Have you got the tenacity, charisma and research prowess to connect leading global employers to top global talent?

Finding, understanding and engaging quality senior candidates worldwide is an intricate and involving task. And it’s one that falls to our growing virtual team of motivated, resourceful Talent Sourcing Consultants. Join the team and become a vital link between our clients and the potential hires they want to talk to.

About the role

You’ll bring your research expertise to an eclectic range of talent mapping and sourcing projects. Working from home, often across time zones and territories, you’ll use various online and phone-based resources to research organisations, generate candidate lists and discreetly gather market intelligence. From there, you’ll contact senior passive candidates to discuss opportunities, before writing candidate profiles and reporting your findings in detail.

Who we’re looking for

You’ll be a true self-starter, comfortable with autonomy, proactive in exploring research channels and keen to delve deep into talent markets. Confidence and credibility are vital: you’re the one making the approach to senior passive candidates, so you must be able to spark, kindle and fire their interest in a role.

You need organizing skills as strong as your research abilities, since you’ll be managing multiple cross-border projects and compiling detailed reports under deadline pressure. If you have a recruitment, research or sourcing background, even better.

Why choose EWS?

Our consultants are the heartbeat of our bespoke talent sourcing solutions, so we’ve worked hard to create a supportive, collaborative culture for our virtual teams. You’ll find the work fast-paced and varied, with the buzz of tackling international assignments for high-profile clients. Finally, you’ll be well rewarded and have the flexibility that fits comfortably into your lifestyle.

To apply, send your CV with a covering email to careers@ews-o.com.

The post Be a Vital Link in the Global Talent Chain appeared first on EWS.

We recently came across an interesting take on the topic of goal setting, from an entrepreneur and keen student of human behaviour and motivations named James Clear. This wasn’t the typical list of 10 ways to achieve every goal you set, or 6 ways, or 5, 4 or even 2. Rather, it was one solitary tip, a simple if counter-intuitive shift in mindset that can be adopted by just about anyone to reach almost any goal.

The basic idea is that once you’ve come up with your goal, you should more or less put it from your mind and pour all of your energies into the system or process that will get you there.

In other words: Set goal. Jettison goal. Achieve goal.

That might sound <insert your own dismissive adjective here> but the closer you look, the more sense this makes.

Motivationally, goals are tricky things. They can overwhelm as much as they inspire; their massive presence on the horizon casting a long shadow over the path to achieving them.

Very often, fixating on the goal itself makes it seem even further away, even more unattainable. Likewise, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a confidence-sapping loop of comparing our current situation to the dazzling dream on top of our far-off golden pedestal.

As James puts it:

“When you’re working toward a goal, you’re essentially saying, ‘I’m not good enough yet… but I will be when I reach my goal.’ ”

So, James’s argument goes, what if you completely ignored your goals and the creeping doubts and insecurities surrounding their attainment?

What if you instead focused only on your systems – the processes, practices and routines that actually get you to where you want to be?

What if you stopped worrying about being on the Board in five years and put all your energies into achieving more this month, learning new skills this quarter, managing more effectively this year?

What if you stopped focusing on the marathon you’re running in six months’ time and concentrated purely on this week’s training schedule, then next week’s and so on?

Would you still get the results you desire? For James, you get them and plenty more besides e.g.:

• The pleasure of enjoying the present moment of your process as well as improving towards your end goal.
• Freedom from being enslaved by a distant and unknowable future.
• Absence of guilt at ‘failing’ to reach arbitrary milestone steps along the way.

Here’s the full story in James’s original article. In the well-ploughed furrow of motivational thinking, we see his ideas as fertile ground for inspiration. (It certainly beats reading the latest thought piece on the enduring merits of SMART goals.)

Undoubtedly, this isn’t the approach for everyone or every goal. But we’re very much taken by the idea that goals are about the journey as much as the destination. With so much uncertainty and turmoil in modern lives, trusting your process seems a good place to start.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Is the Way You Set Your Goals Stopping You from Achieving Them? appeared first on EWS.

1-click applications are a godsend for recruiters and candidates, right?

They give top talent a fast-forward button to your vacancy, meaning you don’t miss out on those stellar candidates too busy being brilliant to complete an entire application form from scratch. Convenience for candidates and a steady flow of engaged applicants into your ATS (not to mention greater resource efficiency) for you.

Another win-win layer of hiring automation. Trebles all round!

