THE CHANGING

ATTITUDES TO WORK

A supplementary whitepaper for resourcing and

recruitment professionals.

FOREWORD

We’re seeing 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 and in this whitepaper, we examine what this shift in service length means for the world of work.

We will see how a combination of economic factors and changing personal attitudes to work are transforming the employer-employee relationship.

We’ll 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.

Ali Hackett & Bill Boorman

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T h e n e e d s o f t h e m a n y n o l o n g e r o u t w e i g h t h e n e e d s o f t h e f e w .

““Those who cannot change their minds

cannot change anything.

- George Bernard Shaw

@meetandengage meetandengage.com

Length of service with an organisation was fairly constant from the 1950s up until the last decade or so.

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 it has since wartime.

According to respected blogger Alison Doyle, people stay with companies for an average of five years or less in the US .

The situation in Europe is even less with an average of three years, with the trend being a declining length of service year on year.

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Sticking around for a hard earned promotion is a thing of the past, with even shorter length of service figures for younger employees entering the workforce now. Those under 28 stay with their employer an average of two years less than their older counterparts.

This changes things for recruiters and hiring managers, not least changing perceptions around what is considered to be ‘job hopping’.

It’s natural to see an adjustment like this after an economic downturn.

The recession of 2008 forced many people out of work completely and others 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

W h a t i s ‘ j o b h o p p i n g ’ ?

Behind the figures it’s clear that something new is happening and that people are either deciding to move jobs more frequently, being driven to do so by their employers – or companies are offering less security.

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 many organisations have talked about the importance of retaining talent, the rewards, for many, have not reflected this.

This creates a sense that the way to move on, both financially and in a career 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’s easy to understand why people may prefer to look outside of organisations to progress, rather than within.

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On top of this, there’s an increased lack of company culture.

Gone are the days of staying with the same company throughout a whole career.

Few of today’s 60-somethings expect to retire with 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 millennials, the fickle youth -employees have witnessed continuous restructures and would argue that loyalty, or the lack of it, cuts both ways.

““Loyalty, or the lack of it, cuts both ways…

Perspective is that individuals are 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 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.

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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 it is inevitable that they will have adopted short-term thinking.

THE DECLINE OF THE TRADITIONAL CAREER PATHC a r e e r b e f o r e e m p l o y e r .

When discussing the nature of people being focused on jobs, and less on staying with companies, it’s easy to assume people are living in the now, rather than thinking long-term.

It’s actually 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:

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• 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

If this phenomenon is real, it significantly changes perceptions around 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.

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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’. Millennials do 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 there is 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 for many in this bracket, and if they are intent on only sticking around for a few years, purpose and culture takes on less significance, at least for attraction.

What 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 by how a role is going to impact on the next one, 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.

But that doesn’t mean that there are huge differences between millennials and the rest of the working population.

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 an 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 you expect 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, sharpen their Employee Value Propositions.

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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 Employer Brand sits in the organisation, and if anyone can really own it, or simply reflect it.

We have witnessed a growing number of professionals in HR teams 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.

THE RISE OF THEEMPLOYER ‘BLAND’

L i v i n g t h e b r a n d .

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Now consider yourself in the shoes of a candidate and 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?” “Does what you see as the external message match with the reality of what you know?”

It’s 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 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.

Modern day recruiting means incorporating marketing tactics, and applying them to the new world of work.

From talking to our clients and analysing the content of their online chats, 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 more so than how a particular organisation facilitates career progression.

Candidates are asking role-focused questions rather than probing prospective employers on culture, leadership or other company-wide concerns.

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 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.

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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.

INTRODUCING THE‘NEW JOB SEEKERS’

I s i t w o r t h t h e i r t i m e t o a p p l y ?

The attention on an opportunity and the future team is a big part of what convinces someone to hit apply, and the potential reward makes it worth the pain.

Yes, they want to hear about your Employer Brand, but they want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, from the people who do the job.

Peer content and peer connection is crucial 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?’.

