Get my free whitepaper “10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition” – Download Now
Trend Spotting – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here
When we talk about employers becoming more inclusive, the focus is often on big strategic thinking and a long process of organizational change. However, companies can often make significant progress by taking small steps in important areas.
The quality of the candidate’s experience is the critical first step in an organization’s inclusivity, and recent data indicates that quality has been dramatically deteriorating over the last 18 months.
So, what practical and immediate steps can employers take to be more inclusive with their recruiting?
My guest this week is Advita Patel from Comms Rebel. Advita is a communication and workplace culture strategist who helps organizations cultivate a culture of inclusion. In our conversation, she shares practical, pragmatic advice on how employers can build inclusive candidate experience by improving the quality of their communication.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The importance of inclusive communication
• Being a comms rebel
• How can the recruiting process be more inclusive?
• Job descriptions and degrees
• Recognizing bias
• Taking micro-steps
• The impact of poor communication on candidates
• What can employers and individual recruiters do to improve the candidate experience?
• The dangers of overly generic AI-generated language
• Candidates calling out employers in public
• Changing expectations of work and the importance of belonging
• Will AI make things better or worse?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Hi, this is Matt. Just before we start the show, I want to tell you about a free white paper that I’ve just published on AI and talent acquisition. We all know that AI is going to dramatically change recruiting, but what will that really look like? For example, imagine a future where AI can predict your company’s future talent needs, build dynamic external and internal talent pools, craft personalized candidate experiences, and intelligently automate recruitment marketing. The new white paper 10 ways AI will transform talent acquisition doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does explore the most likely scenarios on how AI will impact recruiting. So, get a head start on planning and influencing the future of your talent acquisition strategy. You can download your copy of the white paper at mattalder.me/transform. That’s mattalder.me/transform.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there, welcome to Episode 623 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. When we talk about employers becoming more inclusive, the focus is very often on big strategic thinking and a long process of organizational change. However, very often companies can make significant progress by taking small steps in important areas. The quality of the candidate experience is a critical first step in the overall inclusivity of an organization, and all the recent data indicates that this is an area where quality has been dramatically deteriorating over the last 18 months. So, what practical and immediate steps can employers take to be more inclusive with their recruiting? My guest this week is Advita Patel from CommsRebel. Advita is a communication and workforce culture strategist who helps organizations cultivate a culture of inclusion. In our conversation, she shares practical, pragmatic advice on how employers can build inclusive candidate experiences by improving the quality of their communication. Hi Advita, and welcome to the podcast.
Advita: Thank you, Matt. I’m excited to be here.
Matt: Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Advita: Yeah, of course. So, my name is Advita Patel. I own a consultancy called CommsRebel, which is all about positively disrupting workplace cultures to help people thrive in their workplace. I’m also the co-founder of A Leader Like Me, which is a global consultancy helping organizations transform their cultures as well so their people can do good work. And I’m a co-founder of Calm Edged Rebels, which is a Coaching Retreat that we host twice a year. And we also have a membership to help people find clarity in their work. And on top of all of that, I’m also president elect for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and I’ll be president next year in 2025.
Matt: Now, that is a lot. [laughs] That is a lot. [Advita laughs] That is a lot to take in. Give people a little bit more of a flavor of what some of that looks like. So, talk us through some of the projects you work on or some of the things that you–
Advita: Yeah, of course. So, I started working within internal communication around 20 odd years ago, and that involved working in various different corporations, helping people communicate better with each other through various different strategies. And throughout that time, I started to recognize that a lot of organizations that I supported were trying to make change happen, but were doing the same things over and over again. So, I think it was Einstein that said that, “The sign of insanity is expected to see change, but doing the same thing.” So in 2018, I decided that I wanted to do something a bit different, and I went on to a different organization and worked on a merger and acquisition. As I was working in the organization, I started to see gaps in how we communicate with each other in terms of the different types of people we have in our organizations.
And that’s when I got more involved in inclusive communication. And what does that mean? When we talk about inclusive communication is about recognizing that we’re not one homogenous group. We’re all different people with different backgrounds or different experiences, and we all need to have an element of choice in how we receive and consume communication and information, how we interpret that. So, I started to bring that into my practice as an internal communication professional. And I realized that we have to do some things that revolutionize how we communicate, which is where CommsRebel came from. The rebel part was quite contentious at the time. I remember a few of my colleagues and friends saying to me, “Oh, are you sure you want to call yourself the rebel?” [laughs] People don’t like that term. People may see you as a bit of a negative disruptor in an organization.
