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This post may offend some readers, recruiters or not. But only because it’s going to cut close to the bone for many.

And I don’t care if I sound old-fashioned, because actually it’s nothing to do with ‘fashion’ or ‘generation’. It’s got everything to do with basic good manners and respect for other people.

So here goes… How did it get to be “OK” for people to be late for everything?

Because as far as I am concerned, it’s not OK.

In recent years it seems that a meeting set to start at 9 am, for some people means in the general vicinity of any time which starts with the numeral ‘9’. Like 9.30 for example.

People drift in at 9.10 or 9.20, or even later. And they smile warmly at the waiting group, as they unwrap their bacon sandwich, apparently totally unconcerned that others have been there since five to nine, prepared and ready to start.

10 people kept waiting in a meeting for 20 minutes, while some selfish pratt who idles his way via the coffee shop, is actually 20 minutes times 10, which is 200 minutes wasted – while you keep us waiting because you did not catch the earlier bus. That is over 3 hours wasted. By you! How much has that cost the business? Shall I send you an invoice?

And an arrangement to meet someone for a business meeting at a coffee shop at 3 pm, more often than not means at 3.10 you get a text saying ‘I am five minutes away’ which inevitably means 10 minutes, and so you wait for 15 or 20 minutes, kicking your heels in frustration.

And often these ‘latecomers’ are people who have requested the meeting in the first place, are asking for your help, or are selling something. Fat chance mate!

And of course this has massive application to the recruitment industry, where lateness is both commonplace and hugely damaging to your personal and corporate brand.

And it’s not only business.

Why do people, invited for a dinner party at 7.30, think its cool to arrive at 8.30? It’s rude. It’s inconsiderate. And it’s selfish, as I witnessed in a coffee shop near my home one weekend. Three “ladies who lunch” (a species not confined to, but heavily represented on, the lower North Shore of Sydney) were chatting loudly at the table next to me. One inquired what time the ‘drinks do’ was that night. The reply for all the world to hear was ‘Oh 7.30, but we won’t get there till 9 because by then it will have warmed up and all the interesting people will have arrived’. Nice. Imagine if everyone took that view. Cocktail parties would start at 3 am eventually.

Or a dinner at a restaurant where I was meeting two other couples. My wife was away, so I was flying solo. I arrived at two minutes to eight for an eight o’clock booking. At 8.20, I was into my second glass of Pinot and at half-past I got a text saying ‘on the way’. We finally were all seated at 8.45. There were not even attempted excuses from either of the two couples, who seemed oblivious to the fact I might actually have got there at the agreed time. Meanwhile I had put a huge dent in the bottle of Pinot, and was ready to go home.

And it is not that we lead ‘busy lives’. That’s a given, we all do, and it’s a cop out to use that as an excuse. It’s simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs. And technology makes it worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late.

Rubbish.

You are rude. And inconsiderate.

And I act on it to. My dentist kept me waiting 50 minutes not long ago. I walked out, past a literally open-mouthed receptionist who had never seen a patient act on their frustration, only to get a frantic call from the dentist herself as I got into my car.

Sure she was “busy”, another patient took longer than she expected, blah blah.

But hold on, I am busy too! I would not keep her waiting 45 minutes if she came to see me as a candidate. And yet I am HER customer. I told her I have been coming to you for 15 years but don’t take me for granted. See fewer patients in a day if you have to, but see me on time or close to it. She has never kept me waiting again.

Me? Am I ever late? Sure, sometimes. That’s inevitable even with the best intentions. But I never plan to be late. I never ‘let time slide’ because my stuff is more important than yours.

I am not talking about the odd occasion of lateness. I am talking about people who are routinely late. In fact, never on time. You know who I am talking about!

And certainly I consider serial lateness a character flaw which I take into account when working out who to promote, who to hire and who to count amongst my real friends.

It’s that important.

Last week I blogged on why so many recruiters have a shallow understanding of what ‘competitive’ in our business actually means.

And so how do we thrive in a competitive world? What is the way to differentiate in 2010 and beyond?

Well it’s not cool to say it out loud, but as far as I am concerned it’s what technology cannot do that our clients will continue to pay for.

It’s a source of constant amazement to me how many of us in this industry have been completely seduced by the technology spin doctors. We are terrified that the Internet will wipe out our business. We agonise over social networking and how it will change the talent-sourcing model. We quake at the power of LinkedIn, and we are hypnotised by the thought our competitors will develop a piece of technology that somehow will make our service redundant.
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Don’t get me wrong. Technology is reshaping our business and having leading-edge technology is crucial, in as much as it allows your consultants to compete on an even playing field, and gives them the tools to give clients and talent what they really want.

