Lewis Hamilton and HR software – what’s the link?

July 29th, 2021 | Industry News

Everybody knows seven-time Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton, and his untiring advocacy for better access and representation for Black people. A new report called Accelerating Change: Improving Representation of Black People in UK Motorsport, might seem to have limited relevance to UK recruiting, despite being a worthy contribution to the debate – it actually it has strong recommendations for all organisations.

Recruitment database software is one of the tools that can be used for good in this area. As the report highlights, Lewis Hamilton was expelled from school for something he didn’t do – and with Black Caribbean students being 1.7 times more likely to be excluded than their white counterparts, one of the recommendations is that employers, especially SMEs – who might be too small to have their own HR teams and therefore use recruiters who in turn use recruitment agency software – should be imaginative in their approach. If Black students are more likely to be excluded, they are less likely to have traditional GCSEs. The best recruitment CRM can be used to look for equivalent skills, perhaps apprenticeship training, perhaps voluntary work, that reveal the true skills and capacities of the individual. The report talks about there being 4,000 UK motorsport companies, mostly SMEs. Where companies have to search through applications by hand, they may easily miss these candidates, while good recruiting software with wider parameters, will find them.

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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.

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Who should you trust with recruitment?

June 30th, 2021 | Industry News

It’s a serious question. Five years ago, every recruitment software blog was talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the ‘big disruptor’ for recruitment. AI was able to assess facial expressions during video interviews, screen resumes in milliseconds and was generally seen as the solution to every hiring problem especially ‘prejudice’ as we termed it then, as it was seen as belonging to the person who made the judgement. As an integral part of online recruitment software, AI was the future. It would offer the best recruitment CRM, tailoring responses to each candidate. It was foolproof.

And then, in 2017, Amazon stopped using an AI CV screener after discovering that its programme was biased against women. It had been systematically downgrading applications including the word ‘women’ and also penalising anyone who graduated from an all-female college.

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Forecasts become more-casts for the recruitment sector

June 21st, 2021 | Industry News

It seems almost impossible to begin a blog post these days without referencing COVID-19, and this one is no exception!

International IT – ramping up for a diverse future

Some sectors saw massive growth in the lockdown – IT is one of them. The current recruitment software trends in IT suggest a much more dispersed workforce (Tata consulting in India has stated that by 2025 only 25% of employees will operate from a designated workplace), recruitment is growing and the stagnation in both salaries and bonuses is being rapidly eroded by demand, and holistic hiring (AI psychometric evaluations, video task tests and interview tools etc) has become standard as a result of not being able to interview candidates in person. ‘Soft skills’ have come to the fore in international IT as more and more individuals are finding themselves in client facing roles, not least because there are fewer workplace based roles where one person handles clients while a dozen others take on the back-office tasks. Instead, most roles combine technical skills with people skills, and as a result, cultural fit and team-working are being viewed as essential requirements alongside qualifications and expertise. Decentralised international IT is also using SAAS recruitment agencies to reach out to more geographical areas, as it creates systems that allow people to work from home, meaning that concentrations of skills in geographic areas are rapidly breaking down.

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Recruitment roadmaps – post COVID

May 27th, 2021 | Industry News

The UK economy has weathered the second lockdown much better than expected, despite having the worst economic response of the G7 countries and the second worst in Europe (only Spain fared worse), the stock market rallied by mid February and unemployment has not risen as much as feared.

This has significant consequences for the recruitment industry. There may have be more finance on offer for apprenticeships and training schemes and fast track visa options but recruitment management software is tracking some challenging issues: work experience gaps, the collapse of many planned career progressions, especially in research, sales, the arts and hospitality where working from home just didn’t pan out and younger workers failing to get their expected exam results due to COVID-19 disruption.

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HR and Recruitment Agencies – BFF or Frenemies

May 14th, 2021 | Industry News

This subject has been aired on a couple of industry blogs recently, so we thought we’d lay out the pros and cons we’ve seen as recruitment software experts.

Working together is valuable because:

HR departments often don’t have the wider expertise they need. For example, recruiting software can parse translatable skills in a way that individuals often cannot. In addition, recruitment agencies often have deeper links into the wider business sector than HR departments do, which can be valuable in talent acquisition.

Analytics are essential. There’s often a combination of data that delivers the right result. An HR department has information about its own needs, strategies and internal systems while an agency uses recruitment CRM software to mine data on potential candidates and industry developments that can help define a position or benefits in a way that make it attractive to the best candidates.

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Recruitment on the road and from the ground up

April 26th, 2021 | Industry News

Recruitment agencies that make use of SaaS have been reporting a huge surge in recruitment in certain areas of retail… one of which is vehicle sales. More specifically, car sales, as the trade market seems to be taking a little longer to get back on its feet, although several industry professionals are suggesting that we might see a long-term upsurge in van sales, as people move from bricks and mortar operations to mobile ones, both because they are moving away from renting commercial premises as a result of the pandemic and because many furloughed/laid off individuals are looking at starting sole-trader enterprises such as dog grooming, massage, mobile coffee shops and handyman enterprises.

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Recruitment for cybersecurity and why you probably need a recruitment agency

April 8th, 2021 | Industry News

Cybersecurity recruitment issues

There’s a substantial talent gap in the cybersecurity industry, and that’s hardly news. What’s exacerbated the problem is that 2020 turned every functioning company into a technology company, and 2021 is causing many organisations to look at their long term plans and work out how much of their activity they want to keep entirely online. Recruiting software data reveals the truth – it’s not just e-commerce organisations that are seeking cybersecurity professionals. Organisations that are planning to keep their remote working capacity now they’ve found how easy it is are also using online recruitment software to try and find skilled individuals who can help them with issues like ransomware, phishing, and of course, GDPR.

Why such a problem? Partly because there’s a gap between the theory of taught cybersecurity and the on-the-ground (or in the cloud) needs of organisations trying to manage external threats and compliance issues. Narrow curriculums lead to candidates who lack a 360 view of their sector. Recruitment software UK specialists recommend looking at skills based events to recruit proactively and focusing on in-house training as part of the deal.

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Recruitment goes from strength to strength

March 29th, 2021 | Industry News

We all know it’s been an unbelievable 12 months for the recruitment sector. Agencies making use of SaaS (software as a service) platforms in particular have been able to observe the trends, mainly negative, that have shaped the past year in recruiting, but finally there seems to be blue skies above the clouds that have affected every industry. From the USA, comes encouraging news about temporary employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 9 out of 15 major industry sectors posted positive employment levels in February 2021. Highlights include the much needed 355,000 new temporary jobs in the Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism sector. On the other hand, a decrease of 86,000 jobs in education is evidence that there’s still a long way to go. Sadly, the Bureau agrees with everything that recruitment software is also saying – all 15 sectors are still employing fewer people than a year ago.

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How to improve your company’s productivity in 2021

March 9th, 2021 | Industry News

New research from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation claims that professional recruitment boosts UK productivity by £7.7 billion annually. However, the research also shows that while 52% of those consulted say that businesses are recruiting efficiently that leaves 48% who think more can be done to achieve effective recruitment. Online recruitment software has had a major impact on recruitment since the pandemic hit. By June 2020 37% of employees were working from home full-time and happy about it, and a further 32% hoped that the future would bring a better work-life balance by allowing them to work from home at least part of the time in the future. Happier workers are more productive, so this trend is likely to benefit both employers and employees.

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