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It is important for Recruitment Professionals to know what warrants the discipline, suspension and dismissal of an employee, and the procedures required to lawfully achieve this.

Disciplinary Process Training that brings insight into the labour law process around the discipline, suspension and dismissal of an employee.

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Published by

Jonathan Goldberg

The scene of an employee speaking out against the boss in a company meeting, them being chastised by the powers-that-be and then her making the lofty statement of: “I quit” is common to a lot of movies and TV shows.

While this type of scenario is all very good and well for Hollywood, the situation in real life is not as dramatic.

While the situation that we describe in the opening lines of this article often leads to the employee being shown the door, carrying a paper box of their possessions, under South African labour law you need to unpack the nature of the ‘talking back’ and then, based on the facts of the matter at hand, you can then decide on if the issue warrants dismissal.

The Fine Line Between Insolence, Insubordination And Gross Insubordination

When faced with a matter of an employee challenging a statement made by an employer or that employee’s line manager, there are three classifications that this behaviour could fall under:

Insolence,
Insubordination, and
Gross Insubordination

‘Insolence’ is characterised as behaviour that is rude and cheeky. It can be written or verbal. This type of disrespectful behaviour is indeed seen in a serious light however to justify dismissal it needs to be wilful and serious with the result that the employment relationship breaks down irretrievably.

In terms of ‘insubordination’, an employee refuses to accept the authority of the employer or a person who has authority over them, e.g. a line manager. Dismissal for a single act of insubordination is only justifiable in certain instances where the circumstances surrounding the incident are sufficiently serious Normally this conduct warrants a warning.

Regarding ‘gross insubordination’, this is a wilful and intentional act that is unprofessional and unethical. This would normally destroy the trust relationship between employer and employee. If the employee had stood up and said “I will not flipping follow your instructions. Go to hell” that would be gross insubordination.

Avoid Landing Up At The CCMA

As an employer, if you find yourself wanting to dismiss an employee based on gross insubordination, make sure that you are very sure that this is indeed a case of gross insubordination, if it’s not you could find yourself facing a very hefty award at the CCMA.

This was the case in Independent Risk Distributors SA Ltd v CCMA and others. Heard in the Labour Court (LC), this case was an application to review an arbitration award where the Commissioner found that the dismissal of the employee for gross insubordination was unfair as she was merely asking for clarification during a staff meeting and not wilfully disobeying any instruction.

Facts Of The Case

The company’s CEO scheduled a meeting with the sales team (which included the employee) to discuss their team’s underperformance. It was said that during the meeting the CEO instructed the sales employees to go home and reflect on their poor performance.

In a challenging manner, the employee stood up asking why they were being issued with this instruction. As a result of this act, the employee was charged with gross insubordination, was found guilty and then dismissed.

At arbitration, the Commission found the dismissal to be unfair as the employee had not given adequate reasons to substantiate the gross insubordination charge.

The employer took the case to the Labour Court (LC). It applied the reasonable person test when coming to its finding. It asked whether another reasonable Commissioner would have come to the finding that the first Commissioner did. The Court concluded that any reasonable Commissioner would have concluded what the primary Commissioner had come to.

The LC upheld the arbitration award.

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Source
By Jonathan Goldberg and Grant Wilkinson

As any good recruiter knows, limiting your search to active candidates won’t get you very far. About two-thirds of the global workforce are “passive,” according to LinkedIn research, meaning they’re not actively looking for jobs. Ignoring this group means you’re likely missing out on some of the best prospects for open positions.

By definition, a passive candidate is harder to find and engage with than an active job seeker. With many recruiters using the same playbook these days, uncovering hidden gems is more challenging than ever.

We asked two prominent talent sourcers, Alla Pavlova and Vanessa Raath, to share some of their secrets for recruiting passive talent.

Based in the Netherlands, Alla has been building teams for tech startups since 2008 and is currently an interim recruiter at Riot Games, where she’s recruiting for the video game company’s studios in Hong Kong and Singapore. She runs free talent sourcing workshops for her peers and was named “most influential sourcer” in the Netherlands by Dutch recruitment agency EmploIT.

A former teacher who taught middle school kids in London and gave scuba diving lessons around the world before becoming a recruiter, Vanessa is the founder of South Africa–based The Talent Hunter. She trains talent sourcing teams around the world and offers freelance sourcing services. Engaging and insightful, Vanessa regularly delivers keynote addresses at talent industry conferences around the world and is a frequent guest on HR podcasts.

Read on to learn some of Alla’s and Vanessa’s top sourcing tips.

1. The best talent hunters have great personal brands

It’s a classic problem that recruiters face when sourcing passive talent: How do you spark the interest of someone who’s never heard of you and isn’t looking for a new role?