Except it isn’t so straightforward. Like so many steps in the march to automated recruiting, 1-click applications present a precarious trade-off between efficiency, employer branding and candidate experience.

It’s a basic tenet of motivation: the easier something becomes, the less commitment it requires and the lower its perceived value.

If you see a job you really want, you’re willing to run through walls to get it. When you’re offered a one-step, no-hassle way to apply, it suddenly feels cheaper, less worthwhile. “Who’s to say,” thinks the applicant, “that an army of unqualified candidates isn’t right now blindly clicking in their application, swamping the process in mediocrity?”

As a qualified candidate, maybe that will work in your favour, maybe not. The one thing you do know is that you’re in an unedifying numbers game for an employer you now respect slightly less.

Even worse, automated hiring turns all of those unqualified 1-click chancers into potential critics. An unsatisfactory response, whether it’s a terse and cursory automated email or their application ending up in the notorious ATS black hole, casts a long shadow over your employer brand.

In other words, you’ve ended up making naysayers of people who should never have been anywhere near your employer brand in the first place. On the bright side, at least you’ve inflated your ATS with the details of a few more irrelevant applicants you’ll never so much as glance at again.

Sarcasm aside, we have genuine concerns about the payoff between process efficiency and reputation management of automated hiring systems like 1-click application. Likewise automated ATS email responses and artificial intelligence in online video interviewing.

Recruitment is an innately human business, probably more so than any other. A candidate’s suitability for a role is ultimately determined by a nuanced set of intangibles: ambition, worldview, accomplishments, confidence, rapport, cultural fit and so on.

Humans simply do not miss these critical factors in the way that automated processes (what Liz Ryan dubbed “inhuman systems of recruitment” in her epic Forbes takedown of recruiting technology) all too easily can. Meanwhile your goodwill as an employer is being eroded every time a candidate rubs up against the blank void in the automated process where human interaction would otherwise be.

This is a long way from saying that technology plays no role in enhancing recruitment. It’s simply to caution that every automated step added to a hiring process diminishes its humanity and increases its fallibility.

Most jobs are worth more than a single click.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below. (And yes, we fully appreciate the irony in the context of this post.)

Image © R.E.M. Automatic For The People, Warner Bros. Records

The post Is Automated Hiring Making It Too Easy for Candidates to Dislike You? appeared first on EWS.

Job descriptions have a simple goal: to focus your talent search on qualified candidates. Traditionally, that means creating an exhaustive list of tasks performed and experience required, in the hopes that unqualified candidates will rule themselves out of contention. And therein lies the problem.

By prioritising tasks and experience over the impact a candidate will make in the role, most job descriptions drastically limit the job they describe. If the goal is to discourage the wrong people from applying, it’s natural to want to be as detailed as possible on what the job involves and who has the skills to do it. But that also increases the odds of a potential star self-deselecting because they don’t match up to every point on the profile.

To put it another way: the job description should be a tool to plan for excellence. Very often ‘hoping for competence’ is the limit of its ambition.

From job description to success profile

Fortunately, there is another way. The success profile gives you and your candidates a better lens through which to view the role in question. In place of dry lists of duties, experiences and qualifications, it defines the job through outputs, achievements and successes.

Many exponents, including recruitment and training guru Lou Adler, call this a ‘performance-based job description’. We think ‘success profile’ says more with less.

Either way, the key is to change the way you see the job you’re describing:

A job isn’t… an inflexible set of actions carried out robotically until further notice.

A job is… a dynamic performance intrinsically bound up in the results it delivers to your company. For example:

• A salesperson’s job isn’t to talk to prospective customers, but to bring more money into the business.
• An engineer’s job isn’t to create technical plans, but to solve problems.
• A recruiter’s job isn’t to sift applications, but to improve quality of hire.

These are broad examples, but any job should be definable by a clear set of objectives, measurable over time to show when someone is succeeding in that role. (Adler’s claim is that “just about every job in the world could be defined this way with 6-8 performance objectives”.)

What job information goes in a success profile?

These performance objectives form the core of the success profile. They could include:

• Expected outcomes – What 6-8 things must a person achieve in the role to be labelled a success after e.g. 6 months or a year?
• Success measures – Quantify them clearly (e.g. ‘Increase product sales by 10% in Year 1’, ‘Improve our Net Promoter Score by +5’ or ‘Migrate us to a new ATS’).
• Growth potential – If the role comes with prospects, include them. Again, be specific. Where could a high performer end up after two years? What heights have previous postholders gone on to?

