by Fiona Housiaux | Feb 12, 2019 | News
Rumours have been around since the start of time, but in today’s connected world anyone can publish content, fake or not, that can be read by millions worldwide in a matter of minutes.
Social media makes it impossible to avoid fake news and the simple truth is: facts don’t matter.
People very easily get tricked, especially as they already have information overload in the internet era.
People today don’t think twice before circulating misinformation across the world, it will eventually disappear but often not before the damage it intended to cause has happened.
We have become more and more aware of the real impact of fake news over the last two years since it entered the world of politics.
Fake news became a wide spread discussion point throughout the last US presidential election, the Brexit referendum and the recent UK general election and many people believe that the results were shaped by social media.
In the last US presidential election Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent $81m on Facebook advertising alone; in the last UK general election the Labour parties much better than expected results have been largely credited to its social-media campaign.
For some observers, social media has become too much of an influential factor in political decision making, they fear it impacts on transparency, accuracy and most of all truth and it’s easy to see why.
During the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from all 19 major news outlets combined.
And these fake news stories fooled American adults about 75% of the time.
The problem of the power of fake news has become such that in 2017 Germany passed a new law allowing social media companies to be fined up to €50m (£43m) if they persistently fail to remove illegal content including illegal hate speech and other postings within 24 hours after receiving a notification or complaint and to block other offensive content within seven days.
It is not just about spreading false information; fake news causes very real problems as in 2013 when the Associated Press’ (AP) Twitter account was hacked and a tweet confirming two explosions in the White House which injured then President Obama was released.In a matter of minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 143 points
wiping out in excess of $130billion of stock value.
In 2017, in another example of the damage fake news can do, a post claiming that the CEO of cryptocurrency company Ethereum had died in a car accident resulted in a fall of about $4billion off the company’s stock value and led to some analysts quickly speculating over the future of the now leaderless company.
Similarly, a post on Reddit reported the death of a McDonald’s executive in compromising circumstances. McDonald’s were very quick to handle the situation and indeed confirmed that the executive didn’t actually exist, however it still impacted the company’s stock value by around $2billion.
But using fake news to influence stock and share prices is only one way your business can be damaged, sadly there are many other ways a business can be hurt.
A business can spend millions on carefully crafting their image and brand but in the age of social media it can be damaged in seconds through fake news.
When one user of a messaging board discussed issuing fake news about Starbucks that “Could cripple their business a bit” it became a reality with tweets advertising “Dreamer Day”, in which the coffee chain would supposedly give out free frappuccinos to undocumented migrants in the US, spread at lightning speed online and made Starbucks have to race to deny the event and reply to individuals on Twitter that it was “completely false” and that people had been “completely misinformed”.
So fake news can clearly impact a business, but does it really have an any effect on recruitment?
The explosion of fake news is impacting society and how we behave in every way and the workplace, HR and how we recruit is no different. Fake news such as the Starbucks incident can do exactly what the user wants, they cripple the business and have an impact on how the brand is perceived. Any damage to a brand’s reputation can affect how a business attracts the best new talent, especially through the passive labour market and engages and retains current employees.
It isn’t just reputational damage from outside the workplace that companies need to manage either. Besides fake news doing the rounds in the outside world the likelihood is that rumours and half-truths are circulating internally which can cause conflict, internal unrest, distraction and impact a businesses’’ engagement with current and potential clients and employees.
Ultimately, what your employees talk about reflects the kind of work culture your business offers, and you can be sure that what they are saying they are sharing online.In the always connected world of social media many employees barely have a divide
between their work and personal lives.
Indeed the latest research shows that 50% of employees post messages, pictures or videos about their employer on social media often or from time-to-time.
The research also highlights that fake news has the potential to do real damage if spread by an employee as today employees are a businesses true brand advocates.
The figures show that the average employee engaging on social media has 10 times more followers than any corporate network and 90 percent of their social audience is new to the brand they are talking about.
Plus, brand messages are shared 24 times more when distributed by employees, versus the same messages shared via official brand social channels.
Fake news has created a need for transparency and people see employees as authentic, credible and trustworthy and therefore they have real influence to cause effect or change behaviour.
In this new era people are paying more attention to corporate messages delivered from those in their social networks which provides businesses with a great opportunity to utilise this to help maintain and increasing brand awareness.
