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Careers

Stand Out—or Fit In?

skittles-collage

There’s no doubt that Skittles created attention with their extreme makeover! Not only here at Corporate Eye (Media and Brand), but all over the web—discussed and debated by bloggers, social media mavens, and even the relatively staid Wall Street Journal (which provides an interesting analysis).

An interesting part about this: the Skittles site was already more than a little bizarre. (If you don’t recall–or never saw–the “before” version, visit the Wayback Machine. ) So the change may be more noteworthy for its wholesale embrace of postmodern media than merely for novelty per se.

Of course my investigation has to focus on the Careers aspect, which leads to Skittles’ parent company, Mars. And switching to the Mars site is like going back over the Skittles Rainbow to land in Kansas again:

mars-careers

It’s a pleasant design and the site has pleasant functionality. In short—it fits into a visitor’s expectations. But it doesn’t stand out.  (Even when you discover that you can drag the M&Ms around.)

If you are planning a makeover of the Careers site, or even starting from scratch, one of the fundamental design decisions is whether to play it safe or spice it up. A Careers site that looks like 85% of all others runs the risk of boring visitors—or at least, not getting their attention. On the other hand, a site that is radically different from the mainstream is open to one of several visitor interpretations:

  • These guys don’t know what they are doing.
  • This company looks interesting!
  • This site is confusing/awkward/unfriendly.
  • I feel right at home here!

And so on. Individuals bring their own assumptions and motivations to the site with them, and (at the risk of over-generalizing) visitors who are looking for security may favor something safe and traditional, whereas visitors looking for a challenge may be attracted to something adventurous and creative. Age may also be a factor—though not necessarily in a predictable way, since older-somethings could be ready for a big change while younger-somethings may be looking for a safe place to get started.

There’s no pleasing everyone, of course, so it’s important to consider the target audience for your industry and your company, as well as the main types of jobs to be listed. And of course, it’s important to maintain a constructive connection to the company’s brand image. But as food for thought, here are three principles that would hold up pretty well across the board:

  1. A site that looks as if it were made with a Careers-shaped cookie cutter leaves the impression that no one cared very much about the site.
  2. A site that looks great but doesn’t work well leaves the impression that no one cared very much about the visitor.
  3. A site that makes the visitor jump through hoops to get information (or to send a resume or apply for a job, etc.) leaves the impression that no one cared very much about recruiting.

(For an example of the middle ground–mainstream done with pizzazz–visit Umpqua Bank.)

Going Gray

Bureau of Labor statistics

At the level of the national economy, employment news is bad across the board—but even worse for those over 55. The unemployment rate for “seniors” has doubled in the past year, from about 3% to about 6%. And although the hardest hit segment of this group is undereducated men, there is a definite effect for the entire age group. (Urban Institute Report)

Now add the fact that some retirees are returning to the job market, while many workers who might have retired soon can no longer afford to stop working–and you have the makings of a sad story.Or maybe . . . the makings of a happy ending for many companies and job-seekers. Older workers represent a treasure-trove of experience, knowledge and dedication, so having more of them available could be a boon to many companies.

For a crash course on the benefits of hiring and/or retaining older workers, check out this summary at Entrepreneur and an interesting study by Community Inclusion. In a nutshell: older workers bring value-adds of experience, knowledge, and maturity, yet often cost less in terms of total compensation that younger hires.

Once you’re convinced, consider some of the best practices suggested by the National Older Worker Career Center (NOWCC). For online recruiting, best practices come down to two key points:

  • First, avoid age-biased messaging. NOWCC gives a great example of the first point, suggesting that messages like “A great place to launch your career” can be replaced (or supplemented) with messages like “A great place to showcase your talents.”
  • Second, include all ages when depicting your employees.

To put this advice into context, let’s look at Hewlett-Packard–where the Careers site is delivering a subtly youth-oriented message:

hp

The only picture on the page is of two very young people. And the highlighted message says: “When you join HP, you’ll be given every opportunity to stretch your talents, strive for new solutions and succeed beyond what you thought was possible. And when you do, you’ll be recognized and rewarded as you grow and win along with us.”

That’s not obviously ageist language—but put it together with the picture, and there’s a definite suggestion that youngsters are the ideal candidates to “grow and win” along with HP.

Intentional? Almost certainly not! But the suggestion is there nonetheless.

Now let’s look at this image from Securian’s Careers home page:

Securian

No gray beards in this group picture, but clearly at least a couple of fifty-somethings. And the text includes a historical dimension (“Securian has spent over 125 years keeping the long-term promises we make to our customers”) plus a “people” description that focuses on mature capabilities (“who bring their ingenuity, hard work, integrity and dedication, each and every day”).

Again, the effect is subtle. But there’s definitely a different tone and orientation.

