A new branding vision for the worldwide recruitment industry was unveiled yesterday in London on the first day of the International Confederation of Private Employment Agencies’ (Ciett) World Employment Conference 2012.
Centred on two strap lines – ‘The way to work’ and ‘A job for every person. A person for every job’ – the new Ciett branding will underpin five goals for the industry to fulfil within the next five years: supporting 280m people in their job life, helping 75m young people enter the labour market, up-skilling 65m people, creating 18m more jobs and serving 13m companies with the right talents to succeed.
In unveiling the new vision and the pledges, Ciett managing director Dennis Pennel issued a bold rallying cry to delegates to bring emotion into their work. He said that bringing emotion to their work was “something the unions are very good at” and that it was difficult to compete with that.
Richard Cox, co-founder of PR consultancy Salt, which developed the branding vision with Ciett and has been working with the organisation since last year, commented that the employment industry was “an industry that for too long has been playing for a draw – two steps forward, two steps back”, and that now it was time to go for more advances.
Pennel said it was important for both Ciett and the industry to capitalise on what it had achieved through the publication and publicising of a report ‘Adapting for Change’, produced by The Boston Consulting Group last year for Ciett and released at last year’s conference in Rotterdam.
The 100-page report, subtitled ‘How private employment services facilitate adaptation to change, better labour markets and decent work’, concludes that given the correct regulation, “the private employment industry is able to drive inclusive labour markets and provide tailor-made solutions to the new employment solutions”.
In a time of “globalisation, demographic evolution, sectoral and IT shifts, unpredictability and complexity combined with new attitudes to work”, with “severe” consequences for labour markets, “private employment agencies are well placed to enable adaptation to these structural changes” claimed the report.
As various regional representatives gave feedback to delegates on the work they had done around the ‘Adapting for Change’, the question of working with, and at times against, trade unions emerged as a frequent difficulty for employment providers.
North American regional representative Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association, said it “reinforced the message we’ve been using in our internal and external advocacy for many years, and very effectively”, adding that an additional message North America had been trying to promote was that “we do great things for companies, we do great things for countries, but we [also] do great things for people”.
One delegate remarked he agreed that he was “always in defence”, but was refreshed by this new vision, saying “now I feel fine, I feel belief, I love it!”.
Cox concluded: “You make an argument with facts, you win it with emotions”.
- The UK’s Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) is hosting the conference for Ciett at the Landmark London hotel in Marylebone this week (23-25 May).
