CIPD

Confluence time

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As ever, the best laid schemes of mice and men and all that…..tomorrow is the start of the Annual Conference of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, or #CIPD11, and I should be a lot better prepared than I am.

Not only have I no idea what I’m going to wear, but to add to that I’m speaking on the Wednesday (note to self, only ever accept invitations to speak on the first day of a conference to ensure enjoyment of the evening entertainment) and I have no idea what I’m going to say…..

(The session is at 11.15 on Wednesday called, “Harnessing the power of social media” if you want to come and laugh at me making a fool of myself)

This is also the first time that I’ve been to conference in a LONG time (think Harrogate) and I’d like to make the most of it. And it seems that I’m not the only one. Rob Jones was writing this morning about the conference and it appears he too is making an overdue return.

Coincidence? Probably not.  A lot of people attending who I know are, like Rob, my contacts on social media. And this is a population that it seems the CIPD have been going out of their way to engage with and bring on board the mother ship.  And I have to say, I doff my cap to them, to the likes of Natalia Thomson, Johanna Ratcliff, Rob Blevin and of course Jackie Orme shouldn’t go without mention. (Yes I know there are others, but this is a blog post not the New Year Honours…..)

Now the CIPD and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. Or perhaps more correctly, I haven’t seen eye to eye with the CIPD (I can’t talk for them but I would imagine I may have been seen as a bit of a pain in the backside from time to time). But as a membership organisation, they should be looking to engage with all their members, not just the institutionalised, and I think for too long some of us have been forgotten. And together we can make the profession stronger and better served. (That is the confluence joke……geddit?)

So, I have to say that I have a spring in my step this afternoon – I’m feeling really quite excited and enthused about the next few days and looking at the Conference and Exhibition with fresh new eyes.  Hopefully I won’t be disappointed, but I’ll let you know if I am….you can be sure of that.

Now in the meantime, is brown the new black? Has anyone got any good jokes about social media? And where on earth did I put those train tickets……?

Recruiters: Stop playing God

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Sometimes it is the small things that remind you of a bigger issue.  I was in my hotel room in Berlin on Wednesday night when I saw a tweet from Katie McNab, Recruiter for PepsiCo about women who use their partner’s email addresses on job applications. In her words,

“It makes them look like children who can’t be trusted with their own comms”

We had a bit of back and forth over the subject and I think it is fair to say that there was little or no common ground (you can see some of the conversation here).  Katie was firm to her view that this was “inappropriate” and given that she is a recruiter, speaks at conferences and well regarded, I guess I have to bow to her superior knowledge – again in her words,

“placing judgment on people is part of the job”

and according to Katie, I was in the minority (although looking through the timeline there was only one person who agreed and one who didn’t – which is a kind of soviet democracy!).

But it has been niggling away at me. I did a little interview with DriveThru HR where we talked about the skills gaps that we are facing in the global economy.  Manpower, BCG and the CIPD have recently reported that managers were finding it more difficult to attract the right talent.  Good candidates are staying put and have a world of opportunities at their feet should they wish to move. Put simply, recruiting “talent” is going to get harder.

If you listened to the twittersphere and blogosphere you’d understandably be mistaken for believing that the answer is to “go social” and of course that is an element of changing attraction strategies.  But it seems to me we also need to challenge some of the institutional slothfulness of in-house recruiters. Katie is right, we all make assumptions about people, that is human, but we need to be challenging these and minimising them – not celebrating them in public.

Recruitment isn’t about judging people, it is about discovering people.

And recruiters need to stop playing God.

As well as being quasi-discriminatory (although I am sure not in intent) diminishing an application because of a candidate’s CHOSEN means of communication is either naïve, arrogant or idiotic in the extreme – I really can’t decide which.  There is absolutely no legal, morale, organisational or rational argument behind doing so. There could be a million reasons that an individual chooses to include a partner’s email on an application but that is their choice.

Increasingly we will need to be searching for talent, lifting up rocks, thinking creatively about how we bring people in, how we train them, how we help them to meet the requirements of the job and leave our own prejudices and judgments at the door.  The good companies and recruiters will get this and make a name or career for themselves. The bad ones? Well they’ll keep talking the talk in public, but failing to walk the walk where it really matters.

