evp to ivp - meetandengage.com · value proposition (evp) to the individual value proposition or...
TRANSCRIPT
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EVP TO IVPChanging attitudes to work and new
challenges in people management
A White Paper from Meet & Engage.
Written by Bill Boorman and Ali Hackett
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CONTENTS
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Foreword 2
Changing Attitudes to Work 3
Introducing the IVP 15
Challenges in Recruitment and People Management 18
How Meet & Engage can help Employers Embrace IVP 34
Meet & Engage FAQ 37
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We’ve a seismic shift in the world of work. It’s a shift that has huge repercussions for HR
professionals, not only on the way we source and hire people, but also on the way we
manage development and retention.
The average length of service – the time employees spend with the same organisation –
is shrinking.
In this report, we examine what this shift in service length means for the world of work.
Changing attitudes. Recruitment challenges
We will see how a combination of economic factors and changing personal attitudes to
work are transforming the employer-employee relationship. As part of this, we will
discuss how this transformation is fuelling a move away from the traditional Employee
Value Proposition (EVP) to the Individual Value Proposition or IVP.
We’ll argue that the move from EVP to IVP is a reflection of the way today’s candidates
approach career moves which, in turn, challenges the recruitment methods employers
rely on: from source of hire, attraction and onboarding through to people management,
off-boarding and alumni relationships.
We hope you enjoy the read.
FOREWORD
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CHANGING
ATTITUDES
TO WORK
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Length of service with an organisation was fairly constant from the 1950s up until the last
decade. Before then, it was not unusual for a CV or resume to list no more than four
employers, and any more than that was considered flighty. People joined companies on
leaving education and stuck around, hoping for the occasional promotion.
Whatever figures you look at now, it’s clear that the long-term trend is towards shrinking
length of service with employers, and it has been shrinking significantly since the last
recession. Length of service is not only down over a longer period of time but is declining
faster today than at any time since wartime.
According to respected blogger Alison Doyle, people stay with companies in the US for
an average of five years or less https://www.thebalance.com/how-often-do-people-
change-jobs-2060467
The situation in Europe is less with an average of three years, with the trend being for a
declining length of service year on year. Sticking around for a clock is a thing of the past,
with an even shorter length of service figures for younger employees entering the
workforce now, and this changes things for recruiters and hiring managers, not least
what we consider to be job hopping. In this paper we will explore some of the reasons
behind this trend, and what we think this is going to mean for the modern talent
acquisition team.
It’s natural to see an adjustment like this after an economic downturn. The recession of
2008 forced many people out of work completely or into new roles, often in unfamiliar
fields. Typically, you’d expect to see length of service slowly returning to normal as the
economy picks up but this time round, this hasn’t happened. In the digital age, things are
looking different.
SHRINKING LENGTH OF SERVICE
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Behind the figures it’s clear that something new is happening and that either people are
deciding to move jobs more frequently, being driven to do so by their employers – or
companies are offering less security, more a home for now rather than a home forever.
Remuneration is clearly a key driver. Slow growth in the economy since 2008 has seen
an end to regular pay rises. On average, year on year earnings increases have more
than halved since 2007 (4% vs 2%.) - this, after all, is the first generation to earn less in
real terms than their parents, and that has to bite.
Whilst companies have talked about the importance of retaining talent, the rewards for
many have not reflected this. Our research indicates that in-company pay rises have
remained below market rate when compared to market salaries advertised for many
roles. This creates a sense that the way to get on, both financially and career wise (role)
is to change employer at more frequent intervals.
Where companies have talked publicly about internal mobility being a key feature of their
organisation, on their career site at least, the reality has been somewhat different, with a
lack of growth, internal politics, communication of opportunity and permission cultures
acting as a blocker to this nirvana. With this in mind, it is easy to understand the
motivations people may have to prefer to look outside of organisations to progress,
rather than within.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/timeseries/kai9/lms
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On top of this, there’s an increased lack of feeling of the company being a family. Gone
are the days of staying with the same company for your whole career. Few of today’s 60-
somethings expect to retire with a carriage clock and a full salary pension (that is if they
are able to afford to retire at all).
Again, we can attribute this largely to the economy; in a competitive market, employers
are less able to retain staff. In turn, this results in increased feelings of job insecurity and
encourages employees to keep tabs on opportunities outside their existing employer.
Whilst employers might bemoan the lack of loyalty, or in the case of the millennials, the
fickle youth, employees have witnessed continuous restructure (the code word for
layoffs), and would argue that loyalty, or the lack of it, cuts both ways.
