Where am I?

Announcement from 4MAT, Thursday 26th July:

4MAT announce that Andrew Soane has joined the business as Client Development Director.

4MAT is a full-service marketing services agency that provides websites and digital marketing to recruitment consultancies and corporate employers.  Clients include Aspire Global Network, Capita, SThree and RWE npower

Andrew is a well-known industry figure, with over 20 years’ experience in the employer branding and recruitment marketing sector. He has held a number of account management, sales, general and strategic management roles, with agencies such as TMP, Bernard Hodes Group, Barkers, Penna and most recently SAS.

Andrew joins the executive team at 4MAT, and will be responsible for client development, service and strategy, and – working closely with James Saunders, Managing Director, Claire Davidson, Operations Director, Gareth Jenkins, Head of Development, and Philip Jones, Technical Director as well as the wider 4MAT team – for developing the business’ offering.

“Over the last 13 years, we’ve built a successful, profitable business in the digital recruitment arena,” says James Saunders, Managing Director. “We’re already the leading recruitment marketing provider to the recruitment sector, and now we’re developing our offering to the corporate sector. Andrew brings with him considerable knowledge and experience, and we’re excited about how he’ll complement the skills and expertise we already have”.

“Talent attraction is all about digital, social and mobile”, explains Andrew, “so this was a fabulous opportunity to join a business that specialises in those areas. 4MAT have an excellent track record in this space, and I’m looking forward to working with the team and their clients to develop and grow the business.”

Social networking misuse by employees: you do the maths

In a recent survey by international law firm Proskaur, 76% of the organisations questioned use social networking as a tool for their business.  Nothing surprising there.    Nor did it come as much of a shock that 29% still actively block their employees’ access to social networking sites.

(Mind you, with virtually every new mobile handset coming preloaded with a host of apps for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc, you have to admire the blind optimism, if nothing else, of an employer that thinks it can still prevent its employees from wasting time on social networking sites during working hours, or writing anything defamatory, libellous, untrue, or just plain old fashioned nasty about them, simply by controlling access through their own network.  Why am I reminded of the story of the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dyke to stem the flood waters?)

Getting back to the point, perhaps a more surprising finding from Proskaur’s survey is that 27% of organisations monitor their employees’ use of social networking sites?  (And following the furore over News International/NOTW’s telephone hacking,  I wonder how many employers will admit to workplace monitoring like this in next year’s survey?)

But the most surprising finding to have come out of the survey, surely, must be that 43% of employers have had to deal with employee misuse of social networks (with a third of those surveyed having taken disciplinary action as a result) whilst 45% of all businesses still do not have social networking policies in place.

To paraphrase countless Private Eye correspondents, “are these two results by any chance related”?

Yes, of course they are.

So if you haven’t got a clear social networking policy in place, one that makes it clear what you consider to be acceptable behaviour and reminds employees of their contractual obligations to you, and if you haven’t communicated that policy clearly to your workforce, it really is your own fault if things go wrong.  And no matter what you do to limit access or monitor your employees’ social networking activity, if you haven’t got that policy in place, nothing else will prevent the inevitable.

(So if you are one of the 45% that don’t have a policy, I would suggest you head on over to TechRepublic’s useful guide on what you should and shouldn’t include, and ask your legal department to start drafting your soon-to-be-launched policy).

“Jobsite invents Twitter based recruitment”. Allegedly.

OK, strictly speaking the article that appeared in the Evening Standard on Tuesday 23rd June didn’t actually say that Jobsite invented Twitter based recruitment. But it might as well have done.

The headline actually read “Recruitment by Twitter as job search goes online”. That was in the print version. The digital version was slightly more reserved “Twitter launches job recruitment service”. I guess it would have had to have been a bit more reticent. Online readers are more likely to know that job search had gone online.

But either way, the content in both articles was the same.

It’s a new service that has been launched by Jobsite. It’s been a huge success. And my favourite bit. Gary Robinson of Jobsite (sorry Gary) explaining that after Facebook, “this seemed a logical next step” and that he “has no doubt it will soon be commonplace to find a job through Twitter”.

Blimey, talk about crystal balls.

To be fair, the article does say that Jobsite “is one of several firms offering recruitment via Twitter”. Which is true enough. It’s one of several hundred (thousand?) firms doing it. But then, it doesn’t mention any other by name, just Jobsite.

Perhaps more cynical readers might assume that this omission could in some way be related to the fact that both Jobsite and the Evening Standard are owned by DMGT. But I couldn’t possibly comment.

I’m at pains to point out that I think Jobsite is a great site. And it absolutely has a role to play. But let’s not pretend that they’re breaking any new ground here – in this instance, they’re treading a pretty well worn path. One hopes that media planners, resourcing professionals and HR teams aren’t taken in by this kind of nonsense, but if they are, my agency (and indeed every other credible, digital recruitment specialist or recruitment advertising agency) would be happy to help them unpick fact from fiction.