Employer Brand – Helping the Right Talent Choose You
Engaging and retaining your best performers has become increasingly difficult due to the normalisation of shorter tenures. Now more than ever, a strong employer brand is critical to attracting top candidates, keeping your employees engaged, and retaining your talent for the long term.
In this ebook, Employer Brand – Helping the Right Talent Choose You, we explore how organisations can build and maintain a strong employer brand to combat talent risk. You’ll learn:
What goes into a cohesive employer brand and how it can help attract top talent
How your organisation should be managing and caring for your employer brand
How your employer brand can impact cost-per-hire, recruiter efficiency, and employee advocacy
How to measure success from your employer brand efforts
Progress in Action: Moving Toward a Globally Diverse and Inclusive Workplace
Improving organisational diversity is a honourable pursuit for employers across all industries and should be a consistent point of focus for forward-thinking talent teams. Building productive teams from a pool of qualified job seekers irrespective of nationality, gender-identity, ethnicity, religious background and sexual orientation is essential to creating a workplace that reflects the communities that it serves.
So, how can you help your organisation better connect with, source, engage and recruit a more diverse and inclusive workforce? In this ebook, we examine how your organisation can update your DE&I programme with modern diversity strategies.
In this ebook you will learn:
How to accurately measure your DE&I programme’s progress and goals
How to source candidates from underrepresented groups
Recruitment Marketing: How to Stand Apart in the Battle for Great Talent
In today’s candidate-driven talent market, job seekers are more discerning and judicious in selecting a potential employer. To gain their trust and inspire them to choose you over your competitors, you need to ensure that your recruitment and marketing efforts are aligned.
What’s more, the recruitment marketing ecosystem is evolving at an accelerated pace. Tactics that worked in years past may no longer move the needle with candidates. So, how can employers better attract, engage, entice and hire top talent? In this ebook, Recruitment Marketing: How to Stand Apart in the Battle for Great Talent, we explore how employers can build a world-class recruitment marketing program.
In this ebook you will learn:
Establishing your brand narrative as a north star
Building authenticity and trust with your employees’ voice
Connect to talent with data-driven insights
Differentiating your brand through human experience
Candidate Assessment: Bringing in Better with Passion, Purpose and Mindset
Most employers are still using legacy assessment processes that are ineffective in today’s competitive recruitment landscape. With the cost of one bad hire reaching as high as $50,000, it’s imperative that organisations ensure they’ve assessed candidates’ current skills, future potential and cultural fit.
So, how can you adjust your assessment process to bring in talent that will support their business now and into the future? In this book, Candidate Assessment: Bringing in Better with Passion, Purpose and Mindset, we explore how employers can rethink their assessments to hire talent that will thrive.
In this ebook you will learn:
Why assessing only for knowledge and skills puts you at risk
How investing in technology helped one retailer modernise their assessments and improve the candidate experience
How to customise your assessments to find the right passion, purpose and mindset
In today’s highly competitive talent market, companies are employing a range of different activities to attract the best talent. Despite this, the number of unfilled vacancies remains tremendously high.
This further emphasises the need for focusing on looking after and retaining existing employees. The advantages of nurturing and retaining talent already within an organisation include a thriving and harmonious organisation and a reduction in the demands of onboarding and training new starters.
“Focusing on retention is a sensible approach to combatting the expensive competition for talent,” Writes David Macfarlane, talent solutions director at PeopleScout. “Current market conditions place power disproportionately in the hands of candidates. But deciding to move is still a gamble. For employers, a fresh look at retention could be the ace up the sleeve they’ve been searching for.” Read David’s full article in The Herald to see what can be learned from those who are managing this successfully.
We’re all aware of the recruitment challenges facing NHS Trusts across the UK with 40,000 registered nursing vacancies across the NHS in England alone. This is compounded by a sharp rise in people leaving the profession. According to the Nursing & Midwifery Council, 14,000 people left the register last year—up 27% on previous year.
And whilst sharper marketing and investment in building a more distinctive employer brand will certainly help increase the pipeline of quality healthcare job candidates, Trusts can look closer to home for some quick wins.
