As a new business totally focused on employer communications in China, 2009 promises to be a pretty scary year. Only a few months ago all the talk was about the 'war for talent' and companies struggled to hire the people they needed - especially in mid management and leadership positions. We were receiving plenty of enquiries about how we could help customers develop their employer brands, asked for our ideas on tapping into new 'passive candidate' channels and were kept pretty busy working with Microsoft in particular, on their campus recruitment campaign.
How things change! Within a matter of weeks, companies crying out for solutions suddenly announced hiring freezes, or worse. All plans for 2009 seemed to have been put on the back burner and our forecasts took a hit. But then we took a good look around at the general state of employment communications in China and found more than a few reasons to be cheerful.
To put it bluntly, apart from a few innovators, the vast majority of 'talent managers' preside over a pretty underwhelming recruitment and engagement programs. In an age where all candidate traffic should be driven to the corporate career site, we still find plenty of shocking career sites - badly designed, badly maintained and often not even functional.
Only a few are working on SEO in an effort to drive their job offering high on the search engine rankings - most are still satisfied to lump their jobs onto one or more of the big job boards - Zhaopin, 51 etc - along with all the competition. Surely in 2009 the home of employment communications shouldn't be in with 62,000 other competitors for talent, but housed on your own channel, when you can hold more meaningful conversations with the best candidates.
As Rob pointed out in his recent post, pretty much all the 'ads' found in this market are jargonised job descriptions, impossible to understand even by company insiders. It is very difficult, reading any type of employment communications, to figure out what distinguishes one company from another...why should the best candidates chose you, rather than your competition? Although most big companies do have an employer brand articulated at the global level, invariably it doesn't work in China. This is generally because employer branding is such a new concept in PRC, not many people have real experience of it, and struggle trying to bring an EVP handed down from global HQ to life in this environment.
Another area that seems ripe for exploration is the posting of 'job ads' online. I still can't work out why more HR folk aren't experimenting with the massive potential of the wider internet. Posting to the open web - social networks, bbs, blogs, video hosting sites - surely offers huge payback to the companies that get it right. Of course, before you can really take advantage of this area, you need to know what to say about yourself...you need a brand communications strategy and the means to get your message out there. Anyway, one of my predictions for 2009 is that a few brave souls will take the plunge and be repaid handsomely for breaking out of the job-board and headhunter mindset.
And talking of headhunters...in September I took part in a seminar organised by CCH (of China Staff fame) - the talk was about emerging recruitment practices. Mal Bentley, Oracle's Head of Recruitment for Oracle explained how he had created an in-house headhunting team to take care of all of Oracle's recruitment in Greater China. This effort has paid huge dividends for Oracle and I expect many other large employers to follow suit and develop their own direct sourcing teams over the next few years.
So, after getting over the initial panic of head-count freezes and budget clampdowns, it is clear that there is an awful lot of work companies should be doing over the course of 2009 to make sure they are well set for the continuing battle for talent over the long term. They need to sort out their brands, their websites, their communications, their job ad distribution. They need to really get to grips with metrics - especially source of hire and true cost per hire - and they need to think about using talent management software, both pre- and post hire. They should also think about experimenting with emerging assessment tools, psychometric, aptitude and others, as part of the talent acquisitions and evaluation mix. Yes, there is a ton to do...so Oxus will be back with a vengeance in 2009 to move the market along.
MB
31st December 2008
Showing posts with label 2009 forecast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2009 forecast. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Recruiters feel the pinch as jobs contract
This article is interesting for the insights the writers have found from a number of senior managers of international recruitment firms around the world.
Whilst none of them paint a rosy picture of their businesses for the next year or so, they do identify some areas of opportunity for recruiters, such as assisting in the downsizing process with counseling or by further developing their offerings as a temping agency - a possible indication that job-hunters might be well advised to prepare themselves mentally to take on temporary positions or roles with shorter contract terms.
_____________________________________________________________
ARTICLE:
By Deborah Brewster, Brooke Masters and Sundeep Tucker
Published: December 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 27 2008 02:00
Now that the banking slump has spread to the real economy, global recruiting firms are feeling the pinch.
