Copy
View this email in your browser

Recruitment Matters International June Newsletter


Hello from the team at Recruitment Matters International!


According to recent survey findings, 47% of organisations that employ college and university leavers intend to boost the number of jobs they offer that sector in the next 12 months.

So, why the increase? The survey found that 33% of employers said the main motivation for increasing the number of graduates was company growth. 20% said their main motivation was that graduate hires represent 'good value.' However, 90% said that connecting with good candidates was a concern.. 69% of respondents said that work ethic and personal ability ranked way above work experience when it came to offering the job.

In another positive sign of increased hiring activity, we are currently experiencing  a significant increase in demand for our Two Day Introduction To Recruitment course compared with the same time last year. 

We're here to help you work as productively as possible to support both new hires as well as more experienced consultants via our programme of interactive online training courses . Options during Q3 include:-


Two Day Introduction To Recruitment
Candidate Control, Screening & Interview Techniques
Become An Exceptional Temp/Contract Recruiter
Head-Hunting As A Solution/Service
Candidate Sourcing
and
Business Development


In this month's newsletter:-

Warren revisits his iconic recruitment tips book "Don't become a frog!"

Ideal Marketing Company MD Jess Shailes looks at how to pick the best marketing measurements for your marketing plan.

Our networking guru, Will Kintish considers the similarities between dance choreography and conducting a networking conversation. 


JMW's Simon Bloch reviews how this month's Supreme Court judgement has new implications for the hot Employment Law topic of holiday pay.

Lastly for news of our full range of recruitment services, including upcoming training courses, check out "What's new?"

 

Don't become a frog! - revisited




Contributor: Warren Kemp, CEO and Trainer, Recruitment Matters International. Warren is also a qualified Mental Health First Aid Instructor
 
It’s hard to believe that it’s 15 years now since I published my recruitment tips book – and related training course – ‘Don’t become a frog! 250 tips for Busy Recruiters.’ It was on the back of that success that we launched our popular frog logo (which you see at the top of this newsletter). I thought you might enjoy a trip down memory lane with the tip that started it all:
 
The story goes that a frog can be boiled alive if it settles in a pot of cold water and you then heat it until it reaches boiling point. If you placed the same frog directly into an already boiling pot, it would jump out to save itself.
 
Be constantly aware of changes within your market, your clients’ businesses and your candidates’ circumstances and take the appropriate remedial action as things develop. Don’t wait until it’s too late to do something about it.
 
Be well read, develop a feel for the market, ask good questions and be constantly on the lookout for change.
 

Warren Kemp is CEO and trainer with Recruitment Matters International. For more tips, advice and information on RMI, visit https://recruitmentmatters.com/  telephone 0800 0749 289/ +44 (0)1529 410375 or email info@recruitmentmatters.com.

 

Marketing Plans - how to pick the best marketing measurements

 

Contributor: Ideal Marketing Company MD Jess Shailes.

When creating your marketing plan, you have to be clear how you can measure marketing success, but your marketing measurements mean a lot more if they are tied to your business measurements.
 
Vanity vs clarity metrics

The available data, particularly in digital marketing tools, are many and varied, but not all data is created equal. It can be tempting to report on everything and not feel any the wiser, so here at Ideal, we work to decipher the data and provide insights and recommendations as a result of the marketing measurements. Some data looks impressive but doesn’t tell us much, for example, volume of website visits; you may see your website visits go up over time, and we’re often asked if the amount of visits a site is getting is ‘good or bad’. It’s possible to benchmark against industry averages, but the truth is that:

1.The increase in visits could be bots.
2.There is no point in having a lot of website visits if visitors are leaving on the first page they they land on and not converting into a lead.

You could also see a lot of traffic coming from a particular source, like an email campaign or social media channel, but is this good quality traffic? What do the visitors do once they’re on the site? The goal isn’t to get more website visits but to get more good quality website visits. Look at the whole picture to get clarity, not just one measurement in isolation.

Common marketing measurements

Depending on the channel you’re using, you will have different measurements you can use, and I’ll focus on digital marketing tools for this article. Below I’ve detailed which marketing measurements matter and what they tell you.

Website analytics

You can use free tools like Google Analytics or pay for a tool that provides heat mapping metrics or even the analytics that comes with your CRM or sales tool. Whatever you pick, make sure the account is optimised to report on a successful visit to the website. In Google Analytics, this means defining a website ‘goal’ like completing a contact form, clicking on an email link or visiting a particular page. If someone completes a Goal, this is considered a ‘conversion’ and will appear in some of your reports.

Social media

‘Reach’, ‘engagement’ and ‘clicks’ are the main measurements, although engagement could be broken down into ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’. Reach tells you how many people had the potential to see your post, which may be due in large part to the social media channel’s algorithm and also influenced by engagement. You’ll often see an increase in engagement figures and reach at the same time.

Reach – you want to reach more people, but by itself this figure only tells you how many people could have seen your post. If one of your targets is to increase brand awareness, this is a measurement to monitor.

Engagement – demonstrates an interaction with your brand. If the objective of your social media is to improve brand awareness and how your brand is regarded, this metric is helpful to follow.