Which, let’s be honest, is no bad thing really.

It just makes it easier for the rest of us.

Dogma eat Dogma

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Let me state something very clearly, HR people do not like new legislation. Why do I say this? Because of a wonderful statement issued by the Institute of Directors Director General, Miles Templeman,

“The HR lobby is the biggest vested interest of all when it comes to the subject of employment law. When governments create complex regulation, employers are forced to increase their HR budgets to ensure compliance”

Really? As someone who has worked through the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act, the Data Protection Act, the National Minimum Wage, the Fixed term Workers Regulations (to name but a few) and is currently struggling with the Agency Workers Regulations am I really enthused and excited about new legislation?

And if I spoke to my peers and contacts they would probably say the same. So why would Templeman say that? Because the CIPD had the temerity to suggest that productivity shortfalls in the UK economy, might not be due to “red tape” but might actually be due to,

“relatively low rates of capital investment, long-standing deficiencies in the supply and quality of work-related skills, poor management of available skills in the workplace”

Radical thinking………….

If the IoD calling anyone else a “vested interest” group in itself wasn’t ironic, the thing is that HR people are probably the LEAST likely to want new legislation. And the CIPD aren’t suggesting in any shape or form that there should be more. Instead they seem to be arguing that the problems might lie elsewhere – which sounds like a sensible conversation to have, whether you agree or not. And given that Templeman is a board member of Young Enterprise, you would have thought that he might have some sympathy.

Legislation isn’t introduced because people are already compliant.  The Minimum Wage was introduced because people were being paid ridiculously low hourly rates, the Working Time Directive was introduced to give employees some protection against excessive working hours. I could go on. What we really need to do is have a sensible debate about how to improve the UK economic performance AND improve social justice, free from sound bite and dogma. And that is going to take a whole lot more than chucking out the rule book.

Funny thing is, the IoD know that………..they just have a vested interest.

Ethical choices define us. Who are you?

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A little while ago, not long after the banking crisis, I was asked what I thought the role of HR was (or should have been) in preventing or avoiding the institutional failures that led to the meltdown. When I mentioned that I thought HR had a role to play as the organisational conscience there were very mixed views in the room.  My view was and remains that you cannot claim that HR is adding value to a business and then in the same breath deny any responsibility for organisational failure. It is a quid pro quo.

As a profession, we have a Code of Conduct and today the CIPD is launching a consultation on that code. What is ethical? What is unethical? And what are the grey areas…the ones that we really REALLY need to discuss?

  • Who does HR work for and where is the balance of power?
  • Can you operate processes and procedures that are knowingly discriminatory because they are too complicated, too expensive to change?
  • Is it fair game to use any source to get information on an employee, or a future recruit?
  • If you felt the future security of employment, the shareholder investment was at risk through malpractice, would you speak out? And to whom?
  • Would you manage out an employee who you believed was a victim of sexual harassment  at the behest of the senior manager who you felt had harassed them?
  • Would you provide personal details of an employee to the CEO if you were uncomfortable with their reason for wanting them?

I guess what I’m asking is,

“Do you know what is expected of you as a professional?”

Regardless of whether you are a CIPD member or not. If you work in recruitment, the law or PR; what standards do you hold dear? And for my American friends, what can we learn from your side of the pond?

I’d really like to hear as wide a debate as possible on this one, a range of opinions.  We have the chance to make our voices heard and steer the agenda….please don’t overlook this opportunity. Comment here, comment on the Linkedin discussion group, comment on the CIPD website, Tweet about it, blog about it…….

Make your views known and encourage others to do the same.

Going back to the original discussion that started this post. Talking personally ……..I needed to be able to look myself in the mirror every morning.  I need to work, that is an undeniable truth.  But I also need to like myself.  And in this world there is no gig good enough to trade the latter off for the former. A line needs to be drawn, but where I draw that line will be very different to where you draw yours. And that is the value of having a professional code.

Ethical choices define us. Who are you?