Careersite reviews – the NORA finalists

Just when I was wondering which website to review this week, I received an email with a list of all this year’s NORA finalists (National Online Recruitment Awards). Problem solved! You can  get an award for pretty much anything it would appear these days; there are companies who work on a ‘no win no fee’ basis to help companies to scoop up as many as possible. Only this week, nominations are now open for, I kid you not, the British Parking Awards, the International Aperture Awards (for photography since you ask!) and the Local Government Chronicle Awards. Want a Knighthood? No problem, there are companies that can help you get one.

Anyway, back to these website awards………you can see the whole list for yourself if you want to here (most of them are featured on our newlifenetwork.co.uk site) – I’m just going to pick on a few of the more interesting ones. The finalists in the ‘Best Generalist Job Board’ include all the usual suspects such as Jobsite, Monster, Reed, Totaljobs and Fish4Jobs – they are all much of a muchness in terms of what they offer, range of jobs advertised (all with the same quality issues), ‘one size fits all’ career advice pages etc. In the ‘Best Specialist (Niche) Job Board’ category, however, I like Onlymarketingjobs.com. It isn’t the prettiest or most technically advanced, but they get my vote because their founders have worked really hard to build up a real community with excellent and popular networking events and opportunities both on and offline. Good luck in the finals guys. (btw more excellent websites for jobs in marketing, PR and communications can be found here).

When it comes to the ‘Best Major Employer Website’ category, I was surprised to find that it included Claire’s Accessories - popular purveyor of pink paraphernalia to the prepubescent population. What I liked about their site was the clever use of shots of the interiors of their head office location and their stores to give an impression of what it would actually be like to work there. I wish more employers would show the actual working environment as it can be an important decision point for many potential employees. It’s often quite a shock for applicants who have responded to a big brand recruitment campaign when they turn up for an interview at some shabby or unexpected locale. No doubt Innocent Drinks will walk away with the Best Small Employer career site – the quirky and friendly copy and site imagery both engages and amuses and their brand has quickly developed iconic status. Applicants may be disappointed to discover, however, that Fruit Towers HQ is located in a city based industrial estate and not in a leafy orchard. There’s no ‘Claire’s Accessories’ style internal photography available here.

‘Best Online Recruitment by a Consumer Publication’ could only really go to
The Guardian in my humble opinion. They really go to town on engaging younger candidates and graduates, feature very well  written career articles, video and podcasts and are impressive in their use of media like Twitter. I’ve been following them. I’m impressed.

Careerplayer.com

Naturally, I’d love myexecutivecareer.com, mygraduatecareer.com or newlifenetwork.co.uk to be in the running for ‘Best Employment Advice Website’ particularly as when I launched newlife in 2005 it was quite a pioneering force in that regard. However, it does help if you enter in the first place and badger thousands of people to vote for you! Next year, next year. So, my vote? Career Player for graduate jobs and career advice online. The under 25′s are the ‘video generation’ so it makes a lot of sense to offer them valuable career advice and interviews with industry gurus in a format that resonates with them. It helps to have a decent broadband connection or watching the clips buffer gets a bit tedious, nevertheless the quality and range of content is really quite top notch.

The results of the NORAS will be announced on November 4th.

Congratulations by the way to all the team at Veredus for coming top in the service provider performance rankings in the IIM (Institute of Interim Management) 5th annual market survey. Having dealt with them personally on a number of occasions, I can see why they deserved their top spot – they are professional, personable, courteous and give candidates timely feedback on assignments that they have applied for. Certain other providers (you know who you are) please take note! The top 10 companies (as ranked by interim managers themseves) were Veredus, followed by Pilot Interim, Interim Partners, BIE Interim, Odgers Interim, Gatenby Sanderson Interim, Green Park, Methods Consulting, Postern and Alium Partners. You can download the full survey here. (myexecutivecareer.com premium members can find profiles of all the leading interim providers in the executive search directory pages).

