I am going to ask you if you would be so kind as to spare me for £2 and 2 minutes of your time. I am going to be running, walking, falling over, shivering, swearing and generally battling my way through the 8 miles for a different cause that is very, very close to my heart.

As some of you know, my eldest son Oliver, suffers from a couple of genetic disorders (47XYY and a duplication of the short arm of Chromosome 12). He has also very recently been diagnosed with a condition called EDS, which is closely related to Epilepsy. This is a bunch of medical mumbo jumbo that is a fancy way of saying that, through no fault of his own, Ollie and our family have some huge challenges to tackle day to day life and many of the things that normal teenagers would just take for granted. Please don’t misunderstand me, there are an awful lot of people considerably worse off than Ollie, for which we are very fortunate, but this is our reality.

One of the reasons we manage to cope with Ollie is thanks to a charity called Unique. They provide us with family support and are a very valuable source of information and research into his conditions, which are a massive help to the whole family. Sharing this with you all was a decision I have been wrestling with over the past few weeks. Ollie would not be over the moon if he knew I had shared this with you all, however I felt it was important to put it into context of why this is so important to me.

These wonderful people make a real difference to people’s lives. Like many similar organizations they are totally reliant on donations and therefore I am proud to be tackling the Grim on their behalf. Please spare me 2 minutes to follow the link below and pledge £2. My goal is try and get 100 people to sponsor me to try and give something back.

http://www.justgiving.com/Matt-Jessop

Many thanks for your support, it really does make a difference.

I have been lucky enough to attend a number of fantastic events recently, but this was the most enjoyable, thanks entirely to the excellent organisation of @lisascales, and the willingness of many of the finest minds in Social Recruiting to relax and enjoy themselves. Ironically, I probably picked up more learnings in this relaxed atmosphere, than many more formal events, a really unconference.

Many of the attendees I had met before, many others I felt I knew, having followed their tweets, blogs and Facebook walls for some time. However, there was one attendee who, despite my being connected to him in a number of ways, I new nothing about. Having spent the weekend with him, I still don’t know who he is. So what have I learned about him?

• He is the result of a cloning experiment using @petergold99′s DNA. Which, given my estimations of his age (unless he had a very hard paper round) proves that Dolly the sheep was not the first!!
• He is a really genuinely nice guy. You would never know it from his online persona, and I so didn’t want that to be the case, assuming wrongly that someone who goes to that much trouble to protect his identity, must be a self important t@&$€r.
• He is a trained ninja. Break eye contact with him, even for a moment, and he will disappear, only to reappear seconds later on the other side of the camp.

Other than that, and despite several lengthy conversations with him, I can’t tell you a lot. The aforementioned organisational skills of @lisascales had arranged top security;

• James Bond and the British Secret Service lent us Q (otherwise known as @james_mayes) and his plethora of gadgets, who would have been late had I not spotted him hitchhiking whilst I was travelling down.
• A Special Forces bodyguard (@alexhens) was commissioned, who was late, allegedly due to missing his train, but really due to a more important mission in Exeter.
• Surveillance operatives; (@matt[without an underscore]alder) with his sophisticated camera equipment, who was late home due to the chaos that is the M4, and @saraheadworth and her trusty sidekick @andyheadworth.

However, none of the above was necessary. Which goes to prove that it’s not that difficult to protect your identity online. A bit of planning and common sense and even a group of highly intelligent, tech savvy, Social Media types can’t work it out.

OK, so if we really wanted to know, we know the make and registration of his car, and a phone call to a man, who knows a man….. Honestly, I don’t really want to know. The speculation was one of the many enjoyable conversation threads that went through the weekend, and the truth will probably be somewhat of anti-climax.

Really looking forward to the next instalment of this particular murder mystery, apparently set somewhere in Wales. Maybe in the next chapter we find out who he murdered with his axe? Has anyone seen @billboorman lately?

