Interviewing an IT Project Management candidate this week, one of my colleagues heard an answer to one of those ‘standard interview questions’ that made us all think.

The question was … “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

The answer was … “I have no idea!”

Back in the day, this may have led you to think that the candidate lacked ambition or a career plan but she went on to explain that, as the technology that made her last project possible didn’t even exist five years ago, and with tech advancing so rapidly … how could she predict a further five years into the future with any accuracy?

She concluded with, “Whatever cutting edge looks like in five years, I will be there.”

Great answer.

She is right too. Technology is moving fast and businesses have their fingers in increasingly diverse pies. Do you remember the first Apple computer being launched? Who knew that one day you’d make calls from one that you carried in your pocket or wear one around your wrist?!

Transferable skills have never been more important.

Only this weekend, the tech notifications that I set up on my iPhone have been buzzing with news that Dyson is looking to create 300 new tech jobs as it plans to build its first electric car by the end of the decade. Take a moment to consider that. Nissan, Tesla, Renault, BMW and Hyundai already manufacture them and now Dyson, makers of vacuum cleaners, could have an electric car on the road by 2020. If it also vacuums up the leaves from your driveway, I’m in.

This project appears to be accelerating fast. Only last September the BBC reported that “the car does not yet exist, with no prototype built, and a factory site is yet to be chosen.” Half a year later Dyson are looking to take on an extra 300 team members and it seems that the site has been selected.

To me, this is a perfect illustration of transferable skills.

At the launch, Sir James Dyson showed a video of ‘Blue Peter’ from back in the 1990s. He was being interviewed by Anthea Turner about his new invention, a device that would to clean soot from the exhausts of diesel vehicles which, basically, was the cyclone from his vacuum cleaners put to use in another way.

Since those days, he has developed motors and batteries that have powered everything from his famous vacuum cleaners to Supersonic Hairdryers and now he is hoping to bring all that knowledge together and make an electric car. He has taken talent along with him on the journey too – I wonder how many who were first employed to develop a rival to a Hoover would have envisaged that one day they could be challenging a BMW?!

Transferable skills have never been so valuable.

Smart hirers are leveraging this. When considering new talent to develop their IT offer they are looking outside their own specific industry, so a food delivery logistics firm might hire a Project Manager with a background in IT at a public transport operator, a financial services business might head hunt a PM from the public sector, a robotics recruitment specialist might head hunt from a food canning factory, a fighter plane valve manufacturer may recruit from a retail chain. The point is that if your ideal candidate’s thing is, for example, Agile – it doesn’t matter what they last used their skills to deliver or for whom – as long as they will work for you!

Smart IT talent has also cottoned onto this and they are now job hunting in the best possible place to get the greatest return for their knowledge and experience. Talent is accessing specialist IT recruiters, as opposed to industry-specific journals or traditional job boards and getting better placement results for their specialist skills. Who better for identifying where your transferable skills could be employed in a different industry than a subject matter expert in your specialist area with a cross-sector knowledge of and access to opportunities?

The point of all this is that you don’t have to know exactly where you’ll be five, ten or fifteen years from now, no more than James Dyson could have realistically predicted that one day you’d be driving your kids to school in a supersized version of one of his vacuum cleaners.

To make the most of transferable specialist skills though … whether you’re the hirer or the talent … you do need to make sure that you search in the right place.

The post Is Your IT Recruitment Strategy Leveraging Transferable Skills? appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

I had a very interesting email exchange with a Director of HR this week about how the talent management lifecycle is becoming increasingly difficult to control.

Among the key challenges, she told me, is the ever-accelerating rate of change in technology. IT is altering all aspects of managing the talent lifecycle.

She said, “Imagine the career path model of an employee even ten years ago and compare it to today you notice differences, even over a relatively short time horizon. People don’t stay in the same job as long as they used to. Extend that time horizon to 20 or 30 years ago and compare talent lifecycles to today and the differences are stark!”

This evolution in the talent management lifecycle is everywhere but especially for businesses that depend upon IT to deliver their services or products. Which, these days is most.

None of us can predict the future, but we can develop a strategy that prepares for it.

The truth is if IT plays a big role in what your talent delivers to you-you must!

I’ve asked a few heads of HR for their thoughts on this, their combined insights have been distilled into the following five suggestions.

1 – Hire Talent For Potential Over Roles

Most traditional talent lifecycle models start with the initial contact that a company has with candidates … the job ad, the interview. Then they map how, post-hire, employees move up through the company, usually through a departmental silo. Most often it has been a case of matching candidates to roles based on how they measure up against potential job-specific challenges.

In this newly evolved scenario, it may pay to assess the mid to long-term challenges faced by your business, rather than role specific issues, and hire accordingly.

One HR leader emailed to say, “We hired three IT Project team members for roles that technology later rendered obsolete. Two seemed reluctant to evolve and soon left, the other was more rounded and adapted to the new environment. The lesson we learned was to hire more guys like this in the future.”

2 – Hire Culturally Aligned Talent

When you hire talent who shares your belief you buy more than their services, you hire in their blood, sweat and tears.

It can make a huge difference to the talent lifecycle too.

Cultural alignment also buys a degree of loyalty. At least it gives talent another thing to consider when they weigh up alternative opportunities.

As one IT Project Manager once put it, “When your job fits like a glove why would you consider giving it up for a mitten.”

To leverage the best from this you have to know what your business culture is. You know what you do, you know how you do it, but have you really drilled down on why? When you hire people who share your “why” the talent lifecycle starts to manage itself a little.

