Industry: Telecoms, Energy & Utilities

Navigating Change: Launching a Redeployment Program for a Telecoms Provider 

Posted on by akessler
Navigating Change: Launching a Redeployment Programme for a Telecoms Provider

Internal Mobility

Navigating Change: Launching a Redeployment Programme for a Telecoms Provider

A major telecommunications company partnered with PeopleScout to launch and manage its redeployment program to help internal candidates transition smoothly to new roles within the company.

Situation  

Following organizational restructuring, the telecoms organization faced the delicate task of creating an internal mobility program to redeploy talent to other roles within the organization. In their commitment to nurturing and retaining talent, the company sought a strategic partner in PeopleScout to optimize the redeployment process effectively.

PeopleScout’s specialized support played a pivotal role in the success of this extensive redeployment initiative that spanned three years, achieving organizational goals while prioritizing a positive employee experience.

Solution 

The process began with understanding the client’s internal policies, job requirements and the overall objectives of the redeployment program.  

Our team developed a tailored strategy to support internal candidates throughout the transition, including: 

  • Personalized Candidate Support: Our seasoned teams offered personalized guidance to internal candidates, facilitating their journey through the redeployment process. This included arranging interviews for preferred roles, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience. 
  • Hiring Manager Assistance: We supported hiring managers by providing guidance on interview techniques, ensuring adherence to best practices, and fair and objective assessments. 
  • Assessor Engagement: Skilled assessors from our team participated in interviews virtually, ensuring thorough documentation and maintaining the integrity of the selection process. 
  • Feedback Loop: We established a robust feedback mechanism to gather insights from hiring managers, enabling continuous refinement and improvement of the internal mobility program. 

Results 

The collaboration between PeopleScout and the telecoms organization yielded significant benefits: 

  • Smooth Transition: Internal candidates experienced a seamless transition to new roles, supported by PeopleScout throughout the redeployment process. 
  • Positive Stakeholder Feedback: Hiring managers provided overwhelmingly positive feedback on the support received from PeopleScout during this sensitive period. They appreciated the professionalism, expertise and dedication from PeopleScout. 
  • Efficiency and Compliance: The involvement of PeopleScout’s assessors ensured efficient and compliant interview processes, mitigating risks associated with redeployment. 

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Major Telecommunications Provider
  • INDUSTRY
    Technology & Telecommunications
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Openreach Leadership Program: Finding the Directors of Tomorrow

Posted on by akessler
Openreach Leadership Program: Finding the Directors of Tomorrow

Openreach Leadership Program: Finding the Directors of Tomorrow

One of the world’s largest communication organizations, Openreach, turned to PeopleScout for a sourcing-led recruitment solution including talent assessment design to find eight to 10 future directors for a brand new leadership program.

Situation

Openreach approached PeopleScout to help them stand up and deliver a new senior leadership program which would allow starters to rotate through a series of roles to provide them with the skills needed to be successful in a director position. The roles included:

  • Senior Engineering Area / Regional Manager Fibre Network & Delivery (FND)
  • Chief Engineer – Senior Operations Manager
  • Senior Area Manager – Service Delivery

Openreach wanted PeopleScout to drive the talent assessment process and to source candidates for the program, presenting a list of the most suitable.

The aim of the program was to improve diversity and innovative thinking within the business. The business was concerned about a lack of gender and ethnic diversity, and most of their employees came from a telecoms background. Openreach wanted to bring in candidates from diverse backgrounds with experience managing large operational teams outside of the telecoms sector.

Openreach also wanted to improve career pathways within the business. So, our second aim was to support internal mobility by introducing a new step stone between senior management and director levels.

Our team were given a short time frame of just four weeks to create a solution and design the process. Plus, we then had to present candidates to Openreach for interviews in a competitive market.

Solution

Our team were tasked with attracting and sourcing candidates, designing and supporting the assessment center and completing the recruiter screening.

Advertising Plan

To start, we interviewed senior leaders and heads of resourcing to understand the transferrable skills they were looking for. From this we were able to make a target list of industries and organizations which had similarities. These included field operations and management, logistics, and engineering as well as consumer-centric operations such as retail.

With this intel in hand, we developed a solution which included a candidate attraction marketing campaign, including writing job copy and building a microsite.

