Category: Talent Acquisition Strategy

Candidate Experience Pitfalls That Impact Diversity Recruitment [Infographic]

Posted on by akessler

Diversity, equality and inclusion (DE&I) is a top priority for global organisations, but only 5% say they’re succeeding with their DE&I initiatives. We decided to look into where talent acquisition programs fit in and how the recruitment process may be contributing to this disparity for companies.

In looking at the research, we uncovered some common pitfalls within the candidate experience in which organisations unintentionally sabotage their DE&I efforts.

CHECK OUT OUR INFOGRAPHIC TO EXPLORE SOME OF THE DATA WE UNCOVERED IN OUR DIVERSITY & THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE REPORT.

To learn even more about diversity recruitment, download, Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes.

Talking Talent: Talent at the Speed of RPO

Posted on by nfuqua

One of the biggest make-or-break factors in today’s talent market is simple, but difficult to execute—speed. In a talent market where job postings outnumber job-seekers and future uncertainty still plagues employers, speed can be the deciding factor in whether your organisation has enough workers, as well as the best talent and the ability to respond to changing market conditions.  

When I talk about speed, I’m talking about it on two fronts: On one level, employers need to remain nimble. During the last two years, we’ve learned that the world can change drastically at a moment’s notice; as a talent leader, that means you need to be able to scale your team up and down. Can you respond to a hiring spike to keep up with demand? Can you handle seasonal hiring? If you can’t respond and flex your team quickly, you’ll struggle to hire enough candidates and your business will suffer.  

But, there’s more to it than that. There are three key factors that applicants have more of today than they’ve ever had before: Options, options and more options. They have options in the type of work they do, options in the level of compensation they receive and options regarding their work/life balance. Consequently, if you can’t bring a candidate through your recruitment process quickly enough, you’ll lose them to another one of their options.  

All of this is compounded by the fact that recruiters are in short supply. As SHRM reports, many recruiters changed careers after the cutbacks in 2020. Now, job postings for recruiters have tripled, and there aren’t enough candidates to fill the open roles. So, how can talent leaders meet candidate expectations? In this article, I’ll explain how the right talent solution can help you become more nimble and streamline your recruitment process. 

Challenge: Remaining Nimble Amid Uncertainty  

Whether it’s for planned busy seasons or unanticipated shifts in the market, you may need to scale your talent acquisition operations up or down—and fast. At first, you may think that this can be handled internally, but high turnover and a shortage of recruiters makes it difficult. And, although pulling in employees from other areas of the business for extra support during a busy period can be tempting, it then leaves shortages elsewhere in the organisation. Plus, those workers may not have the skills or background to effectively recruit new employees.  

How RPO Can Help: Scalable Support 

Fortunately, you can get around this hurdle by looking for a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner that can blend seamlessly with your organisation. Specifically, an experienced provider can add or reduce the number of recruiters on your team to meet your changing needs. For instance, as you approach your busy season, recruiter numbers can increase to ensure they’re fluent in your business so that candidates never know the difference. Then, when your hiring volume decreases, those recruiters can move to a different project; you don’t have to worry about hiring additional recruiters or keeping additional staff busy during slower periods.  

How RPO Can Help: Automation Technology  

You can also use technology to streamline the process for your talent acquisition team. By doing so, you’ll be able to automate the time-consuming, repetitive tasks that add little value for candidates, but require significant recruiter time. Moreover, this also allows your recruiters to fill more roles quickly, making it easier for them to handle the increased volume of a busy period. Essentially, while you may still need to scale your team to some degree, the right technology can make these shifts less dramatic.  

An RPO provider can also help you find the right technology solution for you. In particular, tools like automated sourcing can take some of the load off of your sourcing team by identifying qualified candidates within minutes. Likewise, automated recruitment marketing tools can reduce the amount of time recruiters spend crafting emails to reach out to candidates. And, virtual, on-demand interviews save recruiters time by removing the phone tag just to schedule an interview; instead, the recruiter and hiring manager can screen candidate responses at their convenience. Finally, analytics tools can help you ensure that you’re using your resources most effectively. PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology, AffinixTM, is one example that can meet these needs.  

How RPO Can Help: Smaller Scale Solutions 

It can be scary to enter into a full-cycle RPO partnership in today’s market, but that doesn’t have to be a deterrent. Solutions like project-based RPO can provide targeted, short-term support for all or part of your hiring process. This can also include technology solutions. What’s more, a project-based RPO can also be implemented more quickly than a traditional RPO program, thereby making it even easier for your team to scale up to meet your hiring needs.  