Step 1, Vanessa says, is cultivating a powerful personal brand that will set you apart from other recruiters and make candidates much more likely to respond to your outreach.

“These people don’t know you from Adam,” Vanessa says. “But if you’ve got a good online brand and they go and Google you, you will stand out as a good recruiter that it’s worth their time to answer.”

Quote from Vanessa Raath, founder of The Talent Hunter

Vanessa’s own LinkedIn profile offers a prime example of what recruiters can do to build a positive image online. In the “About” section, she highlights her world travels and unique backstory, establishing herself as an interesting person worth getting to know. Vanessa identifies both her work passion, “elevating the standard of sourcing globally,” and her favorite pastime, “having a vegetarian braai with family and friends in the bush or at the beach.”

She posts frequently, conducting a running dialogue with her target audience of talent professionals. In a recent LinkedIn post Vanessa posed a “can you relate?” question to her followers, comparing the practice of conducting due diligence on candidates to “stalking.”

“Please tell me,” she writes, “that I am not the only person who has had this thought when chatting with a new prospect?”

2. Establish strong community ties

If you focus on a particular industry, raising your profile in that world is essential, Alla says. “All passive candidates one day will be active candidates,” she says. “I need to be there when they want to be active again.”

One of the most important ways to improve your visibility is by providing help on a consistent basis to the community you’re targeting. Alla serves as the volunteer chapter leader of a tech-focused Slack group in Amsterdam and is active in several other online developer communities. She builds goodwill by offering developers free mentoring, resume writing tutorials, and interview guidance.

This same approach can also help recruiters find more diverse candidates. Vanessa encourages employers to provide support and assistance to groups that cater to people from underrepresented backgrounds. A company she’s working with, for instance, wants to hire more women to fill tech positions. She’s identified a Muslim women’s football team in London and is recommending that her client sponsor the team.

“There are a lot of Muslim females who enjoy coding,” Vanessa says. “You need to think about the communities that are out there who you can reach out to and collaborate with.”

3. Start your outreach — before there’s any job opening

Alla compiles lists of passive candidates she believes would make great future hires and tries to engage with them one-on-one. The goal is to create a pipeline of potential recruits. She keeps the tone of her outreach casual and friendly, sometimes sending people company swag.

“I congratulate them on a promotion,” she says, “or I’ll wish them happy birthday.”

Another way to break the ice, Alla says, is to ask for advice. For instance, she might ask a senior developer if they can recommend candidates for a junior role she’s filling or whether they might have time to help her master a tech skill.

Whether she’s reaching out to make an initial connection or to see if a candidate might be interested in a job, Alla makes sure to research the person first. She then weaves personal details about their background into her messages. Personalization pays off: LinkedIn data shows that InMails sent individually see response rates roughly 15% higher than InMails sent in bulk.

Alla acknowledges that working for a well-known company like Riot Games helps open doors. Nonetheless, she encourages recruiters to start talking to people they might recruit in the future. “I can name at least 10 people,” she says, “very senior, that we hired just because we kept in touch.”

4. Widen your search horizons

If you’re hunting for “purple unicorns,” aka perfect, hard-to-find candidates, you need to go to places your rivals have overlooked.

Vanessa recommends conducting searches on multiple sites, including platforms that aren’t professional networks or job boards. Depending upon the type of candidate you’re looking for, it’s worth tapping social networks that focus on specific industries or groups. Keep in mind, finding candidates on these sites often requires advanced search training.

Among the many sites Vanessa says are “underutilized” for talent searches are GitHub, the software development platform that has more than 100 million developers using its service; Behance, where creative professionals can display their portfolios; and Meetup, the social networking site that organizes meetings for people with common interests. Alla, meanwhile, sources candidates on Discord, the fast-growing voice, video, and text chat app popular with tech communities.

Vanessa also considers Facebook fertile hunting ground. While the giant social network is much better known as a place where individuals share details of their personal lives, not their resumes, that’s changing.

“During COVID,” Vanessa says, “people spent time updating their Facebook profiles and telling us things like where they work and what’s their job title. There are close to 3 billion people on Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to ignore it.”

Final thoughts

Following Alla’s and Vanessa’s recommendations will likely mean more work on your part. You’ll have to pay more attention to building your personal brand, cultivate ties to prospective recruits, and brush up on your search techniques. But the investment could be well worth your time.

“The world of recruitment has changed,” Vanessa says. “If you don’t keep up and don’t change with the times, you’re going to find yourself out with the dinosaurs.” On the flip side, she says, “if you upskill, you’re going to ensure that you’re actually future-proofing your career.”

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Authored by Phyllis Furman

We spend a third of our life at work. And recent developments, like the acceleration of digitalisation and the adoption of remote working following the Covid-19 pandemic, have blurred boundaries between work and our private lives.