Our team devised an inclusive and effective advertising plan. This involved creating a tailor-made job advert and a microsite containing relevant and exciting content about the opportunities available. Using imagery and quotes from their current directors, we brought the Openreach story to life and showed what real employees’ roles looked like. We supported our diversity goal by using both female and male directors in the attraction content.

The microsite played the biggest part in telling the story, taking potential leadership program candidates through their first few years at the company, detailing where they’ll end up.

We partnered with Openreach’s media partner for the campaign strategy for which LinkedIn was predominantly used. Posts from employees were used as well as brand-led posts that recruiters leveraged to highlight roles. We again drove our diversity objectives by using more women in our social media posts to amplify their voices.

A Sourcing-Led Approach

To begin, the recruitment process was sourcing-led, focusing on the candidate experience and the thorough qualification of candidates. We also specifically targeted passive candidates from the industries we identified with key transferrable skills. In order to help bring the roles to life, we directed candidates towards the microsite and video content that PeopleScout created for the campaign.

Talent Assessment

Our team worked with Openreach senior leaders to design an assessment solution, involving job analysis and a competency assessment framework. This enabled us to create a stepwise assessment process to evaluate candidates through cognitive testing and personality profiling. The penultimate stage involved a competency-based interview to identify a shortlist of candidates to present to Openreach for final interviews.

The assessment design included a feedback report from the interview panel for each candidate as well as a feedback interview for candidates who completed the testing stage.

Results

PeopleScout’s assessment design for Openreach led to:

  • Improved diversity amongst new program joiners. Amongst the new joiners, 25% identified as female and another 25% identified as Asian or Black. All selected hires scored highly in both the online test assessment and the interview.
  • 3:1 interview-to-offer acceptance rate. Our detailed assessment process was a good predictor of success. From the 81 candidates who were screened by recruiters, 34 candidates were selected for assessment, with 23 advancing to final interviews. Out of the 23, 10 were offered roles with eight acceptances.

The overall process from start to finish included a collaborative relationship between all teams at Openreach and PeopleScout to successfully deliver a brand new program.

Ten months on from the candidates’ start dates, we can confirm they have all successfully passed probation and are all actively working towards a director position.

“PeopleScout were really thorough, understood our requirements and ensured that they were able to accurately represent our business and the specific roles we were recruiting for. Communication throughout the process was excellent and they delivered the end result we were looking for.  When we surveyed our new joiners about their pre-hire experience, without exception they all held PeopleScout in high regard. We would have no hesitation in using PeopleScout in the future.”

Katrina Baillie, Head of Resourcing, Openreach

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Openreach
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    10 future leadership program candidates
  • LOCATIONS
    Telecomms & Utilities
  • ABOUT OPENREACH
    Openreach Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group. The telecomm provider maintains the copper wires and fibre cables that connect homes and businesses to phone and broadband.
Let’s Connect

The Gender Gap in Energy and Utilities: 3 Strategies for Powering Change

Posted on by nfuqua

The energy and utilities sector has a gender problem. The field is overwhelmingly male-dominated, and if providers are going to be able to meet the global demand in the future, talent leaders in the industry must bring in more women to tackle the gender gap in energy and utilities. 

Women make up 39% of the global workforce, but only 16% of the traditional energy sector. This varies by location and job type. In the U.S., natural gas and nuclear energy have the highest percentage of female workers, at 35% and 34%, respectively. But in some countries, like Japan, women make up only 3% of the energy workforce.  

According to Deloitte, over two-thirds of executives rate DE&I as an important issue. And for good reason. Diversity is strongly tied to innovation. Diverse teams—including women, neurodivergent individuals and professionals from underrepresented backgrounds—are more creative, make better decisions and solve problems more efficiently. 

Additionally, the energy and utilities industry is facing a massive talent shortage. According to McKinsey, the global renewables industry will need 1.1 million blue-collar workers to develop and construct wind and solar projects and another 1.7 million workers to operate them, including laborers, electricians and operating engineers. On top of that, an additional 1.3 million white-collar workers will be needed to install, operate and maintain these facilities, including wind and solar project developers, project managers, finance experts, legal staff and many other roles. 

If talent leaders in the sector stick to the same recruiting strategies aimed at the same talent pools, providers will be understaffed, customers could see more energy service disruptions and workers could experience more incidents and accidents. 