Challenge: Speeding up the Candidate Experience 

Candidates are in the driver’s seat in this job market, and that’s likely going to continue for quite some time. For example, in the past, job-seekers would be willing to wait for a call back or an interview; a strong employer brand made candidates more tolerant of a slow process. But, today, speed is of the essence. Now, candidates are looking to control the timeline—and, if they can’t, they’ll find another opportunity easily and quickly: They can take a gig job. They can take their transferable skills to another industry. They can work for your competitor. Even new grads are in high demand, with many receiving multiple offers or offers months before graduating.  

How RPO Can Help: Candidate Experience Best Practices 

To compete in this market, you need to adjust your process to make it fast and able to provide a better experience for candidates. If you’re struggling to do this internally, look for an RPO provider with the right expertise; look for a partner with both experience in your industry, as well as across industries. While every industry is unique, you can often benefit from knowledge of other sectors and geographies.  

You probably already have good data about your talent acquisition program, but perhaps you lack the expertise to interpret that data and identify areas to improve. If so, choose a partner that’s focused on the entire process—from sourcing through every stage of recruitment to the first 30 or 60 days a new hire is on the job. With that background, they’ll be able to review every step and identify the most influential areas for improvement. For instance: Where are candidates experiencing friction? Is it on your careers site? Completing your application? Scheduling interviews? Waiting on your team to process excess paperwork? Your RPO provider should be able to identify which challenges you’re facing and implement targeted interventions.  

How RPO Can Help: Speedy Technology Solutions 

An RPO provider’s technology solutions can also add speed. If you spend a lot of time interviewing candidates, consider whether those interviews accurately indicate whether the candidate will be successful. If not, you may be able to replace part of a drawn-out interview process with a more effective assessment.  

As an example, a short, mobile-first application can bring more candidates into your funnel. Next, a text or SMS interview can move candidates on to the next steps quickly. Finally, on-demand interviews and interview self-scheduling don’t just help your team work more efficiently; they also help candidates move through the process faster and give them a sense of control. 

Taking the First Step 

Overall, an RPO provider gives you what you need: More resources. At PeopleScout, we can engage our global teams for 24/7 support. For example, recruiters can review résumés, CVs or on-demand interviews overnight so that your team has a prescreened slate of candidates waiting when they start work in the morning. Your RPO provider can also take on administrative steps, like background screenings or drug tests. All of this makes you faster and more nimble.  

Taking the first step toward working with an RPO provider can be intimidating. But, if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s the need to be flexible in finding different solutions to new challenges. You can’t get anywhere quickly if you let things stay the same. 

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Global Diversity Awareness Month: Resources to Improve Your DE&I Outcomes

Posted on by akessler

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) is a priority for 75% of global organisations and corporate DE&I programs offer a huge opportunity to win over talent in today’s tight labour market.

In recognition of Global Diversity Awareness Month, we’ve examined the state of diversity recruiting in our recent report, Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes. This deep dive into the candidate journey uncovers common areas where employers are unintentionally sabotaging their DE&I efforts. Plus, we offer actionable takeaways for addressing these issues and improving diversity recruitment outcomes.

In addition to the report, we thought we’d share some of our top articles and podcasts to help you create a diverse, equitable and inclusive candidate and employee experience where everyone feels welcome and respected.

DE&I and Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition plays a crucial role in bringing to life diversity and inclusion within an organisation through sourcing, engaging and hiring talent from underrepresented groups.

Here are our top insights for talent acquisition leaders for improving diversity recruitment outcomes.

  1. DE&I: Assessing Programme Maturity & the Role of Talent Acquisition:
    Anthony Brew, Vice President of Diversity, Equality & Inclusion at our parent company TrueBlue, shares how to determine the maturity of your D&I program and ideas for talent acquisition leaders to increase their influence.
  2. Podcast: Building an Inclusive & Equitable Employer Brand & Recruitment Process:
    In the episode of our Talking Talent podcast, we hear from Paula Simmons, our Director of Employer Brand & Communications Strategy, about building an employer brand and a recruitment process that is equitable and inclusive for candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.
  3. Podcast: Reducing Unconscious Bias for an Inclusive Recruitment Process:
    In another podcast, Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory, teaches us about unconscious bias and shares tactics to reduce it from various stages of your recruitment process.
  4. Data & Diversity: Using Analytics to Achieve Your DE&I Goals:
    As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. In this article from Liz Karkula, Associate Product Manager of Affinix™, and Jason Kaplan, IT Manager of Business Intelligence, how to leverage technology and analytics to measure and improve DE&I in your recruitment programs.

