WLP38 Matt Alder and the Future of Recruitment
In today's episode, Pilar chats with Matt Alder about the future of recruitment in organisations.
"With all the change digital technologies have brought to
the world of work in the last 15 years, it is very easy for
employers to think that they now fully understand how
they are being affected and that they are planning well
for the future. Over the next few years, however, the
labour market faces further dramatic technology-driven
disruption which will make the changes of the last decade
and a half seem slow and sedate by comparison."Welcome to the Era of the Boiling Frogs in Building the Best Jobs Markets in the World
00:30 Pilar talks a bit about how mindset is changing in recruitment. (Script below.)
She mentions a past blog post on social media and recruitment.
How a young person's cv went viral.
and an article about companies that are currently hiring remotely.
09:05 How Matt ended up working in Digital Recruitment
16:00 How social media can help you recruit talent.The importance of paying attention to social media and mobile in recruitment.
19:20 Why recruitment is no longer just the responsibility of HR
20:55 Understand where your audience are.
23:30 Is recruitment through social media working? You need to know your culture – Glass Door
“Dealing at the intersection between technology and people is really interesting.”
28: 25 How are people looking for work and how is work looking for people? The importance of an online presence.
The power of our extended networks.
Has Hr practice changed now that we can access a global talent pool?
32:12 Where are we heading to? Matt talks about platforms where you can hire people on projects – Hugo.
Connect with Matt:
Recruiting Future Podcast
www.metashift.co.uk
Linkedin, Twitter
“Recruitment has really lagged behind other sectors in terms of understanding social media.”
Today’s episode includes a conversation with Matt Alder, who helps companies with their recruitment strategies, mainly focusing on digital, including social media. He is also the host of The Recruiting Future podcast, so, if you want to know what’s going on in recruitment right now and how companies are changing their approach to finding talent, you should check it out. It’s definitely on my podcast app and I have managed to catch a handful of episodes and can recommend it. So that’s the Recruiting Future podcast, which you can find in your podcast app or through rfpodcast.com
And, even though this is not my area of expertise at all and I haven’t really been involved in the world of recruitment myself, it’s obvious how the world of job seeking and job offering has changed.
And it’s not just about social media, it’s about how the tables have turned. As an employer, you don’t just have to be offering a job – you have to be offering a good place to work in and people can monitor this. News break really quickly now when something dodgy is going on in a company, there are sites like Glass Door where employees will share their experiences and also, and this is something that I actually hadn’t thought of before I first met Matt, there are your social media friends, who might share in their private profiles their rants about their manager, their colleagues or their company. I’ve actually only met Matt once in person, at a talk he gave for one of the CIPD branches in London, and he really made me think about how everyone now in the company has some responsibility in recruitment – if other people can get a sense of what it’s like to work at our company through our actions, then we are involved in recruitment, as you never know what potential candidate is listening. (And this was back in 2013 and I wrote a short blog post around this – some of it sounds a bit dated, some of it could have been written yesterday.) http://www.unusualconnections.co.uk/do-your-employees-share-your-job-posts/
As I said, recruiting is not something I’m involved with, but I have been noticing that many small businesses, are changing the recruitment process from something that involves looking at a person’s past to measure their potential (ie send your cv and ‘tell us about an achievement you’re proud of’) to what, to me, is a much more practical approach. If you want to work for us, tell us how you would solve this problem and deal with this issue. No talk of cv, not mention of having to have five years of experience in the industry.
To answer this well, you need to really know your stuff (sorry for the not very technical term), you have to know the industry and you have to really know the company you’re applying to. I hope the recruiting process moves more towards these kind of questions, as I think they make for a much more creative application process – although of course, there will be quite some jobs where this doesn’t apply, or are there? Answers on a postcard… well answers on an email. Do get in touch.
And maybe is not just up to employers to pursue this way of recruiting but also for those looking for work. Only today I came across an article about a young woman who wanted a job with Airbnb and so she submitted a whole analysis of the global tourism industry and where she thought Airbnb should go next. That was her application. She didn’t get the job, but she did end up working for Upwork, which is a recruitment platform of sorts – it connects freelancers with clients and you might know it was the merging result of Odesk and elance.
I’ll include the article to this young person’s story in the show notes – it’s very 21st Century, as it talks about how her cv went viral and how she got contacted by lots of tech companies as a result, as well as people seeking her advice.
Finally, I really shouldn’t move on to our chat with Matt without talking about the fact that the world is now our oyster if we can make it virtual world work. A recruitment strategy need not be a local strategy anymore – of course recruitment and branding go hand in hand, so is it time for all companies, regardless of size, regardless of location to be thinking about how they are perceived throughout the world? I’ll just leave this hanging but first I’ll refer you to another recent article called If You Want to Find Better Candidates Start Hiring Remotely – it doesn’t really go into much depth but it’s got some interesting numbers like, for example, the fact that IBM has currently “40 percent of its 386,000 employees working remotely, either at home or at a client site.”
Again, I’m not saying that every team or every company should be going remote or that this works for everyone, but it’s always worth considering as an option if it means you’re going to find the right person for your team.
And do check out episode 9 (wow that was some time ago) where Lisette shares her experience recruiting for a virtual team.