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What You’ll Learn: Top recruiting trends for small to medium size businesses (in the US, companies with less than 10,000 employees, in the UK, less than 1000) Benchmarking metrics for value-driven recruitment strategies, including equity, efficiency, and transparency As a scaling startup or mid-size business, what your 2022 recruiting metric goals should be About this […] More
The ‘S’ (social) in ESG campaigns is integral to any business, a lack of diversity can negatively impact growth and stifle creativity. Diverse teams generate almost 20% more revenue than those that are lacking in this area.
Thinking carefully about the specific language used in job adverts, using blind CV assessments, and employing inclusive interviewing techniques can all help businesses embed diversity and inclusion into their recruitment policies.
With almost one-third of jobseekers and employees have said they would not apply to a company where there is a lack of diversity among its workforce, it’s time that businesses start to scrutinize their recruitment policies.
Think about the job advert
Pay attention to the nuances in recruitment communication to ensure what is written is inclusive and unbiased.
Job adverts should avoid phrases such as “competitive nature” and “aggressively determined” in favor of truthful descriptions of competency, these phrases are also typically ‘male-coded’, so might deter female applicants from applying. Similarly, complex jargon and specialist terms can also overwhelm applicants. Adverts should be as simple and to the point as possible.
The use of equality and diversity statements in job adverts can aid in creating an inclusive atmosphere from the very start of the recruitment process. One study found that job adverts with an empathetic diversity statement left 71% of potential applicants with a positive impression of the hypothetical employer.
Similarly, awards such as ‘The Times Top 50 Employers of Women’ can be mentioned on job applicants to reassure minority applicants that they are welcome to apply.
Blind CV assessment
The Department for Work and Pensions sent out applications to 1,000 job vacancies with 2/3 containing names typically associated with a certain ethnic group. Results showed that ethnic minority applicants needed to send out 74% more applications in order to generate the same success rate as those with White sounding names.
Removing names, ages, genders, and postcodes from CVs before they are assessed can remove opportunities for bias to enter the recruitment process. A number of top employers adopt this technique, including the UK’s Civil Service.
Championing diversity and inclusion is not just about CV blind initiatives. It’s a complex and multifaceted agenda.
Keeping an eye out for opportunities to learn more about diverse talent pools should be a priority. At Totum Partners, we host a series of successful diversity and inclusion webinars, such as: ‘How to create the most diverse firm in Britain’.
Inclusive interviewing
Once a candidate is at an interview, the best way to minimize bias is to combine a number of efforts, there is no magic bullet approach.
Standardizing the interview questions in a structured manner will allow the employer to focus on the candidate’s skills that will determine their ability to perform the job. Unstructured interviews are difficult to compare, making it more likely that personal factors will infiltrate the hiring decision.
Sometimes called a “mental shortcut”, affinity bias is common. This means we gravitate towards people who we feel are similar to ourselves. Training modules and workshops are a good way to generate self-awareness of your own biases.
The importance of succession planning
Employees should be able to see diversity all the way up an organization. Last month it was reported that 2 in 5 Black employees have left their job because of a lack of diversity.
Initiatives that only focus on entry-level recruitment leave BME employees without anyone to look up to. Since 2018, among the Fortune 500 boards, of the 974 seats filled by new directors, 80% were by White directors, this is an example of bad succession planning.
Organizations should consider lateral workplace diversity when looking at how to progress talent internally. Firms that ignore this form of conscious inclusion, will soon be left behind, especially considering the escalating numbers of employees quitting their jobs in the UK in recent months.
Accountability
Having awareness of the benefits that diversity brings to the workplace is important, but actions speak louder than words.
As a recruitment firm, Totum is committed to questioning candidate lists that show a lack of diversity. Feedback on a BME candidate that reads “something was not quite right” needs to be followed up for factual feedback. Too often this behavior goes unquestioned.
This is embedded into the Race Fairness Commitment that Totum is a part of. The Commitment pledges all members to engage in activities to ensure equal access to opportunities for all candidates.
Calls for diversity and inclusion will grow louder in 2022. Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial Survey demonstrated that diversity is integral to workplace loyalty, with candidates saying they are more likely to stay with an employer for over 5 years if there is diversity in the workplace.
Employers must be aware of how to entrench diversity and inclusion into their recruitment policies, or both their business and colleagues will suffer. CV blind assessments, inclusive interviewing, and succession planning should be a staple in any recruitment process in 2022 if businesses want to take this agenda seriously.