Research Report

Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes

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DE&I and Employee Experience

The employee experience is just as important to the success of your DE&I program. For employees from underrepresented groups, meaningful engagement and organisational commitment to DE&I can improve retention, productivity and employee referrals that can boost your diversity recruitment efforts.

Below, we’ve outlined our most read resources for creating a more inclusive workplace.

  1. Feeling Part of the Team: The Importance of Building an Inclusive Culture in the Workplace:
    Make your diversity recruitment efforts count by following these ideas to cultivate a culture of inclusion.
  2. Diversity Training: Getting It Right, Right Away:
    Diversity training is one way organisations are fostering inclusion within company culture. This article explores different kinds of diversity training and how to leverage them to improve your D&I efforts.
  3. Diversity and Inclusion: Building Employee Resource Groups and Driving Change:
    Employee Resource Groups, or ERGs, have multifaceted benefits that impact an organisation’s strategic diversity and inclusion efforts in recruitment, retention, mentoring, leadership development, customer relations and more. Check out this article for practical tips on supporting ERGs in your organisations.
  4. Improving Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Workplace:
    This article is a guide to benefits to of diversity and best practices when it comes to implementing and monitoring a diversity policy in the workplace.
  5. Podcast: Women in Leadership:
    In this episode of our Talking Talent podcast, PeopleScout’s diverse group of female leaders from all around the world share what it means to be a woman in leadership. Women at all levels of the company—from executive leaders to team leaders and managers—talk about how they got to where they are and how to create work environments where women can succeed.
  6. Benefits of Workplace Diversity: The Value of LGBTQ+ Employees:
    This article provides a historical look at LGBTQ+ activism and its victories in the fight for workplace equity. Plus, you’ll learn strategies to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace.

No matter how you’re celebrating Global Diversity Awareness Month at your organisation, we hope these resources give you practical steps you can take to improve your diversity recruitment outcomes and create a more equitable and inclusive culture at your organisation.

Want to learn more about diversity and talent acquisition? Download our report, Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes, for the latest research on how to improve the candidate experience for underrepresented groups.

Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes

Posted on by akessler

Diversity & the Candidate Experience

Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) is a priority for 75% of global organisations. But only 5% say they’re succeeding with their DE&I initiatives.

That’s bad news in today’s tight labour market since 76% of candidates said that a diverse workforce was an important factor when considering a new job.

Download this free report, Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes, for research about diversity and recruitment. We’ll explore:

  • The role of diversity and the candidate experience
  • The gap between the perception of companies and candidates
  • An analysis of the stages of the candidate journey where bias is undermining talent acquisition’s efforts to attract diverse candidates

Dow: Supporting Graduate Recruitment in EMEA and India

Posted on by akessler
Dow: Supporting Graduate Recruitment in EMEA and India

Dow: Supporting Graduate Recruitment in EMEA and India

Dow, a leading materials science company, turned to PeopleScout for recruitment process outsourcing for their graduate recruitment program across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India.

15 countries and 5 languages
63 candidate NPS score (considered “great”)
25% % of candidates were female

Situation

Dow has been at the forefront of materials science for 125 years, pioneering new ways for science to make the world a better place. Due the specialist nature of the talent they need, Dow’s in-house recruitment team was at capacity executing a high-touch hiring process and needed support recruiting for their internships and graduate programs in EMEA. They turned to PeopleScout for a global RPO solution spanning 15 countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE and the United Kingdom.

They needed over 100 interns and graduates from science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs. Dow was competing with several other employers in the region for this talent. Plus, the implementation period was compressed from 12 weeks down to five, so we needed to act fast to engage these future innovators.

Solution

The PeopleScout Talent Advisory team built a bespoke microsite, featuring real graduate employees, that brought the Dow culture and their career opportunities to life for their young audience. We also polished job descriptions to resonate with the audience and posted job adverts online, leveraging LinkedIn in some cases to expand the promotion of more specialised roles.

Working as an extension of their in-house team, we conducted phone screens and scheduled interviews for Dow hiring managers. Processing over 6,000 applicants, our multi-lingual delivery team in Poland conducted over 1,200 phone interviews in English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Results

We filled 134 graduate and intern vacancies. Candidate feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with candidate Net Promoter Score (NPS) coming in at 63, which is considered “great.”

“I would definitely suggest Dow to anyone because I had a very good recruitment experience. The company and the position were introduced to me in very detailed way by the recruiter. So, I believe my ambitions and goals are aligned with Dow’s expectations.”

Candidate Feedback

Another key point of success for the graduate recruitment program is that more than a quarter of candidates were women, despite their underrepresentation in STEM fields.

“PeopleScout has been fast in responding to every email and it’s clear that they value meeting their clients’ needs. The roles they’re working on are very niche and technical, but they’ve been able to align to what hiring managers need.”