Workingmums.co.uk have also announced the winners of their inaugural Top Employer Awards. Apparently Accenture, the overall winner, are leading the way when it comes to  flexible working (nice of their competitor Deloitte to sponsor this award!) and KPMG impressed the judges with their record on transition coaching (is that redundancy management?), maternity coaching and women’s networking. The Top Employers Award for Employee Engagement went to those lovely people at John Lewis. Ahh, if Carlsberg ran department stores, they’d probably do it just like John Lewis!

Employer careersite review – Jaguar Landrover

Recession or no recession, savvy organisations are still very keen to build their reputations as top employers, develop their ‘employer brand’ and attract top talent both off and online. So over the coming weeks, as part of my regular look at topical career issues, I’ll also be putting some leading employer and other career related websites under the spotlight.

The Times published their ‘Top 100 Graduate Employers’ table last week. This list is compiled using research conducted with c16,000 students graduating that year by asking the question “Which employer do you think offers the best opportunities for graduates?” I’m not fully au fait with their methodology, and no offence to the undergrads they asked, but how meaningful is this really? What makes PwC number 1 and the Arcadia Group number 75? The number of places? The perceived quality of their training scheme? Starting salary? Salary progression within 3 years? What they say in their brochure, or on their website? The friendliness of their recruitment fair or campus reps and the quality of their career stand freebies? How much they spend on campus or recruitment advertising? The quality of their hiring process? The retention level of graduates within their first three years of employment? Their record on hiring minorities and women? Their CSR credentials? Brand kudos on your CV? Perhaps someone will write in and let me know if it’s anything more complex than loosely opinion based.

The headlines are always full of the great and the good bemoaning graduate shortages in science, engineering and technology so, for my first review, I decided to start with Jaguar Landrover (87th in the Top 100 list). Their entry in The Times states that they have 135 graduate vacancies in 2010, starting salaries come in at £27,000 with a variety of roles on offer beyond the more obvious ones in engineering such as IT and HR. The stated application deadline is December 31st.

 

Powered by People

 

As soon as you click through to their website, the opening visual and the soundtrack simply blows you away. Their key strapline is ‘Powered by People’ linked with a strong call to action for those interested in ‘visionary engineering roles’. If you’re a proper petrol head, an engineering student and a big fan of two of the most iconic British automotive brands, you won’t be disappointed with the way that they’ve taken their consumer brand appeal and translated that into the ultimate employee talent magnet. It’s quite easy to find your way around the site and there’s a truly sexy video or an engaging and clever visual on pretty much every page – check out the ‘Experience’ section and click on the ‘Sight’ and ‘Sound’ links to see exactly what I mean here. It incorporates information about their experienced hire roles alongside those for graduates, work experience students and apprentices, and features a comprehensive explanation of pretty much every aspect of their company culture, their hiring and development processes, their locations (no pictures though), green credentials and so on. All applications have to be completed online and they have also been quite clever in the way they introduce qualification filters to identify and extract the best candidates.

So far, so good. What is rather disappointing is the way that they have, or rather haven’t integrated with other social media. The main ‘Follow us on Twitter’ button on the home page doesn’t work and similar buttons featured throughout the site either take you to their actual Twitter account JLRCareers, or to a page that hasn’t had an entry posted on it since March 2009. It’s not surprising that they only have 166 followers and many of those are definitely not prospective employees! Another missed opportunity is their corporate LinkedIn profile. There are only just under 700 employee profiles registered and many are poorly completed so it’s hard to tell if the really interesting career intelligence such as University attended and degree type is accurate, or whether you have any relevant connections there already. Coventry University would appear to be the most common University attended (they have a strong list of automotive degree courses) and it would certainly be worth a little more research if you are currently considering your UCAS choices. More importantly, if you’re a graduate and you’ve read their advertisement in The Times, you might struggle to find the important stuff on the website such as exactly when you can apply for one those 135 places (it’s in the FAQs section and cross referenced in the ‘Taste’ link of the ‘Experience’ section), and they suggest that you bookmark the page for further details planned to be announced in October. They could have included a link to sign up to their Twitter feed and use that to announce the opening date of their scheme. It also struck me as odd that so many of their experienced hire opportunities have closing dates that are months away. An open communications manager vacancy is carrying a closing date of Dec 31st 2010.  Most unusual – it made me wonder whether they were real or ghost vacancies.