In the past two months, US-based high-end head-hunters such as Korn/Ferry International and Heidrick & Struggles and staffing groups Adecco of Switzerland and Randstad in the Netherlands have all announced falling revenue and shrinking headcounts.
Banks and housebuilders, two big sources of revenue for recruitment groups, are shedding staff by the tens of thousands, and most other companies are being cautious about taking on commitments. Candidates have also grown more wary about changing jobs.
That means searches take longer and there are fewer jobs to fill, cutting into completion fees. Many companies are also cutting back on retainers paid to high-end firms, and some are taking 90 days to pay their bills instead of the customary 30.
"I think 2009 is going to be a batten-down-the-hatches year," says Alistair Cox, chief executive of Hays, a UK recruiter that focuses on mid-level professionals in 27 countries.
The slump is most pronounced in the US and the UK and in the financial services sector. According to recruiters Morgan McKinley, there were 3,780 vacancies in London's financial service sector in November, down 59 per cent from the same month last year. The total also represented a 30 per cent drop from October.
"The landscape has changed significantly. 2009 will be a shocker and probably half of 2010," said Jonathan Evans, chairman of Sammon Associates, a London-based recruiter.
Russ Gerson, chief executive of Gerson Group, a financial services recruitment and consultancy firm agreed.
"The bottom just fell out in September," he said. "In this environment, there are going to be serious cutbacks among recruiters ... We will see the large firms let go of a lot of people, and a lot of the very small firms will go out of business."
Headhunters never have much visibility on their revenues, but tough times make the future even harder to predict, said Steve Ingham, chief executive of Michael Page International, which focuses on higher-paid banking and other professional sectors. "Can I predict what is going to happen in six months? No," he said.
Germany and France remain relatively strong, as do parts of Latin America. But the slump recently spread to Asia, where several key markets - Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan - are now in recession.
The latest Asia survey of 3,000 hiring managers by Hudson, the recruitment firm, showed a marked fall in optimism, with companies admitting their approach towards hiring had moved decisively from "wait and see" towards downsizing.
Mike Game, chief executive of Hudson Global Resources Asia, said Hong Kong was suffering because of its comparatively higher levels of front office jobs in the banking sector, while hiring growth in China had dropped to single digits.
Christopher Sykes, managing director, Asia, of EWK International, which focuses on emerging markets, said companies in the region were not pushing recruitment plans in order to conserve cash.
There are bright spots: public sector recruiting, restructuring and bankruptcy experts, and outplacement services, where recruitment firms are bought in to assist companies to downsize by offering career counselling.
Matthew Bennett, head of the Hong Kong office of Robert Walters, said that his firm had diversified to reduce reliance on financial services, and covered a range of sectors including retail, IT, telecoms and supply chain logistics.
Korn Ferry was this month hired to find a replacement for Tim Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, following his appointment as US Treasury secretary by incoming president Barack Obama. But that didn't stop the Los Angeles-based company from saying it would cut 15 per cent of its workforce to save $50m a year.
Recruiters who also provide temporary workers are also doing better than those focused exclusively on permanent hiring.
Investors have been negative about recruitment companies for months. Korn Ferry and Heidrick & Struggles have each seen their share prices fall by 75 per cent in the past year, and Hays and Adecco are down by about 60 per cent since their July 2007 peaks. Analysts predict staffing agency revenues and earnings are likely to stay low for at least the next 18 months.
"Labour markets tend to lag the real economy by up to 12 months," says Kean Marden, a Singer analyst. "Even if the real economy bottomed out in 2009, unemployment would continue to rise until 2010."
But investors may not wait that long. After the dotcom crash, Michael Page's share price nearly doubled in a year when its earnings barely moved, Mr Marden said. "It completely rerated in anticipation," he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Whilst none of them paint a rosy picture of their businesses for the next year or so, they do identify some areas of opportunity for recruiters, such as assisting in the downsizing process with counseling or by further developing their offerings as a temping agency - a possible indication that job-hunters might be well advised to prepare themselves mentally to take on temporary positions or roles with shorter contract terms.