It’s tempting to say “Yes, but one is a tech company and one is an insurance company—HP wants youth and innovation, Securian wants maturity and stability.” That’s not the whole story, though. The Hewlett-Packard Careers site is serving all parts of the company, not just the gee-whiz departments. So they need to reach candidates with mature capabilities as well as recent graduates.

More to come about “Going Gray” in my next post: A Tale of Two Stanleys.

A Tale of Two Stanleys

AARP

Going Gray looked at some of the benefits and challenges associated with recruiting older workers. Recap: 50+ workers represent a cost-effective resource pool, but Careers messaging often ignores them. And as we saw with the comparison of Hewlett-Packard and Securian . . . youth bias can be quite subtle.

To dive a little deeper, let’s consider another pair of examples.  Stanley Associates is one of the companies included on Fortune’s 2008 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. And Stanley Consulting is on the AARP’s 2008 list of Best Employers for Workers Over 50.

Here’s the Careers landing page for Stanley Associates:

stanley-associates

And here’s the landing page for Stanley Consulting:

Stanley Consulting

Now. Pretend you’re a 50-something job seeker, looking at each page for the first time. (And keep in mind that we tend to notice pictures first, then read text.)

Which page makes you feel more welcome? The one with a gray-haired woman in the second row—or the one that spotlights an age range from 3 to 30? (As for that group picture in the upper left of Stanley Associates . . . I’ve zoomed it as far as it will go, and if there’s anyone there over 39, I envy their youthful appearance!)

The Stanley Consulting page reflects the company’s interest in actively recruiting from the 50+ pool. Over-fifties comprise 34% of their workforce, and the average tenure of Stanley’s 50+ employees is just 5.74 years—a very interesting figure, since it means that many of these employees have not aged into the over-fifty category, but were hired in maturity. Among the policies that attract over-fifties to Stanley Consulting: flextime, telecommuting, and phased retirement.

In addition (according to the AARP profile), Stanley Consulting has an employee who is directly responsible for maintaining relationships with its current group of 144 retirees, and the company acknowledges retirees with regular communications, invitations to company events, and opportunities for temporary work assignments, consulting and contract work.  As employees age, they have choices about their role with the company.

Which brings us to an often-overlooked point. Even for companies where recruitment priorities skew away from older employees—there is still much value to creating an age-inclusive message on the Careers site. It lets the visitor know that experience and maturity have value to the company. And that message will be meaningful to younger job-seekers (who might, after all, hope for a long career in the company!) as well as older ones.

Finally, it’s worth noticing that a majority of the companies on the AARP list are in the health care field, with insurance and financial services, education, and consulting also well represented. Retail appears to be almost absent—but L.L. Bean makes the list at #20, and their creative approach to age-inclusive messaging is worth a look:

LL Bean

No faces on the page, either young or old. Just an iconic image that captures the company’s branding perfectly, and invites job-seekers to lace up and join in!

Places I want to work (Surprise #2)

pearson-lead

Actually, example #2 turns out to be less surprising than #1 (Home Depot), since I have quite a bit more experience in communications than in home improvement. But I was in the publishing industry for several years at the beginning of my career, and wouldn’t intentionally look for an opportunity to return.

So the appeal of Pearson’s site actually was unexpected.  And the site is certainly a complete 180 from the sturdy look-and-feel of Home Depot, with an “employer brand” character that might best be described as beguiling. The tone is direct and sincere, the design is casual (even artless), and the information is simply but adequately presented.

There isn’t a great deal of practical detail, because Pearson is made up of several different components (Pearson Education, Financial Times Group, and Penguin Group) that hire independently. So the parent site focuses on a basic presentation of the company philosophy—and there it has great success.

The key message is stated on the landing page: “We have a simple but ambitious goal: to be the best company to work for in the world, so that our people have the skills to leave, but choose to stay.” Variants of this message are repeated frequently, and are backed up with a sort of detail that is frequently missing in recruitment rhetoric: qualities of the company, and the qualities they are seeking.

Pearson uses words that are not typically found in company self-description. Example: “At the heart of everything we do are three core values: bravery, decency and imagination. These define the culture of our organisation and have always underpinned the way we do business.” Although there are sections on the site that cover the usual matters (benefits, diversity, training, etc.) what comes across most powerfully is the sense that “core values” is not just a bit of jargon, but a real description of their operating philosophy.

Here’s one more quote from a section titled “What we look for in Pearson people.” That’s a very helpful topic to present, I think, and the first item on the list is: “We are in the information business so we expect people to be forward-looking and creative in their thinking. We also assume that they will have a genuine passion for our business.”

And that last sentence actually forms a bridge for my own thinking. One of the strengths I pointed to on the Home Depot site was an image placed squarely in the middle of the Careers landing page—a blackboard with the phrase “What’s your Passion?” written across it in a bold hand.