Consequently, workers' mental and physical well-being suffer, and mental health issues are increasing.

In 2021, the Adecco Group and LHH surveyed 14,800 white-collar workers between the ages of 18 and 60, spread across 25 countries. The survey found that over the previous 12 months, 38 percent were suffering from burnout, and 32 percent said their mental health had declined as a result. The 2022 edition of the same survey (now including 34,200 white-collar and non-desk workers) showed that mental health had again worsened for a fourth of the respondents.

In reaction to this growing challenge, companies roll out solutions like healthy food, games, and yoga sessions over lunchtime. What is often overlooked – and actually more impactful – is an investment in career support.

The impact of one's career satisfaction is often underestimated in the overall well-being conversation. Work remains very much our identity, and when you are in a job that you don't enjoy, it affects all areas of your life. And it is detrimental to companies as well. According to the Adecco Group 2022 survey, 17 percent of workers globally take sick days to balance their mental health. Well-being issues are further reasons behind high turnover rates, with many workers leaving their jobs or retiring to improve their mental health. In short, employers that don't support well-being are losing workers.

How to enable well-being at work

So how to jugulate the hemorrhage? First – identify the problem. The Adecco Group survey mentioned earlier revealed that more than half (51 percent) of frontline managers – the leaders who have the most contact with non-managerial staff daily – admitted they struggled to identify and address issues of burnout and mental well-being in their teams. Without adequate training, leaders struggle to identify when employees need support.

Second - frame solutions to support a culture of well-being at work. It can start as simple as ensuring workers are taking their time off, up to developing a culture of trust. Workers globally identified both as "must haves" to be implemented by employers to support their well-being.

The power of proactive career management

At a time when the skills mismatch requires more career transitions than ever, adequate career support could prove particularly impactful to positively support happiness at work and mitigate mental health challenges. As Risesmart dubs it, 'career wellness' involves the personal satisfaction of employees resulting from work/life balance and achievement of personal goals. When employees' skills are aligned with business goals, they can steer a company through difficult economic times and boost business growth.

However, organisations are not investing enough in career support and development of their employees. Indeed, 24 percent of global non-managers indicated they had never had any formal or informal career conversation with their managers. Organisations are also not sufficiently strategic around actively reskilling their workforce to move into the roles now and into the future.

Career development programs enable individuals to take control of their careers and increase their sense of empowerment. Ensuring that career pathways are visible to the workforce and offering options so they can move into those promote career wellness significantly contribute to preventing skills stagnation. That doesn't mean employees leave once they are trained; on the contrary, job satisfaction increases as a result, and workers are more likely to stay.

In the context of labour shortages and record levels of employee disengagement, it is time to invest in mental health at work. Offering career development programs could pay off far more than a fancy smoothie machine.

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by

World Employment Confederation

Treat sleep like it’s a friend, make a single-item to-do list, and other unexpected ways to improve your life.

Unless you live a charmed life, chances are there are aspects of it you’d like to improve. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, to find time for family and friends, to tackle that to-do list of mundane tasks, to get the printer to actually work.

Out of these everyday difficulties, a market for life hacks was born: seemingly simple ways to optimize and streamline life. Some of these tips proved useful — dropping a pin in Maps where I parked my car has prevented many panicked searches — others, not so much. Oftentimes, however, the most effective step toward self-improvement is the most straightforward. Small and accessible shifts can manifest the most change without totally upending our established routines.

Experts, ranging from authors to academics, offer their bite-size, low-lift advice on how to live a better life. While these tips are meant to be easily implemented, by no means should you attempt them all — just try what speaks to you and your circumstances.

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Try to get natural light every day (and treat sleep like your friend)

“Number one in my mind is having light during the day, particularly in the morning. Sunlight is free. Even if it’s overcast, there’s still lots of bright light outdoors. It’s a triple whammy of being good because you get light, you get fresh air, you get to move your body. Going outside during the day is such a good thing for your sleep and overall mental and physical health.

My number two is to treat your sleep as you would treat your friend. This means prioritizing them and making sure you have time and space for them, but also not being overbearing and chasing them down and forcing sleep to happen. If you strike that balance between being there and holding space for your friend, sleep, but also being chill about it and not being too overbearing, then you’re going to have an easier time having the sleep health that you need.”

—Jade Wu, author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications

Outsource help with dating, work, or whatever else is on your mind

“Weekly, share one of your hopes, dreams, goals, or dating and relationship needs with a new person. This will increase the amount of people who are willing to help you reach your goals.”

