The best recruiting organisations, and the best recruiters, put effort in to establishing open communication, sharing information, providing appropriate guidance, building confidence and even encouraging risk-taking in candidates. Seeking feedback on candidate experience – providing a platform for applicants to have their voice heard and the space to share their thoughts – supports this too. These are all strategic focuses that an RPO partnership can deliver.
At PeopleScout, we are particularly focused on advocating for candidates throughout the hiring process. I believe this is why we consistently receive high candidate satisfaction scores (like NPS) on the candidate experience we provide for our clients.
Creating Psychological Safety through Candidate Engagement
Applying for a job seems an obvious example of taking a personal risk. Candidates deserve the same level of support as employees; after all, unless your search is poor at least one of them is your next colleague, right?
If a talented candidate does not feel engaged during an application, assessment, interview or any interaction with a recruiting team, what is the result? An inability to express themselves, and their talents fully.
When that talent is blocked, or overlooked, who is at fault? The candidate, or the designers and deliverers of a recruitment experience that failed to consider candidate experience?
It our goal to create a candidate experience in which every candidate can bring their best self to the process and find a new position that will create value for the candidate and the client.
Rethinking Required Skills to Engage More Talent
Through our strategic partnerships, PeopleScout helps a wide audience of candidates think differently about their own potential and skills, and what value they might add to an organisation. That approach reaches and engages talent others might overlook.
Recently our team did some work with Defra to bring to life the purpose of Civil Service Success Profiles. Asking candidates to “show off the true you” is a long way from a job advert (or a recruiter sat behind it) seeking experience in the exact same role or sector as an essential requirement.
A quick question to consider: what do you really need to know about a job applicant? Biographical information, years of education, and even job experience are less predictively valid than other modes of assessment. You’ll get a much better indication of future success from behavioural- and skills-focused interviews and tests. One of our teams recently put together a case for removing CV screening from a customer care recruitment exercise based on this principle.
Here’s to all of them for helping people – particularly those struggling to access employment – to think about skills differently and to put that thinking at the forefront of assessment and recruitment. I’m particularly pleased to see Openreach represented here with the clear message:
“If people have got the right attitude, the right mindset, the right customer service and teamwork ethos, we can train them to be great engineers.”
That’s the spirit and confidence you want to see from a potential employer! I’m proud to say that PeopleScout worked with Openreach on one of its biggest ever trainee engineer recruitment drives. Our success hinged on candidate outreach – breaking down preconceptions of video interviews, better informing candidates and giving them confidence in the process.
RPO: Changing Candidate Engagement for the Better
As a leading, global talent partner for a diverse range of businesses, PeopleScout’s RPO solutions have long been designed to amplify employer brands with a recruitment approach that focuses on an enhanced candidate experience. The missing talent can be won by placing the employee experience at the heart of your talent strategy and I’m proud to say in Q1 2022 we are re-delivering hundreds of employees each month into consumer goods and retail sectors for our client partners in the UK, with fulfilment trending positively each month.
