Member News

First of all, we hope all delegates had a great time at #Firmday Manchester… What a day it was!

Secondly, we were so impressed by the outcomes of the roundtables that we decided to create a blog recapping them for you.

We know what it’s like, the brainwaves you have at events like ours can soon dissipate when back in the reality of your daily role. Hopefully this recap will solidify those ideas for you!

Topic 1: What retention initiatives have you launched for your TA team?

• Educational pieces – increased value- needs to be advertised and accessible
• Lateral development 
• Internal mobility
• Skills Gaps assessed and promoting development
• Off-site team building events
• Apprenticeship levy – upskilling
• Salary and Reward
• Clear objectives set against the job description individuals are hired against
• Flexible working options
• Workload analysis to avoid burnout
• Recruiter capability within the team 
• Development opportunities – identify flight risks, secondment opportunities, career frameworks. 
• Recognising that attrition is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing
• Communication – Establishing which of your team members are happy (and which aren’t), plans and development opportunities to promote transparency.
• Engaging with each other as people not just centred on deliverables 

Topic 2: How are you ensuring your team stays engaged and motivated? 

• Additional projects
• Removing communication boundaries – putting sourcers in a communication line with C-suite to increase feelings of value.
• Personalised incentives
• Surveys – quarterly ‘pulse checks’.
• Giving ownership of team direction. 
• Ownership of the role – give recruiters access to HMs
• Clear Team roadmap providing transparency on changes to tech stack. 

Topic 3: How are you managing hybrid working arrangements?

• Ensuring teams are self-driven and managed appropriately
• Balancing the needs of the business is key. Hybrid was the USP, then changes in business needs removed this as an option at the cost of retaining staff
• Giving the right support to employees through any transition
• Peer-to-peer learning
• Personal touch… Which can’t be replaced by virtual platforms!
• Managing flexibility fairly – not just around childcare etc. 
• Ensure the understanding of hybrid across the business. Clear expectations and guidelines. 
• Culture and value – promote the benefits of working in the office again versus just working from home, giving people a reason to want to come back to the office. 
• Understand changes in communication style. Leaders need to understand their team’s communication style for it to work better on a fully remote basis.
• Implementing company culture even in a remote environment.
• Look at talent pools from different areas with the ability to work remotely. 
• Networking/training positives of being in the office… ‘rework’.

Topic 4: How are you managing peaks and troughs of activity within your team?

• Agency to in-house project and relationship management
• Pre-planning events calendars and project deadlines, increasing transparency to give teams an understanding of what to expect. 
• Prioritise, plan and review, evolve and adapt, enabling leaders to work through that change
• Understand the markets – work on people development, promote personal development
• Freezes on non-critical roles
• Secondments 
• Contingent workers
• Seek guidance from others in the company – operational excellent team, specialist team looking at continuous improvement. 

Are you ready to do it all again in London? Book your place here.

The Careers Site Insight Report is available to download now for Premium Members.

As a sneak peak, Laura – our Content and Insight Manager – picked out some of the key findings which you can see within the infographic below…

If you are not yet a Premium Member and would like to see the report, view our membership options here.

Welcome to the February Newsletter.

Our teams are here to support you with all your TA needs.

World Book Day marks the yearly opportunity to read copious blog articles like this one recommending the books that could shift the trajectory of your career. It’s only right that we give you ours!

We’ve compiled a list of must-read books for you, covering everything from the business classics through to practical guides focusing on current industry trends.

Belonging

Belonging confronts the elephant in the room – that many men feel personally under threat  as a result of the diversity conversation. Following extensive research and interviews at over 200 international businesses, Kathryn Jacob, Sue Unerman and Mark Edwards tackle a complex and often uncomfortable subject and makes it truly accessible and absolutely achievable by weaving real stories, sharp analysis and practical, business-ready solutions 

Building an Inclusive Organization  

We all know how important an inclusive organisation is –Stephen Frost and Raafi-Karim Alidina offer guidance on how to implement robust processes and policies to foster  diversity and inclusion in organizations of any size, and in all sectors with case studies from household name organisations. 

Digital Talent

Matt Alder provides advice on how to create new processes that are fit for purpose in the age of digital transformation, build inclusion when digital culture is becoming more prominent and use digital abilities effectively to maximise productivity while maintaining employee wellbeing. And well, why wouldn’t you want that? 