There is a clear opportunity for those in HR and recruitment to accept that employees are already talking about where they work and what they do on social media but turn it into an advantage by giving them information and stories.
An employee brand advocacy program allows every employee to be a brand ambassador by engaging and empowering them with trusted and safe information and they, in turn, will empower and help your brand by engaging and sharing the information to their network.
Companies such as Sky and Unilever are leading the way in employee advocacy programmes with Sky’s #LifeatSky uniting colleagues from across the company in celebrating its culture, experiences and activities and has resulted in an improved recruitment process, driving 100 hires and 10,000 applications through harnessing its employees on social media.
In another successful example Unilever’s employee advocacy programme means colleagues are sharing 14x more frequently, there are 5x more job views and 4x more engagement with content.
Ultimately, fake news can affect recruitment and employees can be an employer’s best advocate or its worst opponent in the war against fake news.
by Fiona Housiaux | Jan 23, 2019 | News
As we await the next outcome in the ongoing saga that is Brexit those of us that make our living in the world of recruitment are facing the reality of a sustained lack of clarity about the future of the UK and what it means for us.
The truth is that there are literally hundreds of unanswered questions and it feels like the only certainty is uncertainty.
Businesses aren’t ready either as a survey conducted in October 2018, by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), indicated that almost two-thirds (62%) of UK firms had not conducted a risk assessment of the impact Brexit could have on their business.
Then again is it really possible to prepare when there are so many possible outcomes?
The one thing we can be sure of is that the answer has to be a yes as the alternative is a
possible lack of competitiveness and a great deal of risk.
We need to control what we can meaningfully change and that is our actions and strategies.
By making changes we will have a stronger chance of survival and make it possible for us to help our clients stay one step ahead of the game and continue to recruit and retain the very best people.
So, what can we do to prepare?
If predictions are borne out, recruitment businesses may have to cut costs quickly to adjust to new economic demands, make strategic changes to ensure a pipeline of talent with the necessary skills is ongoing and offer new services to continue delivering on business
objectives, regardless of unexpected changes.
As we all know when businesses look to secure their financial position during turbulent times they often cut recruitment budgets. Although our clients might be recruiting less we
can focus on offering services that help clients retain their current staff and fill any ongoing roles that have skills gap and are difficult to recruit for.
And of course, finding candidates is unlikely to get any easier and could indeed get harder as the talent pool shrinks post Brexit and immigration rules are potentially tightened.
Therefore, it is an opportunity to help clients conduct more of their workforce planning for now and in the future.
Going beyond the standard role of consultant and become a truly strategic and informative partner to our clients will be key and although there might be bumpy times ahead it is an opportunity to consider new markets and niches and to focus very much on the candidate experience, which takes time.
By taking extra time we can ensure we harness the relationship with any potential candidate early, especially if people are less likely to move jobs because of ongoing uncertainty and we will therefore be more likely to have a healthy talent pipeline for our clients.
Recruiters will need to make more and more informed decisions and will need to utilise data and workplace and industry insights to make hiring decisions for their clients that fit with hiring strategies not just now but in a year’s time too.
As well as helping their clients with their workforce planning agencies will have to look at their own team’s skills and breach any learning and development gaps that are needed to face the challenges of the new recruitment landscape.
It will also be a great opportunity to evaluate your businesses’ brand to guarantee it matches the services you offer clients and how it appeals to candidates in the UK and Europe after Brexit.
by Fiona Housiaux | Nov 28, 2018 | News
In our rapidly-evolving digital world the Internet is able to influence everything we do and even what we think.
People trust online reviews and opinions from complete strangers more than they do information from any business and a recent survey found that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
In the world of recruiting job candidates have never been in a better position to research potential employers and employees, current and past, have never been more able to voice their opinions, good and bad, on a workplace.
Sites such as Glassdoor, WorkAdvisor, Indeed and The Job Crowd appear high in search engine results and afford candidates and employees the unprecedented opportunity to learn more about companies to see if the culture is a fit for them and to share real insider knowledge allowing every aspect of a company from salary information, photographs of the office space, the interview process and details of employee benefits to be reviewed. You can even read an approval rating for a company’s CEO.
Good you may think, but for a business this is where the dangers of anonymous online review sites can present themselves.