Hiring Manager at Dow

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    Dow
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • LOCATIONS
    15 countries across EMEA, including Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE and the United Kingdom
  • ABOUT DOW
    Dow’s (NYSE: DOW) ambition is to become the most innovative, customer centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company in the world. Dow’s portfolio of plastics, industrial intermediates, coatings and silicones businesses delivers a broad range of differentiated, science-based products and solutions for its customers in high-growth market segments, such as packaging, infrastructure, mobility and consumer applications. Dow operates 104 manufacturing sites in 31 countries and employs approximately 35,700 people. For more information, please visit www.dow.com or follow @DowNewsroom on Twitter.
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9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Competition for talent is steep, with high demand from call centres, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs.

Talent acquisition leaders are facing the most tumultuous job market in recent memory with an impossible combination of soaring job openings and a labour shortage.

  • So, how do they compete for talent when the competition is so fierce?
  • And how can they prepare for seasonal peaks?
  • More importantly, how can they increase speed without sacrificing on quality-of-hire?

Download our ebook to learn 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges. It’s a must-read for any talent acquisition team focused on solving critical problems in their high-volume hiring programs.

Seasonal Hiring: How RPO Can Help You Better Source and Hire Seasonal Workers 

Posted on by edyson

Hiring seasonal workers is essential for employers in need of extra talent during the festive season. If your organisation depends on seasonal hiring to augment your workforce, it is vital to efficiently source, recruit, and onboard your seasonal hires to ensure you are staffed during the busy shopping period.

Without a well-designed seasonal hiring program in place, employers risk going understaffed for the festive period, or for other times of the year when a business reaches a peak. In this article, we will walk through how an RPO provider can help you hire talent for the busy season and equip you with tips on building a seasonal hiring pipeline.

What is a Seasonal Worker?

hiring seasonal workers

A seasonal worker or employee is one who works for a short period to meet seasonal peaks in demand. This might coincide with annual seasons, like summer travel peaks, or with festive seasons.

Employers that use seasonal hires typically need assistance at the same time each year, for example as lifeguards or lawn care workers in the summer or retail workers or delivery drivers in the winter. When hiring seasonal workers, you can hire them on a part-time or full-time basis depending on your needs.

What are the Benefits of Hiring Seasonal Workers?

Here are some of the benefits of hiring seasonal workers:

Extra Hands When You Need Them: When a business reaches its peak season, seasonal workers provide you that extra help fast when you need it, without the investment required for full-time staff.

Assist Full-Time Staff: Your seasonal employees can help alleviate the load carried by your full-time employees. This can improve morale for your permanent workforce, because they have the support they need during peak times.

Low Risk: When you hire a permanent employee, you don’t always know if they’ll be a good fit for the job. Seasonal employees are only hired for a short period, if they aren’t a good fit, the impact to your business will be minimised.

Potential Talent Pool: On the other hand, if you hire a seasonal employee who works out well, you might be able to offer them a permanent position when one becomes available. It’s a trial run that works as a recruiting method for permanent positions.

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Better Seasonal Hiring Begins with Crafting Better Job Descriptions

seasonal hiring

Writing job descriptions for seasonal positions is different from temporary, full- and part-time roles. It is important that your job descriptions accurately reflect the nature of your open positions, so candidates know ahead of time if they should apply.

For example, many seasonal roles are in warehouse and logistics setting and may require candidates to work in a more physically demanding environment. Major retailers and logistics companies are in serious need of seasonal workers with John Lewis looking to fill 14,000 roles, including shop assistants, warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the Royal Mail hoping to add over 20,000 seasonal sorters and carriers.

To better understand the nature of the seasonal jobs for which you are writing job descriptions consider spending time shadowing workers in the relevant seasonal positions. What’s more, COVID-19 has made many employers become more familiar with video interviewing, however, the idea of leveraging videos to enhance your employment marketing and employer branding is sometimes overlooked.  

Job descriptions can be bolstered with video. A seasonal job posting could include a short video of a hiring manager describing the job and what they are looking for in a seasonal hire. Your video can even include examples of workers performing the most common tasks required to give candidates an accurate idea of the work involved.

How RPO Can Help

RPO providers can help employers conceive of and create a talent attraction strategy that considers both the needs of employers and the needs of seasonal hires. Through a data-driven approach to talent advisory and recruitment marketing, they help you showcase what makes you a seasonal employer of choice.