—Lamont White, dating coach, television personality, and founder of Better Way to Meet matchmaking services

Start a (small) to-do list

“The simple hack that has transformed my life is putting absolutely everything I want to do for myself, my family, and my work on a digital to-do list that I can check off every day. It seems so simple, but something about seeing those small tasks and checking them off daily has allowed it to become a permanent pattern for me. I recommend that people start doing this with one small task and slowly build up competence before they add more. Every time you check it off, you get the rush of having completed a task and you’re building a consistent habit.”

—Whitney Goodman, psychotherapist and author of Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy

Cut through the chaos with meaningful rituals

“I think it’s important to create your own rituals. I’ve found that my own personal rituals help keep my work-life harmony in check. Whether it’s my monthly supper club or my morning ritual of preparing a hot beverage, I find that these things ground me in even the busiest of times.”

—Tina Wells, business strategist, advisor, and author of The Elevation Approach: Harness The Power of Work-Life Harmony to Unlock Your Creativity, Cultivate Joy, And Reach Your Biggest Goals

Take a breather before dealing with your finances

“Before you look at your finances, give yourself a two-minute transition exercise. For many of us, money is a serious stressor. We may not notice that we’re experiencing a fight-flight-or-freeze response as we sit down to go over accounts, but our body knows it. Set a timer for 120 seconds and do some deep breathing, make a list of three things you’re grateful for or appreciate about yourself, or simply journal for a page or two. Suppressing emotions and telling ourselves our anxieties are stupid or wrong leads to negative coping mechanisms like avoidance, while learning to self-regulate as a part of money management facilitates acceptance and presence of mind.”

—Amanda Clayman, financial therapist

Say hi to your neighbors

“My tip is to acknowledge the people I pass on the street: a smile, a nod, or a hello. I live in a small-ish town and while I know this can be a safety issue for some, I have found in my little community that I feel more a part of it, and feel like I’m contributing, even if it’s this very small acknowledgment on daily walks. My goal is to not be rushing around with blinders on all the time, just going about my business, but to actively work at noticing the people around me. I find I say things like, ‘Please go ahead’ now more than, ‘Oh I’m so sorry’ after having bumped into someone or cut them off. The small reminder to just pick your head up, make eye contact if you can, and offer a smile, nod, or even a hello has been a very worthwhile one.”

—Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute and author of Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition and Higher Etiquette: A Guide To The World of Cannabis, From Dispensaries to Dinner Parties

Prioritize the people who prioritize you

“Choose people who choose you back. This was something I realized on my own that changed so much about my relationships. We should be choosing the people in our lives who are actively choosing relationships with us as well, and anything less isn’t a relationship we have to accept.”

—Lane Moore, author of You Will Find Your People: How To Make Meaningful Friendships As An Adult

Reach out to that friend you’re thinking about right now

“If a friend comes to mind, contact them. It could be a text, a DM, a meme, or even an email. If all you say is, ‘Thinking of you. I just wanted to say hi,’ that is good. Even better: if you reminisce about a specific memory of the two of you together. Share something they’d find interesting — like a meme, news story, mutual interest — laugh again with them about a joke you once shared, or, if you can, honestly say, ‘I miss you.’ If they respond, plan to connect again — to talk on the phone, make a Zoom call, or get together in person. Get it on the calendar and make it happen. And if they don’t respond, give them the grace. People are busy, texts get lost, and even when we appreciate being contacted, we don’t always know what to say.”

—Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas

Make out with your partner… every day

“One small thing you can do to live better is make out with your partner every night before bed. Over time, couples in long-term relationships stop touching and kissing throughout the day. For many couples, the only physical contact they have is when they’re having sex or trying to initiate it. But if this is the only time you’re touching or kissing, that starts to create pressure. If your partner tries to touch you, you might find yourself pulling away because you don’t want it to ‘lead to more.’ Or you might start avoiding physical contact altogether. Instead, if you make the conscious intention to make out every night, you’ll start to break that connection between touch and sex. You’ll stop being so on guard around your partner, and you’ll be able to relax into the contact. Making out every night will help you feel closer to your partner, and you may even get those butterfly feelings from the beginning of your relationship back.”

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Original Source > Vox
By Allie Volpe @allieevolpe

Any basic LinkedIn search will get you a list of candidates, but how can you be sure your search is returning all of the best candidates to be found? A more methodical approach with Boolean search is more likely to lead you to the best and most qualified—rather than simply the ones who are easiest to find. And, according to sourcing guru Glen Cathey, that’s exactly how you can get ahead.

“You guys all have LinkedIn ...,” said Glen Cathey...hence... “You all have the same resources. So what’s your competitive advantage?”

The answer, of course, is how you use it. With that in mind, here are Glen’s most important tips and takeaways for turning LinkedIn searches into a competitive advantage that will help you track down the best—and most overlooked—candidate profiles.