But technology will not destroy our industry. At least not all of it – and definitely not the part we want!

And here is why.  Finding a job or recruiting a new staff member is not a commodity purchase. We are not dealing with the same psychology which drives i-Tunes, e-trade or amazon.com.

This is important because it means that the real value provided by quality recruiters will still have a market.  That is, screening, evaluating, persuading, assessing, negotiating, advising, consulting and acting, as an advocate for employers will still have tremendous value.

It is on these competencies that we need to compete.

But it’s also more than interpersonal recruiting skills (which by the way were largely lost during the decade-long hiring boom that preceded the GFC). Talent management is where the real battle for recruitment dominance will be fought. Building talent communities and managing effective communications channels with those communities is where the holy grail lies.

And we will need to compete in other ways too. Customers will increasingly call the tune. And by customers I mean talent as well as clients. The customer experience will build or tarnish your brand like never before. This is where social media will be able to destroy your business. Get it wrong and your brand will be brought down at viral speed. That’s where we have to compete. How we deal with customers and manage their expectations and experience with us.

Lack of personal interaction is doing our industry no favours. In fact I consider it one of our deepest flaws. Many recruiters use technology to avoid connecting personally with talent, when in fact the real advantage of technology is to get much closer to many more quality candidates.

So social media and technology generally is a threat to you only if you fail to recognise this fact…

… there will continue to be a market for tailored, personalised, high quality business solutions based on an advisory, consultative model, where access to talent is the differentiator.

Don’t be sucked in to competing on the basis of who can commoditise what we do the best. Don’t play the low margin, process game.

As your competitors claim, “we are bigger, have cooler technology and therefore we can do it faster and cheaper” or technology-driven platforms push to cut out recruiters altogether, your premise for doing business is…

“I can solve your problem because I understand your need and I know where the talent live”

During my recent RCSA speaking tour around Australasia I spoke to over 500 Australian and 150 New Zealander recruiters, on the upbeat topic of ‘Riding the Recovery’.

I have to admit it was refreshing to talk about positive ideas and strategies to ensure we take advantage of the opportunities presented by an economic revival.

One of the key areas I covered was the use of Social Media as a sourcing and influencing tool for our industry going forward. I have already blogged on my finding that Australian recruiters use Twitter in tiny numbers and followed that up with a similar story on New Zealand. However, I also used this opportunity to survey (by show of hands, so not very scientific), the use of LinkedIn by New Zealand recruiters.

It turns out that in Auckland and Christchurch, only about 70% of recruiters have a LinkedIn Account (I have to say I am wondering what the other 30% are waiting for). However when asked whether their LinkedIn accounts were worked ‘actively’ with status updates, participation in groups and all the other available applications, only between 10% and 20% kept hands raised.

I am no LinkedIn expert, but it seems self-evident that it’s a great branding tool, a fantastic sourcing tool and an exceptional way to connect with otherwise inaccessible people-not to mention its research capabilities.

I have spoken to clients who acknowledge freely that the first thing they do when assessing a new recruitment service provider, is to review their LinkedIn profile, including an evaluation of history, stability and quality of the recruiters network.

Personally, I could do far more with my LinkedIn account. However I do review it every day, participate in groups, answer questions, update my status and add connections every week. I have also connected my blog and Twitter account to my Linked In page, making an attempt to integrate my Social Media messaging and content. And it works. Even though I am only using the free functionality of Linked In, so far I have hired new Aquent employees from LinkedIn, won clients, secured speaking engagements and generated publicity in many countries and many media.

So Kiwi recruiters, let’s get with the programme. Slow to buy into Twitter I can half understand.

But if you are not LinkedIn… you surely will be left out.

Over the past week I have conducted RCSA seminars for over 150 New Zealand Recruiters in Auckland and Christchurch. The topic was “Riding the Recovery” and part of my session was on Social Media and how we need to build that technology into our talent sourcing strategies.

Well, I grabbed this opportunity to conduct a little mini-survey on the Twitter habits of attendees. It was totally unscientific and very impromptu, so take from this what you will, but I was somewhat surprised to find that only 5% of the attendees (by show of hands) in Auckland, and probably even less in Christchurch, actually have a Twitter account at all.