Sourcing Seasonal Hires

Recruiting seasonal employees begins with mining a verdant source of seasonal workers. Employers should look for candidates such as students and other demographics looking for short-term employment opportunities. For example, consider recruiting recent graduates who are taking time to figure out what they want to do long-term is one way of sourcing seasonal talent. Often, these candidates prefer the temporary nature of seasonal work compared to a longer-term commitment.

Moreover, hiring candidates with a seasonal work mindset can help you keep them around for the full season or even retain them for next year.

When sourcing seasonal workers, look to hire people who want seasonal work including:

  • Retired workers
  • Workers looking for extra work during the holidays
  • Stay-at-home parents who want to work while their kids are in school
  • Students who are on holiday break

How RPO Can Help

Many RPO providers have talent pools and networks they can tap into to source the right candidates for seasonal positions. RPOs also have experience building talent pipelines from the ground up and can assist employers in creating a sustainable seasonal hiring program that delivers year-in-year-out.

RPO partners also offer technology expertise to help you track, measure and optimise your seasonal hiring campaign by showing which channels and recruitment marketing messages are yielding the best candidates. They can help you with recruitment analytics so you can see your recruitment funnel at all your sites in a centralised dashboard.

Managing High-Volume While Hiring Seasonal Workers

seasonal hires

Many employers in need of seasonal hires require a large volume of talent to keep up with peak demand. High-volume hiring at its heart is a problem of scale which requires optimising your time and recruiting spend. Recruitment automation can help you reduce the manual workload on your recruiting team and hiring managers while keeping your visibility on all of the candidates progressing through different stages of the interview process. Automating certain steps, such as screening and triggering assessments, allows recruiters to focus their time on higher-value, strategic work.

How RPO Can Help

An HR outsourcing solution such as RPO provides employers the ability to scale up seamlessly as seasonal hiring demands shift. With an internal talent acquisition team, it may be difficult to scale up hiring quickly enough to handle a higher number of hires and then scale back down when hiring volumes shrink. What’s more, recruitment technology platforms such as PeopleScout’s Affinix can help you automate your recruitment program and create great high-volume hiring efficiency.

Never Neglect Your End of-Season Plans

How you end a relationship with seasonal hires can help with next season’s hiring. Here are a few things to keep in mind at the end of the season:

  • Availability: Ask outgoing seasonal employees if they would be interested in returning next season. Some workers design their needs and lifestyle around managing seasonal and temporary jobs, and they may be looking for another opportunity next year.
  • Exit Interviews: To learn from successes and drawbacks, hold exit interviews with seasonal employees, regardless of how long they worked with you. Having informative feedback can help streamline next year’s efforts.
  • Permanent Talent: Tempting as it may be, you likely won’t have the means or the resources to bring every seasonal employee on full-time. However, keep an eye on exceptional workers whose mix of soft skills and talent would be excellent fit as vacancies come open during other parts of the year.

How RPO Can Help

An RPO provider can help organise your offboarding efforts at the end of the season by assisting in exit interviews, managing your seasonal worker database as well as hiring top performers to permanent positions. An RPO provider’s ability to scale down engagements quickly means the process can be seamlessly executed so that you can resume business as usual.

Are You in Need of a Seasonal Hiring Partner?

seasonal worker

When it comes to maintaining your seasonal operations and providing excellent customer service during your peak months, hiring seasonal employees can help keep your business moving.

Whether you are in need of seasonal recruiting or a permanent talent solution, employers in our new world of work face rising recruitment challenges. An outsourced recruitment solution like PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO and Total Workforce Solutions can help you stay connected with talent and provide hiring resources that will add immediate value to your talent programs.

Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

Competition for talent is steep, with high demand from contact centres, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs. Organisations across sectors are struggling to stand out in today’s competitive talent landscape, but for those talent leaders trying to meet their high-volume recruitment goals it feels like an impossible mission with soaring attrition rates, labour shortages and record job vacancies.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the top challenges you’re probably experiencing with high-volume recruitment and offer some ideas to address them.

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of applicants for similar openings or job types. It requires a tricky balance of keeping substantial quantities of job applicants moving through the recruitment process at speed. Plus, throughout the year it requires talent acquisition teams to scale up quickly to meet seasonal demand, like for holiday shopping periods or during peak travel times.

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9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

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The High-Volume Hiring Landscape

COVID-19 was a mixed bag for high-volume recruitment. Retail and logistics workers were less severely impacted by furloughs and layoffs due to the “front line” status of grocery stores and the growth in online shopping. However, other industries, including the travel and hospitality sectors, were hit hard as lockdown came into force. 