Optimising Your Healthcare Recruitment Strategy
Talking to HR leaders in Trusts across the UK, it’s clear that for many, recruitment is still a linear, administrative model, designed to move applicants through a process.
Compare that to a more commercial model where recruitment business partners work closely with stakeholders to understand current and future needs. These recruiters provide an agile, high-touch approach, which keeps candidates engaged throughout the process.
At PeopleScout we are working with one Trust to understand where high impact interventions can be made which improve candidate experience and ensure a higher number of permanent hires. This has been carefully balanced against a reduction in spend to ensure zero additional cost.
Healthcare Candidate Experience Diagnostic
My final piece of advice? ‘Mystery shop’ your own recruitment process through the eyes of a candidate by applying for a job. I guarantee it’ll be an illuminating experience.
Diversity sourcing is a top priority in talent acquisition. A recent PwC survey found that 57% of CFOs planned to invest in diversity and inclusion initiatives in the next year. But, with investment comes accountability; you can’t track and report your progress without the proper technology tools. So, as employers continue to prioritise diversity, equality and inclusion, talent leaders need the proper tools to understand the progress they’re making toward reaching their DE&I goals.
Additionally, despite the progress made throughout the last few years, employers still have a long way to go. In fact, according to a survey by Boston Consulting Group, only 25% of employees from underrepresented backgrounds said that they had benefited from their company’s diversity and inclusion programs—despite the fact that most companies have these programs in place.
In this article, we’ll discuss how the right technology tools can help measure and improve diversity, equality and inclusion in your recruitment process.
Optimising Diversity Sourcing
DE&I hiring efforts start at the beginning with diversity sourcing; you can’t hire diverse candidates without a diverse pipeline. And, to build a diverse candidate pipeline, you need to track who your candidates are and which of your sourcing channels and campaigns bring them into the recruitment process.
To further understand who your candidates are, it’s essential to capture their demographic information in your applicant tracking system (ATS) through self-identification via the employment application. However, because some candidates from underrepresented groups may feel uncomfortable disclosing this information in an application, it’s best practice to also ask for self-identification after you extend an offer or when a new employee goes through the onboarding process.
Then, track the sourcing channel through your candidate relationship management (CRM) software, which is critically important to track your recruitment marketing campaigns, as well as sources. Simply tracking that a candidate came to your careers site through LinkedIn isn’t enough; you need to know if a specific campaign on LinkedIn influenced their decision to apply.
Often, these data points are stored in different systems. But, a reporting tool can help synthesise your data and visualise trends. Specifically, with PeopleScout’s Affinix™ Analytics diversity dashboards, you can track how diverse candidates are entering your pipeline in real time. Then, by tracking how candidates progress through your funnel, you can determine which sources and campaigns bring in the highest-quality candidates from underrepresented groups. From there, you can then adjust your sourcing spend to maximise the channels and promotions that bring in the most and highest-quality candidates.
For instance, you may find that a recruitment marketing campaign you’re running on LinkedIn that features diverse faces and real employee stories is bringing in far more diverse candidates than the same campaign on Facebook. You could then shift budget from the Facebook campaign to the LinkedIn campaign, thereby optimising your channels. Additionally, you could compare the LinkedIn campaign featuring diverse employees to a different LinkedIn campaign featuring your office space and benefits package to see which type of content resonates best with candidates.
As an example, when one PeopleScout industrial client wanted to add more women to its primarily male workforce, we partnered with the company to build out a recruitment marketing initiative featuring the organisation’s female employees. In tracking the results of the campaign, our client was able to see a marked increase in female applicants and hires tied directly to the recruitment marketing initiative.
Identifying Barriers in Your Process
Building a more diverse, equitable and inclusive process doesn’t stop with sourcing; if you’re bringing a robust slate of diverse candidates into your pipeline, but very few candidates from underrepresented groups are actually hired, you may have a barrier somewhere else in your process: This could be an assessment with an unintentional bias; a recruiter or hiring manager who could benefit from more training; or an issue with your employment offers. In this situation, the right data can help determine exactly where the issue is occurring in your process and whether changes would result in a more equitable recruitment process.
data accurately. Then, in your reporting tool, you’ll be able to identify if a particular step in your process precipitates a drop in candidate diversity.
