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
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.
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?
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.
9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges
Better Seasonal Hiring Begins with Crafting Better Job Descriptions
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
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?
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.
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.
ebook
9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges
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.
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
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
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
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
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
When Dame Sharon White, former Chief Executive of Ofcom and current Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, was recently interviewed on BBC radio, she said: “One area that I think has not had enough attention is what has happened in the jobs market over the last 18 months.” Not enough attention? The UK talent shortage, and the tightness of the labour market, has been at the heart of many mainstream news stories in the UK over the past year: petrol shortages, queues at air and sea ports, and general “skimpflation” in the customer experience.
In this case, White touched upon an interesting factor in the dynamic between an oversupply of job vacancies and an undersupply of job seekers—the “missing million” in the UK workforce who have left employment all together since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
Who Are the Missing Million?
White identified that there are “1 million fewer people in work,” adding that, “Some think about it as the ‘great resignation’. I think about it as the ‘life reappraisal’, because this is predominantly people in their 50s.”
This latter point is broadly correct: four-fifths of the recent rise in economic activity is among older people, and while the concerning increase in long-term ill health negates the idea that this is most often the result a positive “reappraisal” of life priorities, growth in early retirement started in summer 2021 and remains persistent.
White rightly called for government action to address the challenge of encouraging early retirees back to work, and it’s possible that “flexible retirement” will in the future be discussed as often as “flexible working.” In the meantime, there is much that employers can do directly to support and re-engage early retirees including approaches to recruitment, job design, workplace support, and – yes – flexibility.
To succeed, employers must recognise that temporary solutions to business problems, such as hybrid working, have turned into ongoing employee preferences and expectations. If you can’t advertise jobs as flexible and leverage that advantage due to the type of role, investment in pay or upskilling offers may be the answer.
At PeopleScout, we are certainly giving the UK talent shortage our full attention. We’re offering our clients bespoke strategies and tactics to overcome these challenges. By helping organisations understand their audiences—including the missing million—we’re able to support targeted candidate attraction efforts that create real results.
By Andrew Weston, RPO Solution Director, PeopleScout EMEA
In our world of e-commerce and online banking, consumers want slick digital experiences. But they still want the human touch when they run into a problem. Despite the growth of digital channels, excellent customer service is still a must-have in a business landscape where companies compete on customer experience. High-volume hiring in the contact centre has never been more important or more challenging.
Customer queries are more complex and high-value, and contact centre agents are now expected to not only answer calls, but interact with customers through chats, emails and social media. Contact centres need highly-skilled talent who are comfortable working in a myriad of technology platforms. Customer service representatives (CSRs) must also exhibit strong soft skills like listening and empathy—especially as consumers are experiencing more financial hardships and mental health struggles post-pandemic.
Indeed, 84% of contact centre leaders—whether part of a BPO or an internal contact centre—believe the pandemic permanently elevated the importance of the contact centre for their business. But, it’s hard to deliver against your service levels when you’re struggling to hire or when you’re losing staff amidst the Great Resignation. Since 2019, the number of vacancies has increased, while the number of applicants per opening has dropped by 50%.
(Source: Indeed)
So, how can a contact centre director and talent acquisition leader team up to tackle today’s tough landscape? Here are three top recruitment challenges in the contact centre and tips for overcoming them.
1. Use Your Employer Brand to Attract the Right Kind of Talent
ContactBabel’s UK Contact Centre Decision Maker’s Guide states that contact centre attrition reached 23% in 2022, with 1 in 6 operations experiencing annual attrition of over 30%. This results in UK contact centres making over 212,000 hires annually. With turnover like this, how to make high-volume hiring more effective is always on the minds of contact centre directors.
As consumer behaviour has changed, a different set of skills is needed in customer service. Contact centre agents need to exercise problem solving and analytical skills while also displaying empathy to customers who may be upset or emotional. Agents who lack these skills are more likely to struggle to resolve customer issues and to suffer from increased stress levels.
By honing your employer value proposition and attraction messaging, you can stand out amongst your competition but also zero in the characteristics you need for your contact centre. By shifting your mindset from focusing on getting the most applications, or even those with customer service experience, to getting applications with the right profile, you can reduce attrition by increase the likelihood of your new hires being successful.