All in all, this is a pretty good example of online employer brand/talent attraction. A few careful tweaks to make sure that all their links work, that they raise their game on integrating and maintaining their recruitment media channels and create better clarity on the opening and closing dates of vacancies would not only represent a much better return on the investment that they have so obviously made, but also take it from good to great.

To take a look for yourself go to Jaguar Landrover Careers.

 

Ultimate Destination

 

CONTENT UPDATE: 15.10.2010 – I can hardly believe it but Jaguar have replaced this site that I reviewed earlier with a completely different one! The navigation is better and the content for a careers site is fine but very dull visually/brand-wise compared with their old site!

All of a twitter….

Like many people, when social networking tool ‘Twitter’ first burst onto the scene, I signed up for an account to see what all the fuss was about and then promptly forgot all about it (after examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. Media research firm Nielsen also reported that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next suggesting that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them). Stephen Fry is probably the most famous UK tweeter/twitterer/twit/member of the twittererati (you see it’s the name that puts me off, it’s all a bit too ‘Finbar Saunders and his double entendres’ or reminiscent of annoying people talking on the train on their mobiles about the square root of b***r all. Am I the only one who hates it?) and claims to be totally addicted to it, as is Sarah Brown (PR and wife of former PM Gordon Brown). Anyway, my recruitment guru friend Keith ‘Robbo’ Robinson is always going on about it and how I should check it out, so I decided it was about time to investigate it again to see if it would be any use from a careers perspective.

Follow me on Twitter

Setting up an account was pathetically easy but I was way too late to get my own (very common it has to be said) name and I didn’t want to set up three website-specific accounts hence you’ll be be able to follow me at https://twitter.com/mycareersadvice. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how it’s developed since I last looked at it and I’d recommend  you set up an account if you haven’t tried it already BUT be careful how you use it.

Following……..

There are loads of different kinds of Twitter news feeds you can sign up to and ‘follow’ – feeds from companies, random individuals, journalists, celebrities from the A listers right down to the Zs, universities, news publications and magazines, entrepreneurs, recruiters, job boards and so on. Most websites these days will also include a Twitter symbol that you can use to sign up to their feeds. I decided to have a good root around to find out what could be useful for myexecutivecareer.com and mygraduatecareer.com members (plus a more random and experimental list headed ‘just because’) – you’ll find my latest selections in the right hand menu under ‘Lists’. It will save you a bit of time sorting the gold from the dross at first and get you started anyway. Once you begin building your own groups of favourites, you’ll automatically be served a selection of new ones you might like (based on your previous choices) in the top right hand part of the menu bar. Most of the corporate stuff is fed on an more industrial basis – the latest  job feeds, news on recruitment fairs, events, press releases etc. and it’s great for up to the minute tracking of the things you’re interested in – especially if you’re job hunting. The ones full of personal observations or running commentary of the minutiae of their lives will probably be the ones you can take or leave.

Stephen Fry does indeed have a very interesting life and, whilst you might wonder how he finds time to do all that tweeting, let’s not forget he’s created a ‘one man marketing machine’ for everything he does. Respect. Another person I followed for a few days (before I decided that life was too short to continue and promptly ‘unfollowed’ him -  even if it was in the spirit of research), posted the occasional interesting snippet but it was buried in so much chaff about making tea, what time he was going home and who was in the office that day that I couldn’t helping wondering when he actually did any work. I didn’t know him, he wasn’t famous, fabulous, good looking, interesting, useful or even that funny so he was duly sent to my ‘Twitter Room 101′. My followers may well do the same to me of course! It’s a cruel world. I did have a few dubious spammers and perverts who started to follow me at first. Reader, I blocked them.

Sharing………….

You can share or ‘re-tweet’ tweets you like from feeds you’re following with your own followers (this is PR and viral marketing ‘Tweet Nivarna’ getting lots of followers and re-tweets) with a simple click. Most website carry a bookmark symbol too, so if you find something on a website you like you can automatically add it to your own Twitter feed or your LinkedIn account. S(t)weet.

