Many employers around the globe are currently experiencing some kind of skill shortage in at least certain aspects of their hiring. The competition for talent is fierce, and we are seeing increasing investment in employer branding and recruitment marketing as a result.
However, hiding in plain sight there is an untapped talent pool of people attempting to return to the workforce after a career break. People who are being overlooked because of inflexible recruiting processes, automation and unconscious and conscious bias.
My guest this week is Dominie Moss, founder of The Return Hub, a company that places senior professionals who want to restart their careers back into work.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why it can be so difficult to get back into the workforce after a career break
• Why continued human intervention in the recruiting process is needed to achieve diverse hiring
• Busting myths about returners
• Career transitioning and transferable skills
• Ensuring hiring success and inclusion
• Returnships
Dominie also shares her advice to recruiters about what they should be doing to engage with this audience and talks about the critical role senior leadership teams need to play in diversity and inclusion.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Avature ats, an applicant tracking system that redefines user experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. Just listen to one of the many ways in which L’Oreal USA has improved their hiring process with Avature, as told by Edward Dias, Director of Recruitment, Intelligence and Innovation.
Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart automation and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 157 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Most employers around the globe are currently experiencing some kind of skill shortage in at least certain aspects of their hiring. The competition for talent is fierce and we’re seeing increasing investment in employer branding and recruitment marketing as a result. However, hiding in plain sight, there’s an untapped talent pool of people attempting to return to the workforce after a career break. People who are being overlooked because of inflexible recruitment practices, automation and both unconscious and conscious bias. My guest this week is Dominie Moss, founder of the Return Hub, a company that places senior professionals who want to restart their careers back into the workforce. Keep listening to hear her insights into how employers can best access these pools of incredible talent. Hi, Dominie, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Matt, great to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:02:35]:
Could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Dominie Moss [00:02:38]:
Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me. I am the founder of a unique recruitment company. Essentially, we work with individuals who have very often taken a career break. They’ve left their corporate role, sometimes they’ve left that to go and fulfil caring responsibilities. Other times it might be to launch an entrepreneurial business or to undertake further study or to travel or to perhaps who work in the charity sector. But they’re now ready to relaunch their career and we work with those individuals. They do tend to be mainly women. We do work with some fantastic men as well, but the majority of our candidate pool is female and we place them into organisations that are looking to tap into a talent pool that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to in a strategic way and place those individuals into either the role they were doing before, or sometimes we help them with a career transition piece and place them into slightly different roles.
Matt Alder [00:03:31]:
Fantastic. Lots of things I want to ask you about that because I know it’s a subject that will be really interesting to the podcast audience. Before I do though, could you tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to be doing what you’re doing?
Dominie Moss [00:03:47]:
Yeah, sure. Well, my background is I’ve worked in the city in financial services for nearly 20 years. Most of that time has been in executive search. So I work for one of the big financial services search firms for 13 years and really during that that time asked many, many times by my clients, how can you help us reach more female candidates? We want to see more balanced shortlists. And really sort of found it very difficult to come up with a sort of a unique or meaningful answer to that question beyond, there just aren’t many out there. And then about nearly three years ago now, I had a meeting with a fantastic woman at one of the investment banks who was very involved with their return to work program. And she told me about this return ship that they ran, which was this sort of three program. It was the low risk structure that they needed to really bring someone in who had a career gap. Gave them an opportunity to see how these people would perform in a real business situation, hopefully then move them into a real role. But if not, they would be getting some CV worthy experience that they could then take with them. And I thought this concept was a very interesting one. And when she told me that they had, I think at that time it was about 400 applications for a class size of about 20, I nearly fell off my chair. And I couldn’t believe there were these huge numbers of people, mainly women, who were looking to relaunch their corporate careers. And so I thought, well, who’s helping the 380 that aren’t getting on this program? And that there must be lots of employers who would love to do the same thing, but just didn’t have the resources or the know how of a big investment bank. And that was really where the idea for the business came. Since then, we’ve sort of branched out into sort of all sorts of different areas. We now recruit, design and deliver return to work programs. But actually probably over half of what we actually do now is really putting our candidates back on the radar for business as usual hires to really include them as part of A fair and robust recruitment process.
Matt Alder [00:05:49]:
I think one of the things for me here is, I think that there are probably quite a few people out there who’ve never experienced this sort of, you know, the CV gap or having to, you know, leave the workforce for a period of time and then come back again who might not understand the kind of barriers that people in that position are facing. Could you sort of talk us through what the issues are for people who are trying to, you know, sort of return to the workforce after, you know, after a gap for whatever reason?