For instance, your reporting may show that a recently added video interview step resulted in more candidates from diverse backgrounds dropping out of your funnel. In this case, you could try converting the video interview to a phone or on-demand audio interview to see if it improves results. Similarly, your reporting could show that you have one recruiter or hiring manager with a higher percentage of diverse candidates falling out, which could lead to an opportunity to implement more training. Or, you could see that candidates from diverse backgrounds are successful throughout your recruitment process, but then turn down your employment offers. If that’s the case, then you may want to look at your benefits, offer process or employer value proposition.
Using Surveys to Improve Inclusion
Our first examples focused on improving diversity sourcing and equity in the recruitment funnel, but you can also use data to measure and improve inclusion. Your goal is to understand how candidates feel about your hiring process, as well as how new employees feel about your onboarding process and company culture—and the best way to measure this is to simply ask them.
In fact, you can and should survey candidates at different stages of your recruitment funnel. Fortunately, there are a variety of candidate survey tools that you can integrate into your ATS to automatically ask candidates for feedback about their experiences, which can then provide critical insights about points where you may be alienating certain candidates. Yet, very few employers regularly ask candidates for feedback about the recruitment process: According to a survey by PeopleScout and HRO Today, only 29% of employers in North America regularly ask for candidate feedback, while 33% never do so. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the data is somewhat better, with 42% of recruiters reporting that they regularly request candidate feedback, whereas 24% say that they never do.
Essentially, there are two different ways you can gather and gauge the results of your surveys, and it all comes down to the questions that you ask. A strong survey will have a mixture of both scored questions and open text responses; the scores help you identify trends over time, while the text responses help you drill into specifics.
Surveys can also help measure your success and identify problem areas—especially when coupled with your recruiting data. For example, if you ask candidates how they feel about the interview process and those scores start to trend downward, you can review your recruiting data to see if you notice any changing trends. Likewise, if you see more candidates from underrepresented backgrounds dropping out just before or after an interview, you can evaluate and determine why your interview process is negatively affecting candidates—especially if you also have text responses that provide specific feedback.
Going a step further, you can also survey new hires to measure inclusion in your onboarding process. A Gartner study featured in the Harvard Business Review identified seven factors that can provide a holistic view of inclusion within your organisation:
Fair treatment: Employees at my organisation who help the organisation achieve its strategic objectives are rewarded and recognised fairly.
Integrating differences: Employees at my organisation respect and value each other’s opinions.
Decision-making: Members of my team fairly consider ideas and suggestions offered by other team members.
Psychological safety: I feel welcome to express my true feelings at work.
Trust: Communication we receive from the organisation is honest and open.
Belonging: People in my organisation care about me.
Diversity: Managers at my organisation are as diverse as the broader workforce.
Then, if your survey finds that new hires from underrepresented backgrounds feel less of a sense of belonging or less safe expressing their true feelings at work, you can evaluate and improve your onboarding process and, through further surveys, measure the influence of any changes you make.
As employers continue to work to improve diversity sourcing, equity and inclusion within their organisations, it’s critical to have the right tools in place to identify opportunities for improvement and measure success. Talent acquisition leaders play an important role in achieving those goals, and a trusted RPO and technology partner can provide valuable insights and market trends. To learn more about what talent leaders can do, download our ebook, Progress in Action: Moving Toward a Globally Diverse and Inclusive Workplace.
The application process has changed dramatically throughout the years. Yet, some aspects seem eternal—like the fact that employers often start with lots of people at the top of their recruitment funnel and need to make sure they get the right people to the bottom.
But, the world is changing, and the pace of change is accelerating; candidates expect a simple, efficient recruitment process, and employers need workers who are digitally fluent and can adapt easily to change. Reskilling is also becoming even more important.
Plus, there’s also a strong focus on fairness, transparency and equality—with blind reviews of applications, diverse interview panels, and selection processes centred on the need to demonstrate competencies and alignment with the role.
