Solution: Project RPO

SSE: Achieving Project RPO Success Despite Limited Talent Pool

Posted on by rharris

CHALLENGE

As part of the Government’s smart meter rollout, SSE needed to hire 1,500 Smart Meter Engineers in a short time-frame – in direct competition with all the other energy companies looking for the same people. A long-term client, SSE turned to their Talent Solutions Partner to share the problem and outsource the project.

APPROACH

Our task was to recruit 1,500 Smart Meter Installers by December 2017. Time was of the essence. The hiring process needed to be transformed, streamlined and made more consistent, as the existing process was time-consuming for hiring managers and candidates alike. Hiring managers were incredibly busy so we needed a process that required minimal commitment.

The next challenge we faced was the limited talent pool of candidates. So it was essential that SSE made an impact with highly targeted communications.

Our Occupational Psychologist team designed a new online application process that removed the need for SSE Managers to interview candidates. Now they would only need to meet the candidates on their first day of training. Our newly designed online 3D model and multiple-choice tests allowed us to assess candidates much more efficiently. And along the way, our UK Delivery Centre supported candidates at each stage, ensuring that they remained engaged and satisfied.

‘We’ve been really pleased with the speed of project set up, the team and the added value that they continue to provide.” Lee Newbold, HR Business Partner – Metering and Smart Transformation’

RESULTS

Between October 2016 and April 2018, 902 Smart Meter Installers were recruited. The average time to receive an offer has been reduced to 69 days, and recruits now start after 104 days, on average.

And, throughout we have increased the quality of the candidates. 90% of trainee candidates attended assessment and 64% passed at the Assessment Centre. We’ve increased the number of female Smart Meter Operatives by 800%.

The application process was nominated for an Innovation Award by the Association of British Psychology.

Derby City Council: Candidate Generation for Future Generations

Posted on by rharris

Derby City Council needed to recruit several Directors to drive forward their 2030 vision for a safer, stronger city. They engaged our expertise in Candidate Generation and Assessment solutions to ensure the right candidates were identified and assessed in a robust, pragmatic way. We delivered a streamlined, structured solution to ensure they had the information they needed to make successful appointments based on objective, role-specific insights.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
• A ROBUST PROCESS
• IN-DEPTH INSIGHT
• MEASUREMENT & VALIDATION
• BESPOKE CANDIDATE REPORTS
• SUCCESSFUL APPOINTMENTS

IDENTIFYING THE RIGHT CANDIDATES TO DRIVE DERBY’S 2030 VISION

SCOPE & SCALE

Derby City Council has a clear vision for 2030, based on building a “safe, strong, ambitious city”.To achieve this vision they needed to recruit a number of Directors to drive forward their ambitious plans.

SITUATION

Derby City Council engaged our expertise in Candidate Generation and Assessment solutions to ensure the right candidates were identified and assessed in a robust, pragmatic way

SOLUTION

IN-DEPTH INSIGHT
To target suitable candidates for each of the roles, our specialist Candidate Generation team immersed themselves in the culture of Derby City Council. They asked questions to understand the key success requirements, experience and qualities essential for each role. This also supported the development of a compelling, yet realistic, narrative that could be used to keep candidates motivated to complete the recruitment journey.

MEASUREMENT & VALIDATION
Our Senior Assessment Consultant ensured that each candidate completed two personality questionnaires to measure their profiles against the organisation’s key strategic level
competencies. In addition, our Occupational Psychologist conducted a 60-minute validation call with each individual to really get under their skin and bring their behavioral preferences to life.

BESPOKE CANDIDATE REPORTS
We then compiled a report on every candidate, highlighting their key strengths and development areas, providing briefs for the panel to use to probe further during the selection interviews.

RESULTS

SUCCESSFUL APPOINTMENTS
This streamlined, structured solution ensured that Derby City Council had the information they needed to make appointment decisions based on objective, role-specific insights.

A ROBUST PROCESS
It also made for a fair process which both successful and unsuccessful candidates found to be enriching, as they received insightful feedback throughout. Similarly, the assessor panel reported that the briefings helped to focus their questions at the final stage interviews for each candidate.

What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing?

Posted on by epadmin

So, what is recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), and why should companies use it? RPO can boost your talent acquisition by optimising processes amid fierce competition. Whether you’re exploring RPO or want to learn more about maximising it, this guide will provide valuable insights. Understand how partnering with an RPO can boost your talent acquisition outcomes.

This overview explains RPO, answering common questions, including:

  • How RPO works
  • Types of RPO
  • The benefits of outsourcing recruitment
  • What to look for when selecting an RPO partner

What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing?

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a type of business process outsourcing (BPO) in which an external organisation (RPO provider) supports an employer’s talent acquisition function by assuming responsibility for some or all facets of the talent acquisition function to support some or all of an employer’s hiring needs.

For example, an RPO engagement may only cover sourcing and screening candidates (partial-cycle RPO) or it may cover the entire recruitment lifecycle from receiving hiring manager’s requisitions all the way to presenting and negotiating job offers to candidates (full-cycle RPO). An RPO provider works closely with an organisation’s internal talent acquisition team, either remotely or on-site.

👉 Debunk common RPO myths.

talent recruitment

Why Do Companies Choose to Outsource Recruitment?

Below, we highlight a few high-level reasons why organisations seek RPO providers, and conversely, when RPO may not be a good fit:

REASONS TO ENGAGE AN RPO PROVIDER:

  • If your organisation is looking for more speed, agility and flexibility in your recruiting processes
  • If you are looking to improve the quality of candidates applying to your positions or struggle to attract the right talent
  • If your organisation is looking for a more cost-effective and standardised recruiting process
  • If your organisation’s current use of recruitment technology isn’t up to par and you are seeking a variety of digital upgrades specific to your organisation’s recruiting objectives
  • If your organisation is looking to increase diversity hiring, RPO providers can help you uncover new diverse talent recruitment sources and strategies

REASONS NOT TO ENGAGE AN RPO PROVIDER:

  • If your company culture is not ready for outsourcing talent recruitment
  • If you just need a vendor to fill a quick requisition or two as opposed to a partner to support your talent acquisition strategy
  • If your organisation isn’t open to optimising your recruiting processes and tech stack

Remember, these reasons are not set in stone. Only you and your organisation can assess if you are in need of an RPO partner’s services. An RPO partner should customise their solution to match your needs and offer flexible options to support for peak hiring, hard-to-fill positions, compressed time frames and more—however it works best for you.

👉 Are you Ready for RPO? Ask Yourself These Three Questions.

How Does RPO Work?

During an RPO engagement, the RPO provider’s team works closely with their client’s talent acquisition team and hiring managers to learn the organisation’s long-term talent acquisition strategy, hiring challenges and goals.

