This information is reproduced courtesy of Demos
Conclusion
When asked what she thought she had changed during her time as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher gave a reply that has since become famous: ‘everything'.90 This of course ignored questions as to whether ‘Thatcherism' was the symptom or the cause of huge social change in that period. Nevertheless, what is clear is that as the twentieth century drew to an end, Adam Smith's ‘invisible hand' had never been more visible. The West, including Thatcher's Britain, had decided that it could not live without the market. With that choice settled, however, individuals, businesses and nations all around the world are faced with an equally important concern of how to live with the market.
In business and in the labour market, organisations and individuals are coming to terms with a new set of sweeping changes across society, from mass migration and global competition to the rise of new technology. These changes are altering the demands that are made on organisations, the opportunities open to people and the nature of the workforce itself. And politically, both the left and the right in Britain are adjusting to a new era in which a market economy has become part of the mainstream, but the answer to what kind of market economy remains both contested and uncertain. Huge questions remain as to how to ensure that markets are fair and efficient, that people are best equipped to thrive within them and that as a society we are able to identify social challenges that will never be addressed through the market alone - however well it functions.
This pamphlet has aimed to contribute to answering those questions by doing three things:
Our argument
We have argued that the traditional divide between extremely personalised recruitment for highly skilled jobs and relatively standardised recruitment processes for low-skilled jobs looks set to close in the coming years. A combination of new expectations and new opportunities, we suggest, will drive a more personalised approach across the spectrum.
Our recommendations
Beyond the traditional model
We make a series of recommendations to support this process.
Employers should:
1 ensure that commissioning processes - whether through HR or procurement - focus on value rather than cost
2 align HR, PR and marketing and be clear about core organisational values.
Recruitment professionals should:
1 track retention to demonstrate impact
2 demand accountable advertising online to demonstrate impact
3 help organisations learn about themselves by overcoming the insider/outsider problem
4 align the recruitment experience with client ethos
5 find ways to connect with the passive job seeker
6 broker and utilise peer-to-peer relationships
7 use Web 2.0 to build personalised relationships online
8 tap into the long tail.
Markets and social policy
The theme running throughout this pamphlet is both the ingenuity and shortcomings of markets. We argue that many of the likely changes in the market for recruitment will have positive consequences. However, for all their uses, markets often produce imperfect results. They can produce disparities in power which undermine people's ability to shape their own lives. Their outcomes can overlap with social goals, such as more inclusive workplaces, without ever fully achieving them. And markets can be very poor forums for collective decisions about the kind of society that we want to live in; the sum of our individual choices often produces outcomes that none of us are comfortable with. We have identified three social challenges that we consider beyond the market, and keeping our focus on recruitment we make recommendations for:
A word on the future
A core principle behind scenario planning is that it is impossible to predict an inherently unpredictable future. That same uncertainty, however, should be empowering. The uncertainty surrounding the future highlights the possibility of many different future scenarios - and signals our own ability as individuals, organisations and whole societies to shape change as we would prefer it. We hope that the research, analysis and recommendations contained in this pamphlet go some way to helping all those with a stake in the recruitment process and help create a future that is brighter, happier and more productive.