I am not sure what I expected. Having done a similar survey in three large Australian cities late last year, I should have been prepared because the Australian average was only between 5% and 10% as well. But on the other hand, Australians and New Zealanders are massive early-adopters of technology, and at the general level have swarmed into Social Media use. Why not recruiters?

I think this is going to have to change – and fast. New Zealand recruiters won’t be able to rely on job boards for candidates going forward. The cream of candidates, especially passive ones, will need to be sourced through an increasingly fragmented variety of channels. In my view Social Media will be one of those channels.

But for recruiters, Twitter will be far more than a simple source of candidates to fill todays’ job order. More important than that is that smart use of Social Media is an opportunity to be perceived as an expert in your industry niche. Recruiters are going to need to use Twitter to foster relationships (and not to spam people by the way), build credibility, and actually interact with communities of people they might want to place in the future, or who are influencers in their area of interest. That will be increasingly powerful for those who get it right.

In my view it’s like this. Social media remains a TOOL – not a strategy – to reach people. There are still tons of people who will not be found on social networking sites. Recruiters don’t want to be seduced by Social Media and the hype surrounding it — but equally recruiters must acknowledge its’ role, and figure out how to work it into the talent acquisition mix

So Kiwis (and Aussies, by the way) get to it! Build social media into your communications armory. When that talent shortage comes roaring back, you are going to need it!

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I am no social media expert. I am not even that familiar with the ‘ins and outs’ of Twitter, although I have built up 3600 followers during my nine month as a Tweeter. Truthfully, I only plunged into the social media world, including this blog, because I am a recruiter, and I run a business that works in the digital and marketing arena. I felt I needed to know what the medium offered, how it worked, what I could contribute to the conversation, and how our clients and talent could benefit it from it.What better way to do that than diving right in!

And even though I am learning, I am in no position to offer advice on how to use the social networks.

But I can tell you why I won’t follow you back on Twitter.

I suppose I get 5 -10 new followers a day on average. And when I get time – it might be a few days later — I will click on each of their Twitter profiles and see who they are and what they talk about. And, often, I will follow them back if I feel they will add to the conversation and help me build my knowledge and reach. I imagine most people do the same.

But often I won’t follow back. And just recently I was pondering why I choose not to press ‘follow’. My first thought was that the decision was simply intuitive. But when I went deeper, I realised that I do have a sort of mental check-list I flick through when deciding to follow, or not.

Firstly I look at the picture or avatar of the new follower. No avatar is a big #fail, and personally I prefer a real picture of a real person. Twitter is about engagement and conversation, and it’s so much easier for that to happen if you have an image of the person you are tweeting with.

Then I read their most recent tweets. That is key. Lots of one-word Tweets or meaningless phrases and it’s a ‘no follow’. Loads of trivial stuff about how much beer was drunk last Friday, or what they like on toast in the morning, also means ‘no follow’. Self-promoting ads for products or services, or endless streams of automatically generated tweets and it’s a no-go too. I also tend not to follow people who tweet bad language, or who have a penchant for being routinely argumentative and mean-spirited in their comments. That is not what Twitter is about for me and certainly not what I want to see in my Twitter stream each day.

Of course I read the bio. I am looking for some connection. In my case a recruiter, or a marketer, or someone in design. But any field can still get a follow from me, if the bio is interesting and well-written. No bio means almost certainly no follow.

My next criteria is location. Not that I will eliminate anyone because of where they live! No, in fact the worldwide reach of Twitter is a major appeal. But if there is no location on the profile, it leaves a gap in my mental picture of who this is and so they are less interesting and less trusted.

I am always disappointed if the new follower does not list their web address. A link to a blog or a company website obviously adds huge insight to who the person is. It adds credibility too, and it will certainly weigh heavily in my decision to follow you back or not.

But it doesn’t end there. I usually have a quick look at your following/follower ratio. This is not a deal breaker, but in conjunction with other measures, such as Tweet content, can be a knock-out factor. For example, you are following 9697 people and three are following you back. That is a problem.

Twitter, like a lot of technology, can waste lots of time. But I want to extract value out of my involvement on Twitter. So I am rigorous in screening who I follow, and I expect others will be with me too. It’s worth the effort because you end up with a Tweetdeck full of interesting relevant comment at best – and humorous, harmless chit-chat at worst.