The RPO provider then designs a customised recruiting program tailored to support the client’s specific needs. RPO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. A leading RPO partner will customise its service to match your requirements, which could include any or all of the following talent acquisition activities:

RPO Process

👉 Learn more about what to expect in an RPO partnership.

What is the Difference Between an RPO Provider and a Staffing Agency?

An RPO provider is distinct from a staffing agency or headhunter. Staffing agencies identify candidates, obtain their résumés or CVs and submit them to the client.

An RPO partnership brings a higher level of engagement. Your RPO provider will do a deep dive into your talent acquisition goals and challenges and then create and execute a customised recruitment program—and report back on the results. An RPO partner is a trusted advisor who can help you gain agility and future-proof your business.

👉 Learn the top differences between an RPO and a staffing agency.

What are the Types of RPO Models?

Designed for flexibility, RPO can be customised to meet your needs. Fully outsourcing recruitment may not make sense for all organisations. But that doesn’t mean RPO won’t provide value if you’re not ready to go all in. RPO teams are often used alongside existing in-house recruitment teams. The RPO can complement your current recruitment program by handling recruiting for specific job groups, locations or business units.

Here are various types of RPO that are commonly available:

Full-Cycle RPO

The RPO partner owns the entire recruitment cycle from opening requisitions all the way to presenting and negotiating the job offer—and all activities in between. This solution offers the client the full benefit of the RPO partner’s expertise which most organisations don’t have in-house, including value-added services like market insights, recruitment technology and employer brand consulting.

Partial Cycle RPO

The RPO partner covers certain parts of the recruitment process to boost internal recruitment resources. For example, the RPO partner might source and screen candidates and then hand them over to the in-house recruitment team to schedule interviews and manage offers.

Project RPO

Project RPO engagements are typically fixed-term contracts meant to address specific recruitment challenges such as seasonal hiring peaks, hard-to-fill positions, compressed timeframes and more. The RPO is there to augment the in-house team, often due to rapid growth. These engagements kick off quickly, and the required positions are filled within a few months.

👉 Learn more about project RPO.

Modular RPO

Modular RPO, or variable RPO, is a strategic approach to managing the recruitment process in an ultra-focused manner. It involves outsourcing specific components of the recruitment process to an RPO provider, or as a supplement to an existing outsourced recruitment engagement, providing quick access to targeted and customised recruitment support. With a modular or à la carte approach, you choose from a range of services based on your requirements.

👉 Learn more about modular RPO.

High-Volume RPO

High-volume RPO 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.

👉 Learn how to overcome high-volume hiring challenges.

Recruitment Cost Per Hire

What are the Benefits of RPO?

Now that you can answer the question, “What is recruitment process outsourcing?”, you may be wondering why organisations engage an RPO provider. Partnering with an experienced RPO gives you access to extensive recruitment knowledge across industries, roles and regions. RPOs have managed every type of hiring campaign imaginable. Whether you need help with one function or end-to-end recruiting, RPO offers advantages including:

Minimise Costs

Every day a role goes unfilled, your organisation loses productivity, which can lead to losses in revenue and profits. Plus, inefficiencies in your organisation’s hiring processes can result in lost revenue and more hours spent recruiting. And, if your organisation hires the wrong person, you’ll spend even more time and money recruiting and training a replacement for the bad hire. By streamlining and optimising recruitment processes, improving the time-to-hire and retention rates, RPO providers can increase your recruiting return on investment and deliver real cost savings to your bottom line. In fact, Everest Group states that organisations can expect a 45% to 55% annual savings with RPO compared to in-house recruitment.

Access Higher Quality Talent Faster

As skills shortages and talent scarcity becomes more challenging, having an RPO team digging into passive sourcing to access niche skills sets will boost time to hire and improve quality-of-hire. RPO providers leverage their comprehensive talent networks and effective screening and assessment tools to produce stronger candidates and more diverse talent pools. This keeps hiring managers happy and helps your organisation achieve its goals.

Agility & Scalability

A leading RPO provider should flex to meet your requirements. Your organisation can scale the amount of work your RPO provider performs to better manage your recruitment cost-per-hire goals and recruiting budget. When you have an increased demand for talent, an RPO provider can promptly scale up your team of dedicated recruiters to keep on top of your increased demands. This works the other way around as well: when there is less demand, we can scale down, saving you recruitment spend, and you avoid layoffs in your talent acquisition team during low demand periods.

Enhanced Candidate Experience

You want your recruitment process to leave every applicant, regardless of whether they get the job, with a positive experience. Your RPO partner can advise on ways to improve the candidate experience including career site audits, job application recommendations and how to leverage technology to speed up the process and reduce friction.

👉 Get Inside the Candidate Experience with our exclusive research report.

Best-Fit Technology

RPO providers can help you implement technology solutions that balance human expertise with automation. RPO partners have expertise with platforms across the HR and talent acquisition tech stack and can make recommendations to help you attract and engage talent more effectively. PeopleScout’s talent acquisition platform, Affinix™ is a mobile-first, cloud-based platform that creates a consumer-like candidate experience and streamlines the sourcing process.

Access More Expertise

Partnering with an RPO means you gain important talent acquisition expertise without having to invest in internal resources. RPO partners have developed a depth and breadth of experience from working across many clients, industries, job types and regions. While they offer recruitment sourcing best practices, they also offer value-added services that will optimise and streamline each phase of the recruiting process like employer branding, recruitment marketing, skills assessment, market insights, specialist sourcing solutions and more.

Improve Diversity

Through experience collected over many client engagements, RPO teams are knowledgeable about different talent attraction options and can help you expand to new job boards, social media groups, online forums and events to engage a more diverse workforce. Plus, RPOs understand the regional nuances of DE&I issues. For example, in some countries like Poland, it is not legal to ask candidates their ethnicity, gender, etc.

Workforce Planning Strategy

Leading RPO providers can provide labour market insights, talent intelligence and benchmarking data. With access to these insights, you have the data you need to support your workforce strategy as well as tactical business decisions. You can capitalise on the latest market analysis, thought leadership and competitive intelligence to inform your talent strategy. Your RPO partner can provide analytics to help you understand what’s working so you can maximise your ROI.

Global Reach

Leading organisations are taking a much more holistic view of the talent landscape and are looking for ways to standardise across regions. Working with a single partner for multi-country RPO eliminates the need for multiple relationships and saves time and money—while raising the quality of your hires. An RPO provider can be your most valuable partner in global expansion, because they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience gained through working with clients in different industries around the world.

Seamless Compliance

A significant aspect of recruiting is dealing with the multitude of compliance requirements that vary by jurisdiction. Your partner should help you navigate the labour laws and compliance issues that accompany any sourcing program. An RPO provider’s rigorous processes ensure a legally compliant hiring process and streamlined responses to audits. Additionally, a partner can help you anticipate any communication and training issues so that you can tackle them head-on.

