For job seekers this is often good news. There are more roles available, with higher salaries and greater flexibility (especially in relation to remote working), plus there’s an emphasis on training, upskilling and creating a great working culture. Candidates can sit back and take their pick—after all, they are the ones in demand. What employers need is more job seekers—and it’s entirely possible that they can proactively increase that supply.
Talent Acquisition Has New Rules
McKinsey calls this the “New Talent Game.” Employers are now competing not just with each other, but with the wider array of work experiences on offer—not to mention locations. I’m based in Bristol, and for half a decade all my people were too. Now I am nabbing talent from other regions of the UK. Plus, people are increasingly making the (often temporary) decision not to work at all—to, as George Michael would have worn it, CHOOSE LIFE.
How do you win in that context? Organisations must redefine their attraction and recruitment strategies and build an employer value proposition (EVP) that takes employees’ whole lives into account and makes work a more positive choice. What is clear is those candidates are only coming back on their terms: workplace flexibility, adequate compensation and reasonable expectations about performance.
Winning with RPO on Your Side
As a leading, global talent partner for a diverse range of businesses, PeopleScout’s RPO solutions have long been designed to amplify employer brands with a recruitment approach that focuses on an enhanced candidate experience. The missing talent can be won by placing the employee experience at the heart of your talent strategy, and I’m proud to say in Q1 2022 we are re-delivering hundreds of employees each month into the consumer and retail sectors for our client partners in the UK, with fulfilment trending positively each month.
It hasn’t been easy – but we are playing the New Talent Game to win.
In the world of talent acquisition, a brand’s presence online can lead candidates to discover new opportunities. And, employers and brands are taking the hint – maximising the online candidate experience through personalisation and optimisation.
This
brings us to the importance of digital recruitment marketing. Digital
recruitment marketing is a way for employers to source and attract potential
candidates; it can include social media, email marketing, display advertising
and more.
Through this article, we’ll share some important aspects of digital recruitment marketing, including building personas, trending digital marketing strategies and channels, and website optimisation.
Understanding & Creating Candidate Personas
Understanding the key characteristics of the candidates your organisation wants to hire provides context to who they are, which is why organisations create candidate personas. Personas are profiles that represent different types of candidates, focusing on individual characteristics. They create alignment across your recruitment and sourcing strategies.
Personas are organised, analysed and assembled by gathering internal data that reflects candidates’ behaviours, interests, goals and challenges. Let’s dive into how to build your personas.
How to Build Your Personas:
1.Gather Your Data: Focus your data on successful hires and placements within your organisation. Interview professionals who currently work in the type of role you’re seeking to fill to understand what qualities make them successful. Prioritise data points such as:
demographic information
background
personal attributes
qualifications
goals
objections
web activity
Also,
try to gather anecdotal evidence or commentary by consulting other recruiters
and hiring managers who have hired for that role in the past.
Quick Tip: Aim to gather as much information as possible regarding each position or job opening. The more data you have to work with, the more detailed your personas will be.
2. Identify Trends: Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s time to analyse the information and identify shared trends and traits. This is where your personas will really start to take shape. How do you do this? Start by asking some important questions:
Which characteristics
or traits do ideal candidates share?
What motivates the
ideal candidate?
Where does the ideal
candidate search for jobs?
What are the ideal
candidate’s goals and aspirations?
These questions – and those similar – will lead you to draw conclusions about the candidate who will best meet your needs for any given role or job opening.
3. Assemble Your Personas: After collecting and analysing your data, the next step is to assemble your candidate persona profiles. At this stage, you will use the insights you’ve discovered to create a profile of your hypothetical candidate. Some organisations create personas and associate them to profiles with names and pictures to seem more realistic and multi-dimensional; however, be aware of unconscious bias. A good way to avoid bias is to create personas that are based on research and surveys done within your organisation, and to focus only on the specific needs and challenges of potential candidates.
What’s Your Digital Strategy?
Content Marketing
Before
you post on your digital marketing channels, focus on the importance of
strategically crafting your content. The content you post should be more about
your audience, or potential candidate, than it is about your brand. It’s a
conversation that says, “We would be lucky to have you as an employee,” versus,
“You would be lucky to work for us.”