You can also write your own tweets of course. Your post or message has to stick to a 140 characters or less limit and you can use free websites like http://bit.ly// to shorten your own shared links. The important thing to remember is that your tweets become part of your ‘net-rep’ – the online trail of your reputation or presence on the net. Don’t say or forward anything in a tweet that you wouldn’t want your mother, your employer, the press or your clients to see.

Well, I’m off now to post that I’ve written this brilliant gem on my Twitter profile. Don’t worry, if you decide to follow me on the back of this, I promise that I won’t also share with you that teapigs ‘Skinny caramel’ teabags are the best thing since PG tips, that I had a fantastic lunch at Moro yesterday with my favourite former boss, how I got stuck in a traffic jam on the A14,  that I saved my backpacking daughter’s bacon this morning by texting her the address of the Chinese hostel she  needs because she can’t get online from the train, or that I’m going to saw a small branch off a tree in my garden because it’s blocking my view and annoying me. Or should I? Will it make telling you that I quite like the jobs feed feed from Gradplus and Interim Partners, that The Guardian run great careers articles and HarvardBiz publish cracking leadership stuff more interesting? Let me know – Tweet me!

‘They’re just not that into you?!’

Every week we sit down and work out what new content we’re going to concentrate on for all three career sites and respond to what our visitors are telling us is important to them. We have emails from visitors and PR companies, we check what pages on the sites are the most popular,  what’s being downloaded and we pick up on the headline stories and trends in the trade and  consumer press. This week, we’ve put up some new info pages on the mygrad site for Sixth Formers now they’re all back at school, we’ve added some new featured job boards on the newlife site and details of important events for our exec members such as the Consultancy Careers Fair guide at the Barbican, we’ve posted reports like ‘Where Women Want to Work 2010′. as well as publishing numerous links to online articles we think our LinkedIn group members will like. So, busy times are here again at Cottage HQ.

So, what was the big mailbag item this week? Well, funnily enough, this one comes up time and again but we thought it was worth revisiting it again. Whether you’re student trying to win a place on a grad scheme, a mum returning to work after a career break, an anxious manager who is trying to get another job after redundancy or a senior exec making a six figure move, everyone seems to want to know ‘Why are recruiters so bad at getting back to me?’ and ‘When should I call them to see what’s happening with my application?’

OK, let’s try and break this down into bite sized pieces. Whether we’re in a buyer’s or a seller’s job market, recruiters will not always respond to every application for every vacancy that they handle. For one, they will tell anyone who raises this issue that it simply isn’t logistically possible when they are busy and inundated with applications and a tight client deadline to work to. If you have applied speculatively without a specific vacancy in mind, then it is quite likely that you won’t receive a response. One recruiter I spoke to about this said ‘Well, there’s no profit margin in feedback’. Frankly, it’s not what any candidate wants to hear, or terribly good manners either, but it is probably closer to the plain truth for the mass market recruiters. However, it really isn’t rocket science to send out an acknowledgment email to applicants to assure them that their precious CV has been received by the right department/person (a big worry for many candidates given the number of spam filters and other cyber mishaps that could befall their application online) or a politely worded message that informs them that if they haven’t heard from a recruiter by a certain date, then they haven’t made the cut. If that were standard practice, it would certainly cut out a lot of anxiety and wasted time all round.

Quite honestly, if they have received your application and they don’t get back to you at all it’s probably because, like they say in the dating game, ‘They’re just not that into you’ and you would almost certainly be wasting your time calling them. If they did think that, of the numerous responses they’d had, you were by far and away the best prospect they had for placing you with a client and earning a fee, you would definitely have heard from them like a shot. Good recruiters, at whatever level, are first and foremost fee earners. They do, however, largely get paid to put square pegs in square holes. If your CV doesn’t reflect precisely what the client said they wanted to see and they have 10 others that do, the others go forward and yours doesn’t (important career note; always tailor your CV!). Internal corporate HR recruiters don’t usually have the same financial incentive to fill a vacancy, line managers sometimes mess them about with their availability for interviews and providing the right job descriptions and other ‘paperwork’. Finance people often put a spoke in the recruitment wheel by declaring ‘recruitment freezes’ when there’s a cash flow issue and put existing hires in limbo. So, although there are many causes for the confusion that leads to the poor levels of application feedback that candidates experience, it’s the recruitment consultant that usually, and sometimes unfairly, shoulders the blame here.

