Corporate Eye

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Archives for October 2015

Creating Careers Content that Surprises

company-culture

A glimpse of the future… or time to invest in singing lessons

It’s a rare thing for me to find surprising careers content that makes me think: “Wow – I love that!” But that rare thing happened this week when I discovered a company called Medallia.

I’m not even sure where to start here, but a good place could be the all-singing, all dancing “We are Medallia” video on their Careers landing page. If you don’t do anything else with this post, I suggest you do watch this because it’s certainly entertaining. Then watch it a second time because this is a corporate video that entertains and sends out key messages about their culture.

Medallia is obviously a company that likes to use video. There are fast-moving workplace tours rubbing shoulders with video communicating those essential “Why work for us?” messages. And there are lots of employee video profiles as well, with staff members sharing memories of their first day at Medallia, or chatting informally about what it’s like to do their job.

Social media is another key component of Medallia’s career page strategy, with embedded links to Twitter, Instagram and Glass Door. The Instagram and Glass Door links are particularly interesting, and suggest Medallia is targeting the increasing number of candidates who like to share.

Then I found Medallia’s Interview Guide. Now I never thought I’d say this about a PDF, but I really enjoyed reading this.

Not only does it provide basic interview tips, it also gives candidates a glimpse of company culture and Medallia’s intriguing recruiting approach. For example, Medallia use three types of job interview: Functional interviews to assess skills, Culture interviews to understand character, and Worksample interviews that test task ability. Is this an approach that could work for everyone? Maybe not, but it’s certainly food for thought.

The guide also provides a clear overview of the application process and asks for feedback. Yes, that’s right. Medallia wants candidates to let the company know about their recruiting experience, so they can identify and fix issues. And that includes leaving public reviews on Glassdoor.

The Medallia Career pages aren’t perfect and there are some things I’d change (I’d like to see the Interview Guide content actually on the Career pages in glorious HTML), but I don’t want to sound finicky, as I think there’s a lot to like here.

The key things that stand out for me are the engaging videos that are just asking to be shared and the big focus on interaction. But is it really that surprising to find this sort of content on Career pages? For those under-35 candidates who’ve grown up with digital (and an increasing number of digitally-savvy over 35s), sharing and interacting online is well, normal every-day stuff, isn’t it?

Now I’m guessing there are probably some recruiters reading this who might be thinking something like the following: “But my company isn’t a Silicon Valley software company. All that sharing and video stuff wouldn’t work for us.”

Okay, I can understand that point of view, and I’m not suggesting all companies should mimic the Medallia approach. But every company needs to recruit. And today’s jobseekers will increasingly expect to see good quality video on hiring sites, as well as sharing and interaction opportunities. If your career pages don’t have these features, it might still stand out among your peers, but possibly not in the way you’d like.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can improve your career content, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to share our expertise.

PS – And thanks to Recruiting Social for letting me know about Medallia!

Corporate Reputation: Speaking Up

whistleblowing

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”
Thomas Burke

Nobody plans to become a whistleblower.

But sometimes someone finds out that something unethical, immoral, illegal or inappropriate is happening in their workplace or industry sector, and feels that they must report it.

This is a difficult and stressful activity particularly if they need to report something being done by a colleague or employer. Whistleblowers risk losing their job—and, depending on their work, they may find it difficult to find another job in the same sector.

Or if they don’t lose their job, their lives in and out of work can be made very difficult because of hostility felt towards them by employers and/or fellow staff.

And their families may be put under enormous stress—not helped if the case gets media attention.

Yet these are people with courage and integrity, who are doing the right thing. And companies who care for their corporate reputation try to encourage this behaviour.

Big companies try to make blowing the whistle as easy as they can, often signing up for an external service, so that employees (or others: suppliers, contractors, customers or business partners) can report something—in theory—without fear of retaliation.

This isn’t entirely altruistic: misconduct by employees damages a company’s reputation, and a good whistleblowing service —usually a phone line—can alert the company to a problem early, giving them a chance to deal with it before reputation damage occurs. And a reputation for a strong ethical culture never hurts…

So creating a quality system to enable whistleblowing is important, and a good system will support the employee as well as the company.

Make it easy

  • It is important to ensure that the information about the phone line is readily available and well known across the company.
  • Both the promotional material and the act of reporting should be available in multiple languages if a company is multi-national.
  • And it must be clearly available—well-signposted and highly visible—on the corporate website. Those who wish to report a problem may be outsiders without access to internal promotional material or services.

Make it expected

People aren’t comfortable with whistleblowing.