1. Don’t judge candidates based on their LinkedIn profiles alone

While professionals with a detailed list of their experience are easier to find on LinkedIn, those who haven’t had time to fully fill out their profiles shouldn’t be overlooked. Glen often finds great talent by messaging candidates with “text-poor” profiles—the ones who haven’t bothered to write lengthy, detailed summaries on LinkedIn. Best of all, these “ugly” profiles are overlooked by other recruiters, so you’re automatically more likely to get a response.

“It’s very natural for recruiters to skip these profiles because [they] don’t have enough information,” says Glen, referring to the bare-bones profile above. “This could be the best person in the entire stack of results, but you haven’t looked at them.”

Talented candidates have even been known to craft text-poor profiles on purpose because they don’t want to be bombarded with InMails from recruiters. These users found a clever way to stay out of the search spotlight—but as Glen points out, that just means you might be the only one messaging them once you expand your search.

2. Don’t just look at the top 5-10% of search results—try starting from the bottom instead

Many people only look at the first 10% or so of a search result—or the first few pages—assuming they’re seeing the cream of the crop. But recruiters tend to search for similar keywords and get similar results back, which means you’re probably looking at the same 10% of candidates as your competition.

To gain an advantage, Glen recommends “starting from the bottom”—a Drake-inspired method for making sure you get deeper into search results and spot overlooked talent. Don’t be afraid to literally go straight to the bottom, skipping to the end of your results and moving backwards from there.

“[We] have an unconscious bias toward starting at the top,” says Glen. “If you’re not getting to the bottom, then you’re actually not looking at some of the best candidates.”

3. Ask yourself the right questions to perform more strategic Boolean searches

Effective searches begin with asking the right questions. When searching for a specific term, like a skill or title, Glen always asks himself, “Would all qualified people mention it?”

If the answer is no, then you need to modify your search to be more inclusive. If the answer is yes, his next question is, “How many different ways would they mention it?”

For example, if you’re looking for a developer who has experience with Hadoop, you have to consider that they might not all use the title “developer”—and they may not mention “Hadoop” anywhere in their profiles, either. If you just search for those terms, Glen cautions, you’ll exclude lots of qualified candidates.

Instead, use the Boolean OR operator to expand your results. Unlike the AND operator, the OR operator broadens your search because it only requires that one of multiple terms be included in each profile.

Strategically multiple terms with both OR and AND operators can yield a much more targeted search.

In the above example, when searching for a Hadoop developer, Glen connects several possible titles (e.g., software engineer, developer, and programmer) with OR statements in parentheses.

Then he does the same with terms like Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, Yarn, and MapReduce—separating them by OR operators and bracketing them within parentheses. By combining the two lists with the AND operator, his search brings back people who have at least one term from each list in their profiles.

He’s essentially still searching for the same two concepts as the original query (“software engineer” AND Hadoop), but now he’s broadening the search with synonyms while still keeping it targeted.

When you just search for "software engineer" AND Hadoop, you get 70 results, but when you expand that with synonyms using OR—while still connecting the two concepts with AND—you get more than double his results: 151 people, including 81 qualified candidates who were unintentionally excluded from the first result.

This approach significantly increases your search results—and it can be applied to any job title, skill, word, or phrase that might show up in a qualified candidate’s profile.

4. Most candidates that you’re looking for aren’t using the title you’re searching with—but you can still find them

Often, great candidates are out there, but they aren’t showing up in your searches because your terms are excluding them. Here’s a great example:

When you search for “data scientist,” you’ll get 600-some results. But there are tons of qualified data scientists out there who might not use that term. They will, however, use certain words like “data center" or “analytics” instead.

When you exclude those 600 “data scientist” results by using the Boolean NOT operator, and instead search for terms that only a data scientist would use, you get over 6,000 results. That means you’re missing about 90% of data scientists with the first search, just because they’re not using that term.

This is what Glen calls “dark matter.” You can find more candidates (who your competition is probably missing) by searching with dark matter terms. You can find these terms by working backwards. Start by searching for data scientists, then scour the profiles of a few of these candidates to determine what terms come up often. Then you can use the OR operator to feed those common terms—e.g., “data center”—back into your searches, ultimately revealing those hidden candidates who perfectly match your needs.

5. Use the NOT operator to expose hidden candidates with the qualifications you’re looking for

You can make great use of the AND and OR operators in LinkedIn searches, but the NOT operator can be just as useful—particularly when you need to move through a long list of qualified candidates in a strategic, methodological way.

With a method of strategic exclusion, you can make sure that each of your new searches exposes new, good candidates.

In the above example, Glen was searching for a project manager who had experience with EMC technologies. He searched for all the people who used those terms in their profiles (“project manager” AND EMC), but quickly bottomed out the list.