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One way of framing this change is to depict individuals as being less company focused
and more career focused. Pre-financial crisis, employees were happy to follow a career
path with clear progression.
Historically, the norm for employees was to gain new skills in their area of expertise, to
take on greater responsibility, managing bigger roles and more people, and to increase
their earnings accordingly. In doing so, they followed a recognised and accepted
development pattern, the pace and direction of which was determined by their employer.
Jobs were predictable, they did not change much in either purpose or method before the
digital age. In the current day, job roles now may well never have existed before, at least
in their current format, and the skills required to complete the work may be new. The last
decade has seen organisations shift from analogue to digital, and this transformation has
seen many skills and job roles become redundant. Whilst this age, referred to as the
information age, can be traced back 40 years, the real change through technology has
greatly accelerated since the turn of the century, with no sign of slowing down.
This transformation has seen organisational restructure on an industrial scale. When
people lose confidence in the long-term security of both their role and their organisation,
or their employability by the organisation, it is inevitable that they have adopted shorter-
term thinking.
THE DECLINE OF THE MORE TRADITIONAL
CAREER PATH
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When we talk of people being focused on jobs, and less on staying with companies, it is
easy to assume people are living in the now (as a whole), rather than thinking long-term.
What we see now is quite different to that, with people more focused on careers than
ever before, but it’s a new type of focus.
People want to take ownership of their own career trajectory, rather than one which is
pre-determined by their employer and are driven by divergent aims. These might include:
If this phenomenon is real – and the figures do show that length of service is decreasing
and decreasing faster than it has been – it significantly changes the way we view
recruitment and employment: as recruiters, as line mangers, as candidates and as
applicants.
Shrinking length of service has ramifications for the way we handle people management
– from attraction and recruitment right through to off-boarding and, for the most agile
organisations, beyond that.
• To gain new skills in different fields
• To continue to learn new things
• To make themselves more marketable
• To work with different mentors or leaders
• To be able to work flexibly
• To complete more challenging work
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It’s hard to avoid discussing recruitment trends without invoking millennials. Go to any
conference and you are going to hear about Gen Y and Gen Z. The big question being is
shrinking service length a trend that’s being driven by their increasing share of the
employment market? This is particularly relevant when we consider that this generation
(or those below 28), stay at companies on average two years less than their older
counterparts.
Our thoughts are: ‘partly’. The data does tell us that millennials move for money. This is
understandable. Compared with previous generations they are saddled with greater
levels of student debt and as growth in property prices outstrips that of the rest of the
economy, they are struggling to afford to find homes of their own, whether to buy or to
rent – especially in the UK’s bigger cities. Whilst we hear a lot of talk that “purpose” is the
big driver for this generation, and that culture is the be all and end all of attraction and
retention, we need to challenge this perception. Debt is a major driver, and the desire to
get out of it, for many in this bracket, and if you are only planning on sticking around for a
few years, purpose and culture takes on less significance, at least for attraction.
What we are seeing that is different is the attraction of the job rather than the career, with
people attracted to a particular role not by how good the fit is, but more how this role is
going to impact on the next one, researching things like where previous job holders
moved on to, and what a particular role might look like as an entry on their CV. It is as
much about employability in the future, as it is about purpose now. This changes how we
should be thinking about marketing and positioning opportunities to attract the best talent
for now.
But that doesn’t mean that there are huge differences between millennials and the rest of
the working population.
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Today, there are few people management professionals who aren’t conversant with the
concept of the Employer Value Proposition or EVP. The EVP is a cornerstone of
Employer Branding, pioneered by Simon Barrow at the Charles Barker Group in the early
1990s.
Broadly, the EVP defines how your organisation wants to be perceived as an employer,
highlights the attributes that differentiate an organisation from other employers and
clarifies the 'give and get' of the employment deal – what your organisation has to offer
candidates and the behaviours your organisation expects from them in return. It can be
considered an unwritten contract between the company and the employees, as to what
they can really expect in return for their labours. The glue that binds the people in the
organisation and connects them top to bottom.
Certainly, over the last 15-20 years, a huge amount of recruitment spend has been
invested by organisations looking to build their Employer Brand, and, at the heart of that,
in sharpening their Employee Value Propositions. Organisations talk and debate what the
Employer Brand is. If it is another sub-section of the company brand, or something
completely different. The big debate being where EB sits in the organisation, and if
anyone can really own it, or simply reflect it. We have witnessed a growing number of
professionals in the HR team with direct responsibility for Employer Brand.