If you haven’t worked out your “why”, if you’ve struggled with identifying your culture, a recruitment partner with a track record of selling businesses as a great place to work can help. Sometimes, an independent pair of eyes can see your USP in an instant.

And on the subject of partners …

3 – Partner Up Wisely

To feel in control of the evolving IT talent lifecycle, as an employer you want a recruitment partner with excellent reach to find the right candidates quickly and you want those candidates to have been profiled by Subject Matter Experts – so that they stick!

To this end, look for an IT recruitment partner that promises specialist peer profiling for each skill set.

One of the other problems with traditional recruitment services is that you pay upfront recruitment costs and then either don’t get a return for six months … or the hire doesn’t work out and you end up starting the process again (and of course paying for it).

Choose a specialist recruiter who shares the risk – monthly payments that stop if the hire doesn’t work out. This gives you more control and it incentivises the recruiter to recommend the right talent in the first place because they will want to get paid the full fee!

Finally, don’t pay upfront fees. Ever. The longer the money is in your bank account, the longer you hold the balance of control.

4 – Measure Employee Engagement (Above Employee Satisfaction)

You have a physical contract with your employees but have you considered that you also have a psychological contract with them too? If you were to write out the terms and conditions of this allegorical contract – how well do you think you would measure up against them? If managing the talent lifecycle is becoming harder the answers may lie here.

Measuring employee engagement usually has a positive effect on staff retention and gives you feeling that you are in control of the talent lifecycle. You can identify and address workplace, industry and internal company HR trends.

It’s worth repeating the subheading here … Measure Employee Engagement (Above Employee Satisfaction)

Your employees can be satisfied without being engaged. In some industries, job satisfaction may be enough to retain employees. Increasingly, this is not the case with IT talent. Engagement, employees feeling that they are stakeholders, is really important in IT and the good news is that engaged work teams drive greater productivity.

So … personal growth, autonomy, the meaning that employees attach to their work, the wider impact that they believe their work has, their connectedness to, and understanding of your business goals … these are all good factors to measure when surveying engagement.

Engaged talent performs better, with more passion, so it is perhaps not surprising that innovation and engagement tend to go hand in hand. Other benefits include better team performance and smoother organisational change. Beyond the talent lifecycle, there are lots of reasons to focus on engagement.

5 – It’s Not Them, It’s You

There has been a shift in the talent lifecycle, and yes, IT is driving a lot of that.

Occasionally though you come across a business that seems to have “over shifted” in this area.

My friend works in HR for a private sector business, its revenue now is entirely delivered through IT but they really struggle to retain talent. To give you an idea, she jokes about long service awards being given out to people who stay more than a year!

We’d talked about the talent lifecycle and how it had changed but she felt that this wasn’t the whole reason and so she initiated a staff survey.

This was a business that had put energy and money behind making itself attractive to talented people. The IT was cutting edge, the pay was great, the promotion potential was huge … and yet people still quit … fast. The survey revealed that talent may be leaving because of the bosses.

I bet you have quit a boss rather than a job or company. I have too. We’re not alone! When Badbossology.com conducted a survey, it discovered that half of us would fire our own boss if we could.

If you can create a culture where employees feel rewarded, where they are fearless and gratified, retention rates improve and managing the talent lifecycle becomes less of a problem.

In conclusion, in this talent-driven market, employees are likely to flit from one job to another, from one employer to another, in line with their aspirations and ambition.

However, you can maintain control.

You can identify HR trends to anticipate future talent needs and you can assess what your specific needs will be based on your goals and forecasts. You can combine these to identify what positions you will need to fill and to align talent resourcing with the long-term business objectives of your business.

You can do this alone or gain valuable extra insights from an external, independent pair of eyes – a partner you can trust.

Either way, bringing a degree of certainty and control to managing the talent lifecycle will deliver stability to your business in what are progressively uncertain times.

Find out more about Access Talent’s Recruitment services

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It caught my eye. I cannot find robust research that backs it up, but I have to agree, that when you look through the ‘situations vacant’, you do see a lot of basic errors in grammar and spelling. Also, there’s often a lack of focus on who hirers are actually trying to attract. So, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the claim at face value … and if 8 out of 10 job ads ARE badly written. How do you make sure that yours is one of the other two?

First, let’s reframe the question.

How do you go about hooking your perfect candidate’s attention and how long do you think you have to do it?

The answer to the first bit is usually is some kind of advertisement.

To answer the second part, open the stopwatch app on your smartphone, switch on commercial television and time each advert. They are probably, on average, around thirty seconds, right? There’s a reason for that. Thirty seconds is both an adequate amount of time to get your message over and still hold the attention of your target customer.

That actually sounds reasonable, think about a good elevator business pitch … would you say that should last 20 to 30 seconds? Cool, so thirty seconds …

Now grab the jobs section of a newspaper or fire up a recruitment website. Be honest, do many of the ads catch and hook your attention for half a minute? Actually, thirty seconds is probably considerably less time than a candidate will give you these days because something else happened … Smartphones.

According to scientists, smartphones have left us humans with a shorter attention span than a goldfish! Back in 2015 researchers in Canada studied brain activity using electroencephalograms and concluded that the average attention span has fallen to eight seconds.

So, it turns out, that you have just eight seconds to make such an irresistibly good first impression that you catch and hook the attention of your ideal candidate.

Or, to put it another way, the length of time it took you to read that italicised last sentence. Eek!

Badly written job ads are not a luxury you can afford in a competitive job market … but how do you make sure that your ad is one of the 2 out of 10 that isn’t badly written … here are 7 tips.

