When you think about the future of the workforce in Germany, you have to think about demographics. For over 30 years Germany’s population has stayed at 80-84 million, what has changed significantly is the age of the workforce.

The future of the workforce in Germany

Lead author
Brett O’Connor Client Director, EMEA, AMS

Contributors
Ute Neher Head of Executive Engagement, Indeed.com
Heike Lipinski Client Director, AMS

When East and West Germany reunified in 1990, around 1.2 million Germans were born each year. Now, it’s nearer to 900,000. Around 10% of the population is aged 15-24, which has fallen from 16-17% in the mid-80s. This means that it is increasingly difficult for companies – both big and small – to fill job roles with the talent required.

In fact, there are currently 1.7 million unfilled jobs in Germany, with critical labour shortages across all industries. With such an ageing population, if the country doesn’t bring in skilled people in their 20s and 30s soon, they’re going to face huge talent shortages for years to come. By 2030, Germany could have 5 million fewer workers than it does today to which automation cannot compensate.

The need for new talent

The most pragmatic solution that is going to address the challenges is increasing net migration, which before COVID-19 was just over 300,000 people per year. This is a similar amount of people that migrate to Canada and Australia each year, yet with smaller populations there is a vastly greater demographic and economic impact than in comparison to Germany.

The current German federal government is determined to bring in more immigration, to which the challenge is the attractiveness of Germany to global talent. Changes have been proposed to visa regulations and opening dual citizenship for people from outside the EU. However, a key challenge is mastery of the German language. It is not a global language, therefore English-speaking business cultures have the edge in attracting global talent be it Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, the US, or Singapore – all vastly easier countries to integrate into when compared with Germany.

To combat this, some German companies have adopted English as the first language – especially in IT departments. This is particularly prevalent in fintech and start-ups, which are more international in nature. For example, N26 the market leading German mobile bank has adopted English and French as its internal language, which helps them to bring in international talent from the US, South Asia, and other regions.

However, this doesn’t work in all industries. One of the benefits, yet also a challenge, is that Germany has one of the world’s most highly advanced and unique vocational training systems. Germany not only makes products – engineering, pharmaceutical, biotechnology – but it also designs and produces the capital equipment that makes those products giving it a unique place in the global supply chain market.

Changing how those organisations operate is not easy. One multi-national engineering company AMS partnered with, had an executive board who wanted to bring in more English-speaking talent. However, they found that their engineering leadership teams weren’t comfortable speaking in English. More importantly, their customers weren’t comfortable speaking in English.

When you’re setting up a high-technology manufacturing facility in Germany, it is not practical to do this just in English. A reliance on support from the local community and the vocational education system – would be a very challenging transformation. Tesla has adopted a dual running system of German and English-speaking shifts, which may point the way to future ways of working for some production and assembly roles.

What talent wants is changing

The second challenge for these types of organisations is that the changing demographics of Germany mean that 40% of apprenticeships went unfilled in 2021. Whereas these organisations might have had a significant number of applicants per role previously, they’re now lucky to get half of those – or even no applicants in some cases. This means that they can no longer rely on their employer brand to attract applicants.

Like other countries, Germany has a model that is seeing an increase in digitisation, automation and changing attitudes to what people want in life and work. The modern workforce is not so keen to commit to working their way up in one company for 20 years – especially when the work is often specialised.

Take two famous companies – Roche pharmaceuticals and Deutsche Bank. Roche is a family owned business and has been for 125 years. The current CEO started as a trainee, and so will the next CEO. Deutsche Bank’s CEO also started as a trainee. This mindset of lateral movements through an organisation is changing for many companies.

A need to do things differently

To sum up – the practices that have made Germany successful in the past are not going to be successful in the future. Germany has a world leading education system, scientific and academic employment market that other countries would strive for. There is however more work that needs to be done to accelerate immigration, integrate people into the community and workforce and make the country even more attractive because the best global talent has a choice.

The changing demographics across a range of sectors means that organisations will continue to have a limit on application numbers, so they need to work on brand, engagement, community and think very carefully about accommodating migrants into the workforce. It is less likely they will find the perfect candidate from a robust shortlist of choice, so companies need to be open to accommodating people from different backgrounds, life experiences and of different ages.

The last twenty years has seen the nature of work change. People want more balance in their lives, from remote working to reskilling and having different careers. Organisations need to allow people to bring more of their culture and themselves to work.

Finally, it is also about changing the mindset of how we operate. Organisations should consider a total transformation of their recruitment, engagement, induction, and work practices that are in place. Whilst, recognising that people now have significant choice in their careers.

“With the prospect of huge retirement and labour shortages in the upcoming years, organisations need to transform their attraction, retention, sourcing and recruitment strategies. They will need strong partners and new perspectives to master the challenge and to navigate the future of work. We still have untapped talent creating big opportunities for employers across the region who are ready to change their mindset, build on DE&I and transform their workforce”, comments Ute Neher, Head of Executive Engagement at Indeed.com.

This isn’t a new topic for Germany, it has been widely discussed for decades. However, Germany should be confident about its potential to succeed in the future of work – but it needs to face these challenges head on.

If you find yourself facing these challenges please contact us here.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

Lead author:
Brett O’Connor
Client Director, EMEA, AMS

with contributions from:
Ute Neher
Head of Executive Engagement, Indeed.com
Heike Lipinski
Client Director, AMS

The war for talent is raging.In September, a record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs, according to the US Labor Department. That was after 4.3 million people left their jobs the month before, with more than 10.4 million jobs going unfilled at the end of the month.

View the story

How America’s talent wars are reshaping business

Contributors
Nicola Hancock
Regional Managing Director, Americas & Investment Banking, AMS
Ron Thomas
Managing Director, Strategy Focused Group

The war for talent is raging. In September, a record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs, according to the US Labor Department. That was after 4.3 million people left their jobs the month before, with more than 10.4 million jobs going unfilled at the end of the month.

Things haven’t gotten much better in 2022. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 11.3 million job openings were still on the market at the end of May. As organizations compete to fill roles, wages have increased, with average hourly earnings up 0.3% month-on-month in June and 5.1% on the year.

Some of America’s biggest institutions are facing the squeeze. Speaking on a Fortune panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bank of America CEO, Brian Moynihan, admitted that the war for talent is on.

“Our attrition rate came down throughout the decade and dropped in half during the pandemic, but has come back up to where it was in 2019. Part of this is a natural recovery in attrition rates, but a real part of it is in the tightness of the labor market. A lot of people left the labor market and are not going to come back, even with a strong bid for their services,” he said.

“That’s the reality we’re going to be facing. We’re chasing that dynamic of not enough people working. In the US, the immigration issue is also heavily impacting this. Our population growth rate has fallen in half over the last decade and we just don’t have enough people now. It’s going to be a big bid for a while,” added Moynihan.

