We live in rapidly changing times, and it is increasingly difficult for employers to anticipate how the roles in their business will develop. An ageing workforce is a further complicated factor. The growing consensus is that a skills-based approach to early careers recruiting could give employers the flexibility they need to plan for an uncertain future.
But how does skills-based hiring work in early careers, and how should employers develop their strategies in this area?
My guest this week is Matt Kirk, Solution Owner – Talent Acquisition at SHL. Matt has a big focus on early careers and has some incredibly valuable insights to share based on SHL’s pioneering work on skills, competencies and behaviors.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current state of college recruiting globally
• The impact of the cost of living crisis
• Are graduates the answer to the problem of ageing workforces?
• The growing interest in soft skills
• Using a single talent language
• 11 skills that predict success in graduate hiring
• Building data to facilitate internal mobility and skills development
• How skills differ between countries and industries
• Offering an appropriate candidate experience
• Communication and feedback
• What does the future of early careers look like?
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
SHL (0s):
Support for this podcast is provided by SHL. From talent acquisition through to talent management, SHL Solutions provide your organization with the power and scale to build your business with the skilled, motivated, and energized workforce you need. SHL takes the guesswork out of growing a talented team by helping you match the right people to the right moments with simplicity and speed. They equip recruiters and leaders with people insights at an organization, team, and individual level, accelerating growth, decision making, talent mobility, and inspiring an inclusive culture.
SHL (42s):
To build a future where businesses thrive because their people thrive, visit shl.com to learn more.
Matt Alder (1m 10s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 507 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. We live in rapidly changing times and it’s increasingly difficult for employers to anticipate how the roles in their business will develop. An ageing workforces, a further complicating factor, the growing consensus is that a skills-based approach to early careers recruiting could give employers the flexibility they need to plan for the uncertain future, but how does skills-based hiring work in early careers and how should employers develop their strategies in this area?
Matt Alder (1m 51s):
My guest this week is Matt Kirk, Solution Owner Talent Acquisition at SHL. Matt has a big focus on early careers and has some incredibly valuable insights to share based on SHL’s pioneering work on skills, competencies, and behaviors. Hi, Matt, and welcome to the podcast.
Matt Kirk (2m 13s):
Hi, Matt. Great to be here.
Matt Alder (2m 15s):
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Matt Kirk (2m 20s):
I can. My name is Matt. I head up a number of solutions here at SHL, in particular for today’s topic, early careers, which, in my world, is apprentices, interns, and graduates. I’ve been in the assessment industry for around 20 years, more years than I care to remember. In that time, I’ve worked at a number of different providers. I rejoined SHL in August of 2021 to head up some of the TA solutions.
Matt Alder (2m 50s):
Fantastic stuff. Just tell us a little bit more about SHL and what they do now.
Matt Kirk (2m 55s):
Of course. SHL are the world leaders in people science. We assess between 45 million people each year. We have over 10,000 clients all around the world and we collect billions of data points every year on candidates and employee’s acquisition, talent management markets, and ultimately, our vision is to bring the power of objectivity to every people decision.
Matt Alder (3m 22s):
Great stuff. That makes you the perfect person to answer this first question, which is, from your perspective, what’s the current state of the global graduate recruitment market?
Matt Kirk (3m 32s):
Yeah, I probably sum this up quite well in one word, not a great answer, but influx is the perfect description for just the graduate market, but the recruitment market unrivaled and that’s brought number of familiar to the pandemic, the current economic situation that we have and the change we’re seeing in the workplace, and particularly, around roles. What roles all with market for grads in particular, we’re seeing there’s more people graduating than ever and some regions are increasing graduate recruitment, some regions are staying flat so there’s more graduates for the same if not less roles.
Matt Kirk (4m 31s):
That’s obviously having a knock effect in terms of hiring fresh grads. Also, graduates now looked at some research recently that Civil did and they were saying that more graduates than previous years now plan to go straight into the workplace. I think that’s an interesting topic and something we can talk about, but I think that’s down to the cost of living. Yeah, graduates are finishing university often with lots of debt. They’re worried about the cost of living than previously, whereas it may have taken a year out to do a master. I think more and more graduates now saying what need to get into the world earning.