1 – Get Specialist Help

Think about the advertisement timing experiment earlier or the last time you sat through a commercial break without pressing the fast-forward button. How many of the ads that you saw do you think were made in-house by the advertiser? Probably none, right? They were written and produced by specialist agencies with years of experience and a proven track record. It’s the same with recruitment, especially for specialist IT roles. A specialist IT recruitment partner can advise on where and when to place the ad to get the best results, the language you should use and the content of your campaign collateral.

2 – Have Your Ads Written by Subject Matter Experts

The more meaningful your ad is the more powerfully it will work for you. Having everything from role descriptions to job ads written, or at least looked over, by experts in the role for which your hiring will help you attract the right talent – like attracts like!. Recent example, a company looking to hire an IT Project Manager set about the challenge like they did for any other role. Their HR Director called their usual recruitment firm and said find us ‘a Project Manager’. The ad was produced and to the untrained eye it kind of looked OK but it didn’t connect or engage with the talent that it was meant to, resulting in a bad hire. We have since started to work with this business and now that their ads are written by subject matter experts the client is reaping the benefits.

3 – Don’t Copy & Paste

It can be tempting to seek out a competitor who is using a specialist recruitment partner and copy and paste their recruitment ads, I actually saw one of my ads reproduced word for word once. Apart from being quite rude, this is HUGELY self-defeating. The ad that you are ripping off was designed to attract talent to your competitor’s firm, not yours. You have a whole different set of challenges, maturities and needs and, what’s more, you want to attract candidates to buy into your USP not that of the firm across town.

3 – Sell Yourself as a GREAT place to work

For me, this is why you could argue that 8 out of 10 ads are badly written. They nail the role description and a list of responsibilities, salary and reporting hierarchy, they even pepper the ad with keywords … but so do all the other ads on the same page. What makes your ad stand out is the same thing that makes your firm stand out as a great place to work. I’m not talking about the table football or the beer that you put in the fridge on a Friday afternoon, it’s not your Secret Santa or lottery syndicate … dive deeper! When you know what makes you an irresistible place to work and you can communicate it clearly, the potential power of your recruitment advertising increases massively. In short, sell yourself! Say it plain. Say it straight. Tell candidates why they HAVE to choose YOU. If you struggle with the deep dive a specialist recruiter (ie, an independent pair of eyes) can really help!

4 – Approach Recruitment as an Advertiser – Treat Potential Candidates Like Potential Customers

Compare your product advertising with your recruitment advertising campaigns. Why is the budget, time and effort spent on the first greater than the latter? It always is and massively disproportionately so. The best explanation I ever heard was that product advertising brings in revenue whereas recruitment advertising results in a cost – the employee! What a lovely way to be seen by a prospective employer – a cost! OK, I accept that you’re never going to spend the same on recruitment that you do on ‘regular’ advertising but it is worth remembering that in both instances you are projecting your brand into the marketplace. While budgets may never be the same, disciplines, process and methods should be! When you apply the same focus on candidate attraction that you do on customer attraction you will get better results. Know who your target candidate is like you know who your target customer is!

5 – Be Brand Aware (And Consider Including Your Logo In Job Ads)

My colleague always talks about how he once worked with a major high street name that spends millions every year on its brand. If I told you the company’s name you would instantly see their logo in your mind’s eye. Despite this, they never used that logo in any of their recruitment advertising until my colleague pointed out the massive trick they were missing. If you have invested in a logo to make you stand out in the marketplace use it to make you stand out in the equally competitive jobs market. Increasingly, ‘employer brand’ is becoming a more pressing priority for businesses, if you don’t have one consider finding a specialist recruitment partner to help you create yours.

6 – Put the Job Ad in the Right Place

This sounds obvious … and yet I still see adverts for IT Project Managers in the ‘situations vacant’ sections of industry sector magazines and journals. Let’s say you run a train operating company, right now your next great IT Project Manager is working for the local council’s IT team or a chain of chemists or pubs … what are the chances that she’s scouring the job ads at the back of Rail Technology News? Either get a specialist recruiter who will know where to ad

vertise and how to use social media to attract the right candidate or, if you have a large enough team of similar professionals, ask them where they would look for a job.

7 – Use The Language Of Your Candidate – BUT Not Your Jargon

One of the worst examples of a bad job ad, or best depending on how you look at it, was a posting advertising a vacancy for a Business Analyst. Although the firm didn’t call the position Business Analyst (BA) they called it “Business Requirement Manager” (BRM). Not only had they re-invented the wheel, they’d renamed it and made it unrecognisable to anyone in the market for a wheel. The ad itself explained the duties of the BRM and, if you read it long enough, the penny would have dropped that they were after a BA. But remember we established earlier how short attention spans can be, just about every BA who saw the ad zoned out at “Business Requirement Manager” figuring it wasn’t for them! When placing a job ad you need to think beyond the language and jargon used by you, your business or industry sector and reach out using the language of your ideal candidate.

In conclusion, I’m still not entirely convinced that 80% of job ads are badly written and in many ways, it doesn’t matter. It could be 99% for all you care! All that matters to you is that YOURS is well written, designed to attract the perfect candidate and posted in exactly the place where they’ll see it. A specialist recruitment partner can be pivotal to that end but addressing each of the points above will help too. Good luck with your next recruitment campaign and thank you for staying with me longer than 8 seconds!

Find out more about Access Talent’s Recruitment services

The post If 8 out of 10 job ads ARE badly written. How to be one of the other two appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

To attract passive talent you need to redefine ‘passive aggressive’ and turn it into a recruitment strategy.

Imagine your ideal candidate. Smart, hard-working, dedicated, capable, innovative, creative … spend a few seconds populating your own list. Have you ever interviewed this ideal candidate, offered them the gig, only to find they had accepted a “better offer” somewhere else?