Case Study: Finding Candidates with Problem Solving Skills
We helped Direct Line, a British insurance provider, improve their recruitment outcomes in the contact centre through employer branding and recruitment marketing. We found their ideal candidate profile was someone with strong analytical skills and who could proactively problem solve—rather than those with past experience in customer service.
We then expanded our search efforts, looking for candidates who would have honed these skills in non-customer service roles who would be interested in making a career change. Not only did this open the doors for Direct Line to access a new pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.
2. Rethink Your Assessment Centre to Reduce Drop-Off Rate
With growing complexity in customer service, organisations need contact centre agents with strong listening skills and written communication skills (for chat, email and social media enquiries) as well as the ability to self-manage and multitask. Leveraging candidate assessment tools to find candidates with the right combination of skills and behaviours is imperative to the success of your contact centre.
One of our longest standing clients, tasked us with high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for their financial services customer contact centres. The bank needed to recruit more staff to meet their service levels and create a great experience for their customers. We designed the customer contact recruitment process from scratch, including a recruitment marketing campaign.
As part of this new process, we advised the bank to introduce an online test immediately after the candidate applied using an automated email. This caught them while the application was still front of mind and also ensured that only best-fit candidates progressed. This meant that hiring managers were committing their time to top talent and helped to reduce the overall time to hire. As a result of identifying high quality candidates sooner, we were able to reduce the attrition rate to just 11%, well below the industry average.
More Assessment Centre Tips to Reduce Drop-Off
Here are some more assessment centre tips:
Try introducing assessment tasks earlier in the process or combining assessment stages. This helps increase hiring speed and keep candidates engaged.
Rather than traditional multiple-choice tests, try a role play scenario or an interactive experience that gives the candidates a real-life feel of what their day-to-day job will look like. The benefits are two-fold—you get a better idea of how candidates will perform in the role, and they get a better idea of what to expect before they accept the offer.
Ensure candidates are prepared for the assessment centre by offering webinars, instruction videos and even practices tests. This helps to eliminate nervousness and boost confidence amongst candidates—reducing candidate drop-off before the assessment centre phase.
Following the tips above on finding the ideal candidate profile and assessing for the right skills to start with, will help reduce ghosting on day one. In addition, you can also work to speed up the recruitment process and improve communications to keep candidates engaged after offer acceptance.
Speeding Up the Recruitment Process
With so many contact centres vying for customer service talent, employer response time is crucial as you want to beat the by being the first to move the candidate through the recruitment process. About a quarter of candidates state the reason for their ghosting was because the hiring process was too long or too slow. So, take a look at your recruitment process. Are there any steps you could eliminate or combine? Are there ways you could reduce the time between steps?
If it’s feasible for your organisation, you might consider moving to same-day offers, even if they’re contingent upon reference verification, background checks or drug testing. Also, moving the start date up will reduce the likelihood of a competing offer turning your candidate’s head. Waiting for your next training class could be risky, so think about running smaller training classes more frequently to accelerate hiring.
Staying Connected with Regular Communication
Communication is also a key part of combatting ghosting during the crucial period offer and onboarding. Staying in touch with candidates is imperative to keep them interested. If you ghost your brand-new hire by forgetting to check in, they’re more likely to ghost you in turn. The same Indeed study found that 77% of jobseekers saying they’ve been ghosted by an employer.
Assessing the touchpoints between your organisation and the offer holder is an important way for employers to ensure they keep the lines of communication open and increase engagement with candidates. Are you using your CRM to the fullest? Investing in creating content that showcases your employer value proposition (EVP) and sending it out regularly to your candidates via engaging emails will ensure they are reminded regularly of the value you offer—whether through benefits, flexibility, growth opportunities, diversity and inclusion initiatives and more.
Personal touchpoints are another way to stay connected. Check-in emails from the recruiter or even messages of congratulations from the hiring manager will help candidates feel valued and special. You might consider asking existing employees to act as an ambassador and share some onboarding materials with more information about your organisation, your culture and values or your employee resource groups (ERGs) so they start feeling like a part of the team.
