Since the start of the pandemic unemployment is rising all over the world at an unprecedented rate. Even if the labour market does bounce back quickly, things are likely to look very different with many industries currently going through an accelerated digital transformation.
So what can be done to address the increasingly urgent issue of employability, how should employers be thinking about talent and are there any lessons that we can learn from the previous economic crisis?
My guest this week is Colin Donnery, Director at Turas Nua, Ireland’s leading provider of employability services which has helped over 40,000 people back into the workforce in the last four years.
In the interview, we discuss: :
• How the current crisis is different for jobs than previous recessions
• The impact of AI and automation on labour markets
• The disproportionate effect on young people
• Tools and techniques to get people back to work
• Skills for the new economy
• Digitising advocacy and guidance and the importance of human interventions
• How employers need to change their thinking to access valuable pools of talent
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:25]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 284 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Since the start of the pandemic, unemployment has risen all over the world at an unprecedented rate. Even if the labour market does bounce back quickly, things are likely to look very different, with many industries currently going through an accelerated digital transformation. So what can be done to address the increasingly urgent issue of employability? How should employers be thinking about talent? And are there any lessons that we can learn from previous economic crises? My guest this week is Colin Donnery, director of Turas Nua, Ireland’s leading provider of employability services, which has helped over 40,000 people back into the workforce in the last four years. Hi Colin, and welcome to the podcast.
Colin Donnery [00:02:25]:
Great to talk to you, Matt. Hope you’re well.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
Absolutely. And an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Colin Donnery [00:02:34]:
I’ve working in recruitment, employability and training for over 20 years now. The last 17 of those have been for a cooperative social enterprise called FRS in Ireland set up in 1980. And so this is our 40 year anniversary. A strange year for it, but still we’re celebrating nonetheless. FRS is originally set up to, I suppose, support the agriculture sector and workers within it. And since then we’ve diversified into a number of mainstream recruitment, training and employability sectors. We’ve also a tech business, we’ve grown to 70 offices and we have over 2,000 employees now in Ireland.
Matt Alder [00:03:24]:
Tell us a little bit more about the employability aspect of what you do.
Colin Donnery [00:03:29]:
Yeah, so following the financial crash of 2008, it had a profound, profound impact on the Irish economy, which as a result of it it caused our housing bubble to collapse, which initially I suppose on the economic side resulted in house prices falling by over 60% and then unemployment peaking at 17%. We had mass emigration and it was I suppose a horrendous time for Ireland. We had the IMF arrived and basically ran our country for over two years, which wasn’t as bad actually as it sounds. They made things happen really on the ground and fixed things from a banking perspective and helped us I suppose get back on the road to recovery. So in, in 2011 we were working in around the employability area, not through our training business, doing sort of training courses to upskill people and retrain them. And we set up a company called Taurus New, which basically means new journey in, in Celtic. And in 2014 we responded to the, I suppose to the unemployment cris, setting up that business. So we opened 40 offices, hired in just 350 people over 18 months to help the long term unemployed back into jobs as part of a program the government set up called Job Path, which is basically the largest ever employability program in Ireland.
Matt Alder [00:05:24]:
I always want to kind of bring this conversation right up to date and talk about what’s happening now and what’s happening all over the world, but talk through a little bit more in terms of the details, in terms of sort of tools and techniques that you use to help get people back to work.