In this article, we provide three strategies for increasing the number of female workers in energy and utilities to close the gender gap. 

1. Address Barriers for Women  

In order to effectively recruit women into the industry, talent leaders need to understand what is keeping them away and work to remove those barriers to entry.  

One important issue is pay. Globally, women in the sector face a wage gap that is more than twice as large as it is in non-energy jobs. According to the World Economic Forum, women in energy make about 20% less than their male coworkers. Their research shows that the wage gap stays the same when accounting for ability, education and potential experience, indicating that the gap is not because of differences in skill levels. 

This leads to women in the industry being more likely to leave their positions than men, creating a challenge for employers looking to retain their female workforce.  

One step employers can take is to complete a pay equity audit. According to the Harvard Business Review, a pay equity audit involves comparing the pay of employees doing “like for like” work in an organization. To complete this effectively, you will need each employee’s length of service, job classification and demographic information. From there, auditors can perform a regression analysis to account for pay differences based on factors like experience, education and training to identify differences based on gender, race or age.  

With that data, experts recommend a two-pronged response. One is remediation, or adjusting the pay of any employees that may qualify. The next step is to identify what led to salary discrepancies in the first place. Were there incorrect job classifications? Or does the hiring process allow for wide differences in starting salaries? This will help create a fair and equitable process going forward.  

Additionally, companies shouldn’t be shy or secretive about the work they are doing to build a better workplace environment for women. Workers value that transparency. In fact, several large organizations have made headlines for announcing when they’ve reached gender pay equity, like Adobe and Intel.  

2. Invest in Diverse Sourcing Strategies 

Once talent leaders confirm that their organization provides a fair and equitable environment for female workers, the next step is finding them. The energy and utilities industry is not alone in this need. Across all science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs, women only account for 28% of the workforce. 

Energy employers should invest in sourcing strategies aimed at underrepresented workers. Consider adding an AI sourcing tool that can identify passive candidates with the skills needed to succeed at your organization.  

Some recruitment CRMs have automated talent matching capabilities that search candidate databases to find qualified candidates for any role. Candidates are then ranked by how closely they fit the role requirements, how likely they are to leave their current position, and their average tenure. Unlike a manual sourcing process, automated talent matching can help fill the top of your funnel in seconds.   

Notably, in PeopleScout’s Affinix® CRM, Talent Finder can find and filter qualified candidates. The Diversity Boost feature also amplifies diverse candidates to help you reach your DE&I goals. It even allows talent leaders to identify what diversity means at their organization, including the goal of identifying qualified female candidates.  

Also consider low-tech approaches to sourcing more female candidates. Attend “Women in STEM” hiring events, and partner with colleges and universities. The energy sector has become a hard sell for young workers, especially in fossil fuels. One study found that only 44% of millennials and Gen Z in STEM programs would be interested in working in the sector, but 77% were interested in tech. Identifying potential candidates and intervening early can help change minds and bring in more candidates.  

3. Update your Employer Brand 

Finally, talent leaders in the energy and utilities sector need to make sure that their employer brands appeal to female workers. Are DE&I efforts advertised? Do women appear in careers site imagery? What about company leadership?  Are women represented? 

Your employer brand is your most powerful tool in attracting top talent. The energy industry lags behind in employer branding and digital recruitment marketing, two factors that appeal to millennial and Gen Z workers and can attract more women. Showcase and celebrate female workers and leaders in places like your careers site and social media. Share the progress you’re making toward diversity and inclusion goals. Advertise benefits like mentorship programs and leadership training.  

Also consider your job postings. Do they include gendered language? Words like “competitive, dominant or leader” may discourage women from applying. One survey found that male-dominated fields tend to use more masculine words in job descriptions, at 97%. 

These changes can make a real impact. For example, a manufacturing client that operates in an industry that has historically been male-dominated partnered with PeopleScout with the goal of increasing the number of female applicants and hires. PeopleScout worked with the client to develop the Women in Manufacturing campaign. PeopleScout interviewed nearly 20 women who work in roles across the company and who love their jobs. Using this information, PeopleScout built candidate personas to target women interested in the industry, and created a campaign featuring real women who work for the client. 

