A view of 2008 online

Enhance Media's well-attended fourth annual online conference, held at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday 1^st February, provided an interesting variety of perspectives on technical developments and market trends.  Welcoming the guests to this "thought-leading" event, MD Tim Elkington said it was an opportunity to consider the key issues that the next twelve months would bring.

The first speaker, Glenda Stone (CEO of Aurora), talked from the perspective of wheretowork.com, the employer-direct company comparisons website.  She said the market was now candidate-led (predicting that new graduates would have some 36 careers in their working lifetime), and that it was therefore essential for major organisations - many of whom were chasing skill sets restricted to the top 5% of the population - to focus on effective employer branding and communicate clear, consistent messages for both internal and external audiences.

Next up was Westley Gillard, who has orchestrated the development of Zappy Mobile's technology strategy with particular reference to the recruitment sector.  He talked about the fast-evolving state of the market, with brands of all sizes setting up their own branded mobile presences.  The technology has now reached a much more usable state - the user experience is infinitely better, while the price for accessing content is no longer prohibitive.  And with the recruitment market changing - notably through the impact of Web 2.0 - the mobile phone, ideal for personalisation, is the key next step on the digital route.  The key for recruiters is to keep things simple, offer live job searches and feature a number of key calls to action.

Then Luke Mckend, Google's recently-appointed industry head: recruitment, looked at the use of search engines to drive candidates to employer and job sites.  He stressed the need to make sites easy to find - hence the importance of doing well in terms of both organic and paid-for listings.  He also talked of the need to regard search as an integrated part of any recruitment strategy, and therefore to design online campaigns with search in mind.  (There is, of course, a wide range of Google tools and products to facilitate the development of more creative campaigns.)  Luke denied the rumour that Google had been planning to launch its own phone; instead, it's building an infrastructure to enable better applications for phones.  He also stated categorically that "Google has no intention of becoming a job board"!  He predicted that search engine marketing would emerge as a powerful tool for recruiters in 2008, and encouraged recruiters to experiment with new formats - and measure everything!

Charlie Atkinson, MD of Human Factors International, discussed the role of assessment in modern recruitment.  He stressed the importance of the ‘predictive' approach - i.e. focusing on talent and potential, rather than experience.  His suggestions included giving people a clear idea of what roles entailed so that they could self-select according to their appropriateness, assessing people against competency profiles (which not only speeds up the process but also makes hiring decisions more defensible), and making offers knowing the level of fit with the role and the organisation.  For this year he predicted more in the area of self-selection, closer integration with induction, and greater use of smart testing (especially computer adaptive testing) among other things.

Tim Elkington concluded the morning session by going through Enhance Media's howeru (i.e. How ‘e' are you?) research project, which over 12,500 people have participated in to date.  The responses divided people into seven categories of e-virgins (those scoring 0), e-learners, e-students, e-citizens, e-vangelists, e-experts and e-masters (those scoring 100).  The country's average e-score to date was 53.1, with younger people largely outscoring older people (e-learners averaged 46 years, while e-experts averaged 31 years).  In addition, men tended to score higher than women (60.5, as against 48.6).  It was interesting to note that every group, irrespective of age, picked the BBC, Facebook and Google as their favourite websites.  The top-scoring locality was London WC (72.9) , while the UK's least e-town turned out to be Torquay (49.4).

The afternoon began with Paul Harrison, managing partner at Carve Consulting, giving an insight into employer brands and social media.  He concentrated on identifying the opportunities - and threats - of social media, and suggested that organisations had no option but to get involved "because they already were."  He saw 2008 as "a critical year for how brands manage themselves on social spaces," and said that as yet we hadn't even scratched the surface of the impact that social networks will have on recruitment and the war for talent over the next couple of years.  The key priorities were to listen to what's out there (i.e. what people are posting about your organisation), and to define a strategy for dealing with it - although there are no hard and fast answers since, as Paul put it, "There are no gurus out there - organisations need to choose their own paths."  Concluding that the risks were outweighed by the opportunities, he advised listening, learning and engaging at every opportunity, and letting go of control (as "it's already lost").

Sam Michel, whose ten years' experience in the digital media industry qualifies him as a veteran, talked from the perspective of Chinwag, the leading community site for new media and digital marketing professionals.  He spoke on community-driven recruitment, including the various aspects of trust essential for building a community, and looked at the various recruitment marketing issues involved.  Among the current themes he identified were disintermediation (‘squeezing the middleman'), an opposition to commercialisation, control (or lack of it), and the ‘scary' levels of transparency.  He also unnerved sections of the audience by offering to debate ‘the death of advertising' as we know it.

Finally, educational technologist Jodie Fraser considered the ‘fuzzy boundaries' between public, private and online regarding social network services.  She noted that the UK was by far the biggest user of social networking sites in Europe, with more people visiting social networks than email sites for the first time last December.  She also confirmed that most internet users aren't concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and that most don't take steps to limit that information.  Her recommendations included being clear on why and how to use social network services, being mindful of context, being clear about corporate v personal issues, and being upfront about processes.

By this point the appreciative audience was probably struggling to digest the surfeit of information, so it was just as well that they had a full weekend ahead of them!