Picon Business Forum – Nov 2020
Mercury Managing Director, Dani Novick, was invited to speak a the PICON (Printing Industry Confederation) virtual business forum in November 2020. Dani was delighted to share our insights on how to carry on recruiting during the pandemic and covered the whole approach to recruitment covering the key issues facing clients,…
Friday 5’s – Timescales
Managing recruitment timescales is crucial to effective recruitment at any time and as we approach the summer holiday period we potentially hit the perfect storm of obstacles. There can be no doubt that delays in arranging interviews, feedback and offers run the risk of candidates losing interest and dropping out….
How to Design a More Effective Job Advert
Information provided by recruitment specialists, Mercury Search & Selection. Think of it from the candidate’s viewpoint… Advertising is by its nature a passive way of attracting candidates. You rely on attracting a candidate’s attention so it is essential that you think about your ad from the candidate perspective. Typically an…
Cutting The Cost of Open Vacancies
It’s the start of a new year and we’ve been digesting the stats for our performance last year and we’ll be writing about relevance of some of the metrics. This week its “time to fill”. “Time to fill” is commonly held to be the number of days between the publication…
The High-Performance Contradiction
It’s a strange facet of human nature that often the better someone appears to do, the easier they make it look and the less their efforts are valued. We know this as the high-performance contradiction. Perhaps it’s because it is harder to quantify skill, knowledge and background preparation or that…
Appreciating the True Cost of Your Vacancy
Many of the costs of recruitment are easy to quantify, e.g. advertising or agency / consultancy fees, although the focus on these tends to blind many people to the very significant internal, often unaccounted for, costs. We’ll address these in a separate article because the other, almost certainly far more…
Training in the Print Industry
If you asked me “is a formal training plan an important factor in attracting the best talent?” I’d have to say no. Despite its historical link with apprenticeships, the modern print industry is not known for training and it is clear that it just isn’t at the top of the…
Print and Packaging Recruitment: The Recruitment Iceberg
Great recruiters build deep, long term relationships with clients who use them again and again. Their clients have an understanding of and value the work that goes on behind the scenes during the recruitment process, delivering great quality candidates. Unfortunately, where employers don’t have that understanding or are more used…
Strength in depth – More than Succession Planning
Succession planning is a necessity, but one that is often overlooked with serious consequences. And it’s not just the large groups that have to plan ahead; it’s the small operations that can be hit just as hard, if not harder, as its here where the loss of a key member…
Lying on CVs: Lies, Damn Lies
It seems not a year goes by without a media storm about lying on CVs and job applications. High profile cases such as those seen on TVs ‘The Apprentice’ do little to help. The public is at once outraged and seemingly accepting the “everyone is at it, so a little…