The following trends are shaping the high-volume recruitment landscape:

  • Increased Competition:
    Job openings have grown by a third since 2019, yet job seekers per opening have fallen by half. Plus, employees who were let go during the pandemic may feel resentful of their former employers and may have moved on to other roles in other sectors.
  • Recruiters are Rare:
    As of April 2021, recruiter job postings on LinkedIn surpassed pre-pandemic levels. There’s a record number of roles to be filled and not enough recruiters to tackle the work, creating a series of knock-on effects for organisations.
  • Attrition is Skyrocketing:
    A massive 41% of the global workforce is considering quitting their jobs and only 20% report feeling engaged at work. In a recent survey, 55% of hiring managers cited retention and turnover as the number-one issue impacting their ability to hire—and their company’s ability to thrive.
  • Candidate Expectations Have Changed:
    Modern candidates have modern expectations which are more aligned with today’s consumer experience. They want digital-first experiences—on their mobile phone—and fast responses. In fact, they expect acknowledgement of their application immediately upon submission, first contact from a recruiter within 24 hours and regular updates on the hiring process in a timely manner.

High-Volume Recruitment Challenges and Solutions

In this challenging landscape, how can employers stand out from the competition and attract a large number of candidates quickly without sacrificing quality?

We’ll tackle three of the top challenges below and offer strategies you can use to get ahead.

Challenge: Ghosting and Candidate Drop Off are Rampant

“Ghosting”—not showing up with no reason given and often no communication from the candidate—is on the rise at the interview, assessment and even onboarding stages. According to an Indeed survey on ghosting in the workplace, 22% of candidates say they have accepted a job offer but didn’t show up for the first day of work.

Many organisations are not prepared to support the current pace of hiring. Candidates are much less tolerant of long recruitment processes and pauses in communication from employers, so organisations who can move the fastest are more likely to have their offers accepted. Plus, those doing high-volume recruitment are seeing an increase in candidates dropping out of the funnel even in the application phase. If applying for a position is too complicated or too long, candidates won’t complete it. Online applications with 45 or more questions have an abandonment rate of nearly 90%.

Solution:

An RPO partner can help you evaluate your recruitment processes and identify opportunities for efficiency. They may suggest steps you could eliminate or combine and introduce tactics to help reduce the time between steps to help you keep pace with candidate expectations and reduce ghosting. They can also take over time-consuming steps like reference verification and background checks, leaving your team to focus on moving candidates through he funnel faster.

RPO providers also have access to the latest talent acquisition technology which can automate parts of your process. Leveraging CRM technology enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), your RPO partner can nurture candidates through automated recruitment emails and even SMS messages. Texting is also a great way to screen candidates and automate interview scheduling, eliminating manual steps and accelerating your hiring timeline. By automating some of your candidate communications, you keep candidate engaged and reduce funnel drop off without increasing the workload for your recruiters and hiring managers.

Challenge: Desperation to Fill Vacancies Results in Reduced Quality-of-Hire

Increased attrition from the Great Resignation is leading to productivity loss. Many businesses have been forced to close stores due to lack of staff or because they don’t have enough staff to assist customers in a timely manner—in-store, in-branch or in the call centre. The customer experience suffers which results in decreased sales and revenue loss, leading to some talent acquisition teams and hiring managers making bad hires out of desperation to fill vacancies.

With tight competition, time-to-offer has become a competitive differentiator. Often hiring managers may skip some interview or assessments steps in order to speed up their processes and keep talent in the funnel, leading them to compromise on quality-of-hire. Candidate without the right skills can also impact your customer experience.

Solution:

Challenge your assumptions or your hiring managers’ assumptions about the type of skills and background that are really needed for your roles. This will help you understand what experience is necessary for talent to have coming into the role and what can be learned on the job. We did this for one of our high-volume RPO clients that was struggling to hire for customer service roles. By interviewing their most successful customer-facing employees, we helped the brand realise that past customer service experience was not a predictor of future success, but rather employees stressed the amount of problem solving they had to do in their daily tasks. Not only did this expand their pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.

To support this, you should also rethink your candidate assessment so that it evaluates not just hard skills, like the ability to use a point-of-sale system, but also soft skills like empathy, attitude and work ethic, which are increasingly important for high-volume hiring. At PeopleScout, we’ve developed our whole person assessment model specifically for high-volume hiring. Through this we’ve helped many organisations create an assessment process that can identify and excite great candidates without extending their recruitment timeline.

Challenge: Leaning on Hiring Managers to Recruit is Leading to Burnout

With recruiters in short supply, hiring managers are picking up the slack in order to fill their vacancies. Unstructured, ineffective hiring processes and weak employer brands are putting the burden of attracting candidates and creating positive candidate experiences squarely on the hiring manager. The pressure only increases as they miss business targets due to lack of staff. In fact, 84% of hiring managers say they have hit or have come close to burnout because of hiring for their organisation.