Right, now imagine if, when you interviewed this ‘gold standard’, ‘A class’ candidate, they’d told you that they weren’t interviewing with any other business. Does that sound too good to be true?

Meet the passive candidate.

There’s a lot of talk about passive candidates and how to attract them, which I’ll add to, but first let’s consider who they are and why you should attract them in the first place.

The passive candidate is a bit of a misnomer because they’re not a candidate at all, not really, not yet at least. They are employed by someone else, they’re good at what they do and are not looking for work elsewhere.

They are, by far, the majority of the workforce. Four years ago LinkedIn put this into numbers estimating that around 75% fell into this category. Personally, I’d move that percentage upwards into the eighties. Your ideal candidate could be part of this 75-80% of the workforce and, because they weren’t actively looking, you could effectively have exclusive access to them.

It’s important to tap into this market because IT recruitment IS a challenge, increasingly so.

Back in the day, IT talent worked for IT firms and when they left they joined another IT company. Then IT got REALLY good and instead of simply supporting businesses, in many cases, IT became the business. Suddenly, IT firms were losing great talent to public transport operators, food distributors, restaurant chains … everybody became an IT employer. Returning to that percentage figure, even taking LinkedIn’s estimate, that’s a lot of businesses trying to recruit from just a quarter of the workforce, the ones actively job hunting. They’re talking to every Tom, Dick and Harry from every conceivable business sector and they are increasingly considering hiring remote workers to fill the talent shortages.

Consider how you’d go about attracting candidates who are actively job hunting … you’d stick a job ad in an industry journal or post on a job board, you’d get in a recruiter who’d throw a pile of CVs your way and hope that something sticks. The phrase “fish in a barrel” springs to mind but by doing this you will be missing out on potential talent.

Your passive candidate is not being interviewed by every Tom, Dick and Harry – they weren’t even job hunting until you turned their head.

What’s stopping you engaging with such a great opportunity? For most businesses, the reason is – it’s hard. Actively engaging passive candidates is paradoxical in the extreme when you think about it. It takes great skill, experience and creativity.

So … I’ll say it again … To attract passive talent you need to redefine ‘passive aggressive’ and turn it into a recruitment strategy. Here are a few thoughts on how.

Social Media

Ask your recruitment partner how they WILL use social media to attract passive candidates. Bold, italics and capital letters for the word WILL because they MUST. Passive talent may not be searching for a job … but … every lunch, every ‘comfort break’, every coffee shop queue … they are on social media! Another time they hit up social media is when things aren’t going quite so well at work .. who doesn’t? When your star candidate gets frustrated and hits up Facebook for a feel-good fix of cat videos … you need to make sure that you are on their timeline with your exciting opportunity to tempt them. This takes targeting.

The thing about social media is that it’s quite hard to get right, to leverage maximum effectivity, but it is really easy to get wrong. For instance, there was a business last year that followed IT Project Talent on social media and, once the talent followed them back, bombarded them with spam about a single vacancy they had. Not cool!

If in doubt, get a specialist recruitment partner with a proven track record of using social media to attract passive talent.

Employer Brand

Do you have one? There is a chance that the ‘A class’ rock star candidate you’re seeking … has never heard of you. Many firms are investing as much in their ’employer brand’ as they are in their regular customer facing one.

Take this example, a bus company was looking for an IT Project Manager recently and they successfully caught the eye of a young PM who wasn’t looking but was the perfect fit. She didn’t know much about them so she searched for them on social media. This is where the wheels on the bus came off! Their Facebook page was full of slightly geeky pictures of buses and their Twitter feed was a list of apologies for delays and cancellations … and while that may have kept their passengers up to date it didn’t make them look very attractive to this young and ambitious PM.

Look at social media posts through the eyes of a potential candidate – does it need a dash of polish? You can encourage staff to tweet about successes, to post pictures to Facebook and share it with your Instagram followers.

And challenge your recruitment partner to sell what a great place to work your business is!

Database Of Talent

Another challenge for your recruitment partner … ask them how well they keep in contact with interviewed talent.

The thing about passive candidates is that they will, at some point, have been active. Many recruiters don’t maintain contact with talent in between placements but those that do invariably know things like when contracts are due to expire and how well things are going for previously interviewed candidates. Furthermore, talent that has agreed to receive updates about available work from their preferred recruitment firm are more likely to take a look at your vacancy if it were to appear on one of their communications.

Have More Than One Passive Candidate Egg In Your Basket

Earlier, I said that you could be the only business that a passive candidate is interviewing with because they weren’t looking for a new opportunity until they saw yours. Most of the time this is true but sometimes talent whose head is turned like this does look elsewhere too, it’s an opportunity to “see what else is out there”.

It’s not just another firm that might tempt your passive candidate away … it’s the other firm … their existing employer.

I have seen firms successfully attract a passive candidate and focus just on hiring that one perfect individual only to find that the company they’d be leaving made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, increased their remuneration package or promoted them, and they stayed.

You, or your specialist recruitment partner, should always have a ‘plan b’ and a ‘plan c’.

Try To Avoid Being Used

That last point is worth further thought. That 75-80% of the workforce is an ocean of talent that is perfect for your vacancy but it is also rich with ambitious and creative individuals who want the best for themselves and maybe their families. It is not unusual to reach out to a passive candidate and convince them to meet up only to find later that they saw your opportunity as a means of persuading their existing employer to give them more money. Isn’t that what we’d all do?