Matt Kirk (5m 11s):
The final point for me was I think organizations see graduates as the answer to the ageing workforce. The number of people that believing the world of work experience and their knowledge is higher than ever. Roles are changing, but more importantly, organizations’ roles, graduates as well, individuals gaps.
Matt Alder (5m 32s):
A lot of the conversations that I’ve had about graduate recruitment, college recruitment in the last year or so focus a lot on skills and skills-based hiring. In fact, a lot of the conversations I’ve had about any recruitment focus on skills and skills-based hiring, I think, it’s probably important to really clarify what is meant by that. Can you explain what skills-based hiring means in this context and, suppose, particularly the differences between skills, behaviors, and competencies?
Matt Kirk (6m 8s):
Of course, it’s a hot topic. I have the fortunate pleasure of speaking to many, many clients around the world who partner with us for their talent acquisition needs and skills as we are conversation listeners. It’s important to note from an SHL point of view, we measure two types of skills. We measure hard skills, which are coding, typing things that physical can do. Then second is softer skills and that’s where we’re interested and uptake market skills-based hiring.
Matt Kirk (6m 51s):
Just wanted to clarify the different types before I got to this point. Behaviors in HLS world, these are observable actions at work. Things that you can see people doing on a day-to-day basis, so think about things like encourages other people to express their views or consults widely before determining actions. They’re the things that we can see on a day-to-day basis. Individuals, now they’re good. The challenge with using those for recruitment is there are hundreds if not thousands of them, so how do you identify the key ones that are important for roles?
Matt Kirk (7m 35s):
It’s a difficult thing to do. What we then have next is soft skills. That is really made up of several behaviors. If we think about the examples around expressing perspectives, that would roll up into ageing, the thing about skills is it takes hundreds and hundreds of behaviors. It narrows those down in HLS world 96 skills that are for all roles within the organizations. What we have is a much more manageable number that organizations can help to use for recruitment and development. It does gives us a basis of foundation, a single talent language that everybody can be assessed about.
Matt Kirk (8m 21s):
Then finally, if you took a range of skills and you combine them, typically, that’s where your competency level. Historically, organizations have recruited at competency level and I don’t think that competencies will go anywhere over near or long. We’re seeing such uprising competencies defined. If you have a role and it’s been the same for a number of years reliably, you can say, “Okay, I’m happy to look at the competency level because I know it’s consistent.”
Matt Kirk (9m 3s):
What we’re seeing now is organizations have no ideas, probably strong, but organizations are struggling to predict their talent needs over the next two years. Skills at the next level down below competencies gives us a broader view, a broad enough view that we can not only look at whether somebody is right for the role that they’re coming into the business to do, but then also as that role changes or as the organization changes, does that person have skills needed to be flexible enough to do something different within the organization?
Matt Alder (9m 38s):
From what you’ve said there, it makes perfect sense that skills are what people are now looking for when it comes to hiring graduates. Is that why it’s advantageous to do your skills-based hiring for graduates?
Matt Kirk (9m 49s):
Yeah, it’s offering more flexibility competencies do, and to be very, very clear, organizations will still recruit against competencies. That makes sense. Organizations will say, “Okay, also want look at skills or maybe a combination of the two,” and that what is why I think there’s additional value for organizations to be had. To give you an example here, SHL Talent framework is called the Universal Competency Framework. Now, that measures 20 competencies and it measures 96 skills. That is made up of hundreds and hundreds of behaviors. If we take that example, obviously, in a recruitment context, in any context to be honest, we’re not gonna provide an individual organization with 96 scores skills for each of those.
Matt Kirk (10m 41s):
It’s unmanageable, it’s confusing, it’s unnecessary, but what we can do collecting more data is we can do a number of has identified 11 skills based on research that are predictors of success across all graduate roles. At a recruitment stage, getting insight into those 11 skills is critical because you know that it’s a research model around predicting success. What we’ve done by measuring the 96 is in the backend, we have scores on the remaining 85 skills so that when you onboard people, when you develop people, when you want create a marketplace, you have a whole host of data on those individuals that you can repurpose and look at different points in time throughout the employee lifecycle, at career path, look at who benefit that organizations will get from skills.