What Should I Look for in an RPO Company?

If you’ve decided that RPO will be a good fit for your organisation, you may be wondering how you go about choosing the best provider. Here are just three things to consider in order to make RPO a truly transformational model for your business.

Partnership

The best RPO partners understand that each company has unique needs. Look for an RPO partner that is collaborative, that will listen to your ideas and take the time to truly understand your business and pain points. Avoid providers with a one-size-fits-all approach. The right partner balances consistency with customisation.

At PeopleScout, for 30 years we’ve built our services on integrity. We won’t say one thing during the sales pitch only to reset expectations after the ink is dry. We won’t make you comply with a cookie-cutter recruitment process. If we mess up, we’ll make it right. That’s why we have some of the longest running client relationships in the RPO space. 

Talent Advisory Solutions

A strong employer brand is key to recruitment success. The right RPO partner offers talent advisory solutions to develop your employer brand, EVP, recruitment marketing approaches, candidate assessments and more.

Companies often use separate agencies for recruitment marketing and RPO. This silod approach means less accountability. The agency is less likely to be held accountable for their campaigns leading to high quality candidates entering later candidate journey stages. On the other side, the RPO partner has limited means to provide feedback on the campaigns and the impact the ads have on recruitment outcomes.

Look for an RPO with in-house expertise (not one who outsources to an external agency) to consult on your entire talent program, not just filling roles. A holistic approach attracts and hires quality candidates.

Technology Acquisition Technology

HR tech is rapidly evolving, and RPO partners are well positioned to advise on tools like AI and analytics to improve recruiting. Your RPO partner should offer expertise on talent tech. Others have their own proprietary talent acquisition platforms. Look for an RPO partner who will support a modular approach, so you can continue to benefit from existing investments and grow your recruitment tech stack as your needs change.

👉 Get the most out of RPO with this podcast.

talent acquisition recruiter

What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing? The Keys to RPO Success

The most important key to successfully engaging an RPO provider for services is to have a clear understanding of what your organisation is trying to achieve. Then, you can choose an RPO provider that best meets your needs.

One thing to keep in mind on your RPO journey: RPO engagements are not only about outsourcing your recruiting, they are also about finding the best partner to help manage the people, process, technology and strategy of your talent acquisition function.

There is no single best option, only the option that best aligns with your organisational needs. To determine if RPO is right for your organisation, take an audit of what your organisation’s specific recruitment and sourcing challenges are and if you have the internal capabilities to overcome your challenges.

Attitude is the New Experience

Posted on by epadmin

There have been numerous studies on turnover rates in multiple industries, and they all land on a similar conclusion: a high proportion of staff fail within the first 18 months of starting a new job. In fact, one study found that figure to be 46 percent of 20,000 new hires in America. When you look at the reasons why, 89 percent of those who failed did so due to cultural misalignment or attitudinal reasons, rather than technical capability.


To try and buck this trend, I’ll share with you a few tips on why it’s so important to attract and retain the right people, rather than the right skill set and how you can adopt this approach in your organisation.


First, you need to have a great culture, which is essential to keeping people in the building. Each company’s culture and mission will be unique, and you need to make sure you have values that you stand by. Secondly – and this is the main area that I’m going to focus on in this article – you need to have a recruitment strategy that is aimed at finding the right people for the organisation rather than the right skill set at every opportunity, from graduate roles through to senior management. At our client PHD Media Worldwide (PHD), we’ve focused on hiring people that align with our values of collaboration, courage and curiosity with conviction – and it’s really, really helped!


“Hire for attitude, train for skills” is a phrase that every HR professional has uttered once or heard being uttered from colleagues. However, unfortunately, only a small number of businesses apply it (like, actually apply it) to their recruitment strategy. Whilst a lot of job advertisements will focus on the soft skills and cultural alignment piece, often the interview process can revert to focusing purely on the hard skills and capability a candidate has from day one.


We work in an ever-changing industry, with the constant emergence of new technologies, new software and increasing shift in focus from traditional channels to more sophisticated digital channels. Change takes place now at a faster rate than ever before, and what you knew yesterday might not necessarily prepare for you tomorrow. So, with that in mind, why do some businesses focus on purely trying to tick skills boxes? The candidate who feels fully aligned with their organisation’s strategy and beliefs and is a part of its continued success will be more motivated to learn the necessary skills for tomorrow than someone who only has today’s skill set and not the buy-in.


Here is how we can go about finding those right candidates in various levels of the organisation:


Graduate Roles


For so long, the media industry, for example, has only considered candidates from a media/advertising/marketing-related field and often opt for interns who have gained first-hand experience working with their particular agency. When interviewing candidates with a specific degree and asking them what they know about a media planning and buying agency, their knowledge levels are comparable with that of any other degree – very little!


A huge amount of the first 12-18 months in a media agency is about learning as much as possible. A very small amount of what you learned in university actually applies to what you are now working on in terms of real briefs with real multi-million-dollar budgets attached. With that mind, at PHD we’ve had a lot of success in opening up our doors to entry-level staff from any degree/non-degree background.


Zac and Tiffany, two great coordinators who joined PHD in the last 12 months, even wrote an article recently on how university prepares you for your first job in media. Notice how throughout the article, it never mentions that it’s the marketing theory they were taught in school or the principles of advertising that has helped them succeed. Instead, it’s the focus on meeting deadlines, presentation ability, working under pressure and as part of a team. These are the skills that you need to succeed in your first job, and when you couple them with the right attitude, you can really learn anything, relatively quickly.


More Senior Roles 


Believe it or not, it’s those same soft skills that apply to the more senior roles that we look to fill. Let’s face it – at one point or another, we have all had to “fake it ‘til we make it” in our careers. A little white lie in an interview, a little oversell of our abilities and BANG, we’ve landed ourselves a gig without a clue of what we’re actually going to do. When faced with this situation, those with a good attitude, flexibility and the ability to learn quickly will be able to adapt and succeed in their roles better than those without these critical skills.


Additionally, no one knows exactly what they are doing on day one. We all have our own systems, processes and ways of doing things. At PHD, we have our proprietary planning tool, SOURCE. Unless you have worked on it before, there is a learning curve for everyone to pick it up, and it’s the pace and ability with which people pick it up that matters, as they would have zero experience in using it before. All companies have their own processes and tools, which they will expect you to learn over time.


Yes, you need to have a fundamental understanding of what you are talking about and the more senior the role, the more of an understanding we expect you to have. But we want to talk to someone about their attitude towards certain situations, learn how they act when everything goes wrong (because it does sometimes) and what they would do in the difficult times and how they bring a team along on the journey with them. Ultimately, someone who ticks the attitude box will get the job, and we will often wait until that person comes along, rather than simply fill a role with a candidate who doesn’t fit.


So, What is Attitude?


