Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

Here is the fourth and final guest blog for November for The Burch Report on Digital Retail. I am back in the saddle and presenting my predictions for recruitment in 2011 the first week in December.

Every blog I read from Sirona Consulting, I agree with wholeheartedly (I’m wondering if I should move to England and beg Andy for a job) and I’m grateful and honoured to present the following guest blog from Andy Headworth.

Andy  is the Principal of Sirona Consulting (www.sironaconsulting.com )  – a company that specialises in helping organisations with recruitment strategy, recruitment process, online recruitment and social recruiting. He is also a well respected blogger, with his blog www.sironasays.com covering the world of Recruitment, HR and Social Recruiting.  You can also follow him on Twitter – www.twitter.com/andyheadworth .

Is retail recruitment ready for the socially advanced Generation Z’ers?

Retail recruitment is still trying to play technological catch-up to meet the demand of the candidate marketplace.  Candidate expectation for companies using social media as engagement and communication channels, I believe, is already high and growing every day.
But the problem is that many retailers haven’t even grasped the concept of online recruitment properly, so the ‘dreaded’ world of social media is even scarier for them!

Generation Y, who we all now know are ‘fairly savvy’ when it comes to Facebook, Twitter and alike, are the driver of the recruitment pain for retailers at the moment. They are a demanding demographic anyway for employers, but many retailers have been slow to react to the pre-recruitment needs of them.

Retailers are still struggling to effectively put their recruitment online. Many are using online recruitment systems (ATS’s – or Applicant Tracking Systems), some well, but the majority very poorly. They seem to have forgotten the concept of the candidate experience and what it means to their own employer brand. They are simply transactional – they have no engagement with prospective employees at all.  While many people within the companies would argue that ‘transactional’ is all they need, the candidates (surely the important part of the equation) want engagement – and the Gen Y’ers are the most demanding.
Now let me be straight here –  I know retailers are busy companies (I currently work with one of the busiest ones in the UK), usually with small and therefore very busy recruiters/HR departments. The last thing they want to hear are the words, “you need to engage with every single candidate”. But the problem is, they actually need to!
For many retailers, their customers are their potential/future employees – their brand =their employer brand.  And with the social media savvy Gen Y demographic making up such a large proportion of the workforce, it is becoming a problem.

Many retailers are still not helping their own cause by –amazingly – still having no ATS in place for their recruitment, instead relying on the Outlook Inbox to accept CV’s. I know of one retailer who has a folder of over 26,000 CV’s sitting in one of their Outlook folders (in just over 3 months!) How can they engage with their candidates with that sort of system – it is simply impossible!
Strangely enough, it is these same retailers that then want to ‘go social’ and plug into the social networks!  My answer is always the same – let’s sort out the recruitment system first, THEN ‘go social’ – otherwise your will actually be doing more damage to your employer brand than you are now!  Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for sharing candidate experiences…… very quickly!

Let’s just look ahead to the impending ‘recruiters nightmare’ that will be the Gen Z’ers – if you thought Gen Y was bad enough, you haven’t seen anything yet!

I have put together some traits of the upcoming generation (if you have young children in this age group you may recognise) that may well put the fear down a few retail recruiters (and every other recruiter for that matter!) – remember these are your future employee demographic…..

1. The internet is their life. They are very web savvy and are continually plugged into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
2. Email? Whatever…… You are going to have to communicate via Facebook, Twitter etc to reach out to them
3. They are ‘surgically attached’ to their mobile phone. Whatever you do to recruit – make sure it has a mobile application.
4. They have a short attention span. Very short!
5. They are astute online consumers and are well versed in searching for the best deal. They have no qualms of going to a different website if it doesn’t offer then what they want.  Career site looking old, dated and unfriendly? They won’t stay long.
6. They will be a transient workforce. They will ‘follow the work’ and live where the work is based.
7. Attraction strategy for Generation Z’ers – Video, Music and real time interaction.
8. They will expect to use the internet for everything, certainly for finding a job, and they will want to do so through their favourite channels – Facebook and Twitter.
9. Don’t expect many real grafters – too many will have had it too easy for too long! Training and coaching is needed!

Scary stuff isn’t it? Very worryingly, many retailers are a while away from getting their recruitment propositions right today.  And many of the companies that are doing it well today are certainly not looking forward to the next generation. How few are developing mobile applications for their recruitment for example?

For me the next few years in recruitment is going to be very interesting indeed. It is going to be all about the candidate experience. The retailers that get it right will get access to the best talent available, the ones that don’t will (ultimately) suffer the consequences of their lack of foresight.

Filed under:
Restaurants, Retail, hospitality, recruitment by Brenda