This is a guest post from Rebecca Siciliano, Managing Director at Tiger Recruitment, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Rebecca shares her thoughts on how to support working parents through the recruitment process.
In March 2021, Tiger hosted a webinar to help businesses better support their working parents post-pandemic. We found that many employers were looking for guidance as their staff were struggling with managing childcare responsibilities and working during lockdown. Our speakers were Joeli Brearley from charity, Pregnant Then Screwed; Ursula Tavender from consultancy, Mumbelievable; and Cat Harris from the software company, Brandwatch. Their advice was highly relevant to companies looking to increase the number of working parents in their teams – something that should be a priority for businesses moving forward.
Here’s why.
While some companies have previously been unwilling to hire working parents, it makes good business sense to tap into this talent pool. Before the pandemic, 24.9% of mothers and 7.4% of fathers with dependent children were not actively working in the UK. These numbers are only likely to have grown over the past 12 months due to some parents leaving their roles throughout lockdown to look after their children. Not only are parents more likely to have developed essential soft skills like communication, people management, problem-solving, organisational skills and time management, they may have years of training and experience under their belts. Additionally, the inclusion of parents in the workplace will allow your clients to increase diversity across the board, a key focus for many businesses moving forward.
We’ve highlighted four areas to help employers become more accessible and inclusive in their offering to working parents.
Monitor a diverse range of data
Data monitoring is an excellent first step for any employer looking to increase the broad diversity of their team. However, when targeting working parents, it’s essential to look beyond the ‘standard’ data points, like gender equality and pay gaps in the workplace. According to Joeli, companies should also track how many parents return after parental leave, how long working parents stay at the company, how quickly they’re promoted and how often requests are approved for working flexibly. Analysing this information will highlight any problem areas to your clients, ensuring they can make necessary changes to their existing policies and processes.
Introduce attractive initiatives to working parents
Employers will likely be looking for specific, parent-friendly initiatives they can implement. In our webinar, Cat explained she set up a committee with working parents at Brandwatch, which allowed them to talk about their company’s changes. If your clients want to introduce a more casual forum for parents to chat, creating a specific channel on Slack or Microsoft Teams is a great, cost-effective way to facilitate dialogue.
Additionally, some of Ursula’s clients adopted a firm commitment to learning and development for their working parents through resilience workshops and subscriptions to meditation apps like Headspace. If possible, employers may also find it useful to set up an unstructured time with their working parent population, allowing them to voice feedback and discuss solutions with management.
Ensure jobs are advertised flexibly where possible
As many of your clients have now worked remotely for over a year, they are likely to have an internal policy in place around flexible working. It would help if you encouraged them to extend this benefit to future roles they recruit for, as offering flexi options may make all the difference in the number of parents applying for their roles. Implementing flexible working as a blanket policy across the workplace will also positively impact employee engagement and staff turnover. Additionally, 57% of people want to have the option to work from home in the future, so they may be limiting applications from talented applicants by not doing so.
According to Ursula, this can be a challenging concept for management if they have the mindset that everyone must work flexibly in the same way. However, this isn’t the case at all. While a front-line worker may not work from home, they can still have flexible options available to them, like flexi start times and job sharing. Additionally, your clients can also put practices in place to help staff develop into different business areas that offer the type of flexibility they’re looking for.
Keep in mind; the government is set to launch a public consultation around flexible working by default, which would allow staff to work from home when they want to. Considering this, businesses should be looking at future flexible working options that will suit their business and staff.
Build a culture where everyone feels included
While working from home is an attractive option for working parents, this mustn’t create inequalities in your client’s workplace. For example, if a parent has chosen to work from home, the business must ensure that they don’t miss out on information or key business decisions to avoid an ‘us and them’ culture.
Working parents may need flexibility to work to the best of their ability; however, it’s well worth your clients making an effort to implement effective initiatives. With essential soft skills and solid experience, parents make up a significant (and valuable) portion of the available talent pool that businesses must take advantage of moving forward.
Author, Rebecca Siciliano – Managing Director at Tiger Recruitment 
Rebecca Siciliano specialises in PA recruitment and is the Managing Director at Tiger Recruitment. Tiger is B Corp Certified. They are part of a global movement of businesses committed to improving social and environmental conditions around the world.
