Recruiters used to deal with line managers or HR people who, although not always friendly, were familiar.  Now it’s those ‘aggressive’ procurement types who are just looking to cut margins and make the savings………..

So, how should recruiters approach this issue to enable them to win the business and maximise margins? A few ideas to consider:

Learning about how procurement teams are organised can often be very revealing and assist greatly in business development by targeting the right individuals.  Mapping out teams is not always easy – but knowing about common procurement models can help.

Procurement people are trained in managing the ‘category management’ process – and this involves far more than just sending out a tender.  Learning more about this process, the key stakeholders involved and the timings on the reviews can be worth its weight in gold.

Stepping into the shoes of procurement can also be revealing – how do they work, what targets do they work to, what KPIs are they measured by?  Remember, their bonuses are often based on achieving these targets.

What is the profile of a ‘typical’ procurement person and what makes them tick?  What things can a recruitment company do to get on their radar and influence them to consider quality, speed of fulfilment, geographical coverage and the other important USP’s of your recruitment business?

Of course, some recruiters try another option – to avoid procurement and the PSL entirely and target off-PSL areas………!.

Blue Bamboo is a specialist provider of training and coaching to the recruitment sector and other corporates. For more details on our course ‘How to deal with Procurement People’ contact us on  0800 9888 208 or info@bluebambooconsulting.com

In fact, it’s a very human thing to respond to external triggers like the New Year.  Birthdays, anniversaries, a newly decorated room, a new car, a style make-over, a new job….all useful spurs to action.  Why is this?

Perhaps because it’s also very human to become comfortable and have a life where things are more predictable and less subject to change.  After all, who wouldn’t want to return to comfort zones?  They’re nice places to be, aren’t they?  And quite right too: sometimes we spend an inordinate amount of time working hard to establish those ‘norms’ that give us certainty and that warm feeling of having arrived ‘home’.  So why the periodic (and with some people, very regular) urge for a personal spring clean?

I think it’s because at a pretty deep level human beings are driven by self-improvement and personal development.  It’s true that sometimes it’s not so visible on the surface of people’s behaviours.  That gym membership, taken out on the 1st January, only being used four times, for example!  And the pain in the neck colleague, who always seems to delight in taking an entrenched position, never considering a change of mind, may be another example…..

But here’s the thing: I think we’re ‘hard-wired’ to evolve.  From Maslow to L. Michael Hall we can see a pattern bedding in over centuries: once certain basic needs are met (those primarily concerned with our personal survival and safety), we start to crave more.  Hall’s work on self actualisation (go to http://www.self-actualizing.org/articles.html) has done a huge amount to make this central aspect of human motivation more accessible and understandable.  From my perspective, the arrival of an urge to do something different is an indicator of a basic instinct for evolution.  It’s as if we’ve become aware that the outcomes we’re getting in our lives – work or personal – are not the ones we’d like or hoped for and that it’s time for a change.

Paradoxically, perhaps, it’s often within the nature of change itself that we find most satisfaction.   Simply doing something differently, guaranteeing some sort of difference in outcomes, is often enough to shift our emotions around the issue.  Even making a firm decision can sometimes be enough to ensure a qualitative change in someone’s outcomes.

And so here I am, having taken out that gym membership and been committed enough to go six times so far this year.  Will power, eh?  And I’ve also written a short article for our website Resource Centre on the ‘New Year, New You’ stuff (go to www.bluebambooconsulting.com) where those of you considering your career options at this time can digest my pearls of wisdom.

So to conclude, I’m wondering what sorts of resolutions you’ve made?  Maybe yours is not to make any resolutions at all this year, and just see how things pan out.  Maybe the New Year just isn’t the best time to make those changes?

I guess the really important thing is spotting that something needs changing in the first place.  So my New Year tip: notice what’s happening and what’s not happening in your life; be observant. It’s amazing how clever we can all be at not noticing stuff sometimes; we settle into comfort zones so easily that we can quickly become blind to what we’re doing and what outcomes we are getting.  Comfort zones are like that – they’re strangely dis-abling because we get used to the habit and don’t notice that other things and people have evolved around us.  Do this: notice a comfort zone habit and just change it.  Just a bit.  And see what happens.  Go on – it’s the New Year after all.

The coming of the New Year is a time for reflection and, often, for considering new career options.  In the current economic climate, planning for options in your career will be as valuable for your own personal development as for your business.  So why not develop your Plan A, Plan B and Plan C for the year ahead?  These days it’s up to individuals to shape their own careers by asking the right questions – so here are some questions to help you map the way ahead.

What can I influence and control?

If we are not enjoying work we often think we need to change everything.  However, taking small steps towards your larger goals can be empowering and can often move you to the next step of your journey.  Identify the small changes that punch bigger than their weight and make a big difference to your current situation.

What would I like to be remembered for?

People are motivated by many different things.  Identifying those motivational ‘hot buttons’ in yourself can release energy and provide direction.  Identify what can be put in place in your Company that will leave a legacy and really make a difference.  And  this can include your life outside of work too – helping in your local community, for charities or any environment where your skills can be shared and benefit the wider world.