Here, having an experienced specialist recruitment partner will save you time, but you should at least try to ‘reality check’ passive candidate approaches. Consider factors like how far from your workplace they live – is the commute realistic? What’s their current salary? (If you’re offering less – they’re almost certainly using you as bartering tool!) What scale of projects are they used to and how do they compare with yours? How does their existing culture compare and will they fit in with yours? Ask them … “What was it about our approach that you found attractive?”

In conclusion, attracting passive candidates is hard but it could be the most rewarding hire you ever make. I described it as an ocean of talent just now, to land the right catch you need to sail carefully through some choppy waters but above all, you need to know what bait to have on the end of your line … or know someone who does!

Find out more about Access Talent’s Recruitment Services

The post Passive aggressive. Your new IT Talent Recruitment strategy? appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Despite this, a friend just complained about feeling uninspired by respondents to a recent job advert. She showed me the correspondence.

It seems that something else that has happened – and on this one, I think that the internet needs to hold its hand up and say, “My bad!”

Looking through the CVs and covering letters – they have started to look the same. It was almost as if every candidate had Googled “how to write a CV and covering letter” and then followed the instructions they found on page one to the letter.

I asked to see what stimulus from her organisation had garnered such an unimaginative response and she showed me the job advert. To be fair to the candidates the advert was a rehash of one that I know they’ve used a few times, it had been placed in the same places and copy and pasted onto the organisation’s social media channels and website in such a way that it looked like an afterthought.

It was almost as if they’d Googled “how to write a job ad” and then followed the instructions they found on page one to the letter. Imagine such a thing.

Perhaps if you want to catch new interesting fish you need to use new bait? And maybe it is time to look beyond the pools that you’ve always fished in.

According to recruiter Hudson – 28% of hiring managers in Australia say the effectiveness of job boards is decreasing – nine out of ten say that they’re looking beyond job boards and active job seekers. That report is a couple of years old now, but still relatable and recent anecdotal evidence suggests a similar trend in the UK.

Here’s an idea – why not try to attract talent that isn’t even looking to leave their current position?

Who is most likely to hit the ground running?

Someone who is happy in their current post, getting great results and positive feedback … or someone who is either unhappy in their current position, desperate for a move or even currently out of work?

Now, of course, most job seekers will turn out to be stand up employees and definitely worth a punt but if you’ve ever head hunted someone you’ll know that they do come with an edge. There is a difference between getting a job you saw advertised in the back of the industry paper and being sought out and approached by someone with a position to fill because they think that you are the right person for it.

That Hudson Hiring Report I mentioned surveyed 3,228 Australian professionals and three-quarters said that despite presumably being happy in their work they were open to being approached by a recruiter.

Now imagine the size of this new talent pool.

Imagine how many people in your sector, although not actively looking for a new post, would be open to you approaching them. There’s an exciting side effect too, the bigger the available market the greater the chance of attracting someone who is a cultural fit with your company. Imagine choosing from candidates who will not simply be able to do a job for, but people who are already living your company values elsewhere.

The cultural fit thing cuts both ways too, increasingly job seekers and employees are placing it in their top five priorities and while I can’t imagine it ever replacing things like salary and work/life balance, sharing the values of the firm you work for is more important for individuals than ever before.

Many employers are starting to think more along these lines, many more will as the internet continues to shrink the planet and every potential employee’s web presence grows.

From an individual’s perspective there has never been a better time to get ready for this, here are three things you should do this week.

1 – Make sure your CV is up-to-date, sharp and ready to send.

2 – Be current, visible and impressive. Have a LinkedIn profile with an appropriate current photo. Regularly check your LinkedIn CV (your timeline of current and past jobs, skills and qualifications). Connect with your competitors’ hiring executives!

3 – Know the market and your place and value within it. Do some homework, fire up those online salary calculators.

As for employers. Well the most satisfied hiring managers are seeking a recruitment partner (some are so confident they’ll even share some of the initial “risk”), they’re hitting up social media and attending recruitment events – they’re using two, three, four or more different avenues and they are getting great results and attracting the best talent.

Instead of using the same old tried and tested (often tired and tested) recruitment channels seek out multiple sourcing, more targeted tools and smarter ways to Access Talent.

Source
Hudson Hiring Report

The post When Angling For Exciting New Project Talent – Fish In Exciting New Pools And Don’t Use The Same Old Bait! appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Where do your new IT hires come from? Other IT companies? How’s that working out?

If you’re finding the traditional talent pools are drying up, you are not alone.

In the UK, British Gas hired an ex-NASA data scientist to progress its Hive smart heating project, who said IT recruitment wasn’t rocket science?!

In the US, LinkedIn has reportedly hired economists, physicists and perhaps most famously a brain surgeon to fill IT roles.

Why?

Because, like you, they have found that the traditional talent pools are either drying up or they are being overfished. Take LinkedIn, they are competing for IT talent from (or gravitating to) California with Apple, Facebook, Google, Adobe, eBay and Twitter – to name just a handful. It makes sense to cast the net wider.

It’s more than that though. Simon Zhang, the aforementioned former brain surgeon, brought something new to LinkedIn. He came with skills that go beyond old school data crunching.

Of course, data is something LinkedIn gathers a lot of and recognising new sales opportunities or potential for new features from all that data requires a special mindset. The type of mindset honed removing hundreds of cancers at China’s Tianjin Medical University Cancer Hospital and Institute, it turned out.

What made Zhang a great brain surgeon, an instinct for quickly identifying meaning in data coming thick and fast from different directions, also made him ideal for the business analytics opportunities LinkedIn had. Ironically, when originally interviewed, Zhang deleted his time working in brain surgery from his CV considering it irrelevant. It was only when his interviewers quizzed him about the gap in his career timeline that he mentioned it and the rest is history.