Clicks – getting clicks is positive if you want people to go to your website where they are more likely to contact you. However, we caution against using social media purely as a tool to promote your business and always including links because it can backfire and your reach is likely to be lower. Combine promotional posts which include links with purely brand-building posts that encourage engagement and make a positive impression.

Email marketing

Open and click-through rates are the main measurements to pay attention to, but open rates can be skewed by different email software options. Open rates are heavily affected by your email subject, so consider doing an A/B split test on different email subjects if you want to improve open rates. Click-through rates also depend on how many links you include in your email and how compelling the reason to click is.

Digital advertising

Digital advertising can be used for brand-building campaigns, but we’d usually recommend only putting money behind a campaign that could lead to a sale or customer and sending visitors to a landing page expressly set up for the digital advertising campaign.

Depending on whether you’ve used paid social media, Google Ads or another platform, there will usually be a ‘pixel’ or tracking code you can add to your website and you can define success much like with Google Analytics.

If you’re using Google Ads you can attach your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account and import your goals. Most digital advertising options will use AI to improve the performance of a campaign over time, but it can only do that if it’s clear what a successful website visit is, so it’s worth taking the extra time to set this up. You’ll get a much better return on investment in the end.

The most important metric with digital advertising depends on your campaign’s objective. Still, I suggest it’s website ‘conversions’ because it will be hard to prove an ROI on a digital advertising campaign otherwise.

SEO

The objective of SEO is to improve where your website ranks in the search engines for chosen keywords, so monitoring ‘Average Position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)’ is the most important measurement to demonstrate successful SEO work. However, the following are also important:

Impressions – how many times the website was shown in Search Engine Result Pages for a keyword. This will increase as your average SERPs position improves.

Click-through rates – this gives you an idea of the available times someone could have clicked through, how often they did.

Their behaviour on the website – metrics like bounce rates, time on site and conversion rates matter here because there is no point in attracting more visitors to a site if they don’t do anything once they’re there.

Tie it together

Ideally, you won’t look at the measurements for one channel in isolation, as many digital marketing tools work together after an initial set-up. For example, you can add an integration between Mailchimp and Google Analytics that will allow you to know which email campaign someone clicked on to get to your website and then see the behaviour of those people. If you don’t look at both sets of data you could get a skewed perspective of which email campaigns are ‘working’ best.

Scenario A
You look at your MailChimp data and see that one of the campaigns received a lot of opens and clicks, so you assume you should create more versions of that campaign.

Scenario B
You review both your MailChimp data and Google Analytics data and find that while the campaign that got a lot of opens and clicks resulted in more traffic than other campaigns, the time on site, pages visited, and conversion rate/volume of that campaign were lower than other campaigns.

Scenario A is vanity, and scenario B is clarity. If you can track the behaviour further into your sales software and report actual sales figures, then you are cooking on gas!

For a free consultation about your marketing needs, from branding to PR to digital marketing, visit idealmarketingcompany.co.uk or call 01858 44 55 43.
 

The Choreography of a Conversation
 



Contributor: Will Kintish, Networking guru
 
Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of physical actions into attractive dance, ice skating or ballet movements.
 
So how can I align this to a conversation?
 
Whilst I do not wish to make it firm, which is often expected in physical movement, I do believe there are 4 main ‘steps’ in a conversation at a business event.
 
1. This must be the ice-breaker. For example, ‘Where have you travelled from?’ ‘What do you hope to get from attending this event?’ ‘How do you know our hosts?’ Avoid’ What do you do?’ that can come later.

2. The small talk. This is where we get to know the person rather than their work. Avoid politics and religion and beware when asking direct questions about peoples’ families. You can find out about their family by asking ‘What do you do when you’re not working?’

3. Questions about their business. Be aware some people don’t want to say too much so watch their eye movements when listening for their answer. A 3-step sequence here can be, 1 knowing what they do now, 2 how they got to that position, 3 what plans they have going forward.

4. The follow up questions. When you believe the conversation, is worth following up after the initial contact suggest you call, yes call, to arrange a meeting or a ‘virtual coffee’ i.e. a meeting without travel. With video calls or the old-fashioned telephone call this could be an efficient way to establish if there is a true basis for a potential business opportunity.
 
For more information on Will’s networking services, visit https://www.kintish.co.uk , call +44 (0)7939 205719 or email will@kintish.co.uk.


 
Harpur Trust v Brazel - a legal update


 

Contributor: Simon Bloch, who is a Partner at JMW Solicitors.

Holiday pay has been a hot topic in Employment Law recently. The Court of Appeal released their Judgment in February of this year on the case of Pimlico Plumbers v Smith, regarding holiday pay for those with disputed employment status. Cases such as Pimlico Plumbers v Smith help to increase awareness of worker rights especially in relation to paid annual leave, which means that employers now are under greater pressure to ensure that holiday pay calculations are correct. Otherwise, they may risk being in receipt of Employment Tribunal claims.
 
On 20th July 2022, the Supreme Court released their awaited Judgment on Harpur Trust v Brazel, which was heard by the Court of Appeal in November 2021.
 
