Appropriately in the week of the Chelsea Flower Show, when the great and the good of the business world wander round the leafier parts of SW3, all appears relatively rosy in the UK economy’s garden. The FTSE 100 hit a 13 year high earlier this week. The hugely influential US economy added no less than 165,000 jobs in April. The planned cut in national insurance payments for employers is leading to one in three SMEs being more optimistic about hiring. Export trade figures to non EU markets were up 10% and to US markets by a very healthy 20%. Overall UK adspend for 2012 was up 2.3% in figures published last week, hitting a total of £17bn, an amount last seen in 2007. The next two years look even more positive, with growth in 2014 forecast to touch an exceedingly perky 5%. And April’s service sector hit 52.9, higher than expectations, and the best monthly performance since the Olympic boost of last summer. According to Nick Beecroft of Saxo, ‘We’re looking at a Goldilocks economy, not too strong, not too weak. It’s a sweet spot that should last a few months.’ Good news all round.
But how much credence should we attach to such barometers and metrics? At first glance, they appear to come from unimpeachable sources. The epitome of big data, in fact.
However, earlier this month saw a number of headlines casting doubt not so much over the triple dip recession that the economy appears to have nimbly dodged in 2013’s Q1, but last year’s double dip. The second dip the UK economy encountered (in the current cycle) covered the final quarter of 2011 and the first one of 2012. Subsequent revisions now suggest that both quarters declined by just 0.1%. It is not impossible for the publication of the national accounts figures in late June to indicate that a small, very small, growth took place in 2012’s Q1.
So far, so what?
So, plenty. Just think how many key business decisions were made on the basis of an assumption made 15 months ago that we were back in recession. How many redundancies were announced because HRDs and CFOs assumed we had returned to the bad old days of 2009? How many hiring plans were discretely shelved as employers could see only grim economic tidings? Were salary increases, benefit re-thinks and engagement initiatives put on hold? And on the other side of the interview table, how many candidates probably thought better of a move, in the light of the economy taking a step back into the red?
Big data doesn’t get much bigger than the Office for National Statistics. And the call that the economy went into recession in late 2011, early 2012 now comes with a big question mark attached.
Nevertheless, big data is big news right now for recruiters and employers. The opportunity to focus on real time hiring insights, to combine internal and external data sources, to track recruitment effectiveness to a much finer degree, to benchmark against competitor organisations and to make far more evidence-based decisions are genuine game changers. And big data is big business. According to the Wall St Journal, 85% of Fortune 1000 executives are currently initiating plans to get more commercial value out of their data sources. And Gartner suggests that big data will influence some £22bn of IT spending in 2013.
But, as even David Bernstein, VP of eQuest’s Big Data Division suggests, ‘despite the relative newness of big data, many companies are losing sight of something crucial – the human element’.
This is a massive issue for employer branding and engagement. Great people don’t leave or indeed join companies because of metrics, decimal points and statistics, they do so often because of emotional, human, subjective responses to colleagues, initiatives, moves and announcements. There will always and rightly be a comfort and reassurance provided by metrics and big data – however, they should be used in conjunction with qualitative even subjective insight. Right now, TMP is working with at least one organisation that manages to create tangible affection, even love (there, I said it) amongst its employees. It’s hard to demonstrate and articulate that sort of emotion via a spreadsheet.
Want a very topical example of the love and very human response to a brand? Business schools’ case studies will cite 1985’s consumer reaction to the much unloved launch of Coke’s ‘New Coke’ recipe – and the rather swift decision to revert to ‘Coke Classic’ following a heartfelt and passionate consumer reaction (not to mention the associated falling sales). However, this week saw a far more topical example – Yahoo!’s purchase of Tumblr for an impressive £725m saw an equally visceral outcry from users and Tumblr brand advocates – ‘No, no, no, Tumblr is about to suck’. So strong (and predictable) was this outcry that Tumblr’s owner, David Karp was forced to declare words of reassurance, ‘We are not turning purple. We won’t let you down’.
The opportunities and insights that big data will open up are massively exciting and massively value adding. They should not be seen however as a panacea for extracting and analysing employee (and candidate) insights or for the opinions, passion, heart and spirit that encompass and define great employee experiences and great employer brands.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 