_____________________________________________________________
ARTICLE:
By Deborah Brewster, Brooke Masters and Sundeep Tucker
Published: December 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 27 2008 02:00
Now that the banking slump has spread to the real economy, global recruiting firms are feeling the pinch.
In the past two months, US-based high-end head-hunters such as Korn/Ferry International and Heidrick & Struggles and staffing groups Adecco of Switzerland and Randstad in the Netherlands have all announced falling revenue and shrinking headcounts.
Banks and housebuilders, two big sources of revenue for recruitment groups, are shedding staff by the tens of thousands, and most other companies are being cautious about taking on commitments. Candidates have also grown more wary about changing jobs.
That means searches take longer and there are fewer jobs to fill, cutting into completion fees. Many companies are also cutting back on retainers paid to high-end firms, and some are taking 90 days to pay their bills instead of the customary 30.
"I think 2009 is going to be a batten-down-the-hatches year," says Alistair Cox, chief executive of Hays, a UK recruiter that focuses on mid-level professionals in 27 countries.
The slump is most pronounced in the US and the UK and in the financial services sector. According to recruiters Morgan McKinley, there were 3,780 vacancies in London's financial service sector in November, down 59 per cent from the same month last year. The total also represented a 30 per cent drop from October.
"The landscape has changed significantly. 2009 will be a shocker and probably half of 2010," said Jonathan Evans, chairman of Sammon Associates, a London-based recruiter.
Russ Gerson, chief executive of Gerson Group, a financial services recruitment and consultancy firm agreed.
"The bottom just fell out in September," he said. "In this environment, there are going to be serious cutbacks among recruiters ... We will see the large firms let go of a lot of people, and a lot of the very small firms will go out of business."
Headhunters never have much visibility on their revenues, but tough times make the future even harder to predict, said Steve Ingham, chief executive of Michael Page International, which focuses on higher-paid banking and other professional sectors. "Can I predict what is going to happen in six months? No," he said.
Germany and France remain relatively strong, as do parts of Latin America. But the slump recently spread to Asia, where several key markets - Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan - are now in recession.
The latest Asia survey of 3,000 hiring managers by Hudson, the recruitment firm, showed a marked fall in optimism, with companies admitting their approach towards hiring had moved decisively from "wait and see" towards downsizing.
Mike Game, chief executive of Hudson Global Resources Asia, said Hong Kong was suffering because of its comparatively higher levels of front office jobs in the banking sector, while hiring growth in China had dropped to single digits.
Christopher Sykes, managing director, Asia, of EWK International, which focuses on emerging markets, said companies in the region were not pushing recruitment plans in order to conserve cash.
There are bright spots: public sector recruiting, restructuring and bankruptcy experts, and outplacement services, where recruitment firms are bought in to assist companies to downsize by offering career counselling.
Matthew Bennett, head of the Hong Kong office of Robert Walters, said that his firm had diversified to reduce reliance on financial services, and covered a range of sectors including retail, IT, telecoms and supply chain logistics.
Korn Ferry was this month hired to find a replacement for Tim Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, following his appointment as US Treasury secretary by incoming president Barack Obama. But that didn't stop the Los Angeles-based company from saying it would cut 15 per cent of its workforce to save $50m a year.
Recruiters who also provide temporary workers are also doing better than those focused exclusively on permanent hiring.
Investors have been negative about recruitment companies for months. Korn Ferry and Heidrick & Struggles have each seen their share prices fall by 75 per cent in the past year, and Hays and Adecco are down by about 60 per cent since their July 2007 peaks. Analysts predict staffing agency revenues and earnings are likely to stay low for at least the next 18 months.
"Labour markets tend to lag the real economy by up to 12 months," says Kean Marden, a Singer analyst. "Even if the real economy bottomed out in 2009, unemployment would continue to rise until 2010."
But investors may not wait that long. After the dotcom crash, Michael Page's share price nearly doubled in a year when its earnings barely moved, Mr Marden said. "It completely rerated in anticipation," he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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