Employer Branding  for Dummies 

We think Lars Scmidt’s title is pretty self-explanatory. We’re not saying you’re a dummy  of course, but when it comes to Employer Branding who wants complicated when you can have a clear, no- nonsense guide to attracting and retaining top talent? 

Exceptional Talent 

Matt Alder and Mervyn Dinnen combine their considerable industry experience to offer advice and guidance on everything from how to build an authentic employer  brand to the impact  of referrals, to retaining and engaging employees – and much  in between. 

Hire Power 

Ah, the age old reactive  vs proactive issue.  We all know that proactive is better  for your business than reactive  when it comes to resourcing – in this book John Wallace provides  real life examples and practical steps towards building a strategic resourcing strategy. 

Hiring for Attitude  

What’s more important in a job candidate―skills  or attitude? Mark Murphy argues for the latter, and Hiring for Attitude provides  the data  to back it up. Do be aware  Murphy uses data  from a survey conducted by his own company but the book provides  great  food for thought when reviewing your own recruitment strategy. 

How to Win Friends and Influence People 

How could we not include Dale Carnegie’s timeless bestseller? This is the latest refresh of the classic motivational guide – taking into account that times  have changed a little since the original publication in 1936. 

Neurodiversity at Work 

With Neurodiversity  being such  a hot (and incredibly important) topic, we had to include Amanda  Kirby and Theo Smith’s book highlighting the benefits of employing the neurodiverse, as well as tips on how to attract, recruit and engage. 

On Recruitment

You’re a recruiter and you’ve used  LinkedIn, so how could you have missed Mitch Sullivan’s distinct  brand of dry wit, unapologetic sarcasm and on point observations, usually sprinkled with profanity. On Recruitment is a whole book of just that – if you love his LinkedIn content, you’ll love his book too. 

Recruiting 101 

Not everyone  is an old timer, and if you know someone newer to the industry, Steven Mostyn’s book is a great  read to learn the fundamentals. And you never know, if you’re an old timer, maybe  a refresher would reignite your passion! 

Recruit Rockstars 

I got 99 problems but – oh wait, recruitment is one of them… Jeff Hyman uses his book to assert that ninety percent of business problems are actually recruiting problems in disguise,  and here he reveals  his bulletproof  10-step method for landing the very best talent, based on data  to enable  you to always hire Rockstars, not B-players. 

Social Media Recruitment 

Social Media. There’s not a lot of getting away from it, so you should  absolutely be embracing it as part of your recruitment strategy. Andy Headworth shares everything from how to implement a social media  recruitment strategy to how to measure ROI with plenty of case studies to prove concept. 

Successful Onboarding 

Mark Stein & Lilith Christiansen have created a ready to use process to help you map out a comprehensive onboarding plan for your new hires – with the ultimate  aim of ensuring engaged, and happy employees, who stick around! 

The Robot-Proof Recruiter  

Katrina Collier’s survival guide is a friendly reminder  that no amount of technology and data  can take the place of human interaction,  and includes  plenty of tips about  the tools that can make  your job easier. 

In this guest blog Martin Kavanagh, Head of Assessment at Amberjack shares his experiences of assessing for potential.

A year ago I joined Amberjack as Head of Assessment. There was a lot that made me want to join Amberjack, but above all I was attracted by their vision for early career talent* which was very well aligned with my own:

“Enabling a world in which individuals are hired and progressed solely based on their future potential, rather than past experience or privilege.”

In this article, I aim to share some of my thoughts around this vision and how organisations can assess for future potential.

To start thinking about assessing for future potential, let’s first look at an example of favouring past experience/privilege.

After completing my Masters, I was fortunate enough to gain a place on a graduate scheme for one of the UK’s best known companies along with around 200 others. I recently re-read my feedback report from my successful attendance at the assessment centre. I scored really well on the competency related to leadership. My feedback notes gave some insight into why:

“When responding to the question about past leadership experience, Martin gave an excellent example of how he had shown the behaviours we would want whilst leading a trombone section on a music tour.”