Solution:

A high-volume RPO solution helps augment your resources by acting as an extension of your in-house team. An RPO provider can handle everything at scale from sourcing and pipelining, screening, interviews, assessments, reference checks, offer management and more—whatever you need to free up your in-house recruiters and hiring managers to focus on more high-value tasks. Plus, RPO partners have particular focus on keeping hiring managers informed—whether it be ensuring they’re prepared for interviews or delivering feedback from candidates afterwards.

One of the biggest value-adds that RPO brings is experience with the latest talent technology innovations. An RPO partner can help you assess talent acquisition software to address all aspects of your recruiting process, from sourcing talent to creating a more efficient candidate experience. Your provider can show you how emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and predictive analytics can boost your speed and hire quality. Your hiring managers will love not having to spend so much time on administrative tasks.

Conclusion

The current talent market can’t be conquered with your old talent acquisition strategies. A high-volume RPO solution offers a range of approaches to help organisations attract, process and hire a large number of candidates. Whether you need to revamp your employer brand or to augment your in-house recruitment team, an RPO partner can help crank up your high-volume recruitment program.

Reducing Attrition in the Contact Centre Through High-Volume RPO

Posted on by akessler
Reducing Attrition in the Contact Centre through High-Volume RPO

Reducing Attrition in the Contact Centre through High-Volume RPO

A leading British financial services company tasked PeopleScout with high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for their customer contact centres.

104% % of Target Achieved
11% % Attrition Rate—Well Below the Industry Average of 30%
We're Duplicating This Campaign’s Success for Some of the Client's Other Departments
We’re Duplicating This Campaign’s Success for Some of the Client’s Other Departments

Situation

The increased cost of living means the customer service advisors at this leading UK bank are under greater pressure to handle more and more complex customer queries, leading to longer calls and increased hold times.

The bank needed to recruit more staff to meet their service levels and create a great experience for their customers. As their RPO partner, we are currently recruiting almost 2,800 permanent customer service advisors per year. In response to the changing needs of their customers, however, we launched a campaign to recruit an additional 150 customer service representatives for their contact centres plus up to 450 additional advisors within their branch network. At the same time, we enabled them to transition from contingent solutions to 100% permanent hiring.

Solution

We designed the customer service recruitment process from scratch, which included a recruitment marketing campaign that we designed and managed. Digital adverts directed candidates to a careers page where they could apply. Each candidate received an automated message to complete an online test, which ensured only best-fit candidates progressed. Our team then reviewed the applications and test results and put forward candidates to the client for a virtual interview and role play.

Once the selection process was complete, we managed the offer process and submitted compliant right-to-work documentation for successful candidates.

Results

To date, the PeopleScout have achieved 104% of our hiring goal, with an attrition rate of just 11%—well below the industry average of 30%.

As a result, the client have asked us to duplicate this campaign to support recruitment in additional call centre teams.

“The PeopleScout team work tirelessly to deliver and are fully invested in our objectives and values. There is always a willingness to be flexible and agile, working collaboratively to achieve a common goal.”

Recruitment Manager

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    Leading UK Bank
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    3,000+ across customer services in-branch and in the contact centre
Contact Us

Soft Skills Training for Employees: Improving Internal Mobility with Soft Skills Training

Posted on by edyson

Soft skills training can help both employers and employees alike. Soft skills are increasingly important as organisations across all industries look to fill roles, and talent leaders are increasingly investing in internal mobility programs to harness the skills of internal talent. While employers can assess candidates and employees alike for competencies like communication, conflict resolution and problem solving, some internal candidates may need additional training or education when moving into a new role or area of business operations. What’s more, soft skills training can help improve client relationships and foster a stronger team dynamic. In this article, we list the benefits of including soft skills into your employee training and professional development program.

Benefits of Soft Skills Training

Improved Customer Service

When an employer invests in soft skills training for employees, they are preparing their workforce to better engage customers. For example, training employees on active listening means they will more effectively establish customer needs, identify issues and help resolve them. Moreover, empathy can have a positive impact on company culture as a whole in addition to customer service.

Soft Skills Training Can Increase Sales

Improving soft skills can benefit your sales team during the sales negotiation process. Employees can use their competencies to engage with the client on a more personal level, without breaching the all-important professional boundaries, and your customers will appreciate this. When employees take additional time to discuss the pain points that your clients experience and match them with the right solution, the sale will happen by itself.

Better Employee Retention

Investing in the professional growth of your employees will pay off with increased employee retention. You will reduce the need to hire and train replacement staff, thus reducing organisational costs. Additionally, soft skills improve knowledge retention and equip employees to take ownership of their personal development.