Therefore, in order to adapt to today’s ever-changing landscape, it’s vital for employers to focus on a candidate’s potential to grow and adapt to future needs, as well as the skills and qualities they have today. To that end, throughout this article, we’ll share four steps for building a better assessment process—because not only is assessment the key to a more productive workforce, but it’s also essential to a workforce that’s more resilient and able to stand the test of time.
Step One: Shift from Experience to Potential
In a bid to prepare for the unknown, employers need to shift their focus away from candidates who have prior experience in a role and toward those who have potential. That’s because the employees who can demonstrate flexibility and resilience will be the ones who are best able to ride the wave of uncertainty.
Specifically, McKinsey & Company predicts that higher cognitive skills—such as creativity, critical thinking, decision-making and complex information processing—will be the most in-demand traits in the future. In fact, the need for these skills is predicted to grow by 19% in the United States and by 14% in Europe by 2030—up from already sizable demands. Furthermore, the same research also predicts the fastest rise ever in the need for advanced IT and programming skills, which could grow by as much as 90% by 2030.
As such, organisations that want to be at the forefront of innovation need to start thinking creatively about how they can tap into the vital perspectives of diverse minds. To lead a sector, outrun the competition, and truly innovate, employers need to stop looking for people who fit and start looking for people who add. Likewise, bias—conscious or unconscious—needs to be removed from the process. Besides, although they might seem like they come with a higher risk factor, people who do things very differently can create exceptional outcomes. So, instead of always asking, “Who can do the job?”, employers should be asking, “Who can take us further?”
Step Two: Reap the Rewards of Great vs. Good
Transforming candidate assessment and selection is an investment, but the business case has never been more important. Plus, many of the current processes and tools are subjective and don’t focus on differentiating between good and great hires. With this in mind, are organisations and hiring managers equipped with the tools they need to make the right decisions?
Additionally, better performance predictions will lead to better outcomes, and investing in the right tools can deliver multi-millions in cost benefits. In essence, an employer with a more agile and adaptable workforce is in a far better place to achieve competitive advantage—as well as the kind of employee satisfaction that attracts more high-achieving, agile candidates. In this way, quality hires have a substantial influence on business performance.
However, despite rigorous testing, chemistry sessions and multiple interviews, it can still be quite difficult for employers to understand whether an individual would actually be effective in a role—thereby making bad hires surprisingly common.
Conversely, getting great people—the people who go above and beyond the role criteria—is really good news because it has a profound effect on quality of output, which is truly beneficial to the business. What’s more, while great employees are valuable in and of themselves, they also drive wider team performance, inspire others and make it easier to recruit other great people.
Step Three: Build Better by Thinking Bigger
So, if we’re going to build a better and fairer candidate assessment process, we need to find a way to:
Measure potential, rather than experience, because we don’t know what the future looks like.
Identify the behaviours that are required to separate those who will actually be successful from those who present well during an interview.
Distinguish between good candidates who meet the criteria and great candidates who will take an organisation further.
Give candidates a clear and authentic picture of the organisation and the role so that they can self-select out of the process if the opportunity isn’t right for them.
Include candidates who might have non-traditional experiences or career paths and assess them equally.
Assess candidates fairly and without subjectivity or bias.
Finally, employers need to be able to identify and select candidates who are motivated and energised to be productive at work. And, the way that we do all of these things is by assessing for passion, purpose and mindset.
Assessing Passion, Purpose & Mindset
Traditional assessment processes assess for capability, behaviour and results. These terms are defined as:
Then, when these aspects are combined with new measurements that focus on purpose, passion and mindset, we can better predict the success of candidates and determine the candidates who are more engaged and likely to be a better hire for employers.
Let’s dig into those new descriptors and what they mean.
Purpose
Purpose is a candidate’s alignment with and willingness to contribute to the vision and values of an organisation. For example, one study reported by McKinsey found that, out of 100 variables, employees reported that seeing purpose and value in their work was their most motivating factor—even more so than compensation. Notably, this is especially important for younger workers.
Clearly, ensuring that applicants understand the organisation’s purpose and consider how aligned they are with that throughout the assessment process engenders a sense of belonging and partnership that underlies both great performance and job satisfaction.