Attitude, for me, is a collection of soft skills that you can apply to every job. It’s not necessarily something that someone has been taught (or could be taught) but more an approach to work, an approach to learning and the way someone conducts themselves personally and professionally.


What does one look for when gauging attitude?
  • People who look for solutions to problems rather than people who find problems without resolve.
  • People who raise their hand rather than point their fingers.
  • People who make mistakes and have a sense of humility but then focus on what they can do next time to improve.
  • People who, when times get tough, dig in and rally everyone to achieve the same, rather than openly complain to others.
  • People who genuinely love their job and are interested in joining the organisation – this is half the battle, finding someone who wants to be on the same journey as you.
  • People who genuinely seek development/career growth opportunities.

Too often, and it’s so easy to, we get bogged down by the immediate needs of our new hire. It may be replacing someone who has left, or it might be a new role that has popped up because of workload increases. However, it works, every time, to be cautious and focus on hiring the right person for the organisation, because the longer-term impact of having the right person will really pay off and the struggle of having to dig a little harder to find them will soon be forgotten.


Read the original article on AdNews.au.

Talking Talent: How RPO Can Solve the Top Challenges in Healthcare Talent Acquisition

Posted on by epadmin

In this episode of Talking Talent, we discuss how RPO can solve the top challenges in healthcare talent acquisition.

The Bureau of Labour Statistics projects that healthcare occupations in the U.S. will grow 18 percent between 2016 and 2026. With this growth and staffing shortages that are already common in the industry, healthcare organisations face new challenges sourcing, recruiting and retaining top talent. To cope, healthcare organisations are increasingly turning to RPO providers that can act as an extension of a healthcare organisation’s HR department to source and hire top talent.

At PeopleScout, we’ve recently expanded our healthcare solutions to help clients compete more effectively in the intensifying race for healthcare talent.
As part of this expansion, Brett Bryner joined the PeopleScout team. Brett is our healthcare workforce leaders who brings decades of insight-driven strategy and talent intelligence. Brett creates customised solutions for both clinical and non-clinical healthcare talent acquisition needs that support full-cycle, partial-cycle, project-based and total workforce engagements. In this episode, he talks about the top challenges in healthcare talent acquisition and the specific ways an RPO provider can help.

In this episode, Brett shares expertise about topics including:

  • Employee turnover
  • Talent shortages
  • HR Technology
  • Candidate Expectations
  • And more

How the Skills of the Future Will Impact Enterprise Recruitment Teams

Posted on by epadmin

Technology is disrupting nearly every industry, at a pace that has never been seen before. As we shared in our earlier article on how to create a workforce equipped with the skills of the future, this pace of change means that employers need to take a proactive role in ensuring their workforce is prepared for this change. As in-demand skills shift towards prioritising complex problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and creativity, workforce leaders need to rethink the way they are acquiring talent.

We’ve explored the pending change of skills in the workplace and its impact on employees, but what does this mean for an in-house recruiting team? As roles are redefined and employers move from traditional job descriptions to skills-based definitions, traditional recruiting teams must learn to adapt.

In this article, we’ll examine the need to change the way jobs are defined and categorised to attract the right talent, how the shifting candidate experience drives continued focus on digital sourcing and recruiting strategies and what these changes mean to in-house recruiting teams.

Changing Skills in the Workplace and the Impact on Recruiting Teams

Jobs are being redefined, which impacts the way recruiting teams must work to find the best candidates. How can internal recruiting teams that have traditionally been aligned to specific business units adapt to meet the needs of workforce 4.0?

  • Some companies are realigning their recruiting teams away from business units to talent segments, where they focus on recruiting for a specific skill set
  • Others are outsourcing select talent segments to RPO providers for additional support and expertise
  • Other employers are moving from job-based recruitment to skills-based recruitment

The shift towards aligning recruiters with specific skills creates a challenge for in-house recruiting teams, which may not have the bandwidth or ability to shift to this model. In-house teams are struggling to keep up with the pace when recruiting for a large variety of roles and skill sets, as the number of jobs being redefined to adapt to new skills increases. Analysis of some in-house client teams show time-to-hire is actually increasing as teams find difficulty with new skills and unique roles to fill.

The digitisation of work is also having a major impact on recruiting. It’s difficult for enterprise recruiting teams to keep up with the pace of change in talent acquisition and HR technology. Recruitment teams have access to more technology, which should increase productivity and improve the quality of candidates. But in truth, it can be overwhelming. The HR technology marketplace is valued at more than $14 billion, and new technologies continue to enter the space.

As employers continue to shift their recruiting processes to keep up with the pace of change, many are turning to outsourced providers, like RPOs, to help with talent segments they’re having trouble with. Partnering with an outsourced firm also brings access to improved talent technology. At PeopleScout, for example, our Affinix™ technology is equipped with AI, machine learning and predictive analytics tools that enable our clients to connect with the best talent faster. We are also continuously evaluating and implementing new tools and features, so our clients are on the cutting-edge of emerging technologies in the marketplace.

Changing Candidate Experience: Ways to Engage with Candidates Online

Employers need to contend with changing candidate expectations in addition to adapting their jobs for the skills of the future. Candidates today want benefits like flexible working hours and virtual work opportunities and have in-demand skills that translate across multiple job categories. And, candidates today have more options than ever. With very strong job growth and low unemployment in many of the world’s leading economies, it is becoming a more candidate-driven job market every day.

How do you find these candidates of the future? Employers need to shift their employment branding strategies to fit the digital era.

Many employers invest large amounts of time and money in their career sites and application process, however most candidates are not finding your career site organically and the application process is often still cumbersome and slow.

While it is critical for candidates to have a good experience when they hit your career site, you need to first find and reach candidates where they are. With the rise of Amazon and other personalised online retail experiences, candidates expect to be treated like a consumer throughout the recruiting process. Recruitment marketing tactics must evolve to meet these requirements, with career sites recommending jobs to candidates the way online retailers recommend products to consumers.

Developing candidate personas can help employers understand exactly who they are targeting. With the candidate in mind, you can develop targeted digital advertising campaigns, post positions on specialty job boards and develop recruitment marketing content to guide candidates through the application process.

It is also critical to closely monitor job rating sites. A poor candidate or employee experience can result in a loss of candidates due to negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. A positive review, on the other hand, can be more meaningful as it is coming straight from an unbiased individual, rather than a company career site.

The right talent acquisition technology tool can also help provide a superior candidate experience.

  • AI-enabled sourcing tools help recruiters find the best candidates faster.
  • A streamlined application process can allow candidates apply with just one click.
  • Personalised recruitment marketing tools like chatbots, SMS messages, email campaign and individualised landing pages provide candidates with the consumer-like experience they have come to expect online.

Why Turn to Outsourced Recruitment?