By offering the writer anonymity they also offer a lack of accountability, which does mean there is an opportunity for exploitation. A sacked employee could, for example, easily post exaggerated negative reviews or indeed a company could even fabricate positive reviews.
Like it or not these sites are not going anywhere and their influence is likely to increase especially in the competitive world of recruitment as research highlights that nearly 1 in 3 workers have declined a job offer primarily because the company had negative online employer reviews.
Companies need to understand their online presence is so much more than careers pages and job posts and is so important to their employer brand as it is so often the first glimpse into a company for potential candidates and what you do and indeed don’t do can severely impact your overall reputation and your ability to attract, recruit and retain the very best talent.
So, how can you improve your reputation on anonymous online review sites?
- Manage your own page – take some of the control back by creating your own page.
For example, Glassdoor allows you to build a page through a business account where you can set the design, monitor page analytics and reply to reviews.
Your page should reflect your business as would your LinkedIn or Facebook company page. Celebrate your culture and include positive messages, plus photos and videos.
- Engage – the truth is that these sites will always attract the disgruntled before the positive and this can impact on your overall rating. However, by encouraging as much positive feedback you can bring things back in balance by asking your current employees and interview candidates to leave positive reviews.
- Listen – use the analytics and listen to feedback and do something about it if there is a pattern within a particular branch, division or department.
These sites offer an exceptional and cost-effective insight into employee morale, so listen and act accordingly.
- Respond – by taking the time to promptly and politely respond to reviews, good and bad, not only shows you care and are willing to listen but it also, in the case of negative reviews, allows you to close the thread as the reviewer cannot respond again.
- Accept – there can be no doubt that company review sites do help provide necessary insights into company culture and employee satisfaction and the key is the acceptance of their importance to your employer brand: care about your employees and candidates or lose them to those who do.
by Fiona Housiaux | Oct 15, 2018 | News
Psychometric testing in recruitment is nothing new and is highly prominent in executive search but is also widely used when selecting candidates for promotions, graduate positions and where there are a high volume of applicants.
For those that use them there is a clear believe that they bring a certain level of objectivity when selecting and judging candidates that interviewing alone cannot offer.
When psychometric tests get it right it is easy to see why more than 75% of The Times Best Companies to Work For and 80% of Fortune 500 firms use them. They can offer a means of supporting managers by increasing their self-awareness, reducing unconscious biases and
filtering large numbers of candidates and amounts of information in a short period of time.
However, when psychometric tests get it wrong the consequences can be widely felt as in the case of the former Chairman of the Co-operative Bank, Reverend Paul Flowers. After a large scandal MPs heard through evidence given to the Treasury Select Committee, being held regarding the matter, that although Flowers, a former Methodist minister, had little experience in banking when he was appointed in 2010 he was indeed appointed to the senior banking role after “He did very well in the psychometric tests.”
So, could psychometrics really be to blame for one of the country’s most high profile and misjudged appointments? Many believe the answer to be a resounding yes as they should have highlighted that Flowers had a tendency towards extreme risk taking and was therefore clearly unsuitable for his role.
So, have businesses become too reliant on psychometric testing for recruitment and ultimately, does the science support their case or undermine it?
The latest evidence highlights that 81% of those using psychometric tools expected to make more reliable and less risky decisions and 57% believed psychometrics could help predict future performance.
These results highlight that many are using them and believing the unscientific claims made to make decisions rather than only to inform decision making, which is their goal.
Ultimately, anyone can misinterpret data from a single tool to fit their own narrative if they want and many believe that you can do this with tests such as Myers Briggs and this can lead to candidates ‘playing’ to the results and exaggerating a particular side of themselves.
Also, many believe that the psychometric test must only be used as part of a suite of tools and HR practices and no single tool should be used in isolation and the data should only be utilised to ask better questions of the candidate and to probe deeper.
One of the most controversial and widely used tests is the century-old Myers-Briggs (MBTI) who some say has as much scientific validity as your astrological sign.
It is hard to understand how a psychometric test devised by two housewives with no formal training in psychology and who based the test on the totally untested theories of Swiss
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who himself warned that his personality “types” were just rough tendencies he’d observed rather than strict classifications, has become one of the world’s most utilised psychometric tests.