What candidate requirements go in?

Needless to say, the success profile also reinvents the person spec. It has to: If a job is defined by results not duties, it makes no sense to set out an arbitrary list of requirements for how those results must be achieved. For instance:

• Why does someone need 10+ years’ experience? What if they have four but they’re a really fast learner?
• Is a degree absolutely necessary to answer the question ‘Can I increase turnover by 20% in Year 1?’
• Can a programmer be trained up in one of the six languages you’ve speculatively listed under skills required?

The point is that results can be achieved in unexpected ways. Enlightened employers are ready to be surprised. To avoid the risk of turning away a great candidate who doesn’t tick every last box, you need to distinguish essential requirements from nice-to-haves.

Once you have your essentials, define them in a role-specific way. Don’t fall back on empty phrases like ‘excellent oral and written communication skills’. Tell people what they’ll be doing with them (e.g. emailing customers, providing product demos). Likewise, nail down soft skills such as ‘can-do attitude’. What is it about a person that makes others think they have a can-do attitude? What specific behaviours do they exhibit?

Is it worth changing the habit of a lifetime?

Making a change this fundamental in your hiring process is undeniably hard work but there are persuasive benefits for all concerned.

Candidates love the approach because…

1. It lets them imagine themselves in the job. They get to visualise themselves succeeding, progressing and having an impact in your company, not just performing an assigned set of tasks. This is a way to speak directly to their abilities AND their motivations.
2. It gives them something to get excited about. Every sales job description out there talks about ‘using your people skills and strategic sales outlook to achieve results in a high-pressure environment’. How many put a figure or a timeframe on those results?
3. It opens the job up to new audience groups. Where traditional job descriptions risk disqualifying candidates on superfluous requirements, a success profile lets people decide whether they can do what’s needed with what they have.

Smart employers love the approach because…

1. It prioritises qualified candidates over unqualified ones. Old job descriptions say ‘if this profile doesn’t look like you, this job isn’t for you’. Success profiles say ‘if you can get these results, we’re interested’. It selects in qualified candidates and launches your relationship with them on a positive footing.
2. It’s the choice of diverse employers. The success profile has the potential to widen the candidate pools you source from and the breadth of quality candidates you attract. It opens up the possibility of different paths to the same destination.
3. It’s a useful interview tool. By defining the job in a more meaningful, focused way, the success profile is a better starting point for competency and performance-based interview questioning.
4. It’s easier to update. Future-facing employers review their job descriptions at least annually. The quantifiable nature of a purpose-based role profile makes it easier to identify and change any out-of-date details.

You can probably tell we’re firm believers in the value of switching your thinking to adopt the success profile approach. Indeed, we’re planning a follow-up post contrasting a sample success profile with its job description counterpart.

You can sign up for Talent Unlimited updates to be notified when it goes live.

The post Why Your Job Descriptions Could Be Harming Your Hiring Prospects appeared first on EWS.

Here are our top five tips for getting more out of any company meeting.

1. Set a meeting-cost timer

Nothing sharpens minds like the thought of wasted money. Instead of holding meetings against the clock, try one of the ingenious meeting-cost timer apps on the market, like MeeTime. These do what you’d expect – clock up how much the meeting is costing you, based on an average cost per attendee. When the cost runs into thousands (far sooner than you’d imagine), meetings quickly become more productive.

2. Leave the meeting room behind

The meeting room is the ultimate comfort zone. Staring at the same four walls dulls creativity and engagement, while sitting in those comfy ergonomic chairs hardly encourages urgency. A different setting is a great way to keep people focused and attentive. If you’re looking to stimulate creativity one-to-one, try Steve Jobs’ preferred mode of conversation: the al fresco walk-and-talk.

3. Stick to the objective like a bloodhound

The most effective meetings begin with a watertight agenda and end with actionable outputs. The way to achieve both is to start with a clearly-articulated statement of objective (ideally shared beforehand) and don’t allow the meeting to drift from it. One leadership guru claims this can save on average 17 minutes per meeting.

4. Make it exclusive

In the film In The Loop, a hapless MP is invited to an important meeting, only to find it stuffed with needless attendees, collectively referred to as ‘room meat’. There is no room in your meeting for room meat. If someone isn’t essential to the objective, don’t invite them. Is there an absolute cap on numbers? Ten is probably a sensible limit – confirming Amazon’s celebrated two-pizza rule.