Matt Kirk (11m 43s):
Is that flexibility of being able to capture more data and different points throughout lifecycle?
Matt Alder (11m 59s):
Is variation with graduate recruitment, is there a variation between different countries and different industries?
Matt Kirk (12m 9s):
Absolutely. SHL has recently conducted two studies around graduates. The context for this is, which is that I mentioned and we have looked at 20,000 responses from candidates all around the world and looked at how they’ve scored against those skills, looked at what are the top three skills and what are the top three skills that areas for development It brought a number of things that’s interesting. For those listeners, there are two studies, there’s lots of the more data in this.
Matt Kirk (12m 55s):
Obviously, we’re gonna fly through this at the moment, but if you go click on the graduate page, you’ll be able to download the white papers there. Also, we’ve got some upcoming webinars on this subject so you can register for those as well. Looking at regions firstly, so we’ve looked at the global profile, so what are the top three strengths and top three areas for development? Actually, in strengths in particular, we see a lot of consistency across different regions around the world. Takes responsibility, coping with setbacks and criticism, and adapt to change are consistent across all of the regions.
Matt Kirk (13m 38s):
One which come onto itself is very, very interesting. I’ve unfortunate term snowflake flashed around when talking about graduates, but actually what the objective data is telling us is actually adapting to changing, coping with setbacks are real strength for this cohort. Again, for those who are worried about graduates into the business thinking not be resilient, actually our data says opposite. The one difference we see is is around Africa. We see there adapt to change isn’t one of the strengths there, but it replaced with works to high quality standards.
Matt Kirk (14m 26s):
Very consistent, very little difference. We do start to see a bit more of difference in the areas of the areas for development. Again, global profile analyzes information strives to achieve and uses time efficiently. They’re the three globally that we see. When we look at all plus sets of of candidate completions, they’re the ones that are most commonly seen as as weaknesses. We see differences in Africa, Americas, Europe, and Ocean around the areas for development. Again, reasonably minor, it’s fairly consistent and without going into all the details are safe, people can download the white papers and have a look for themselves, but it’s interesting.
Matt Kirk (15m 21s):
It starts to become more interesting when we think about, “Okay, well what does this mean? What are the implications for hiring graduates in these different regions? If you’re looking for adapting to change, for example, in Africa, and it’s not a strength, what does that mean through applicant Paul? How could you measure that as part of the recruitment process? We’ve then taken it step said, well the regions is really interesting. I wonder how that differs by industry. We’ve taken the same set of 20,000 completions, we’ve looked at nine industries within that data and we’ve identified the areas for strength and areas for development.
Matt Kirk (16m 2s):
We see the same pattern. Again, really areas of strength, very consistent across all of the industries and with a few minor differences. One would be consulting. We have adapt to change falls out and works to high quality standards takes its place. Then we start to see some more differences around areas for development, particularly around automotive consulting, government, and public sector. Interestingly enough, government and public sector, one of the areas for development, which is unique, which we didn’t find in any of the other industries, was generating new ideas.
Matt Alder (16m 44s):
Going back to earlier in the conversation when we were talking, you mentioned the cost of living crisis and how that was affecting when new graduates choose to enter the workforce broadening that out slightly. What does work-life balance mean to the young people who are entering the workforce right now?
Matt Kirk (17m 3s):
It’s in their top five of wants from employers. Having a worklife balance and the research you talked about there in terms of, if we back to that when grads now coming into the workplace would is the same view but based on the output of the pandemic candidates or graduates had a strange unique time during that period where they faced challenges none of the generations before them have had in the same way.
Matt Kirk (17m 42s):
The work-life balance has become more and more important. I think that’s true broadly not just for graduates. I think people are now saying, “Okay, it’s not just about hours per weeks.” Me working myself and having that and organizations who don’t provide that balance are likely to struggle to attract, but also retain the talented people within their organization.