To have this conversation, your content needs to adhere to your candidate persona’s desires and interests. Your content also has to create a narrative and capture your audience’s attention, while driving home your selling points in a concise way. For example, social media is one trending digital marketing platform. It is a very distracting environment, and you have very limited time to connect with candidates. So, it’s vital to know what you need to say to them via posts, tweets and images, and truly connect the right candidate, or persona, with your open jobs.
Social Media Marketing
I recently hosted a Talking Talent Webinar, “Digital Recruitment Marketing: A Guide for Employers.” During the webinar, I asked attendees to answer the question, “Which recruitment marketing strategies would you like to implement at your organisation?” What was one of the top answers? Social media marketing, of course, with 36.4%.
Conversion rate optimisation – 45.5%
Social media marketing – 36.4%
Email marketing/marketing automation – 36.4%
Pay-per-click advertising – 9.1%
Display advertising – 9.1%
Search engine optimisation (SEO) – 18.2%
Viral digital marketing – 36.4%
None of the above – 0%
Don’t know – 27.3%
Although proven to be effective, not all social media channels are created the same. Each platform has its own particular set of users with their own quirks as to how they interact with content. Candidate personas can help you identify your target candidates and shape your social strategy to fit each candidate’s specific preferences. You can utilise them to prioritise the platforms you use, to personalise your messaging, and to share content that engages your ideal candidates.
A helpful
tip when approaching social media marketing is to start by researching all of
your top competitors. Check each of their social media pages and see:
what content they are
posting
how often they are
doing so
how many users are
engaging with that content
what platforms they’re
using
Once you conclude which social media platform is yielding the greatest results – whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. – focus your personalised content on that particular site.
70% of hiring managers say they have successfully hired through social media
91% of employers are using social media to hire talent today
Career Sites Matter – A Lot
If your targeted candidates engage with you on digital
recruitment marketing channels, often they then arrive at your website. Your
website is the backbone to your digital footprint and communications. Not only
should an immense amount of effort go into creating a site that has engaging
content and is aesthetically pleasing, but it must also be user-friendly for
potential candidates.
It’s vital that your website or career site is optimised for job-seekers. Optimising key words in job descriptions, and ensuring your links are working properly and that your site is mobile friendly can help candidates find your organisation and apply to your jobs.
When
building a career site, the process, structure and flow of the site must be
deliberate. Site flow is a major contributing factor to increasing the number
of candidates that move through the funnel and make it through the application
process; It’s all about user experience.
What’s Important in the End
Ultimately, an effective digital marketing campaign takes time, patience, planning and teamwork. It’s important to build customised campaigns that cater to candidate personas, be clear on your branding efforts, really push your employer brand’s unique selling points, and optimise your careers site for search engines and conversions. Put together, each aspect creates a strategy that is focused on personas and will be beneficial as you move forward in searching for candidates in the digital recruitment space.
PeopleReady, one of the top industrial staffing agencies in North America, required a digital recruitment solution powered by PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology, AffinixTM, to attract and engage candidates.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
Direct sourcing solutions with increased reach via SEO
100% automated application, selection and onboarding process
Mobile-first, easy application complying with all North American state and province laws
SCOPE & SCALE
PeopleReady attracts more than one million candidates annually to staffing and short-term labour positions. The client required a digital recruitment solution that increased reach by creating virtual talent communities of prospective candidates, while also providing a seamless online application experience that could be completed on a mobile device in under 20 minutes.
SITUATION
PeopleReady has invested heavily in innovative, mobile-first work scheduling and dispatching technologies but lacked a digital online sourcing solution to attract and engage candidates. PeopleReady selected PeopleScout’s Affinix recruitment technology platform to replace its existing solution. Affinix enhances the online candidate experience and increases conversion rates by solving the following challenges:
Simplify the previously complicated job posting process by distributing job openings to multiple sourcing channels immediately by creating just one post in Affinix
Implement direct sourcing to channels such as Indeed, Google for Jobs and niche platforms
Improve email integration with assessment vendors that previously had high drop off rates
SOLUTION
An engaging, mobile-optimised apply experience that guides candidates through application, online selection, employment form completion, WOTC, W4 and I9 processes via a safe, remote process
Direct integration with four external vendors to ensure the entire application process can be completed within the browser, with no interruptions from external emails or links
Highly localised job recommendations
RESULTS
TARGET LAUNCH ACHIEVED
Solution launched within 15 weeks, on time and under budget
RECEIVED MAJORITY OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS
80% of candidates apply via a mobile device
INCREASED CONVERSION RATES
15% increase in conversion rates within the first two weeks of go-live
CLIENT FEEDBACK
“The PeopleScout team allowed us to design a candidate flow that met the needs of our business. The team was quick to pivot and solution as areas of opportunity were identified for improving the candidate experience. Launching a solution with operational reporting allowed us to immediately monitor candidate flow to allow for quick adjustments of sourcing strategy. Very positive partnership with the entire implementation and technology teams.”
