what3words ///straight.to.interview

Here at Bamboo, we love tech. We love its ability to transform, simplify, and streamline everyday tasks.

We’re on a constant digital transformation journey, analysing every facet of our candidate and client journeys to see how we can effect transformational and incremental change.

The last 15 months have seen a marked shift to online interviews. This has given us some time to cast a critical eye over the candidate experience, and find ways to improve it for when we return to the ‘new normal’.

We surveyed 300 candidates who attended interviews via Bamboo. One of the key stress points that emerged was finding the office.

Candidates said the nature of interviewing for jobs (while employed) means you have to cut as much as you can out of your diary, so there’s ample time to wander up and down roads looking for the office.

This problem was particularly an issue for our London-based candidates. London’s streets are a marvel of ad-hoc construction, having grown with the times rather than to any grand plan.

While this creates a warren of intrigue, it’s a challenge to find a specific address.

Precision exactitude is required. With this in mind, we had a chat with Keith Leddington, Senior Partnerships Lead at What3Words HQ.

If you’re not familiar with the company, they’ve broken the entire planet into a grid of 57 x 1012,3 meter x 3-meter squares - each with a unique 3-word reference. 3 meters x 3 meters gets you straight to the door, for example,  ///Luxury.Thigh.Pilots will land you on Bamboo’s doorstep.

We’ve now incorporated this tech into our interview confirmation process, and moving forward, every candidate will receive an email containing a What3Words reference and a picture of the office door. This means you can spend your journey to the interview running through examples, safe in the knowledge that you’ll be guided straight to the door.

We’re always keen to speak with companies whose tech might make our candidates’ and clients’ lives easier.

If you have a solution that might help, get in touch. Equally, if you’ve experienced a solution that made life easier while searching for a job or carrying out a recruitment process, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Global distribution of ‘thought leaders’

As with any of our blogs at Bamboo, it’s best not to use this as the basis of a PhD.

With that caveat out of the way, we’ve noticed an increase in people describing themselves as ‘thought leaders’ on LinkedIn. With the definition being a bit too nebulous for us to get our heads around, we thought we’d look into the global and regional distribution of thought leaders, and leave the concept for others to analyse.

To kick things off we’ve taken the total number of people on LinkedIn who self-identify as thought leaders and looked at how this breaks down in terms of countries where English is the main language. There may well be a French or Mandarin equivalent of thought leader but it’s outside the remit of this blog.

Expressed as a pie chart, it doesn’t really tell us much except that most of the world’s thought leaders are in the US, but you didn’t need us to tell you that would be the case:

What’s much more interesting is what it looks like if you break down the number of thought leaders as a percentage of the total population (according to Wikipedia).

A surprisingly even distribution.
Here’s the data.

To make the comparison a bit easier, we multiplied the percentage by 1000.

It shows us that Australia and the US have broadly the same number of thought leaders in their population, which is roughly double that of the UK, Canada, NZ, and Ireland.

As a slight aside, that works out to one English-speaking thought leader on LinkedIn per 32,038,349 people globally.

Moving on to the UK.

The first thing to note is there’s a fairly big discrepancy between the overall number of thought leaders in the UK and those we could find by searching by city. We couldn’t figure out where the missing 2,910 thought leaders in the UK are living so we widened the search.

Again, the pie chart doesn’t tell us much except that most are based in London. Again, quelle surprise.

However, once again, when shown as a percentage by population, the pie chart is more revealing.

This leads us to conclude that the missing 2,910 thought leaders must be fairly evenly distributed between every town and city in the UK.

Again, the stats by city.

So, what can we conclude from all this? Perhaps that the overall distribution both on an international and regional level is surprisingly similar in countries where English is the first language.

Looking at the regional distribution of thought leaders in the UK, it seems that areas in the Celtic League have roughly half the number of thought leaders with the exception of three in Llandudno where the stats may have been skewed by the very low numbers. Why this might be is anyone’s guess.

We’ll have to revisit this in a year or so to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.

How recruitment consultants describe charities

In one of the most niche blogs ever dreamed up, we decided to take a look at the different adjectives used to describe charities by recruitment consultants looking for fundraisers in Greater London.

We decided to focus on the precis of the advert which comes up on the various job boards.