These small gestures can help your candidate feel connected to the organisation before they start—and could end up being what keeps them from changing their mind when they receive a competing offer.
RPO for the Contact Centre
Facing a recruitment landscape in which you need high-volume hiring to support your contact centre operations? Check out our latest webinar in conjunction with Personnel Today, featuring CCMA, in which we discussed how to maintain speed and agility in high-volume hiring whilst keeping the quality of hire. Watch it on-demand!
WEBINAR ON-Demand: Hire quality vs speed: Finding the perfect balance
We all know it’s a candidate’s market. A lack of applications and number of suitable candidates, ghosting, dropouts, and a high level of attrition are all making hiring more difficult than ever. In 2020/21, the customer services market saw a record number of vacancies. However, the number of active candidates per vacancy reduced by half. This has further highlighted the need for organisations to use innovative solutions to attract talent.
A recent poll by PeopleScout asked participants what their biggest hiring challenges were in the current market:
50% of candidates answered that they faced the most problems getting good quality candidates to apply
27% said that holding onto candidates throughout the hiring process was their second biggest challenge
In addition, time-to-hire is also an issue that has been at the forefront for our clients. So, the question becomes, how do we accelerate the hiring process without jeopardising quality?
In the last 12 months, PeopleScout have helped organisations such as Virgin Media, the AA and Heathrow to make 4,000 new hires, ranging from graduates and apprentices through to customer service agents.
Our hiring success is a result of working in partnership with our clients, understanding their employer value proposition (EVP) and activating their employer brand. We bring to the partnership expert planners, designers, and implementation specialists who provide innovative strategies to recruit the right quality and volume of talent in the shortest timeframes.
We recently hosted a panel for our Hire Speed vs Quality webinar including speakers from PeopleScout, Virgin Media O2, easyJet, Shakespeare Martineau and the Call Centre Management Association. These experts discussed the challenging market situation and how innovation can provide solutions. The panel agreed that, taking greater precedence than ever before, is the need for more creative solutions to making the process smoother and quicker. This in turn ensures that the company’s investment in the candidate is not wasted.
A clear and informative job profile that brings the role to life can be the first step to finding the right candidate.
Once they apply, setting clear expectations and providing interventions to keep candidates informed between recruitment stages keeps them engaged. A good EVP that brings company culture to life also helps the candidate understand early on whether they want to remain part of the recruitment process or not.
Providing Workforce Planning Data to Support European Call Centre Recruitment
Call centre recruitment is essential for any enterprise in today’s customer-centric environment. A large multinational financial services provider identified five European countries where they could potentially open a bi- or tri-lingual contact centre. They turned to PeopleScout—and our Talent Insights solution—to get the data they needed to understand which location had the best talent pool for their needs.
Labour market data provided for five countries
Provided data on size of talent pool and language capabilities
Added value with data to support DE&I and more
Situation
With dozens of contact centres in countries around the globe, the financial services organisation wanted to simplify and optimise their operating model with multilingual hubs. The client asked PeopleScout to help them understand more about five shortlisted potential locations for these “super sites.” Time was of the essence with delivery of the insights required in just two weeks.
Solution
Our in-depth talent insights included:
Size of talent pool – The number of individuals working in the customer service sector in those locations
Languages spoken – The languages spoken by the talent pool within those locations
Cost of language ability – Any additional cost to hire people with particular language abilities in those locations
Demographic data – Age and gender data to support diversity, equality and inclusion (DE&I) efforts as well as recruitment marketing messaging
Drivers and motivators – For candidates in each market to inform go-to-market messages that will resonate with each audience
Channel strategy and advertising tactics – To attract these audiences on their go-to websites and job boards
Candidate expectations – What candidates want from the recruitment process to enable an improved candidate experience
Salary expectations – How the employment offer might need to vary from location to location based on regional information
The Results
The PeopleScout Talent Insights team distilled their research into an easily digestible report. For each country, the report included:
A high-level summary of our findings and recommendations
An overview of market size broken down by active and passive job seekers
Highlights on “hot spot” locations within each country showing language capabilities and salary expectations
What customer service professionals are looking for from an employer
Job boards and websites favoured by candidates in each country
Demographic details including gender and age as well as education and experience levels
Expectations for the candidate experience including timelines, number of interviews and likelihood to negotiate offers
The insight PeopleScout provided for each location equipped the client with valuable information that helped confirm the suitability of a location for their multilingual contact centre. We were also able to provide them with additional analysis to define their proposition, shape their talent attraction strategy and inform their salary and compensation packages.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY Global financial services organisation
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Talent Advisory
ABOUT THE CLIENT This multinational insurance and financial services company offers personal and professional insurance products as well as asset management solutions.