As employers continue their recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, many face the same two challenges: Applications are up and talent acquisition teams are lean, which leaves a smaller team to sift through mountains of job applications.
At the same time, the pressure to find and hire the best candidate is high. After all, top talent can help speed a recovery. And, while the hiring process needs to be fast, it can’t leave out top candidates. So, let’s examine strategies for managing high candidate volumes that can help employers stand out during the Great Rehire.
HR Outsourcing
Challenge: Our organisation needs to scale quickly to make a large number of hires, but our team doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle the volume.
One key pillar of value for HR outsourcing solutions – like RPO; on-demand or project based RPO; or Total Workforce Solutions – is the ability to scale seamlessly as hiring demands shift. Conversely, in an internal talent acquisition team, it can be difficult – if not impossible – to scale up quickly to handle a higher number of hires and then scale back down when hiring volumes shrink. Consequently, many organisations find themselves initially making a large volume of hires to staff up new locations or during a peak season, but then hiring volumes return to normal.
What’s more, businesses in industries hard hit by COVID-19 will see especially high numbers as the economy continues to recover. For these organisations, RPO providers – specifically, on-demand or project RPO solutions – can help fill the gaps by providing focused support based on the needs of individual organisations.
For instance, at PeopleScout, we bring expertise and insights from across our client base, as well as the people needed to handle hiring spikes. Our industry-specialised flex team of recruiters can be activated on short notice, and our global delivery centres provide 24/7 support and recruiting capabilities that enable a faster recruitment process.
An RPO provider can also provide broader solutions – like bringing technology expertise to add automation or virtual interviewing solutions; or providing talent advisory services to improve employer branding, assessments or job posting strategies.
Technology Solutions
Challenge: Our team is too bogged down in repetitive work; the process of screening candidates and scheduling interviews takes too much of our recruiters’ time.
COVID-19 has exposed technology gaps for many employers. In the early days, many scrambled to implement virtual hiring solutions so that they could keep their talent acquisition functions moving. Now, as the pandemic passes the one-year mark, employers face a different challenge: Is their technology built for scale?
When facing high candidate volumes, recruiters can easily get bogged down in repetitive administrative tasks. For example, they might get caught in a game of phone tag trying to schedule interviews; answering simple questions from candidates; sending emails to keep their talent communities warm; and sourcing candidates for hard-to-find skillsets. As a result, that leaves little time for higher-value activities, like communicating with top candidates.
However, robotic process automation (RPA) can lift some of the load. This technology utilises bots to replicate human actions for time-consuming, but straightforward administrative tasks. And, while it can be used to screen résumés, it can also go far beyond that.
For example, RPA can be used to deploy chatbots to answer simple questions from candidates 24 hours a day. A chatbot can also be used in automated candidate screenings to ask questions about a candidate’s skills, education and experience – either online or via text. Best of all, in addition to saving time for the recruiter, this technology also improves the candidate experience by allowing them to get answers more quickly and feel as though they’re driving the recruitment process forward.
RPA can also be used to automate emails, social media posts and other employer branding campaigns. Right now, many organisations are building candidate pipelines and keeping talent communities warm as they prepare to make hires. In this way, RPA can be used to send messages to these communities – keeping candidates engaged and keeping your company top of mind.
Interview scheduling tools can also prove to be a significant time-saver for recruiters. As an example, with Affinix – PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology – recruiters can avoid the back-and-forth of scheduling interviews with candidates by automating the process instead. Specifically, a recruiter can sync their calendar with the tool and provide candidates with a link to schedule the interview at a time that works best for them.
These tools can then be combined into a virtual solution that spans from recruitment marketing tools all the way through onboarding. And, as the recovery continues, many employers are finding lasting benefits from adopting these strategies.
Candidate Generation & Assessment Strategies
Challenge: We’re seeing high applicant volumes, but we want to make sure the people we hire are interested in the role for the long-term; we’re worried about high turnover as the economy improves.
