• What is the Good Work Plan? Further details have been released of the government’s strategy to create a fairer workplace.

• Does nobody want to work at Facebook any more? The social networking giant has faced image problems of late.

• Which jobs have the highest demand, at present? One jobs board reveals the skills that employers are crying out for.

Good Work Plan changes for recruitment

Government strategy to secure jobs market in post-Brexit Britain.

The UK government has fleshed out its Good Work Plan: offering greater clarity on some of the key proposals. The plan, which began as a paper to parliament, aims to safeguard worker rights while improving output for UK businesses. It addresses several key aspects of the modern and future jobs market: from the gig economy, to clarification over working relationships. eBoss considers how the plans could change the shape of recruitment in the years to come.

What is the UK Government’s Good Work Plan?

The Good Work Plan was written as a response to the Taylor review into modern working practices. That report, and subsequent consultations, have led to changes in IR35 worker statuses.

This latest proposal is a roadmap that seeks to deliver a better labour market for the UK. The proposals seek to boost productivity and earnings, while rewarding hard work and incentivising fair employment practices.

The strategies outlined in the paper would commit the government to imposing fairer conditions for British workers. Most significantly, the proposals would include a set of new legislation, that would clarify working relationships between employers and workers.

We have previously seen how unscrupulous employers can game the system of UK employment rules. The Good Work Plan seeks to preserve the benefits of flexibility in the workforce, while diminishing the risk of exploitation. Enterprises which use so-called ‘gig economy’ tactics may find that they have to adapt their practices in future.

As such, the ideas in the Good Work Plan could change the way that recruiters approach their duties in future.

Good Work Plan: the Key Points

The government consultations have been critical of “one-sided flexibility”. That is: zero-hours contracts and other casual employment tactics which primarily benefit the employer while removing entitlements from individual workers.

While flexibility remains a key component of a rewarding work-life balance for many workers, the new plans aim to tackle abuse of the system. The new outlines are broken down into five key areas.

Fair Play

The government wants to ensure fair pay for fair work to promote an aspirational working culture. Proposals include a greater degree of transparency concerning internal pay inequality, clarity on holiday pay rules, and an expansion of gender pay reporting.

Satisfaction

Perhaps the area of most interest to recruiters, the proposals aim to boost employee satisfaction. In particular, the government wants to set out guidelines that ensure businesses create meaningful jobs that boost retention and talent acquisition..

Participation and Progression

We have previously investigated the appeal of candidates who upskills themselves. The Good Work Plan aims to enshrine the right for all workers to develop their personal know-how and set of skills throughout their working life. Access to training, and planned career progression will become central to this proposal.

Engagement

The Plan will seek to enfranchise employees and ensure that every worker has a voice within their organisation. Again,. This is a factor that is seen as crucial to employee retention rates. At the same time, providing workers a platform with which to voice their own aspirations or concerns will help organisations better manage morale and target-setting, while ensuring morale remains positive.

Well-being and safety

With reports showing high levels of stress and employee “burnout” affecting output, well-being is a key concept of the Good Work Plan. Better understanding of mental health and its impact on the work place, plus improving management of the work-life balance, will help to build more productive working environments.

Why Does Nobody Want to Work for Facebook?

Scandals and poor brand image have impacted the network’s appeal as a place to work among young professionals.

Last week, we detailed how Linkedin has enjoyed rapid expansion in its job listings and recruitment activity. This week, we see the contrasting fortunes of another web giant.

It was revealed this week that Facebook has suffered a significant slump in the numbers of job offers being accepted over the last year. The presumption is that, following a series of data scandals, the social networking brand is no longer seen as an appealing place to work.

The news was broken by Facebook’s own former recruiters who have chosen to publish job acceptance rates at the company. Their own figures found that acceptance rates had more than halved since the company began attracting negative publicity for its handling of personal data.

In the year 2017-2018, Facebook had boasted candidate acceptance rates of 85 per cent. By the end of 2018, however, that figure had fallen to as low as just 25 per cent.

In the highly competitive software development field, Facebook fared just as poorly. In 2016, it succeeded in placing 90 per cent of candidates who were offered roles. By the start of 2019, just half (50 per cent) of candidates took up a position that had been offered. As the dash for key talent continues, this collapse in performance could create long-term difficulties for the social network.

Is the Facebook brand slipping?

The timing of the slump in acceptances suggests that negative publicity has fed directly into performance.

2018 saw consistently negative press coverage of Facebook. It was first embroiled in the vote-rigging and data-sharing controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica. It has since been criticised for enabling unsuitable content to be freely published on its site. Most recently, the network was named as one of the sites which hosted videos from terror atrocities.

However, more worrying to company bosses will be the fear that the change in fortunes is not a temporary setback. There is a very real concern that the low placement rates are the result of an underlying demographic shift in Facebook users.

The data in this report followed graduate candidates, specifically. The majority of these young adults view Facebook as a network already populated by older generations. Snapchat and Instagram are the go-to apps for the new generation entering the jobs market. While a string of poor press coverage can be addressed in time, reversing a generation-wide trend away from the brand may be a greater challenge to overcome.

However, Facebook’s spokesperson Anthony Harrison denied that the company was facing hiring troubles. “Overall, the percentage of offers accepted by engineers has gone up in 2019. We continue to meet our engineering recruiting goals and are confident that will continue.”

Indeed reveals most sought-after skills

Jobs board Indeed reveals which skills are the most sought after in the UK jobs market.

IT engineers are the most sought-after skill in Britain, right now. That is the key announcement from Indeed.

The jobs board revealed the professions which saw the highest demand in 2018. It found that searches for IT engineers had increased by more than a third in the last twelve months.

The next best performer was in financial technology services (fintech). The fintech sector anticipates strong growth over the next three years. Expansion of the sector is expected to reach 88 per cent by 2021.

Construction was the third strongest sector for skills acquisition. The demand for construction skills is perhaps unsurprising, given that the number of building firms in Britain has grown by 10 per cent since 2016.

Meanwhile, transportation and logistics was the top sector for rate of growth. In the last seven years, the number of road haulage firms in the British Isles has risen by 229 per cent.

Indeed UK’s manager, Bill Richards, said the data was positive for the country’s jobs market. “The roles seeing the greatest growth in demand often reward highly skilled people with high salaries, even at entry level. The message is clear – no matter where you are in your career path, opportunity is there if you feel like a change.”