an anonymous letter to the employer, telling them how rude their silence is.

First, read the instructions to the right. Then, using the form below, submit the email address of the employer who never responded to you. They’ll get a polite letter explaining why their silence is rude. The letter will be sent from this site; the employer will not know that you are the sender…

I agree that it IS annoying if you are a job seeker sending applications to and being interviewed by prospective employers and then never hearing back from them. I also find the idea of giving feedback to the employers fantastic but seriously, why should somebody send it anonymously via an unknown web page? HR people are always teaching others how to give and receive feedback and they should be able to cope with honest and personal personal feedback from a candidate without considering it as a way of burning the bridges.

So if you are annoyed because you did not hear back from the recruiter, my advice is to take the following steps: 1) search for his/her phone number 2) dial the number 3) introduce yourself 4) give your feedback 5) thank for his/her time.

It is so simple!

In spite of the Christmas Peace, which will be declared in Turku, Finland tomorrow, the war for talent continues. Recruiting and retaining talented employees has become more and more competitive in the past years, and companies need to come up with new strategies how to survive and win this war. According to a study of McKinsey & Co, the most important company resource in the coming years willl be talent. Talents want to have great jobs in great companies with great values, great culture and great management, not forgetting great salary and great location.

I have been fighting in the war for talent when I recruited technical staff (researchers, engineers, technical sales and marketing people) for multinational engineering and chemical companies in Central Europe. Even with the help of well-known recruitment consultants and headhunters, it was extremely difficult to find the right people for the open positions. We did a lot in terms of employer branding and new recruitment strategies but there were simply too many other companies out in the market offering better salaries, more attractive locations etc.

The war for talent has also hit Finland if you believe the Finnish media and the authorities (see e.g Taloussanomat ). The Finnish labor force is shrinking, and until 2013 there will be more employees retiring from the job market than employees replacing them. The gap needs to be filled with foreign employees who will be imported en masse from different parts of the world. We need more talented researchers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and so on in order to stay competitive.

I have recently moved back to Finland and I have not seen a sign of war for talent yet. Of course the economic downturn has influenced the supply and demand in the job market but I could not believe that people with academic degree, several years of working experience, international background, business mindset, excellent language and social skills have it so hard to find proper jobs here. One dark November evening I met 4 foreigners who had voluntarily moved to Finland and all of them had been searching for a job for months. Three of them came from Western Europe and one from India, and their backgrounds varied from mathematics to law and business. It was frustrating to hear their stories how badly they had been treated in the application processes and how most of them had planned to start searching employment elsewhere where companies and people are more open-minded. Friends of them had already given up and left the country.

What I want to say with this posting is that firstly, many of the Finnish companies have apparently not heard from the war for talent yet or if they have, they have not understood the importance of it. Secondly, as long as the attitudes towards foreign employees are so narrow-minded there is no need to start recruiting more people from abroad. Thirdly, it would be wiser to utilize the resources that are already available here rather than start attracting new people to Finland. And believe me, attracting foreign talents to Finland is not going to be a piece of cake. For most of the foreigners who move to Finland, the motivation to come here is definitely not the weather and not the location but the Finnish girls with whom they fall in love. And hopefully in the future also an irresistible job offer from a Finnish company, which has understood the importance of the war for talent!

Jobvite has listed 4 main reasons why social recruitment makes sense for companies in times of the digital revolution:

1. Because more and more people network online
2. Because people build their opinion based on the information they get in social networks
3. Because you can easily get connected with passive candidates
4. Because recruitment through social media is less expensive than through traditional channel.

You can read the complete article here.

Jobvite also conducted a survey on the usage of social recruitment in the U.S.. The survey results showed that already 80 % of the companies are using or are planning to use social networks in recruitment. LinkedIn is clearly number one (95 %), followed by Facebook (59 %) and Twitter (42 %) when sourcing candidates on online networks.

It is obvious that the survey does not reflect the current situation in Europe but it clearly shows where the trend is going.

As soon as you have understood the importance of social revolution,  you need to start rethinking your recruitment and employer branding strategies on the web (in case you haven’t done that yet). What would I do in HR if I got the task to build a presence for a company in online networks? I could think of the following steps:

1. Create an account for the company in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
2. Start gathering friends and followers. I would start with the existing employees and candidates and, with help of them, start spreading the word to other target groups.
3. Link the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles to the company web page.
4. Post and tweet interesting job opportunities, promotions and news about the company regularly.
5. Screen potential candidates in social networks.
6. Follow what is written about the company on the internet and react to the feedback.
7. Observe what the competitors and other companies are doing.
8. Stay updated about changes and new social networks in web 2.0.

If you are not familiar with the web 2.0 environment and you don’t have a digital native in your team, why don’t you hire an intern who is more than happy to spend his/her working days in social networks and get paid for that?

When I have been preparing myself for job interviews, I have missed a web page where I can exchange information about interview and assessment centre experiences with other job seekers. Now I found this great web page, Glassdoor.com, where candidates can write interview reviews, and former and current employees can rate their companies and share salary information. This gives candidates helpful insider information such as how is it to work for a certain company, what could I possibly earn and what can I expect from the interview day and hiring process.  The company founders asked themselves the following question when the company was founded:

“What would happen if someone left the unedited employee survey for the whole company on the printer and it got posted to the Web?”

The answer is: more transparency and honest insider information for free both for candidates and companies. You can easily find out how is your image on the market and how are your competitors benchmarked. Are you paying worse salaries than your competitors? Are your hiring methods still up-to-date? These kind of internet services also emphasize the need for employers to be present on the web, to be informed what is written about them in online communities (this can be easily done with Google Alerts). A great deal of people form their opinions based on other users’ experiences.

Most of the rated companies on Glassdoor.com are U.S. based but I hope the service will be expanded to Europe soon!

I decided to start my blog with the subject I am the most familiar with: recruiting. I have interviewed hundreds of candidates in my previous jobs and I have been interviewed several times for jobs I have applied for. As a recruiter and job searcher you are always faced with the question: where should I post my job in order to find the right candidates or, alternatively, in which job board do I find the most suitable openings.

I did a quick analysis regarding the popularity of Finnish recruiting pages with the help of Google Insights. With Google Insights you can compare the search volume of different terms in specific regions and within specific timeframe. This is of course statistically seen not a valid method but since most of us are using Google, it gives you good insights about the popularity of the recruiting pages. I compared the search volumes for the following job boards in Finland in 2009: Monster, Mol, Uranus, Oikotie and Aarresaari.

In the first chart I searched for the names of the web pages (e.g. “Aaarresaari”, “Monster”):

This search shows that Mol and Oikotie are by far the most popular search terms. Monster is on third place and Aarresaari and Uranus are not often searched.

Since the term “Oikotie” also includes the search for cars, houses etc. and “Monster” can refer to other pages than monster.fi,  I limited the search and combined the terms “name of the job board” and “työpaikat”, which means jobs, (e.g. “Monster työpaikat”, “Oikotie työpaikat”) and received the following results:

This chart shows a similar trend than the previous chart. Oikotie and Mol are leading, Monster is clearly on third place. Aarresaari and Uranus are not shown because there is not enough data available.

From my experience as a recruiter and job searcher, these results reflect the real situation on the market. However, it would be interesting to see what the official visitor numbers of these recruiting pages are. Do they indicate a similar trend than Google Insights?