Barkers

A-Z OF BARKERS

This section contains everything you need to know (and a few things you don’t) about Barkers, our services, our people, the projects we’re currently working on and any jargon you may come across. Just click on the letters and all will be revealed.

AGR (Association of Graduate Recruiters)

The Association of Graduate Recruiters is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to supporting employers in all aspects of graduate recruitment and development. As integral members, Barkers manages the National Graduate Media Audit in conjunction with AGR every year.

Attraction

More commonly known as Advertising and Communications. Whether it’s 100 of the best graduates you’re after or a meatpacker in Aberdeen, our experienced account handlers, creative creatives, media experts, diversity specialists and clever research teams will work together to give you the seamless, great value service you want.

Awards

We have won more than 40 awards in the last 5 years covering Recruitment Effectiveness, Web Design and Build, Creative Advertising and Employer Branding. Here is a selection of our 2007 & 2008 awards.

Onrec.com Awards 2008: They keep on coming... The 4th Onrec.com Awards, held on 5th March saw Barkers scoop another 2 awards, this time for Best Public Sector Recruitment Site – HM Prison Service (www.whatsontheinside.co.uk) and Best Corporate Use of On-line Recruitment – Tesco
RAD Awards 2008: Hurrah! This year’s RADs saw us win Best Campaign for Tesco’s “Magical things happen at night” (www.magicalthingshappen.co.uk) and best Online Marketing for MI6 “Shredder” campaign.; In 2007 we did really well with wins in IT, Electronics and Communication for SIS/MI6, Professional Services and the Crown Prosecution Service.
PPMA: Barkers won best advert in IT, SIS/MI6.
Times High Fliers: We won for Best Graduate Recruitment Brochure — Accenture and Best Graduate Recruitment Advertisement – Accenture again.
CIPD: At the CIPD Awards 2007 Barkers picked up two gongs for Employer brand — McDonald’s and Website — McDonald’s.
AGR: We won awards at the AGR for Best Website for a company recruiting under 30 grads — Parsons Brinckerhoff (www.pbgrads.co.uk), Best Website overall – Dresdner Kleinwort (www.dresdnerkleinwort.com/graduates), Best Brochure for a company recruiting over 100 grads - Balfour Beatty and, finally, Best Exhibition stand (and that’s for the fourth year running!)

BarkersZenithOptimedia (BZO)

A joint venture with Europe's leading specialist media planning agency, BZO is an independent recruitment media planning and buying operation, which plans and buys media for Barkers Group companies, as well as their own clients.

Thanks to its consumer roots, BZO has a wealth of media planning and mapping tools at its disposal. It can segment audiences by lifestyle or attitude, pinpoint which magazines specific groups read for fun and provide direct marketing routes to take your message to the heart of community groups.

Applying that kind of insight to the employment marketplace ensures that we are much more precise when planning campaigns. And with tracking and measurement tools in place, their focus is on investing client budgets to generate maximum ROI.

CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development)

The CIPD is the leading professional body for those involved in the management and development of people. Barkers is a corporate member of the CIPD and play an active part in regional connection and key steering groups. In 2007 Barkers was retained by the CIPD to produce a practical guide for HR practitioners in developing and communicating an employer brand. For a copy of the guide please contact Lucy Orfeur at Barkers. To support the guide we are developing an interactive tool for the CIPD which will be available from February 2008.

Creative

A generic term for the creative department and creative people. People who can come up with anything from a whole new corporate brand identity to campaigns of ads, posters, online and ambient media ideas that get tongues wagging and clients winning awards. Set them a challenge or see our fab work section for ideas.

Digital

Barkers Digital has some of the most experienced, high quality minds in the industry. That’s why our media, development and creative teams can come up with market leading strategic advice, web site design and builds, media planning and buying, advertising creativity and emerging channel insights.

Diversity

As the working population changes ever more quickly, fairness and equality are important issues for every employer we work with. We know how important it is for people at all levels within an organisation to quickly master the issues and to develop the policies and practices to secure a reputation as a diverse and inclusive employer. Everyone at Barkers has access to advice on current legislation, good practice and most important of all, common sense, to make sure that everything we produce contributes to effective communication with the widest possible audience.

Whether you want to develop an effective strategy for recruiting returning mums, to reach out to under-represented groups within your local labour market or to develop a robust and genuinely useful Single Equality Scheme, we can help.

Employer Brand

We have recently developed a practical guide to Employer Branding for the CIPD which will help HR practitioners in developing and communicating an employer brand.

Pulling from existing theory, research and thinking, this guide provides clear guidance and frameworks for how HR practitioners can develop and define an employer brand and then communicate it to both potential and existing employees.

The research provides practical answers to:

How does HR develop an employer brand?
How does HR pick up the communications brief, communicate an employer brand effectively and sustain it?
What are the returns and risks of using such a strategy?

In support, case studies illustrate practically how a variety of organisations have used their employee brand to attract, retain and/or engage both potential and existing employees.