What is pretty terrible, however, is where a recruiter approaches a candidate to apply for a position, has them faff about with their CV, fill in a load of paperwork, maybe take an online test and then not give candidates timely feedback on where they are in the process. If candidates have also attended interviews, it is totally unacceptable not to give them feedback on whether they were successful or not. Not calling them and hoping they’ll take the hint just isn’t appropriate. At this point, they may have their hopes up, they’ve probably had to eagerly respond to an employers questions about why they’d want the job and what they’d do if they were hired. It’s like meeting your dream date, feeling like it all went really well and then they never call you again because ‘They’re just not that into you’. Except, it’s not a date, it’s a professional business transaction that has been very cowardly and badly handled. In such circumstances, most candidates will and should call the recruiter to politely but firmly hold them and the client to account. They should also (especially graduates) apply for a number of positions to compare the experience and take it into consideration when being made an offer. If an employer can’t be bothered to get back to you, take your talent elsewhere to one who will.

If there are any HRDs or recruiters (inhouse and consultants) concerned that this might be happening on their watch please do make every effort to ensure that it doesn’t continue. Inept management of application feedback results in poor candidate experience and it reflects badly on any employer’s or consultancy’s brand. It’s unnecessary and rude and so very easy to fix. Ahem, getting down from the old soapbox now!

References ain’t what they used to be!

Every week I check in on the discussion groups of my favourite groups on LinkedIn; an interesting debate was raging in one of them about references. Years ago, when I was being trained as an HR Manager, the importance of reference checking and looking for unexplained and potentially dodgy gaps in employment in someone’s CV was impressed upon us continually. Being in the retail trade, checking on the honesty, physical fitness and reliability of a candidate, as well as the validity of any of their qualifications, was pretty essential stuff; I doubt if very much has changed on that score but it seems that other aspects of checking out a potential hire aren’t quite so straightforward any more.

On my recent visit to Hughenden, I was helpless with laughter when I read a copy of the employee ledger that Viscountess Beaconsfield (Disraeli’s wife) kept on their servants. Dismissal for impertinence, various kinds of ‘outrageous behaviour’, for being ‘incapable and unwilling’, mismanaging the household expenses and drunkenness were all pretty commonplace. Presumably, as a domestic, not having a decent reference for your next job could condemn you to a life of crime or the Workhouse. There would certainly be no question that your alleged or actual misdeeds wouldn’t be shared quite openly with whomsoever asked.

Today, trying to give or obtain a reference is fraught with complexity. Every employer still asks new employees to provide references but no one really seems to want to give one. Fear of reprisal, lawsuits or just the administrative cost of responding keep many employers or individuals from providing them at all. If you have a long employment history or you’ve been made redundant, your previous employer might not necessarily still be in business or even have your old records on file. HR departments will usually take responsibility for dealing with requests so that their line managers don’t fall foul of the law and will generally only confirm the basics such as the dates of someone’s employment and job title. Commenting on the quality of someone’s work (yes, the really useful stuff!), is what people usually want to avoid disclosing in case it lands them in a legal mire. That’s why, when people are leaving their current employer to take on a new role, I always advise them to make sure that their exit documentation has been completed properly before they leave, particularly where their new contract (as is usually the case) is dependent on the receipt of satisfactory references. Also, keep copies of appraisal documentation, any awards or commendations, emails of support etc. – it’s good for your personal development, your CV and your self esteem as much as anything else. It’s also wise not to burn your bridges and leave on as positive a note as possible, even if you can’t wait to get out!