Non-IT professionals are a great resource and can deliver an extra dimension of business knowledge to your IT department. Rethinking about how you attract and develop IT talent in this way can pay you back big time but what if you cannot access the occasional brain surgeon? How can you be sure that talent from “outside IT” will work if you lure them in?

Peer Profiling works. Have you considered accessing Subject Matter Experts, people who performed the project or IT role you’re looking to fill to profile candidates for suitability? This doesn’t just work for those non-IT business professionals either, peer profiling traditional IT talent can also limit the risk of a bad hire.

Fishing in new pools need not mean casting your net for the next Simon Zhang. The best specialist IT recruiters pool interviewed candidates and maintain ongoing contact giving you increased response times over traditional recruitment methods and a direct link with suitable talent – your own private talent pool!

Attracting culturally matched talent is also working for many IT hirers. When you work on the premise that, culturally, the right candidate at your firm might not be right for your competitor, it makes sense to try to hire talent in this way – even if it does mean operating in smaller pools. When your new hire fits right in and hits the ground running on day one, what may seem like marginal gains, can actually, hugely increase the return on your recruitment investment.

Among the quickest ways to leverage this is to partner with a specialist recruiter who will, first of all, get to know you, your business and how you operate so that they can match you with talent already on their radar or focus your campaign on attracting “best fit” talent. You (and your partner) must be clear about what your culture is … LinkedIn knew theirs and so they could identify how a brain surgeon would be the perfect match that he turned out to be!

It’s not rocket science … or brain surgery for that matter … but rethinking about how you attract and develop IT talent can return amazing dividends.

The post Re-thinking IT recruitment is not rocket science. Well, not always! appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

What did you make of the deliberate spelling mistake in the header? Hopefully, it got your attention on a page full of search engine results or list of blogs fighting for your attention.

Did you notice it?

I just did a little experiment by presenting 10 people in the office with five genuine job ads. I asked them to click on the one that got their attention. Nine of them clicked on the one that had a similar spelling mistake to this one in the job title.

Of those nine, five said they hadn’t consciously spotted the error but later said that their eyes may have subconsciously been drawn to it and four said they had noticed it… ABOVE all else… but still clicked.

It’s not scientific but does demonstrate the value of standing out from the crowd, although there are probably better ways than littering your message with typos!

When you recruit for an IT position it’s more important than ever that you can get your message across above the noise of an increasingly busy marketplace. Fifteen years ago, you may have placed an ad in the job pages of your local newspaper and providing that the other IT firms in your neighbourhood weren’t recruiting you’d have the pick of the available local talent.

The Internet changed all of that. A little over a decade ago the proportion of job seekers using the web was just above 25% (in the U.S.). A more recent poll by Pew found that over half of U.S. adults (54%) have looked for information about jobs online. Among those who have actively looked for work in the last two years, 79% used online resources for their most recent job search. 34% now say online is the most important tool available to them.

With more and more options for IT talent to work remotely, you are no longer just up against employers in the same postcode, your main competitor for hiring top local talent could be based miles away … and they might not even be an IT firm! Put a search for “IT Project Manager jobs” into Google and many of the companies that are hiring are not traditional digital employers. Most businesses are now IT dependent so many different sectors are chasing the same talent.

You have to stand out.

However, you have to be credible.

This brings me back to that spelling mistake. Remember I asked ten people to click on one job ad and nine of them chose the one with the spelling error. I asked the chap who selected one of the other ads and he said, “If the employer isn’t intelligent enough to spot the typo or competent or diligent enough to spell check, I doubt that they have much to offer me.”

Getting noticed is one thing but getting noticed for the wrong reason may harm you.

9 out of 10 recruiters now believe that recruitment is candidate-driven. Recruiters are having to adopt an inside-out approach to candidate attraction showing their best side to applicants from way before their very interaction. To this end, according to LinkedIn’s Global Recruitment report, budgets for “employer brand management” are being increased at a majority of businesses.

What all of these numbers confirm is that, more than ever, recruitment of IT talent has to be spot on. More businesses are realising that this means hiring a recruitment partner but this isn’t always a silver bullet.

In an IT recruitment partner, you need the search capability of a recruiter with the selection skills of a subject matter expert to provide you with only the very best candidates. You need someone who will take time to get to know what it is that makes your firm the best place to work and have the skills to communicate that message with potential talent both active and passive.

This is best achieved by creating bespoke adverts with meaningful role profiles, written by subject matter experts. Your partner must be focussed on candidate attraction based on best fit with your company culture, selling your business as a great place to work but attracting talent who will complement and enhance your culture.

Thankfully, businesses are becoming as conscious of the brand they project to potential employees, as they are of the one that they project to potential customers. If this isn’t on your radar yet, now would be a good to adjust.

Choose a recruitment partner whose offer is as unique as yours and you can position yourself above the noise and be better prepared to get noticed in this candidate driven landscape.

The post Why IT rercuiters must work harder to get noticed appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

There is a fairly interesting statistic that has been doing the rounds over the past year or so. It comes from Glassdoor, whose US site claims that 89% of its users are either actively looking for jobs or would consider a better opportunity. Given what Glassdoor is and does, that is maybe not a huge surprise. It’s like saying the majority of people on Tinder are looking for a new partner or the majority of people in Asda are likely to purchase groceries sometime soon.

What is interesting, when you unpick that statement, is the suggestion that people who are not actively seeking a new gig are still using a site that is effectively an employer/employee matchmaking service. A bit like finding your other half is still swiping away on Tinder! Indeed, almost six out of ten users of the service are ACTUALLY employed, either full-time or part-time already.