As employers hire in 2021, they face a mountain of applications. This includes both candidates who are excited about the role and see it as a long-term step in their careers, as well as candidates who are looking for the role now, but don’t necessarily want to stay in the role or at the organisation for the long haul. But, how do you differentiate between the two?
One option is to adjust your candidate generation and assessment strategies to attract and hire the employees with the passion, purpose, and mindset that best match for the organisation and the role. For instance, to showcase an honest and authentic employer brand, write honest and authentic job postings. By tailoring your employer brand and job postings to attract only candidates who are truly qualified and interested in the role, you’ll save recruiter time by eliminating the résumés of candidates who aren’t qualified or aren’t excited about the role.
As an example, one PeopleScout client previously wrote job descriptions with an overly positive view of their open positions – without mentioning the more challenging elements. And, although they received a high number of applicants, as those applicants moved through the process, many realised that they didn’t want the job. Meanwhile, others accepted the job, but the turnover rate was high, which was expensive and wasted time for both the recruiter and the hiring manager.
In response, PeopleScout worked with the client to make the job postings more realistic about the challenges, in addition to providing a real preview of what the job would look like. In the end, the client received fewer applicants, but turnover in the role dropped significantly. The client also saved hundreds of hours in hiring manager and recruiter time.
Employers can also adjust their assessment process to identify candidates who can succeed and grow in the role by evaluating their passion, purpose and mindset. This means assessing candidates to find out if the candidate has the enthusiasm for the work; finds purpose in the role and at the organisation; and has the right mindset to grow and learn.
Bringing It Together
Combining these strategies in the right way for your organisation can help manage the high candidate volumes we expect to continue during the economic recovery from COVID-19. Furthermore, many of these tools and strategies will continue to show their value when unemployment is low. RPO providers and on-demand or project-based RPO can help manage yearly hiring spikes; technology tools will continue to free up recruiter time; and job posting and assessment strategies that guarantee the right cultural fit will continue to result in better talent and higher-performing teams. And, for talent leaders in 2021, solutions that deliver immediate results and lasting benefits will drive success.
Candidate Assessment: Bringing in Better with Passion, Purpose and Mindset
Most employers are still using legacy assessment processes that are ineffective in today’s competitive recruitment landscape. With the cost of one bad hire reaching as high as $50,000, it’s imperative that organisations ensure they’ve assessed candidates’ current skills, future potential and cultural fit.
So, how can you adjust your assessment process to bring in talent that will support their business now and into the future? In this book, Candidate Assessment: Bringing in Better with Passion, Purpose and Mindset, we explore how employers can rethink their assessments to hire talent that will thrive.
In this ebook you will learn:
Why assessing only for knowledge and skills puts you at risk
How investing in technology helped one retailer modernise their assessments and improve the candidate experience
How to customise your assessments to find the right passion, purpose and mindset
In an unprecedented development, the number of open positions now exceeds the number of people looking for work in many parts of the world. In the U.S., job openings numbered at over 11 million in February 2022—five million more vacancies than available workers. It’s a similar situation in the UK, with vacancies outnumbering unemployed people for the first time ever. In the face of these labour shortages, it’s imperative for employers to tap into new talent pools to fill their vacancies and remain competitive.
As employees seek greater workplace flexibility and opportunities to work from home are in greater demand, organisations can now access a new talent pool. Geographic borders are blurred, and many organisations are expanding their recruitment reach by engaging with globally dispersed talent. Enterprises still using a siloed, regional approach to talent acquisition will struggle to reach their recruitment goals in today’s talent landscape. A global talent acquisition strategy will not only help you to compete locally but also win to top talent on a global scale.
Embracing Global Workforce Planning as a Talent Acquisition Strategy
In the U.S., 60% of employees say they enjoy working remotely. In fact, between January 2020 and March 2022, U.S. job postings for remote work went up 319%, with searches exceeding that 458%. Meanwhile, in the UK, remote job postings have increased by 329%, whilst the number of searches has skyrocketed by 790%. So clearly, candidates seeking remote work outweigh the remote opportunities offered.
Some enterprises have been embracing a borderless workforce for many years. Yet, many are still resisting remote employees even though it offers them a number of opportunities, including expanding access to talent, boosting diversity, and increasing brand presence in new markets.