Candidates need to be aware that they can be fired quite legitimately if it is subsequently discovered that they lied on their CV or important disclosure documents like medical questionnaires or security clearance forms. A little bit of ‘lily gilding’ is commonplace on a CV, but claiming a qualification or employment that is pure fabrication or fantasy will get you caught out in the end. Lots of employers now employ professional ‘forensic’ reference checking agencies to do the hard digging on high risk jobs to avoid this very issue.  You should also expect to routinely produce your passport as evidence of being eligible to work in the UK and copies of any qualifications you claim to have. Certain sectors also operate quite differently and it can come as a bit of a culture shock if you’re not expecting it. In the private sector, references are usually only sought once someone has been made an offer. In the public sector, it is common practice to take up references before you get an interview and it puts many people from the private sector off applying for those roles. You probably wouldn’t want your boss to know you were applying for another job and who in their right mind would offer up any other source of reference if they weren’t going to say something positive so (a) how beneficial is it to the process? (b) how awkward is it if you then don’t get the job? (c) if you don’t get the job will you wear out the welcome mat by asking the same person to supply yet another reference for yet another job that you may or may not get? It’s a conundrum isn’t it?

So, professional networking groups like LinkedIn where members can display testimonials on their profiles about their work by people who know them (and vice versa) would seem like a very elegant and attractive solution to this problem. The raging debate I  mentioned at the start of this post was, however, all about how seriously any recruiter or employer would take them.  Colleagues or clients writing constructive or positive things about one another is apparently, in the eyes of some people, quite unacceptable, likely to be ‘a pack of lies anyway’ and unlikely to make a blind bit of difference. There’s just no pleasing some people is there?

Whilst we’re on the subject of trust, the ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) have just published the results of their 2010 Leadership Trust Index – you can check out their findings on the myexecutivecareer.com site here.

Even buildings can have careers?!

I’m so sick of airports that we’re ‘staycationing’ this year and having mini-breaks instead of a holiday abroad. Anyway, we’ve just been to stay over at The Yew Tee Inn, Marco Pierre White’s lovely pub in Berkshire. It doesn’t look much from the outside to be honest and it could do with a lick of paint but the food is quite fantastic (as you’d expect), the service is warm, friendly and low key and serves the best English breakfast I’ve ever eaten. What strikes you about the place after a while, however, is that is a complete shrine to the great man’s career and others he admires.

Most of the walls upstairs are covered in brilliant and original drawings by JAK the famous Evening Standard cartoonist. Every wall, every nook and every cranny downstairs has a framed menu (including those created for Royalty), an award or a photo of himself with one his heroes and mentors (the Roux Brothers) or a famous colleague like Heston Blumenthal. There’s also this photograph of him with Gordon Ramsay’s head on a platter! Having left school in Leeds without any qualifications and going on to become the youngest ever chef at 33 to receive 3 Michelin stars, he’s certainly got plenty to be proud of career-wise. Now The Yew Tree Inn has become his ‘career showcase’.

The following day, we had a wander around Hughenden Manor, the former home of Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister. He became PM despite not being from the traditional class and background of the time and bought the house to secure his political career. As he wasn’t from the landed gentry, he felt that he needed to buy his way in. During WW2 it was code-named ‘Hillside’ and was a secret intelligence services base dedicated to aerial photo reconnaissance and making maps for RAF bombing raids on Germany. It’s now owned and operated by the National Trust and is open to the public. As I wandered round looking at all the memorabilia and drinking in its history, it struck me that buildings can have careers too; Hughenden Manor has has a career in politics, military espionage and now tourism.  It’s certainly had a much longer and more fascinating one than the rest of us mere mortals can ever aspire to!

PS: Despite all the ‘staycationing’ we managed to get Emma’s first publication up on the mygraduatecareer.com site this week ‘From Facebook to LinkedIn’ is essential reading for anyone who knows how to ‘social network’ but not how to ‘career network’. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Career dealbreakers?

I was listening to Jane Garvey and her guests on Radio 4 this morning discussing bad breath, dirty toenails or calling women “laydeeeeez” – the deal-breakers that ultimately spell doom in a ‘romantic’ relationship. Anyway, as I was wondering what to put in the blog this week, it got me to thinking about the deal-breakers of the working relationship between employee and employer.