Asking around, the average cost of filling a vacancy is between three and three and a half thousand pounds and takes around 45 to 50 days to do. The reality of the candidate led recruitment landscape of today is that investing all that time and money in finding someone does not guarantee loyalty from them. Just look at the recruitment site’s stats above – no sooner have you moved them in and worked out how they take their tea than they start looking for their next move.

My friend’s business recently spent just over £3000 on a Kyocera printer and photocopier and roughly the same recruiting a new IT Project Manager. She jokes that the photocopier will still work in her office long after the PM has shuffled off elsewhere. Despite the joke, you can tell that it’s no laughing matter.

So, what’s the answer?

It’s you. You are the difference.

You can complain about spending thousands recruiting, for example, an IT Technical Services Manager only to have them leave making you start all over again. Many hiring organisations do have a moan about this when I first talk with them. You should hear the language that they use, I’ve heard talk of a “fickle workforce”, a “volatile marketplace” or “capricious, ungrateful employees” and yet one of my friends just clocked up 15 years’ service with the same employer. Hardly fickle, volatile or capricious. The truth is, he and his employer just hit it off. They are well suited to one another. So why do so few “new hires” clock up such long service?

To find out why it’s useful to return to Tinder, I mean not literally, I don’t want to be cited in your divorce petition.

How does Tinder match make? It’s fairly one dimensional. If someone takes your fancy, you swipe right to ‘like’ them or if they don’t you swipe left to ‘pass’. If they’ve also ‘liked’ you – you’re in and you can start messaging. Based on what? Your mutual love of classical music or the architecture of Watson Fothergill? No, of course not. It’s based on your reaction to a carefully selected, filtered and possibly airbrushed photograph. Hardly any wonder that so many users stay on the site after they find a partner on Tinder – when you meet up and spend some time together the chances of finding that you have nothing in common are quite high.

Recruiting through an online jobs matchmaker can be like that. Sure, you get paired based on more than just a photograph but keywords appearing in both a list of employer requirements and an employee’s CV are no guarantee of a match made in heaven. You spend the biggest part of your waking hours at work and when employees and employers are not a cultural fit for one another it soon starts to show. Is it, therefore, any wonder that so many keep their online recruitment profile active?

Maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps Tinder and its recruitment equivalents are not the best place to find lasting matches. Some get lucky. More often though its back to the drawing board for all concerned. Another three grand down the drain.

Some recruiters have responded to this new candidate led reality and recruit based on cultural fit. In other words, they get to know you and how you go about your business. They work out what makes you unique and what makes your firm a great place to work. Simultaneously, they have a growing database of active and passive candidates and know which would be a perfect fit for you – speeding up the process and lowering the risk and overall cost of a hire. The best ones are so confident that they share the risk of recruitment with you, which can even mean spreading payments over the initial months of the candidate’s employment and if during that time the candidate leaves, the payments stop.

Ultimately, in most human interactions, from love to IT recruitment, the matches that last are those cemented by common values and shared perspectives. Keywords and swiping right, however much fun they may be, are perhaps not be the best way to ensure this.

SOURCE
Glassdoor.co.uk

The post Is ‘Tinder for recruitment’ the best way to access IT talent? appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

It’s the same with a job search. Either consciously or subconsciously the criteria that fits with a candidate’s search is what stands out when they scour the job boards or do some research online about a potential employer.

Sometimes, when recruiting, the things that make your company a great place to work can get forgotten in the “busyness of business” and you can find yourself falling into the mind-set trap of offering a job or placement – rather than an opportunity to be part of something truly amazing! Why would you go the trouble of being a fabulous employer and not tell potential candidates?

Working with companies to produce meaningful, bespoke adverts focused on candidate attraction to match their business or company culture, I have identified many things that I believe every business needs to offer to IT talent, apart from a great salary! However simply offering these things is not enough, you have to loudly announce in your recruitment collateral or company mission statement or website exactly what candidates can expect when you sign up with you.

Here are just ten things that both active and passive IT talent have said that they want from their next position. Are you a magnet for these? How many do you offer? Furthermore, how many of these things do you tell candidates that you offer?

1. Trust

Can employees speak out without fear of consequences? If something is wrong most IT Talent wants to be able to call it regardless of who is involved. Makes sense. If a strategic IT Project is veering away from delivering the agreed business change anyone on the team who identifies this should be empowered to flag it up without upsetting (for example) the Project leader. Making sure that candidates can identify if this is your culture will attract talent with a collective responsibility mindset.

2. Clearly Defined Roles and Responsibilities

A recent LinkedIn Talent Trends report put this as the number one thing that talent wants to know. In your business, grey areas in client expectation cost money, cause breakdown of relations and delay. Similarly, if you were to think of your business as a client of your talent can you honestly say that roles are locked down and clear?

3. Proper Acknowledgement for Hard Work and Achievement but Also Constructive Feedback When Things Don’t Work Out

One company has the phrase “We never fail. We either succeed or we learn” on the wall above the water cooler which is a great mantra but such sentiment is never evident in their recruitment literature. This means talent attracted to a philosophy of continual experience-based improvement and ‘credit where credit is due’ may not have them on their radar.

If total honesty in all communication is key to you then you need to attract like-minded talent.

5. Ample Opportunity to Grow Both Professionally and Personally

Organisations that have programmes in place to accelerate the development of the most talented people see a greater return on their investment. Increasingly talent is attracted to positions that have a career path mapped out or the opportunity to pioneer their own. Win/Win

6. Solid Leadership

Research shows that of all the people candidates would like to meet at their interview, their direct boss should they take the role is number one. Having the supervisor or manager to whom they will report available on the day of the interviews or at least available to answer questions during the process can be hugely beneficial. If you have good, competent leaders – put them in the shop window.

