The Talent Scout Episode 24: How to Use an ATS to Improve Your Candidate Experience
You don’t need to launch a huge project to find out what candidates want. Here’s how to use an ATS to improve your candidate experience.
The Talent Scout Episode 22: How to manage seasonal recruitment
Listen now Construction, Retail, Mining, and countless other industries all have very stressed out recruiters, HR Professionals, and hiring managers working within them that are trying their best to overcome the significant challenge that is seasonal recruitment. It’s always been a challenge to hire a large volume of new team members on a temporary basis
The Talent Scout Episode 20: How to pick a winning candidate
Listen now If you’re an avid fan of us here at Scout, you probably tuned into the recent webinar held by our specialists. They discussed how to pick a winning candidate and all things shortlisting & selection, interviewing and candidate testing. If however, you missed it, then don’t worry, because we have you covered with
The Talent Scout Episode 19: What do Candidates actually want?
Listen now If you’ve been following our posts here at Scout Talent, you may have noticed references to a Candidate Experience survey that we carried out internally. Today we’re going to deep dive into the findings of that survey and think a little bit more about what Candidates actually want. For contextual information, this survey
The Talent Scout Episode 18: When to work with Recruitment Companies
Listen now Imagine this scenario, you have a friend and they’ve come to you with a great idea to start up a business or organise a community event. You run through the plans with them and to your horror, you become increasingly aware that they are going to cover everything from sales to accounting to
The Talent Scout Episode 17: How Important is Diversity in Your Hiring?
Listen now This post has been written by Shane Keane, Senior Recruitment Specialist, Scout Talent. When it came to scheduling episodes for this podcast, I always wanted to take a week in June to talk about diversity in organisations and within recruitment. The initial reason for this is that June is recognised in many parts of the world as Pride month, and as a gay man that’s a time of year that’s deeply important to me. However given the social injustice that a lot of us have recently been made more aware of due to the protests in America, even though this racial injustice has always existed, it feels more important than ever to have detailed and ongoing discussions about diversity. Why diversity matters in the world of recruitment Why diversity matters in the world of recruitment is because we are the gatekeepers who have massive control over how diverse our organisations are. If we’re failing at our jobs either due to conscious or unconscious bias then it’s almost a certainty that everyone in our organisation looks similar, has similar experiences, and perceives the world from a very similar viewpoint. To begin with, I’m going to do something that I really hope is actually unnecessary. I’m going to make the business case for diversity in the workplace using statistical data. • 62% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities, and more than 50% of current employees want their workplace to do more to increase diversity. • Higher representation of women in C-suite level positions results in 34% greater returns to shareholders. • According to fortune 1000 while only 5% of companies are run by women those organisations contribute 7% of the total revenue of the Fortune 1000 list. • Organisations with above-average gender diversity and levels of employee engagement outperform companies with below-average diversity and engagement by 46% to 58%. • A 2018 study by Harvard Business Review found that the most diverse companies were also the most innovative with companies that have higher than average diversity having 19% higher innovation-related revenues. • According to a 2015 McKinsey report, companies in the top quarter for racial/ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to surpass peers, while those in the same bracket for gender diversity are 15% more likely to do the same. • Diverse companies on average enjoy 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee and are much more likely to capture new markets. • Diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions. Finally, I’d like to add that millennials are 16% more diverse than baby boomers, a metric mirrored in a lot of the western world, and the millennial group is set to make up 75% of the workforce by 2025. How do we transform our recruitment processes in order to appeal to a much more diverse talent market? One of the first things we can do is try to silence the subconscious bias we all have. Statistically, women are much more likely to be hired with blind applications with the likelihood of getting the job increasing by 25% to 46% using a blind application. It’s equally been well established with several studies that job applicants with ethnic-sounding names working in English speaking countries get fewer job opportunities than people with recognisably white or English sounding names. The solution here, at least initially, is to make your resume screening process blind. If you don’t know your candidate’s name, address, or where they were educated, you are statistically more likely to make a diverse shortlist. Another option if the Applicant Tracking System you’re using doesn’t give you the capability to go blind is to attempt to fully address your subconscious bias by building quotas into your shortlist. I remember the CEO of a company I used to work for telling me a story about hiring members of her C-Suite. She initially threw out the shortlist that was presented to her because it was all men and instead requested that she receive a shortlist that was 50% male and 50% female. She ended up hiring a woman, a woman she would have never seen if she hadn’t asked for her shortlist to be more diverse. Quotas aren’t perfect and they don’t solve everything but they are a sure-fire way to make your shortlists more diverse. Employer Brand and Diversity A complaint I often hear from clients is that they want to be more diverse but the candidate pools they receive aren’t. If this is the case then you need to address your Employer Brand and your Candidate Attraction strategies as that is probably where the problem lies. If a candidate looks at your company website and every photo they can find of a team member is a white man, that doesn’t present as diverse or overly welcoming to people that are not white, male, and presumably both straight and cis-gendered. How we get around this is by ensuring that photos of our teams on our company websites and job descriptions are more diverse. If, and I often hear this as another objection, your team and company just aren’t a visually diverse group there are other things you can do. A lack of photo opportunities is certainly not an excuse to give up on trying to become more diverse because the fact is that diversity is not always visual. Something as simple as seeing a sentence in a job description about valuing diversity in your workplace can make a candidate feel so much more comfortable about the prospect of applying for a role. Equally, you can back up that sentence by visually celebrating events like Pride Month, International Women’s Day, and Black History Month to name a few and sharing the value of these days to your company or organisation on social media. Some people in leadership roles are afraid of doing this for fear of pandering, well, in that case, don’t pander, put your money and time where your mouth is and support organisations like
The Talent Scout Episode 17: How important is diversity in your hiring?
Listen now This post has been written by Shane Keane, Senior Recruitment Specialist, Scout Talent. When it came to scheduling episodes for this podcast, I always wanted to take a week in June to talk about diversity in organisations and within recruitment. The initial reason for this is that June is recognised in many parts
The Talent Scout Episode 16: Video interview best practices
Listen now We are all probably are aware of it by now, but on the off chance that you’ve been living under a rock, the current climate with Covid-19 has forced us all to become much more comfortable with using technology in our recruitment processes. For a lot of hiring managers, making a decision to
The Talent Scout Episode 15: Employer Branding best practices
Listen now What is Employer Branding? Today we’re going to delve a little bit deeper into some Employer Branding best practices and start to talk more about how to tell your organisation’s story. Before we do this, it’s probably best to examine what exactly Employer Branding is. Here at Scout, we would argue that Employer
The Talent Scout Episode 14: How to Use Your Employees as Part of Your Recruitment Process
Listen now Today, we’re going to look at how your people, your employees, play a massive part in your recruitment process whether you want them to or not. And how you can work with your people to achieve your recruitment goals. Your employees and your Employer Brand Your employees are the living proof of your