I am fortunate enough to have had some great comments to my post of last week “Contingent Workers Are Second Class Citizens..“. However it was in moderating these comments, I was reminded of a particular challenge that has been troubling me for some time;

As, I believe is good practice, I published a link to my blog post on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The post was well received and I am grateful for the comments made. Here’s the challenge though; Some of the comments I have received have been directly on the blog, some of the comments I have received have been replies to and retweets of the Twitter post and some have been replies to my LinkedIn status. All perfectly valid and I am not for one second advocating that I should be able to mandate how people respond. People should be able to react or not as they choose and via whatever medium that they choose.

This isn’t an issue for me, as naturally I can see all four channels and moderate and respond accordingly. However, what if someone is, for example, following me on Twitter and interested in my post? There is no easy way for them to see the comments made on LinkedIn, without a lot of work on their part to go looking for them or a lot of work on my part to collate them.

So what, you might think. Well if one the reasons we blog is to inform, comments on blog posts are an important part of that process. I use my post as an example but the principles apply to anyone that blogs, if I see a post that interests me, it would be great if there was an easy way for me to see all of the feedback for that post, without having to hunt for all the places the author might have posted links to it and see what comments, if any, had been made.

Truth is, I don’t know what the answer is to this dilemma. However, here is my appeal to the many, many talented developers out there; Please can I have a WordPress plug in, that I can use to tell WordPress all of the places I am going to place links to my post, and any replies/comments/ retweets etc can be collated back and accessible from the post?

Wishful thinking? Maybe, but if you don’t ask you don’t get

….or so you might think, if you looked at many companies’ recruitment strategies.

Before I explain my thinking, allow me to explain why this matters. The REC‘s figures for 08/09 put the value of the UK recruitment industry at £22.491 billion. Of which £2.609 billion relates to perm recruitment and £19.882 billion relates to contingent recruitment. Now I fully understand that you can’t compare the two, perm recruitment figures are typically fees only and temp recruitment figures are typically salaries plus fees. It is also very difficult to calculate how much of the £19.882 billion relates to fees, but for the purpose of this it is enough to state that it is a very significant figure that probably isn’t a million miles away from the perm figure. Contingent bookings totalled 1,068,197 for the same period, perm placements were somewhat less at 582,803. Again it would be wrong to try and make a direct comparison between the two, but again contingent recruitment represents a significant proportion of a companies hiring activity.

OK, so if we accept that companies are spending a significant amount of money on contingent labour, if we accept that there a large number of contingent hires that need to be managed, if we broadly accept that when our stereotypical CEO says ‘our people are our best asset’ they should be referring to everyone that contributes towards their organisation, and if we broadly accept that we are moving towards a more flexible workforce (a debate for another time), do we see a significant difference in priority in the market between perm and contingent recruitment? Here a few example of why I think we do, in no particular order;

Experts – I cannot move in the market without falling over an expert prepared to share their views on all different aspects of permanent recruitment. As with anything, some of it is good advice, some of it is rubbish. However, look for similar advice in relation to contingent recruitment and it’s much harder to find. Some would argue that much of the advice they give can be applied to both. I would argue that whilst there are certainly many commonalities, there are just as many differences and even applying the common principles shouldn’t be done without due consideration of the differences.

Technology – Take a look at the market for permanent recruitment technology and there are a vast myriad of different solutions available. Take a look at the equivalent market for contingent recruitment technology and you will find it to be significantly smaller, which is odd if we look at the figures above that suggest the market need is broadly similar. You will also see that contingent recruitment technology is often very focussed on the financial aspects of the transaction. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but what about the importance of skills and cultural fit in relation to a contingent worker? I do acknowledge that things are starting to change slowly, some of the leading Applicant Tracking providers have released contingent modules and some of the leading Vendor Management providers have released recruitment modules, but there is still a huge disparity.

