Digital Recruiting

Monster faux pas?

This came from a recent press release on ClickZ all about Monster's New Year cross channel advertising campaign and made me laugh a little.

"A job search is not always the most positive experience for people, so as a brand, we always try to take the positive and optimistic approach,"

Having seen the TV advert (very stock shot and American IMHO) I think he means that the driver for people conducting a job search often isn’t for positive reasons, so Monster are looking to promote moving for the right reasons rather than the negative “my job is sh*te” or “please somebody, anybody give me a job!”.

However - perhaps he does know exactly what he’s talking about – in which case perhaps he should try Jobsite or TotalJobs and see if they provide a more positive job search experience for him.

:-D

New year – new commitment to not undervalue what we can actually do for clients.

So, here we are in 2007 and it’s about time I pulled my finger out of my proverbial and contributed to this blog malarkey. Interesting that eventually our rag tag bunch has actually managed to do something constructive other than just getting another round in, but as with these things (and as I’m always at pains to point out to clients (and some colleagues) who think that blogging will somehow be the panacea to their graduate recruitment requirement) it’s a marathon and not a sprint, with some serious dedication and commitment required to make it work. Looks like my promise to work more sensible hours this year is going the way of most other resolutions.

Will be interesting to see how this thing evolves – will personally try and make an effort for it not to just be a hub of negativity, although it’s true that this very entity is of course borne out of our joint frustration at the abundance of charlatans, jokers and idiots that seem to clog our tiny niche / backwater of advertising. I’ll try, but don’t hold your breath – unfortunately I seem to be developing into a right middle aged grumpy old man with a significant propensity to rant at any given opportunity (at a Christmas lunch with a very lovely media colleague I had a feeling there was even a degree of Rant Bating being played out – of course I don’t like to let people down, especially when they’re paying).

Was pondering life the universe and everything the other day (as men tend to like to do with quite some regularity – you know, the kind of pondering that has you reaching to read the ingredients of a bottle of bleach or air-freshener) when I was thumbing through a back copy of NMA (New Media Age) – yup, the paper medium still has a big enough part to play in my life for the foreseeable. Anyway, came across an article about PPC (Pay per click advertising on search engines) being used as an aggressive PR tool to counter, or at least help manage, negative news.

The example given was about the exploding lap top story that was in the news a while back, and the number of searches looking for information on the story, or indeed probably just for the rather amusing footage, went through the roof. Anyway, someone at Hitwise worked with this and directed a major PPC campaign that at least offered those searching a clear link through to the Dell / IBM / Sony / whatever site where they were able to put it all in context and offer replacement batteries and frontline customer support. Brilliant.

And it got me thinking. When we started working with a large financial institution 2 or more years ago they had an issue about all press about their jobs telling you they were offshoring thousands of roles. We suggested countering this with a PPC campaign (which cost bugger all) so at least when people searched on related strings there’d be a link offered to a more positive recruitment result. Yet here we are, 2 years on and there’s and there's an article about such practice being deployed in the big world of proper advertising.

Now I’m not claiming to be an internet pioneer or any such nonsense (unlike many other laughable self appointed online gurus in our space), but it still amazes me just how much we undervalue our expertise and what we can and often do add in terms of solutions. Internally and externally the pressure is on for quick turn around and keeping it cheap (it is the internet after all), whilst talk abounds about developing and enhancing the employer brand. Couple of nice posters for the toilet and a new clever strapline – employer brand sorted!

Recruitment advertising has for years run itself down, devaluing consultancy and service in exchange for media commission, spot-buys and massive contract kick backs at the point of media purchase. Maybe not quite short sighted as it’s sustained businesses for a good few years, however with media now being bought differently and online driving down prices then it was never a particularly long sighted business model.

Prices have been further driven down by HR / recruitment teams / businesses  that don’t understand marketing or branding, together with ridiculously inept business / financial management pressure that looks at short term HR culls with no consideration of the massive long term costs of Recruitment Consultant reliance. All of this topped off with mediocrity of service and short-termism throughout the agency world, cutting off our own noses in the frenetic pitching drive to get that next high profile new business win (no matter the sustainability of the margin or any realistic consideration of the delivery requirement). Advertising agencies have over time become our own worst enemies.

Although when you look at the experiences some clients relay then maybe the monkey service they seem to get is symptomatic of the peanuts that many clients want to pay. What does DEFRA hope for when they proudly announce (Ri5 – 2-1-07) that in their tender the award criteria is quite simply “lowest price”? Have these people never bought a car, eaten at a nice restaurant or had a nice glass of wine and realised that you generally do get what you pay for?

If one thing is for sure, our new world emerging requires intelligent, insightful planning and execution together with ongoing follow up and review – and that can only come at a cost to those paying for it. These are real man hours of experienced professionals that can’t be covered somewhere down the line by a £5k spot buy that had previously hidden the true cost for the service. A colleague actually commented in a meeting the other day that getting paper media information would take a bit longer than online media as it “wasn’t that straight forward” – yeh right! ‘Cos considering the options and getting the costs across for 3 potential print titles just as you did last week and the week before that takes a whole heap of understanding the medium and shifting job seeking patterns.

So – there we have it – January the 3rd and I’m working just as hard as I was last year (have a nice honeymoon Ben) but have added a blog to my to do list, a blog in which I’ve already exploded onto the scene with an abundance of negativity and frustration. So is there any real hope of me putting an appropriate value on the service and consultancy that we offer and keeping the faith against client and intra-agency pressure? Probably about as much as me hitting 14stone by February, but the realist in me says 15stone by beginning March is doable – so maybe the strength to charge more appropriately for the intellectual capital and hours our work often takes isn’t too much to aim for, just with a pinch of recruitment budget realism.

:-)