Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

Recruiting Trends for 2011 for the Retail industry in Canada

This blog has been delayed and delayed as each day brings another knowledgeable blog post or article on the topic of recruiting in Canada or worldwide and every day I think I should wait a bit longer until I can absorb all the current knowledge so I can produce THE most edifying thoughts on recruiting in Canada and North America.  Yeah, sure.

Finding the right needle in the haystack that is the Internet is often times an exercise in futility and frustration.  This very accurate blog Social Media Statistics from Andrew Hannelly at Social Media Explorer will clearly illustrate that most elements of Social Media are not the Silver Bullet that often gets promised for every aspect of all of our lives.

I used to call these trends ‘predictions’ and I used to take a fairly strong stand on what would happen or work and what wouldn’t.  Perhaps age or perhaps way more information now demands I simply call them trends with the only caveat being that these trends are only in context for the Retail and Hospitality industries and primarily in Canada.  Here are my 2009 predictions -  Retail Recruitment Predictions for 2009

Here are the 2010 predictions – Retail Recruitment Predictions for 2010

These are in no particular order.

My first point in the 2010 prediction blog was that social media would become a household word and that using social media to recruit would become commonplace.  Duh! The social media part is only partially true and the using social media to recruit is only very partially true.  Let me explain…………

The Social Media part wasn’t quite as pervasive as I envisioned.  Yes, Twitter has gone from 300,000 in May to nearly 1 billion today and the advent of the Facebook ‘Company/Group/Political Party, etc’ page is being embraced at all levels.  Words such as tweeps, followers, groups, and fans are being used in whole new ways.

BUT, whereas the majority of retailers in Canada are now aware of ‘social media’ and probably have a somewhat decent understanding of the term, there are still many, many individuals who toil in marketing and human resources departments in mid and large size retail and hospitality firms still trying to convince their bosses that getting in the social media game is essential and not defined by creating a Facebook Fan page.  There are thousands and thousands of superb independent retailers and restaurateurs who get it that social media is necessary but aren’t embracing it because it will take up time, or it isn’t fully understood.  I predicted that Social Media would become a household word in 2009 and most retailers would be embracing social media to recruit in 2010.  I think the household part is true, but embracing and using social media to recruit isn’t being embraced on a large scale at all by retailers in Canada.

If anyone reading this blog takes anything at all away from the read, please know that social media – really the re-definition of communication today – MUST be embraced at some level in 2011, particularly but not necessarily only for recruiting purposes. Having stated this, social media will always remain a tool in the Recruiting toolbox and does not define recruiting today.

2010 was supposed to be the year that Marketing started working with Human Resources in utilizing various Social Media platforms for recruiting and employment branding and, for some retail and hospitality companies, they did.

They most certainly did in great online examples of Sodexho, L’Oreal, Starbucks, Fairmont Hotels, and many, many others.

2011 will see the demographic-driven labour shortage that was in full swing in 2007 and early parts of 2008 return.  Retail and Hospitality will feel it first.  Recruiting will re-gain its topmost priority position at most retailers.

I talk a little bit further down this post on Diversity hiring and its importance in working with the challenge of a Labour Shortage.  But, whenever talked Labour Shortages we can never forget the importance of ensuring Generations Y and Z are aware of the benefits of Retail as a Career.  This is a more difficult challenge in Canada – it always has been – as our citizens haven’t viewed Retail or Hospitality as a chosen career right from college as students in all other parts of the world do.  Much work has been done to change that perception, but something like the Retail Careers Facebook Fan Page owned and operated by the National Retail Federation in the US would go a long way to providing students and graduates with profiles of successful retailers, information, the opportunity to ask questions, etc. etc. in a platform they prefer.  Check out Retail Careers

Another aspect of addressing the labour shortage and forwarding Retail or Hospitality as a Career is understanding the latest audience – Generation Z.  Andy Headworth, an expert on using social media to recruit, wrote this Guest Blog for me in November  -  Is Retail Recruitment Ready for the Socially Advanced Generation Z?

It’s an excellent piece on what retailers have to do to engage with Generation Z.  Those recruiting for the Retail and Hospitality industries need better information on what their audience wants.

Good old Recruiting has morphed into Talent Acquisition, Radical Recruiting and Recruiters are now named Sourcers.

It seems that Recruiting/Talent Acquisition has come to mean exclusively the identifying of ‘talent’, not the entire Candidate Care process.  There is a tsunami of information on how to network, use job boards, use social media, work job fairs for best results, etc. etc. all in aid of finding candidates.  Comparatively, there is little about how to engage and relate with candidates once you’ve established an interest in your open position.  Has Recruiting/Talent Acquisition come to mean strictly the sourcing without the hiring?

Mobile Recruiting is Here

I guess this is a given.  I did not believe that candidates would respond to the latest positions being texted to them via their SmartPhone as soon as they become available.  I was wrong. Candidates do and many now expect any company with openings, or job boards, or Facebook Fan Pages to have the ability to simultaneously upload through an application (app) to their SmartPhones as soon as a new job posting appears anywhere.  Every type of SmartPhone, not just Blackberry or IPhones.  Preliminary screening questions to be answering by a mobile phone are being tested.  Every online presence your company has for the purpose of recruiting must be configured in such a way that it can be read easily on a mobile device.  Mobile Phone and the development of new applications for recruiting will only increase in 2011.