Greater proliferation of Employer Brand has seen an increasing number of organisations
adopting the same approaches to both Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing. As
an experiment, take your competitors’ career sites, employer brand messages and
recruitment marketing activity, and take out all identifying features like logos, colour and
design. Compare this content as a message, once you have taken away the fancy
artwork.
Now consider yourself in the shoes of a candidate (something we should all do on a
regular basis). Now ask yourself an important question: “Can I tell the difference from
one company to another?” “Do I have enough information to choose between where I opt
in, and where I opt out?” “Where you know an organisation well, does what you see as
the external message match with the reality of what you know?”
It is fair to say that some organisations do this extremely well. I would probably attribute
this to the overlap between Employment Branding and Recruitment Marketing, where the
public face (career site, social accounts etc) are seen as a means of attraction rather
than as a means of differentiation, fuelled by the concept of “the war for talent”. It is this
that can be described as ‘Employer Blanding’, and this new market requires some new
thinking. It has often been stated that in the modern world, ‘Recruitment is Marketing’,
but for my money this is too simplistic.
Whilst we should be learning from marketing colleagues when it comes to attraction and
process, we should not be doing so at the expense of good recruiting. That might not
match the ‘Kool Aid’, but recruiting is recruiting, and modern day recruiting means
incorporating marketing tactics, and applying them to the new world of work.
THE RISE OF THE ‘EMPLOYER BLAND’
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It is clear at Meet & Engage, both from talking to our HR clients and from analysing the
content of their online chats, that candidates of all ages increasingly want to understand
how their next job is going to help them to develop their skills and boost their
employability rather than how a particular organisation facilitates career progression.
Time and time again, we see candidates asking role-focused questions rather than
probing prospective employers on culture, leadership or other company-wide concerns.
The context is that many people today don’t see themselves as having a traditional
career. And, from talking to delegates at industry events, it’s becoming apparent that
careers are no longer following the typical trajectories we’ve seen in preceding decades.
In 2018, there’s no such thing as ‘normal’ and we are seeing a new breed of jobseeker
emerge.
In the eyes of these ‘New Jobseekers’, Employer Brand is becoming Employer Bland.
They want a job of choice not an employer of choice. They are often looking for a move
in the here and now, not planning for the future.
The idea that people are less respectful of brand fits in with data from the world of
consumer marketing. This Havas study from 2017 tells us that increasingly, consumers
are less concerned about and expect more from brands and the content they deliver.
http://www.meaningful-brands.com/en
INTRODUCING THE ‘NEW JOB
SEEKERS’
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Candidates today are eager to see beyond the sheen of a perfectly polished Employer
Brand. The increased traffic on review sites like Glassdoor tells us that people are
looking for transparency; they want to see right inside an organisation: the good, the bad
and the ugly. Less sell. More tell, and that the teller is more important than the story.
Think about that for a moment. It is more than a throw away statement. In today’s
connected, noisy world you are battling for time and attention, but you are mostly battling
for credibility. When there are upwards of 30 companies trying to get the attention of the
same people, what is going to cut it?
Increasingly we are witnessing the rising importance of peer to peer content and peer to
peer conversation in influencing career decisions and choices over employment
destinations. Developers want to hear from developers, accountants want to hear from
accountants and so on. They don’t want a central message or to talk to a recruiter as
their primary source of information until they have decided to become an applicant.
We describe this decision-making stage as the Candidate Stage. This is the time when
they are formulating opinions about jobs and deciding if they want to go through the pain
of applying. It might sound dramatic, but we have increasingly heard people describing
applying for a job as being a bit like ‘Game of Thrones’. They assume it’s going to be
painful, time consuming, frustrating and that they are probably never going to hear back.
As employers, if we are honest, we probably need to put our hands up and own that.
Now factor in that the new candidate is thinking that the job is going to be for a few
years, probably no more, they need to be bought in that it’s worth it to hit apply.
TELLING NOT SELLING
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The kind of over-arching, top-down messages employers
have long relied on about their culture, vision and ethos are
failing to promote opportunities to candidates looking for
their next me-sized move.
What we are seeing is that it is the attention on an opportunity and the future team that
convinces someone to go for it and apply. The potential reward makes it worth the pain.
Yes, they want to hear about Employer Brand (although they probably won’t call it that),
but they want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, from the people who do the job. This
convinces them to become an applicant, or not. Peer content and peer connection is
critical if the candidate is likely to progress to being an applicant, and it’s applicants who
want to talk to recruiters, because now the conversation moves from job and opportunity,
to how do I become an employee.