Do I want to break new ground – or replay last year?

You may want to do something that is entirely different or simply widen your comfort zone. Consider your CV – where are the gaps that may be useful to plug?  Think about whether the implications of change are too great to you personally or whether not changing what you’re doing may cause people to consider you as stale and jaded, limiting your chances for further growth and progression.

What would I like to be different or stay the same?

What do you enjoy about your job/what would you be happy to change?  Asking some fundamental questions:  around fulfilment, how the work environment has changed, whether you want to remain in your current role/company, are you stimulated, do you like the people you work with and find them stimulating?  Tracking levels of happiness against each role you have had to date – and what it was about the jobs that brought you most fulfilment can be revealing.  Could this be replicated in any future changes?

Do I actually want my boss’s job?

Think broader than just climbing the tree and vertical promotion.  Lateral shifts can enable you to continue to learn and make progress over the coming years.

How do people in your business see you?

Recognising that your reputation influences your chances of a promotion, be aware that networking is critical to your career path.  Make sure you have some people who are willing to give you honest feedback to ‘stay on track’ and ask for advice from those you seek to emulate.  Ensure that your achievements are promulgated and your value recognised.  And do it now! Networking is time-sensitive – talk to those inside and outside your business and establish relationships before you need them.

Research suggests that writing down your plans and options with timescales attached will ensure that you are more likely to achieve your goals.  Review your progress during the year – tracking progress can be motivating and inspirational.  As Diana Sharf Hunt is often quoted: “Goals are dreams with deadlines”.

Happy New 2011!

In my travels across the UK, meeting recruitment businesses to discuss their performance gaps, it’s interesting to note who has a robust platform in the critical area of learning & development.  The people development agenda has consistently been the single most important feature of staff retention – particularly in recruitment businesses where the structure of the organisation is traditionally fairly flat.  Of course, there are loads of other tools and processes that support the super-structure that is L&D: for example, how many recruitment leaders really know what lies behind people’s performance?  Is their training needs analysis (TNA) accurate?  And again, when an assessment of the performance gap has been carried out, what then?  What do recruiters have in place (either in-house or via external providers) to close the gap?

Of course, this blog is all about staff retention – and the seamless flow from defining Company aims & objectives, to accurate TNA to closing the gap is an essential component of keeping your best people (and allowing those who really should be moving on to do so).  So why is L&D so fundamental to your retention strategy?

In reports, articles, surveys and polls over the years, regardless of industry sector or type of work, putting money, time and effort into people development has consistently been acknowledged as key to motivating, retaining and driving optimal performance from teams and individuals.  We’re all familiar with what most of us say about the benefits of personal development:

-          Increased motivation

-          Increased feelings of belonging

-          A sense of being valued and supported; that we matter

-          A sense that we are more than our current behaviours

-          That the Company believes we are capable of better performance

-          That our development is not just to improve business results; it’s for us, in the round

So, given that L&D allows for both increased motivation and better bottom line results, what’s curious is why the recruitment sector has not universally embraced L&D (and put in place robust strategies in this space) and, furthermore, tolerated such traditionally poor quality training from external providers?

I think the answers are many and complex.  For the sake of this blog, let’s offer up some possible reasons for the first challenge: why haven’t recruitment businesses fully embraced the L&D agenda?  Perhaps because, in a time and price-sensitive sales environment, the notion of spending time and money in training does not seem to be warranted if individuals are likely to leave for ‘better’ things within 12 to 24 months.  Indeed, the high churn in most recruitment businesses is indicative of such an accepted culture.  In fact, I would suggest that one reason why this remains a challenge for the industry is that many still regard recruitment as less of a professional career and more of a convenient ‘stop gap’ job.  Where does this come from?  My belief is that it emanates from a lack of vision from senior leadership and a legacy of when times were easier.  It didn’t matter that consultants left – there’d always be another one along the next day.

In the good old days when recruitment was buoyant, good consultants would stay, enjoying the personal benefits of good commission payments every month.  Now, however, with a third of recruitment companies going to the wall during the recession and clients in much more control of the market, decent, regular commission is harder to find.  The good recruiters are staying put if they feel their business is on a sound footing to get them through the current fragile climate; the poor recruiters are looking for work.  So now, more than ever, there’s a case for investing in the L&D agenda – to keep the good people and get them to deliver even more results for the business.

So what about the quality of L&D within the recruitment market today?  I have to say, the landscape of external training provision is littered with well-intentioned entrepreneurs who have made it in the heyday of boom times, wanting to roll out their model as a set of training modules; it’s also populated by people who perpetuate the notion that recruitment is no more than a crude sales process, where persuasion and spin are all that’s required to place a candidate (in the hope that their candidate will stay in post long enough to cross the calendar threshold of returning the client’s fee as laid down in their Terms).  And that’s about it really.  Two choices – ‘my way’ or the ‘sales’ way.  As we all know, it’s only when we get beyond three options that real choice becomes available to human beings.  And recruiters are human, aren’t they?

