By Michelle Boyde
Tomorrow promises to be a painful day in the capital, not to mention a long one as we try to get around without the tube. If you find yourself feeling a little bitter about tomorrow’s strike, spare a thought for my colleague. He will be caught by our strike tomorrow morning as he heads for St Pancreas and then by the French Metro strike (over retirement age) when he arrives in Paris later that day. Strikes are certainly prevalent right now…
Coca Cola have confirmed their strike over pay for September 8th and the majority of union members at the BBC have called for industrial action over the change in pension scheme. I won’t even mention British Airways.
Strikes are certainly a very visible example of disgruntled employees. Others may not be quite so palpable. However, for loyal employees who have stood by their employer the last couple of years, through the pay freezes and imposed hour cuts, many will be asking what they will get in return. In amongst the job cuts, perhaps they should be happy to have a job. However, the reality is that top talent can always find job elsewhere and they are the ones you need to keep. New hires are expensive; investing in current employees is better value for money.
Internal engagement continues to be a critical facet of employer branding – brands are built from the inside out and now is one of the worse times to neglect this element.
By Michelle Boyde
Today, The Times reports that the Big Four are recruiting 3,850 graduates in the UK this year. This is an increase of more than 20 per cent on 2009 and surely good news for the UK’s graduates. However, it seems that too much of the UK are lured by the lights of London. PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 70 per cent of their applicants apply for jobs in the City, making it tougher to fill vacancies in other offices.
This is not only the case with graduates. Some BBC employees have been reported to be unhappy as they are required to relocate to Salford Quays in Manchester, to continue their jobs outside the capital.
However, invention and ideas are rife outside London. In today’s FT, a report from the British Library, home of the national patents collection, reports that north-east generated more patents per person per pound of investment than any other region.
Geographical location will continue to be an important factor when choosing a job. Firms need to build their employer brands to encompass how attractive locations outside of the south-east can really be.
By Michelle Boyde
A-day is fast approaching. On Thursday, anxious 18 year-olds across the country will collect their A-Level results, discovering if their place at university is secure or not. For many it will not, and students will have to move quickly to find a place through clearing, although this is no longer a guaranteed route to gaining a spot with many universities reporting no places available through clearing.
So what will become of our budding students? A colleague of mine, recently out of university herself, told me she has a friend who achieved three A’s at A-Level and missed a place at university two years in a row – he is trying for a third time this year. If it is not a case of third time lucky, I doubt he will pass through the UCAS system a fourth time. He is an example of potential top talent who may become ‘lost’.
For those students not entering the UK university system, what are the options? Some may forego a tertiary education all together, or others may venture abroad. The US is becoming an increasingly appealing option, especially as the gap in fees between the UK and US narrows. In addition, Australian and the Dutch universities will be undergoing recruitment drives in the UK this week.
UK top talent will inevitably become more dispersed with young people abroad or missing from the education system all together. The question is how will graduate recruitment evolve to prosper from these increasing considerations?
Gen Y has seen university as their right, many going through the motions of UCAS without considering what they wish to achieve and what they want from a career. Increased tuition fees and insufficient places may provoke our youngsters to consider their career path more closely.
By Michelle Boyde
Source: Universum Quarterly 2010, Issue 1
Do you work in a recruitment team or a rejection team? It’s possible that you have not considered your role in this light before. Many employers decline far more candidates than they ever hire. The world’s most popular employers will always have to deal with declining large numbers of candidates. However, due to the impact of the global economic crisis, employers of all sizes, from small start-ups to multinational conglomerates are facing the issue of declining candidates in large numbers. Today’s rejects are possible future lateral hires and potential customers or business partners – do your processes protect your employer brand against this threat?
The phrase ‘rejection machine’ was coined by Charles Macleod, head of global resourcing and mobility at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). This is a very fitting phrase as PwC receives 20,000 to 25,000 applications for 1,000 jobs in the UK– they certainly do much more ‘rejecting’ than ‘recruiting’. This expression prompted Universum Quarterly to take a look at an aspect of the recruitment process many employers are reticent to discuss.
5,800 students from Russell Group universities select their “Ideal Employers”
Apple and Google were the undisputed winners in Universum’s Ideal Employer rankings this year, released on April 15th, according to a student poll of nearly 12,000 students – yet look at Russell Group’s students only and the choice of employers change. Read the rest of this entry »
By Michelle Boyde
Today’s Guardian touches on internships and how UK employers financially exploit young people. It reports that one in three UK interns are working for nothing. However, with high-unemployment and a wealth of new graduates scraping around for constructive work experience to enhance their CVs, this is not overly surprising. Universum data has continued to show internships to be a popular channel for learning about employers. In 2009, over a quarter of students wanted to take part in an internship. The question is: will recent experiences have disillusioned students about the benefits of internships? The brand new results from the Universum UK Student Survey 2010 are released April 15th and are sure to give us an indication. It’s possible, however, that high-unemployment will see our young people prepared to ‘intern’ in the name of experience whether they are paid or not.
By Christopher Van Mossevelde
Compared to men, women around the world anticipate less in annual earnings. In the 16 countries where Universum conducted its research, and based on the answers of 224,542 university students, female graduates’ salary expectations are generally below that of men’s. In Austria, female graduates’ salary indications were on average 21 per cent less than their male counterparts. In Italy, it was 20 per cent less, and in Poland and Germany, it was respectively16 per cent less. Austria is the country where the ‘gender pay gap’ can be considered the highest, followed by the other above mentioned countries. Where the differences were smallest, however, were in the Netherlands and Sweden (seven per cent), Norway (five per cent) and the UK (four per cent). The results do not represent current salary levels, yet are an indication of what graduates expect to earn in their first job after graduation. More importantly, the results emphasise that the ‘gender pay gap’ begins with female graduates looking forward to earning less. Read the rest of this entry »
By Christopher Van Mossevelde
Branding is what marketers practice to increase the sales of their products or services and has become common knowledge. Employer branding, however, is still a practice that seems to elude most. Ask the average person what it means and they’ll probably say they’ve never heard the term. A search for the words “employer branding” on Google brings 391,000 hits. “Corporate branding”, however, produces over half a million hits. If it is just the word “branding” alone, it delivers 30 million search results. And marketing, unsurprisingly, brings in 450 million search results. Look for “employer branding” books on Amazon.com and it delivers 38 options, whereas books on “branding” produces 2,622 hits and on “marketing” a whopping 352,000 results. Case closed! Employer branding is not common knowledge. Yet, what is it and why does it matter? Read the rest of this entry »
Employer Image Rankings
By Christopher Van Mossevelde
With all the talk about the iPad, whether you’re a fan or not, Apple is strongly associated with attractive/exciting products and services, a quality that contributes to their employer brand and lures top talent to want to work for them. Read the rest of this entry »
By Christopher Van Mossevelde
Post-recession, the practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), alternatively known as responsible or sustainable business, will play a huge part in employer branding work in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »
