Solution: Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Candidate Experience Pitfalls That Impact Diversity Recruitment [Infographic]

Posted on by akessler

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

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

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

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

Talking Talent: Talent at the Speed of RPO

Posted on by nfuqua

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

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

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

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

Challenge: Remaining Nimble Amid Uncertainty  

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

How RPO Can Help: Scalable Support 

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

How RPO Can Help: Automation Technology  

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

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

How RPO Can Help: Smaller Scale Solutions 

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

Challenge: Speeding up the Candidate Experience 

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

How RPO Can Help: Candidate Experience Best Practices 

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

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

How RPO Can Help: Speedy Technology Solutions 

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

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

Taking the First Step 

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

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

High-Volume RPO

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Get the Ebook

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

Posted on by akessler

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

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

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

DE&I and Talent Acquisition

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

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

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

Research Report

Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes

Download Now

DE&I and Employee Experience

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

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

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

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

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

Dow: Supporting Graduate Recruitment in EMEA and India

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

Dow: Supporting Graduate Recruitment in EMEA and India

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

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

Situation

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

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

Solution

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

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

Results

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

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

Candidate Feedback

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

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

Hiring Manager at Dow

AT A GLANCE

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

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by edyson

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

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

What is a Seasonal Worker?

hiring seasonal workers

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

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

What are the Benefits of Hiring Seasonal Workers?

Here are some of the benefits of hiring seasonal workers:

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

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

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

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

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Get the Ebook

Better Seasonal Hiring Begins with Crafting Better Job Descriptions

seasonal hiring

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

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

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

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

How RPO Can Help

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

Sourcing Seasonal Hires

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

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

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

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

How RPO Can Help

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

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

Managing High-Volume While Hiring Seasonal Workers

seasonal hires

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

How RPO Can Help

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

Never Neglect Your End of-Season Plans

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

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

How RPO Can Help

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

Are You in Need of a Seasonal Hiring Partner?

seasonal worker

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

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

Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

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

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

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

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

ebook

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Get the Ebook

The High-Volume Hiring Landscape

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

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

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

High-Volume Recruitment Challenges and Solutions

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

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

Challenge: Ghosting and Candidate Drop Off are Rampant

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

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

Solution:

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

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

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

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

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

Solution:

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

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

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

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

Solution:

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

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

Conclusion

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

Reducing Attrition in the Contact Centre Through High-Volume RPO

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

Reducing Attrition in the Contact Centre through High-Volume RPO

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

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

Situation

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

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

Solution

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

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

Results

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

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

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

Recruitment Manager

AT A GLANCE

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

The UK Talent Shortage: How to Engage & Support the “Missing Million”

Posted on by akessler

By Joe Mongon, Head of Recruitment Delivery

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.

How to Attract and Retain Older Workers

A clear and informative job profile that brings the role to life and amplifies these factors can be the first step to finding the right candidate, including engaging overlooked or under-engaged audiences like the missing million. Job seeker priorities are often straightforward and are typically unaffected by age. Salary and flexibility—especially work from home considerations—lead the way when it comes to potential job switches.

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.

Interviewer Skills Training: How to Conduct Interviewing Skills Training for Hiring Managers

Posted on by edyson

Interviewing skills training is crucial, as many hiring managers feel that the success of a well-conducted job interview hinges on the interviewers ability to build a connection with the interviewee. What’s more, for many candidates, the interview is a critical factor when deciding whether to accept a job offer, with 50% of candidates declining job offers after feeling disrespected during the interview process.  

When interviews do not go well, they not only lead to candidates declining offers, but they can also lead to poor hiring decisions, possible compliance issues, and hiring manager burnout. Interviewing candidates is arguably the most important part of the hiring process, so interview training for hiring managers is essential. Hiring managers touch many parts of the recruitment process—often opening new roles, writing job descriptions, posting on job boards, interviewing, and in some cases, making that final call on which candidates get hired. 

With all that’s riding on the hiring manager, they must know how to interview effectively. Interviewing tips for managers can come in handy because the interview process can be stress-inducing regardless of which side of the table you happen to be on. In this article, we provide insights into training hiring managers to be effective, impartial and empathic interviewers. 

 

Securing Hiring Manager Buy-In for Interview Skills Training

recruiter training

Both new and experienced hiring managers can benefit from interview skills training. A veteran hiring manager typically has years of hands-on experience engaging, interviewing, and hiring candidates for a variety of roles. However, even the most seasoned hiring manager may need to brush up on their skills through learning emerging interviewing skills and techniques, like combating bias and improving diversity, how to use structured interviews, and avoiding cliché or out-of-date questions that conflict with the modern hiring experience.

For newer hiring managers, interview training can serve as an on-the-job education and can help accelerate their career through learning the latest and most effective interviewing techniques.

Before introducing a new interviewing skills training program, schedule a meeting with hiring managers to discuss the status of your current interviewing process as well as their thoughts and concerns when it comes to engaging with candidates. You can ask them if they use interview techniques such as structured interviews, panel interviews, and blind interviews to gauge areas of interest and potential training topics.

It may be a good idea to create a list of questions for hiring managers to think about leading up to their training. Questions for your hiring managers may include:

  • Can I talk about the company’s strategy, mission and structure confidently?
  • Can I answer questions about perks and benefits accurately?
  • Do I know what the job description involves before going into an interview?
  • Have I coordinated with my team on the candidate and job details?
  • Have I read candidates’ CVs?
  • Do I know what interview questions I’ll ask?
  • Are my interview questions reviewed by HR for legality?

 

Interviewing Skills Training: Help Hiring Managers to Combat Bias

job interview skills training

Meeting a candidate for the first time may prompt a series of unconscious judgements that cause a hiring manager to make unfounded assumptions based on attributes that are not job-related, such as race, gender, religion, or socioeconomic status. These unconscious biases can result in unequal treatment of candidates. Yale University released a study revealing that hiring managers judge candidates’ socioeconomic status based purely on the first few seconds of their speech. Furthermore, the candidates perceived to be from a higher social class received more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses.

Everything that makes a hiring manager a better interviewer in turn makes them less biased. The best way to combat biases during interviews is to be aware of them. This can’t be achieved overnight—it takes time and effort. A good start would be to help the interviewer standardise their interviews.

Unstructured interviews lacking defined questions where a candidate’s experience and expertise are meant to translate naturally through conversation can be unreliable and produce bias. Structured interviews, where each candidate is asked the same set of defined questions, thereby standardising the interview process, help minimise bias.

This outcome (allowing hiring managers to focus on skills and experience that directly impact the role)  comes from having an interview based on job analysis and a structured, evidence-based assessment framework. Standardising the interview process reduces bias by creating a level playing field for all candidates and ensuring that everyone is asked the same questions in the same way.

Combating bias is not easy, however, by addressing bias you will empower your team to tackle bigger challenges and to make a real commitment to building an inclusive culture.

 

What is a Structured Interview? Teaching Hiring Managers to Understand Structured Interviews

Structured Interview

Conducting structured interviews is an exceptional strategy for screening job candidates and finding the best possible person for a role. So, what is a structured interview? Structured interviews ask a set of questions in a structured format intended to help hiring managers to collect valuable data from each interviewee that can then be compared to the response of other candidates. Your should also include a clearly defined rating process for hiring managers and interviewers to follow when evaluating and scoring candidate answers to questions- asked during an interview.

Structured interviews are more objective and legally defensible than unstructured interviews. Interviewers who use this interview format should learn how to prepare behavioural questions, understand rating scales, and score candidates consistently.

In this section, we provide examples of structured interview questions as well as how to conduct and rate interviews.

 

Role-Related Structured Interview Questions

Role-related questions ask candidates directly about the duties and responsibilities of the role. Including role-specific questions in a structured interview can assist a hiring manager in determining whether or not a candidate possesses the skills and experience necessary to succeed in the role.

Examples of role-related structured interview questions include:

  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of the CRM software you used in your last role?
  • What in your career or educational experience do you believe connects you with this role ?
  • What do you like and dislike about working in nursing?

 

Behavioural Questions and Structured Interviews

Behaviour-related questions in structural interviews ask candidates to provide examples of their professional experiences. Including behaviour-related questions in structured interviews can help hiring managers to find out which experiences the candidate may have excelled in and struggled with in the past. Ask a mix of questions to gain information about each candidate’s professional successes and challenges and the way they interacted with their clients, coworkers, and superiors.

Examples of behaviour-related structured interview questions include in interview skills training:

  • Describe a time when you have had to deal with a difficult colleague?
  • How do you ensure that you know what kind of experience your customers are having in your stores?
  • Can you tell me what you look for in a manager or which management style fits you best?

 

Situational Questions for Structured Interviews

Situation-related questions in a structural interviewing skills training ask candidates to think on their feet and imagine how they would handle varying scenarios working for your organisation. Situation-related questions can determine a candidate’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills. There are a variety of questions that assess how candidates would interact with your clients and employees, how they work with a team, and how they would react to common workplace challenges.

Examples of situation-related structured interview questions include:

  • How would you handle an unhappy customer?
  • How would you pitch our new product line to customers?
  • How would you prioritise multiple deadlines from different stakeholders?

 

What is a Mock Interview? Teaching Interview Skills Training Best Practices Through Role Playing

mock interviews

Mock interviews are simulated or role-playing interview exercises designed to give hiring managers the opportunity to sharpen their interviewing skills through formulating responses in real-time. Mock interviews can help inexperienced hiring managers familiarise themselves with an interview setting and give veterans a chance to practice the latest techniques. For example, hiring managers can practice brief notetaking techniques to avoid being distracted by their notes during actual interviews.

Here are the goals of mock interview training for hiring managers:

  • Identifying the common steps of the interviewing process and how to respond
  • Learning how to thoroughly review a candidate’s CV and prepare for a productive conversation
  • Developing technical, cultural, and behavioural questions to successfully evaluate a candidate’s fit in the role and organisation
  • Determining what they need to do before, during, and after an interview
  • Evaluate information gathered during the interview more successfully
  • Understanding how to interview within the law using acceptable and appropriate questions
  • Reading body language

Much of communication is nonverbal. In an interview setting, hiring managers unable to understand body language may misinterpret what is being communicated during an interview. Mock interviews can help interviewers become more aware of candidates’ nonverbal cues, thus improving their overall interviewing skill set. For example, if a candidate’s body language suggests they are anxious, interviewers may make a more conscious effort to relax the candidate. You can train interviewers to control their body language as well. Even if hiring managers think a candidate is unqualified, they should not let their body language negatively affect the candidate’s experience.

Job Interviewing Skills Training: Compliance Training is Key

One of the best ways to avoid potential legal compliance issues is to ensure that all interview questions are related solely to the role the candidate is interviewing for and are in compliance with the employers hiring laws and practices. To determine if a question is truly role-related, have your hiring managers ask themselves the following questions:

  • What type of information is the candidate likely to provide in response to the question or the comment?
  • Is that information related to the job?
  • Is the question that I am about to ask, or the comment that I am about to make, necessary to make a legitimate assessment of the candidate’s qualifications?
  • Could it appear to the candidate that I was trying to encourage them to reveal information related to the candidate’s inclusion in a legally protected class (based on age, race, disability, national origin, marital status, etc.)?
  • Do I need to know the information that I am about to (or likely to) gather?

What’s more, many countries have laws protecting job candidates from discrimination during the hiring process, so it’s important for hiring managers to understand how discrimination can occur in recruiting, interviewing, and hiring and how to remain complaint with local laws. You can provide guidelines for handling your interview-related responsibilities fairly and legally. Guidelines may include:

  • Guidance on identifying candidate categories protected from employment discrimination
  • Follow a standardised interview process to help ensure a fair and consistent hiring process
  • A list of questions to avoid during interviews that can lead to discrimination claims
  • How to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate interview behaviour from candidates

 

Skills Training for Interviewers Begins and Ends with Relationship Building

As a talent acquisition leader, investing in interviewing skills training can mean the difference for your organisation’s ability to hire quality staff in today’s candidate-driven market. With a well-run interviewer training program, you can increase the chances of securing the talent your organisation needs for a competitive edge.

It is no longer only about candidate experience, it is about building candidate relationships. Candidates expect their job search and hiring experience to be positive, and the interview is a key component of fulfilling their expectations.