Dominie Moss [00:06:18]:
Yeah, well, it’s a number of things really, essentially down to the fact that there are very few sort of clear paths for them back through traditional recruiting methods. So the recruitment industry at the sort of volume end, if you like, is, you know, is very much about square peg, square holes and those recruiters have a lot of pressure in terms of time to hire. And so it’s just very difficult for a candidate who perhaps has a nonlinear career or has a CV gap to get a look in with those, with those type of roles. The executive search industry obviously is very good if you’re already in a job, but the way that they identify talent is by mapping the kind of in role or in market candidates. So again, if you’re not already in that job at, you know, ABC Employer, you just don’t get identified by those methods. And then you have the, on the online job, the jobs boards, the online applications, where you have an algorithm that basically filters the huge number of applications that online roles can attract into a manageable number by a human person at the other end. And they will, those algorithms, or applicant tracking systems, ATS as they’re called, will filter out candidates that have a CV gap very often and certainly those ones that are not again, that sort of square peg, square hole candidate. So what happens is it’s just very difficult for these individuals to really find a path to really just to meet an employer, frankly. And so what tends to happen is they rely on their own network, which can be a very effective way for them to get back to work. But it obviously is, you know, it can be somewhat limiting and they definitely don’t have the same sort of breadth of opportunities available to them as someone who perhaps has a more conventional CV or who’s enrolled.
Matt Alder [00:08:11]:
So basically there’s lots of inflexibility in the recruitment process for various reasons. And I think that this is something that potentially could get a lot worse because one of the things that we talk about on the podcast a lot is recruitment automation and algorithms doing more of the work when it comes to recruiting, what would your sort of message to employers be about the kind of talent and the kind of opportunities they’re missing out on by having this inflexibility in their recruitment process?
Dominie Moss [00:08:42]:
Yeah, well, it’s an, it’s an excellent point and something which is very much on our radar at the Return Hub. We feel very strongly that while, you know, technology can be a great thing and, you know, extremely useful in automating some of the decisions or processes that go on through the recruitment cycle, if you like, but it is really, really important for employers and for recruiters to be aware there are certain kinds of questions in a certain class that are absolutely fine to be automated, but there is a huge number of questions that are just simply not able to be done effectively by a machine, by a, you know, by an automated process. And particularly when you’re dealing with, you know, experienced hires. So candidates who may have had 10, 15, 20 plus years experience, they have rich and varied skill sets and, you know, sort of career histories and really there is no substitute at this time for a kind of human conscious element in the decision making process. And really the best person to evaluate that candidate is another human being and there’s just no way around that. And so whilst there seems to be more and more of a push to sort of to towards AI and automation, this is an incredibly dangerous thing from a diversity perspective. I think we saw recently in the news that Amazon, I think it was last, or Amazon, have ditched their AI recruiting tool because it was seen to be screening out female candidates. And you know, what we know is that the machines, the automation is only ever as good as the information that is inputted into it. And whilst that comes from a sort of relatively homogeneous data set of what past success looks like, you’re basically feeding into the machine data which is going to only perpetuate the status quo rather than change it or evolve it. And I think it’s really, really important that employers really do understand that because very often what we see is that these tools are being marketed as being without bias. And I think that’s a very, you know, I think one needs to be very aware of the limitations of automated recruitment processes.
Matt Alder [00:10:59]:
So expanding a little bit on that, on that point, what would I know that there’ll be lots of, lots of recruiters listening who would be very KE to engage with these types of audiences and make sure they’re getting the best possible talent into their organizations. What would your advice be for recruiters in terms of engaging with the sort of audiences that you work with?
Dominie Moss [00:11:30]:
Well, I think in the first instance, one needs to identify them in a sort of strategic fashion in order to be able to evaluate from this pool who the best person might be. So I think from a starting perspective, it is obviously looking at the traditional strategies and things, thinking, what do I need to do differently? I think there’s also an assumption, there are lots of myths about returners in particular, namely that they’re all women, they’re all mothers and they all want to work part time. What I can tell you is that 73% of our candidates at the moment tick the full time box when they register with us. So I think it’s all about being aware that perhaps some of the myths, or misconceptions, if you like, about this pool and some of those need to be put to one side. The quality of candidates is extraordinarily high. PWC did a piece of research a couple of years ago that showed there were 427,000 professional women who are currently on a career break who will go back to work. And I think, you know, these are individuals who’ve probably got, you know, as I say, sort of maybe 10, 15 years experience under their belt and many of whom, whilst they’ve been on a break, have actually been updating their skills or acquiring new ones or tapping into new networks and gaining in perspective and maturity. And I think it’s with that mindset that recruiters need to look at this talent pool and think to themselves, you know, gosh, I bet there’s some really great talent in those pools and, you know, how do we go about finding them? I think the other thing to be aware of is perhaps the career transition piece as well. I mentioned a little bit earlier, but we do find that whilst lots of the return candidates that we work with are looking to go back into the role they had before, there are many that actually are thinking, well, I used to do X, I’ve got all these transferable skills, what could I use those to do next in my career? And so I think it’s really important for recruiters to be really aware of transferable skills and thinking, literally thinking sort of outside the box when looking at these kind of candidates.