Matt Alder (18m 10s):
That makes perfect sense. I suppose pulling the skills-based hiring, the work-life balance, and people’s expectations of the workforce in 2023, how can employers offer an appropriate candidate experience to this cohort of people when they’re recruiting them?
Matt Kirk (18m 31s):
It’s probably my favorite subject. I think there’s a number of things that organizations can do to help engage talent. The first thing I would start with is communication. If you look at things like Wiki jobs, Glassdoor, those types of of websites, you’ll see often that communication is one of the things that candidates complain the most about. Whether it’s, “I didn’t know what was happening or the next stage in the process is,” and I think with technology that’s quite an easy thing to fix. Towards probably the end of 2022, we did a candidate feedback survey and we asked a whole range of questions.
Matt Kirk (19m 17s):
One of the things was, “What’s the most important thing for you as part of the recruitment process?” One of the answers was, “I wanna understand what’s happening. I wanna understand what the process is. I wanna understand why, for example, I’m being asked to do an assessment and I want understand what’s then done with that assessment output.” How do you make decisions based on it? I think communication, for me, letting people know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I also think making it a two-way process will increase candidate engagement tenfold. Whatever the outcome, whether a candidate is successful or not in getting a role, everybody should benefit from the process.
Matt Kirk (20m 2s):
Some of the ways that candidates could benefit is they’re getting insights potentially into the organization and the role itself. They’re learning about whether that’s the right organization for them. I think also offering when assessments are used, development device, and strength-based feedback is a must. Again, one of the survey results are the vast majority of candidates took the survey said they were very happy to do assessments and actually, in fact, they felt like it gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in a fair way, but they wanted to get something outta it. That, again, with technology, is reasonably easy to do.
Matt Kirk (20m 43s):
Here at SHL, we offer personalized video feedback for all candidates. Everybody who completes, whether you’re successful or not, they’ll get a video addressing them and their strengths so that they get something out the process. The last thing I would say is just make it engaging. Talk to them, show them a video of last year’s graduate talking about their experience. I I think there’s often a case for a lot of organizations where it’s very corporate and actually for this generation, that may not always be the best approach. Think about your audience, make it engaging, make it a two-way process, and just be open with the communication.
Matt Alder (21m 28s):
As a final question and really picking up on your comments about technology there, what does the future of graduate recruitment look like and how’s technology likely to change things further in the future?
Matt Kirk (21m 40s):
Yeah, I think the reality is we’re at the start of the new norm now and the new is probably constant change with everything that’s going on in the world. The reality is we’re probably in this situation for the next two to few years, I would say at least. Actually, technology would drive the innovations in that time. SHL have launched SHL Labs, which we have committed 30 million over the next three years to innovation in this space. IT assessment experiences, a whole host of things in that space. What we then get is now things like chatGPT, what does that mean for the future of graduate hiring?
Matt Kirk (22m 30s):
How do we make sure that’s being used in the right? Think technology ultimately is drive innovation, the assessment market. It’ll be certainly be a very interesting space to be in. Data has become the number one thing we get asked for. Organizations now, clients that we partner with that we didn’t simply get asked for anywhere near as much give us as much data as we care about these people so that we can use it different ways. They can get the best out of it from a candidate or an employee point of view. Organizations can make the right people decisions based off it.
Matt Alder (23m 13s):
Lastly, you mentioned the website there where people could look at the research. Remind us of that website and where else can people find out more about the insights that SHL has around graduate recruitment?
Matt Kirk (23m 23s):
Yeah, so SHL.com, there is a solutions tab on the website. If you click on that, you’ll see the white pages, and on LinkedIn as well. We publish research, say we’re getting billions of data points across million candidates every year. We’re using that research to help predict future trends as well as identify itself. Constantly updating it. There’s always some new research that people can digest.
Matt Alder (23m 54s):
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Kirk (24m 2s):
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder (24m 3s):
My thanks to Matt. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