It’s no longer enough to spread the word that your business is dynamic and ambitious, to
set out your vision and values or to convey a catch-all employer personality via a handful
of carefully curated employee profiles. No matter how true to life these propositions are
or how well you present yourself as an employer, they can’t be specific enough to help
people to really understand the job in hand and what it entails for them.
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Increasingly, before going to the trouble of applying for a role, prospects want to know
what’s in store for them, as individuals. They want to ‘try on’ the job. They want to see
inside the organisation.
They can’t glean this information through the typical channels they encounter: generic,
heavily corporate copy on a careers site or job postings dwelling on the demands of the
job. It’s against this backdrop that the idea of the Individual Value Proposition (IVP) is
emerging, because if we believe that all people are different (and we should), then the
needs of each person from each job will be unique, and the messaging has to reflect
this.
Whilst some of the headlines might look similar, it means something different for each
individual, because people, and their backgrounds are unique.
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• What part of the city is the job in; can I get there easily?
• Does the healthcare package extend to my partner?
• Can I take an external qualification?
• Who is my line manager?
• I do not have a degree in xxx but I do have yyy; is that OK?
• What are the local sandwich shops like?
• Which days do I need to travel to Slough; is there any flexibility here?
• Can I do my induction in a store near my house then relocate for work?
The EVP is macro level; top down. It has often been carefully cultivated by creative
recruitment communications specialists and distilled to be as direct as possible. By
contrast, a person’s Individual Value Proposition (or IVP) tends to be multi-faceted.
Candidates will want to know about micro-level details of the job in hand from both a
personal and professional perspective.
When our clients run Meet & Engage sessions, the same discussions come up over and
over again. Some of the details people typically want to discuss include:
INTRODUCING THE IVP
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This sounds more like a ‘frequently asked questions’ section of the career site, but as a
candidate, thinking about applying, I want the answers first hand. I want them from
someone I can relate to, and my reason for wanting them is going to be completely
different as to why the next person wants them.
Whilst the same discussions come up in the beginning, participants who get the right
answers to these questions choose to stick around. This is when each of the
conversations and questions become unique, bespoke to the people, their situations and
circumstance. It is this that leads us to question if it is possible to apply the same
overarching EVP to everyone, or if the reality is that each person wants something
unique. We call this the Individual Value Proposition, because it is not one size fits all.
These questions were once the kind candidates would save for an interview. If the
competition for a position was particularly fierce, they’d potentially remain unasked;
candidates wouldn’t want to look as though they weren’t 100% convinced by the
overarching appeal of the company; that they were immune to the allure of the EVP and
Employer Brand.
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Today, as the balance of power in recruitment shifts from organisations to individuals, the
smartest hiring organisations will be the ones that move to address micro-level, job-
centric concerns as early as possible in the recruitment process.
One of the most potent ingredients in the conversion process that turns candidates into
applicants and, in turn, into employees is conversation.
Candidates are highly likely to dismiss the carefully curated picture painted by
employers. They value credibility over creativity and facts over stories. Unsurprisingly, in
a world where social media is prevalent and digital connections are convenient, we’re
seeing that candidates increasingly want to connect directly with the people who can tell
them the most about a vacancy: line mangers and people who are doing (or have done)
the job.
Nor do candidates see applying for a job as a formal activity, as it once was. In the case
of digital natives, it’s because they know no different. In older candidates, who may well
remember having posted a handwritten covering letter, the shift to informality is partly
down to increased connectivity and partly due to the increased confidence that comes
with more frequent job moves or from moving in and out of self-employment.
Clearly, there is a growing demand for direct access to decision-makers, line managers
and company insiders, and with that a burgeoning market for engagement platforms
such as Meet & Engage, which combines the immediacy of social media expected by
this generation of jobseekers with the professionalism and traceability that modern
recruitment demands.
CONVERSION THROUGH
CONVERSATION
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CHALLENGES IN
RECRUITMENT
AND PEOPLE
MANAGEMENT
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Career moves are becoming a transactional choice – not a relationship-with-employer
choice.
The way we handle those transactions and the interactions along the way needs to
change.
Candidates are becoming empowered. We’ve seen how they are being freed from
traditional career paths. People are working for longer and it’s not uncommon to retrain
or switch sectors. Economically, there’s a shift towards flexible working and self-
employment.
