What responsibilities do employers and recruiters have?

July 19th, 2021 | Industry News

It’s a good question, especially when it comes to recruitment. This week we’re highlighting two very different recruitment issues, to explore how technology can help, and where it can’t.

Finding talent

In a recent article in The Engineer, Natalie Desty, Director of STEM Returners for the Royal Academy of Engineers, points out that the demand for engineers will massively outstrip supply in the next couple of years. With an expected demand of over 180,00 engineers annually, it’s expected companies will need to double recruitment of apprentices and graduates.

However, there’s a group of potential candidates who could be ideal for this gap, and recruitment software could help locate them. They are the already trained professionals who are on a career break. Unbelievably, these excellent candidates struggle to obtain interviews because of outmoded recruitment processes that keep them from the shortlist. Recruitment database software can be helpful or harmful – if it’s used to ‘weed out’ anybody whose experience is more than a couple of years old, then it’s missing this talent pool, but the best recruitment CRM doesn’t exclude such candidates, instead it flags them for consultant follow-up, for a call or meeting that explores why they’ve been out of the industry, how long they’ve been trying to get back to work and what they’ve done to update their skills outside the workplace; for example many excellent candidates have upgraded their computing skills in their own time, to ensure that they are able to hit the ground running. The idea applicant tracking system UK would recognise this approach and communicate it to employers.

Supply chain clarity

Sophie Zinser, a Schwarzman Academy Fellow in the Asia Pacific Program and Middle East North Africa Program at Chatham House in London, recently wrote an article for the Council on Foreign Relations which highlights the opportunity to focus on more transparent overseas hiring. Aimed primarily at an American audience there are still good lessons for us all in what she says. Highlighting two exposés: Topglove in Malaysia refusing to pay migrant workers and confiscating their passports and Boohoo clothing company in the UK paying overseas workers just £2.90 a day, she reveals that recruiting software can be used to spotlight where the 24.9 million people who are victims of forced labour are actually working.

Garment, packaged food and other consumer goods are all substantial labour forces that recruiters may find themselves involved with. Technology such as web based recruitment software, properly applied, can help reputable recruiters using online recruitment software to identify other downstream recruiters who might be violating worker rights, either deliberately or inadvertently. This can be done by establishing simple factual evidence like; whether the worker has possession of his or her own passport, daily pay rates as reported by agency and by individual worker etc. Such information allows a good recruiter to avoid exploitation and challenge suspicious recruitment actors so they don’t themselves end up with the wrong kind of reputation.