The consulting community have, as usual, assigned a number and letter descriptor (that Tom Peters has a lot to answer for with his seven ‘S’ model!) to help corporate types understand what is after all a pretty simple idea, but it probably makes them feel much better about paying thousands in fees for the privilege of being told the blindingly obvious. Anyway, it’s known as the four ‘Cs’ of employee engagement – culture, commitment, communication and compensation. In other words, if you’re unhappy about your pay, ‘the ways things are run around here’ and how you get to find out about stuff, you’re probably much less likely to be satisfied/happy and productive at work (see, I told you it wasn’t rocket science).

Productivity at work (which is what bothers employers after all, not your ‘happiness’ as such) has long since been understood as a combination of ‘skill x will’. It takes effort and time to build expertise and talent at work and the will to apply it effectively, but motivation is highly fragile and can disappear in moments. Deal-breakers are highly personal and, rather than it being something big and obvious like bad pay and prospects,  it can often just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back that has people running out the door before you can say ‘Headhunter’. It could be the boss who demands constantly but never says thank you; it could be a promotion deemed unfairly denied or the retraction of a perk of the job like free parking or Business Class travel. If people like the company and have a greater connection with their employer’s brand, a perceived failure to live up to their ‘promises’ by the company and it’s officers can feel like even more of a betrayal. Like disappointed and disenchanted lovers, disengaged employees don’t always physically leave the company (marriage/partner/husband/wife), they can keep miserably going through the motions for quite a long time. This is why CEOs and HR departments the world over always seem to have ‘engagement’ on their agenda but few seem to pull it off, especially in a recession.

According to some ‘research’ conducted with 1,326 respondents by HireScores, they found that American companies are the most appealing work places to Brits, with US brands topping the poll. The study also showed that UK brands are desirable to many of the  respondents – companies such as British Airways (really?) and Virgin. Coca-Cola is seen as the ‘dream employer’ by more than three quarters of UK job seekers. According to the response to the question ‘which of the following companies would be your dream place to work’ the following constitute their top 10 most desirable employer brands.

1.    Coca-Cola – 76%
2.    Microsoft – 69%
3.    Google – 66%
4.    Apple – 61%
5.    Virgin – 57%
6.    Vogue – 54%
7.    Facebook – 51%
8.    Disney – 48%
9.    Kraft foods – 44%
10.  British Airways – 41%

When asked why, the research found that 76% of those polled ‘dream job’ would be at Coca-Cola, with 23% admitting it is for the ‘freebies’ and 42% saying the salary is the main reason for Coca-Cola being their dream job. Of the 48% that dream of working for Disney, 34% say it is because they believe it will have a ‘fun atmosphere’ while 28% claim it has been a ‘childhood dream’. When asked ‘do you think you will ever achieve your dream job in your dream company?’ only 16% said ‘yes’.  38% admitted that it was just a ‘fantasy’ and 21% feel it is ‘unachievable.’ So, I guess their deal-breakers could be finding that a day’s work at Disney doesn’t consist of going on any of the rides, or that if you work for a mean boss even free sugary drinks won’t make him or her any sweeter to work for.

So, what would my deal-breaker be? I’ve thought about that a lot and I can honestly say that I can pretty much work my backside off for just about any company that hires me, but what I can’t abide is a boss I don’t respect. I don’t have to like them or agree with them all the time, but I have to respect them as leaders. I have left jobs I’ve enjoyed, for companies that I liked because my old boss had gone, the new one wasn’t up to much in my book and frankly, life’s too short to put up with idiots. Funnily enough, it’s a common deal-breaker that many people identify with although it’s hardly ever one that is dealt with openly in the recruitment process (because no one wants it to look like they were the one who is difficult to get on with or rubbish at their job) or, where they exist, exit interviews (because people still want to know they can count on a decent reference).

How highly, I wonder, does this figure with any current ‘engagement’ or employer branding programmes that are currently going on? If anyone does measure employee turnover and the exit patterns of talented employees, what do they really do about that most insidious of deal-breaker – the bad boss?  Let me know if you come across any great examples, I’d love to hear about them.

The nicest thing I ate this week: A pistachio macaroon at Comptoir Gascon in Smithfield.

Most useless fact I learnt this week: The dot that appears over the letter “i” is called a tittle.