Check this announcement to learn about Cranfield School of Management's Business Technology Conference and iProCon's involvement on topics of Cloud Computing and contracting opportunities in IT

So, here is some food for thought for the bank holiday (those readers not lucky enough to live in the UK or any other country enjoying a day off today are of course encouraged to take a few minutes out as well to think about this phenomenon):

I just read a few more CVs. I must have seen hundreds or thousands of them by now and most o fthem share a few remarkable features. As, I guess, do most other CVs out there.

Imagine a data mining company breaks into monster.com and a few other CV databases and takes seriously, what they find in the "achievement" sections of those life success stories. Here are some conclusions they must come up with:

1. 99.9% of all projects are successfully delivered in time and in budget - common wisdom and other research must be wrong here
2. Adding all the savings delivered by candidates, most organisations must have reduced their operating cost so much that their annual spending is now next to nothing. As this includes procurement as well as salaries, global buying power in the consumer as well as B2B market is almost 0.
3. At the same time all those organisations have increased their revenues dramatically - thanks to the super heroes in the CV database. Considering our second point, all this revenue must come from public sector spending and consumer debt. Well, at least this would explain the current debt crisis.

Seriously: whilst each individual CV might be the true story of Candidate Right, it just can't be possible that the labour market is full of supermen and superwomen. As a hiring manager, do you really expect a candidate never to have made a mistake or be involved in a failed project? Have so called career coaches, CV writing services, and professional recruiters, who understand buzzwords, but rarely the business they are hiring for, created to a world, where all we expect from a CV is to tell us the most consistent and polished fairy tale?

Actually, I'm really hoping to see a CV one day, where a candidate admits failure and explains how she or he learned from it!

As a hiring manager: would you consider such a candidate? Honestly?

As always: hoping to hear your thoughts via contact@iprocon.co.uk

some food for thought on a Friday afternoon: "People join companies, but they leave managers." So, you can call for corporate to improve employer branding, but you may only have yourself to blame for high turnover rates in your team.

We discussed typical issues occurring, when you use recruitment agencies, on this blog already (see this article on salesforce incentivisation on iProCon Insight 09/2008). Based on a recent case study and a survey as well as further observations, we want to give you some ideas about how to cut recruitment cost while increasing quality at the same time by using alternative channels and by managing agencies better, when you need them.

This article on recruitment best practice  

• shows some evidence that many organisations spend far too much on recruitment agencies, while still not getting the best candidates
• presents a case study on how an Australian software company cut recruitment costs by half relying much more on referrals than agencies
• explores the role of recruiting websites, communication, and organisational culture in your recruitment process

In its edition from 31st October 2009 The Economist magazine published an article with the title “A tough search for talent”. This article points out that the public sector across most rich countries struggles to find the right talent, an issue expected to get even worse when the labour market becomes more difficult for employers once the current economic crisis ends.

Two factors making it particularly difficult are:

• The public sector is increasingly looking for candidates with profiles closer to what the private sector is looking for.
• The culture within many public sector organisations can easily alienate the talent needed to face the challenges of the future.

These factors lead to the public sector losing many of the better candidates to the private or the charity sectors. You can read the full article via this link: www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14753826

US-based recruitment specialist Jobvite recently published the results of their "2009 Social Recruitment Survey".  

An increasing number of organisations rely on internet communities like LinkedIn or XING for recruitment purposes. Some post vacancies on those websites, whilst others conduct profile searches to target individuals.

The vast majority of organisations leave a significant footprint in these online communities, much of which is beyond their control - most notably from their own employees. While some employers seem to be aware of this, very few actually try to influence the impression that candidates get from these sources.

The question is: Why should candidates rely solely on the official company profile in the job advert and company website when there are hundreds of employees in online communities sharing their own perspectives about the potential employer?

We are not suggesting organisations should police all of their employees’ activities on the internet, however there are a few relatively simple things organisations should consider:

• Provide guidelines for employees on how they can help to build the organisation’s employer brand
• Provide company profiles, logos and KPIs that employees can use in their profiles
• Ask employees for help to turn the attention of candidates to your job postings

This could all be done within a section of the company intranet about online communities, where employees learn how to protect their own as well as their organisation’s data from abuse, as well as how they can use Web 2.0 for learning, etc.

The same principles can be applied beyond employer branding, so ideally the initiative goes across functions (and is not restricted to Marketing or HR). How might your organisation benefit from consideration of these factors?