And what of the landscape on internal provision in the L&D space?  A mixed bag, it would appear, ranging from no provision at all, to young, inexperienced HR grads studying CIPD, to MD’s who “train their staff” regularly – often repeating the same model, regardless of the nature of their changing and sophisticated audience.  It’s rare, from my view of the marketplace, to see a recruitment business who really knows what excellent L&D looks like; furthermore, it appears that even those businesses that endorse training and personal development still believe ‘training’ to be the thing to plug the gap on performance – very often as a singular intervention, in groups, in isolation.  Shame really; human beings are sophisticated animals, particularly in terms of why, how and what they learn.  Thinking that sending your people on the odd training course (particularly when the content and delivery has suffered from only having its own internal referencing for feedback) is at best well-meaning and at worst naive.  And what of coaching, mentoring, blended learning, CPD, behavioural competency frameworks……?

Learning is systemic.  Everything (and I mean everything) has a bearing on how effectively L&D works in a business – from client relationship strategies, to sales processes, to the colour in the kitchenette or break-out areas, to how people talk to each other, to the power and congruence of the senior leadership team’s vision for the future……

So is it possible that the recruitment sector have inadvertently restricted themselves to these two options?  Can it be that they, for all their positive intentions, look to external providers for help, not knowing what ‘good’ looks like?  I believe this is the case.  The recruitment sector deserves better: from both the world of external L&D provision and from their own profession who, only in certain niche areas, has fully embraced the notion of being a profession.  My call to action?

-          Get someone in who can help you really know where you are (in terms of recognising that performance, as is learning, a systemic thing)

-          Get to a point of real clarity about what you (collectively) want

-          Only then can you plan how to get there

And for goodness sake, let’s encourage those in the industry to believe themselves as professionals, delivering a necessary, valuable and professional service to people – and as we all know, being fulfilled, successful and happy in your job is a pretty fundamental ‘right’ for human beings.  We should strive to embrace this fact – and embrace the fact that the very best recruiters are those that are properly trained, coached, mentored, supported, challenged, encouraged to evolve etc. etc. etc…………..

I’ve just got back from spending a long weekend at the Download Festival at Donnington Park. Loud music. And the great and the good of the rock-loving public, all 40,000 of them (although I lost count at about 136).

So why would I be writing about such an event here, on what is effectively supposed to be a business blog? Because, as you all know, my colleagues and I at Blue Bamboo are fascinated by people – what they do, how they do it, what outcomes they get and why they do it. And at Download there was plenty of opportunity to observe and reflect on a really amazing bunch of people…..

And there were thousands of people to observe: from the ‘old rockers of latter day saints’ club, young pretenders from the ‘we can scream louder than you’ gang, children showing off new wellies, babies showing off new fluffy hair and bright eyes straining in the afternoon sun, families, musicians, fans, writers, poets, priests, short people, long people, square people, trend setters, commercial directors, painters, sales people and wannabies – and ME with my 15year old and his mobile phone seemingly grafted into his hand.

The inspiration for this blog is my curiosity about paradox: it seems that when you put that many people in one place there’s not a lot you can do to police them, to control them or influence them to behave in any particular way. There’s simply too many. So a strange thing happened: with the lightest touch of an ever-present security team, people gravitated towards a common expression, a shared set of behaviours, a similar attitude. With no real direction from the festival management or security teams, people found a consensus: to simply have a good time, be nice to each other, acknowledge and respect (though not really notice or comment on) the magical diversity of human beings.

I wanted to write about this gift of a metaphor: how, in certain circumstances, people can find their own way to live harmoniously, behave excellently and get what they wanted even though individuals no doubt had different personal agendas.

How can this provide a parallel to the world of business and to team dynamics I wonder? In some sense, it’s obvious: when people – everybody get permission to do what they want, we recognise that each person has the same right. So it becomes a shared goal to support each other’s goals, knowing that everyone is doing the same thing for each other. It’s a sort of mutual ‘get what you want’ theme.

Furthermore, it’s even more curious to note that individual goals also share similarities. The NLP concept of ‘chunks’ of information and the ‘hierarchy of ideas’ both point to an apparent truism: that there appears to be a place, at least at some point in the hierarchy, where we all share a common purpose.

When businesses and teams go looking for this ‘higher’ chunk, this shared purpose, they often find it. It seems that disagreement and conflict often arise from arguments about ‘how’ to get to a goal. When we focus on ‘what’ we want – and how exiting it is to recognise how much we share in terms of common purpose and vision – the ‘how to get there’ debate becomes more of a creative surge, rather than an opportunity to express entrenched, subjective opinions.

As well as returning home with ACDC, Bullet for My Valentine and Rage Against the Machine still reverberating in my head, I was left with an enduring hope for the future: that people are capable of amazing things when they give themselves, and others, permission to get what they want. In our own way, all of us at Download were living some important principles that are found embedded in NLP: there’s always a positive intention behind every behaviour and a focus on ‘what’ and ‘why’ is the necessary pre-cursor to our ‘how’ strategies. Interesting where we find our most useful learning experiences, isn’t it?