In this way, assessment tools can be built around the organisation’s vision and values so applicants have a chance to form an appreciation of them from their earliest contact with the organisation. Then, if they don’t share the same values, they can choose another path. However, applicants who see an affinity with their own values will begin to feel the engagement and inspiration that will drive job success and satisfaction—even before they’re hired.
Passion
Passion is a candidate’s enthusiasm, enjoyment and commitment to mastering the requirements of a role. When an employee is passionate about a role, they’re engaged. Even so, most employers don’t have a method to effectively understand what a candidate is passionate about.
For this reason, during the assessment stage, employers need to find ways to reveal an applicant’s natural passions—which are often in the form of strengths—and find out if these are aligned with the role requirements. Then, they’ll be able to determine whether the candidate is likely to be a high performer who will want to commit the effort needed to succeed in all aspects of the job. Interviews, assessment centre exercises, and immersive online assessments are excellent vehicles for exploring and observing applicants’ innate strengths in relation to the role. Similarly, self-evaluation tools can also be used to help applicants consider their own strengths and whether the role will offer sufficient opportunity to use and demonstrate them.
Mindset
Mindset is a candidate’s belief about themselves and their basic qualities, although these beliefs are rarely measured by employers. The two types are defined as:
Fixed mindset: The belief that one’s talents are innate gifts and not malleable.
Growth mindset: The belief that one’s talents can be developed through education and effort.
It’s thought that people with a growth mindset achieve greater success because they’re focused on learning and believe that they can get better and develop new skills. It’s worth noting here that organisations can have a growth mindset, too. For instance, organisations with a growth mindset are more likely to fill vacancies internally, whereas organisations with a fixed mindset automatically advertise in the external market.
When assessing mindset, we’re looking to understand a candidate’s strengths and attitudes in relation to learning, feedback, resilience and adaptability. Of course, there are many ways to do that; just keep in mind that it’s less about what candidates may have done in the past and more about how they approach their work and develop and broaden their competence.
Step Four: Think Outside the Checkbox
By focusing purely on the capability, behaviour and results of candidates as they’re presented in front of the recruitment team, today’s more traditional interview and assessment process can be challenging for both candidates and employers. That’s because, while these measures can predict the future success of certain candidates in specific roles, change is now constant—which means that better, more well-rounded assessments are a must.
For instance, a more blended assessment during the pre-screening allows employers to shortlist candidates based on several different attributes at the same time. The candidate can then forego multiple stages by demonstrating different attributes at the same time. This way, employers can get a clear picture of the different strengths and weaknesses of the entire group of candidates in order to make informed decisions about which candidates are best to bring forward to the interview stage.
The talent landscape and the world around us renders current assessment processes ineffective. As such, employers need to embrace a new approach that both ensures that candidates are assessed appropriately and also empowers them to make good decisions.
To that end, passion, purpose, and mindset can have as much influence on performance as a candidate’s core intellect, achievements and behaviours. And, by building these factors into the assessment of a potential employee, employers can select from a diverse pool of candidates based on each individual’s potential, as well as their current performance.
Unfortunately, most employers aren’t assessing for all of these factors, so they’re missing out on a comprehensive look at candidates. In the end, the question your organisation needs to consider is this: In a rapidly changing world, what is the cost of maintaining the status quo?
To learn more about how to build the specific assessments to fit your needs, download our ebook.
Diversity recruiting is a hot topic right now. As your organisation continues on its journey toward becoming more diverse, equitable and inclusive, it’s important to ensure that you’re relying on the most up-to-date strategies and understanding of candidates’ needs and behaviours. And, while there are many assumptions and diversity recruiting strategies that have become part of accepted wisdom throughout the years, are they still true? Are they still the most effective methods for interacting with candidates?
In my role as PeopleScout director of employer brand and communication strategy, I deliver actionable insights and consultancy to clients; in essence, I help employers understand, articulate, and measure what makes their organisations unique places to work and then help them better understand and engage audiences from underrepresented groups. As such, I’m very outcome-focused. I don’t want to generate insights for the sake of insights; I want to challenge employers and support them in their journeys. For me, that means constantly interrogating what we think we know, what we just accept to be true and how effective our strategies are and how to manage diversity better.
