Member Article

What are jobs candidates looking for?

It’s jobs focus week on Bdaily. Here, Serocor Group CEO Mike Gawthorne talks about the changing climate – and some surprising myth-busters – in the recruitment market.

As someone who has been in the business of recruitment and talent management for many years, I’ve seen the cycle of supply and demand, of candidate-led and hirer-led markets waxing and waning. There tends to be an assumption that in times of high unemployment it is a hirer-led market, which means in a nutshell that hiring organisations, rather than jobseekers, are in the strongest negotiating position.

But in the more technical markets this is not necessarily the case. In fact we have seen a significant change in the motivations of professionals who are looking to change jobs and why.

In the past, people moved jobs to get a change of job title, more responsibility or a pay increase. But in the last couple of years, it’s more a case of people looking for companies with cultures and ethics that match their own profiles. I am writing of course of those who are fortunate enough to be in this position at all.

Strong candidates are looking for investment into their career and their time from their employer, and benefits like training and flexible working hours play a big part in the decision making process of most of the candidates we speak to.

There’s something else too. The financial stability of organisations has taken on a new level of importance. Organisations that have navigated the recession, have strong working capital and are known to have looked after their staff during periods of economic unrest have earned themselves a well-deserved reputation as employers of choice.

It’s pretty obvious why. Recessions are no longer something that only your parents or their parents remember. A very large percentage of the working population has now experienced a recession. At one end, the workforce is maturing, with people working longer into their lives than at any other time in recent history. At the other end of the scale, because of the rising cost of further education, more people are electing to take up apprenticeships and work-to-train schemes - so we have a very large working population with hard experience of one, or more, recessions.

Our candidates expect us to be a font of knowledge about our clients (that is, hiring organisations) so that they can have those conversations with us in the first instance. Candidates ask some pretty testing questions and expect us to know everything about our clients’ internal cultures. Personally, I welcome this. Not all clients wish to share this information, but if you’ve nothing to hide as a hiring organisation, I strongly urge you to shout about your internal culture – or better still, get your own staff to do it for you.

Those clients that do open up to us and are proud of their unique selling points as a hirer give us the best possible chance of articulating those USPs to a much larger audience than they could manage; a company with a strong awareness of the need to have a positive culture can win the war for talent.

To win this war, hiring organisations have to stop believing in this false equation that a recession equals all the time in the world to make a decision on hiring. It is not the case – certainly not in our markets. Assuming an equal playing field in terms of their USPs, brand equity and so on, the organisations that are going to win this war are those that move quickly, plain and simple.

Why? Because the candidates those firms really want are in a strong position; they will be receiving counter offers and multiple job offers.

For job seekers, I would recommend being a bit “old-school”! You can create your own USPs if you think hard about what it is that you do particularly well, and foreground that in a tailored (and I do mean tailored) job application. In the era of social media, click to apply and web 2.0 and 3.0, do not underestimate the power of a good old conversation.

Technology can only get you so far and jobseekers should be confident that they can present and talk well about themselves, their career and their skills. I’d extend that to the application process too. Those who don’t rely on just sending an email with a CV attached are already putting themselves ahead in a game where so many people do just that.

I think sometimes people forget the importance of their CV. Spelling and presentation is still important.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mike Gawthorne .