Using our proprietary total talent suite Affinix, we built a dedicated landing page and talent community for female candidates. The four-week Women in Manufacturing campaign launched on International Women’s Day and showcased the company’s woman-friendly, inclusive culture. The campaign featured employee spotlights, videos and stories to showcase how women are integrated into the corporate culture and are integral to the company’s success. This increased the number of women who visited to the employer’s careers site and is moving the needle on the company’s DE&I goals.  

Think Long Term to Close the Gender Gap in Energy and Utilities 

As with many male-dominated industries, progress won’t happen overnight, but employers should set reasonable and achievable goals to close the gender gap in energy and utilities. With the staffing challenges facing the industry, building a more diverse workforce for the future isn’t an option—it’s a necessity.  An RPO partner brings industry expertise, recruitment technology and talent advisory solutions to the table, providing employers the tools they need to find and hire more diverse talent.  

For more insights on recruiting in the energy and utilities sector, download our ebook, The Recruitment Handbook for Energy and Utilities.

Navigating the Transition to Green Energy: Recruitment Trends for Energy and Utility Employers [Infographic]

Posted on by nfuqua

The energy and utilities industry is in the process of a massive transition as providers move to green and renewable energy sources and adjust to changing energy use patterns across the globe. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, which increased the incentives for energy-transition-related investments and core renewables. In EMEA, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has spurred a faster transition to renewables, according to the UK Climate Envoy.

This growth has left a massive talent gap, especially in an industry with an aging workforce. Talent acquisition leaders in the energy and utilities sector need to understand the forces shaping the recruitment landscape to remain competitive.

CHECK OUT THIS INFOGRAPHIC FOR INSIGHTS TO HELP YOU NAVIGATE THIS GREENING INDUSTRY.

The Recruitment Handbook for Energy & Utilities

Posted on by akessler

The Recruitment Handbook for Energy & Utilities

The energy and utilities industry is undergoing a massive transition as providers move to green and renewable energy sources and adjust to changing energy use patterns across the globe.

This means the sector is facing a unique set of talent challenges. In many areas of the globe, energy job growth is outpacing the rest of the economy. At the same time, the workforce is aging, creating a massive talent gap. In fact, according to McKinsey, the massive growth in solar and wind projects expected by 2030 will make it almost impossible to staff these projects with qualified development and construction employees as well as operations and maintenance workers.

Now, talent leaders need to think big—not just to attract more and younger workers, but to reskill workers in the shrinking fossil fuels industry and plan for the future.

In this handbook, you’ll learn:

  • Global trends driving the need for energy and utilities talent
  • Strategies for overcoming challenges in your energy and utilities hiring programs
  • How partnering with an RPO provider can help

Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

Posted on by edyson
Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

Talent Consulting and Strategic Sourcing Support for Business Critical Roles

PeopleScout helped this waste disposal company source, attract and hire drivers, administrative roles and technicians with RPO, recruitment marketing campaigns and compliance support.

16,000 annual hires targeted
957 offers made over two career day events
38 % improvement in key SLAs in just 30 days

A leading waste disposal and environmental services company faced significant challenges sourcing, attracting and hiring talent for vital full-time frontline roles including CDL drivers, technicians and administrative roles.

Scope and Scale

As a result of continuing skills shortages in high-demand roles, the client found it increasingly difficult to source talent with the required skills, credentials and experience to fill business-critical roles. The client required a full-cycle RPO solution to support its internal team in making 16,000 annual hires across North America. What’s more, the client sought a consultative partnership with ongoing strategic guidance and best practice implementation across the client’s talent sourcing program.

Situation

PeopleScout has partnered with the client for nearly 14 years supporting full-cycle, end-to-end roles and recently, the client required additional support for partial-cycle hiring. PeopleScout deployed a flexible RPO solution to source and deliver a continuous slate of qualified candidates into the client’s talent pipeline. PeopleScout also provides the client with recruitment marketing support, detailed talent market insights and expertise on program compliance.