Of the jobs currently advertised by agencies, 65 use the ‘we are working with a [insert adjective] charity’ format.

Here are the results.

So, half of all recruitment agencies are using one of the ‘big three’, leading, exciting, and the fairly uninspiring ‘well known’.

In the interest of transparency, of the 9 jobs we’ve currently got advertised, there are two ‘fantastic’ charities and one ‘leading’ one.

The point of this was to see whether recruitment adverts are as repetitive as we suspected they might be.

And it seems they are. For every ‘inspiring’, ‘amazing’, and ‘fabulous’ charity (as perceived by recruitment consultants) there are three ‘leading’ ones.

The conclusion? We’ll head to thesaurus.com before posting our next advert.

The vagaries of Individual Giving

This morning, we found ourselves wondering how exactly an ‘individual giving (IG)’ job is defined.

We assumed it was a direct marketing role, with the odd charity using the term interchangeably with major donor fundraising.

We thought we’d put our theory to the test by taking a look at a snapshot of roles advertised by charities and agencies.

Broadly speaking, (for charities at least) the primary purpose of an IG fundraiser is to ‘solicit funds from an individual, or facilitate a way to do so’.

This makes sense.

But when it comes to mid-level giving, IG roles fall into a grey area between direct marketing and major donor fundraising. So we’ve erred on the side of direct marketing.

The major donor roles indicated below fall under the IG umbrella.

Findings for jobs advertised by charities:

And for agencies:

So, it seems our suspicions were in the right ballpark. Although charities seem to agree that IG is mainly direct marketing, the odd charity defines it as a pure major donor role.

Agencies, it seems, agree that direct marketing is the king of the IG castle, but they believe major donor fundraising plays a much bigger role in the catch-all of ‘individual giving’.

As for the other results, your guess is as good as ours.

We would have thought corporate and statutory fundraising are about as far away as you can get from individual giving, but who are we to judge?

Conclusions

If we were going to advertise a pure major donor role, we’d title it as that.

With Direct Marketing, it’s a judgment call.

We’ve started collating stats on the number of job titles across fundraising advertised by charities.

Here’s a graph showing the roles advertised as either IG or DM from mid-December to today.

Assuming the majority of charity advertised roles are direct marketing, you can see there’s a preference for charities calling direct marketing roles ‘individual giving officer/manager’, with the trend increasing in the last few weeks.

Is this a move to ‘soften’ the job title in the wake of various ‘scandals’ (as the tabloid press would call them) and GDPR making people more aware of marketing in general?

It’s impossible to say as we only started analysing a couple of months ago.

As with all our stats-based bloggery, we’ll revisit it at a later date to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.

The fundraiser’s guide to the Christmas Party

In the corporate world, people get into the festive spirit with pay rises, hefty bonuses, and fancy black-tie Christmas soirees. They slowly take their foot off the work pedal in the week leading up to Christmas and grind to a complete halt around December 21.

This is in stark contrast to fundraising where Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year.

Rather than a pay rise or bonus to ease the cost and stress of Christmas, a £10 Secret Santa and a glass of Lambrini is often the only salvation.

If you fall into the latter category, look upon it as a stroke of good fortune. We’d rather be in the local Youngs with a small team of people we like than at The Savoy in a £150 rental tuxedo with 500 people we barely know.

If you’ve been to one of these events, you’ll know that they’re often cringe-worthy, mutual back-slapping affairs that begin with a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation about the growth of the company, the very antithesis of Christmas.

We also get the distinct impression they’re used as pseudo appraisals of how people present themselves after a few drinks … if you’re sat next to a senior manager from some other team, are they secretly taking notes on how well you’re doing? Are you asking the right questions about the intricacies of their job? Are you coming across as boring because you’re only talking about work?

It’s a minefield that people often choose to cross with the aid of alcohol.

All too often, we’ve seen the negative feedback loop of dulling the sense of awkwardness with wine. From a glass of red thrown over a pristine white shirt to a foam fire extinguisher being set off, the damaging effects of over-the-top Christmas parties outweigh the positives.

The best-case scenario? You get to sit at a table with some friends, eat your food in peace, and have a couple of drinks. Something you can do with ease on a shoestring at your local pub - something fundraisers know how to do better than anyone.