To combat this, Bank of America bumped its minimum wage to $22 a hour, equivalent to nearly $45,000 a year for full-time employees. It also expanded its stock awards program to employees who make up to $100,000 annually – nearly 97% of total employees – who previously received a one-off cash bonus. The move could cost the bank up to $1 billion.

Beyond salary

Other businesses are following suit, with those working in service industries just as likely to see a wage increase as those in offices. However, the labor market squeeze means that continuous pay bumps are not sustainable. Instead, organizations are looking for new strategies to recruit, upskill and engage their employees.

“While salary plays a role in attracting talent, it shouldn’t be the dominant piece of the puzzle,” says Ron Thomas, Managing Director at consulting firm Strategy Focused Group.

“Can you sell your brand and purpose? Can you tell the story of how you build a career in the organization? What success stories do you have? People today are looking to connect and be a part of something bigger,” he adds.

“Organizations recognize that they have to think differently about their talent strategies,” agrees Nicola Hancock, Regional Manager Director, Americas & Investment Banking at AMS. “There aren’t enough people out there to simply think about constantly buying in more talent. Instead, they have to think more holistically and start developing their own talent and retrain existing employees.”

Internal mobility

For Hancock, this starts with organizations being less reactive in sourcing talent and more strategic. Such is the competition for hires, that even the biggest businesses are having to rethink how they attract the people they need.

“Everybody is looking at their employee value proposition, even those organizations that haven’t had to traditionally rely on that. Just look at the big corporate players, across all sectors, they’re all leaders in their respective industries who have been able to rely on their logos to attract and retain talent. Now, they’re recognizing that they’re having to work a lot harder,” she says.

One way to do this is to focus on building talent from within. However, internal hiring isn’t the same as internal mobility, warns Hancock. Instead, businesses need to think about how they can be agile in moving talent around the business depending on strategic needs.

“Internal mobility is cheaper and creates better engagement. Internal candidates get to productivity quicker, understand culture and know who to collaborate with to succeed,” says Thomas.

There are other ways American organizations are looking beyond salary. Some are increasing employee flexibility – whether location, remote work or compressed work weeks. They’re re-examining the benefits they offer in a post-pandemic era, moving away from office perks to offerings around mental health and wellbeing, and they’re particularly looking at career development, training and reskilling programs.

Reskilling programs

Back in 2019, JPMorgan announced a $350 million investment in skills development and social mobility. The investment created training programs upskilling the bank’s workforce for changes in technology and business, while also forecasting future workplace skills to build opportunities for internal employee development. It also made it compulsory for incoming asset management and investment banking analysts to take coding classes.

This allowed the bank to refocus its skillset – JPMorgan sees itself as a technology group, not just a bank, with technologists now accounting for a fifth of the organization’s 250,000 plus workforce. However, such large-scale reskilling programs are the exception, not the norm, says Hancock.

“The skills gap has always been there and it has gotten worse during the pandemic. This means that organizations need to fundamentally rethink how they approach talent acquisition. With digitalization, the skills organizations need change much more quickly than previously and the idea of a job for life doesn’t really exist anymore,” she says.

“Fundamentally, businesses need to be more agile and think about talent acquisition differently. Those that do will gain a competitive advantage, as it’s no longer affordable to keep buying in talent as it becomes even more of a premium,” adds Hancock.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Nicola Hancock
Regional Managing Director, Americas & Investment Banking, AMS
Ron Thomas
Managing Director, Strategy Focused Group

Global travel restrictions, the impact of remote working and the growth of workplace technology means that the need for employees to be office-based is diminishing. However, it’s not just the office that employers are foregoing, with an increasing number of organisations looking beyond location and geography when it comes to recruitment. Welcome to the era of ‘borderless’ hiring.

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The boom of borderless hiring in the APAC region

Joy Koh
Head of Growth and Advisory (APAC), AMS
Siddharth Suhas
Head of Growth Initiatives and Partnerships (APAC), AMS
Michael Uhlmann
Senior Manager, RPO Solutions Design (APAC), AMS

While the pandemic has increased opportunities for employees used to working from home (WFH) to try working from anywhere (WFA), the concept is not a new one. Companies as diverse as Amazon, American Express and Siemens have adopted long-term work from anywhere policies, while Salesforce President and CPO Brent Hyder even called the 9-5 workday ‘dead’.

The benefits of being borderless

Another organisation that introduced a work from anywhere policy in 2021 was Swedish audio streaming service Spotify. It allowed its 6,500 employees to determine how often they worked in an office and even where the location they chose to work from (providing the company had operations there).

It also revamped how it set salary bands, setting them by country rather than city or region, encouraging employees to move within locations.

The result? One year on, Spotify has seen attrition rates fall – 15% lower in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the same quarter in 2019 – and diverse representation grow. In Europe, the streaming platform has grown its operations beyond its Stockholm headquarters into Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. At the same time, its location flexibility in the USA has seen half of hires come from cities outside its main US hubs of Los Angeles and San Francisco, helping it to meet diversity targets.

Growth in APAC region

In the APAC region, many organisations are choosing to hire from geographies or locations beyond their headquarters too.

A survey by global banking giant HSBC found that 40% of companies are encouraging more flexibility around the location or office employees work from over the next three years, with more than a third (36%) increasing the number of international remote workers they employ. Companies in India (51%), China (48%) and Australia (47%) had the greatest appetite for borderless workplaces, according to the Future of Work survey.

Meanwhile, at Indian IT services consulting giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), CEO Rajesh Gopinathan has plans to make 75% of the company’s 450,000 employees fully remote by 2025, reducing its global carbon footprint by 70% compared to a decade earlier. COVID-19 offers an opportunity to ‘leapfrog us into a new model’.

So what is driving cross-border hiring in the region?

“A lack of talent in the market and organisations fighting for the same talent, coupled with border closures due to COVID-19 limiting relocations, means many organisations have been forced to think about increasing borderless hiring programmes in the past year,” says Joy Koh, Head of Growth and Advisory, APAC for AMS.

“Secondly, companies are increasingly recognising that diversity is important to innovative and successful teams. It’s not just about diversity of location, but also the diversity of thought and problem-solving that people from different backgrounds bring. Companies are realising that a diverse workforce strengthens the organisation,” she adds.

Countries with the greatest appetite for borderless hiring

Australia

China

India

Three things companies should be doing to capitalise on borderless hiring

The way companies post jobs, screen resumes, make offers and onboard hires needs to change in the face of borderless recruitment. Furthermore, company culture is evolving as we move away from office-based organisations to remote ones. So while borderless hiring opens up new and exciting talent pools, it’s important to remember that the way these employees interact and engage with your business is also different.

To succeed, organisations need to think about the following:

Be aware of compliance and tax issues
Hiring employees from different geographies may mean a change in how organisational and employee taxation is calculated. Structuring globally compliant payrolls or industry-specific issues always requires detailed analysis before you go borderless.