By embracing a location-flexible approach to your workforce planning, you give yourself a greater chance of winning the competition for talent. For example, before the rise of remote work, you may have been looking for 30 roles in your offices in France and Belgium. But now, if you think about it as simply 30 French-speaking roles, you can widen your search area (i.e., French ex-pats living in the UK) and access new remote talent you didn’t consider before. In today’s ultra-competitive talent landscape, dropping geographic limits means reduced time-to-fill, cost-to-fill and ultimately, productivity loss from positions remaining open.
Plus, it can also eliminate the need to open a legal entity in new countries to remain compliant. In our French-speakers example, rather than going through the effort and expense to open an office in France or Belgium to gain French language skills, you could look for French speakers in the countries where you’re already established.
Where Talent Acquisition Strategies Fall Short
Traditionally, companies recruiting in numerous countries or continents have multiple talent acquisition teams, each focused on particular geographies. Even if an organisation is leveraging recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), this typically means using multiple vendors to achieve global coverage. For example, they may use one RPO provider in North America and a different one in Europe.
Whether through different regional talent acquisition teams or regional RPO providers, these disparate teams can lead to disjointed processes, candidate experiences and technology systems—and a lack of visibility into your recruitment program across countries or regions. As the pandemic recovery accelerates and talent continues to become more decentralised, a siloed recruitment model won’t keep up with the future of work and an increasingly geographically disparate workforce that is unattached to traditional offices.
How a Talent Acquisition Program Benefits from the Global RPO Model
According to Everest Group, a growing number of multi-national companies are embracing a global recruitment process outsourcing model, in which one RPO partner takes responsibility for fulfilling positions—or augments your in-house teams—in any country where the company has multiple openings. This helps organisations to gain better insight and control, obtain the best talent at the global level and achieve efficiencies that come from standardisation and centralisation.
Often organisations are unprepared for global recruitment. In fact, 30% of business leaders say their organisation’s top management team lack knowledge of hiring for international markets. Global RPO partners can help you create a recruitment process that is consistent but can still be flexed to account for the cultures and candidate expectations in each market. Leading RPO providers offer global delivery centres that help you expand your geographic reach and hours. Plus, some even offer proprietary technology to support virtual interviews for remote candidates.
A single global RPO partner can boost your talent acquisition strategy by:
Giving you more agility and allowing you to scale up or down as your hiring needs and market conditions fluctuate.
Expanding your hiring capacity through on- and offshore recruitment teams
Providing a wide variety of language capabilities
Helping you navigate compliance issues and cultural nuances in all countries where you’re hiring
Consolidating under a single RPO partner gives you more control over your global talent acquisition outcomes by eliminating the need for multiple relationships, raising the quality of your hires while saving time and money. The economies of scale gained through a global RPO model can help you achieve your recruitment goals in all your locations. Plus, with work-from-home models becoming more popular, a global talent acquisition program provides an opportunity for organisations to expand across borders to access new skilled talent to accelerate recovery and growth.
To learn more about how global RPO can help your organisation tap into new talent, check out our ebook, The Definitive Guide to RPO.
We’re all aware of the recruitment challenges facing NHS Trusts across the UK with 40,000 registered nursing vacancies across the NHS in England alone. This is compounded by a sharp rise in people leaving the profession. According to the Nursing & Midwifery Council, 14,000 people left the register last year—up 27% on previous year.
And whilst sharper marketing and investment in building a more distinctive employer brand will certainly help increase the pipeline of quality healthcare job candidates, Trusts can look closer to home for some quick wins.
Optimising Your Healthcare Recruitment Strategy
Talking to HR leaders in Trusts across the UK, it’s clear that for many, recruitment is still a linear, administrative model, designed to move applicants through a process.
Compare that to a more commercial model where recruitment business partners work closely with stakeholders to understand current and future needs. These recruiters provide an agile, high-touch approach, which keeps candidates engaged throughout the process.
At PeopleScout we are working with one Trust to understand where high impact interventions can be made which improve candidate experience and ensure a higher number of permanent hires. This has been carefully balanced against a reduction in spend to ensure zero additional cost.
Healthcare Candidate Experience Diagnostic
My final piece of advice? ‘Mystery shop’ your own recruitment process through the eyes of a candidate by applying for a job. I guarantee it’ll be an illuminating experience.
The application process has changed dramatically throughout the years. Yet, some aspects seem eternal—like the fact that employers often start with lots of people at the top of their recruitment funnel and need to make sure they get the right people to the bottom.