When candidates have greater choice, they have more power. In this climate, building an
employer brand that functions as a giant magnet, then trying to shake applicants off via a
torturous application process is no longer a good model. Let’s face it, it never was!
In this section, we’ll examine how the rise of the IVP presents challenges for recruiters at
every step of the hiring and people management process – from attraction, assessment
and selection to onboarding, offboarding and alumni relationships.
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Shrinking service length means that filled roles function more like short-term contracts.
Recruiters have to accept and embrace higher turnover. They need to become more
proactive – they’re permanently hiring, rather than responding when an employee hands
in their notice.
In this climate, talent pooling takes on increased importance – it’s vital to satisfy business
demands and operational requirements that internal recruiters have a supply of suitable
candidates on tap.
It’s not only the increased frequency of attraction that’s challenging recruiters; the nature
of attraction activity and the content needs to change to attract our IVP-centric
candidates.
CHALLENGES IN ATTRACTION
Trends we’re seeing include:
• Selling the job more and the company less
• Better written job postings with a focus on specific details
• A move away from storytelling; IVP-style attraction is less about the brand story and more about
the teller
• Recruitment advertising being replaced by reaching out: people are having two-way dialogue about
career opportunities on social media and engagement platforms
• Creative attraction that’s less conceptual and more reality-based; a focus on content that allows
candidates to see inside the organisation
CASE STUDY
Allianz Global Investors’ interactive film The Investment Factor gives jobseekers huge
insight into the decisions you’d face in a typical day as a trader and brilliantly brings to
life the company’s people, culture, and offices. The film won a 2017 RAD Award.
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Recruiters used to throw out CVs from people who had worked in too many roles or were
constantly chopping and changing from one job to another over a short space of time. It
did not look good on a CV to be in a role for less than a couple of years. Short stints at
different organisations made a candidate look unreliable; perhaps it had not entirely been
their decision to move on.
Similarly, periods out of work had to be carefully disguised or justified to avoid appearing
like an applicant, not 100% dedicated to your career.
In 2018, job hoppers are the new norm. Recruiters do not automatically turn them down.
This is partly because they are recognising the trends that are being discussed and
understanding that moving can make candidates more attractive. It is also down to
economic reality: in a higher-turnover market, they cannot afford to dismiss more
peripatetic candidates.
CHALLENGES IN SELECTION
In line with these changes, the challenge in the selection of
candidates is to evolve towards a more transactional model.
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Applying for a job needs to be straightforward and fast. We need intelligent design and
UX (user experience): careers sites that simply work; application forms that require the
minimum level of detail. Savvy employers are making it easier for candidates to apply on
their terms: you can send a CV, drop them a tweet or chat to a recruiter online.
Likewise, assessment shouldn’t be about shoehorning you into a preconceived company
development programme. It needs to be more focused on the individual. Greater choice
means that candidates will have competing offers too so the time to hire needs to be
reduced.
That said, reducing time to hire is about user experience – not about rushing through the
assessment process. Candidates aren’t looking for an express checkout – just a
different, more consultative route.
CHALLENGES IN CANDIDATE
EXPERIENCE
In the age of the IVP, applicants demand good candidate experience.
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The most successful recruiters in future will be those who understand that assessment
now works both ways: that candidates want as much opportunity to understand and
review the job on offer as businesses have traditionally had to assess them.
This also changes the traditional order of the application process. IVP culture means that
candidates want to know more; ideally, they want to connect with someone who’s done
the same role or their prospective managers (not just a contact in HR) before they decide
to invest valuable time applying. Formal application is starting to move further and further
along the assessment process; it’s a formality after both sides have had chance to
assess each other.
In the age of the IVP, the assessment process needs to become much more fluid.
FUTURE
Attraction
Connection
Conversation
Meet The Team
Trial Day
Interview With HR
Offer
Carry On…
TRADITIONAL
Attraction
Application
Assessment
Interview
Offer
Meet The Team
Introduction
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It is still not unusual for people to be hired for roles on the basis of one or two interviews.
Certainly 10 years ago, this was the norm. You’d meet your prospective line manager
and perhaps another colleague for a grilling about your CV. A quick office tour might be
forthcoming, provided you’d jumped through the preceding hoops and not asked too
many demanding questions about the company, its culture and the ‘attractive
remuneration package’.
The rise of the IVP sees the balance of power shift away from employers to employees.
Just as you wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive, so IVP-centric candidates
want more insight into the organisation than they’d traditionally get in the ‘Any Questions’
session at the very end of an interview.