Despite this and the fact that as many as 50 per cent of people get different results when they take the test for a second time after a five week gap, still around two million people take the MBTI test every year and is used by organisations as an essential tool in
determining whether a job candidate is a good fit for a company, earning the company that produces the test about $20 million each year.
Top names such as General Motors and Procter & Gamble have admitted to using the test on employees, however according to many top psychologists it shouldn’t be used in recruitment at all.
Why?
Well, the test is certainly based on outdated science and lacks both reliability and validity.
The study of personality has come a long way and has superseded that of Jung and the test offers vague descriptions that have huge amounts of overlap, so many people could fit into several of them.
This is called the Forer Effect and is a technique long used by purveyors of astrology, fortune telling and other sorts of pseudoscience to persuade people they have accurate information about them.
However, the main reason you should not use the use the Myers Briggs test for making hiring decision is that it isn’t predictive of job performance. Studies have consistently demonstrated that the test fails to predict job performance in any meaningful way and the MBTI’s publisher itself explicitly discourages its use as a pre-employment test. The guidelines put out by the Myers & Briggs Foundation very clearly state that “it is not ethical to use the MBTI instrument for hiring or for deciding job assignments.” This is because the test is not predictive of job performance and lacks the validity of many other professionally developed and validated employment personality tests.
Ultimately, the key thing we can learn is that we can use psychometric testing to help with parts of the recruitment process, such as filtering out unsuitable candidates or as a help to identifying the best candidates, however they should only ever be used as a wider recruitment strategy and never used to solely pick the candidate.
by Fiona Housiaux | Sep 3, 2018 | News
After Google secured the content from several major UK recruitment services, including Totaljobs, Reed, Guardian Jobs and Haymarket, as well as global sites including Glassdoor and LinkedIn, they have launched their UK version of their job hunting search tool: Google for Jobs.
The goal of Google for Jobs is to stop job seekers from having to sift through numerous results from different job sites, in order to find the role they are looking for.
As well as the major job listing sites Google for Jobs also highlights the content of thousands of smaller, niche and specialist sites and lists the newest and most relevant jobs on offer based on the location of the user and the keywords they have entered.
So, what are the benefits of Google for Jobs?
For the user the key benefit is the ability to search in one place for jobs from all over the internet. For the job sites and employers whose job roles appear on the site, the major benefit is that they can use the power of the Google brand to get their jobs exposed to as many potential candidates as possible, free of charge.
For both groups Google for Jobs offers some unique “search smarts” over other sites, including the ability for job seeks to carry out one search to find similar jobs listed under different titles, for example: programmer, software engineer and developer.
A major frustration for job seekers, the ambiguity and discrepancies over job titles can lead to users having to make multiple searches, with multiple keywords, as employers call the same job role by many different titles. Google for Jobs has improved the user’s experience by making this now unnecessary.
Additionally, by utilising Google Map’s data and its location tracking services users are able to see the length of time it will take to commute, and you can search for specifics such as “jobs near me” or “baker jobs near me”.
Users can also search for jobs on their phone and save them to apply later on a desktop computer, you can also save a certain job search on your phone and then access it again later on a computer or save a search term to set up Gmail alerts.
Another feature which is sure to be popular with job seekers is the ability for users to rate and review the employer who is recruiting, providing invaluable information about the strengths and weaknesses of the business as an employer of choice.
The cost to third party sites placing their listings on Goggle for Jobs is currently free of charge, although many in the industry see a time when they charge for job listings and other premium services.
Currently on Google for Jobs, when a job seeker finds a job they are interested in applying for they click on the listing and are taken back to the third party site to apply for the position there, however whether this will stay the same in the future is still to be seen.
It is however this particular feature that Google themselves have said shows their commitment to not destroy sites like Indeed or Reed and that they are fully committed to encouraging any employer or job seeking platform to access its guidelines on how to mark up their listings and appear in the new search experience.
However, not everyone is willing to share their data with Google for Jobs, in particular Indeed. The world’s most popular job searching platform, with more than 200 million unique visitors a month, has taken the bold decision not to currently partner with Google for Jobs, resulting in links to Indeed pages appearing further down Google for Jobs’ results pages.
One thing is for sure, even if you don’t like all aspects of Google for Jobs it is working towards making job searching a more seamless, simpler and pleasurable experience for job seekers and offers advanced efficiency for recruiters; which can never be a bad thing.
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