He then asked himself whether all qualified project managers would list EMC in their profiles—and because the answer was no, he chose to exclude that term in his next search with the NOT operator (or simply a “-” mark), while using his “dark matter” strategy to add several related terms (e.g., data centers, migrations, and storage).

This brought back a completely new stack of candidates that was mutually exclusive from the previous results. Best of all, he tracked down a perfectly qualified candidate who simply didn’t think it was worth mentioning EMC in his profile.

“It was an a-ha moment,” says Glen. “You’re getting into the mentality of the candidate, and some of them are not even thinking of putting the term you’re searching for in their profiles.”

6. Use the NOT operator to methodologically build a list of very qualified candidates

You can take this strategy a step further by strategically excluding candidates. Start by searching for every single qualification by stringing them all together with the AND operator. For example, if we have five qualifications that we’ll call Q1, Q2, etc., our very first search would look like this:

Q1 AND Q2 AND Q3 AND Q4 AND Q5

You’ll get a small group—let’s say four candidates—who match every single qualification.

Then, let’s systematically add a NOT before the final qualification. The search would look like this:

Q1 AND Q2 AND Q3 AND Q4 AND NOT Q5

Now you’ll get a bigger stack of candidates—11, maybe—who have all but one of those qualifications. Most importantly, these 11 won’t overlap with the previous four candidates at all.

Next, add the NOT operator before the second-to-last qualification:

Q1 AND Q2 AND Q3 AND NOT Q4 AND Q5

You’ll get yet another new stack of very qualified candidates, who don’t overlap at all with your two previous searches.

You can keep repeating this process for as long as necessary, continually building on your results in a systematic way.

Imagine it like a series of concentric circles. In the dead center, you’ve got the small amount of candidates who meet every qualification—the five. The next circle contains the candidates who match all but one qualification, and so on.

By using the NOT operator, you’re broadening your searches while making sure you don’t see repeat candidates. After you exhaust the center circle, you exclude it (with NOT) and search through the ring around it. You can repeat this process systematically, going ring-by-ring, instead of going through bigger, messier circles full of people you’ve already reached.

7. Find high performers with achievement-related Boolean search terms

Once you understand how to ask the right questions and turn them into Boolean searches, all kinds of new possibilities open up. For example, Glen often uses the OR operator to stash a ton of related terms into one search. He tinkers and experiments with the terms, always aiming to find a specific marker of the best talent.

When looking for high performers, he started by asking himself what an exceptional candidate would have in their profile. They’d likely mention things like awards, achievements, honors, and making President’s club, so that’s exactly what he puts into his Boolean search, separating each word or phrase with the OR operator.

Using this many terms may bring back thousands of results, but for Glen, who’s always looking for ways to uncover overlooked talent, that’s exactly the point.

“My goal is to find more people,” says Glen, “of which there will always be a subset of very good people.”

Once you have that big stack of results, you can use methods like strategic exclusion to winnow it down to the most qualified people.

Recruiters who apply Glen Cathey’s simple but effective search strategies have experienced great results, but even this list doesn’t include all of Glen’s insights from his talk at Talent Connect. Stay tuned for our next post on Glen’s approach to candidate searches, including new tips on using Boolean search to find more diverse candidates.
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by Glen Cathey

Flexible work provides benefits for both companies and people. It affords each party the opportunity to grow by enabling them to allocate their time, resources and energy to those things that they really enjoy and value.

Unfortunately there is one challenge with flexibility: this form of work is often inadequately regulated, abused and regarded as cheap. As a result those involved in flexibility – workers and businesses – often make lower wages and lower margins – not least because governments and unions develop or maintain incentives against flexible working or because pop-up companies define their service solely based on price rather than on quality and innovation for their clients. This is clearly not sustainable. It is unacceptable that those who choose to work flexibly should be punished for doing so.

Wherever we look around the world, regulations favour labour market rigidity. This increasingly serves vested, conservative labour unions rather than the labour force as a whole. For flexible workers these regulations include thresholds to social security (allowing different payment levels based on the length of contract), unbalanced collective bargaining, limited access to training and often blatently lower pay. Such rules are all too often justified with the excuse that a temporary job is not a “real” job, or that it is a “side” job and hence not worth a real wage, social security or training. Other arguments used are that workers in century-old, golden cages feel threatened by those willing to work in flexible new ways; or – and the most outrageous and misguided of all – that temporary work is a placeholder for women while they wait to give birth, rather than a means to combine work with other responsibilities for both women and men alike.

These outmoded rules and justifications have allowed short-sighted business models to present flexible work as a way to cut labour costs rather than as a way to provide greater agility and choice for everyone involved. Based on this premise the market for added-value flexible providers is being squeezed and set on a downward spiral of decreasing margins, quality and innovation. But who can blame them if labour laws are set up to enable this behaviour? Whatever moral or economic stance people may take on this issue, the bottom line is that it undermines the market for flexibility for flexibility’s sake and prevents people from entering the labour market on a temporary basis as it simply doesn’t pay enough to make economic sense.