Last week I blogged on the importance of customer service in the recruitment industry, and how Aquent is surveying customer satisfaction, and rewarding our staff based on customer feedback

My story was picked up by recruitment journalists in Australia and the UK, and I have been fascinated by the feedback this concept has received. Comments on my blog are all favorable, but I have also had feedback that the concept is flawed because our staff ‘will be worrying about satisfying customers instead of focussing on making money’. In particular, some critics regard spending too much time on candidates as foolhardy because, in the words of one individual, ‘Candidates don’t pay your fees’.

Frankly, this kind of comment gives me tremendous encouragement. That competitors in the staffing industry can be so naive, and so blind to the power of referral, recommendation and repeat business, driven by satisfied customers, makes me very confident about the future of Aquent, and the careers of our staff.

Two days after my blog, came an article in the Australian on-line newsletter Recruiter Daily. Robert Godden, a HR consultant with People Magic conducted research that involved collecting 85 job ads (50 with agencies, 35 with employers), all of which invited potential applicants to call a specific person for more information.

In the course of making 85 phone calls, Godden was only able to reach seven of the nominated contacts, all of whom were from agencies.He left 76 messages for the remaining recruiters (after two numbers rang out).The “unbelievable” result of the experiment was that only seven recruiters returned Godden’s calls — less than 10 per cent.

After ringing 50 of the numbers again a week later, he got through to two recruiters and only a further four (out of 48) returned his messages – again, less than 10 per cent.

As a career recruiter, proud of what we do, I find this result supremely depressing. We run expensive ads and invite people (customers in my view) to call us. Then we ignore them. It is disrespectful. It’s a sad indictment of the way recruiters are managed and coached. But it is also a supreme opportunity. An opportunity for forward thinking recruiters to differentiate and provide a level of service that leaves customers “wowed,” Frankly right now, it seems just returning a call might ‘wow’ most candidates replying to ads.

Talent is the only real currency a staffing company has. It’s what clients pay us for and it’s going to get increasingly difficult to access quality talent as the recovery takes hold. Job boards will become less effective and in any event they only tap into the active talent market. The recruitment company that owns the talent market.. will own the market

Candidates as customers? It’s a no brainer surely!

At Aquent we have a global strategy to improve the client and talent experience. We know we have much work to do. But we are tackling the task with gusto. We plan to stand out by hiring people with the right attitude, coaching customer service standards, measuring our customer satisfaction independently, and then rewarding staff according to what the customer thinks.

I have been in business a long time. And all of that time has been in the rough and tumble world of recruitment and staffing. Having worked as a recruiter, manager, and owner of recruitment businesses all over the world, I have seen my share of dubious business practices. Indeed I have, sadly, been witness to many instances of outrageously deceitful and unethical behavior. We have all seen it no doubt.

In business, as in life generally, we expect to confront people who are dishonest. We know they are there, and we become better at identifying them before too much harm is done. But what really gets me is that category of person in business who preaches ethical behavior, even believes they are whiter than white, but when put to the mildest of tests, will collapse in a heap of moral compromise at best, and resort to outright duplicity at worst.

In a strange way I have even come to prefer dealing with crooks who knows they are crooks, rather then those people who believe there are degrees of honesty. People who somehow feel you can leverage acting decently against the amount of money involved. You cannot. Honesty is like being a virgin. You are, or you are not. You can’t be a virgin when it suits you.

I remember a conversation with a manager a long time ago that sticks with me as an example. I had recently taken over a business, and inherited some of the middle-management. The situation was that we had billed a client a large fee. The placement was made in Asia and the fee was in Singapore dollars. The client, based in the US, paid the invoice with US dollars, a value that was almost double the original, correct amount. I asked the manager of the office handling the deal “what do you propose to do”? The reply was along the lines of, “well normally I would tell the client about the error, but this is a large fee and we are having a poor month in my office, so I feel we should let it slide”. Of course I quickly smothered that idea, but I knew I had a serious problem. What is the mindset of a person who will effectively steal from our clients? What is the moral fortitude of someone who will compromise any standard of honesty “because they are having a poor month”.

In 2009 I saw so many examples of this “rubber-band morality”. Clients, candidates and others closer to home, have managed to surprise even me with how tenuous is their grasp of what is right, and what is wrong. Yes, times are tough and money is tight. But what we have to understand is that it’s in exactly these circumstances that honesty and moral strength counts. Anyone can be ‘ethical’ if there is no temptation to test your ethical fibre. It’s very easy to see yourself as ‘honest’ if there is nothing financial at stake to give you pause for thought.