Understand culture and how to engage remotely
While the pandemic has helped many organisations develop employee engagement programmes remotely, borderless hiring requires you to take this up a level. How are you going to build teamwork and a sense of belonging if employees never meet face-to-face? How are you going to ensure that those working remotely have the same opportunities as those in office? How will your culture evolve to be inclusive of people from new geographies and locations?

Plan for growth
Borderless hiring provides an opportunity for rapid growth, but businesses need to be prepared for this eventuality. If you suddenly find you have several hires in a region, are you prepared to set up regional hubs to facilitate more efficient work? Should this affect where you look to hire from? Prepare for borderless hiring to be a long-term strategy, not a short-term solution.

Siddharth Suhas, Head of Growth Initiatives and Partnerships APAC at AMS agrees that the combination of closed borders, tighter international talent mobility and dwindling local talent pools has forced businesses in the region to look further into borderless hiring, as well as outsourcing. However, it is the scope and speed at which borderless hiring is taking place that makes it a trend worth following.

“As with any new emerging talent channel or phenomenon, APAC is very much at the forefront and leapfrogging other regions. Tech hiring in particular, followed by certain operational and functional roles seem to be paving the way. What is different is that it is not just teams, but also leadership roles that are now being looked at with no location barrier,” says Suhas.

“It’s also probably one of the few times when both ends of the employer spectrum – big multinational companies and startups – are following and leveraging the trend. They might be doing it with different EVP spins, but the truth is borderless recruitment is now a very key part of hiring strategy,” he adds.

What this means for recruiters

Borderless hiring opens up a new set of challenges for recruiters and hiring managers used to more traditional recruitment methods. Historically, recruiters would be assigned to specific sectors and geographies. Now, they need to cast their net wider meaning a greater need for data analysis and automation to improve the efficiency and impact of the profession as search goes global.

There are also compliance and tax considerations – both corporate and individual – to take into account. However, one of the biggest shifts is a need to focus on cultural fit over skillset.

“Because borderless hires are not in the office, you can’t engage with them in the same way you used to,” says Koh. “It’s really important to screen them for cultural fit, so there is a sense of belonging and engagement. Someone sitting in a different country who doesn’t get to meet colleagues face-to-face can be at a higher attrition risk.”

However, companies thinking about borderless hiring can lean on the remote working experiment of the pandemic for ideas when it comes to culture, argues another AMS colleague.

“Companies have experimented with different strategies to engage staff whilst working remotely. We’ve seen some of the best organisations have adapted their approach and culture to almost a remote working first mindset. Although touch points between employees are less frequent, they can be more meaningful as organisations take the time to build connections and culture,” says Michael Uhlmann, Senior Manager, RPO Solutions Design APAC.

This requires a reset of traditional hiring practices. Is your organisation ready to make the change?

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Joy Koh
Head of Growth and Advisory (APAC), AMS
Siddharth Suhas
Head of Growth Initiatives and Partnerships (APAC), AMS
Michael Uhlmann
Senior Manager, RPO Solutions Design (APAC), AMS

Jim Sykes – Sector Managing Director, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences and Professional Services, AMSChip Holmes – Managing Director, Client Services, AMSCeline Raffray – VP Talent Acquisitions, BMSBeth Keeler – Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, Merck

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Closing the US pharmaceutical industry’s growing skills gap

Jim Sykes – Sector Managing Director, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences and Professional Services, AMS
Chip Holmes – Managing Director, Client Services, AMS
Celine Raffray – VP Talent Acquisition, BMS
Beth Keeler – Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, Merck

The world is facing a talent crisis. In the US, there were almost two jobs available for every unemployed person in July, with wage inflation rampant and the Great Resignation making it even harder to keep the talent that organisations are able to bring in.

One industry facing particular skills shortages is the life sciences and pharmaceuticals industry. Buoyed by rapid investment and hiring during the pandemic – as the sector ramped up manufacturing to deliver life-saving vaccines to millions of people – life sciences has nevertheless faced long standing challenges in bringing new talent and skills into the sector.

Back in 2017, industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) warned that the US would need to hire 3.4 million employees to meet demand in life sciences and pharma by 2025, but that 60% of those jobs would be vacant due to skills shortages, a lack of effective education policies and increased competition for talent from other countries.

Skills mismatch

By 2020, a McKinsey & Co report into future pharma workforces concluded that 80% of pharma-manufacturing companies were reporting a skills mismatch, with the pace and scale of technological disruption key.

“Manufacturers are introducing advanced technologies, automating and digitising processes and applying advanced analytics to data. Pharma is also facing its own disruptions – for example, new business models (such as direct-to-customer sales and personalised medicine) and new product modalities,” suggests the report.

This reflects what Celine Raffray, VP Talent Acquisitions at BMS, sees in the modern day market.

“Like all companies in the life sciences sector we’re feeling the competitive nature of the jobs market, particularly for scarce skills such as digital or cell therapy. Whilst BMS has an incredible brand to leverage in order to acquire the best talent, I am very aware the challenge will only get greater in the coming years,” she says.

“As such, I see the need to be more agile and flexible and turn to innovative or inhouse solutions such as upskilling and reskilling of staff, enhanced internal mobility and the need to take a skills-based approach to talent acquisition as being of great strategic importance,” adds Raffray.

So how can the pharmaceutical industry meet the twin challenges of digital innovation and a growing skills gap?

“Historically, the life sciences sector hasn’t done a good job attracting talent from outside the sector. Instead, it has had a very heavy reliance on hiring job ready candidates rather than investing in campus or internship programs,” says Jim Sykes, Sector Managing Director, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences and Professional Services, AMS.

“The challenge of this is that when you’re hiring job-ready candidates, you’re limited to headhunting talent from competitors. If you look at the market, you have increasing demand for pretty much any skillset, with attrition going up and unemployment going down. For me, the answer isn’t tactical, but rather it’s about more strategic approaches to how businesses approach talent,” he adds.

Sykes’ colleague, Chip Holmes, Managing Director Client Services at AMS agrees that the shortage of talent means that pharmaceutical companies have to rethink their talent strategies.

“For the first time, we have seen a greater willingness for talent to migrate out of the life science sector. Where organisations previously had attrition, it would usually be leaving one company in the sector to move to another. Now, we’re seeing people leave the industry altogether which is exacerbating the problems facing the sector,” he says.

New approach to talent acquisition

Changing the headhunting approach to talent means rethinking how pharmaceutical companies approach internal mobility, training and development and reskilling. Like other industries, more needs to be done in the life sciences to help existing employees update their skillsets to meet future demands – as well as engage them so that attrition falls.

However, actually creating effective reskilling programmes is still a challenge.

“A client of mine was going through a significant restructure. One therapeutic area was reducing significantly, while another was growing massively. You had a hiring freeze here, and a big recruitment drive there, but there was very little investment in crosstraining talent to facilitate moves between these therapeutic areas. With big pharma, the business units can be so big in their own right that they miss the opportunities to retrain talent,” says Sykes.