When enterprise recruiting teams are struggling to implement technology or source the right candidates for positions requiring new skills, some employers bring in a talent partner to focus on specific job functions or skillsets. Talent acquisition leaders are turning to RPO providers for their expertise in hard-to-source talent segments. They’re also looking for a partner who can bring the right technology to improve sourcing and hiring metrics. Visit our website to learn more about PeopleScout’s RPO solutions.

How to Create and Provide a Positive Candidate Experience

Posted on by epadmin

The world of hiring is more candidate-driven than ever before. Professionals in various industries at different levels of experience are in high demand, and that means they have more options when it comes to choosing an employer. The presence of options, coupled with the rising bargaining power of employees, has lifted candidate experience to the top of many organisation’s list of talent acquisition and workforce management priorities.

Generally, the better the candidate experience, the more likely an organisation is to attract the best talent. Top candidates demand compelling experiences during and after the hiring process. In this post, we outline ways organisations can improve their candidate experience to gain an advantage over the competition.

Why is Candidate Experience Important?

The candidate experience covers the entire recruitment process from before an application is submitted to onboarding, and everything in between. Poor experiences during the recruiting process can negatively impact an employer’s ability to hire talent. In fact, 27 percent of candidates who have a bad experience would “actively discourage others to apply.” What’s more, 77 percent of candidates are likely to share positive experiences with those in their network.

Today, candidates have more choices, making it harder for employers to differentiate themselves and establish how their values, company culture and employees represent a unique opportunity for top candidates. Through a positive candidate experience, organisations can gain the trust and loyalty of applicants who may become advocates for an organisation and help bolster their employer brand. With a stronger employer brand, organisations can distinguish themselves as an employer of choice in their industry.

Research Report

Inside the Candidate Experience

Read the report

Candidate Experience Touchpoints

Every interaction with an organisation, from job postings and career sites to speaking with a recruiter or hiring manager can positively or negatively impact the candidate’s perception of an organisation. Candidates often decide whether or not to accept a job offer based on how they were treated throughout the hiring process.

Each touchpoint throughout the hiring process—from attraction and sourcing to onboarding—should be taken into consideration when optimising your candidate experience. The following are tips on how to enhance your candidate experience.

Employer Branding

In today’s digital-obsessed world, most candidates use the internet to research an potential employer prior to applying for a job. Having a strong employer brand not only helps build a connection with a prospective hire, but it introduces them to who you are, what you do and why you are a great place to work.

There are many ways in which a company can work to optimise its employer brand. For example, organisations can ask current employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor or submit a quote about their experience to be used in recruiting materials. Social media savvy employees can also be encouraged to share company culture through news, photos and events.

Employer branding messages should be communicated across all platforms that are relevant to the organisation’s business and recruitment efforts such as job boards, social media platforms and industry publications.

Make a Good First Impression

According to a CareerBuilder study, 57 percent of candidates conduct their preliminary research by visiting an organisation’s website, making it clear that career pages and candidate-facing web pages need to be designed to capture an applicant’s interest.

An effective career site should make visitors feel welcome and give applicants the information they are looking for, such as details about employment opportunities, company culture and work environment.

Career sites should be both engaging and easy to understand. An excellent online experience can motivate candidates to apply and differentiate employers from competitors.

Respond to Candidates

CareerBuilder also reports that 47 percent of candidates never receive any form of communication from the organisation they apply to, even past 60 days after applying. This leaves a huge opportunity for organisations to provide superior communication and recruitment marketing.

Every candidate deserves a response, even if they will not be given an interview. Whether the response is an automated email, a letter or a phone call, as long as it is prompt and tactful, applicants will not feel that they wasted their time.

Organisations who treat every candidate equally are more likely to have applicants reapply to the company or encourage family, friends and coworkers to apply.

Create Unique Experiences

An optimised application process should be tailored based on different criteria such as the role, location or technical experience required. For example, certain positions may require rigorous technical screening questions, while others might rely more on personality or cultural fit. Organisations can even display specific job postings in an applicant’s preferred language to make them feel more comfortable with the hiring process.

Employers can also build a way for applicants to showcase their personal interests and non-work-related activities throughout the application process. This allows candidates to display their personality in addition to just experience; organisations can also use this opportunity to learn about additional skills that may make a hire more desirable.

Improving the Application Process

Many qualified candidates are lost because organisations lack a streamlined and easy application process.

To improve the application process, organisations should ask the following questions:

  • What does the application process look like? Is it long? Is it tedious?
  • What happens after a candidate completes the application?
  • How will they know if they have been selected to move on through the hiring process?

Below, we outline some additional ways to improve the candidate experience through improving the application process.

Mobile-Friendly Applications

Job seekers today spend time on their smartphone doing everything from buying birthday gifts to scheduling doctor appointments. In fact, according to Pew Research Centre, 53 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds and 43 percent of all users have used a smartphone as part of a job search. Yet, many employers still offer an outdated or poorly designed mobile application experience.

Because so many candidates learn about job opportunities on their mobile devices, organisations need to create a mobile-friendly application experience. Candidates—in particular, high-demand candidates such as those working in technology and executives—may judge an organisation by its technology and application processes. Being perceived as “outdated” could damage an organisation’s employer brand.

At PeopleScout, we understand the importance of creating an optimised application experience across all devices, which is why we built Affinix to be mobile-first. Learn more about PeopleScout’s mobile-friendly recruiting solutions with AffinixTM.

Job Descriptions

A well-written job description can engage a candidate and convince them to apply for a position. However, there is a disconnect when it comes to job descriptions, with 72 percent of hiring managers stating that they provide clear job descriptions, while only 36 percent of applicants agree.

Organisations should perform a quality check on their job descriptions and ask the question, “Could these descriptions describe any company?” If they can, the descriptions probably rely on a list of generic skills and traits, which may deter top candidates from applying while inviting unqualified ones.

Instead, organisations should write job descriptions that highlight what a candidate would be expected to achieve during their first month, three months, six months and a year into the job. The improved clarity will provide candidates with a clear understanding of what they can expect if they are hired.

Shorten Applications

The length of a job application can have a major impact on candidate experience. A study conducted by Indeed found that 88.7 percent of potential applicants abandon the application process if there are 45 or more screener questions. What’s more,  43 percent of candidates spent more than 30 minutes completing an application, and 12 percent spent more than one hour.

A “Quick Apply” feature that only collects the most pertinent information required to move a candidate forward in the process can help shorten job applications. Many ATSs have features that allow applicants to import their resume from other sites such as LinkedIn or auto-fill parts of the application to save time. By shortening the application time, organisations will have more candidates completing the process, adding to the applicant pool and increasing the chances of finding the right hire.

Provide a Positive Interview Experience

A positive interview experience can present a positive image of a company, improving the odds of the best candidate accepting a job offer.

