Unlike Princess Anne’s now rather famous mustard coat worn at this year’s Ascot and, as it transpires, on numerous previous occasions dating back to the Trooping of the Colour ceremony of 1980, things change. Although with England shuffling both ignominiously and prematurely out of yet another football tournament this week (the European u21 Championship) and another national team likely to come a distant second to the Australians in the soon to start Ashes’ contest, you might well dispute this notion.
But, like death and taxes, change is inevitable.
Nowhere is this sense of change more clear than the UK labour market. And with events such as last week’s #TREC 2015 and other sources producing a raft of data touching on this subject, my personal favourites come from a piece of research by Hays/CIPD. Between 2014 and 2015, more than a third of UK employers increased their resourcing budgets. The comparable percentage between 2012 and 2013? Just 8%. (A staggering increase and yet we might wonder what strategies the remaining two thirds of employers who haven’t increased such spend are adopting).
And there’s no doubting the reason behind this increase in activity. The same study suggests that 78% of UK employers are reporting hiring difficulties. The research contrasts this with the statistic that just 45% of the same study base is investing in more internal talent development.
Along with the labour market getting stronger, Glassdoor points to another significant change in employers’ engagement with external talent pools.
Very simply, it takes longer to hire someone today than it did in 2010. The average hiring process (and there are clearly sizeable variations depending on function and seniority) is up 3.7 days between 2010 and 2015 to 28.6 days for the UK. Perhaps it is no surprise that the average goes up the larger the hiring organisation.
And certainly a reduced pool of talented candidates may well play a part in this challenging and enterprise-impacting metric. However, Glassdoor tends to attribute this additional time down to increased use of background checks, personality tests and skills evaluations.
(It would be interesting too to understand if the move towards more in-house resourcing has had a positive or negative influence on these figures).
However, more fundamentally, are the online recruitment systems used by the vast majority of employers a tool designed to suit the labour market of 2010 and not that of today?
And I speak with a certain personal knowledge of this challenge. Having spent a fair proportion of the last nine months working with/irritating/hindering (better ask her) my daughter in her attempts to secure an internship, I claim a certain intimacy with the candidate experience employers are providing labour market entrants.
I did think, perhaps naively, that as a female engineering student at a top ten university, getting work experience might be within her reach. And, with an internship that started last week, ultimately, that was indeed the case. The journey, however, could have been infinitely smoother, more intuitive, more empathetic and more in step with the labour market. She came across clunky systems, hard to locate ATS’, repetitive questioning, frustrating waits for feedback, vague, confusing communications. I could go on. From a candidate experience perspective, she seemed to encounter more in the way of barriers than open arms. For someone with in-demand skills as well as an obvious lack of exposure to such systems and processes, it was a dispiriting experience for her.
And all this coincides ironically with a lot of vital and well meaning Women in Engineering activity. If such initiatives are successful in attracting more women into the talent pipeline of such employers, I hope the subsequent up-swell in candidate activity encounters a recruitment process that attracts rather than detracts.
Because if the processes designed to cope with large amounts of often inappropriate applicants from, say, 2010 are being used, albeit more slowly, in 2015 to handle the applications of significantly fewer candidates who (in many cases) hold the power, then do such processes remain fit for purpose and fit for the times in which we live? Are employers evaluating the routes into their organisation through the eyes of the candidate? It probably doesn’t feel that way to many applicants.
In a candidate driven market, it seems little wonder that hiring periods are extending (with all the cost and opportunity implications) and that skill shortages are growing, if an applicant’s first engagement with a potential new employer doesn’t recognise the changes the last few years have brought.
An organisation’s employer brand has no greater test, no greater exposure, than during the candidate touch-point process. This is when the promises made via communications and messaging are either delivered or dashed.
If an organisation is using the same or similar approaches and experiences to handle fewer candidates, albeit ones today with much more leverage, than they used to process large numbers of applicants in yesterday’s employer-driven markets, then they should perhaps expect more hiring delays, more skill shortages and more bottom line impact.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 