Those in industry agree that new ways of sourcing talent need to be developed to meet demand – but that doing so could also help diversify the industry. Beth Keeler is Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition at Merck. She believes that transforming talent acquisition processes in the life sciences can bring new people into the sector.

“Hiring volumes at Merck, as with most companies inside and outside our sector, continue to be high and we certainly feel the competitiveness of the market when it comes to particular skills and geographies,” says Keeler.

“Amongst many initiatives, we are focused on transforming our talent acquisition processes to build long-term and diverse talent pipelines, creating more opportunities for those who haven’t been given a fair chance to gain qualifications for these roles. In doing so, we’re addressing the skills gap and building a better and more diverse organisation at the same time,” she adds. “We are proud to offer opportunities that provide purpose within a career through saving and improving lives while encouraging our employees to bring their authentic selves and various skill sets to our company to mirror the patients that we serve.”

Changing approaches to talent acquisition is one challenge – but how do you source people with niche digital skills who are in demand across different industries? As Sykes puts it – if your technological skills are such that you can work for tech companies like Apple or big banks like JPMorgan, pharmaceuticals is probably not going to be top of your list of employees.

Develop branding

The solution requires swallowing some pride and reasserting why the industry is a great place to work.

“In a lot of larger companies, there’s an assumption that everyone wants to work for them. The reality is that people now are less concerned with where they work than with what they do,” says Holmes.

“Organisations need to think about segmenting and differentiating their brand to target different groups of talent,” agrees Sykes. “The idea that you would go to market with a brand just as adept at hiring manufacturing talent as digital or clinical talent is nonsense. Tailor your brand to talk specifically to the talent you want to attract.”

“There is a golden opportunity now for Life Sciences companies. As a result of COVID, people now hold pharma and life sciences in higher esteem than ever before due to the amazing contribution to society that the companies have made. There is an opportunity to make a massive leap in attracting talent from other sectors.”

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Jim Sykes
Sector Managing Director
Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences and Professional Services, AMS
Chip Holmes
Managing Director, Client Services, AMS
Celine Raffray
VP Talent Acquisition, BMS
Beth Keeler
Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, Merck

Post-pandemic, most organisations are on a recruitment drive. However, the war for talent is fierce and businesses are having to get creative and look beyond salary to attract the right people. If your company is looking to hire more Gen Z talent, there are several things you’ll need to consider.

View the story

DEI & early careers:
Why it’s so important to start here

Terina Matthews-Davis
Client Director, Early Careers & Campus Americas, AMS

Jaymie Hinton
HR Operations Manager, AMS

Kahlil Greene
Online Educator and Senior, Yale University

Chief among these is understanding the desires, needs and interests of this generation. While it’s always dangerous to generalise about an entire population, it’s clear that Gen Z has different expectations about work and careers than previous ones.

Having seen older family members experience burnout, economic insecurity through recessions and poor work/life balance, they’re now demanding better from the companies they work for – better pay, better balance and a better impact on society and the environment.

Representation matters

This also means a more diverse and inclusive workplace. The business case for diversity has long been clear – a McKinsey & Co report found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above average profitability, while those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity were 33% more likely to be profitable – but businesses are still struggling to meet DEI targets.

However, for Gen Z, the debate around the merits of diversity are old news. As online educator and Yale’s first black student body president Kahlil Greene recounts in this piece for HBR:

“As a freshman, I attended an investment banking event for underrepresented minorities where a recruiter told us about the efforts of the company’s diversity recruiting team. The team struggled to get adequate buy-in and investment to build a more diverse and inclusive workplace. What finally broke the inertia was a robust business case that proved that diversity was good for profits.

“Although the recruiter didn’t intend for her story to be received this way, our big takeaway was: When it comes to DEI, that firm would only make progress if it was directly framed around profits, not because it was the right thing to do. It told me that they may not value ideas I bring to the workplace unless there was a direct link to revenue growth. I stopped considering working there after that session.

As one of my peers recounted, “If you care about your people, you care about what your people care about.”

Despite increased attention on diversity in the US, black and Hispanic early careers professionals remain 50-70% more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts, according to research from the Brookings Institution. So how can we change this?

“A lot of times when I’m conducting interviews, when I get on the screen and I’m a person of colour and a woman, people are excited. Why? One, I’m doing an interview at that level. Two, the person being interviewed is making a conscious decision in their head about this being a place they want to work because I’m in this role. They can see themselves progressing in the company – representation matters,” says Terina Matthews-Davis, Americas Client Director, Early Careers & Campus at AMS.

Matthews-Davis’ colleague Jaymie Hinton is an HR Operations Manager at AMS. As a military veteran, she understands what it’s like to be on the outside looking in when it comes to finding a job. Hinton argues that many young people have the same feeling when it comes to current hiring processes, but that things are beginning to change.

“Sometimes people don’t feel like they’re included and safe to be themselves, whether they’re gay, straight or ‘different’ somehow. I’m ex-military and I’ve had doors shut in my face because hiring managers don’t understand transferable skills,” says Hinton.

“Younger generations can feel distant from the hiring process. When I got out of the military 20 years ago, it was about who you knew. Now, you have different ways of applying for jobs and companies are looking to be more diverse. There has been a change in awareness,” she adds.

Representation matters

However, for Gen Z, the debate around the merits of diversity are old news. As online educator and Yale’s first black student body president Kahlil Greene recounts in this piece for HBR:

As one of my peers recounted, “If you care about your people, you care about what your people care about.”

Be authentic – performative allyship
doesn’t work

When it comes to attracting future talent, it’s important to be authentic. Gen Zers aren’t falling for performative allyship, so simply sticking a Black Lives Matter poster in the window or showing support on social media isn’t enough.

Organisations need to be truthful about where they stand and what they’re doing to make a change, especially if they’re currently struggling with diversity. The more authentic and open you are, the more early careers talent will support you.

“It’s 100% about calling out where you are as an organisation. It shows your authenticity, it shows you are working on it and it shows candidates they can be part of a change,” says Matthews-Davis.

It’s also about actively going out into the communities you want to hire from and meeting talent where they are. This might mean partnering with HBCUs, sponsoring societies or getting involved in community events. Early careers talent is big on altruism and being active locally. If you’re not building local relationships, you’re not getting in front of them.

As Hinton says: “Everybody is in the war for talent and everybody is in the war for diverse talent. It has to be about more than expecting them to come to you.”

Go beyond your usual hiring routes

Hinton and Matthews-Davis help clients looking to hire more diverse candidates create strategies that have an impact. Practically, this might be about providing tools that match roles to candidates, such as platforms like WayUp or RippleMatch. It might be about partnering with new colleges or institutions to look for interns. Ultimately, it’s about looking beyond your traditional hiring routes.