During the interview, one of the most effective ways to get good responses is by using behavioural interviewing techniques. Behavioural interviewing is the concept that past experience is a good indicator of future performance. Questions that begin with “Tell me about a time,” or “Describe a moment when,” are usually behavioural in nature. It allows the candidate to share an experience from their past.

Ultimately, a well-defined interview process will give everyone the comfort to ask and receive the best answers.

How RPO Providers can Help with Candidate Experience

From the initial recruiting email or phone call to onboarding, high-quality talent expects a high-quality candidate experience. An RPO provider who makes smart use of technology and recruiting strategies can help deliver high-quality experiences that make candidates feel important. An RPO partner’s recruiting teams spend hours cultivating relationships with candidates. The rapport they build with candidates helps establish relationships that over time lead to making quality hires and recruiting success.

Organisations who partner with PeopleScout can build a world-class, global candidate experience that features personalised messaging, social recruitment, retargeting and programmatic prospecting as well as data-driven decision making.

Learn more about how you can boost your candidate experience with our research report, Inside the Candidate Experience.

Strategies for Building an Effective Talent Community

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Competition for talent is increasing across the globe, and employers are looking for innovative strategies to stay ahead of the competition. To gain a competitive advantage, employers are deploying a variety of methods. Wages are on the rise after years of slow growth. New graduates face strong prospects for employment. Even retirement is starting to look different for older workers with important skills. Finding new ways to source and attract workers with the skills of the future is a growing need.

In the U.S., years of job growth have led to the lowest unemployment rate in decades. Around the world, favorable job conditions are making it more difficult for employers to hire the talent they need. Adding to the challenge, employers are facing a skills shortage as they look to hire candidates who have the training, education and experience to bring their workforce into the future. This pressure is even greater in industries that are currently adapting to disruptive technology, like the auto industry. While reskilling and future degree programs can help increase the size of the talent pipeline in the future, employers still need to find and hire talent today. Building a talent community is a promising solution.

What is a Talent Community?

A talent community is a sourcing strategy that is an ongoing, multifaceted approach to candidate engagement that creates employment brand ambassadors and a talent pool that begins to feed itself. A talent community is a process rather than an event and takes continual effort to maintain.

Traditional sourcing starts with a job opening. From there, a job description is written and disseminated. A sourcing specialist may search their contacts and social media to find a candidate with skills that match, but the process largely involves posting a job and waiting for the right candidate to find you.

In a talent community, the process is cyclical. It starts before a job requisition is created, and it doesn’t stop when a candidate is hired. Employers consistently build profiles of the types of candidates they would like for roles they may need to fill in the future. Then, employers need to build pipelines through technology, partnerships and employer branding initiatives to connect with those people, whether the employer currently has a job opening for that candidate or not. Finally, when a candidate gets to the point of applying, the experience throughout that process needs to be so strong that even candidates who do not make it through the process will become ambassadors for that brand and continue to apply for open positions in the future.

Building a talent community sourcing strategy has a host of benefits for employers. A talent community is sustainable. It can feed itself. This means decreased time-to-fill and cost-of-vacancy because candidates who are interested in working for an organisation are waiting for a job to be posted rather than a recruiter posting a job and waiting for the right candidate to apply. It also leads to increased quality of hire because the employer has already determined the ideal candidate persona and has built a pipeline to find those people. When more qualified candidates are in that pipeline, the likelihood of making a strong hire goes up.

Why Talent Communities Alone Aren’t Enough

  • They have to be combined with great employer branding.
  • Your content has to be engaging and of value to the audience.
  • You have to have the right mix of viable candidates with the skills and experience that your company values, and ambassadors for your employer brand.
  • It is what you put into it, not what you take out–you have to cultivate the community or it will stagnate.

Using Employer Branding to Build a Talent Community

As employers work to create a talent community they need to build an employer brand that stands out from other organisations they compete with for talent. Organisations with a strong employer brand can stand out in a crowded landscape and draw in more candidates. There are several strategies employers can use to build their brands.

Online Talent Communities

An online talent community is a way to continue to communicate with candidates who may be interested in working for you in the future but can’t find a job opening that meets their skills and needs right now. It is also a way to engage with candidates who apply to jobs they aren’t qualified for yet but still have potential. An online talent community allows candidates to provide their contact information, resume and job interests. Then, the organisation can search those resumes when a position opens, and it can send matching job openings to the candidate. This keeps the employer at the front of a candidate’s mind and provides recruiters with a slate of candidates every time a requisition opens.

Recruitment Email Marketing

Many organisations use email marketing as a part of their traditional marketing strategy, but it is also important in employment branding. Email marketing can be used in partnership with an online talent community. Organisations can send recruitment marketing emails to share job openings, as well as information about their culture. One caveat to using email marketing as a part of an employer branding strategy is that the emails should be as personalised as possible. A candidate who has provided their resume should only receive job openings that correspond with their skillsets. Data about candidates can also be used to personalise how often candidate receive emails or at what time of the day they are sent. Regulations like CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and GDPR in the EU regulate email marketing, and we discuss those later in this post.

Social Media

Every organisation should have a strategy for sharing its employment brand on social media, though that strategy may look different for different companies. One option is to create a separate “careers” social media page where the organisation can post job openings and information about the workplace, culture and current employees. At PeopleScout, we recommend this strategy to our clients and work with them to optimise their existing pages to showcase their employer brand. This strategy works well for employers with a strong brand presence and large volume of hires. Another option, especially for smaller organisations, is to include some employer branding on their traditional social media accounts. In this approach, employer branding related posts that share information about the workplace and culture should be interspersed between standard social media posts.

Video

Many employers are familiar with video interviewing, but video can enhance employer branding in several additional ways and doesn’t always need high production quality. One example is video job descriptions. A job posting could include a short video of a hiring manager talking about the job and what they are looking for. A video like this gives a candidate a better understanding of the job and gives them a glimpse into the culture of the organisation. Additionally, organisations can use video to show workplace tours, so job seekers get an idea of what working for an organisation might look like. If an organisation is hiring for a lot of entry-level roles but frequently promotes within the company, a video that shows an employee’s career path from entry-level to a leadership role can also motivate candidates to apply for hard-to-fill entry-level jobs.

Chatting and Text

Another method of building a strong employer brand is communicating with candidates in the ways candidates want to communicate. Chat and text are growing in popularity. Some employers are deploying chatbots throughout their recruitment process. For others, a chat window with limited hours but access to a live recruiter can be successful. While many employers may be cautious to start a system to text messages candidates, several PeopleScout clients have found success and higher rates of candidate engagement.

Using Innovative Technology to Power a Talent Community

While a compelling employer brand is important for attracting strong candidates, it’s not enough to stay ahead in the current competitive landscape. Innovative technology solutions can help employers source top talent faster than the competition.