To support the guide we are developing an interactive tool which will be available from February 2008. View the guide at http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/corpstrtgy/empbrand/_empbrndapp.htm

Education

We have over 100 years’ experience of serving clients in the Education sector, as recruiters and in marketing their own brands to a variety of audiences. Our Education Market Research practice is one of the most respected in the UK and we have a strong track record in helping institutions develop their brands and curricula and making the most of emerging digital techniques to reach audiences both at home and in international markets. Universities ancient and modern, FE colleges and specialist bodies are all represented on our client list; find out more here: www.barkers.co.uk/education

Graduate Communications

Graduate marketing has long been a substantial and important part of Barkers business — both in the UK and on an international scale. Our services range from research, campaign planning, design and delivery through to campus relationship management, assessment design and 360° feedback. We have experience in all sectors and with organisations of all sizes.

Graduate Resourcing

Barkers Resourcing has a dedicated team of in-house Occupational Psychologists, Project Managers, Assessment and Selection specialists experienced in recruiting graduates on behalf of national and international clients. Whether it’s competency profiling, online selection tools or assessment centre design we’ve the knowledge and resources to ensure your recruitment process identifies the right talent for your organisation.

Graduates

We’re proud to be a trusted partner to some of the world’s leading graduate recruiters, delivering everything from university targeting strategies to global research programmes, from award-winning websites to innovative campus presence strategies and from candidate screening to full-scale assessment solutions. You can see examples of our work and find out more about our people and capabilities here: www.barkers.co.uk/graduates

HR

Our Human Resources team manages the recruitment process for Barkers vacancies. You can view our vacancies here.

We see our business as helping organisations build reputations as great places to work. If you ask around, you’ll find our reputation is pretty good, too. But to more familiar attributes like ‘fair’, ‘straight’, ‘secure’ or ‘intelligent’, we’re adding ‘exciting’, ‘challenging’, ‘risk-taking’. Which means there’s never been a better time to join us — a time when so much is happening, and when we’re creating so much opportunity.

It may be you’re one of the people we need to hire, right now, for specific roles. But we’re always interested in talking to people with good brains, unconventional ideas and great personal qualities.

We of all people know how scarce good talent is. And we, of all people, know best how to nurture and develop it.

NGMA (National Graduate Media Audit)

The Barkers/AGR National Graduate Media Audit is the most extensive media response survey in the graduate sector. Carried out annually, it ranks 200 graduate media titles from the response data for more than 110 recruiters, who together recruit over 12,000 graduates. The report also ranks careers services at the UK’s leading universities. Contact Lucy Orfeur for further information.

People

We’re not known for being the most admired company in our marketplace for nothing. No one else comes close to the quality of our work, our people and our relationships with clients. Here we treat everyone with respect, we support each other and we definitely don’t do status. Ours is a culture full of ‘good habits’ that see us getting into our clients’ heads, understanding their markets, delivering what they need and, often, becoming good friends along the way. Take a look at our Facebook page and see for yourself what a good looking bunch we really are.

Planning

Planning is what we do to make sure that our recommendations are properly targeted. While we have a dedicated Planning team, everyone plans at Barkers — they seek information, they ask questions, they draw on their experience and they use instinct and intuition to deliver great ideas that work.

Our planners provide structure and support to those ideas through a comprehensive range of information and insight. Salary benchmarking, demographic patterns, travel-to-work data, skills availability, graduate destinations — they provide instant access to the lot. And when you need to understand an issue in more detail, they’re also there to design and deliver research programmes: everything from a couple of focus groups in a call centre to an online global perception study amongst specialist staff.

Our unique commitment to Planning is one of the things that makes Barkers different. You can be sure that our solutions will be based on the best possible understanding of your target markets — and that we’ll provide you with the business case to prove to your own clients and stakeholders that you’re using their investment wisely.

Research

Sometimes, you need to know more about an issue before you decide what to do. That’s where research comes in — and we’re really good at it. We have a team of talented people who can deliver anything from desk research into a local labour market to a major perception study around your employer brand.

We’ve invested in the best set of tools and resources in our sector, allowing us to offer focus groups, telephone interviews, creative and concept testing, online polling, campus sampling and a wealth of other techniques — delivered by our own people, rather than an expensive and inaccessible third party.

Resourcing

At Barkers Resourcing our unique approach to strategic resourcing means we can support you throughout the talent lifecycle from - ‘Potential Employee to Employee Potential’. Our experts will work with you to develop individually tailored solutions that will improve the calibre of new hires, reduce overall expenditure and drive down attrition rates.

Social Networking

Social networking is all about establishing interconnected internet communities that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise. It works by joining a site and inviting people you know to join as well. Those people invite their contacts to join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and so on. At Barkers, we’ve realised what a great method this is to contact potential client audiences. That’s why we’ve used social networking in many of our online campaigns.

Vodcast

A vodcast is video content that’s available on the internet. We love vodcasts. In fact we use them all the time for video profiles because it’s a great way of hearing what it’s really like to work somewhere, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Accessibility Information

Barkers

A-Z OF BARKERS