But, the world is changing, and the pace of change is accelerating; candidates expect a simple, efficient recruitment process, and employers need workers who are digitally fluent and can adapt easily to change. Reskilling is also becoming even more important.
Plus, there’s also a strong focus on fairness, transparency and equality—with blind reviews of applications, diverse interview panels, and selection processes centred on the need to demonstrate competencies and alignment with the role.
Therefore, in order to adapt to today’s ever-changing landscape, it’s vital for employers to focus on a candidate’s potential to grow and adapt to future needs, as well as the skills and qualities they have today. To that end, throughout this article, we’ll share four steps for building a better assessment process—because not only is assessment the key to a more productive workforce, but it’s also essential to a workforce that’s more resilient and able to stand the test of time.
Step One: Shift from Experience to Potential
In a bid to prepare for the unknown, employers need to shift their focus away from candidates who have prior experience in a role and toward those who have potential. That’s because the employees who can demonstrate flexibility and resilience will be the ones who are best able to ride the wave of uncertainty.
Specifically, McKinsey & Company predicts that higher cognitive skills—such as creativity, critical thinking, decision-making and complex information processing—will be the most in-demand traits in the future. In fact, the need for these skills is predicted to grow by 19% in the United States and by 14% in Europe by 2030—up from already sizable demands. Furthermore, the same research also predicts the fastest rise ever in the need for advanced IT and programming skills, which could grow by as much as 90% by 2030.
As such, organisations that want to be at the forefront of innovation need to start thinking creatively about how they can tap into the vital perspectives of diverse minds. To lead a sector, outrun the competition, and truly innovate, employers need to stop looking for people who fit and start looking for people who add. Likewise, bias—conscious or unconscious—needs to be removed from the process. Besides, although they might seem like they come with a higher risk factor, people who do things very differently can create exceptional outcomes. So, instead of always asking, “Who can do the job?”, employers should be asking, “Who can take us further?”
Step Two: Reap the Rewards of Great vs. Good
Transforming candidate assessment and selection is an investment, but the business case has never been more important. Plus, many of the current processes and tools are subjective and don’t focus on differentiating between good and great hires. With this in mind, are organisations and hiring managers equipped with the tools they need to make the right decisions?
Additionally, better performance predictions will lead to better outcomes, and investing in the right tools can deliver multi-millions in cost benefits. In essence, an employer with a more agile and adaptable workforce is in a far better place to achieve competitive advantage—as well as the kind of employee satisfaction that attracts more high-achieving, agile candidates. In this way, quality hires have a substantial influence on business performance.
However, despite rigorous testing, chemistry sessions and multiple interviews, it can still be quite difficult for employers to understand whether an individual would actually be effective in a role—thereby making bad hires surprisingly common.
Conversely, getting great people—the people who go above and beyond the role criteria—is really good news because it has a profound effect on quality of output, which is truly beneficial to the business. What’s more, while great employees are valuable in and of themselves, they also drive wider team performance, inspire others and make it easier to recruit other great people.
Step Three: Build Better by Thinking Bigger
So, if we’re going to build a better and fairer candidate assessment process, we need to find a way to:
Measure potential, rather than experience, because we don’t know what the future looks like.
Identify the behaviours that are required to separate those who will actually be successful from those who present well during an interview.
Distinguish between good candidates who meet the criteria and great candidates who will take an organisation further.
Give candidates a clear and authentic picture of the organisation and the role so that they can self-select out of the process if the opportunity isn’t right for them.
Include candidates who might have non-traditional experiences or career paths and assess them equally.
Assess candidates fairly and without subjectivity or bias.
Finally, employers need to be able to identify and select candidates who are motivated and energised to be productive at work. And, the way that we do all of these things is by assessing for passion, purpose and mindset.
Assessing Passion, Purpose & Mindset
Traditional assessment processes assess for capability, behaviour and results. These terms are defined as:
Then, when these aspects are combined with new measurements that focus on purpose, passion and mindset, we can better predict the success of candidates and determine the candidates who are more engaged and likely to be a better hire for employers.
Let’s dig into those new descriptors and what they mean.
Purpose
Purpose is a candidate’s alignment with and willingness to contribute to the vision and values of an organisation. For example, one study reported by McKinsey found that, out of 100 variables, employees reported that seeing purpose and value in their work was their most motivating factor—even more so than compensation. Notably, this is especially important for younger workers.