So, in this article, I’ll examine the traditional wisdom around diversity in recruiting. Specifically, we’ll look at how our understanding of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds has evolved, share updated recruitment methods, and reflect on how factors like intersectionality and social mobility can be part of an effective recruitment process.
Rethinking Limited Media Targeting & Focusing on Employer Branding
Traditionally, when employers have wanted to recruit candidates from underrepresented groups, they’ve relied on limited media targeting. For example, if an organisation was looking to attract more women, talent leaders would post open jobs on job boards targeting female candidates. And, while this is one strategy to bring in more diverse candidates, it does have its limits. For one, it doesn’t take into account what we know about candidate behaviour.
Rather, by tracking engagement metrics and actually speaking with candidates, we know that just because a person consumes a certain type of media in their everyday life, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a person will use that specialised media in their job search. Take me, for example: I’m Black and I’m female and I’m absolutely proud to be both of those things. But, neither of those has ever formed the basis of my job search. Instead, if I were looking for a new role as a communications consultant, I’d look at platforms offering roles related to my profession. Then, I’d research potential employers to ensure that they were welcoming and inclusive.
So, instead of focusing on targeting niche, identity-related media and job boards, employers should focus on targeting the right professional or work-related channels with the right messaging. This means going beyond just talking about the responsibilities of the role in the job posting to also focusing on diversity, equality and inclusion (DE&I) within the organisation as a whole. When candidates from underrepresented groups are searching for jobs, the right job title might be enough to get them to click on a posting—but whether they actually apply is influenced by what they read and hear about how an organisation treats its people. Likewise, whether they continue in a recruitment process depends on how they’re treated throughout the candidate journey.
Diversity Recruiting Strategies for an Inclusive Recruitment Process
But, what does this look like in practice? Well, if talent leaders at an organisation have analysed the data and decided that they want to focus on certain demographics, the right campaign can be pretty effective if they make interventions at the right point in the hiring process. Below, I’ll outline some examples using the common goal of attracting more women.
Language in Job Postings
To ensure an inclusive process, employers should pay close attention to the language used in job postings. For instance, accepted wisdom suggests that women can sometimes be put off by words like “excellent,” “strong,” “driven” or “competitive.” So, to generate optimum engagement, one obvious intervention would be to find alternatives to use in job postings.
However, it’s not that simple. In my work, I’ve spoken with many senior female professionals who say they expect to see words like that in job advertisements aimed at their level. Therefore, for employers, this means that language does matter—but your solution cannot be a one-size-fits-all. Instead, the language you choose for a job posting should feel inclusive, but should also reflect the job type and career level of candidates.
Job Criteria
Many talent leaders are familiar with the research that shows how women are less likely to apply for roles where they don’t meet 100% of the criteria, whereas men will apply if they meet just some of the requirements. Interestingly, anecdotal feedback from women shows that this isn’t because women don’t feel as though they can’t do the job; rather, they just don’t want to waste their time or energy on an application that they believe would be automatically rejected.
So, to build a more inclusive job posting, employers should list only the essential criteria. Additionally, talent leaders should recognise that, as the list of criteria on a job posting gets longer, the applicant pool for that job will likely become less diverse.
Representation
You’ve heard the phrase “representation matters.” In popular media today—whether it’s movies, television or literature—you can see it in action. Similarly, employers must employ the same principles in their recruitment process, as well.
If we stick with the example of attracting more women, that means employers should ensure that any recruitment communications include voices and stories from women at all levels of the organisation. Likewise, employers should also be transparent about their diversity recruitment data and any plans in place to shift the dial around female representation. Then, when female candidates encounter more female voices throughout the process, they’ll realise that not only are they welcome at the organisation, but they’ll also have the opportunity to thrive and progress. The same principle can be applied to any demographic group.
What is Intersectionality?