5. Banish all devices

So, you’ve got the right people in the right meeting space, keenly focused on the objective at hand and primed to respond quickly and creatively. Distractions are the last thing you need. Remove the temptation to fiddle with phones or check email on laptops by banning them altogether – and watch attentiveness surge.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post 5 Easy Ways to Stop Meetings Being a Waste of Time appeared first on EWS.

Trust and loyalty in the workplace are inextricably linked. Essentially, trust is the belief that drives the practice of loyalty. When trust is present in an organisation, people feel closer, more united and more willing to depend on each other. In its absence fragmentation, conflict and suspicion quickly fester. Colleagues become disconnected from a shared sense of purpose and often from each other. Loyalty inevitably suffers.

So, what if the erosion of loyalty in the workplace is actually a breakdown in trust? There is some compelling evidence in support of this idea, in the shape of a 2016 global study by EY into the topic.

Surveying over 9,800 full-time workers in eight countries, EY found that fewer than half of respondents had ‘a great deal of trust’ in their current employer, boss or team/colleagues. At the other end of the scale, nearly one in six had ‘very little’ or ‘no trust at all’ in their current employer.

These were the headline findings trumpeted by the report, but for us, there was a particularly alarming statistic buried on page 12:

A third (34%) of global respondents have “very little” to “no trust” in their current employer that if they “work hard” and “meet performance goals” they will be rewarded with “increased pay or a promotion.”

For some reason, these respondents no longer believe in the link between performance and reward in their organisation. Startlingly, they have lost faith in the employment contract.

This should sound alarm bells for employers everywhere, particularly when considering the four biggest consequences of lack of trust quoted in the EY report. Low-trust employees are most likely to:

1. Look for another job
2. Work only the minimum number of hours required
3. Be less engaged/productive
4. Make less of an effort to produce quality work

If one in six of your employees has this low-productivity, low-morale mindset, your organisation is in serious trouble. Not least because productivity and morale are only two factors affected by workplace trust. Creativity and ingenuity are two more, according to Jacqueline Oliveira in her illuminating TEDxCesena talk The behaviour of trust in the workplace.

So what can organisations do to safeguard trust and stop employees going on what leadership consultant Dennis Jaffe calls ‘an internal strike’? Fortunately, his excellent Forbes article on the topic of trust lists six building blocks of trust, which individuals or organisations can assess for in their relationships:

1. Reliability and dependability – Are individuals, particularly leaders, true to their word? Do they fulfil their commitments?
2. Transparency – Do managers and leaders keep their teams in the loop or do they meet in secret and withhold important information?
3. Competency – Do employees believe that leaders, managers and colleagues are capable of doing what they are supposed to do?
4. Sincerity, authenticity and congruency – Do employees believe that leaders say what they believe and believe what they are saying?
5. Fairness – Is respect, recognition and energy evenly dispersed through your workplace, or are some areas noticed and listened to more than others?
6. Openness and vulnerability – Are leaders and managers capable of apologising, admitting mistakes or being disagreed with?

Jaffe believes organisations that are able to assess the presence or absence of each of these six qualities are best equipped to build or restore trust. With prizes such as greater productivity, creativity, ingenuity and morale at stake, it’s well worth trying.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post This is Why Workplaces Don’t Work Without Trust appeared first on EWS.

The founders of Digital Minds position themselves as digital psychologists offering “a revolutionary assessment tool” that’s not only more accurate and precise for employers, but also easier and faster for (fully consenting) candidates.

Their product, in Politico’s words, “skims a job applicant’s private conversations to compute an assessment of his or her psychological traits […] based on the so-called Big Five personality traits — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. [This] gives the potential employer an assessment of whether the person in question would be a good fit at his or her company.”

It follows a 2017 study by the University of California, Berkeley, which found that language used in internal company emails could successfully predict an employee’s career trajectory. So is this simply another heel-click step along the road to the promised land of cheap, reliable, unbiased automated hiring?

Your answer to this question ultimately depends on how happy you are to blindly hand over decision-making power to opaque and unaccountable algorithms.

It’s hard to avoid the exploding trend to take decisions out of human hands and entrust them to algorithms. Amazon and Netflix decide what we’ll like to buy and watch next. We let Google algorithms determine the answers to our questions. In finance, 85% of foreign exchange trading is conducted by algorithms alone. In Italy, healthcare treatment is allocated via automated data analysis. The list goes on.

