HR Club Sydney

HR Club Sydney

Special Guest Post from AER Head

Posted on | February 2, 2010 | View Comments

I’m very excited this morning to publish this guest post from AER Head.

Aer Head is a Sydney-based blogger, analyst and commentator on trends in the attraction, engagement and retention space in Australia. He is currently GAD at TMP Worldwide, Sydney, (and takes no credit for any of the work mentioned below which was managed from Adelaide- but read on, it’s great stuff).

It seems everyone is predicting 2010 as another year of change.

Kevin Wheeler is foreseeing a greater movement to non-traditional employment (temp, contract, consulting, etc). Michael Specht is advising employers to focus on workforce planning and increasing metrics. John Sullivan is imploring employers to act swiftly to plan and prepare for the changes ahead.

But in reality, the trends that our industry has been banding about for the past year or so have been evolving for decades. The GFC has merely been the catalyst for an explosive change of pace and investment of resources.

One thing I’m seeing right now at my place is the more advanced organisations planning long-term in determining the talent and skills they’ll need to be competitive, and then assessing and choosing the tools and strategies to develop, engage and/or attract them.

While today’s financial climate means much HR work is focusing on existing talent, it did remind me of a piece of work that readers in Sydney will have missed unless they were travelling through South Australia last year. It was significant to these trends because:

1. The organisation was acting now to respond to future needs.
2. The organisation was willing to conduct research to establish what the problem to be solved actually was.
3. The organisation had determined what success meant and how to measure it.

The organisation in question was the Department of Trade and Economic Development (DTED). For those unfamiliar with them, this is the South Australian Government’s partner agency, responsible for – no surprises for guessing here – economic development.

DTED had some research that demonstrated an alarming trend: so significant was the decline in students undertaking school math and science, technical degrees and apprenticeships, the future viability of South Australia’s Mining, Defence, Advanced Manufacturing, and IT/Communications sectors was under threat.

We couldn’t have that.

So, without taking you through every detail of the campaign, our brief was to close the skills gap in these industries. We needed to compete for the attention of 14-17 year olds – closing the gap between school subject choices, and the career options ahead.

As teenagers generally don’t like being told what to do, we decided to promote the idea that they could turn the interests and passions they have now (skateboarding, computer games, camping), into a satisfying career in the future. And the thinking and planning stage starts now.

We used a range of approaches including TV, online, print, DM, radio, outdoor, competitions, speakers, and PR some of which you can view here.

And we drove people to a bespoke online environment that you can find here.

Some readers may be interested to hear that in the first two months of the campaign we drove some 16,700 unique visitors to the web portal (representing 24% of the entire SA 14-17 population). But at the end of the day, you could easily claim, volume is a very limited measure of success.

After all, so what if we get visitors? If there is no real change in beliefs and – ultimately – decision-making behaviour, then surely we’ve failed?

And that’s where it gets even more interesting. Because DTED engaged independent market research agency Square Holes to research and analyse the effect of the campaign. This demonstrated a number of things:

Recall of the campaign was high among students (92%), teachers (70%) and parents (86%).

And:

“[S]cience, maths, physics, chemistry and computing are more interesting [to students] since 2008”. (Chemistry up 10%; Maths and Physics up 6%.)

And:

“Two in five students [40%] were encouraged to find out more about subject choice, study and careers as a result of the advertising.”

However:

The “likelihood to consider work in defence, electronics and mining and resources has remained fairly consistent among students since 2008. A quarter would consider work in defence [24%, 2009], or electronics [23%, 2009] whilst few would consider the mining and resources industries [12%, 2009].”

So patting ourselves on the back will have to wait. While this campaign won a number of industry awards, the goal was to increase employment in the sectors above and there is clearly work to be done. So it’s time to revise our strategy and move forward from there.

But the lesson for all HR plans is clear: plan ahead, measure diligently, and refine and rework your goals religiously.

And, if all else fails, make like a 15 year-old and go skateboarding instead.

Category: Employee Engagement, Recruitment, Social Media/Technology, Talent Management
Tags: > > > > > > > >

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