“People hire people who look like them. They hire from where they went to university, so it’s about being intentional and understanding your strategy. If you say you want 50% of your incoming class being diverse, but you’re mainly hiring from Stanford, Harvard and Notre Dame, you’re probably not going to reach your target if you look at the percentage of students of colour from those campuses,” says Matthews-Davis.

“When you go outside your target schools, you find amazing talent that is hungry. Students there know they aren’t part of the core target list, so they have to get in early and prove themselves. Companies are starting to think more broadly about where their talent comes from,” she adds.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Terina Matthews-Davis
Client Director, Early Careers & Campus Americas, AMS
Jaymie Hinton
HR Operations Manager, AMS
Kahlil Greene
Online Educator and Senior, Yale University

Be authentic – performative allyship
doesn’t work

As Hinton says: “Everybody is in the war for talent and everybody is in the war for diverse talent. It has to be about more than expecting them to come to you.”

Go beyond your usual hiring routes

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Terina Matthews-Davis
Client Director, Early Careers & Campus Americas, AMS
Jaymie Hinton
HR Operations Manager, AMS
Kahlil Greene
Online Educator and Senior, Yale University

The COVID-19 pandemic left retailers scrambling for talent as employees moved on to other industries with higher wages, better job security and improved benefits.

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Three ways retail organisations can use technology to engage and hire frontline workers

Contributors:
Jeanette Leeds
Managing Director, Hourly by AMS
Adam Lukoskie
Vice President, National Retail Federation Foundation

The COVID-19 pandemic left retailers scrambling for talent as employees moved on to other industries with higher wages, better job security and improved benefits. Many traditional retail employees simply left the job market altogether, meaning the war for talent in the sector is intensifying.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics more than 1 million of the 11 million jobs available in the US are in retail, with one retail industry figure speculating that applicant numbers had fallen by 40% in just a year. With nearly two jobs available for every unemployed person, companies are having to get creative in their hiring processes to get the volume of workers they need.

For many retailers, this has naturally led to a reappraisal of how technology can make hiring more efficient and effective.

“Like many other industries, retailers have faced an increasingly tight labour market in recent years. In order to compete for talent, many have integrated technologies to further attract candidates and streamline the overall hiring process,” says Adam Lukoskie, Vice President at National Retail Federation Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the world’s largest retail trade association.

“From advertising on social platforms such as TikTok, to enhancing the user experience with clear and frictionless job applications, along with convenience factors like conducting interviews virtually and extending job offers earlier in the application process, retailers are creating more opportunities for people of all backgrounds to quickly secure roles in an industry that offers tremendous growth potential,” adds Lukoskie.

Enforced online shopping during the pandemic has also shifted the dial on digital transformation in the sector, with customers trialling new ways to shop.

A McKinsey & Co report found that 10% of UK shoppers tried grocery delivery during the pandemic, with 12% expecting to shop less at non-essential stores post-lockdown. The same report predicts that a third of all tasks in retail will be affected by technology by 2030. The seismic shift in how we shop means that recruiters are having to contend with both a shortage of currently available talent and the need to build in skills of the future.

“What big retailers tell me is their biggest problem is getting enough people to fill jobs. The supply of people and talent isn’t enough to fill available roles. The second part is about attrition. How do you keep people once you get them?”, says Jeanette Leeds, Managing Director Hourly by AMS.

For retailers, the competitive nature of the labour market is pushing them to streamline their recruitment processes, introducing artificial intelligence and automation into the early stages of hiring to help talent acquisition employees hire more efficiently. In a candidate-driven market, speed is vital. But how can technology improve retail recruiting?

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Jeanette Leeds
Managing Director, Hourly by AMS
Adam Lukoskie
Vice President, National Retail Federation Foundation

In a tough, candidate-led jobs market, the traditional approach to talent acquisition is over. Employers are increasingly having to convince candidates that their company is the right one to join, offering a combination of purposeful work, development opportunities and values that match the individual

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It’s plain as day –
employer brand really is everything

Contributors:
Bryan Adams, CEO, Ph.Creative
Bill Cleary, Managing Director, AMS
Terina Matthews-Davis, Client Director, AMS

As with many other future of work concepts, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a catalysing effect on employer branding. Faced with a genuine global crisis, business leaders were forced to not only communicate their values, but demonstrate them.

Lockdowns, physical and mental health challenges and a potential recession meant that employers had to decide whether common company values like trust, honesty and integrity were things to live by, or just words that sounded good.

Now the Great Resignation has hit and employers are struggling to fill talent gaps. Differentiating yourself from your competitors is key when the talent pool is shrinking – and talent is watching.

According to Glassdoor, 86% of women and 67% of men wouldn’t join a company with a bad reputation. Half of all candidates wouldn’t join a company with a bad reputation even if they offered them a pay rise. On the flipside, three-quarters of jobseekers are more likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand and 92% of people would consider switching jobs to a company with an excellent corporate reputation.

For recruiters, employer brand is important too. The same report suggests that a strong employer brand can reduce cost per hire by as much as 50%, with a negative reputation adding an extra 10% onto each hire.

“Brand is a differentiator, so for companies it’s about how do I promote my brand and make candidates aware of it, but also meet them where they’re at,” says Bill Cleary, managing director, advisory at AMS.

“This might mean identifying the different personas of the candidates you’re trying to hire and differentiating your brand message along those lines. It’s about being custom to the individuals and personas you’re trying to attract,” adds Cleary.

Creating an employer brand

Bryan Adams is CEO and founder of North American based employer brand agency Ph.Creative. He believes that there are plenty of misconceptions around how organisations can create an authentic employer brand. To begin with, he advises companies to focus on three key components: reputation, proposition and experience.

“Modern jobseekers weigh a prospective employer’s reputation heavily in their decision to apply for a job or accept an offer, because they’re keenly aware of the impact it will have on their own reputation and the way others perceive them,” he writes.

Like Cleary, Adams believes reputation can mean different things to different employees, so it’s important to segment different personas. This leads onto proposition, which defines the employee-employer relationship. This establishes the expectations that the company has for employees and how they will be rewarded. The key here is honesty – a mismatch in expectations can lead to lasting damage on your brand.

Finally comes experience. Good employee experience is vital in building your reputation, providing excellent – and sometimes vocal – feedback on what it’s like to work at your organisation.

As Adams writes: “Much as satisfied customers can often make the best salespeople, satisfied current and former employees can be an invaluable source of candidate referrals, strengthening your ability to attract top talent.”

The graduate landscape

One of the most competitive areas of recruitment is in the graduate and future talent area – and it’s a demographic that is heavily invested in employer branding.

Terina Matthews-Davis is Americas client director, early careers and campus for AMS. She believes that companies are having to be more creative and personalize their offerings to attract the next generation of candidates. It’s about giving students the opportunity to see places they wouldn’t normally get to go to on their own.

“In New York for example, instead of taking all interns to a Yankees or Mets game, companies are thinking ‘maybe not all our people are interested in baseball, so let’s give them a choice and split up our business leaders to go to different events/locations such as: Radio City Music Hall, backstage tour of a Broadway production, an event at the Metropolitan Museum Art, or even a guided tour of Central Park.’ It’s about giving them options to not only engage with the company, but also the city they’re going to be living and working in,” she says.