Colin Donnery [00:05:41]:
Sure. So initially when we looked at the employability sector, I suppose we looked at the uk we partnered with a UK charity called Working Links. Initially we set up a joint venture and I suppose we had the on the ground recruitment experience in Ireland and training and that, and they had some, I suppose expertise in the whole sort of helping unemployed people back into work. So with them, I suppose the first thing we did was we understood we would need to assess people and understand their distance from the labor market. So we created what’s called a distance travel tool. So it’s a piece of assessment technology which looks at the individual customer, individual unemployed person and looks at their, their distance from the labor market across a lot of different areas like skills, confidence, health, mental health, drugs and alcohol, housing issues, childcare issues and transport. And basically when each customer comes in, they do, they take this assessment and it shows their distance from the labor market on a score of 1 to 10. And it also shows their, I suppose, adaptability and the types of jobs that they could be eventually moved to or retrained for. So we’ve had over 110,000 people come onto the program. So we keep them for a year on program and help them back into employment. And I suppose to date we’ve helped almost 40,000 people into real jobs, into full and mostly full time jobs and a few part time sort of positions. So this assessment really drives, I suppose the whole way we work with the individual and it is really an individual assessment. And we’ve seen, I suppose to date we reassess people after 13 weeks, 26 weeks, 39 weeks, and when they leave us at 52 weeks, if they haven’t found a job. And we’re able to see regional trends, I suppose across the country, sectoral trends, you know, challenges around childcare in particular regions, regions where drugs is more I suppose has a part to play or alcohol. And we’re able to obviously give that information at a macro level to inform policy. So that really drives I suppose the initial interaction with the customer. And I suppose one of the key things with, you know, when someone’s unemployed, I think people tend to forget this the longer they go unemployed, even if they’re really good at the job they did. And you know, confidence tends to wane particularly and depression and mental health gets affected. So we see through our programs that just by interacting with the people in that initial stage that their mental health starts to improve and we really work on their confidence. So we do that in a one to one basis. So we have frontline personal advisors that work with the customers and I suppose just talk them through what getting back into work is like, where to the types of roles they could focus on and help them and help them to do that. I suppose one of the things we learned quite early on was initially we were looking at what we would call in the recruitment agency sector A360 model for this. But we found, I suppose that it was a really big challenge for an advisor to deal with a customer’s challenges while also trying to find them jobs. So basically what we did was we created what we call our employer services team which sits on top of the business so goes out to employers, brings in jobs and basically supports the individuals in the recruitment process. So I suppose that’s the advocacy piece which the employer services team do, the personal advisors do the whole guidance piece. And we work with over 12,000 employers in Ireland from the largest multinational through to small and medium sized business. But I suppose what we see is there’s different challenges with different people and you need basically a tailored journey for each of these individuals. I think we see, I suppose the impact that that has in improving confidence. Then working on skills which we do, we have a Tutor team which is in the business I suppose over 30 tutors which we, we built over 60 individual courses which help around skills and confidence and then routeways which we build for certain sectors of the economy like construction, healthcare, retail, customer service. It so effectively what we’re doing is we’re taking information from the labor market, from employers and building I suppose the service we deliver for those individual unemployed customers to help them back into work.
Matt Alder [00:11:06]:
Coming right up to the current situation, 2020, we find ourselves in a, in a, in a position that no one could have predicted. Unemployment in many, many countries around the world is going back up to the level that you’ve described very, very quickly. Obviously you’re kind of right at the front line in terms of what’s happening here. What, what are you seeing? How is this different from before? What’s going on out there at the moment?
Colin Donnery [00:11:35]:
Okay, so I think like we’ve never seen obviously look we’ anything in our lifetimes like COVID 19 and I suppose either really has the labor market initially when we looked at it we sort of look back to The, I suppose September 11th in 2001 when the economy took a real hit really quickly at that point and it had a huge impact on obviously world economies and world labor markets. But that was a shortish sort of six month to eight month hiatus and the economies bounce back really, really quickly. This is definitely different. Right. And I suppose that’s, I’m stating the obvious in Ireland. So just to take the Irish economy. So we had reached basically zero unemployment, technical zero unemployment, about 4.5% in February this year. Now what we’re seeing is youth unemployment has risen to 50% unemployment and we’re technically in I suppose around the sort of 35% unemployment rate. The OECD and the Irish government and I suppose various commentators are saying that best case scenario you’re looking at probably around 12.5% unemployment mid range about 16 and a bad forecast is about 20%. So just looking at the UK numbers, it’s a pretty similar scenario in the UK and the US I suppose the difference this time compared to Ireland. I think the world probably has a lot to learn from Ireland’s response to the last crash. The key thing and I think governments are doing at this time is putting the infrastructure and financial supports in place to support workers and businesses to hire workers. So I think initially that’s a good thing. But the sectors been affected are a lot different to the last time. So retail and hospitality particularly have obviously been decimated and I’ve heard the Reports of the UK sort of losing a lot of retail jobs and it’s the same in Ireland and that’s a dual thing going on. So obviously Covid has, has caused as COVID 19 but also I think the move to, I suppose digital, you know, the Amazons of this world and online purchasing has really exacerbated this and it is debatable whether I suppose those jobs will return. I think we can be probably sure they won’t return in the same numbers, but it’s really, you know, how deep, how deep those job losses will be and what will, what will return. Hospitality has obviously been, you know, you know, dramatically affected and I think the numbers suggest it mightn’t be as badly affected as we come back out into, into normality. But I think one of the areas that people miss is that these sectors, particularly retail and hospitality have always, I know even for me, I, I started off working in, in a pub many, many years ago and my current career and it helped me through college and as it does for a lot of people. So they create their stepping stone jobs in retail and hospitality and if they’re not there for students and people who are getting on the first rung of the ladder, it causes a huge challenge particularly for those youth unemployment numbers. And you know, across Europe we see it in countries like Spain. Portugal have had stubbornly high youth unemployment and lack of engagement From I suppose 18 to the 24 year olds in, in the, in the labor market.