Solution

  • PeopleScout’s team executes talent sourcing strategies, provides guidance on how to tap into talent channels and helps the client develop grassroots recruitment marketing campaigns to reach the right candidates.
  • PeopleScout developed a custom SLA dashboard and performance reporting via Affinix® Analytics which highlights roles that aren’t getting as much traction and optimizes channel usage and ad spend accordingly.
  • With the additional scope, PeopleScout ramped up its team of 47 to 284, with specialized global support spanning India, Poland, UK and the U.S.
  • PeopleScout Talent Advisory team conducted a two-phased research project, including an exhaustive candidate persona framework based on interviews with the client’s current employees, for insight into their talent audience to develop highly targeted creative and messaging.
  • PeopleScout created a new employer branding and recruitment marketing strategy, and dedicated marketing experts from PeopleScout manage all the client’s social media accounts.

Results

  • PeopleScout’s team finds qualified candidates in niche skill sets despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting talent shortages.
  • PeopleScout’s full-cycle RPO solution targets an average of 16,000 annual hires for extremely difficult skill sets, improving business outcomes across the enterprise.
  • Implemented new channels including Indeed, Appcast, geofencing, social media and more which allow the team to instantly post jobs to multiple job boards at one time.
  • After just 30 days of launching the SLA dashboard, the client saw a 38% improvement in SLAs including the interview-to-offer ratio, candidate outreach timeframe and offer extension timeline.
  • PeopleScout helped with the planning and execution of two career day events with over 1,900 attendees and 957 offers made, resulting in two of the best career day events the client has ever had.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Waste disposal and environmental services company
  • INDUSTRY
    Utilities, Environmental Services
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory, Affinix
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    16,000
  • ABOUT THE CLIENT
    As a leading waste disposal company in North America, this organization has over 45,000 employees supporting over 20 million residences and businesses with their waste and recycling needs.
Let’s Connect

Labor Market Trends Impacting Customer Service Hiring 

Posted on by akessler

In today’s tumultuous labor market, where some industries are slowing down, customer service hiring is still challenging across financial services, utilities, hospitality and retail. Organizations in these sectors often find themselves competing on customer experience, which is being impacted by the lack of staff.  

A consumer survey from PwC shows that the four most important factors for an exceptional customer experience are speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service. The key to excelling in these factors is happy, engaged employees. Organizations with highly engaged workforces are 21% more productive, outperform competitors by 147% and have customer loyalty rates 233% higher than companies without engaged employees. 

How can companies achieve this kind of success when they are struggling to fill their customer-facing vacancies? Talent acquisition leaders are getting creative to recruit and retain customer service and call center talent. Here are three trends in how companies are adjusting their approach to hiring and engaging a customer-focused workforce.  

Trend 1: Hiring for Potential 

As customer expectations have changed, so have the skills needed for top customer service talent. We recently conducted a poll in which talent leaders indicated that soft skills related to emotional intelligence are highly sought after. 

The most desired skills for customer service recruiting are communication, empathy and relationship building.

We’ve worked with several of our clients to implement a culture-centric approach for attracting talent. Instead of assessing candidates based on previous work experience, we advise evaluating based on whether they possess the right skills, values and behaviors to be successful in the role. We’re reimagining interviews and assessments to be more focused on soft skills and purpose as we help talent leaders and hiring managers embrace candidates coming from outside of their industry.  

Trend 2: Expanding Talent Pools  

With job openings outnumbering job seekers, organizations across sectors find themselves getting creative as they try to expand their talent pool. For some, this means looking into new talent audiences, like underrepresented group or military veterans, and putting programs in place such as apprenticeships to future-proof their talent pipeline.  

For many companies, the growth of remote work means that they’re looking outside of their physical call center locations to candidates across the country and even expanding to new countries. This requires an adjustment to your talent acquisition strategy to ensure your employer brand and recruitment processes are ready to handle dispersed talent.  

Trend 3: Adapting to Remote Work 

Remote work is impacting more than just where talent comes from, it also affects how organizations onboard and engage their staff. As some countries are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, customer service representatives are fielding queries from vulnerable customers which can be especially draining. Talent leaders are getting creative in how they connect with staff to ensure a sense of belonging and wellness—regardless of where the employee is working.  

Some contact centers have even adjusted their operational structure to work in “pods” which ensures agents—both in the office and remote—get the support they need to solve customer queries efficiently. Before, managers and team leads could walk around the call center floor and see when agents looked stressed. Remote working has made it harder to monitor employee wellbeing. Customer-focused leaders are investing in employee wellbeing, from training managers to catch the signs of burnout to offering wellbeing support programs.  