Matt Alder [00:13:31]:
So obviously successful hiring is all about people not just being recruited, but coming into the company and being a success and staying, staying with the business for an appropriate amount of time. What advice would you give to employers in terms of making sure that they are giving these hires the best opportunity to succeed?
Dominie Moss [00:13:59]:
So I think obviously when organisations are contemplating putting together a specific return to work programme, then one of the key things is the elements of that program and what goes into making that program a success for the employer and for the returner. And there are a couple of things that really do help to kind of key everyone up for success in that respect. One thing is actually the support that we give to the hiring managers. So how do you give them a toolkit to manage, assess onboard someone who is not the kind of square peg, square hole candidate. And that’s really everything from, you know, perhaps interview style, interview technique, what can you, can’t you say to understanding what some of the perhaps soft and hard development needs of that individual are when they arrive in the role. And then obviously the other thing is really providing that support to that individual once they return. And obviously one of the benefits of people coming back as part of a programme, as part of a cohort is that you can facilitate that peer group support for those individuals when they arrive. As well as one to one coaching, should that be required over the course of the first perhaps three, four months of what sometimes can be, not always, but sometimes can be a bit of an up and down journey back to work. And that’s really things like helping that person rebuild confidence, if that is indeed an issue for them, certainly not for everybody. Building resilience and being aware of their personal brand when they arrive and really looking at the onboarding process that you would go through with any other candidate and really sort of seeing if it should be enhanced in any way for someone who is perhaps returning to the workforce after a period of time out.
Matt Alder [00:15:35]:
So from a sort of corporate leadership perspective, I mean there’s obviously lots of talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, but what should sort of CEOs, boards, senior leadership teams be doing and thinking in this area to make a real difference?
Dominie Moss [00:15:53]:
Well, that is actually that’s the key question to my mind. So where we see organizations really delivering on their, on their targets and their aspirations to achieve that better gender balance is where the senior leadership team have been much bolder and braver in their decision making and they have essentially empowered, whether it’s the sort of the mid level hiring manager or the recruiting team, to go and do things differently. And inevitably doing things differently does very often cost more money and it takes more time. And it’s really important that I think organisations are open eyed to that very often. I think what we’ve seen over the last decade is organisations delivering various different initiatives on the topic of diversity to try and move things forward. And whilst they have very often been very well received from an individual basis. The fact of the matter is, is that they haven’t really moved the needle. So as I say, I think the leaders of these businesses need to really be very aware that the old strategies are not working, new strategies need to be looked at and as I say, just much, much braver and bolder action on behalf of the leaders of our businesses.
Matt Alder [00:17:10]:
So final question. In the sort of, the sort of years that you’ve been sort of working in this space, is the situation improving, our companies changing their thinking? Are there any sort of particular success stories here?
Dominie Moss [00:17:25]:
I think one, I think there’s every reason to be really optimistic. I mean, we work with enlightened employers every day and we speaking all the time to employers who genuinely care passionately about doing things differently. And so I think whilst the pace of change can sometimes feel very glacial and somewhat frustrating, fortunately there is every reason to be optimistic and hopeful. And I think that’s driven by several things because we know there are now enough studies that show that the benefits of a diverse workforce are a good for the bottom line, but B, also very effective from a corporate governance perspective. And so I think with this sort of hard data around the benefits for diversity, we’ve moved diversity from a sort of, you know, a nice to have to a core business priority. And I think that together with things like the women in finance charter, with things like the gender pay gap reporting, you know, this is shining a light on really, a really, really important and it’s all helping towards getting organizations to a just be aware of how important this is and B that they really need to do something about it. So, yeah, I think there’s every reason to be optimistic.
Matt Alder [00:18:49]:
Dominie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dominie Moss [00:18:51]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:18:53]:
My thanks to Dominie Moss. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your App store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