Suppliers - In terms of agency suppliers to the industry, there is no such disparity. There are many contingent recruitment suppliers out there, as there are many permanent recruitment suppliers out there. Given all the potential risks around co-employment, IR35, AWD and the various other relevant legislations, they arguably provide more value add than their permanent recruitment cousins. However, this is in itself an issue. Companies are spending large amounts of money and managing large numbers of transactions with large numbers of suppliers. Yes we see lots of initiatives by companies to try and rationalise this, and yes there are specialist RPO and Vendor Management providers that will work with the bigger companies to help them achieve this. However the majority of the initiatives, and many of the specialist providers service offerings, are based around rationalising rates and margins. Nothing inherently wrong with that and many of these companies provide a good service. However, companies should recognise that Contingent workers are human beings, not boxes of stationary, you cannot procure them in the same way. Ignore the importance of skill sets and cultural fit at your peril. If the supplier has sold the company a contingent labour procurement service, it is not the suppliers responsibility to address these related aspects, it is the companies responsibility to complement these services with the relevant systems and processes.

Having said all of the above, I do understand many of the reasons why we are where we are. Not least of which is that perm recruitment is typically ‘owned’ by HR and contingent recruitment is typically ‘owned’ by Procurement. Whilst there are many fine procurement departments that do a good job of managing the financial aspects of contingent recruitment (there are just as many who struggle), there is nobody to own the people aspects of contingent recruitment. HR don’t really want to own permanent recruitment in a lot of cases, and definitely don’t want contingent recruitment. Hence the vacuum, hence the issues.

So my plea to our business leaders is, take the best of the advice, systems and services that are on offer and continue to invest in you permanent recruitment strategies. But don’t ignore the valuable contribution that your contingent workforces make to your business and invest in ensuring you get the best contingent talent as well.

The answers are out there if you know where to look and I will try and dig deeper into some of the challenges and possible solutions in future posts.

I confess the original Blog, now consigned to the recycle bin of some anonymous server at Blogger.com, was constructed on the basis of “because I think I should”. In putting together the new one, and relating it to the new website, Twitter feed and Facebook and LinkedIn pages (under construction), I wanted to take a more considered approach this time around, hence the thought process of ‘why’. Here are some of the conclusions I came to;

Promote – OK, so lets not pretend that I haven’t got a business to promote and I am doing this purely for altruistic reasons, because I have, and I’m not. However, I really hope that my posts never stray in the direction of blatant self promotion, that’s not something I feel comfortable reading on other people’s blogs and it’s just not me. If you catch me doing it, you have my express permission to reprimand me severely.

Inform – So if I want to promote my business but I don’t want to be telling everyone how wonderful we are, how is that going to work? Well, the plan is to publish posts that are informative; that provide useful information about the topics we are passionate about, that give people an insight into how we think and feel about different subjects, and allow people to make up their own minds about whether we are a good fit for their needs.

Educate – In doing the above, I am hoping we can pass on our understanding on different topics. One of my pet hates is blog posts that purport to educate on a particular topic, often titled something like “7 things you must know about ……..”, I have a sense of anticipation on clicking the link, only to find a page of information that is factually correct but often doesn’t even reach the level of stating the obvious. If people want to take what we know and go it alone, I wish them well.

Develop - OK, so in trying to think of a one word heading for each line I couldn’t think of anything less pompous! However, I am a great believer that writing down an idea and having to formulate it into some kind of logical structure on the page, is a great way of further developing said idea. That in itself doesn’t need a blog, but if in doing so I am fortunate enough to garner feedback and comments, the idea develops further

Respond - I am a huge fan of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but often I have wanted to respond to other peoples posts, new articles etc and it simply isn’t possible in 140 characters. Hence the blog is an ideal format for a considered riposte.

Rant - Yes, apologies in advance, sometimes I want to get things off my chest and I can’t always do it in 140 characters. My mother will be pleased to know that she raised me well however, and I don’t have it in me to name and shame, however tempting it may be sometimes.

Amuse - All work and no play, I am sure from time to time my twisted sense of humour will produce the odd post designed to amuse those with similarly warped minds.

So make up your own mind as to how many of the above objectives I have achieved with this first post! Many would argue that I am setting myself up for fall by declaring such aspirations, only time will tell, but I’ll not apologise for aiming high.

That’s the plan and I’ll try and revisit this every so often to share with you how I think we are getting on.