Days in the sun – working from home

Employers are, everywhere, urged to introduce family-friendly practices and allowing staff to work from home is one that is often cited. Quite apart from the potential cost-savings (office space) the ability to cut out the daily commute combined with the additional ‘empowerment’ away from the boss is supposed to bring greater motivation and loyalty. A report in ITPro offers its top 10 most common distractions for working at home. As someone who permanently works from home I recognise most of them.

Check them out

It can be entertaining to Google the name of a long-lost friend, neighbour or work colleague (don’t forget the ” “) and see what turns up. But it can have business uses as well.

A survey of top executive headhunters, by leading UK executive careers website Experteer.co.uk, found that 86% of recruiters use the Internet to research potential candidates. Interestingly, the balance between finding good and bad news was fairly even at 63% good and 51% bad. Of course this was a survey about senior roles so you would expect there to be a lot out there on the web. Many applying for roles sufficiently senior to be headhunted are likely to be mentioned on company publicity, conference proceedings, charity committees and the like. They are probably too old to have embarrassing student pranks on facebook. Nor is it surprising that 86% of headhunters do search for information. They have a reputation to loose if a ”bad ‘un’ is put forward to clients. More odd that the other 14% do not.

But what about your own in-house recruitment? Do you routinely search the net for information about candidates? If not, why not? Should you search on all staff, just senior staff, security staff? Do you pay for a service company to check out staff for you? Do you think it is improper to do so?

Web 2 to you

More on the topic of checking out candidates. A CIPD press release ahead of their recruitment and retention conference talks about how well or badly HR is embracing Web 2.0 in their recruitment activities (note to self: do try to get a clear definition for Web 2.0 into my head*). Deborah Fernon, their Organisation and Resourcing Adviser rightly warns against being overly concerned by what you read about someone on their social networking site but then goes on to say: “Good practice requires that every candidate is treated equally, which means all candidates would have to have similar profiles before information is used, and … not everyone has a … profile.”

Sorry, but if you learn something about a candidate that calls their suitability into question you cannot just go ahead and risk your employer’s business because the other candidates knew how to use the privacy settings on facebook. Do you keep the information away from the other interviewers? Or do you tell them and order them to ignore it; sharing the blame? And when something goes wrong later on?

*ps. have just tried to get a definition for Web 2.0 via Google. Seems there are several hundred of them, all complicated, over-long and as concerned about what it is not as what it is. On balance it seems to mean all that interactive stuff that you could not do with just a web page and email – like this blog (but only if people post a comment). My best advice is that if you are faced with someone pontificating about Web 2.0 do not, whatever you do, ask them to define it. Unless, of course, you can offer a succinct sentence of explanation.