  • Asking people to ‘raise their voice’, to ‘speak up’, to ‘be heard’ or to ‘play the red card’ will create a culture where reporting issues becomes the norm. Look at those companies—such as BG Group—where the safety culture is strong, and endeavour to reproduce that kind of culture for ethical behaviour
  • Promote the need to report problems at every level of the organisation, and locally as well as globally.
  • Provide training in what to do in difficult situations, to try and avoid the problems in the first place – and consider the Institute of Business Ethics Say No Toolkit, which helps advise people on avoiding problems, or with reporting a problem they have come across.
  • And be careful when identifying KPIs to measure success; proclaiming that your target is a low number of reports will create the wrong culture.

Make it safe

People will feel uneasy at reporting such incidents, so they need to feel safe.

  • Choose an external reporting service that offers anonymity—for example, use of pseudonyms, and willingness to ensure no personal information is requested.
  • Offering advice about anonymity online can help reassure: for example, explain that using a public PC (e.g. at a library or café) can improve anonymity.
  • When a report is made, it should be taken seriously—with strong procedures to avoid retaliation. Make it clear what the process will be, and what steps will be made to maintain anonymity.

Reports of ethical problems are hard to hear, but just as customer feedback serves to improve products or services, so this kind of feedback can serve to improve the organisation—and support the corporate reputation.

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This post is part of Blog Action Day; the theme this year is ‘raise your voice’.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day have been:

2014: Recruitment and Equality: Diversity and Inclusion
2013: Communicating Human Rights
2012: One Plus One Can Be Greater Than Two
2011: Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor

Careers: Make your emails count

warwick-1warwick-2
Consider the humble application confirmation email. It’s not asked to do much, other than say: Thanks and we’ll be in touch.

Well, universities use similar emails for students booking Open Day visits. But they also use them to do far more.

By incorporating informative links and the university’s social media outposts, the confirmation email suddenly becomes a new way to engage potential students.

This is an approach that can be easily applied to the corporate world, and it could make all the difference in the battle to hire top quality candidates.

How to be innovative when talking about innovation

siemens-digitalIf you’re looking for a creative way to talk about innovation, check out Siemens and their fantastic 360° interactive digitalization tour. The tour combines “what we do” content with Siemen’s latest ideas on how to deal with the challenges of tomorrow.

Your next interview candidate will see you on Channel 3

video-interviewsI can still remember how annoyed she sounded: “But we spent all that time and money interviewing and assessing you!”
The HR manager had called me the day after a successful interview and offered me a job. And I’d had to turn her down (I had a better offer elsewhere).

I’m not surprised she was annoyed. Interviewing and assessing candidates face-to-face is expensive. There are schedules to clear, rooms to book, and resources and people to pull together.

But help is at hand, according to an increasing number of recruiters. Dip a toe into the Google Ocean and you’ll find a lot of HR professionals talking about how more and more companies are using video interviews to hire the right candidates. But how many companies really are doing this? The answer is quite a lot.

In 2014, Monster.co.uk and University College London (UCL) surveyed the recruiters on Monster’s database to identify future hiring trends. Use of video interviews was one of their key findings, with 48% of respondents saying they were already using video as part of their hiring process. Other studies from the US suggest American recruiters are even more enthusiastic about using video, with one study suggesting 60% of recruiters regularly use video to carry out remote job interviews.

Still not 100% convinced, I sought out further evidence that big companies were embracing video, and I found it at the UK Post Office. Faced with thousands of applications for temporary Christmas roles, the Post Office worked with video specialists Sonru to incorporate video interviews into its hiring processes, and the results were pretty good to say the least.

“It saved around 80% year-on-year in terms of travel, venue and similar costs,” said Brett Davies, resourcing manager at the Post Office, “Previously, prospective candidates would have attended an assessment centre with up to 20 trained assessors hired for the day, so we could easily be spending £50,000 to run 10 assessment days.”

By this point, I was starting to feel convinced, but I wondered how a recruiter might use video for the first time. The one-way video is one simple approach. After initial role screening, the best candidates can be contacted and invited to answer a list of questions and tell their story by submitting a video. Recruiters can then get an early look at possible recruits from the comfort of their desktop. And if one of these candidates seems special, recruiters can then arrange a Skype call to ask more questions.

The video interview obviously offers advantages to business, but what does it mean for the talent pool? For a generation familiar with daily YouTube uploading and Skype, the video conversation may actually provide a more relaxing platform to sell themselves compared to a conventional interview. However it might not be quite so relaxing for candidates that haven’t grown up with YouTube, or for people who don’t feel comfortable on screen. One way of getting around this is to ensure that the video interview process also offers candidates clear advice on what the recruiters are looking for and easy mistakes to avoid.

Video obviously offers great time and resource saving advantages for business, but the key thing that sold it for me was a little more human. Recruiting process improvements can sometimes be impersonal and, in worst case scenarios, alienate candidates. But integrating video into the recruiting process offers a way to save time and money, and provide more opportunities for human interaction between recruiter and candidate.

Note: And finally…a quick thank to HR Magazine and Business Insider for inspiring me to write this post!