The candidate-driven market means that employers are having to temper expectations about when interns accept offers. Such is the volume of opportunities, that all candidates can be more selective about where they work.

“Companies used to ask interns to make decisions about offers immediately or within 2 – 4 weeks. In the current market, organizations have to be OK with interns shopping around for additional full-time opportunities, before making their final decision to accept or decline their intern conversion offer.” says Matthews-Davis.

To combat this, businesses need to up their engagement strategies. A starting point is to focus on young talent as mentors, giving prospective employees the opportunity to learn and hear from employees who have just been through the journey they’re starting.

Secondly, companies are recruiting from more diverse populations and colleges, doing away with the core school mentality of only recruiting from certain institutions.

Now the Great Resignation has hit and employers are struggling to fill talent gaps. Differentiating yourself from your competitors is key when the talent pool is shrinking – and talent is watching.

Creating an employer brand

Finally comes experience. Good employee experience is vital in building your reputation, providing excellent – and sometimes vocal – feedback on what it’s like to work at your organisation.

The graduate landscape

One of the most competitive areas of recruitment is in the graduate and future talent area – and it’s a demographic that is heavily invested in employer branding.

Secondly, companies are recruiting from more diverse populations and colleges, doing away with the core school mentality of only recruiting from certain institutions.

Finally, Matthews-Davis says companies are learning to invest in student populations over the long-term.

“When I was in-house building this population, we had a ‘keep warm’ policy. From when an intern accepts an offer to when they actually start can be nearly a year, so you need to keep them engaged so they don’t shop around.

“One way is to send them gifts. In certain sectors, it’s a badge of honor to have a duffel bag or vest with a company logo. So, companies are upping their game, sending out brands like Patagonia and North Face to keep engaged,” says Matthews-Davis.

This also provides employers with a chance to interact with future hires by surveying them on the sort of gifts they would like. By asking their opinion, brands can show this talent pool that their thoughts are valued, turning them into potential brand ambassadors as they show off their gifts to fellow students.

The challenge of this focus on employer branding is to match expectation with reality. Matthews-Davis believes there is a danger that entry-level talent could become ‘over-entitled’ and have unrealistic expectations around the speed of career trajectories. To combat this, she suggests that companies should provide mentoring from other employees explaining their career paths.

Ultimately, no amount of good branding can keep talent if the actual experience of working somewhere is different.

“What talent wants is true, authentic leaders that they can engage with. They want a balance of value-added work and development within the organization. Those things haven’t changed,” says Matthews-Davis.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:
Bryan Adams, CEO, Ph.Creative
Bill Cleary, Managing Director, AMS
Terina Matthews-Davis, Client Director, AMS

Finally, Matthews-Davis says companies are learning to invest in student populations over the long-term.

Ultimately, no amount of good branding can keep talent if the actual experience of working somewhere is different.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:
Bryan Adams, CEO, Ph.Creative
Bill Cleary, Managing Director, AMS
Terina Matthews-Davis, Client Director, AMS

Relevant, engaging, and thought-provoking content from industry leaders related to the world of talent and work.

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Promoting and retaining talent from within is one of the best ways to foster a more diverse and inclusive workforce. Facilitating internal mobility enables organizations to foster diversity on all levels of the organization by training and upskilling existing talent.

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How Career Mobility can drive greater diversity and inclusion – and is key to increasing retention

Contributors:
Jackie Ford, Professor, Durham University
Judy Ellis, SVP of DEI Advisory, AMS
Paul Modley, DEI Managing Director, AMS

During 2021, more than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Worker shortages are everywhere, with analysts from Goldman Sachs recently claiming the US is in the midst of its biggest talent shortage for 80 years – and that more jobs are available than workers can fill.

With organisations competing to fill positions and candidates fielding multiple offers, companies are being forced to massively hike salaries to ensure existing talent stays, while at the same time struggling to bring new hires onboard.

Issues like candidate ghosting – where hires cut contact with an employer or even fail to turn up on their first day, having found a better offer – are growing, with 28% of jobseekers admitting to ghosting and 8% simply not turning up, according to a 2021 Indeed survey.

Mobility as a tool for retention and driving diversity

One defence against the competing need for new talent and retaining existing employees is career mobility. Not only does it provide employees with opportunities for growth, development and reskilling, but it also can help drive another key metric for many businesses – greater diversity and inclusion.

In fact, mobility and diversity and inclusion leaders face similar challenges. Both are looking to attract the best talent and develop future skills capabilities, both are looking to fill talent gaps, and both are looking for new ways to engage and retain their best people. So how can talent leaders improve diversity and inclusion through career mobility?

“Research by JR Keller and others has shown that internal hires outperform external hires. Organisations have much more information about internal candidates than external ones, so businesses are increasingly thinking of their existing employees as ‘talent rich’ and looking at how they can utilise their skills in different roles,” says Judy Ellis, senior vice president of DEI, advisory at AMS.

“The problem is that internal moves and promotions tend to be a result of the network of the person looking to move. When you’re dealing with diversity, typically the more your dimensions of diversity separate you from the mainstream, the less networked you are and the less people are aware of your accomplishments,” she adds.

Combating this ‘who you know, not what you know’ culture requires being more explicit about the opportunities available internally and better understanding the capabilities of your existing talent.

This could mean creating a talent marketplace by posting all roles internally and looking at sponsorship of underrepresented high potential talent, placing them in specific talent programmes where they have access to senior leaders and their skills and accomplishments are exposed to new networks and opportunities.

It also means being aware of how your internal communications and employee engagement strategies impact different demographics. Two-way communication is key.

“I’ve seen issues with getting women and people of colour to apply for internal roles. In focus groups I conducted for clients, many saw internal postings as perfunctory, believing hiring managers had already chosen their desired candidate, so few believed in the process. At the same time, senior leaders were wondering why they had a lack of underrepresented applicants,” says Ellis.

“I found unsuccessful candidates often received no feedback about why they weren’t selected for a role. Therefore, when they saw the position filled by someone else, they determined the hiring manager had ‘pre-selected’ them. Failing to close the communication loop with unsuccessful candidates impacts them and everyone they talk to. Hiring managers should give specific feedback to candidates so they understand how to build their capabilities. While this may seem labour intense, it pays dividends to the individual and their network, instilling confidence in the overall process,” she adds.

Mobility as a tool for retention and driving diversity

It also means being aware of how your internal communications and employee engagement strategies impact different demographics. Two-way communication is key.

The problem is that internal moves and promotions tend to be a result of the network of the person looking to move.

Demographics are not homogenous

Professor Jackie Ford is professor of leadership and organisation studies director at Durham University Business School. With colleagues, she has just completed a three year research project into diversity and inclusion challenges in the UK retail sector, focusing on 70,000+ employer Marks and Spencer.