These are just a few of the labor market trends that are impacting how companies hire and engage talent. Clearly, organizations are finding creative and bold ways to invest in their employees to maintain a resilient and customer-focused workforce.  

9 STRATEGIES FOR SOLVING HIGH-VOLUME HIRING CHALLENGES

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Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

Competition for talent is steep, with high demand from contact centers, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs. Organizations across sectors are struggling to stand out in today’s competitive talent landscape, but for those talent leaders trying to meet their high-volume recruitment goals it feels like an impossible mission with soaring attrition rates, labor shortages and record job vacancies.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the top challenges you’re probably experiencing with high-volume recruitment and offer some ideas to address them.

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of applicants for similar openings or job types. It requires a tricky balance of keeping substantial quantities of job applicants moving through the recruitment process at speed. Plus, throughout the year it requires talent acquisition teams to scale up quickly to meet seasonal demand, like for holiday shopping periods or during peak travel times.

ebook

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

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The High-Volume Hiring Landscape

COVID-19 was a mixed bag for high-volume recruitment. Retail and logistics workers were less severely impacted by furloughs and layoffs due to the “front line” status of grocery stores and the growth in online shopping. However, other industries, including the travel and hospitality sectors, were hit hard as lockdown came into force. 

The following trends are shaping the high-volume recruitment landscape:

  • Increased Competition:
    Job openings have grown by a third since 2019, yet job seekers per opening have fallen by half. Plus, hourly employees who were let go during the pandemic may feel resentful of their former employers and may have moved on to other roles in other sectors.
  • Recruiters are Rare:
    As of April 2021, recruiter job postings on LinkedIn surpassed pre-pandemic levels. There’s a record number of roles to be filled and not enough recruiters to tackle the work, creating a series of knock-on effects for organizations.
  • Attrition is Skyrocketing:
    A massive 41% of the global workforce is considering quitting their jobs and only 20% report feeling engaged at work. In a recent survey, 55% of hiring managers cited retention and turnover as the number-one issue impacting their ability to hire—and their company’s ability to thrive.
  • Candidate Expectations Have Changed:
    Modern candidates have modern expectations which are more aligned with today’s consumer experience. They want digital-first experiences—on their mobile phone—and fast responses. In fact, they expect acknowledgement of their application immediately upon submission, first contact from a recruiter within 24 hours and regular updates on the hiring process in a timely manner.

High-Volume Recruitment Challenges and Solutions

In this challenging landscape, how can employers stand out from the competition and attract a large number of candidates quickly without sacrificing quality?

We’ll tackle three of the top challenges below and offer strategies you can use to get ahead.

Challenge: Ghosting and Candidate Drop Off are Rampant

“Ghosting”—not showing up with no reason given and often no communication from the candidate—is on the rise at the interview, assessment and even onboarding stages. According to an Indeed survey on ghosting in the workplace, 22% of candidates say they have accepted a job offer but didn’t show up for the first day of work.

Many organizations are not prepared to support the current pace of hiring. Candidates are much less tolerant of long recruitment processes and pauses in communication from employers, so organizations who can move the fastest are more likely to have their offers accepted. Plus, those doing high-volume recruitment are seeing an increase in candidates dropping out of the funnel even in the application phase. If applying for a position is too complicated or too long, candidates won’t complete it. Online applications with 45 or more questions have an abandonment rate of nearly 90%.

Solution:

An RPO partner can help you evaluate your recruitment processes and identify opportunities for efficiency. They may suggest steps you could eliminate or combine and introduce tactics to help reduce the time between steps to help you keep pace with candidate expectations and reduce ghosting. They can also take over time-consuming steps like reference verification and background checks, leaving your team to focus on moving candidates through he funnel faster.

RPO providers also have access to the latest talent acquisition technology which can automate parts of your process. Leveraging CRM technology enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), your RPO partner can nurture candidates through automated recruitment emails and even SMS messages. Texting is also a great way to screen candidates and automate interview scheduling, eliminating manual steps and accelerating your hiring timeline. By automating some of your candidate communications, you keep candidate engaged and reduce funnel drop off without increasing the workload for your recruiters and hiring managers.