Matt Alder [00:15:35]:
You said that there’s obviously different industries being affected this time around and it’s a strange situation because there are industries that have literally just stopped overnight. As you say, some of this is, is speeding up a digital transformation that was already, that was already potentially happening. There are also other industries that are still looking to, to recruit and, and want to sort of bring great talent and great potential talent into their businesses. How do employers in those industries, how do they need to change their thinking to access some of, some of these talent pools that are out there that might be traditionally people with backgrounds that they wouldn’t have considered employing before.
Colin Donnery [00:16:18]:
Traditionally in the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s, most organization looked at people’s CVs and really where they had worked previously. And I suppose the great companies we work with in Ireland look beyond I suppose those previous experience and look at the inherent sort of, I suppose, skills that these unemployed individuals have and someone and it comes back to the sort of digitizing of advocacy and guidance which is what we do. And we’ve been looking at this for a number of years now. And it’s actually really challenging for us to, to I suppose digitize that service. But I suppose we’re starting to use things like chatbots to I suppose make the experience better for our customers. But I think when we look at a company that comes to, usually what will happen is if there’s a, we’ll take a call center job. You know, company has a call center job, there’s three people who would apply for it. You know, you’ve got a person who’s in a call center job, has applied, but obviously they’re the favorite to get the job. You’ve got the, the unemployed person who’s maybe just been made unemployed from, you know, through COVID 19 worked in retail and you might have a long term unemployed person who is unemployed maybe seven or eight years. The challenge for the latter two is that as we see like one of the issues for employers and for, and I suppose for those job seekers is that, and we’re seeing it already is job applications have, have multiplied dramatically in the last couple of months. So employers are starting to put in place technology, screening technology to I suppose try and find the best person for a job and it effectively rules out anyone who doesn’t have exactly what it says on the tin in terms of skills and experience. So I suppose what we try to do is obviously advocate for that individual, get talking to the employer and I suppose tap into their HR processes and their hiring processes processes to allow that to happen. So I think the really great employers look further than the CV and I know you’ve talked about that in previous shows, you know what I mean, how we still seem to be stuck on this sort of basic, you know, if it’s not on the cv, it’s sort of the CV goes in the bin. So I think our opinion is that the really great employers move, move beyond that and look at what this person can bring. And I think, you know, from, you know, diversity and you know, lots of different areas of bringing, I suppose different thinking into an organization and different skills. Like what we find with, I suppose with unemployed people is that really engaged and looking get back into work. They’re hungry for work and I suppose hungry to make a difference really initially to their lives. But when they’re given an opportunity, you get, I think an exponential return on investment from, from that and that person coming into your organization.
Matt Alder [00:19:30]:
One of the things that also comes out from all of this is there’s a huge amount of publicity about large organizations having big layoffs. So in the UK the week that we’re recording this, Boots and John Lewis have been in the news for laying people off. But, but actually in many countries it’s the smaller sort of medium sized businesses that actually sort of make up the bulk of the economy. And no one really sort of talks about redundancies and closures and the effect that that has on the labor market. What are you seeing from that perspective?