What is the claim about?

In 2015, Mrs Brazel brought an Employment Tribunal claim for unlawful deductions from wages. She raised complaints about how her holiday pay was calculated by her employer and the Respondent in the proceedings, Harpur Trust, from 2011 onwards.

 
Mrs Brazel was engaged on a permanent, irregular-hours contract as a visiting music teacher. She worked during term-times and then took her annual leave at three intervals during the year whilst school was not in session.  Prior to 2011, Harpur Trust determined her holiday pay by calculating the average weekly pay earnt in the previous term.
 
After 2011, Harpur Trust decided to change their method of calculating Mrs Brazel’s holiday pay and instead paid holiday pay according to 12.07% of her usual pay. ACAS guidance at the time suggested that this method was lawful.

 
Mrs Brazel applied to the Tribunal as she believed that the latter method of calculating her holiday pay was incorrect. The Employment Tribunal rejected her claim in 2017, and subsequently allowed the appeal in the Employment Appeal Tribunal in 2018.  Harpur Trust appealed to the Court of Appeal, and they decided in 2019 that the appeal should be rejected. The position prior to the Supreme Court decision was in favour of Mrs Brazel’s original complaint that Harpur Trust’s methods of calculating the holiday pay post-2011 were unlawful.
 

What did the Supreme Court say?
 
The Supreme Court engaged in a discussion about the distinction between the ‘calendar method’ (i.e. Harpur Trust’s original methods of calculation) versus the ‘percentage method’ (i.e. the calculation of 12.07% of a worker’s usual pay). They found that the calendar method was the only lawful way of calculating holiday pay for irregular-hours workers.

 
The main law relevant to this decision is the Working Time Regulations 1998 and the Employment Rights Act 1996. Whilst the Working Time Regulations lay out the right to 5.6 weeks’ paid annual leave, the Employment Rights Act 1996 dictates how this pay should be determined. Section 224 states that a week’s pay is the average weekly remuneration from the previous 12-week period. As of 6th April 2020, the period relevant for calculating a week’s pay is 52 weeks (rather than 12).
 
Therefore, the Supreme Court held that holiday pay for term-time workers and others engaged on permanent contracts, needs to be calculated with reference to section 224 if the workers do not have normal working hours. They decided that Harpur Trust’s suggested alternative methods of calculating holiday pay were not permitted by the legislation, even if it means that by using the calendar method, the workers technically get paid more favourably than those occupying full-time posts. It was not for the Supreme Court to decide whether the legislation fits in with current working practices. That instead is a matter for Parliamentary discussion.
 
What can employers practically do in light of this Judgement?
 
Employers will want to consider the following actions:
  • Reviewing how their workers are paid holiday pay and changing to the ‘calendar method’ in line with section 224 if their irregular-hours, permanent workers are currently paid holiday pay according to the ‘percentage method’. This change should be communicated to their workers, so that they understand why their pay may be different moving forwards.
  • Analysing historic practices and remedying any incorrect holiday payments made in the previous 2 years, to avoid the receipt of unlawful deductions claims. This may involve a timely exercise, and businesses would need to take a view on whether they wish to undertake these tactical audits or risk future litigation.
  • Ensuring that the previous 52 calendar weeks are reviewed when assessing a week’s pay for the purposes of holiday pay. It is important to note that the reference period was extended from 12 weeks to 52 weeks in April 2020, to account for those who work irregularly throughout the year.
This article is for general guidance only and should not be used for any other purpose. It does not constitute, and should not be relied upon as legal advice.

If you would like to discuss this article or any recruitment issue in more detail, please contact Simon Bloch of JMW Solicitors LLP either by email at
simon.bloch@jmw.co.uk or by telephone on 0161 838 2628.



What's new?

Here's a link to our latest open course training schedule . Our next Two Day Introduction To Recruitment course runs on July 20th and 27th.

It's not long now until Warren's Mental Health courses in August and September:-
FREE Mental Health Awareness Sessions
Mental Health First Aid Champion - one day course
Become A Mental Health First Aider - two day course


Remember that we can come in-house to you via Zoom or visit your offices to deliver face-to-face training in a Covid-secure environment. It just needs a bit of forward planning, so do contact us as soon as possible to discuss your potential requirements.

We continue to welcome subscribers to our FREE pre-recorded online training programme ku.dos to help provide further support for you in your recruitment career. 
 
If you think that mentoring or consultation via telephone, Skype or video conferencing could work for you, please contact us to have a chat about your options.


Looking to hire? If you have any recruitment requirements, check out our RPO and RPR services.
                    
For more information on all our courses and our other services and products, visit
www.recruitmentmatters.comemail info@recruitmentmatters.com or call Ken on 0800 0749289 or, if you’re overseas, 0044 1529 410375.
 

Contact us

Sales Office
Recruitment Matters International Ltd
43 Meadowfield
Sleaford
Lincs NG34 7RG
UK
Tel: 0800 0749289 / +44 (0)1529 410375
Email: info@recruitmentmatters.com


 
Copyright © 2022 Recruitment Matters International, All rights reserved.