Time for our quarterly look at unemployment with the news that in the three months to July the total number of jobless rose by a massive (and scary) 210,000, the equivalent of the entire population of an outer London borough.
Over to you Lord Sugar: ”Hounslow…you’re fired.”
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My book of the week is ‘Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature‘ by Mark Earls, a highly original take on marketing, consumerism, and the way we are influenced by business (or not as it happens). This book turned out to be so compelling that I placed on hold my two other excellent holiday reads, Andrew Roberts’s ‘Masters and Commanders’ and ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg Larsson, in order to read it cover-to-cover in record time.
Earls’s theory is that rather than behaving always as rational and independent individuals, we are in fact much more influenced by those around us (family, friends, colleagues) than perhaps we realise. From his perspective as an expert marketeer, albeit one who displays a healthy scepticism of his own herd, Earls combines commentary on the works of social scientists such as Desmond ‘Naked Ape’ Morris et al with his own ideas (supported by plenty of examples) as to how businesses should really approach marketing and business management. At its heart is the contention that much as businesses would like to see their influence on potential customers as a straight line relationship: advertise, market, promote = sale, the reality is infinitely more complex and depends on much information, opinion, and recommendation flowing within informal networks around the potential customer only some of which will be directly influenced by the business itself.
You may not agree with all of the book’s conclusions, and from my own perspective it would have been good to have heard more about how to get the herd moving in favour of a nascent business like GazetMe, but it is without doubt one of the most original business books I have ever read. I recommend this book highly because it will make you think. I’ll be seeking to get the herd moving myself and will report further on this as I go.
Every business has customers. And generally speaking the cost of selling to an existing customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new customer. Thus businesses will value highly any employees who can demonstrably assist with maintaining good customer relations. So how can you demonstrate expertise in customer service? The key thing to remember is that every interaction with a customer contributes to the overall impression that that customer has of your business. It may not be a direct selling opportunity, and indeed your job may have nothing to do with selling, but treat the customer well and you enhance the reputation of the business.
How then to demonstrate customer service as a competency in a CV? Again, if your role involves direct customer interaction it will be easier to give examples of good customer service that you have provided: anything that involves going beyond the call of duty (making comprehensive travel arrangements for a visiting customer perhaps, or ensuring that a customer has all the information he or she may need before a meeting without having to wade through a website to find it for themselves). If your role is not customer-facing (working in the back-office or on the factory floor) such opportunities will present themselves less readily. The important thing is to seize chances that do arise, keep a record of them for future reference, and be prepared to talk enthusiastically to prospective employers about your awareness of the fact that the customer is king.
Following hard on the heels of my earlier post about censoring your Facebook profile comes this excellent guide to managing your online profile from recruiters Badenoch & Clark. An easy to read, concise summary not only of the dangers of letting your online reputation get out of control, but also of the positive things that you can do to enhance your reputation online. A recommended read.
Well they may not be coming until 2010, but the announcement by Tesco that it is to create 800 new jobs in Glasgow as part of its growing finance business is good news. Why Glasgow? Doubtless a £5m grant from the Scottish Executive helped to sweeten the deal, but it’s likely that Tesco was looking to Scotland anyway given its previous collaboation with RBS. Whatever the reasons, the news is good for those in Scotland’s finance industry and for Glasgow in particular.
If your Facebook profile includes embarrassing photos or comments that you wouldn’t want a prospective employer to read, think hard about your privacy settings because employers are increasingly turning to social networks as part of their background checks.
As a new survey by CareerBuilder makes clear, more employers are pre-screening candidates using their social networking profiles and the results can be positive or negative. The survey revealed that 35% of employers had decided not to hire a candidate as a result of photos, comments, and information about drinking/drug taking posted on profiles in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc.
The message then: clean up your profile, or ensure that anything that might embarrass you is only viewable by your closest friends.
Hattip Fast Company
A worrying piece in Personnel Today quotes both John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI with the same observation: that the much touted creative alternatives to redundancy (e.g. 4 day weeks and job sharing) may only serve to delay redundancies rather than prevent them altogether. It may seem like stating the obvious, but these solutions only prevent redundancies if the businesses deploying them are able to return to good profitability in a relatively short timescale. With evidence from the Bank of England confirming what many have feared, namely that the recession in the UK is deeper and will last for longer that predicted, the question is: how long can businesses hold-out before more severe cuts become essential.
A further illustration of the paucity of new jobs about comes in the announcement by Diageo that it was to ‘create’ 400 new jobs at the same time as it made 900 redundancies, which is beginning to unravel. As this report in the Daily Record shows, many of those new jobs are in fact unlikely to be permanent being just six or nine month contracts offered to redundant staff. Of course if the economy starts to grow again it is quite possible that those jobs will continue beyond their initial term. But if it doesn’t, the jobs will simply dry up again. While it might be reasonable for Diageo to claim that it is doing its utmost to balance the needs of the business with the interests of its employees, the episode shows that businesses should take care when announcing job creation - non-permanent jobs are only a temporary solution, and businesses like Diageo should make this clear.
I have been thinking a lot about planning this week as we see reruns of that great JFK speech setting out his vision of putting a man on the moon:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Why is this relevant to business planning? Because it is the start of a visionary process - the setting of goals that, through detailed planning, will, in a defined time-frame, be realized. Make no mistake, this speech demonstrated many other things too (leadership in particular), but for me the importance of it was that it was the start of a process culminating in that near-unbelievable step off the lunar lander by Neil Armstrong nearly ten years later.
Business planning then is a great competency to be able to lay claim to because it combines the vision of a soothsayer, with the thoroughness of an obsessive compulsive. Sure, most of us will never reach the heights of JFK, but to be able to plan for a business, you have to be able to look at what an enterprise might achieve two, three, or even five years down the line, and then articulate for the benefit of others how that achievement might be realised.
And while it is probably true that most businesses don’t actually follow to the letter a plan as laid out over that period of time, the value of business planning cannot be underestimated. Why? Because planning is a process by which businesses can be energised with a vision. A business with a vision clearly articulated is a business that is looking to the future. The vision may not be right, the plan may change, but the vision ensures that the business is looking forward, looking to what might be, rather than merely dealing with what is.
For all of us then it’s worth taking a moment to soak up JFK’s vision and determination. Read his speech in full and remember to look to the future in your plans.
As we’ve made it a habit here to report on many of the job losses over the last six months it would seem churlish not to raise a small cheer for the news that Nissan is to create 350 new jobs at its Sunderland plant. But two thoughts spring quickly to mind: first, this is a tiny number of new jobs compared with the many that have been lost in the car industry and in the wider economy; and secondly, reading the BBC’s piece on the news reminds us that 1,200 jobs there had been cut earlier this year. For ‘new jobs’ it might almost be better to substitute ’saved jobs’ since the likelihood of these positions being filled by recently redundant members of the Nissan workforce must be pretty high.
Once again then, a small cheer; but as they’ve been saying at Lords today: ‘it ‘ain’t over yet’.
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