Geofencing

Geofencing can be used in a few different ways during the sourcing process. Much like targeted ads for restaurants or stores can be delivered to a person’s cell phone or computer based on where that person is located, job ads can be targeted to candidates in a specific geographical area as well. This can be valuable to employers that have a variety of locations spread across a large geographical area. Geofencing can be used to target job ads at candidates near specific branches. It can also be used for industry events or expos where a large number of potential candidates could be in one location at the same time.

AI Sourcing

Artificial intelligence sourcing can provide recruiters with a solid slate of candidates as soon as a requisition is opened, giving the recruiter a strong head start to fill the role. An AI sourcing solution that uses predictive analytics modeling can also provide the recruiter with information about how well the candidate matches the job opening and how likely the candidate is to leave their current role. With this information, recruiters are able to work more quickly and efficiently, filling the role with the best talent in less time. In the end, it saves companies time and money. At PeopleScout, AI sourcing is built into AffinixTM, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology solution.

AI Data Tracking

AI data tracking can be used to make other sourcing and employer branding strategies more effective. Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can understand and predict candidate behaviors. By tracking what time of day candidates apply, open emails or use social media, employers can schedule email marketing and social media posts to maximise the number of candidates who will see and click on job postings. Employers can also use this data to optimise their ad spend on job boards, so the ads appear when the best candidates are most likely to be online. One PeopleScout client had data that showed most of its applicants applied after lunch on Wednesdays. By posting jobs just before that timeframe, the employer saw a 15 percent increase in applications.

Finding a Partner

As employers work to build their own talent communities, an RPO provider can be a valuable partner. The right RPO partner will have a wealth of knowledge gleaned from experience solving a wide variety of problems and successfully sourcing and recruiting in a number of markets and industries. Employers can benefit from that collective knowledge.

Additionally, working with an RPO partner provides compliance benefits. Many of the sourcing strategies addressed in this article are impacted by GDPR, CAN-SPAM and other regulations, as well as regulations by the OFCCP. RPO providers have years of experience with these regulations and strong checks in place to ensure all sourcing strategies are compliant. This can provide peace of mind for employers.

Employers working with RPO partners will also see financial benefits, including reducing or eliminating agency spend. At PeopleScout, some clients have gone from agency usage as high as 25 percent or more to zero. To accomplish that, employers need to be committed from the top down to building the sourcing infrastructure to implement a talent community.

To find an RPO partner who is a good fit, employers should look for providers who possess customisable offerings that can be adapted to meet every need. A one-size-fits-all approach ignores the specific needs of employers in different industries and the unique challenges that can arise in recruiting in different markets. To build a strong talent community, employers should look for an RPO partner who can successfully deploy and manage these innovative sourcing strategies.

Removing Barriers to Employment for the Long-Term Unemployed

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With record low unemployment rates in the U.S., the UK and other leading economies, recruiters seeking to attract talent may assume that everyone who wants a job already has one.

However, this not the case, even in the strongest job markets. In the United States, the long-term unemployed are defined as those who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more and are searching for work. In May 2018, when the jobs report numbers were so good that reporters ran out of words to describe it, nearly 1.2 million individuals had been out of work and seeking employment for more than six months. The long-term unemployed made up 19.6 percent of all unemployed Americans and May was the first month that this percentage fell below 20 percent since the Great Recession.


During an economic downturn, the primary cause of long-term unemployment is simple: there are not enough jobs to employ those who want them. With the robust job growth over the last year, the ranks of the long-term unemployed in the U.S. have fallen by one third. During times of economic growth, causes of extended joblessness can often directly be addressed and remedied by employers.

Minding the Resume Gap


Imagine being a qualified job candidate who has been unemployed for nearly a year. After months of disappointment, a job comes along that looks like a perfect match. The candidate is excited to fill out the online job application, but when they reach the job history section, they see: “Please provide the start and end dates for all of your jobs. If there is a gap of more than six months, please provide an explanation.” These types of questions related to job history can be used (or perceived to be used) as a way to disqualify candidates.


The Deloitte Handbook A Guide to Recruiting and Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed recommends removing filters and screening procedures that ask for dates of last or current employment and automatically eliminate unemployed and long-term unemployed applicants. It also recommends confirming that Applicant Tracking Systems do not screen out resumes based on employment status.

Avoid Date Limits on Valuing Experience


A candidate who has been unemployed for an extended period may possess years of valuable experience and required job skills. It is important for employers to consider whether their recruitment process gives undue weight to recent expertise over cumulative experience gained over the lifespan of a career. Recruitment processes should also be checked for any potential bias against older applicants. An OECD study found that incidence of long-term unemployment increases with age throughout many developed economies.

Addressing the Jobs Skills Gap


A lack of in-demand skills can be a cause of long-term unemployment. There are many resources for those with extended joblessness to receive training in marketable skills. Employers can build relationships with these agencies as part of their recruitment programme to target the long-term unemployed. In the UK, skills training can be included as a standard benefit offered to the long-term unemployed. In Australia, the government offers programmes which include training for young people and others who either have or risk having long periods of unemployment. Job training services are also provided by Canadian provinces and by state and local governments in the United States.


There are numerous local initiatives in which businesses combine with non-profit agencies to provide skills in an effort to fight all levels of unemployment. Employers can work closely with these agencies to source available talent (often at reduced sourcing costs) and even partner with them as part of their community engagement efforts.

Reaching the Hard to Reach Talent


Individuals without strong job seeking skills can have their period of unemployment unnecessarily extended. For example, the process of finding a job 15 years ago was completely different from today. Reaching candidates whose experience and skills may add tremendous value to your organisation requires specialised expertise in sourcing that may not be readily available in many human resources departments. Several leading employers have turned to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) companies to successfully attract and recruit hard to reach talent.

Worth the Effort


For many companies, the incentive to attract the long-term unemployed may be to meet a need to recruit the last pool of available talent in a tight labour market. However, hiring those with extended unemployment can potentially be a valuable tool in retaining talent, which is critical in today’s economy. The Deloitte handbook cites a White House study that found that companies that hire the long-term unemployed experience higher retention rates and greater workforce loyalty. Given the potential for talent attraction and retention, employers who remove barriers for the long-term unemployed may gain an unexpected competitive edge in an increasingly challenging market.

How to Create a Workforce Equipped with the Skills of the Future

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Automation is transforming the way we work. The World Economic Forum calls this change the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is characterised by a “fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.” In short, technology is disrupting nearly every industry, at a pace that has never happened before.

This pace of change means that employers need to take a proactive role in ensuring they have a workforce equipped with the skills of the future in order to avoid skills gaps. To accomplish this, employers first need to understand the skills they will need to remain competitive and innovative. Then, they need to understand how best to prepare and train their current workforce, as well as prepare to source, recruit and hire the talent of the future. In this post, we’ll share the top skills of the future, how technology is changing the way we work and explore ways organisations can prepare for the workforce of the future.