Not that every Careers site needs to sneak in the word “passion” somewhere! But in both these cases, the idea of passionate engagement is integrated into the messaging (visually in one, verbally in the other), and strengthens an overall impression that the company really cares about making a match that works for both employer and employee.

Delivering a meaningful message won’t overcome lack of functionality or nonsense navigation. But it will make a good site much better.

Freshening Up

Spring is here–which encourages thoughts about new growth. So here are some updates and extras relating to previously planted posts, plus two new seedlings.

Following up on Silver Linings, the post about a grassroots employment campaign that took root on Twitter:

  • Job Angels now has a website—minimal, but helpful if you want to pass the story along to others. It contains a brief version of how Job Angels got started, along with links to the various social media implementations of JA.
  • Nice news: The number of Job Angel participants (following and being followed) on Twitter has more than doubled in the month since my original post.
  • In a similar spirit, David Szary at Recruiter Academy offers food for thought about recruiting and life, with a post that starts off by asking “Are we forgetting what we do for a living?”

Recalling three recent posts that took a deep dive into Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work—it was fun to see a segment exploring the list on the CBS News program Sunday Morning for March 15. “In Good Company” focuses on Fortune’s #15, W. L. Gore & Associates. (The “associates” are the employees, every one of them.) If you missed it, it’s not too late to watch!

dan-schorr-21Just after All Atwitter was posted, a delightful segment on National Public Radio program Weekend Edition captured veteran journalist Daniel Schorr (now 92!) discovering Twitter. Schorr—who began his career in 1946 as a foreign correspondent and has covered every noteworthy event since—still appears weekly as a senior news analyst for NPR. And his Twitter following is coming up on 6,000.

And two new items worth taking note of:

  • Job Radio. I won’t lie! I had fun channel-surfing this clever site, which offers assorted audio content about job-seeking, career-building, and more. And while there, I discovered—
  • Jobs in Pods, a product/blog that focuses on “jobcasting.”

(And by the way . . . if you’ve been wondering how things are going for Skittles—no one has yet analyzed the longer-term outcomes of their radical website makeover. But I’ll keep watching!)

Information, Please

In It’s not the R, it’s the I, I opened a consideration of how ROI analysis applies to online recruiting in general and social media investment in particular—and I planned to follow up with posts drilling down on these topics. This has turned out to be much more of a challenge than anticipated!

So I’m falling back on an old journalistic trick: make the story the story. And the story is . . . there is very little information or analysis to use in discussing these aspects of recruiting expenditure. Although there are many software products, consulting companies, pundits, and industry associations that refer on their websites and in their literature to metrics (aka “analytics”), online recruiting, electronic recruiting, and so on, their commentaries and presentations seem to be long on rhetoric and short on facts.

I did not find any up-to-date, in-depth case studies or white papers. Maybe they are out there (and please share any knowledge you have!), but I couldn’t find them—and not only could I find no free information, I couldn’t even find anyone selling expensive reports that seem to promise illumination. This is true for HR and recruiting in general, not just the online aspects, as confirmed by experts:

Noted HR commentator Dr. John Sullivan starts off an ere.net post on Talent Management Analytics with the sentence “the subject of analytics is often discussed but rarely executed well, even in the most well-established talent management functions.” He continues with a long discussion about why this practice lags (short version: it’s too hard) and how new techniques like predictive modeling and text analytics will be revolutionary—except that “unfortunately, leveraging new and emerging tools often requires that users step out of their comfort zone.” So it seems we will have to stay tuned a while on those developments.

Ray Schreyer (Program Manager of Interactive Recruiting Channels for IBM and co-author of The Employer’s Guide to Recruiting on the Internet) observes on his Corporate Recruiting Blog that the “big three” job boards experienced a 35% drop in traffic during 2008, explaining that “2009 looks to be the year of Job Aggregators and Job Distribution Networks. The Job Board destination model is near dead, and seems only perpetuated by HR Recruiting folks who are lacking metrics and an ‘in the tank’ Wall Street crowd who does not understand the dynamics of the online recruiting marketplace. More to come in the weeks ahead.” But (again) unfortunately, twelve of the weeks ahead are now in the past, and there’s no further word from Schreyer.

In their Hiring and Recruiting Challenges Survey 2008, well-known consulting firm The Adler Group included a section on how recruiters and recruiting managers rank their use of specific recruiting metrics. An article by Bryan Johanson explains the findings, and notes among key conclusions: “Even with all the talk and focus on metrics over the last few years, recruiting departments and recruiters still struggle to implement real-time metrics.” (Though the survey information dates to 20007, it’s worth browsing Lou Adler’s summary of the findings.)

Of course the connection between internet recruiting in general and the Careers website specifically is another topic—one which also is noted by many as (a) very important and (b) not given sufficient attention. I’ll turn to that in the next post, and in the meantime, will keep looking for hard data to support the discussion.