By Deborah Gray, Director at Totum Partners.
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What You’ll Learn: Benchmarking metrics for efficiency, equity and transparency How top employers are winning tech talent and how you can emulate them Overall trends in what employees want from an employer brand In this ebook: While the US continues to see record highs in “quits” among what’s known as “The Great Resignation,” companies are […] More
There’s no denying that 2021 was a wild ride for HR teams, making it tough to predict HR trends for 2022. Around the world, millions of employees took part in the Great Resignation—quitting their jobs at record-setting rates and leaving companies rushing to fill open roles. In the months that followed, HR professionals faced a […] More
There’s no denying that 2021 was a wild ride for HR and talent acquisition teams, making it tough to predict recruiting trends for 2022. Around the world, millions of employees took part in the Great Resignation—quitting their jobs at record-setting rates and leaving companies rushing to fill open roles. In the months that followed, HR […] More
In December 2021, total payroll employment rose by 199,000 nationwide, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. But despite the solid rehiring in the last few months, the labor force participation rate remains short of pre-pandemic levels.
A low participation rate – coupled with a labor shortage that is giving workers more leverage than they have experienced in years – is continuing to challenge employers in attracting and retaining key talent.
While positive for workers, the competition for talent is expected to last well in 2022. And though hard to predict what the future will hold in this candidate-driven market, it is clear that hiring will not get easier in the coming year. To overcome this, recruiting teams should turn to various tools including talent acquisition (TA) planning “workbooks,” which are catalogs of tools designed to help recruiters approach strategic recruitment in the new year with a reimagined gameplan.
Create a high-level strategy
The first step in improving recruiting strategies this year is creating a strategic and detailed plan to help achieve 2022 hiring goals, including anticipating the number of new hires over the next 12 months. Recruiting teams should work with their executive leadership team to understand what the company’s strategic plans are for the new year, and in turn, what roles they will need to hire.
This is also a key time to examine if a team should:
Conduct employee engagement surveys, which can help anticipate satisfaction, engagement, and turnover.
Study historical trends, as some employee turnover and hiring needs can be cyclical. For example, many employees make the decision to leave their current jobs in January.
Estimate the impact of the “Great Resignation” on your employee base and anticipate increased employee turnover as well as expectations such as increased wages, better working conditions, remote work options, flexible workplaces (especially for working parents), and improving diversity, equity, & inclusion (DE&I) efforts.
Similarly, get a firm understanding of DE&I goals for 2022, as well as any plans for attracting, hiring, and retaining talent from all walks of life.
Consider any internal mobility or promotions anticipated that will lead to the need for new hires. Additionally, determine the anticipated number of new employees needed by role, location, and business unit.
This strategy should help establish goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Recruiting teams should set a realistic number of goals that a given team could achieve depending on team size, maturity of the TA function, and the company’s strategic plans. A great way to think about goals is to put the team into the future: “By Dec. 31, 2022, the team will have hired 10,000 new employees, increased the percentage of underrepresented employees by 10%, and reduced time-to-hire by 30%.”
Build targeted audience plans
Another strategy recruiters can employ in 2022 is identifying, prioritizing, and nurturing the audiences most important to the organization. Specifically, this includes:
Key talent audiences: These audiences have the experience and skill set to fill high-volume jobs, geographically targeted jobs, or critical jobs like executive hiring.
Strategic audiences: These demographic groups that businesses want to attract such as underrepresented candidates, veterans, and military hiring, along with university relations for students, interns, and recent graduates.
Relationship audiences: These include candidates that the business already has a known relationship with, including employees, alumni, employee referrals, contingent workers, and past applicants, such as high-potential candidates.
Most companies are already focused on developing great content, whether it be through clear job descriptions, cultural videos, or company blogs as means to attract and engage new job seekers. To ensure this content is seen by the right candidates, recruiters should incorporate targeted audience planning into the research and development steps that come right before the content is built. Before executing any recruitment marketing effort, TA professionals should gather a team made up of a representative from marketing, recruiting, customer success, sales, and employees who match the type of hires the company is looking to attract in order to ensure materials are seen through multiple perspectives within the organization.
Overall, organizations need to become more adaptable to labor market conditions in the new year. In addition to the above, this can include automating recruiting processes and leveraging innovative technology such as intelligent messaging and chatbots, as well as outsourcing more jobs and making more internal hires.
