Disability and Brexit – failures and opportunities for recruitment

October 22nd, 2018 | Industry News

According to the UK’s Recruitment Industry Disability Initiative, 70% of employers don’t know where to find disabled talent and only 11% of HR professionals are ‘confident’ that they can locate and recruit disabled candidates.

As our next piece reveals, this is a major failure of recruitment for two different reasons:

• Ethically – the failure to recruit and utilise talent, regardless of ‘ability’ weakens an organization, can damage confidence of employees (particularly Gen X and Z, who are much more inclusive and non-abilist than their predecessors) and weakens brand reputation
• Economically – as the UK struggles with talent acquisition in the run up to Brexit, failure to identify talent and to retain it, particularly at the senior level, leaves businesses open to a reduction of their skills and experience base and a diminution of the competitiveness in the marketplace.

The best recruitment software for agencies is both sensitive to these issues and able to present candidates based on their talent and relevance to the role. Good recruitment CRM software also maintains relationships with such candidates, allowing employers to appreciate their development and experiences, giving a rounded appreciation of what candidates can bring, rather than a concern about what they might require.

The Brexit fault line for recruitment

Increasingly, recruitment consultants are being asked to help employers rejig job descriptions, revise benefit packages and rescale salaries to remain competitive in the fight for overseas applicants. Given this increased consulting role and the demands it makes, agencies are recognising the need to devolve more responsibility to online recruitment software so that they can focus on relationship building and advising their clients.

A recent LinkedIn study shows that more than a third of recruitment agencies have seen a decrease in demand from the banking, construction, education, healthcare and manufacturing industries when it comes to international hiring and that core European markets such as France, German and the Netherlands have all become less likely to use UK based recruitment consultants for their international hiring needs. The same LinkedIn study says that nearly 40% of European candidates have expressed reluctance to move to the UK.

Recruiting software that can tailor offerings to each potential candidate is likely to be the future of recruitment, whatever the future of Brexit. Knowing candidates well through recruitment database software, and being able to highlight key parts of a recruitment package that will appeal to that candidate could make all the difference. So successful agencies will find the balance between knowing business clients and understanding candidates and to do that they need recruiting software that gives them time and space to build relationships in both directions.