Clearly, ensuring that applicants understand the organisation’s purpose and consider how aligned they are with that throughout the assessment process engenders a sense of belonging and partnership that underlies both great performance and job satisfaction.
In this way, assessment tools can be built around the organisation’s vision and values so applicants have a chance to form an appreciation of them from their earliest contact with the organisation. Then, if they don’t share the same values, they can choose another path. However, applicants who see an affinity with their own values will begin to feel the engagement and inspiration that will drive job success and satisfaction—even before they’re hired.
Passion
Passion is a candidate’s enthusiasm, enjoyment and commitment to mastering the requirements of a role. When an employee is passionate about a role, they’re engaged. Even so, most employers don’t have a method to effectively understand what a candidate is passionate about.
For this reason, during the assessment stage, employers need to find ways to reveal an applicant’s natural passions—which are often in the form of strengths—and find out if these are aligned with the role requirements. Then, they’ll be able to determine whether the candidate is likely to be a high performer who will want to commit the effort needed to succeed in all aspects of the job. Interviews, assessment centre exercises, and immersive online assessments are excellent vehicles for exploring and observing applicants’ innate strengths in relation to the role. Similarly, self-evaluation tools can also be used to help applicants consider their own strengths and whether the role will offer sufficient opportunity to use and demonstrate them.
Mindset
Mindset is a candidate’s belief about themselves and their basic qualities, although these beliefs are rarely measured by employers. The two types are defined as:
Fixed mindset: The belief that one’s talents are innate gifts and not malleable.
Growth mindset: The belief that one’s talents can be developed through education and effort.
It’s thought that people with a growth mindset achieve greater success because they’re focused on learning and believe that they can get better and develop new skills. It’s worth noting here that organisations can have a growth mindset, too. For instance, organisations with a growth mindset are more likely to fill vacancies internally, whereas organisations with a fixed mindset automatically advertise in the external market.
When assessing mindset, we’re looking to understand a candidate’s strengths and attitudes in relation to learning, feedback, resilience and adaptability. Of course, there are many ways to do that; just keep in mind that it’s less about what candidates may have done in the past and more about how they approach their work and develop and broaden their competence.
Step Four: Think Outside the Checkbox
By focusing purely on the capability, behaviour and results of candidates as they’re presented in front of the recruitment team, today’s more traditional interview and assessment process can be challenging for both candidates and employers. That’s because, while these measures can predict the future success of certain candidates in specific roles, change is now constant—which means that better, more well-rounded assessments are a must.
For instance, a more blended assessment during the pre-screening allows employers to shortlist candidates based on several different attributes at the same time. The candidate can then forego multiple stages by demonstrating different attributes at the same time. This way, employers can get a clear picture of the different strengths and weaknesses of the entire group of candidates in order to make informed decisions about which candidates are best to bring forward to the interview stage.
The talent landscape and the world around us renders current assessment processes ineffective. As such, employers need to embrace a new approach that both ensures that candidates are assessed appropriately and also empowers them to make good decisions.
To that end, passion, purpose, and mindset can have as much influence on performance as a candidate’s core intellect, achievements and behaviours. And, by building these factors into the assessment of a potential employee, employers can select from a diverse pool of candidates based on each individual’s potential, as well as their current performance.
Unfortunately, most employers aren’t assessing for all of these factors, so they’re missing out on a comprehensive look at candidates. In the end, the question your organisation needs to consider is this: In a rapidly changing world, what is the cost of maintaining the status quo?
To learn more about how to build the specific assessments to fit your needs, download our ebook.
HMRC: Creating a New Virtual Assessment Centre for Greater Diversity
Every year, His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) hires 40 lawyers in an annual campaign. Ahead of their annual hiring effort, they turned to PeopleScout to help them modernise their assessment centre to secure more qualified talent.
56Qualified Candidates Found for 40 Vacancies
40%of Offers Made Were to Candidates Who Identified as an Ethnic Minority
33%of Offers Made Were to Candidates Who Identified as Being from a Lower Socioeconomic Background
Situation
The HMRC team was concerned that their current assessment centre was no longer a good predictor of performance in the role. They had also received feedback from a number of candidates who said they’d experienced functionality and formatting limitations while completing the written exercise.
The HMRC wanted PeopleScout to evaluate their assessment strategy to ensure they were evaluating for the right traits, to improve the candidate experience, and to reduce potential hidden bias within the process since diversity was a critical goal for their recruitment programme.