These strategies are just the beginning of ways teams can ramp up hiring efforts in 2022. Because of the constant change in the TA landscape over the last year, it can be difficult to know where to begin when preparing for the new year in recruiting. But with the worksheets as a tool, recruiting teams can take stock of current programs and make data-driven decisions to get better results from future processes, ensuring a positive return on their hiring budget for the new year.
By: Kerry Gilliam, Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Jobvite.
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Every day, four billion email users are tapping into email marketing – a low-cost but highly effective digital comms tool. And for recruiters, it’s not only an easy way to engage with candidates on a one-to-one level, but it can also open up doors to new opportunities.
However, that doesn’t mean to say that each piece of content landing in a jobhunter’s inbox will be acted upon or even looked at. There must be a compelling reason as to why they should interact with what they’ve received and ultimately place their career search in the hands of specific recruitment professionals.
What that means today is, it’s no longer best practice to send out hundreds of bland emails to a bunch of prospective candidates – containing an irrelevant message that’s loosely received by all – in the hope that an individual might take up the offer presented to them. It’s about providing comms that are valuable and helpful to ease the strains of a monotonous job search.
The good news here is, there are a multitude of ways in which email marketing can encourage candidates to engage, and even if they’ve never previously interacted with the recruiter too. Here are five areas recruiters should focus on if they want their next comms campaign to be a raging success…
1. Always opt for clickable subject lines
If a job hunter isn’t interested in the first line they see, they’ll be highly unlikely to open and digest the content – regardless of how carefully crafted the content is. After all, 50% of a user’s decision to engage with an email is all to do with the brand itself. The other half? The subject line. So remember:
Get straight to the point: Examples such as ‘Junior PHP Developer Wanted: Near Newcastle’ or ‘Experienced B2B Copywriter Needed’
Think about verbs: What should the recipient do? Will it be ‘Read Our Top Tips Guide On Job Interviews’ or ‘Learn How To Create A Cover Letter’
Don’t forget the proof: In a nutshell, ‘88% Of Candidates Want Hybrid Working’
Could there also be a question? To provoke debate – examples include, ‘Are You Tired Of The Commute?’ or ‘What Would You Do With A £45k Salary?’
Then there’s the urgency: ‘Hurry, It’s The Last Day To Apply!’ or ‘Be Quick, Send Your CV Today!’
And remember to personalize where possible: This is ideal when it comes to adding an ultra-individualized touch. For example, ‘Hi [name], I Was Impressed With Your CV’ or ‘[first name], [company name] Was Mentioned Today…’
2. Be clear with what the recipient needs to do
Once someone has engaged with the subject line, what should a recruiter do next? Here’s where the nurture comes in – and it’s easy to do.
Simply split up valuable email content over a series of email sends to truly keep a candidate interested throughout the journey. Plus, this technique provides recruitment professionals with even more opportunities to say what they want their readers to do without it coming across as aggressive or a ‘hard sell’.
A 10-word headline and focused call to action work well. Not only is this a succinct way of doing it, but there also won’t be any confusion as to what the end goal is. For example, ‘Book An Appointment’ or ‘Download Our Guide’.
And never alienate people with jargon-heavy language or tiny text that’s impossible to read on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Think about font size, colors, and the overall sentence structure to ensure candidates are provided with ultimate accessibility to all the relevant information.
3. Ever heard of the ‘Squint Test’?
If not, do it now. Sit back and squint before reading the email headline, call to action, and viewing the main image.
Does it still read well and look engaging?
If elements are spaced out, sized nicely, and are still able to stand out – that’s gold dust! Plus, the recipient is more likely to interact with the comms because they’re not trying to figure out a clunky sentence or being taken aback by a sea of color clashes. Simple and effective is the way forward.
4. Think about including ‘trampoline’ email content
Whatever sits below the email headline and call to action is what’s referred to as the ‘trampoline’. Why? Simple – it’s designed to bounce the reader back up to what they should be clicking on if they want to access more detail.
If recruiters are still unsure as to what this copy might entail, think about including reviews and testimonials to invoke trust and authenticity, or reference related products and articles such as ‘You Might Also Like…’
5. Personalization, personalization, personalization
For every piece of content that’s heading into a candidate’s inbox, always hyper-personalize the comms. The easiest and swiftest way to do this is by plugging in an intuitive marketing automation platform that’s built to enable users to send targeted, ultra-individualized emails specifically to segmented groups. And it’s more than a ‘Hi [first name]’ introduction – it’s all about sending the right message to the right person, at the right time.