Top Soft Skills in the Workplace

Now that we have outlined some of the benefits of soft skills training, here we provide the top soft skill competencies you should concentrate your employee soft skills training on. LinkedIn published a list of the most in-demand soft skills with leadership, communication, collaboration and time management coming out as the soft skills employers were actively seeking. In this section, we take a take closer look at the specific skills you should consider training your employees on and the best ways to train your employees.

There are a number of options for delivering soft skills training to your workforce. You can dedicate entire courses solely to soft skills, or you can add relevant soft skill sections to your existing employee education content. In terms of delivery methods, consider using some of the options outlined below.

Coaching and Mentoring

If you identify an employee who has a development need for a specific soft skill like leadership, you can consider bringing in a mentor or coach and tailor a learning approach that’s specific and targeted. The coaching process in the workplace typically implies collaboration with the employee to identify, target, and plan for better performance.

A coach can help the employee define their goals, existing skill sets, strengths, and, of course, weaknesses. For example: the employee finds out that he/she is not good enough at communicating with the staff supervised, so a coach creates a development strategy and provides him/her with a clear pathway to improve their communication skills. When an employee is on their way to implement this strategy, a trainer supports them and provides them with actionable feedback.

Coaching and mentoring is especially effective in imparting soft skills, such as communication and leadership which are key in improving customer service.

Interactive Workshops

If you want to train an entire group of employees in a specific soft skill, you can organise live workshops to reach as many employees as possible while also helping to foster team building skills. The best workshops have a concrete, action-oriented purpose and aim to find answers to current problems in the field.

Let’s say you want to teach your customer service staff how to resolve conflicts with clients. You can develop role-play scenarios and play them out right in the workshop. Let the supervisor or learning and development representative be a disgruntled customer and your employees will have to try to settle the conflict. Based on their responses, the trainer will be able to bridge skill gaps and point them in the right direction.

Peer Learning

Another effective yet simple way of developing soft skills is to learn with other people. Research has shown there is a significant link between having fun in the workplace and informal learning. You can take advantage of this by creating streams of work or small-scale projects that require collaboration between colleagues at work. Or you can undertake social learning online via the use of social apps and other tools.

Try launching a peer forum where employees will discuss soft skills in the workplace and how to achieve their full potential. They will have a place to ask questions and share stories to get peer-based feedback. For instance, an employee encountered a particularly difficult customer who got on his/her nerves. He/she can share his/her experience on the forum, discuss it with colleagues, and get useful advice for the future.

What Is Emotional Intelligence? Is it a Soft Skill That Can Be Learned?

Emotional Intelligence or (EI) is the ability of a person to manage both their own emotions and understand the emotions of people around them. There are five key elements to EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Employees with high EI are better at identifying how they are feeling, what those feelings mean, and how those emotions impact their behaviour and in turn, other people such as customers and coworkers.

It can be a little difficult to “manage” the emotions of others as one cannot control how someone else feels or behaves. If employees can identify the emotions behind their behaviour, they have a better understanding of where they are coming from and how to best interact with them.

High EI overlaps with strong interpersonal skills, especially in the areas of conflict management and communication—crucial skills in the workplace. Employees who can self-regulate their emotions are often able to avoid making impulsive decisions since they think objectively before they act. Operating with empathy and understanding is a critical part of teamwork; being able to attribute someone’s behaviour to an underlying emotion will help you manage relationships and make others feel heard. On an individual level, being aware of your feelings is the first step in not letting those feelings control you. Recognising how you feel, and why, will help you to sit with those feelings and then move forward in a productive way. 

Effective leaders are often very emotionally intelligent. In the workplace, it’s important for leaders to be self-aware and able to view things objectively. This translates into understanding your strengths and weaknesses and acting with humility. This must be balanced with empathy—employees who feel appreciated and valued at work aren’t only happier, but more productive.

Fortunately, you can help employees improve EI skills with some thoughtfulness and practice:

  • Ask employees to try to slow down their reactions to emotions. Try phrases like: “Next time you feel angry, try to sit with it before lashing out.” “Did someone upset you?” “What do you think was the emotion underneath their behaviour?”
  • Ask employees to think about their strengths and weaknesses. No one is good at everything, and that’s okay! Make sure employees understand that it’s okay to ask for—or offer—help.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, putting in the effort to better train and understand your employees’ soft skills can greatly improve communication between customers, employees and coworkers. The modern workplace can sometimes make employees feel confused and overwhelmed which can have and adverse effect on employee mental health. Soft skills training can equip your workforce with great compassion and competencies that will make an impact on a human level.