This was the first time I had read this feedback report since I had been fully inducted and immersed in the Amberjack vision, which meant I looked at it through a new lens. I empathise with the assessor. They had probably spent the day hearing examples from recent graduates of a group project they “took the role of leader for” on their degree course. My answer would have stood out. But I was only able to use that example as I was lucky enough to live in an area with a fantastic music foundation that took us on tours and I was lucky enough to have parents who paid for music lessons for me and drove me around the borough for rehearsals and concerts.

What was wrong with the approach this company took?

This organisation would proudly say in their attraction materials that they were looking for their “leaders of the future”. Given this, it intuitively makes sense to assess leadership capability. This in itself is not the problem. The way they went about assessing leadership capability is the problem. For the vast majority of people applying for the role, the bulk of their “experience” would have come from an academic system were you are rewarded for being an individual contributor. You need to get your head down, meet milestones, and complete exams in silence. In fact, you could argue, those best at leadership would be inspiring others to do their work for them – in the academic world this is called plagiarism and is heavily punished!

I was reflecting on the recent research we did in collaboration with The Firm which showed that the majority of organisations are still asking early career talent for their CVs and a significant minority are still using competency-based “tell me about a time when…..” methods of assessment. I’m not discounting the value of competency-based/experience-based approaches entirely. They certainly have their place. When I was recruited to my position, it would have been a very bold move for the leadership team at Amberjack to hire me without asking me about my experience of designing, and advising clients on, assessment and selection methods. Therefore, a CV would have been helpful in doing an initial appraisal of my suitability for the role. “Tell me about a time when” questions can also give deep insight into the level an experienced hire has been operating at. Their value does however become very questionable when looking at early career talent and looking for potential.

So how do you assess for potential?

At Amberjack we have a model of potential that was built from first principles to identify the qualities that set apart high potential early career talent. Using the available academic literature on potential, over 5 years of application data, insights from our clients, and the thoughts of futurologists in the changing world of work, we identified four key pillars which define a candidate’s potential to succeed and grow: Applied Intellect, Creative Force, Grit, and Digital Mindset. We then designed, and continue to design, assessment methods which assess these areas in an engaging way.

Using this model, the organisation who recruited me as a fresh graduate would have realised that rather than asking about how I had led in the past, they should have been exploring my potential. Specifically, in terms of leadership, they should have been interested in the extent to which I had the Grit and the Applied Intellect to understand when is the right time to be delivering through others, and how effective I would be at bringing people with me on the journey.

How can you get started in assessing for potential?

Whilst I would absolutely recommend you look at your assessment model/framework to ensure it is assessing potential in the way the Amberjack model does, there are three simpler steps that you can take to move towards assessing for potential.

1. Help your candidates prepare for assessments – you shouldn’t be wanting to catch candidates out. One of the most important pieces of feedback we are always interested in is the extent to which candidates have been given the opportunity to demonstrate what they can bring to the role. Giving candidates the space to show what they can bring to a role is how you’ll tap into true potential. We encourage our clients to provide detailed preparation materials and, where appropriate, pre-event coaching calls to help ensure candidates can demonstrate their true potential.

• When interviewing, have back up questions to your standard competency-based questions – your organisation may not be ready to give up their well-understood interview questions. So if you are assessing a role where experience isn’t necessary for success, and it’s potential you’re after, prepare future focused questions looking at how the candidate would behave in particular situations. As long as the scenario is allowing the candidate to demonstrate the same behaviours, you can use it if the individual struggles to find an example for the original question.

• Review your exercises with potential and privilege in mind – are you asking candidates to do something that would favour people who have had certain types of work experience? This could be as simple as using corporate jargon that candidates would only understand if they had certain experiences but it could be more baked into the assessment method itself. For example, if you are asking people as part of an exercise to make inferences from a profit and loss account, whilst this may be job-relevant, you are favouring those who have worked in financial environments. In early careers recruitment this may reduce the diversity and inclusivity of your candidate pool, favouring individuals who have been given certain types of opportunities. I would encourage you to review your assessment materials with this in mind.

Like many other recruiters, you may indeed be looking to hire your leaders of the future. To do this, you need to understand their genuine potential rather than understanding what they have had the opportunity to do in the past.

*individuals who are looking for entry level roles where no specific work experiences are needed