Some industries are following the lead of the tech and creative sectors in offering
prospective employees trial shifts including typical work-focused tasks in addition to – or
in lieu of a traditional interview. You might call this a job audition – a chance for both
sides to see if the chemistry is right.
In other cases, interviews are getting shorter; they’re procedural – to simply rubber
stamp the appointment. This is made possible because of the ways the shift from EVP to
IVP changes the source of hire. The trend here is for organisations to fish more
frequently – and fruitfully – in established talent pools. The better you know an applicant
– whether they’re alumni, referrals or internal candidates – the more scope there is for
informal conversation – whether that’s face to face or online in place of the formal
interview.
CHANGES TO THE INTERVIEW PROCESS
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CHALLENGES FOR THE WAY WE
MANAGE PEOPLE
We’ve known for years that retention is as important as recruitment. Clearly, if service
length is shrinking, an employee’s experience at work matters even more. Put simply, if
they’re getting what they want out of a role and can see that continuing, they are more
likely to stay.
Because Meet & Engage work with hundreds of HR clients who use our platform to
converse with both applicants (during the attraction phase) and employees (during
induction and onboarding) we’re privy to a fascinating insight into what today’s
jobseekers are most interested in and what they look for in a job.
Learning is a huge area of interest. In the past, a recruitment ad might promise excellent
training and development, but during the conversation process, we’re seeing candidates
are looking for firm evidence of how training is delivered and what precisely they can
expect.
There’s also a noticeable trend for candidates who want to make their achievements
portable. Certified training is a huge draw, compared to on-the-job. That said, provided
employers are clear about what’s included in on-the-job packages and who’s delivering
that training, this can also help to convert candidates.
The takeout here is that employers who move to validate people’s skills and introduce
internal or external assessment and qualifications will have a huge advantage in
persuading candidates to join them. The more conversation fuels conversions, having
concrete examples of what you can offer prospective employees matters.
90% of executives said keeping new hires is an issue in
their organisations
- Korn Ferry
88% of business planned to improve employee
engagement
- Virgin Pulse SOURCE
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We have always measured hire in terms of how long people stay with an organisation.
Today, it’s becoming increasingly meaningful for employers to measure the length of the
relationship they retain with people.
In the age of the IVP, offboarding is arguably as important as onboarding.
Historically, you’d expect to see an 80:20 split between bad leavers and good leavers.
Today that figure is rapidly reversing. We’re seeing a huge shift in the quality of
relationships with leavers. Companies and employees alike are having more honest
conversations about leaving roles.
It’s tempting to view this shift as being driven by a new breed of young, assertive flexible
talent – younger people who want to work on their terms, But that’s not the only factor. At
the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing older workers who are keen to continue
working, partly due to lifestyle changes and better health and life expectancy – but also
driven by legislative changes like the end of the Default Retirement Age in 2011, which
made it illegal to force people to retire unless it could be ‘objectively justified’.
Here, smart employers are finding different ways of managing their workforce and
employees are open to suggestions on revising their role – or at least, leaving on positive
terms.
CHALLENGES TO THE WAY WE
OFFBOARD PEOPLE
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Amongst progressive employers who embrace the IVP, future career plans are no longer
a taboo subject. If managers and employees feel free to talk about the right time to move
on, what they want to do next, it could be hugely effective – both in terms of employee
satisfaction and workforce planning.
Similarly, businesses who are able to say, “Sorry you’re leaving; keep in touch” will have
a huge advantage over those who sever ties with leavers. There are some simple
benefits here; the “Where’s that file” factor. Employees take away a lot of knowledge with
them; it’s useful for employers to be able to tap into that after they’ve left.
Beyond that, parting on good terms is important from a PR perspective. In today’s
transparent, connected world, a bad departure can easily be publicised, negatively
impacting on an organisation’s employer brand and potentially reducing hires –
especially in niche talent markets. Bad news travels faster than good.
Finally, one key reason we’re seeing better attitudes to offboarding and that relationships
are increasingly being retained is because today’s leavers are tomorrow’s hires. We’ll
look at that more in the next section.
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
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As we discussed in the last section, smart employers are increasingly keeping in touch
with their departed employees. They’re a valuable commercial asset – they know where
that glitch is in the code, which suppliers to talk to if you need a good deal….
They’re also a fresh talent pool. In an age where careers are becoming more fluid, the
old mantra ‘never go back’ is disappearing. Data shows that employees and employers
alike are more open to the idea of employees returning to a previous employer. So-called
boomerang hires are becoming more common.