But the concern for many is that all of these decisions are based on at best undecided criteria, at worst completely inscrutable ones. And as Politico puts it:

“The opacity in exactly how [algorithms] make those decisions is what poses the biggest risk from these new technologies and approaches.”

Indeed, there is a growing bank of evidence that algorithmic decision-making is profoundly fallible.

Reuters reported last October that Amazon had to scrap a prototype AI recruiting tool after it was found to be discriminating against women. Likewise, a 2016 ProPublica study uncovered a racially biased algorithm at use in US courtrooms.

There are enough reported instances of algorithms going rogue to give even the most burnished AI evangelist pause for thought. John Jersin, vice president of LinkedIn Talent Solutions, acknowledged to Reuters that:

“I certainly would not trust any AI system today to make a hiring decision on its own. The technology is just not ready yet.”

Regardless of whether or when the technology is ready, the question remains whether it should ever be trusted.

In the brilliantly titled comment piece Algorithms Are Already Making Decisions For Humans, And It’s Getting Weird, Dionysios Demetis of the University of Hull concludes that:

“As new boundaries are carved between humans and technology, we need to think carefully about where our extreme reliance on software is taking us. As human decisions are substituted by algorithmic ones, and we become tools whose lives are shaped by machines and their unintended consequences, we are setting ourselves up for technological domination. We need to decide, while we still can, what this means for us both as individuals and as a society.”

These decisions – about the scrutability, accountability and unintended consequences of automating machines like Digital Minds – are the ones we still have control over. Now is the time to exercise that control.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Why Algorithms In Your Inbox Are Bad News For Everybody appeared first on EWS.

Nowadays, the argument goes, we’re all serial entrepreneurs continually reinventing ourselves in our work. Every role is an opportunity to hone new skills and boost our future employability. When we outgrow a role, we shed it like an old skin and move on to the next new challenge without a backward glance.

This has been described by one senior recruiter writing in Forbes as a transactional concept of loyalty, whereby:

“The mentality is, ‘You pay me to do X, I do X, and we are even.’ ”

The author also knows where to lay the blame for this state of affairs, opening his piece with the observation that “millennials were three times more likely than non-millennials to change jobs in the last year, and 91% don’t expect to stay with their current organizations longer than three years.”

At EWS, we’ve heard this a lot in the last few years. Millennials have cast off professional loyalty in pursuit of their own self-determined career planning. It’s an observation that’s cropped up in this blog more than once, in some form or other. And until recently we’ve taken it as fact, an interesting and valid insight into shifting workforce demographics and demands.

Then a couple of months ago we wrote a post about job auditions. In it was a story about web development house Automattic, which has successfully incorporated job tryouts into its selection process. The company did this, says CEO Matt Mullenweg, because it wants to build working relationships that last decades.

In a talent world that is coolly casting loyalty aside, Automattic – the name behind WordPress – is looking for, championing and structuring its HR processes around the trait.

For us, this last point is where it gets really interesting. Automattic actively models itself as a loyal employer. It gives out what it demands. Indeed, Mullenweg believes employers need to accept a share of responsibility for any diminishment in loyalty the world of work may be witnessing:

“Some people say that younger workers have a different notion of job tenure and want to move around more frequently. That may be, but I think companies, too, have changed. If a company treats people as if they’ll be around for a while, managers develop a different sensibility when it comes to investing in and retaining people. Loyalty is a two-way street.”

Maybe employees are becoming less loyal. But maybe this is a legitimate response to the jettisoning of loyalty from the prevailing work culture. The more statistics we hear about millennials’ flighty attitudes, the more entrenched these pernicious beliefs becomes, and the less employers do to embrace loyalty in their own organisation. And thus turns a vicious circle; a race to the bottom ending in a coldly transactional and mutually untrusting employment relationship.

There are some statistics to bear this theory out. Only 54% of 3,600 employees surveyed by CareerBuilder in 2017 felt that their employer was loyal to them. Meanwhile in the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, over 60% of respondents said that their leadership skills were not being fully developed at work. Is employee loyalty lag actually a sign of employee neglect?

To our mind, this line of thinking should sound a bleak warning in any beating HR heart. In fact, it’s merely part of the new consensus on loyalty. In researching this piece, we came across the following post on Quora from another HR senior, responding to the question “Why do employers want loyalty when they aren’t loyal?”