These are only some of the ways in which recruiters can drive a greater level of interaction and get to know candidates on a much deeper level. Having a relationship built on trust – and which is beneficial to both parties – can be powerful, and that’s before considering how much it can positively impact a professional’s conversion rate.
By Adam Oldfield, CEO of marketing automation platform Force24
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The record number of vacancies across the country is no secret. The war for talent is creating a difficult hiring environment for organizations across all industries. This has prompted a self-fulfilling prophecy, and in turn a key challenge for all businesses – the power has well and truly been put into the hands of workers (of all kinds).
The ‘great resignation’ is the result of individuals realizing they can have more control and autonomy over their careers based on their experiences during the pandemic. As a result, most have more demands from prospective employers than ever before.
Those sourcing workers with digital skills in particular are experiencing some of the starkest shortages. So, if businesses don’t look to overcome them soon and find the talent they need, they’re at significant risk of having to put their digital transformation strategies, which are crucial for their future, on hold.
Priorities are changing
A lot of digital transformation has taken place over the past 18 months, but digitizing is an ongoing process with no end game. In fact, most businesses are still playing catch up as they look to overcome the challenges created by the pandemic as many weathered the storm by adopting a reactive business continuity approach to digital development rather than taking a more strategic view on the opportunity. This is in addition to the challenges brought on by Brexit and the subsequent supply chain struggles. However, digital transformation cannot go ahead without the right people driving it.
This increased demand for a specific set of skilled workers is having a big impact on the way businesses are looking to attract them. Some have turned to increases in salary, for example, but research shows that’s not enough – employees now increasingly value flexibility on par with, if not more than, their salaries, having appreciated the work-life balance afforded to them during national lockdowns.
With so many businesses hiring from the same pool, organizations might need to think outside the box to get the people they need to drive their futures. After all, this landscape means it is becoming more time-consuming and expensive to recruit in the traditional way.
Breaking the habits of a lifetime
Especially when recruiting for digital roles, organizations are usually looking for highly specialized skills, and at short notice. Often these skills are needed for specific and individual projects, which can put HR teams under pressure to fill the gaps quickly. However, the sourcing of permanent, full-time employees typically remains the end goal, for which the traditional recruitment process is too cumbersome, expensive, and limited.
Instead, when recruiting to make up the personnel shortfall needed to deliver these projects, businesses must embrace more flexible methods beyond the standard recruitment of full-time employees. Away from the world of fixed notice periods and poor scalability, doing so can provide faster access to quality talent that businesses might not have had the pulling power to hire permanently.
For example, freelancers are playing an increasingly important role in plugging the skills gap faced by businesses. It’s becoming a more attractive career option for many, as individuals realize they can take back control of their own time and prospects. Many furloughed workers who have turned to self-employment simply haven’t gone back. Thankfully, embracing this more flexible talent pool is an important and efficient way of making the recruitment function – and therefore the company’s workflows – more agile.
Businesses should remember that embracing a more flexible and elastic workforce must be matched by a more flexible way of working. To truly take advantage of the sharing economy for skilled labor, they must have a global mindset, rather than falling into the trap of settling for local candidates, something now possible with most knowledge workers based remotely. After all, the benefits of a flexible and elastic workforce will be largely redundant if the search for said skilled workers is restricted to a comfortable commuting distance.
It’s time for change
It’s hard to believe that so many businesses are putting potentially revenue-generating projects on hold because of hiring struggles. The incumbent recruitment strategy feels even more outdated when you consider that many of the skills they need today might be different tomorrow. However, working with skilled freelancers – or building an elastic team– to complement full-time staff, means businesses can use as much or as little resource as they like and scale and recompose depending on demand.
This doesn’t put recruiters out of a job. Like all industries, it simply demonstrates a need to evolve. As we look to 2022, businesses will need to adopt more flexible approaches to recruitment and talent management. This doesn’t mean simply putting better ‘perks’ in a place like hybrid working – arguably the bare minimum for today’s workforce – but shifting to a new flexible, elastic model that can respond to how the hiring and recruitment landscape is changing.
By Callum Adamson, Co-Founder & CEO, Distributed.
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