I love the competitive nature of the recruitment business. Anyone I have worked with or against will attest that I ask nor give any quarter in the commercial battle. Winning is important. Success is what we strive for.

But not at any cost.

To me its obvious that in business, or indeed any commercial interaction, you play it as hard as you can, but stick by the rules, retain your humanity and ensure that you will always be able to look every person you deal with in the eye.

Don’t be like a client who said to me once, as he lied his way out of paying a bill , “Greg, I am an honest man, but business is business”

Sad and pathetic

I have been reading quite a bit lately about creating a personal brand online. The subject fascinates me, not least because I see so many people making a total hash of it by the inane things they post on Facebook, Twitter, blog replies, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn.

But recently I had such a powerful personal example happen to me, that I feel compelled to share it with you. This small Twitter exchange taught me a huge lesson in how quickly “Brand You” can be harmed by inappropriate online behaviour.

You see recentlyI was shocked to read a Tweet which, frankly, made a very disparaging remark, directed at me!

TweetDeck advised me I had several “mentions” overnight, and I glanced through them, smiling at some banter with followers, until I struck the Tweet that, for reasons still unknown to me, took a personal shot at me, by name. Look, it wasn’t a vicious remark. But it was personal, it was negative, it was totally unprovoked and of course, it was very public.

Now if this has not happened to you, I can confirm it is an unpleasant experience. The comment was untrue, and I hope it is not how anyone views me. So it rankled! I obviously clicked on the perpetrators’ Twitter page and found that I had never even heard of the guy! Never had anything to do with him in the real world or the online world, although I did work out he is a Twitter follower of mine (or was!). Nor was his comment in response to any Tweet of mine. It was not even directed to me, but to a third party, about me.

I searched for his LinkedIn page and found he holds a nothing-job in a widely unrespected company. I was not sure if this made me feel better or worse! I racked my brain as to why this stranger would attack me, publicly. I won’t lie to you. It stung. However after about 10 minutes I started to lose interest and decided not to respond in any public way. I resolved to forget about it.

But that’s when it got really interesting. Over the next few hours my Twitter DM inbox (Direct Message) began to fill up with fellow Tweeters who took great umbrage at the remark this guy had made. I had at least 10 in a single day, and the theme was “who is this guy?” and “Who does he think he is” and more specifically “What a rude jerk”, and interestingly “I will never use him or his company again.”

One follower –who I do not know personally at all, and only vaguely remember as an online friend, had done his research on the “offender” and Direct Messaged me to say that he was amazed this guy was in the advertising industry “because he has no idea of how to manage his personal brand”

And it was that remark that struck me hard. In a flash, I realised that it was not MY reputation that had suffered as a result of this online rudeness. It was the reputation and brand of the person who made the remark that had taken a huge hit. Just one Tweet and provoked such an active response from my followers, all echoing disapproval. The question is, how many people read that Tweet and thought “idiot”?

And so the lesson was learned. By me, if not by the person who chose to hurl cyber-insults. Online, we are what we write. In real life we can make a risqué joke to close friends because they “know” us and take the joke in context. In real interpersonal situations we can pass the odd sarcastic comment, accompanied by a smile, and the receiver feels no hurt because there is context and history, which makes it ok and appropriate. Dropping in the odd swear word while chatting with like-minded buddies does not raise an eyebrow because it conforms with the group culture.

Online we have no such protection.

All this got me thinking about my own online “brand”. I have 5,200 plus Twitter followers and get thousands of visitors to my blog each month, but a tiny percentage of those people are known to me personally. Yet many of the rest I have what I consider to be a great relationship with. We reply to each other’s Tweets, we DM, we offer advice, and we share good-humoured banter as well as seriously useful data. We pass on knowledge freely, and even do business together.

I thought about how I viewed these people. I have an image of them, they have a “brand “ with me based on their tweets, their humour, the quality of their information and their online generosity. And that ‘brand’ or ‘reputation’ is as real as if I had met them. And I will make decisions to trust them and buy their services based on the brand they have built up with me online, over time.

So the lesson is this. Consider “Brand You” before you Tweet how many beers you sank on Saturday night. Consider ‘Brand You’ before you use gratuitous profanities online. Consider “Brand You” before you post that heavily politicised or semi-pornographic video on your blog spot, after months of building up credibility as a professional recruiter.

And of course, consider “Brand You” before you hurl insults at people who might actually have a stronger online brand than your own.