There is a lot of recruitment going on. That’s what the news is telling us. There were 1.1 million job vacancies advertised between July and September according to the office for National Statistics, which is the highest level since records began in 2001. So for those running recruitment companies and for recruitment consultants, this must be good news, right? Our partners, MyPeople (who I’m doing a live show with on Thursday 28th October) tell us there is much more to this story than the headlines.
There are over 40,000 registered recruiters in the UK; that’s one recruiter for every 67 registered companies in the UK. That’s a lot of recruiters, fighting over the same candidates, in the same LinkedIn pool, with little to differentiate one from the other. This can create a race to the bottom on fees.
That also means a battle for in demand candidates, making the market candidate centric. So understanding the needs of candidates has never been more important.
When we also examine current hiring themes for organisations, the picture becomes even more complex. Companies are becoming more socially aware, at least in their marketing content! HR departments are tackling difficult social topics like diversity, gender balance, removing bias in the hiring process whilst trying to establish meaningful company values that matter to their people. This means hiring managers have a tricky balance to achieve. They need to hire individuals that ‘can hit the ground running’ whilst also being different enough to improve their existing team’s diversity, and somehow ‘know’ their new hire will ‘fit’. That’s a very difficult balance to achieve with any confidence. Hiring managers need help and need tools that will improve their recruitment decision making.
So those 1.1 million vacancies don’t tell the more detailed story of a candidate centric market, candidates wanting more from their recruiters, clients and hiring managers wrestling difficult issues, needing more from their recruiters. Throw in 40,000 recruitment companies competing with one another to get the vacancy, it highlights that despite this increased demand, market conditions are challenging.
These problems do present a big opportunity to recruiters though.
If, what I have described seems vaguely familiar to you and your recruitment colleagues what I am going to write about is a proposed solution that will help you. If you are making hay and making placements every which way and don’t need to improve or want don’t want to lead on some of these market issues, this isn’t for you!
First lets tackle the problems from a candidate perspective, then we will look at the hiring manager and then how you can differentiate yourself, and ultimately make more placements.
Improve candidate loyalty by understanding their values and what’s important to them
A candidate’s values and workplace preferences are hard to surface objectively in an interview. Most people know what is important to them but find it hard to articulate this in an interview and harder still to describe what their ‘ideal’ company and team looks like.
So we should be helping candidates by using a scientific and more objective approach and in doing so place their values front and centre in their search for a new role. How? At MyPeople, our recruitment system, uses an academically validated personality, values and work preference survey that has 20 years research behind it.
It takes 4 -6 minutes for a candidate to complete on-line online and is ‘just’ a set of statements that they agree or disagree with; so no awful battery of psychological tests that take hours. Critically, It can be used on all roles and all levels.
The result is an easy to use, simple process for objectively understanding candidate needs and their values.
But, this is only the start. What about the hiring managers and matching candidates to a role or team?
Remove bias by using data to work out what works in each role and team
Hiring managers are typically bad at describing their teams and what qualities they think a candidate needs to succeed in role. Their biases impact the profile they are looking for. The traditional assessment approach of going for a beer with a prospective new hire is not going to work here either!
A scientific and objective profile is needed. At MyPeople, our recruitment system only needs you to type in a job title. Then using US and UK labour and workforce ‘big data’, where the qualities required for over 10,000 jobs have been codified, we automatically generate a profile.
We combine this with data from the hiring manager (completing a similar preference survey to the candidate, but focused on how their team acts) to refine the big data to make it specific to the client’s team. We use similar statements to the candidate survey (but it’s specifically focused on their team) that the hiring manager agrees or disagrees with.
And that’s it. The MyPeople system then matches candidates to roles and teams. But importantly this is not to disqualify candidates. Actually the opposite. To improve the quality of questioning at interviewing for hiring managers, the system actually takes areas of mismatch as discussion items for further probing, going so far as to provide questions for the candidate and hiring manager to explore further, together.
In this way, by improving the dialogue between candidate and hiring manger , you as the recruiter are at the heart of a much improved recruitment process.
Our growing list of recruitment clients have provided us with some heart-warming tales of how the MyPeople platform has helped them.
One example: a placement at a bio tech company, where the vacancy was difficult to fill, in a difficult location, open for months and the hiring manager was asking for a lot in terms of the experiences and skills of the new hire. Two candidates were matched by the MyPeople system who did not have the required experience levels. BUT, both matched the team values and both had the right personal qualities to do the job. The data from the MyPeople platform enabled the recruiter to have the evidence and give the hiring manager the confidence to ‘take a risk’. Best of all, the new hire is now thriving in a role they would have been excluded from otherwise.
Finally, for you as the recruiter, using the MyPeople platform is very straight forward . Type in a role. The profile generator creates an automated profile. Add your candidates and a hiring manager to a job and they automatically receive their surveys. And that’s it. The system generates matches and candidate reports based on fit and provides areas to explore further and sample questions to ask, written by our in house organisational psychologists.
And to top this all, everyone that signs up becomes an accredited MyPeople data driven recruiter. So hiring managers know you use a scientific approach to hiring and that helps you stand out from the other 40,000 recruiters in the UK.
In summary, this approach takes more care with candidates. It further professionalises your interactions with candidates, not just in understanding their preferences, but in using the data to improve candidate and hiring manager dialogue. You create more opportunities for candidates to get roles based on who they are and what is important to them rather than reducing the candidate to purely their experience to date. You are therefore giving them more chance of securing roles not less.
And for the hiring managers you are making it easier for them to describe a role, describe their team and understand who fits and who doesn’t. Hiring managers will love how easy this is and how you are improving their understanding of candidates. You are taking more care with your hire and providing more value to your clients.
And this value has a price. You can stand by your fees, or you can use this approach and software as your platinum offer, your premium offering with a greater fee.
And happier customers and more loyal candidates equals greater probability of placements.
So that’s how our data driven software approach can increase your placements and protect your fees.
For more information …… www.mypeoplegroup.com