Thus far in this article, we’ve discussed diversity in simple, binary terms. But, if you’ve been paying attention to the DE&I space, you’ve likely heard the word “intersectionality.” Intersectionality is about recognising the connections between social categories—including factors like race and ethnicity; gender identity; neurodiversity; and social class—and how an individual can be a combination of those things and potentially suffer compounded discrimination and disadvantage because of it.
As a talent leader, you must approach DE&I from an intersectional perspective. Unfortunately, there can be multiple potential failure points in a candidate’s journey due to the intersectional nature of the people applying for roles. So far, I’ve used women as an example. But, the perceptions and experiences of Black women will be different from white women, Latina women or Asian women. Going even further, consider whether your female candidate is also from a socially disadvantaged background. Or, is she neurodiverse? All of these will influence how she interacts with your organisation and whether she sees a potential career with you. And from your side as the employer, these combined factors also increase the risk of her falling victim to multiple adverse impacts in your recruitment process. So on the basis that no person is just one demographic, it’s critical that your organisation considers intersectionality and ensures your processes are audited to eliminated as many chances as possible for bias to creep in.
For me, employer brands and diversity recruitment marketing campaigns that factor in intersectionality are far more likely to be inclusive. They’ll be the ones showcasing employees across a range of demographics so that candidates can see a variety of different types of people flourishing at an organisation. They’re also putting in the work to make any necessary adjustments in the candidate journey, so that everybody has an equal opportunity to do well. That includes training for recruiters, hiring managers and other decision-makers, too.
The Role of Social Mobility in Diversity Recruiting
Another factor that often gets lost in discussions of diversity, equality and inclusion is the role of social mobility. Social mobility is the link between a person’s occupation or income and the occupation or income of their parents. The stronger the link between a child and a parent, the lower the level of social mobility; the weaker the link, the higher the level of social mobility. For example, if an individual works on a production line at a factory and that’s also what their parents did, then that’s a low level of social mobility. If, on the other hand, the same individual secured a white-collar, managerial role, then their social mobility is high because of their earning potential.
In diversity recruiting initiatives, social mobility can play into DE&I programs in a number of ways, but, most importantly, it plays a critical role in helping individuals achieve better outcomes. Plus, it also contributes to organisational success because it adds an additional layer of diversity within critical teams.
There are several ways that employers can engage with social mobility; one is through schools and outreach activities, where you can introduce students in disadvantaged areas to careers that they may not have otherwise heard about. You can also use apprenticeships as a strategy to get early-career talent into roles that might not otherwise be accessible to them, while also allowing them to continue their education. Additionally, those employers that are able to make any of their roles fully remote can engage workers from disadvantaged areas and who may not have access to strong career opportunities within easy commuting distance.
Making the Change
For many employers, the strategies I’ve outlined will present a marked change from their standard way of doing business—and that’s okay. It’s important to recognise that change won’t happen overnight. When it comes to engaging with potential candidates from underrepresented groups, it’s about building an inclusive employer brand that appeals to multiple demographics and fosters a sense of potential belonging in an organisation. Diversity recruiting also very much about building a brand that focuses equally on messaging, human stories and the candidate journey—and making sure that the different parts of the process truly support bringing in individuals from all walks of life who are the best people to fill your roles.
I am sure like me , many people watched the documentary on Monday with Davina McCall, “Sex , Mind and The Menopause” .
There is currently so much work being done to remove the taboo and support women in the workplace. So what can employers do to gain a little understanding around why 900,000 women are feeling so overwhelmed that they would leave the workplace.
Symptoms at Work
Menopause is a problem women have been dealing with and managing at work for years and has always been around. The menopause is a physical process in which women stop having periods, either naturally or through surgery. The average woman in the UK reaches menopause at 51 years old—with plenty of working life left.
Symptoms of menopause include, but are not limited to:
Insomnia
Anxiety
Difficulty concentrating
Hot flushes
Fatigue
Clearly, any woman experiencing these symptoms will find it hard to do her best at work.
How Employers Can Support Women at Work
Women experiencing menopause need more support, both personal and professional. Employers need to put the effort in to educate and support managers so they can provide better support to women in turn.
Together we can drive a positive change. Let’s #RemoveTheTaboo.
