Following a late afternoon appointment recently, I found myself at Waterloo station, too late to go back to work and too early to depart for home. Phone on silent, coffee to hand, I took a mezzanine seat and surveyed the world rushing past. Both fascinating and productive my surveying was too. In the midst of this activity, I became aware of a PR exercise clearly gaining a lot of traction. Mercedes had taken to wheeling in a new model onto the station concourse. Initially, I thought this a quaint anachronism. Waterloo’s commuters, faces alternating between smart phone and the departures board – what interest would they have in the new Mercedes CLA Shooting Brake? An attractive car, admittedly, but no Ferrari or Porsche. How wrong I was. There was a steady flow of people quite literally kicking the tyres, bouncing on the seats, checking out the interior.
And this very much correlates with a recent piece by Lloyd Dorfman, Chair at Doodle, in City am, touching on the coming together of the physical world and its digital sibling. He referenced this through the forthcoming opening of the very first Google shop, right here in Tottenham Court Road, in partnership with Dixons Carphone. Amazon too opened its own first staffed customer order pick up/drop off at Purdue University. Allegedly, it is also eyeing up the physical assets of recently failed retailer Radio Shack.
So if we are increasingly aware of consumer marketing combining the physical with the digital, and not seeing them as mutually exclusive, what does employment marketing have to learn?
I read a fascinating piece in the immediate aftermath of the UK election. One particular pollster, Survation, had produced figures suggesting that the Tories would win 37% of the vote to Labour’s 31% – very close to the eventual outcome. However, such was the weight of counter opinion and alternative polls around Survation, that, in their own words, ‘they chickened out of reporting this’. The reason? The power of group think. If everyone appears to think something, it must then be true.
And if we’re not careful, we in the recruitment and people communications business might be guilty of a similar collective assumption – that a 100% focus on digital is the right course of action, in all cases.
The UK economy and job market continues to throw up any number of staggering statistics and metrics – consistently pointing towards the strength of the economy. Most of them we nearly take for granted – over 31m in the workforce; 202,000 more working than the previous quarter; unemployment down to 5.5%.
For me, however, was a metric hidden away on page 37 of the most recent ONS monthly bulletin. There are now 745,000 vacancies in the UK economy. Even at the peak of mid 2008, that figure was less than 700,000. Today’s figure is also comfortably higher than at any point since comparable figures began in 2001.
It might be easy to place this in the interesting but ultimately so-what category. And that would be a mistake. For me, it suggests that hiring organisations have never had more of a challenge to differentiate their roles and opportunities over those of the competition. There are 75% more vacancies out in the economy. 75% more choice for candidates who are already enjoying some benign deflation at the same time as wage increases. 75% more competition for each employer seeking to deliver their employer brand.
So if the audiences that employers want to reach are potentially comfortable where they are or happy to be tapped on the shoulder, they need an increasingly persuasive reason to search through a growing number of online vacancies.
And we are seeing examples of organisations combining the recruitment version of ‘clicks and bricks’ – Snapchat this month was observed sending geo-filtered messages to the headquarters of Uber, suggesting people there come over to Snapchat to work. Graduate recruitment is seeing more and more examples of imagination and awareness of the physical space. At Cambridge, employers are marketing their organisations using bicycle seat covers placed on bikes overnight, clearly alongside some increasingly sophisticated online offerings. TMP’s own recent and award-winning work touching on immersive assessment in partnership with our client Virgin Money, makes use of PR, editorial and imagination as well as a great digital offering.
And a combination of Nissan and PlayStation have joined forces to offer one fan the chance to launch a career in motor sport. Nissan is offering one gamer a shot at the GT Academy to compete to become the next big name in race car driving. The chance to step from gaming console to physical driver’s seat seems pretty enticing and apparently the company car isn’t too shabby either.
This finally is of critical importance to would-be job changers. In the past, even if they were not looking for a new career, they would be exposed to the recruitment messages of organisations through newspaper and magazine advertising. The understandable exodus of these messages towards online channels means that passive candidates can remain passive in the absence of employers working hard to ensure – via both physical and digital channels – that their profile remains high and that such candidates have a clear reason to engage.
Organisations, then, who ignore group-think, but which rely on insights relevant to them and their target audiences and which are imaginative enough to make a use of all existing (and some not yet in existence) options and candidate routes are likely to be at the front of the growing crowd of 745,000 vacancies, rather than the distinctly ignored back.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 
So, all those years ago, the war for talent turns out to have been a minor skirmish with the real battle lining up – right in front of us – right now! Great post and I agree a lot of imagination is going to need to be deployed to candidate sourcing, attraction, and on-boarding.
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Great blog Neil. It takes guts to stand out from the crowd, especially when there are far too many people around 'pretending' to see something quite different. Take Winston Churchill in the 1930s, and Michel Platini v Sepp Blatter, as we speak! I do think it's a bit of the Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome going on a lot of the time. As seasoned recruitment professionals, we can't quite get away from that good old fashioned 'gut feeling'. The difference nowadays is that we have the science and art of new technology to help us to make an even more informed decision!
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