THE GROWTH OF ALUMNI NETWORKS
‘In a survey of more than 1,800 human
resource professionals, managers, and employees; 76%
said they're more accepting of hiring former employees
than they were five years ago’
- (Kronos and Workplace Trends) source
‘98% of HR pros are open to hiring former employees’
- (Accountemps)
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But Alumni aren’t just another recruiting channel. In the age of the IVP, experience is
becoming a key attractor. We share our experiences socially. Someone who’s had a
positive experience with your company is a huge asset in convincing an IVP-driven
jobseeker to join your business.
Alumni are a powerful tool for promoting jobs and careers with your organisation. Could
you envisage using profiles of alumni on your careers website? Just because they don’t
work for you anymore, doesn’t mean they’re not a great ambassador for a career with
your company.
Whilst seeing someone else’s employee on your site is still not that common, smarter
employers are using their alumni to attract fresh talent behind the scenes; we’re often
asked to host alumni-to-candidate events on the Meet & Engage platform.
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We’ve seen how the shift from EVP to IVP is changing the way we offboard people and
how it creates a new, important talent pool: Alumni. That’s just one way that the source of
hire is changing.
Going back twenty years, most companies would automatically place a newspaper
advertisement as soon as a vacancy had arisen. Fast forward to 2018 and there are
several sources of hire we can – and probably should – tap into before we even think
about advertising externally.
THE SHIFTING SOURCE OF HIRE
29% of American workers say they have
‘boomeranged’ at least once in their career, and
41% say they would consider going back to a
former workplace
- (Spherion)
52% of employees said their company currently
employs at least one boomerang worker
- (Spherion)
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The more our own people are looking for me-sized opportunities, the more scope there is
for internal moves. This isn’t linear anymore; in the past, a typical individuals’ career path
might have looked something like this:
Trainee Widget Maker
Junior Widget Maker
Widget Maker
Senior Widget Maker
Team leader (Widgets)
Manager (Widgets)
Regional Manager (Widgets & Gizmos)
INTERNAL MOBILITY
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You’d rarely hear about opportunities outside your department. And if you did there was
an obstacle course of covert conversations and office politics to negotiate before you
could openly apply for the role.
Today, we can expect to see people move in several routes, and not necessarily
following the typical path of promotion to a more responsible role in their initial field of
expertise. They may call on transferable skills to move departments altogether. They
may move into an expert role, rather than seeking to manage people. They may use their
skills to carve out a new niche entirely.
Trainee Widget Maker
Widget Maker
Widget Machine Maintenance Specialist
Temporary Gizmo Maker
Gizmo Purchasing Executive
Purchasing Trainer (a new role; didn’t exist before)
Development Manager and Widget/Gizmo 2.0 Blogger (in spare time)
Owner/Maker at Widget/Gizmo 2.0 Start-up (Self employed)
Clearly, the more fluid people’s perception of their career options, the deeper your
internal candidate pool. From the employer perspective, changing behaviours to
accommodate ‘Generation IVP’ is helping to facilitate internal moves too.
Talking about people’s next move is an essential part of modern people management. If
you know where your people’s ambitions lie, you have a better chance of finding – or
creating – the right internal move for them. Again, we’re seeing that conversation fuels
conversion and fills vacancies.
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REFERRALS
What it says on the tin. But increasingly, referrals are as likely to come from your alumni
network as they are from your own staff.
CANDIDATES
By candidates, we mean anyone who chooses to connect with you. Obviously, there’s
some overlap here with the two groups above – but some candidates may have
spontaneously connected.
PAST APPLICANTS
Another category that talent acquisition was once reluctant to tap that’s becoming a rich
source of applicants. On one hand, the increase in hires from this group is fuelled by
IVP-driven candidates who don’t follow the old-fashioned rules of recruitment. They’re
not deterred by rejection, clued up on the best employers in their sector and what they’re
looking for and, as we’ve seen, highly likely to be acquiring more marketable skills, either
gained on the job. If they want to work for you, a single rejection won’t deter them.
On the other hand, growth in this sector is being fuelled by businesses who are open-
minded, probably with fast changing requirements and, crucially, who have improved
data and more sophisticated ATS technology at their fingertips, which enables them to
swiftly tap into this particular talent pool.
NEW SOURCES
Not long ago, this was the go-to source for the vast majority of vacancies. Now, for the
smarter hires, it’s sixth on the list.
Companies who’ve already begun to take a more proactive, planned approach to their
recruitment over the last decade are now reporting that they know enough candidates, so it’s about onward, relevant engagement.