Skills of the Future

According to the World Economic Forum, the top ten skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution have shifted in the last several years, prioritising complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity as the top three skills and adding emotional intelligence to the list.

The following ten skills are listed as the most in demand for employers by 2020:

  1. Complex problem solving
  2. Critical thinking
  3. Creativity
  4. People management
  5. Coordinating with others
  6. Emotional intelligence
  7. Judgment and decision making
  8. Service orientation
  9. Negotiation
  10. Cognitive flexibility

This list reflects the fact that robots can complete many tasks faster than humans, but the machines still lack soft skills like creativity and emotional skills. As technology takes on more of the workload, the most in-demand employees will be those who possess the skills that computers cannot replicate. However, the need also increases for workers who have the skills to use, build and innovate the technology of the future.

Automation is Changing the Way We Work

It’s no secret that automation is fundamentally changing the way many industries operate, increasing the demand for tech and digital skills in the workforce. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, as many as 375 million people around the world will need to change occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.

Let’s explore this idea using the example of the impact of automation on the automobile industry. Some of the most well-known innovations in automation have happened in the industry – starting with Henry Ford’s assembly line. Now, companies around the world are racing to bring autonomous cars to market. We expect that the first autonomous cars will be available for sale to the public as early as 2021. The link to the potential disruption in complementary industries from delivery services to drive-through restaurants is overwhelming. However, it is an excellent example to use to illustrate the complexity of the skills needed for the future.

The skills required to deliver the cars to market are both highly technical and analytical.  However, the skills needed to design and operate the vehicles of the future are more complicated. Skills in design thinking and innovation will be critical. Programmers will need to ensure safety in weather conditions from blizzards to heavy rains and navigate autonomous cars and trucks through road construction and complicated intersections and interchanges.  They may be faced with programming life and death decision-making into the vehicles, which are inherently complex human behaviours requiring emotional and social intelligence skills above all others.

How to Prepare the Future Workforce

The Transformation of Talent

Automation and the skills transformation will affect many industries over the next decade, but lessons can be learned from the industries that have already come through the journey, transforming their workforce in order to deliver to a new business model. This transformation is illustrated with an example of one of PeopleScout’s clients, a company which provides research and risk management services.

The company began migrating customers from the traditional print version of their core product to an online version available on multiple platforms. This was a complicated and highly-involved transformation which impacted everyone from their internal workforce to their heavily print-dependent end-user. To illustrate the skills transformation that occurred, since that point in time, the number of technology hires PeopleScout makes for this client has increased 500 percent. This includes roles like product analysts, product managers and implementation consultants. At the same time, hires for editorial roles like editors, journalists and content developers have increased only 14 percent. And, 100 percent of editorial roles filled were for their online research product; no positions filled were for the traditional print product.

In order to help guide this client through their talent transformation, PeopleScout worked closely with the internal HR function to adapt their candidate personas for both external hiring and internal mobility. We then developed sophisticated sourcing strategies to source candidates with skill sets that would meet the needs of the new organisation. In addition to sourcing new candidates internally and externally, there were also efforts to analyse which traditional roles had transferrable skills to the requirements of the new roles. This was a journey to take a traditional business and transform it into a technology company and substantially shifting the workforce to meet the new strategy.

Future Skill Degree Programmes

Another way employers can prepare for the future workforce is through working closely with high schools, colleges, universities, apprenticeships and graduate recruitment programmes to help develop degree programmes that meet the skills of the future. By building these programmes, employers can ensure that graduates have the skills necessary to succeed in the coming years.

The importance of high school programmes is not yet as obvious as those in higher education, but many businesses and universities have started working with high schools to source and attract new talent early. The programmes are particularly significant in industries where there is a forecasted talent gap. For example, Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy students in Sydney have the opportunity to partner with an engineering company to learn valuable job skills and open up thinking about new career pathways.

I recently participated in a panel discussion with other industry leaders as well as a professor at a university in Sydney. The professor shared that the university spent time with CEOs and business leaders asking them what skills they felt their organisations needed to ensure their business was successful in the future. As a result of those conversations, the university created a highly-innovative, cross-disciplinary degree programme designed to produce students with skills that include high-level critical thinking, future scenario building and innovation, as well as many other skills identified in the World Economic Forum top ten list.

However, in the first year of the programme, they had minimal applicants. Why would such an innovative and carefully-designed degree have so little applicants? More work may need to be done to ensure that parents and students are fully educated on the necessary skill sets to be successful in the future of work.

How to Prepare your Current Workforce

Employers cannot simply wait for the workforce of tomorrow to arrive. To stay ahead, it is necessary to train and prepare current workers for these shifts. To make this a priority, HR and the C-suite need to be aligned on what roles will be needed in the next three, five or ten years, as well as what skills will be needed to fill those roles. The roles that exist now may transform or disappear altogether, and new skill sets will be necessary for the business to drive growth and strategy. Both need to be open-minded about the transferrable skills in order to ensure success in having the talent to deliver key business outcomes.

Reskilling Programmes

In some countries, governments have taken on some of the burden of reskilling. For example, the Australian government has established the Skilling Australians Fund which provides $1.5 billion to support apprenticeships, traineeships and other employer-related training. The goal is to retrain more Australian workers with the skills needed in the tourism, hospitality, health, engineering, manufacturing, building and construction, agriculture and digital technologies industries. The programme is targeted toward automotive workers who lost jobs due to closing car manufacturing plants.

In the United Kingdom, the government plans to spend as much as 500 million pounds per year on worker training to combat low productivity. According to Reuters, the spending could reach as high as nearly 6 billion pounds on academic and technical education which will transform the system of technical education and increase the amount of training available by more than 50 percent.

Moving forward, governments could also potentially track metrics around reskilling opportunities as well as metrics for job creation in order to drive these initiatives even further forward.

How an RPO Provider Can Help Prepare for the Skills of the Future

An RPO provider can be a valuable partner for employers looking to prepare their workforces for the skills of the future. RPO providers can help organisations adapt their candidate personas, to ensure they are sourcing talent with the necessary skills and identifying new ways to target candidates who fit these personas. In addition, they can work with internal HR departments to demonstrate how candidates who may not have an exact profile for a role have the transferrable skills to be successful.

An RPO can also help build graduate and internship recruitment programmes and partner with schools and government programmes to find candidates from new sources with new skills.

An experienced RPO provider can also help you build your talent pool from within your own company, by consulting to develop an internal reskilling programme and helping reevaluate your current positions and workforce mix to ensure your organisation is targeting the right talent.

To stay ahead in the rapidly changing talent landscape, employers should evaluate their current workforce needs, the skills they have within their current employee talent pool and seek out an RPO provider who can act as a partner in sourcing, recruiting and training employees with the skills of the future.