School’s out for the summer, but in the world of our RPO partnerships this is the time of year where we focus on early careers recruitment, in anticipation of entering apprentice, undergraduate and graduate markets in the autumn. Right now, we’re talking with clients both established and prospective about their needs in this area and, as ever, the focus on using EC programs to correct or balance diversity of workforce and (future) leadership remains a priority.
Most organisations will not necessarily view themselves as having a “diversity crisis” of the kind described in a recent article highlighting research into consulting and finance hiring in the City of London. However, many will benefit from accepting its key takeaway that, “employers are more likely to hire black candidates if they rely on anonymised, ‘skills-based’ assessments in the hiring process”.
In my experience, employers have long moved on from the most “traditional methods”. It’s certainly been a decade or more since I’ve heard of an early careers program requiring a cover letter or making space on an application form for candidates to list all the University societies of which they were definitely the President.
But my experience is not universal. I’m not a graduate looking to start my career, and I’m lucky enough to work in a recruitment business with an award-winning assessment consultancy arm, partnering with clients who take hiring for true potential seriously. That doesn’t mean there’s not more work for us to do within these partnerships—even for those who’ve taken positive steps in this area. Each year brings a new implementation cycle, and new opportunities to improve.
Here are some solutions we’ve developed, launched or refined in our 2022-23 early careers RPO partnerships:
Assessing for Skills & Strengths in Early Careers Recruitment
Over time, many employers have reduced focus on abilities in favour of strengths- or behaviour-based testing, which is considered more conducive to measuring potential. Organisationally we broadly agree, but, where appropriate, we continue to recommend reasoning tests covering verbal, numerical and cognitive ability.
The key here is not to use them in isolation as a blunt tool. Benchmark or cut off scores should be set only within the parameters of adverse impact analysis using anonymised candidate diversity data, and ability tests should be followed up with strengths or behavioural assessments. The link RPO expertise can create between recruitment technology, recruiters, and business psychologists is critical in this space.
Recruiting for Role Fit to Enhance Diversity
Predicting workplace performance and potential through behavioural assessment is often seen by early careers talent acquisition leaders as a smarter approach to hiring. Experiential tests, backed by data and research, producing personal interview guides for final stage assessment often leads to better outcomes and maintains diversity in the process.
This approach highlights candidate suitability against role fit over culture fit, the latter being a potential barrier to creating a more diverse workforce (the concept of aligning new recruits with a prevailing culture or mindset being an obvious denial of the need for organisational change).
Focusing on Culture Add Rather than Culture Fit
I am not yet aware of any early careers programs where assessment is now 100% anonymised. Whether online via video, as part of a wider virtual assessment experience, or in a traditional face-to-face meeting, an interview is going to happen before a hire is made. Removing anonymity can introduce bias, and we promote two key mitigations.
Firstly, design and deliver structured interviews which are competency-based and/or focused on culture add (what the candidate can contribute to your organisation’s culture) over culture fit. Our teams often partner with hiring managers on best practice in this area, even facilitating or assessing directly where needed. This helps maintain consistency and relevance, avoiding questions on personal interests or previous experience—instead asking specific questions on working styles and preferences.
Secondly, put candidate experience first and learn from feedback to provide support and guidance, setting the stage for success. By hearing the candidates’ voice, and measuring their experience across, we’ve been able to improve outcomes for employers.
We’re looking forward to seeing how these solutions progress, and what improvements they bring as we take early careers RPO from now to next, supporting the diverse workforces of the future—identifying and unlocking true potential wherever it exists.