What about job boards?

I still follow the job board industry in Canada fairly closely, particularly those boards with large amounts of both retail and hospitality jobs.  As stated last year, job boards won’t disappear and die any time soon.  But the large companies posting hundreds of job postings on a single job board under an unlimited package are nearly gone.  Most larger retailers are now splitting their job board dollars between niche sites, social media sites and everyone uses LinkedIn for certain category levels.  LinkedIn’s job search focus is currently second-to-none, in my opinion.  Job Boards with strong reputations for results in Canada in the retail and hospitality industries with social media features and collaboration with aggregators will continue to succeed.  Those boards that are now incorporating more recruiter-like services like personalized short-listing, reference checking, and job post writing will succeed even better.

Diversity

Diversity recruiting became increasingly important during the labour shortages of 2006 – 2008 as companies turned to new immigrants and different cultural groups to fill their open vacancies.  Some progress has been made in how best to approach, source, and engage candidates from outside traditional pools.  Diversity only Job Board Talent Oyster and Will Stewart’s Equitek plus the many diversity groups on LinkedIn are making inroads into not only how to attract, but also engage diversity candidates. And saavy recruiters are discovering new ‘diverse’ groups. In the US, 1/2 million military workers per year for the next 5 years are transitioning out of active service with the withdrawals from various fighting fronts. On a much smaller scale, the same situation exists in Canada. Brand new companies are being established to assist Canadian and US companies in hiring these ‘diverse’ individuals.

Recruitment Training

I wrote a blog this year entitled Untraining – the Training and Development Revolution about training in the Retail and Hospitality industries.  It wasn’t written especially for Recruiters or Human Resources personnel, but I believe the points made apply.  Training for Recruiters, Sourcers, or for HR people in general has been inconsistent, even spotty, over the years.  Today’s hiring climate demands razor-sharp individuals with good business skills as well as recruiting skills.  For years before the CHRP in Canada, the Human Resources profession, including recruiting had no barriers to entry and the standards reflected that.  2011 will see recruitment conferences with a difference (I will be one of the Team Leaders at a Radical Recruiting Event in Vancouver in June –  Radical Events ) The format for these sessions ain’t your mother’s conference, but they have become wildly successful worldwide, along with Recruiting Camps, tweetups, etc.  Finally, in the areas of training, most social media platforms are not self-evident and it’s astonishing how many recruiters use only a very small portion of the features of Twitter or LinkedIn or others.  Solid comprehensive training in that area is required as is team-building.  More on that in my final comment.

Contingency workers

You heard it here first.  The term ‘Contingency workers’ via Wikipedia – A contingent workforce is a provisional group of workers who work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, also known as freelancers, independent professionals, temporary contract workers, independent contractors or consultants. …  It is estimated that beginning in 2012 in the United States and in Canada in 2013, 10,000 Baby Boomers will retire per day, every day for the next nineteen years! Now, there’s lots of talk that due to the recent recession not all Baby Boomers can or will fully retire.  But report after report after article after blog agrees that many Baby Boomers will prefer to work on a ‘contingent’ basis.  Further, new Generation Z workers no longer look to establish themselves with a full time job for a single company, in fact the opposite.  Most companies do not have policies and procedures to work with these flexible-workers.  With the candidate re-gaining control, the nature of the worker has changed and we all know the most successful recruiter is not just the one that can find or identify the top talent, it’s the one that can actually hire him/her.

And that brings me to my last point……..

People instead of companies

I read recently that a Recruiter’s job is not to find the right person for the job, but find the right job for the person.  If the talent crunch and the labour shortage develop into anything like most predictions for the next 5 years, the Talent Acquisition role in any organization will become key with only the most skilled in many disciplines (management, marketing, finance, and human resources) excelling in this crucial area.  And the judgement of the skill won’t be with who is best at making lists of potential candidates gleaned from LinkedIn or a day at a job fair.  It will be those people who have developed a group of interested, qualified candidates around them in a talent hub.  Candidates who trust the individual recruiter (not the company they work for) and can be leveraged themselves when the time is right to join the organization or can provide referrals and who appreciate the inside company knowledge and overall information provided by their recruiter.  Recruiters who can, from their ‘hub’ bring forth highly qualified candidates, who are already bought in to the integrity and purpose of the company and can and want to be hired.  Any search firm will tell you that its extremely difficult – and getting harder – to convince clients that you are dealing with the ‘company’ and not the individual recruiter.  Search firm clients become attached – rightly so – to the recruiter and often follow them if they leave.  I know, I owned a retail recruitment firm.  It was true then, and with the advent of all the social digital platforms, it’s becoming truer by the day – people want to work with people, not companies.  This means that 3^rd party recruiters need to let their search consultants shine on their own, perhaps write their own blogs, tweet under the companies Twitter account in their own language, do public speaking, etc.  This notion of engaging and connecting in your own voice is very new and challenging for a large company with strict policies and procedures.  But, I believe, it’s the future.

As always I look forward to your comments…………and if 2011 is the year to embrace some of these new revelations, or begin using social media to recruit, I am available on a contingency basis.

Blog:  The Burch Report on Digital Retail

LinkedIn: Brenda Dumont

Twitter: @retailblog

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Retail, hospitality, recruitment, social media, social media recruiting by Brenda