Talent Pipelines: Outreach & Recruitment

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Organisations wanting to improve the diversity of their hires need not only to recruit in the traditional, established ways, but to reach beyond their existing recruitment practices into the world of outreach. How much an organisation has to do of each and the balance between them is inevitably variable. But there remains relatively limited experience of effective outreach, and existing norms of recruitment are changing all the time, prompting a constant need for agility. In this, our third article on how organisations can address the ‘S’ in ESG, we address how to succeed in a complex space.

Recruitment

The internet followed by social media have been game changing in the world of recruitment. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought change, as in-person events were replaced by online events.

1. Job advertisements and your offering to employees

We talked in the second article about how important job advertisements and your offering in terms of salary, benefits, and inclusive policies are to securing candidates, and about the way in which you deal with all applicants. Social media has given people the opportunity to talk more widely than ever before, so you need to think about what a previous applicant will say to a prospective applicant about your application process, and do everything you can to make the impression positive, even where it ended in a rejection.

2. What influences decisions to apply to your organisation

Recruitment teams are well advised to continue with events and actions they know are generating applicants. The problem is how to really ‘know’. While many organisations ask candidates how they found the vacancy, the extent to which this data is analysed varies. Even where analysis tells you that a candidate found the vacancy through X source, that does not mean that their decision to apply was exclusively generated by their exposure to X source. Perhaps they saw an advert, then attended an event, then reached out to current employees before making their decision.

So, the second recommendation would be not only to ask where your candidates heard about the vacancy, and not simply how many of the list of sources they consulted, but which and in what order. If, when you analyse this data, you see clear patterns emerging, you can get a sense of where your approach to recruitment is working well, and thus where it is important to keep investing resources. It is likeliest that applications for jobs are influenced by more than one ‘interaction’ with your organisation.

3. Re-imagining and re-inventing core recruitment activities

No matter how successful you currently are, you should always be thinking about how to improve your core recruitment activities, because it would be a mistake to imagine that what works now will still work in a year, two years, five years. As part of this, you should always be looking at emerging platforms or approaches that you might capitalise on in the competition for talent.

4. Improving applications

If you are not as heavily subscribed with applicants as you would wish to be, and feel that you are lacking quality fields repeatedly, then you must scrutinise:

• How competitors recruit, and what the most successful ones do, alongside salaries and benefits.
  
• Whether there are potential sources of recruitment you are not using.
  
• Whether you could improve in any of the activities you are currently investing in.

5. The importance of brand perception

It is not unusual for application patterns to be skewed by brand knowledge/exposure. So always be prepared to ask how your brand is perceived. Recognising that asking this question and looking closely at areas for improvement is not just about winning business, but winning talent too. That said, there may be some differences between successfully improving brand perception among candidates, and doing the same with clients/customers.

Outreach

Successful outreach is difficult to achieve, and it is important to be prepared to expend resources that are disproportionate in strict relative terms to the gains you make.

Members of under-represented groups can lack:

• Confidence and cultural capital
• Connections and role models
• Resources
• Knowledge
• Qualifications

This makes shifting the composition of your workforce incredibly challenging.

Unsurprisingly, research has shown that one-off contact with potential applicants from under-represented backgrounds is much less effective in inducing those people to move forward with an application than multiple points of contact, even more so than in the traditional world of recruitment. But it is important not to underestimate how early connections with under-represented groups should be made. You should be prepared to invest resources in work with schools/high schools, and young people’s organisations. This is because issues are deep-rooted; changing self-perception and presenting wider, attainable horizons at an early age is critical.

Some actions you can take to begin to bring about change:

1. Think about groups that are under-represented in your organisation, and set targets for what you want to achieve.
2. Create an outreach officer/team if one does not already exist; this is a long-term project.
3. Ensure that your marketing and communications are inclusive.
4. Monitor progress against targets and be prepared to change tack with your outreach strategy if you are not making progress.
5. Focus outreach activities with under-represented groups in mind; don’t simply adopt generic approaches.
6. Consider whether there are partnerships that could be established with schools, universities, and third-party organisations (e.g. Speakers for Schools, IntoUniversity, the Sutton Trust) working on social mobility and related issues to create pipelines.
7. Use staff pro-bono time to take part in initiatives.
8. Design a programme of events for school students in respect of gender and other characteristics.
9. Provide events and mentor potential applicants, perhaps as an add-on for some targeted participants in the already existing programmes.
10. Create mechanisms and programmes that ensure sustained contact with individuals and groups.

Conclusion

Investing in recruitment and outreach is crucial. Your staff are your greatest asset, and, as such, you need to be prepared to invest in maintaining the existing the pipelines, while also scanning the horizon constantly for new opportunities; and, to improve diversity, there are no quick fixes: it is essential to create further pipelines for traditionally under-represented groups.

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