7. Respect for Life Away from The Office

When LinkedIn studied responses to recruitment messages sent via InMail they found those sent on Saturdays were 16% less likely to get a response than those sent during the working week. What’s more, the closer it gets to the weekend, the less likely talent is to respond. Recruitment mails sent on Thursday between 9 and 10 am were 12% more likely to get a response than those sent on Friday during the same time period. This tells you that talent values the work/life balance – reflect that you do too in your communications with candidates.

8. The Ability to Make a Dent In The Universe

Having a more influential role within the organisation or working on projects that make a real difference are often cited as key influencers in choosing which offer to accept. One of the legacies left by Steve Jobs is that great quote, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?”

9. A Supportive, Collaborative Environment Where Teamwork and Innovation Are Actively Encouraged

In her Huffington Post blog, culture expert Karin Volo makes the point that collaborative, not competitive environments are at the centre of the modern workplace. Supportive relationships between co-workers raise job satisfaction and employee retention so it pays to make this your thing. “There is a definite energy that comes from employees who enjoy working together,” writes Karin, adding, “They stop being a cog in the machine and know that what they do makes a difference — they are able to contribute on a personal level to a company contributing on a much bigger level. This excites them to get up in the morning and come to work.” Collaborative talent is attracted to collaborative environments.

10. A Great Interview Experience

83% of talent say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once liked, meanwhile a roughly similar number (87%) say a positive experience can change their perception when they had initial doubts. Getting your interview process right or making sure that you have a recruitment partner who will get it right on your behalf is more important than ever!

Getting to know what interview content will make a difference is also important. Almost half (49%) say that getting business questions answered is the most important interview takeaway – make sure you’re ready.

These are just ten to consider. The point is that whatever makes you a great place to work, whatever is going to attract great talent your way, THAT should be the lead story when you recruit. Make sure you identify where you and the talent you want are aligned and then make sure that they know all about it – or get a GREAT specialist recruitment partner who will do it for you! That’s how you become an IT Talent magnet.

Sources

LinkedIn:Global Talent Trends

Huffington Post

The post How to be an IT talent magnet appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

No wonder talent retention is increasingly important to many organisations. If you have the chance to retain great talent, you should do everything you can to do so, it’s the people working for you that makes you what you are, as one friend of mine puts it, “if you use different ingredients chances are you’ll bake a different cake.”

However, people do move on so is great talent replaceable? I mean, your company can hire someone to fill a vacancy, but what about the hole their departure leaves in your experience and knowledge bank and your corporate culture? How can you be sure that you fill those when you hire new talent?

You’re kidding yourself if you think you can do it by simply hiring someone with a more impressive CV or list of qualifications. Many generalist recruiters offer this and on paper, it looks like you’re getting a “new and improved” version of the person you lost. Often though, unless your recruiter has their finger on the pulse of the industry and a thorough understanding of your culture you won’t get the maximum return on your investment.

Of course, no-one knows you better than you do so you may decide to go down the “D.I.Y.” hiring route. You may already be a personality assessment expert, you may know what to look for in a covering letter or CV, you may have a set of killer interview questions … or you may just get lucky BUT it’s not just about identifying the ideal candidate. Half your battle is attracting them and even just getting their attention in the first place can be hard.

A specialist recruiter should yield a greater quantity and quality of candidates for you, but it’s more than that because the holy grail is replacing the ingredients but not affecting the flavour of that cake!

This is why a really good specialist IT recruiter should get to know you and your culture first – they need a big taste of your cake! This is how they to produce superior results. Aligning talent with business culture is the best way to ensure perfect fit.

To do this they should be able to demonstrate an understanding of your needs, they should get to know your goals and how you go about achieving them and be able to recite them back to you. Then, because they have a database of pooled interviewed talent they should be able to quickly find you the perfect match. In short, they need to have their finger simultaneously on the pulse of the industry and your organisation, its structure and its business needs.

That ongoing relationship that your specialist IT recruiter has with talent is important to you. The best specialist recruiter builds such relationships because let’s face it, a candidate is likely to switch more than just once in their career but it helps you too because it usually means that they can suggest suitable candidates without having to even advertise. Reach and speed are vital when replacing great talent.

If they do have to enter the market you have to be confident that they know where to look and that they have the relevant industry background and experience to know what they’re looking for. A proven track record or a connection and working experience within your industry are things you should look for in a partner, it is these guys who will find the right candidate for you.

That word “partner” matters too. To ensure that you get the right cultural fit you should look for a partner who sees themselves as just that. Look for specialist recruiters who will share the risk of the hire for example.

Your niches should dovetail too. If for example, you have a vacancy in Project Management your partner should be able to field any questions that you ask them on the subject. They should speak the same language as you and your potential candidates. The more they know about your subject, the better they’ll be at recruiting the right person. Subject matter experts and peer profiling are ways that the best specialist recruiters achieve this. When hiring for key roles or when replacing great talent it’s worth spot testing your potential recruitment partner on their knowledge of your specific area to make sure that they are best positioned to get a result for you.

In conclusion, 2017 is going to be a challenging year for IT employers. In the past, you’d only have to worry about rival companies in the same field headhunting your staff. As more firms become ‘tech firms’ there will be a greater number of opportunities for your talent to transfer their skills in a wide range of businesses. You may not be able to hold on your best people.

The title of this post was “Great Talent Is Not Easily Replaceable” and that’s true but with a plan and the right talent attraction partner, it is not impossible.

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