You may note the post ends with the same observation as Mullenweg’s, that loyalty is a two-way street. But there the similarities end:

“Loyalty is an older, broader term that is easily misinterpreted and is often used as a blanket for ‘do what I want’ (or you aren’t being ‘loyal’)… I often expand the term ‘loyalty’ to mean more what is usually meant by people using it – that is “blind loyalty”. No one today should be expected to give “blind loyalty” to anyone or anything…

“[We aren’t] surprised when a great employee continues to learn and grow and we can’t offer them something at their new capability level with proper pay, so we understand they will be looking elsewhere for better opportunities. So ‘loyalty’ is a two-way street.”

There’s a message for your employee handbook. Glibness aside, we of course recognise the need for a degree of hard-nosed pragmatism, especially in a global economy now in its second decade of seismic uncertainty. But this is surely no excuse for failing to even try to create a workplace where great people want to give their best for more than a couple of years.

It’s not as though being a loyal employer is even that difficult. There are all kinds of extra steps you can take to make your people feel acknowledged and valued enough to stick around. You can:

• Celebrate successes and support them in their struggles at work, and outside where appropriate.
• Invest in training to show them you’re with them for the long haul.
• Recognise and reward everyone equitably for their contribution in their specific role.
• Be clear in your company purpose and never miss an opportunity to unite people around it.
• Always try to promote from within in the first instance and only downsize as the last resort.
• Stand with them through company upheavals – this is when people need to know their employer has their back.

These aren’t all big structural changes. They’re mostly mindset shifts, mostly for managers, that pay enormous dividends if they help you keep hold of your top talent for longer. In the modern world of work, especially in the modern world of work, loyalty is a virtue worth fighting for.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Who’s to Blame for the Death of Workplace Loyalty? appeared first on EWS.

In this complex landscape, intelligence and insight are your allies. Realising this, more and more recruiters are adopting proven marketing tactics to enhance, refine and ignite their hiring efforts. The rise of the candidate persona is a prime example.

What is a candidate persona?

Candidate personas are the recruitment equivalent of a marketer’s buyer persona. The latter is a semi-fictional version of an idealised customer, created from detailed research to focus marketing minds on exactly who they’re reaching out to with their products and advertising.

Likewise, a well-developed candidate persona can focus and steer your recruiting strategy, giving you a definitive image of a real person to latch onto at every stage of your talent acquisition process. No more hazy, ill-defined target audiences. Candidate personas give you a tangible and relatable figure, alive with personality, ideally suited to your role and ready to inspire their real-world counterparts to apply.

They’re a useful tool in any hiring campaign – which is why it’s a good idea to create personas for every key role in your organisation.

What goes into a good candidate persona?

The important thing about any good persona is that it’s real. A composite picture it may be, but your persona has to ring true as a multi-dimensional person. So it should cover far more ground than the work history, skills, qualifications and cursory demographic information that informs most job profiles.

You’re aiming to flesh out a complete human being, with drives, goals, habits, passions, reservations and objections, even a name and a mugshot. We like Maren Hogan’s neat summation of 3 things candidate personas need to focus on to be effective:

• Who this person is
• What they do all day
• What keeps them up at night

Here’s a more in-depth list from Glassdoor:

• Demographic information: Age, location, current job title, income.
• Background: Educational and professional history.
• Personal attributes: Traits, strengths, weaknesses, interests, fears.
• Qualifications: Any required or preferred skills, certifications etc.
• Goals: What motivates them? Where are they going?
• Objections: Why would they not want to work for you? What aspects of your brand, culture or hiring process would cause them to lose interest?
• Web activity: Where do they spend time online? Where can you start an authentic hiring conversation with them?

And here’s a fully comprehensive cheat sheet, courtesy of TalentLyft:

From research to realism

The other key to keeping it real is rooting your persona in reality. The best examples are informed by the richest research. The good news is that you should have a lot of what you need already in the organisation, in the shape of your successful hires and star performers.

If you’re hiring into sales, interview your top salespeople to see which traits are common to them all, then add the data to your persona. Review successful sales applications from the past and feed the overlaps in. Maybe reach out to the external market too, by setting up a Survey Monkey questionnaire for your professional or personal network.

What does it get you?

We’ll admit that a lot of effort needs to go into creating a candidate persona for it to be of value. But this is undeniably time well spent, certainly for mission-critical roles. One particularly evangelical article lists 14 benefits, ranging from better quality hires and more offers accepted to reduced turnover rates and lower cost-per-hire.

