Author Archives: Simon Jones

How Poor Recruitment Can Wreck Your Business

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Originally published April 2012

Poor, shoddy customer service is something which most people aren’t prepared to accept these days.  We’re more likely to complain than in the past if we don’t receive prompt responses, if a company fails to deliver what it promised or if they try to fob us off. And in these days of social media, a moan about a particular company (such as Waitrose or H&M) doesn’t just go to a few friends but can be around the country or globe in minutes. Years of careful marketing and “brand management” can go out of the window in hours or days with a tweet from an irate customer.

Yet when it comes to recruitment, how many HR people consider the organisation’s image when planning the process? But how many times have you come away from a job interview thinking “what an awful organisation – I wouldn’t work there for double the salary”?

There’s really no excuse for not giving candidates a positive impression of your organisation, and you should always be striving to ensure that your recruitment processes match the public image your organisation has. As US recruitment guru Crystal Miller points out, candidates only expect two things:

  • Acknowledgement- simply that you’ve applied and we acknowledge that. Thank you.
  • Closure- simply that you are or are not qualified for the position, that you are or are not getting the job, there are or are not other opportunities with us, and we acknowledge all these things in a consistent and timely manner. Thank you.

But a good recruitment process offers them more: an insight into working for you, your organisation’s culture and values. Just as much as you deciding who you want to recruit, the candidates will be deciding whether they want to work with you – you are  forming a relationship.

And finally – don’t forget the rejected candidates. Depending on their skills, they may well end up working for a client, supplier or major customer. A bad impression of your company based on their recruitment experience may well cost you in the future.

The Masterchef approach to Talent Management

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Originally published in December 2011

Fans of TV reality show Professional Masterchef will have seen Aussie chef Ash Mair win last night in one of the closest finals in the series. What makes this programme different from the normal reality freakshow (e.g The Apprentice) – and a good example of how to manage and develop talent in any industry – is that it takes those who are already trained in their chosen field and sets up a method of developing their talents by giving them real life situations where they are both mentored and challenged to improve their performance.
The selection process is not through interview or psychometrics – the chefs are given a basic skills test before they can progress to actual cooking (scarily, quite a few apparently qualified chefs fail this). They are not only mentored in specific culinary skills by working with Michelin starred chefs, but also learn about customer service and marketing (challenges  have included taking over a hospital canteen,  and producing menus for children where extra credit is gained for whose dish is chosen most), working with key stakeholders and opinion formers (by cooking for food critics) and benchmarking themselves against the best in the industry.
The key though is that they are always given constructive criticism and challenged to improve, while being given the support to do this. By working with the best, they are then assessed to see what they have learned and pushed to do better.  And while there is a competitive edge, both the other finalists (and indeed others knocked out earlier) will also see a tremendous boost to their careers.
At a time when management is being increasingly criticised for poor performance, and businesses need to develop their staff to give them a competitive advantage, perhaps it’s time to look at the Masterchef model as a way to do it.

Are you ready for the Olympics?

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Originally published in September 2011, this post is recycled regularly whenever there is a major sporting or public occasion!

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a raft of “Olympics” policies and briefings issued by various organisations. Now I know it’s good marketing advice to tie in your public comments with a current event or issue, but an Olympics policy? When we are trying to encourage business to be flexible and both managers and staff to behave responsibly, do we need to tie them down with yet another set of rules? And how, precisely, do these Olympics policies differ from the World Cup policies being touted last year, or the Royal Wedding advice that was available in the spring?
I used to work for a bus company that operated hundreds of buses, involving thousands of drivers, in Merseyside and North London. When Liverpool played Arsenal in the Cup Final one year, did I write out an FA Cup Final policy for our garage managers to follow?  No – in fact as HR Manager I left matters completely in the hands of frontline staff and managers, who with a mixture of shift swaps, overtime and knowledge that for every football fan there was a driver who wasn’t interested in football (or was an Everton or Spurs fan!), ensured that services were covered.
It’s really a question of “work-life” balance.  If an individual has a particular interest in something happening outside work and you can accommodate a request for time off then there’s no problem. Equally if it’s an event that happens during working hours, is it really going to be that disruptive to let staff keep track of it while working? (after all, even with false starts, Usain Bolt can run 100m in less than 10 seconds).  Forward planning, not rules and procedures, is what is needed.

Dads Army & Crisis Management

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Originally published February 2011, at a time when everyone was seizing on the latest economic statistics as evidence that we were all “doomed”

It’s often helpful, in a difficult situation, to see how people have handled such crises before.  For example, the different ways in which the members of the Walmington on Sea Home Guard reacted to the constant threat of invasion in WW2 is strikingly similar to how many are behaving in the economic climate today.  See if you can identify yourself or colleagues in the list below:

Capt Mainwaring – in charge because of his status rather than his competence, he uses bluster and nice sounding phrases to disguise that he has no idea how to deal with the situation.
Sgt Wilson – the calm voice of experience, refuses to get flustered as he knows that things have been this bad before and will resolve themselves again.  He always takes the considered view, which often pulls Mainwaring out of trouble.
Cpl Jones – panics at the slightest thing and over-reacts to the mildest bit of bad news. Unless controlled, his attitude infects the rest, creating mayhem and negativity.
Pte Fraser – the voice of despair, who enjoys seeing how bad things can get and is secretly hoping they will get worse.
Pte Walker – spots the opportunity to make money in everything. Sometimes his scams backfire but often they come to the aid of the platoon as well as his own pocket.
Pte Pike – never experienced anything like this before, really not sure how to deal with it except that it all looks very bad indeed and his Mum wouldn’t like it.

Looking around, it seems to me that at the moment we have a lot of Frasers (especially in the media) and Joneses, and perhaps not enough Wilsons and Walkers.  While many under 35s, who have never experienced any kind of negative economic conditions before, are cast in the role of Pikes, slightly bewildered and looking for reassurance.  As for Mainwarings – are there any you could suggest?

Passion is No Ordinary Word

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Originally posted January 2011

Everyone has their own most disliked management phrase. Mine is probably the use of the word passion in the world of work. I don’t know whether it arose from an over-active marketing executive or is part of a general trend to use words conveying strong emotions in a way where their meaning becomes debased. But when I see a sentence in a recent blog like “we need more love, courage and passion in our workplaces” I cringe (and not only at the potential sexual harassment cases coming my way).

Setting aside its sexual and religious meanings, the most common definitions of passion are “a powerful or compelling emotion” and “a strong or extravagant desire”.  Are either of these really the sort of behaviours we expect to see, let alone encourage, in the workplace? And do we want HR people to be “passionate” about our work, as I’ve read recently?

Let me give you an example using a different strong emotion. I’ve just redrafted a time off in lieu policy for a client, under which a small group of staff would be disadvantaged. In consultation, one affected member of staff told the Chief Executive that when she read the new policy she was “angry”. As a friend of mine commented “I get angry about children starving in Africa. I might get a bit annoyed if I didn’t like the way my company had changed one of its policies.”

So let’s be clear. I enjoy working in HR, I often find it fun or stimulating, and I can sometimes become very enthusiastic about aspects of it. But passionate about HR – no!