We need to break this vicious circle. Just as with nationality, gender, ethnicity and age, the length of one’s contract should never be grounds for justifying lower wages or benefits. Governments and unions should abandon their idle policies of trying to squish workers into a one-size-fits-all model and punishing those who opt out from the model with decreased wages and levels of social protection. The world has changed and our approach to work needs to change with it. Making this a reality will involve a radical reform of existing rules and regulations as well as confronting the privileges of workers on open-ended contracts.

Obviously, this is not a message that all HR and procurement managers will want to hear. Yet, if adjustments are required in order to align salary packages with production, the idea of taking those wage discussions to an HR provider is inherently flawed. These types of discussions should take place between the employer and the employee – with or without the support of their representatives. This would then free-up HR professionals to create efficiencies and savings through a more efficient deployment and organisation of work. By addressing the unfair compensation and rights of flexible work, we will allow it to play its true role of enabling work for all.

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by

Jochem de Boer

Global Public Affairs Manager, World Employment Confederation

@ JochemPdeboer

Today’s digital age is taking us into a territory where new skills are becoming crucial. Not only are new jobs being created but existing ones are being ‘digitalised’ and thus require that the skills needed to perform them also evolve. At the same time, digitalisation offers potential to facilitate skilling with tools such as gamification and virtual reality, or simply by collecting data that will help organisations to better evaluate their workforce needs.

The HR services industry is already harnessing technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality and the metaverse in its daily work. Through digitisation it supports skills training and creates a virtual world where people can meet, learn and engage. Digital tools facilitate interview processes and even skills accreditation.

To truly reap the benefits of digitalisation, we must ensure that it offers opportunities for everyone and that nobody is left behind. Addressing the World Employment Conference in March 2023, the Director General of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Gilbert F Houngbo, issued a rallying call for the HR services sector to support the digital transition of the workforce. We listened and have responded with recommendations on five main ways in which our industry can support positive change in the months and years to come.

First up is to recognise the sheer size of the skills challenge. Research reveals that the vast majority of employers are concerned that they won’t meet hiring needs for technical skills. Finding the trainers available to teach people new skills is an equal problem. We need to scope the challenge and work together to find creative solutions. Recent research such as the OECD’s Skills for the Digital Transition, supported by WEC member Randstad, explored 417 million online job postings over a period of 10 years in 10 countries to discover the most recent labour market trends in demand for digital professionals and skills.

Next, the HR services sector needs to be a voice on skills policy, working with education experts and policymakers to inform the skills agenda at national and regional level. Bringing parties together is crucial in meeting the challenge. Our sector connects with thousands of workers, academics, innovators and business leaders every day, so is uniquely placed to understand the challenges and opportunities that digitalisation offers and to play a convening role in ensuring that everyone can work together to deliver solutions. This labour market knowledge is crucial in designing targeted retraining and upskilling policies.

In addition to this expertise, we can also rely on a long-standing tradition of upskilling and reskilling, especially in the agency work sector. Through social dialogue, several countries around the world have builtinnovative models for training agency workers, ensuring sustainable careers for them. As the European Union launched its European Year of Skills in May 2023, I am very proud of the renewed commitment and the joint recommendations that our European regional federation, WEC-Europe, adopted with its sectoral social partner counterpart, UNI-Europa. As skills and training are becoming increasingly important in the context of the digital transition, WEC-Europe and UNI-Europa pledged to work jointly with their members and affiliates in improving access to the skills required for these transitions.

Creating short-term skills solutions for employers is important too. While better skills and education policy to deliver long-term solutions to skills matches remains the priority, employers still need solutions now. Our sector can be a very useful partner in providing immediate solutions such as temporary placements, reskilling and career management that will allow the organisation to keep the doors open and meet immediate staffing needs.

The HR services sector also needs to gain a better understanding of the skills that leaders need. Business leaders will only remain relevant in today’s digital environment if they can oversee a culture of change and innovation. I believe that there is an interesting business opportunity for our sector in working with business leaders to manage change and attract the type of staff needed to deliver ongoing workplace evolution.

Our last recommendation concerns the skills set of the HR services industry personnel themselves. There is a vast opportunity for the sector to offer a far more strategic service. Indeed, 87% of recruitment professionals say that this is already happening, and they are increasingly required to provide clients with broader, more nuanced advice on mapping staffing needs.

There is a whole new seam of opportunity opening up for the HR services sector. By ramping up its strategic impact, the sector has the chance to offer real added value to companies, workers and labour markets and enable the digital transition.