On a less granular level, we’d describe the key benefits as greater foresight, accountability and personalisation in your hiring approach. If you value candidate experience, your persona can inform every stage in your process, from your attraction messaging and where you put it, to how you write your job description and what format assessments take.

If your persona is most interested in career growth, that’s what you should talk to candidates about the most. If they’re more interested in innovation and ideas, show them your entrepreneurial side. If they don’t want to be deskbound, interview them offsite.

Take your hard-won insights and build a tailored process around them. Crucially, make decisions that are guided by logic, evidence and intelligence… three key traits in the idealised persona of any recruiter in 2019!

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Candidate Personas: Think Like a Marketer, Win As a Recruiter appeared first on EWS.

It’s an important practical question in a discussion with such huge workforce implications. Ever the pragmatists, it’s the question we’ve found ourselves pondering recently. Here’s where those ponderings have led us.

To start, some background. The TUC’s proposal is based on its belief that the benefits of technology (specifically automation, AI and robotics) should be shared evenly among the workforce. In support, the BBC cites an estimated £200bn UK economic boost from these technologies in the next decade.

Distributing these benefits would effectively mean paying typical nine-to-fivers a full weekly wage for a day’s less work. It would be to reset the clock: four days (28 hours) a week is the new full-time.

The idea is widely supported by workers. In the study underpinning the TUC proposal, 81% of respondents favoured reducing the working week to four days or less. Perhaps more surprisingly, this enthusiasm extends to bosses. A survey by Crown Workplace Relocations found 40% of leaders saying they would consider introducing a shorter work week. 60% agreed cutting hours could boost productivity.

Improving productivity is core to the four-day-week argument. There is tentative evidence that people really can do at least the same amount in less time. CNBC’s pointing to a 5% productivity increase during the 1974 Three-Day Week may be stretching exceptional circumstances. However, many of the businesses experimenting with reduced work hours are reporting at worst no reduction in output. As one advocate, Chase Clemons of Basecamp, bluntly puts it:

“[A shorter working week] forces us to prioritize what we work on.”

Crucially, anecdotal productivity gains must be weighed against the other critical factor in the four-day week argument. The evidence for improved employee wellbeing is substantial. Longer hours are linked to stress, depression, anxiety and irritability, while early adopters of lower hours say their people are “happier” (Toyota), “sharper” (Basecamp), “more relaxed” (Radioactive PR) and “stimulated, committed and empowered” (Perpetual Guardian).

Together, these two factors make a compelling case. People can achieve at least as much in a 4-day week, and enjoy a better work-life balance in the process. Doesn’t that make our adherence to a 5-day week presenteeism of the worst kind? In the words of a comprehensive Equal Times article on the topic:

“The traditional 40-hour-a-week could only be a convention made valid by tradition [rather] than its efficiency.”

Which leads us to our original question. If a shorter work week can be effectively implemented and provides sound benefits to companies and workers alike, what’s holding it back?

Traditionally, we might expect employers to be the opposition. Impetus for lower working hours in the past has come from what Gregor Gall in The Guardian terms “the twin forces of compulsion (through legislative underpinning) and pressure on the shopfloor (through workplace union organisation)”.

But if the prize of a 4-day week is improved employee wellbeing with no drop-off in productivity, why should employers resist? Of course, there will be some companies that can’t rely on technology to fill the efficiency gap. But for those that can, maybe caution is all that’s holding them back.

What’s clear is that change doesn’t take place without commitment, as neatly illustrated in two contrasting quotes from senior figures in two companies which have tested out a shorter working week.

In New Zealand, where estate planning firm Perpetual Guardian successfully trialled a 4-day week, founder Andrew Barnes states:

“The right attitude is a requirement to make it work – everyone has to be committed and take it seriously for us to create a viable long-term model for our business.”

Meanwhile in Sweden, this from Erik Gatenholm of 3D bio-printing company Cellink:

“When we read about the six-hour work day in the news, we all chuckled at the idea. I was not convinced it was a viable option but I was willing to give it a shot to test the waters. So, we tried it out with our production staff. In the end, we realised it wasn’t for us.”

Maybe it really wasn’t viable for Cellink. Then again, perhaps those initial chuckles were all it took for the trial to fail. Our hunch is that, if the future of work is set to be more flexible, contingent and tech-assisted, this may be the time to seriously review our pre-conceived notions of the ‘normal’ working week.

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