She believes that one of the biggest mistakes organisations make when implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives is to treat all groups as one homogenised demographic with the same needs and desires.

“Leaders sometimes make assumptions about people who present with particular characteristics, whether those with disabilities, older women or different ethnicities. They make assumptions about how to support them or what they might want, rather than just asking them,” says Ford.

This can disengage employees and lead to inconsistency between what diversity initiatives are trying to achieve and what they actually do.

Ford gives two examples from the study. The first involves older female workers, who were seen as both valuable sources of knowledge and experience, but also as coming to the end of their careers and unlikely to want to get involved. The second is around talent hired from competitors to modernise the brand, but who were blocked by senior leaders who were unreceptive to their ideas – despite hiring them for this very reason. Poor communication and a lack of transparencies around your procedures can very quickly hinder culture change.

“Don’t just look at people as one culture or demographic and don’t assume one size fits all. If you make assumptions about how people will behave, the danger is that is what they will become and you won’t change,” says Ford.

The role of leaders

Having a disconnect between employee value propositions and what you actually deliver can lose you diverse talent – so it is vital leaders set the right example.

“Organisations are working really hard to hire the talent they need, so it’s incumbent on all leaders to create an environment that supports diverse talent and matches what they were sold in the hiring process,” says Paul Modley, director diversity, equity and inclusion at AMS.

Doing so means hiring diverse talent with a view to progressing them through the organisation, not just getting them in the door. The opportunity to develop is the key to retaining all talent.

“When it comes to making your organisation more diverse, yes you’re hiring for a particular role, but you also need to be thinking about roles down the line,” says Modley.

For Modley, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, diverse talent needs to see progression pathways and role models in senior positions so that they know an organisation is serious about representation at the top level. Secondly, in a candidate driven market, progression means retention.

“All organisations are looking to hire diverse talent, so if they can see brilliant career mobility programmes, they’re more likely to stay with you. More importantly, if you’re selling the dream to candidates about the diversity of your organisation but they come in, look upwards and can’t see anybody like themselves, then the organisation has failed,” he says.

Some businesses are taking a very proactive approach to career mobility, with Modley detailing one organisation that set up an internal headhunting desk, where career mobility consultants were expected to understand the skills base of existing employees and actively encourage them to apply for internal roles.

While this might not be a cultural fit for most organisations, it does exemplify current market trends. In a talent scarce world, progressing the right candidates from within can improve employee engagement, motivation and reduce time to hire. Providing the right pathways for diverse talent gives businesses – and employees – the chance to finally make our management teams more representative. It’s the right thing to do.

Written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Jackie Ford
Professor, Durham University
Judy Ellis
SVP DEI Advisory, AMS
Paul Modley
DEI Managing Director, AMS

Demographics are not homogenous

This can disengage employees and lead to inconsistency between what diversity initiatives are trying to achieve and what they actually do.

The role of leaders

Having a disconnect between employee value propositions and what you actually deliver can lose you diverse talent – so it is vital leaders set the right example.

Doing so means hiring diverse talent with a view to progressing them through the organisation, not just getting them in the door. The opportunity to develop is the key to retaining all talent.

“When it comes to making your organisation more diverse, yes you’re hiring for a particular role, but you also need to be thinking about roles down the line,” says Modley.

Written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:

Jackie Ford
Professor, Durham University
Judy Ellis
SVP DEI Advisory, AMS
Paul Modley
DEI Managing Director, AMS

The Great Resignation has created an unprecedented wave of global employee turnover, with severe shortages in certain job roles leading to fierce competition for the best talent.

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Hire, train, deploy – brave new hiring strategies to face a brave new world

Contributors:
Dr. Kiki Leutner, Lecturer, Goldsmiths University of London
Michelle Hainsworth, Managing Director, AMS

The Great Resignation has created an unprecedented wave of global employee turnover, with severe shortages in certain job roles leading to fierce competition for the best talent.

In the US, nearly four million Americans quit their jobs each month in 2021 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with job openings at a historic high. As of December last year, there were just under two open positions for every unemployed person in the United States.

One area that is particularly oversubscribed is tech talent, with digital transformation brought about by the pandemic further driving demand. Amazon announced plans to hire 55,000 new people in the US and Facebook needs another 10,000 European tech employees to build out its Metaverse proposition. And yet there isn’t enough talent to go around. Germany alone needs to hire 780,000 tech specialists by 2026 to meet current requirements, while nearly 3.5 million cyber security jobs were left unfilled in 2021.

However, there is another sector facing huge talent shortages and bottlenecks in hiring people – and that’s recruiters, the very industry at the centre of solving the talent crunch brought about by the Great Resignation.

A dearth of talent

August 2021, there were more recruiter jobs advertised on LinkedIn than software engineer roles (364,970 to 342,586), with a 6.8 increase in recruiter jobs posted between June 2020 and June 2021. The data also suggests that hiring managers are increasingly swimming in the same talent pool when it comes to recruiter talent, with 59% of hires coming from a previous recruiting role, compared with 33% pre-pandemic.

Why? This is partly due to the number of talent professionals who were laid off during the pandemic coming back into new roles, but it’s also likely that the current hiring frenzy is seeing organisations stick to experienced recruiters who require less training, driving even fiercer competition.

As LinkedIn’s senior director of talent acquisition Erin Scruggs puts it: “Most of our new hires are coming from competitive offer situations where they were interviewing elsewhere and working with other companies’ recruiters.”

Making recruitment more representative

It is clear there is a significant and ongoing skills gap across all sectors including the talent space. Organisations that recruit inhouse are desperate to fill their talent needs while at the same time recruiters’ salaries are continuing to rise though there has been some softening here in recent months.

To help organisations meet this demand, AMS has launched Recruiter Skilling as part of the AMS Talent Lab offering, a new solution that helps businesses to build their inhouse recruitment teams by both identifying and hiring potential applicants, then provides expert training to ensure they succeed.

AMS provides applicants with ten weeks training in how to be a recruiter including a two week client specific training program to learn about their specific employee value proposition, culture, and systems. Once completed, the trainee works in the client environment but remains an AMS employee, who provide ongoing training and mentoring. The ultimate aim is for the individual to roll into the client’s inhouse recruitment team, becoming a permanent employee.

For AMS, one of the main aims of the programme is to open up recruitment to a more diverse field of people such as veterans and their spouses, older workers, returnees, people from different socio-economic backgrounds and varying minority groups. With this in mind, to become a successful future recruiter greater emphasis should be given to soft skills such as adaptability, business acumen, agility, and empathy.