PREVIOUS EMPLOYEES (ALUMNI)
We’ve seen that it makes great business sense to keep in touch with your leavers – and
not just for advice when an historic project is revisited. So too, more and more
companies are taking on people who have worked for them before.
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HOW MEET &
ENGAGE CAN
HELP
EMPLOYERS
EMBRACE IVP
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If there’s one thread we’ve seen through this White Paper, it’s that the shift away from
the EVP and towards the IVP is going to mean an end to broadcasting and a start to
narrowcasting. There are several groups we need to address before we market a role.
You don’t advertise to discrete, small groups of people you know on a billboard.
You talk to them.
Likewise, the choosier candidates become and the more the balance of power tips in
their favour, the more recruiters need to engage with people’s IVP, rather than
broadcasting their company’s catch-all EVP.
You can’t address everyone’s IVP triggers in a single job post or on your company
careers pages. You can in a conversation.
SOURCES OF HIRE
Internal
Alumni
Referrals ENGAGE WITH
Past applicants
Candidates
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New sources ADVERTISE TO
Source of hire is changing. To keep pace, recruiters need to engage with candidates on
their terms.
The growing interest we’ve had in the product since we launched in 2015 tells us there’s
no doubt that recruiters – especially with smaller, more agile firms or those in creative or
tech environments – are starting to embrace engagement and look beyond LinkedIn. You
have to go where your audience is; it’s no different to consumer brands shifting
resources for handling complaints away from call centres and onto social media.
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The problem is that any approach still needs a level of formality. A software start-up might
be able to get by with a “Hey, would be good to catch up about our new coder jobs” via
WhatsApp but the reality is that most businesses need to present themselves more
professionally.
It is also important for our clients to be able to track conversations they are having with
candidates, whether that is to adhere to company policy or wider employment law or
simply for their own sanity.
We understand this. Meet & Engage is the only platform of its type that has been
designed by people with recruitment and candidate experience expertise for recruiters
and employers to use.
Engage with us…
Meet & Engage enables employers like Virgin Media, Accenture and Npower to engage
with their current and future employees instantly, in a moderated, branded environment.
meetandengage.com @meetandengage
FAQs
meetandengage.com @meetandengage
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HOW ELSE CAN I ENGAGE
WITH CANDIDATES?
Using the Meet & Engage platform, you will be
answering questions from your participants,
but to really bring the chat to life and curate
the experience, you can share videos, pictures
and documents, as well as launch live in-chat
polls.
CAN YOU INTEGRATE WITH
OUR EXISTING
TECHNOLOGIES?
The Meet & Engage platform has been built
with easy integrations in mind. Many of our
clients choose to use our standalone
customisable landing pages, but for those who
require an integrated solution we can provide
our plug-in API. We will need to be able to
speak with your other technology provider(s)
to get the integration up and running, but your
M&E relationship manager will manage the
process so it will all run smoothly.
AM I ABLE TO ACCESS ANY
DATA AFTER THE EVENT?
Yes! We understand how important data is
and our platform includes a full suite of MI and
the ability to build custom reports to meet your
needs. We have sentiment analysis and a Net
Promotor Score (NPS) survey built into the
platform and you can see details of who
registered for, attended and missed a chat as
well as create a full chat transcript post event.
HOW DO WE PROTECT
OUR BRAND IN AN OPEN
FORUM?
Even though our platform has a social feel,
because it has been built for use by
businesses, it has protections built in – we call
this our moderated functionality. When a
participant asks a question, no other
participant within the session will see it until
one of your moderators makes it live. You can
reply to questions and make them live to the
whole room, or whisper back, which keeps the
question and your response private. This gives
you full control over what is seen.
CAN WE USE THE SYSTEM
GLOBALLY?
Yes. We work with global clients and have
offices in both the UK and Singapore.
We have clients using the platform across
Europe, North America, APAC and Africa.
CAN PEOPLE JOIN ON A
MOBILE DEVICE?
The majority of participants join using a tablet
or mobile phone and the technology has been
built to be responsive; all users have a great
experience, regardless of the device they use.
One of the things that makes live chat so
appealing as a way to engage with people, is
that it’s easy and familiar. Participants can join
whilst they are on the move and you can easily
interact with candidates and employees who
are not desk-based.
Any further questions? Visit meetandengage.com or email [email protected]
meetandengage.com @meetandengage
Find Out More
www.meetandengage.com
@meetandengage
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