On the 21st June 2011, 4MAT hosted their latest breakfast event at Adam Street Private Members Club. With a focus on corporate recruitment, “Recruiting the Best Talent” saw guests attending from a diverse range of brands, including Apple, NPower and Virgin, and featured an interview between highly regarded motivational speaker Jeff Grout and Isabelle Hung, formerly of Monster, Yell and Harrods.
A small and personal event by design, “Recruiting the Best Talent” saw Jeff interview Isabelle at length about her experiences working in corporate recruitment for major brands, and her successes and innovations for capturing the best talent, using techniques ranging from the traditional to the cutting edge.
The “cutting edge” featured heavily and, as may be expected, using social media as a recruitment tool was a key point. However this was reinforced with the understanding that social media represents a long term investment of both time and resources, and can in no way be a ‘quick-fix’ in terms of providing high-quality candidates. Indeed there was great emphasis on the need for social media to be managed appropriately in order to avoid its pitfalls: releasing a brand into social media means to relinquish control of it.
In addition to the focus on social media, the importance of building a substantial, well-presented and well-maintained career portal was also discussed. Again, marketing best-practice came into play, as Isabelle and many of the attendees discussed successful career portals and how they functioned as an extension of the brand, sharing the look and feel of customer websites as well as the values inherent in a particular brand.
Indeed, brand values and how they relate to HR gradually became an overarching theme as the discussion continued. Perhaps one of the most important takeaways of the event was the notion that HR teams must have a fuller understanding of their brand when looking at applicants, to be sure that they will fit in with the values of a company as opposed to just having a matching skill-set. This of course extends from interviews right the way through to online brand presence, from career portals to blogs to Facebook campaigns. Though somewhat broad and very definitely a marketing ideology above all else, the concept of brand values being as important to HR as they would be to any other aspect of a company was certainly an innovative one that sparked engaging discussion between many of the guests.