In today’s ever changing world of work, it is imperative for a recruiter to demonstrate these core skills. Firstly, it importantly ensures recruitment teams are more representative of the people they are aiming to attract and ultimately hire, and secondly, the skills needed to sell a job are changing. And changing fast. More and more employees say they will only consider companies that have a purpose that resonates with their own values and belief systems. Policies around mental health and wellbeing as well as DE&I and sustainability / ESG activities are mattering more and more. Recruiters need to be able to sell a job, and be empathetic too. As a result, there is a new wave of recruiters coming in with a different skillset who will be able to close candidates more effectively and at pace.

The Great Resignation has created an unprecedented wave of global employee turnover, with severe shortages in certain job roles leading to fierce competition for the best talent.

A dearth of talent

In August 2021, there were more recruiter jobs advertised on LinkedIn than software engineer roles (364,970 to 342,586), with a 6.8 increase in recruiter jobs posted between June 2020 and June 2021. The data also suggests that hiring managers are increasingly swimming in the same talent pool when it comes to recruiter talent, with 59% of hires coming from a previous recruiting role, compared with 33% pre-pandemic.

Making recruitment more representative

Future skills

A recent Josh Bersin post entitled The Definitive Guide to Recruitment: Human-Centred Talent Acquisition looked at the skills a modern recruiter requires by surveying 600 companies. It suggests that recruiters need to move away from technical knowledge of job roles to softer, more rounded skills like collaboration, branding, and employee experience, ‘personalising candidate experiences’, ‘building authentic marketing to appeal to top talent’ and ‘flexing with changing business needs’. The modern recruitment professional is a strategic ally and influencer on business goals, it suggests.

Bersin’s research also advocates the use of technology to strengthen talent pipelines, though he admits most companies remain in the dark about how to effectively do so. Nevertheless, his research suggests that technology can drive key metrics.

“Companies that employ AI throughout their recruitment processes are four times more likely to boast a strong candidate pipeline. Likewise, those that leverage a variety of digital hiring solutions like online assessments, virtual interview platforms and pre-hire chatbots, are twice as likely to be able to attract and recruit the right talent,” he writes.

Dr Kiki Leutner is a lecturer in occupational psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and co-author of The future of recruitment: using the new science of talent analytics to get your recruitment right.

Like Bersin, she believes that technology can drive huge efficiencies in the recruitment process – and that the near universal use of video interviews during and post-COVID shows recruiters can adapt easily.

“There are two key benefits to recruitment technology in the post-COVID era. One is time to hire. You can communicate with candidates and hire much quicker using automated text messages, standardised online processes and game-based assessments.

The second is ease of application for candidates. When applicants have lots of opportunities to choose from, you lose them when you put them through hours of in-person testing or don’t respond promptly,” she says.

Strategic data analysis

Another important outcome from technology is the opportunity to reduce bias in recruiting, whether through gamified testing which is less stressful and more inclusive than panel interviews, or through machine learning aimed at removing human bias in selection processes.

“We’re seeing more companies use analytics in their video interviews or applicant tracking systems. If you have a platform all applicants go through, you can compare data to ask, ‘are we more diverse in applicants this year?’ The main goal is to get recruiters thinking about hiring in a data driven way,” she says.

This is a challenge that some are meeting better than others. “We still have a mindset where hiring managers think they are the best judge of character. Whether unconsciously or consciously, they still want to recruit the same mould of people,” says Michelle Hainsworth, managing director, for Tech Skilling at AMS Talent Lab.

Like the Recruiter Skilling programme, Tech Skilling takes individuals with adjacent skills and retrains them into new tech roles, before placing them with clients. Again, the aim is to diversify the sector and solve skill shortages, which has seen demand sky rocket.

“Recently I’ve heard a lot about candidates ghosting. They have so much choice that they don’t even bother to tell you they’re not turning up on day one after they’ve accepted the job. They’re getting multiple offers and buy-back from existing employers,” says Hainsworth.

The solution isn’t simply offering higher salaries, although they are yet to slow down. Rather, says Hainsworth, it’s also about organisations offering purpose at work, development opportunities and work/life balance – and recruiters knowing how to sell this. Candidate engagement and experience has never been more important.

“Wellbeing, mental health, social and corporate responsibility – all these things are becoming more important to people. I don’t think that those organisations that simply have a pay strategy will win people back long-term.

“It’s not just about getting people through the door, it’s about what you do after that,” adds Hainsworth.

Recruiters might be the first line of attack in getting talent through the door, but increasingly, they also have a part to play in keeping your best talent with you. Developing the skills needed to do so means looking beyond traditional recruiter profiles and developing a more rounded talent acquisition team. It’s time to be brave.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:
Dr. Kiki Leutner
Lecturer, Goldsmiths University of London
Michelle Hainsworth
Managing Director, AMS

Future skills

Strategic data analysis

“It’s not just about getting people through the door, it’s about what you do after that,” adds Hainsworth.

written by the Catalyst Editorial Board

with contributions from:
Dr. Kiki Leutner
Lecturer, Goldsmiths University of London
Michelle Hainsworth
Managing Director, Tech Skilling, AMS

Let’s make AI work for you.

An Eye on Tomorrow

Thinking about skills-based hiring?

The need for new talent

Image captions

There are 1.7 million unfilled jobs in Germany

The population aged 15-24 has fallen from 17% in the 80s to 10% now

By 2035, Germany is estimated to have 7 million fewer workers than today

What talent wants is changing

A need to do things differently

Image captions

Beyond salary

Image captions

Internal mobility

Reskilling programs

Image captions

The benefits of being borderless

Growth in APAC region

Countries with the greatest appetite for borderless hiring

Australia

China

India

Three things companies should be doing to capitalise on borderless hiring

What this means for recruiters

Skills mismatch

The US life sciences industry needs to hire 3.4 million people by 2025

80% of pharmaceutical companies report a skills mismatch

The US life sciences industry needs to hire 3.4 million people by 2025

80% of pharmaceutical companies report a skills mismatch

New approach to talent acquisition

Develop branding

Representation matters

Image captions

Representation matters

Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to have above average profitability

Companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity are 33% more likely to have above average profitability

But Black and Hispanic early career professionals are 50-70% more likely to be unemployed

Be authentic – performative allyshipdoesn’t work

Go beyond your usual hiring routes

Image captions

Be authentic – performative allyshipdoesn’t work

Go beyond your usual hiring routes

Image captions

Creating an employer brand

The graduate landscape

Creating an employer brand

The graduate landscape

Mobility as a tool for retention and driving diversity

Mobility as a tool for retention and driving diversity

The problem is that internal moves and promotions tend to be a result of the network of the person looking to move.

Demographics are not homogenous

The role of leaders

Demographics are not homogenous

The role of leaders

A dearth of talent

Making recruitment more representative

Image captions

A dearth of talent

Making recruitment more representative

Image captions

Future skills

Strategic data analysis

Image captions

Future skills

Strategic data analysis

Image captions

The US life sciences industry needs to hire
3.4 million people by 2025

The US life sciences industry needs to hire
3.4 million people by 2025

Be authentic – performative allyship
doesn’t work

Be authentic – performative allyship
doesn’t work