Challenge: Desperation to Fill Vacancies Results in Reduced Quality-of-Hire

Increased attrition from the Great Resignation is leading to productivity loss. Many businesses have been forced to close stores due to lack of staff or because they don’t have enough staff to assist customers in a timely manner—in-store, in-branch or in the call center. The customer experience suffers which results in decreased sales and revenue loss, leading to some talent acquisition teams and hiring managers making bad hires out of desperation to fill vacancies.

With tight competition, time-to-offer has become a competitive differentiator. Often hiring managers may skip some interview or assessments steps in order to speed up their processes and keep talent in the funnel, leading them to compromise on quality-of-hire. Candidate without the right skills can also impact your customer experience.

Solution:

Challenge your assumptions or your hiring managers’ assumptions about the type of skills and background that are really needed for your roles. This will help you understand what experience is necessary for talent to have coming into the role and what can be learned on the job. We did this for one of our high-volume RPO clients that was struggling to hire for customer service roles. By interviewing their most successful customer-facing employees, we helped the brand realise that past customer service experience was not a predictor of future success, but rather employees stressed the amount of problem solving they had to do in their daily tasks. Not only did this expand their pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.

To support this, you should also rethink your candidate assessment so that it evaluates not just hard skills, like the ability to use a point-of-sale system, but also soft skills like empathy, attitude and work ethic, which are increasingly important for high-volume hiring. At PeopleScout, we’ve developed our whole person assessment model specifically for high-volume hiring. Through this we’ve helped many organizations create an assessment process that can identify and excite great candidates without extending their recruitment timeline.

Challenge: Leaning on Hiring Managers to Recruit is Leading to Burnout

With recruiters in short supply, hiring managers are picking up the slack in order to fill their vacancies. Unstructured, ineffective hiring processes and weak employer brands are putting the burden of attracting candidates and creating positive candidate experiences squarely on the hiring manager. The pressure only increases as they miss business targets due to lack of staff. In fact, 84% of hiring managers say they have hit or have come close to burnout because of hiring for their organization.

Solution:

A high-volume RPO solution helps augment your resources by acting as an extension of your in-house team. An RPO provider can handle everything at scale from sourcing and pipelining, screening, interviews, assessments, reference checks, offer management and more—whatever you need to free up your in-house recruiters and hiring managers to focus on more high-value tasks. Plus, RPO partners have particular focus on keeping hiring managers informed—whether it be ensuring they’re prepared for interviews or delivering feedback from candidates afterwards.

One of the biggest value-adds that RPO brings is experience with the latest talent technology innovations. An RPO partner can help you assess talent acquisition software to address all aspects of your recruiting process, from sourcing talent to creating a more efficient candidate experience. Your provider can show you how emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and predictive analytics can boost your speed and hire quality. Your hiring managers will love not having to spend so much time on administrative tasks.

Conclusion

The current talent market can’t be conquered with your old talent acquisition strategies. A high-volume RPO solution offers a range of approaches to help organizations attract, process and hire a large number of candidates. Whether you need to revamp your employer brand or to augment your in-house recruitment team, an RPO partner can help crank up your high-volume recruitment program.

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Competition for hourly talent is steep, with high demand from call centers, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs.

Talent acquisition leaders are facing the most tumultuous job market in recent memory with an impossible combination of soaring job openings and a labor shortage.

  • So, how do they compete for hourly talent when the competition is so fierce?
  • And how can they prepare for seasonal peaks?
  • More importantly, how can they increase speed without sacrificing on quality-of-hire?

Download our ebook to learn 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges. It’s a must-read for any talent acquisition team focused on solving critical problems in their high-volume hiring programs.

Vodafone: Overcoming a Powerful Consumer Brand in Graduate Recruitment

Posted on by jpatel
Vodafone: Overcoming a Powerful Consumer Brand in Graduate Recruitment

Vodafone: Overcoming a Powerful Consumer Brand in Graduate Recruitment

To overcome misperceptions about their mission, Vodafone engaged PeopleScout for employer branding and a recruitment marketing campaign to support its early careers recruitment program.

16,000 Applications Received, Beating our Target by 60%
23 % Increase in the Numbers of Female Candidates
27 Places Jumped on the Times Top 100 Rankings

Counterintuitive as it sounds, strong consumer brands can hinder recruitment. Applicants can get an idea of what to expect that doesn’t match the reality of the careers experience being offered. This was the case with Vodafone. For consumers, the organization is a high-profile mobile phone retailer. But, behind that perception sits a multifaceted tech innovator with a mission to make the future world a better place.