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by

Denis Pennel

Managing Director, World Employment Confederation

@PennelDenis

With artificial intelligence increasingly becoming part of daily life, more and more job seekers are using AI tools in their job search journeys.

Trisha Chapman, founder of impressivecv, says large language models can help job seekers craft resumes, cover letters and practice for interviews.

Providing the chatbot with your work history will allow it to generate a resume. Same for a cover letter – if it is provided with your experience and the job description, she says.

It “can save you time and effort, allowing you to focus on other aspect of your job search,” Chapman adds.

According to ResumeBuilder.com, 46% of the 1,000 job seekers surveyed in February said they are using ChatGPT to write their resumes and/or cover letters.

Nearly 60% said they were hired after applying to a job using ChatGPT-written material. However, 11% said they were rejected after employers learned they used the chatbot.

How can you use AI to optimise your job search? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

___________________________________
Sources:
✍️ Dana Moukhallati
Resume Builder: https://lnkd.in/ehWeG5pS
Trisha Chapman: https://lnkd.in/eYvgcTgH

We know that personalization works. When recruiters personalize InMails, they see a 40% increase in acceptance rates. But we know that manually researching each candidate and personalizing every message is nearly impossible to do at scale.

That’s why we’re rolling out AI-assisted messages in LinkedIn Recruiter that will help you save time and engage with the right candidates, faster.

Since we launched our Recruiter product in 2008, we have continuously invested in our technology and features to help hirers find the right candidate based on skills, shared values, and how and where people want to work — and we’ve managed the complexity of connecting all of this at scale by using AI. Today, we’re going a step further and rolling out AI-assisted messages in Recruiter to help you create personalized messages, so you can save time, increase candidate engagement, and build meaningful connections.

This is just the beginning of how we’ll use generative AI to help you hire in Recruiter, and we’re excited to continue building and rolling out new features that will transform the hiring market and help you be even more successful in your job.

Easily craft effective, personalized InMails to maximize candidate engagement

Using AI-assisted messages is easy. Once you’ve selected a candidate in Recruiter, all you have to do is click the button that says “draft personalized message” and a unique and personalized message will be crafted for you to review, edit, and send. You can also further customize the message by selecting additional fields like job location, skills, and workplace type, and the message will be updated for you with more details based on your preferences.

GIF of how AI-assisted messages work in LinkedIn Recruiter

How does it work? Using our own LinkedIn in-house generative AI model trained on successful InMails, we use the information from the candidate’s profile, job description, and the recruiter’s company to draft a highly personalized message to get the conversation started.

We’re starting to roll out AI-assisted messages in Recruiter today to a handful of customers in the United States and Europe in English, and we’ll roll it out more broadly starting in June.

Efficiently hire the right candidates with Recruiter

Though generative AI is the new and exciting technology that everyone is talking about today, we’ve used AI to help hirers find qualified candidates fast for years — whether it’s through job recommendations for our members or recommended matches in LinkedIn Recruiter.

Most recently, we’ve used AI to update our recommended matches feature so that you can see real time personalized recommendations based on your hiring activities, candidates’ job seeking activities, and key information from your job posts, helping you to discover up to 10% more new and qualified candidates that you’re less likely to find on your own. And we’ve found that if you use recommended matches — rather than Recruiter Search alone — candidates are 35% more likely to accept your InMails.

"As a global employer with a priority on inclusivity and being data-driven," says April Samulewicz, vice president and global head of talent acquisition at Thomson Reuters, "we find Recruiter essential for sourcing and hiring top talent that drives our business forward. Thomson Reuters needs a solution that can help us discover candidates with the skills, experience, values, and work preferences that would make them a great near and long-term match. Recruiter is exactly that, and that's why we've been using it for over eight years to great effect."

We’ve also used AI to make skills a central component of LinkedIn Recruiter, so you can find and hire candidates based on their skills as opposed to work experience or where they went to school. We’ve recently launched things like Skills Match so that you can see a candidate’s skills within Recruiter and determine if the candidate is a match to the job you’re recruiting for, as well as Resume Search, which pulls relevant skills from a candidate’s resume and displays it in the Skills Match section of the candidate’s profile in Recruiter.

"Demand for the right skills is high," says Brett Underhill, director and head of global talent acquisition and learning and development at Taboola, "and it’s critical that we find top talent globally across every function to support our business and customers. With Recruiter’s search capabilities, including its Recommended Matches feature, our recruiting team is able to quickly find and hire the right talent to support the changing needs of our business."

These are just a few of the ways we’re using AI to power our products to help you find and hire the best possible candidates quickly, so you can focus your energy on the most strategic elements of your role — like speaking to and building relationships with candidates. This is what we’re focused on, day in and day out — stay tuned for what’s to come.

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This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Srinivasan - VP of Product at LinkedIn

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