Solution
Reassessing the Assessment Centre
Our tech team and assessments experts had several sessions with the HMRC team. The HMRC team was able to share the skill and behaviour requirements for the legal roles. Each skill and behaviour was weighted to ensure the online assessment was tailored to their specific needs. This collaborative approach gave the HMRC team opportunities to provide direct input into the direction of the assessment centre and develop trust in the outcomes as well as PeopleScout.
The new assessment centre consisted of a behavioural test which also assessed for verbal and cognitive aptitude. This combination gave HMRC the opportunity to evaluate a broader skillset to better judge a candidate’s fit for the role. The new assessment was accompanied by tweaks to the technology platform which created a smoother experience for candidates.
Our PeopleScout team trained HMRC’s internal teams on administering the new assessment centre as well as a new video interviewing tool. In addition to the training session, each interview panel member received a detailed guide to minimise the likelihood of any disruption for the candidate.
Creating an Excellent Candidate Experience
We designed and delivered a webinar to engage candidates and educate them about the new virtual assessment centre. This gave them the opportunity to ask questions and feel confident going into the testing stage.
A PeopleScout assessor was present during all virtual assessments to support the HMRC team with their assessment expertise and ensure a consistent experience for all candidates.
Results
Of the applications received, 62% were passed to HMRC for sifting and to complete the assessment centre. Just under half passed and completed a virtual interview with HMRC. Ultimately, 56 qualified candidates were identified against 40 vacancies, giving HMRC a talent pool to draw upon for future openings.
Great strides were made against HMRC’s diversity recruitment efforts. Of the offers made:
7% of candidates stated “yes” to having a disability
60% of candidates identified as female
40% of candidates identified as minority ethnic
33% of candidates identified as being from a lower socio-economic background
Feedback from candidates was positive with many saying they felt the new platform was easier to navigate.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC)
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Talent Advisory
ABOUT HMRC: His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is a department of the UK Government responsible for administration of taxes, national insurance contributions, the national minimum wage and more.
HOW WE CREATED A BESPOKE BEHAVIOURAL ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK FOR A MULTI-BILLION-POUND COMPANY
PeopleScout’s talent advisory team created a new candidate assessment centre for a large British bank, resulting in a 58% reduction in recruitment costs totalling £24M.
58%Reduction in Recruitment Costs
resulting in £24M savings
55%Reduction in Attrition
in the first year
50%Reduction in Application-to-Hire Ratio
from 32:1 to 16:1
SITUATION
Arriving at the right assessment solution for a complex, multi-faceted, multi-billion-pound contemporary business is a major challenge. But, this was a challenge that PeopleScout’s team of psychologists was built for when our banking client came to us with a big brief. The company had just launched a crucial new set of values. They wanted us to create a bespoke, joined-up and levelled behavioural assessment framework, along side a full suite of assessment tools to support hiring into core customer-facing roles across the bank.
SOLUTION
We began by carrying out a comprehensive job analysis, involving over 300 colleagues in focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with job incumbents, senior stakeholders and transformation stakeholders. We identified synergies and differences between role requirements and complexity across the bank. The detailed research and analysis revealed three job families across all roles, each with four levels of complexity. We developed definitions and behavioural indicators for each group and each level in the framework.
Following sign-off on the new behavioural framework, we developed the assessment matrix and recommended key assessment methods. We streamlined and simplified the existing multi-stage process, bringing both the process and tools into alignment with the new values. This made it easy to understand and implement across the bank. We recommended a three-stage process across the framework, allowing for tailoring to job family and complexity levels, using specific skills assessment and assessment centre micro exercises.
RESULTS
We built-in various ways of measuring the cost-efficiencies and the overall return-on-investment of the end-to-end assessment solution. The client were delighted with the results:
A reduction in the classroom-based training time required as the calibre of candidates was improved.
Improved conversion at every stage of the assessment process, meaning less business time was required for assessment. The application-to-hire ratio was cut by half, from 32:1 to 16:1.
There was a 55% reduction in first-year attrition.
There was a 58% reduction in whole life recruitment cost, saving £24M.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY Leading British bank
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
ABOUT THE CLIENT This client is a leading UK financial services group that includes several retail banking brands. The client has been partnering with PeopleScout for over 20 years, making it one of our longest-standing client relationships.