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It’s no longer enough to spread the word that an organisation is dynamic and ambitious in order to set out the company vision and values or 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 organisations are presented as employers, they can’t be specific enough to help people to really understand the job in hand and what it entails for them.

Increasingly, before going to the trouble of applying for a role, prospective candidates 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 it is truly believed that all people are different then the needs of each person from each job will be unique, and the messaging has to reflect that.

Whilst some of the headlines might look similar, it means something different for each individual, because people, and their backgrounds are unique.

““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.

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 clients run Meet & Engage sessions, the same discussions come up over and over again.

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Some of the details candidtes typically want to discuss include:

• 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, 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 and then relocate for work?

INTRODUCINGTHE IVP

F r o m g e n e r i c t o t a r g e t e d .

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This sounds more like a ‘frequently asked questions’ section of the careers site, but candidates who are thinking about applying want the answers first hand from someone they can relate to.

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, is it possible to apply the same overarching EVP to everyone, or does 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.

““We call this the Individual Value Proposition, because it is not ‘one size

fits all’.

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, 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 don’t know any different.

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For 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 technologies and support, that combine the immediacy of social media expected by this generation of jobseekers with the professionalism and traceability that modern recruitment demands.

CONVERSIONTHROUGH CONVERSATION

T h e p o w e r o f c o n n e c t i o n .

We know that there are never enough hours in the day to maintain an exceptional candidate experience –however strong the intent, especially when it comes to the micro details needed to successfully facilitate an Individual Value Proposition (IVP).

Meet & Engage Candidate Experience Technology reduces the time resourcing teams spend on repetitive tasks whilst driving a high quality, measurable candidate experience.

It’s built by recruitment industry veterans – people who understand the challenges you face and how the Meet & Engage technology can help you.

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C a n d i d a t e E x p e r i e n c e T e c h n o l o g y

GIVING YOU MORE TIME FOR THE RIGHT CANDIDATES

O u r t e c h n o l o g y c o n s i s t s o f a c o m p l i m e n t a r y s u i t e o f l i v e c h a t a n d c a n d i d a t e e x p e r i e n c e c h a t b o t s .

Our chatbots can share Employer Brand content on your careers website, complete screening processes, walk prospective candidates through online application forms and keep them warm throughout the recruitment journey.

They record detailed candidate experience data and can be plugged in directly to your careers site or ATS or be used as a standalone solution.

You can see how our Candidate Experience Chatbots have supported the Yodel resourcing team by downloading our Yodel case study from our website.

If you’d like to find out more about how our Candidate Experience Chatbots can help support you and your resourcing team, get in touch to book a demo.

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Our live chat event tech turns your best people into brand ambassadors and helps share your story with candidates throughout the recruitment process – from attraction to onboarding.

Live group sessions or 1-2-1 chats keep candidates engaged in a way they are familiar with, all in a fully moderated and branded environment.

Take a look at our client case studies to see more of our work with clients such as Diageo, Capco, npower and more.

If you’d like to find out more about how the Meet & Engage live chat events platform can support you and your team to meet your recruiting objectives, get in touch and book a demo.

L i v e C h a t E v e n t s

C a n d i d a t e E x p e r i e n c e C h a t b o t s

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REFERENCES

CONTRIBUTORS

Writing

Ali HackettBill Boorman

Editing

Adam WomersleyMonica JinabhaiAli Hackett

Design

Adam Womersley

https://stats.ukdataservice.ac.uk/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TENURE_AVE#

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/mar/29/a-world-without-retirement

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-often-do-people-change-jobs-2060467

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-jobs-career-work-salary-quit-young-people-study-a8361936.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2015/02/24/employee-tenure-is-shrinking-what-do-we-do/#8259d315f64a

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/03/20/5-reasons-why-long-term-employment-is-dead-and-never-coming-back/#2f5ef8534e41

https://www.business.com/articles/welcome-to-the-era-of-job-hopping-the-lifecycle-of-the-american-worker/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2016/01/13/true-or-false-employees-today-only-stay-one-or-two-years/#56f65c226b4c

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