I love that they have been able to capture both sides of the same coin, insofar as they have data from both agency and in-house. In producing the report in conjunction with the HR Grapevine, eploy have been able to get a decent view of the UK market. The collaboration with HR Grapevine extended their reach, however it would have been an even richer piece of research if they were able to expand this into other regions, making it a more comprehensive narrative. That said, there was some very interesting, and yet not altogether unsurprising, pieces of data in the report. The usual reporting of diversity and inclusion statistics was somewhat in line with what I was expecting.
Here are a few of the highlights that caught my eye :
Building a diverse and inclusive workforce is now the #2 priority for in-house teams (up again this year)
It would be great to understand what priority recruitment firms placed on this
Agencies are still fishing in the same pools of candidates that they always have done. Either LinkedIn or their CRM/ATS platform
This highlights the issues around being more inclusive (Jo Major(one of Kinverse’s partners) delivers a great piece on expanding the “fishing pool”)
The vertical discrepancy for how much of a challenge Diversity and Inclusion is to a firm, is astonishing. The Accounting industry sits at the top of the table with it being at 54% with over twice that of Marketing/Advertising/PR
The assumption that “all professional services” are the same is not the case, as the Legal sector is at 36% in comparison.
My biggest surprise came from the use, or complete lack thereof, of measurement in order to make decisions. Not every company can or needs to go the whole hog and bring McKinsey in to do their magic; there is enough research out there that is freely available that shows Who, What, Why When and How to measure. Other functions, such as sales, finance, technology, marketing, production, all run on kpi’s. This report shows that there is a significant lack of understanding or utilisation of data, with barely 40% of the respondents regularly measured their Programmatic Advertising (which is heavily automated), and varies other channels being measured on a regular basis as low as 20% to 30%. Using data can have a significant influence on the success of your talent attraction and recruitment programme. Two slides that highlight this point well are, “what content you have on your career site” and “what content could make the difference to your career site”, in comparison to peak or poor performers.
Virtually all the data points in this report reinforce the old adage that “if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Everything from talent pooling, employee referral schemes, events, corporate websites, specialist job boards, generalist job boards, all consistently deliver better quality and quantity of candidates. There are no excuses anymore. There are an abundance of ways in which to get the data that you need. Either speak to your supplier and ask them to get it for you or use a platform that can provide it for you. Eploy have given people a powerful step in the right direction towards which questions to ask.
On a final note, with my “diversity data” hat on, it is inconceivable, that diversity and/or inclusion initiatives should be halfway down a list!. This should be hard coded into the very core of (DNA) your organisation. Now is not the time to be paying lip service, there are enough people out there that can help ensure that you get this right.
To read this report for yourself, you can download it directly from eploy :
https://www.eploy.co.uk/resources/whitepaper/uk-candidate-attraction-report-2021-22/
Rob Dagge