It can be something of a bleary-eyed challenge stumbling our way into the new year. Few of us emerge from the festive period likely to be mistaken for being bright eyed and bushy tailed. Instead, we’ve travelled, we’ve eaten, we’ve imbibed, we’ve exchanged socks and then we’ve done something very similar all over again. Clothes, mysteriously no longer fit. Lap tops are nowhere to be seen. Alarm clocks, all of a sudden, are going off at unfeasibly early hours and we face returning to a chilly, grey, January reality. No, but seriously, happy new year.
But as we try to remember the location of work shoes, the station and our offices, we tend to return in the new year faced with choices.
Individually, those choices tend typically to be around calorific intake, alcoholic consumption and paying for, in all likelihood, a 12-month gym membership for one month’s use. Do we opt for Dry January or Veganuary or, my particular favourite, a January spent booking a holiday to warmer climes?
And organisations face making some equally significant choices too. How does talent acquisition respond to the current labour market squeeze?
With the British Chamber of Commerce reporting recently that no fewer than 81% of its members were reporting recruitment difficulties – the joint highest monthly figure ever reported – and Universities UK forecasting that by 2030, the UK will have a talent deficit of between 600,000 and 1.2m workers across business, finance and IT, we might assume that recruitment professionals would be perfectly justified in upping resourcing budgets accordingly.
But is it ever as simple as that?
On March 29ththis year, we are likely to encounter an utterly unique event in UK economic, political and employment history, as we leave the EU. Despite today’s apparent benign economic metrics, it is increasingly likely that Brexit, of whatever hardness, will bring with it a softer, less positive business sentiment – or something worse, much worse. In the much more eloquent words of Diane Coyle, Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, ‘The outlook is anything from lacklustre to catastrophic’.
All of a sudden, raising talent acquisition spending appears more questionable.
In making such a choice, do employers have to go for the obvious option, or does thinking laterally, bravely or counter-intuitively bring benefits?
Try as you might, I’d imagine it’s been hard to avoid the Greggs’ vegan sausage roll story over the last few days.
The high street has been anything but a comfortable environment of late – the struggles of players such as House of Fraser, Maplin, Game, Homebase and Patisserie Valerie bring this cruelly into focus. So how should it respond? By appealing to the consumers who have always been loyal? By improving its already legendary steak bake? Or by making a non-obvious choice?
At the beginning of this year it revealed, to quite some fanfare and no lack of raised eye-brows, its vegan sausage roll.
It’s debateable which environment has seen the greater activity – the Twittersphere or buying customers. Piers Morgan inevitably got in on the act, frothing away about such PC nonsense – only to be put in his place, in all likelihood temporarily, by Greggs’ PR people, who tweeted: ‘Ah, hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you’.
End result – significant amounts of positive PR sentiment for Greggs and the consumption of an awful lot of said vegan sausage rolls.
What about the Army? Their recruitment challenges over the last few years have been well documented and equally well criticised. Given their predicament – and armed forces recruitment has always been a challenge during periods of high employment – they had little choice other than to make a bold statement. Their new campaign, aimed at addressing years of resourcing under-achievement, broke very recently and provoked all manner of reaction. The messaging sought to turn target audience stereotypes on their heads – Snowflake, Me Me Me Millennial, etc – in an homage to Kitchener’s First World War ‘Your country needs you’ platform.
As always, the ultimate judgement will be based on recruited numbers, however, the Army has come up with a non-obvious choice – just like Greggs. Initial reaction appears mixed at best, with the soldier portrayed in the Snowflake version apparently all set to resign as a result of how his image has been used.
When we analyse, however, the UK employment landscape, it can feel all too easy to opt for the obvious choices.
For example, research from Rare Recruitment last year suggested that pupils from private and grammar schools were 100 times more likely to apply for the UK’s most prestigious graduate schemes.
Similarly, data from UCAS admissions report that eight UK schools and colleges – either public or grammar – had more students accepted to Oxbridge over the last three years than three quarters of all other schools across the land.
With a small number of top grammar and public schools continuing to produce the talent that leads from Oxbridge to the top graduate training schemes and onwards, what can employers do in terms of giving greater consideration to those from perhaps a less obvious background?
Because once in the workplace, do the applicant tracking systems compound such issues? How do they respond, for example, to career breaks, dyslexia, single parent/carer responsibilities, names associated with certain ethnic groups, mature candidates, disability?
Do increasingly efficient and sophisticated ATS’ make it more likely that employers will continue to make the obvious recruitment choices?
A CBI Conference from late last year, ‘CBI2018: Attracting the next generation of talent’ saw some organisations with real intent on not simply taking the easiest, most predictable, most established routes to talent acquisition.
Liv Garfield, CEO of Severn Trent, felt that organisations ‘had to take a risk’ in finding great talent. Even more interesting were the thoughts of Lynne Atkin, HRD at Barclays, who touched on how the bank was recalibrating its recruitment in order to find ‘trapped talent’ – those people whose education had been interrupted through no fault of their own and whose subsequent career choices were influenced by this.
Trapped talent, for me, is a fascinating space. I think it takes in far more people than we might imagine.
Whether it relates to the people identified above by Barclays or countless thousands of others who might have graduated immediately post the 2008-10 downturn with little in the way of choice. Or those people who stumble out of education lacking advice, guidance or mentoring and who have all the ability but an absence of work experience and direction.
Such talent might already be working for you, perhaps in the mail room, in an unloved call centre or a similarly obscure and over-looked part of your business. There was an interesting and perhaps over-looked statistic from ONS metrics from late last year. The number of people made redundant in the quarter ending in October stood at 83,000. Not much consolation, I suspect, if you were one of those 83,000, however, this is the lowest quarterly figure since the ONS began taking such readings in 1995.
Whilst such a reaction is likely to be driven by employers realising the recruitment market is particularly challenging and holding fire on letting people go, I also hope this leads to such organisations interrogating their own internal talent pools in order to seek the potential in their own trapped talent.
Trapped talent might also touch on older talent whose educational achievements perhaps reflect more the era they left the system, rather than their own potential. It might touch too on those people whose family responsibilities mean they instinctively feel that career moves are for others.
But, ask yourself, how would your current application processes respond to such potential candidates? Would they give such talent a chance or would they make the obvious choice?It’s hard, for example, not to praise the work of Ben Gledhill at Yodel, who have re-engineered their resourcing system to reflect the times their candidates might be able to engage with the recruitment process, rather than the other way around.
This feels pretty important when, according to Kevin Green, Chair of Good Recruitment Campaign, this week suggests that despite the fact there are 8m of us working part time in the UK, just 8% of advertised roles mention flexible working.
According to the FIRM’s Annual Membership Survey, regardless of the shadow of Brexit, 60% of its members are anticipating an increase in recruitment activity this year. And 51% of such members are forecasting having to deal with over 500 vacancies this year – in 2016/17, that figure was just 37%.
As talent acquisition gets back down to business in 2019 it will be confronted by no shortage of choices. Brexit will certainly influence such choices. But, in acquiring the talent that their organisations crave, I hope they are on the look-out for choices which might not be obvious and that their recruitment infrastructure allows them to make such choices.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 