Colin Donnery [00:20:03]:
Yeah, so in Ireland, as in most countries, small and medium sized employers make up about 60 to 65% of the labor market in terms of headcount. And these types of organizations have been decimate really. They tend not to have big cash pools or big balance sheets in order for them to ride out this type of, this type of economy and catastrophic drop in business. So what we’ve seen is, and I suppose we’ve got this sort of false economy, I would call it, going on at the moment. In the UK you call it furlough. So you have many people still, I suppose technically employed by their employers. The UK is different to Ireland in that I suppose the workers don’t work in the UK when they’re furloughed basically. But in Ireland actually they are still working and attached to the employer. And I think it’ll be interesting to see how that one plays out which, which system works better. It seems to be working really well in Ireland so far in that we have I suppose 600,000 people still attached to their businesses and still working way. So as I say, it’s a bit of an experiment. It also brings in the whole sort of UBI Universal Basic Income type of argument. We almost have a, an experiment really at play at the moment. And I suppose the challenges around that from a, I suppose societal perspective is, and, and, and the naysayers on UBI would say, well, you know, it’s a disincentive to work. So when we start to come out of this, it’ll be interesting, I think, to see how that plays out. But on your question on small and medium sized business, I think there’s absolutely no doubt that they have been massively affected. We’ve seen large multinationals in Ireland. We have I think more or less 48 of the top 50 companies in the world who are headquartered in Ireland. And the bulk of them are doing fairly okay. Like some of them have actually grown dramatically during the, during the crisis. And I think it leads to a sort of a societal question really around, you know, the whole social contract and you know, as society is made up of workers, employers, you know, and government and stakeholders and you Know, this whole area of I suppose what’s been created in the last 10 years of the gig economy really comes into question, you know, where workers really don’t have a social welfare parachute to protect them during periods like this. Most people have been protected at the moment, but as we come out of this, typically what happens, a lot of people get left behind and I suppose they’re the people that will need to be supported. The gig economy effectively doesn’t provide, I suppose the tax numbers to two states around the world and in any country to provide the social welfare benefits that people require. Now obviously that’s a regional thing and different countries work and work I suppose operate in different ways. Like in the US is obviously different to Ireland and the uk But I think it’s going to become a really big question for us as a society and how we protect workers going forward.
Matt Alder [00:23:46]:
Final question. Obviously governments all over the world are now addressing the issue of how they get people back to work, how they get jobs growing in their economies. Again, what would your advice be to policymakers in terms of what they have to put into place to get people and their skills ready to get back to work in the new economy that we find ourselves in?
Colin Donnery [00:24:11]:
That’s a big question, Matt. But I suppose the first thing obviously is to I think continue the supporting first of all organizations to allow them to keep people in jobs as long as possible, which I think is a good thing. We seem to have moved from the austerity to more of an investment type strategy in supporting businesses and workers. So I think that’s the first bit. I think secondly, we certainly have challenges around youth unemployment and areas like I suppose single parents and the drugs and alcohol. So this whole area is sort of embedded and has a lot of different inputs and drivers in terms of what affects it. The education system I think needs to change dramatically as we move to much more gig economy style work and you know, consultants and contractors, you know, we don’t really teach our kids as they come through school and college how to operate in that type of market. So I think we need to look at education, we need to look at the individual and I suppose give the individual supports. Governments tend to like dealing with things in cohorts, right? So it’s like we’ll put a lot of money into, into particular cohort and that will support that. But I think we’ve got to continue to look at the individual, provide I suppose the funding to support employers to hire these people. And the Irish government did a lot of this with they, I suppose organizations Were, you know, incentivized to look a bit differently at the people that were coming in the door. And, you know, if they were unemployed, they were incentivized to hire them. And we did that. We had a successful internship scheme in Ireland in 2013, 14, 15. There’s talk about, I suppose, companies being allowed to use an extended furlough scheme to, to hire people. And I think that would be a really good thing. Also, they’ve got to look forward. I don’t think governments really are looking forward on things like, you know, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and how that is impacting jobs. I think there’s a really good professor at MIT called David Autor who’s the really I would look up to for guidance on this. And, you know, AI is really interesting. Terms of job displacement is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, right? So we see jobs been displaced right across the world and right across sectors like call centers. Chatbots are replacing jobs. And it like right through our economy and our history. And you know, over the last 100 years, jobs have been displaced and replaced by automation and technology. Not necessarily overnight, but these things are definitely happening. So two things need to happen, I think from that perspective is one, one looking at the retraining and skills of people and the education of people to, I suppose, I suppose, develop as workers and as citizens and as individuals. And then, you know, on the other side is looking at how we, how we support those, how we support those people to continue to grow in the economies around the world. Colleagues.
Matt Alder [00:27:52]:
Colin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Colin Donnery [00:27:54]:
Thank you, Matt. Great to talk to you.
Matt Alder [00:27:56]:
My thanks to Colin Donnery. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