In order to achieve this, Vodafone turned to PeopleScout to help it become a youth employer of choice, because changing the future meant gaining the buy-in of those who would be influential within it for years to come.

Research

As part of our research phase, we took a deep dive into Vodafone’s future jobs strategy. The client wanted to overcome high levels of youth unemployment by providing up to 100,000 young people with a digital workplace experience at Vodafone. Plus, given that one-in-five young people say they feel under-prepared for the digital economy, the business set another ambitious goal to support 10 million young people with access to digital skills, learning and employment opportunities.

So, how could Vodafone attract Millennials, Gen Z and beyond? These generations are big achievers whose ambitions soar higher than working in mobile phone retail. We needed an attraction strategy and recruitment marketing campaign that changed their audience’s perceptions about Vodafone and all the different kinds of careers—and impacts—they could make there.

The Brief

Vodafone asked us to create a campaign that would spark conversations and stand out as part of their instantly recognizable brand. They needed to generate 10,000 applications to fill 150 graduate roles and 100 intern/industrial student placements across the business. Plus, the overarching goal was to change misperceptions of Vodafone, showing it as a major tech company, not a retailer, and build its reputation as a youth employer of choice. Importantly, we were asked to reach a more diverse audience and increase female applications.

Audience Insights

Of our target audience, 90.4% regularly used social media. On top of this, 91% of all social media users access channels via mobile. So, we developed a mobile-first, social media friendly campaign. Further research revealed that many students with the right background and personal qualifications were put off from applying due to a lack of confidence. So, we needed a message that was bold, relatable and empowering.

Just as important as the audience insights were the strategic considerations. Candidates are also customers. When buying products, they expect a streamlined, user-friendly, friction-free process, and they had the same expectation when making career decisions. So, we made every touchpoint (especially the application) as slick and easy as possible.

No contemporary attraction approach can be just about advertising. Long-term connections are far more powerful. So, central to our strategy was to set Vodafone up to engage in conversations and initiatives with high-potential university students throughout their full university lifecycle. In short, the strategy was to start on day one, not year three.

The Core Message

Our message, #GenerationPossible, aimed to capture the spirit of change and possibility and draw on the opportunity young people have to make an impact on the world for the better. Our visual approach used photography that reflected our target audience combined with bold headline statements.

Social media and career site content featured current grads and interns sharing their advice for the next generation of Vodafone employees, with a #GenerationPossible video at the heart of this campaign. Our six-month social media strategy for mobile consisted of 104 social posts with 20 mini-videos/GIFs. We posted, tracked and analyzed this content on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Get to Know Us Videos

Our research had identified that our target audience felt like they weren’t good enough or lacked the skills to take on these roles. So, we created a series of videos featuring current Vodafone graduate recruits and interns. Filmed in and around Vodafone’s main campus, these videos gave real-life insights into what they could expect when it came to work, wellbeing, social responsibility, innovation, the assessment center and the interview process.

Campus Events

Away from social media, we built a series of 41 on-campus events to connect students directly with Vodafone employees. We carefully chose our campuses based on those with the highest female-to-male ratios for tech degrees, as a way to help us drive up female applications.

Results

The campaign comfortably exceeded Vodafone’s expectations.

  • We generated over 16,000 applications – beating our target by 60%.
  • We increased the number of female candidates by 23%.
  • We increased Instagram impressions by 89.3% (post-campaign vs. pre-campaign).
  • We saw 1.5 million Facebook impressions.
  • We gained 6.8 million impressions on organic posts on LinkedIn.
  • We created a hyper-targeted paid Facebook campaign which produced 390,510 impressions and 2,541 clicks – all from the target audience.

These numbers are backed up by audience sentiment. We improved Vodafone’s reputation as an employer significantly, jumping 27 places in the Times Top 100 rankings. As a result of its success, Vodafone asked us to develop the concept for their apprentice campaign audience and roll it out through a new assessment process design.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Vodafone
  • INDUSTRY
    Telecomms
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Talent Advisory
  • ABOUT VODAFONE
    Vodafone is a British multinational telecommunications company. They provide connectivity and digital services for over 300 million people to work, learn, stay in touch with friends and family, access healthcare and more.
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