“Get hired. Love your job”
In my previous blogs I wrote extensively about employee engagement, employer brand, and changes in the industry that require a whole raft of new skills. I also mentioned the concept of on-boarding, a strategic process of engaging with new employees that goes beyond standard induction by providing information, training, mentoring and coaching throughout the transition.
These are the most important trends impacting recruitment and human resources at large right now. Transparency and social recruiting are other trends that are currently shaping the landscape of talent acquisition in the UK.
“Get hired. Love your job” is a slogan of Glassdoor, a well-known social rating site, where employees, former employees and indeed applicants leave their comments and reviews about the company culture, its management and rate the overall experience, including the recruitment process.
At SUEZ environnement Recycling & Recovery UK, we spend a great deal of time looking at the ‘recruitment route’ to ensure our applicants have a good experience.
As HR director, my priority for the next few months is to get the whole on-boarding process right. We are currently looking at developing a system that will automate much of this ‘route’ with the resourcing and HR teams playing a more integral part in the process. However, in the meantime we have developed some tools to assist the line managers in pulling together an induction plan covering the early days of a new employee’s time with us and we are currently rolling these out across the business.
To measure how well we do this, we will complete our second quarterly internal survey of new starters to compare the findings with those of the first one done earlier this year.
The recent survey showed that while overall the on-boarding experience is positive, there are areas we can improve. This time round, additionally to the internal survey, we will be analysing data and user-generated, anonymous reviews from sites like Glassdoor to ensure that we have a good mix of feedback including good and bad opinions.
We’re all using rating sites like Trip Advisor before booking holidays or a restaurant, and in the era of peer-to-peer recommendations and social recruiting, we’re under no illusion that job seekers behave differently, especially when it comes to making important life decisions. Our future employees are researching and sharing opinions about SUEZ environnement on platforms such as Glassdoor, and we welcome the feedback that will help us shape our internal structures and ultimately enable us to attract, hire and retain top talent.