And I was like, “You know what? What we need if we want to see things change and we want people to thrive, we want them to do good work, we need to revolutionize how we do it, and we need to go against status quo, and we need to ask those curious questions, and we need to question why we have certain processes and procedures.” And I always saw a rebel in a very positive light in terms of that, they are willing to stick their neck out to do something a bit different. They’re willing to ask those questions as I said, they will go against status quo. And not everyone has the confidence to do that. So, my role is to kind of come in and as I said at the start, Matt, like positively disrupt and ask those curious questions about why we do certain things in organizations all through, by the way, the employee experience life cycle, right?
Because I think sometimes, we forget that there is a life cycle that colleagues go through and we focus all our energy sometimes in recruitment and then maybe a bit of retention, but then forget about all the other processes that we go through. So, I kind of come in under the guise of like CommsRebel and support organizations. A Leader Like Me came actually when I asked somebody to be my mentor, Priya Bates, who’s my co-founder for A Leader Like Me and A Leader Like Me was based on our experiences as south Asian women, working in an industry that there weren’t many people who looked like to us. So, we were saying that, “What if you could see leaders like yourself? Will that make a difference in how you perform and behave in organizations? And that’s where a leader like me came from.”
Matt: Amazing stuff. And I can see your book in the background there, building a [crosstalk] [Advita laughs] So, let’s dig into that in the context of sort of recruiting and talent acquisition, that kind of a start of the employee journey, if you like. So, everyone talks a lot about diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging in the talent acquisition space, but yet there are lots of things about the recruitment process that haven’t changed in, I want to say, a 100 years, [chuckles] but at least several decades. How could recruiting processes be more inclusive? And where are the areas where they’re sort of currently excluding talent?
Advita: Yeah. I mean, it is. You’re so spot on in terms of how change hasn’t happened as quickly in the recruitment side, from the basics of not having salaries on a job description, I’ll never really understand. I’m sure there’s a valid reason somewhere and someone can come up with some real good reason why salaries are not on there. But not having salaries on JDs is quite exclusive and it means that there’s certain individuals who will not be able to apply for that opportunity because they just don’t know where they stand in terms of, is it something that’s affordable to me? Am I able to survive on that salary? And is it something that I can contribute as well in terms of my living experience? And that kind of doesn’t appeal to those from a lower socioeconomic background or somebody who may be underrepresented in other areas of those characteristics. So that is a very tactical, basic thing that I still don’t see many organizations do in terms of being very clear on what you’re expecting that potential colleague in terms of their reward and bonus.
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: What’s expected there? Things like not being very clear on the essentials for that role. So, there’ll be loads of job descriptions that will have lots of nice to dos and nice things. And we need four degrees from 15 different universities. [laughs] And I’m always saying to recruitment managers that I work with, is that an essential, is it an essential that somebody needs to have a degree or a master’s or an MBA? Is that going to make a difference to the job? Or is it possible that you could recruit somebody who doesn’t have a traditional route in the way they got their experience? And really think about that and question yourself in why are we asking for degrees and MBA’s when actually it’s not needed for this role? And a lot of recruitment managers don’t even think about it. They’re like, “Oh, yes.” We probably don’t need somebody who’s got a degree.
We could do with someone who’s got more experience in X, Y, Z to help us do this a bit better. And the thing with the recruitment side, Matt, is that a lot of it is just based on what we believe good looks like, based on the biases I think we’ve been surrounded by. And when you’re listening to people who are from similar backgrounds, similar experiences, similar thought processes, you don’t really recognize the gaps and the pitfalls in your recruitment policy, which is why I’m so encouraging of recruitment managers and talent acquisition folks to look outside of their circle-
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: -and ask those curious questions and be a little bit more mindful about why they may be asking for certain essentials when it’s not necessary for that job. And that’s one of the things I would really ask people to think about.
Matt: I think that’s interesting as well, because sometimes when people talk about being more inclusive, it’s suddenly seen as this massive project that’s going to take years, cost loads of money, etc., etc. But what you’ve outlined, there are some really simple steps that people could take straight away to instantly make things better.
Advita: Yeah, micro steps. I am so about micro steps. Like, well, we live in a very complex world right now, and it’s tough, it’s challenging. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the pandemic. There’s lots of challenges for organizations. We’re struggling to retain talent. We’re struggling to recruit talent. We’re struggling to keep the businesses afloat really. We need to make things as simple as we possibly can in how we do these things. And I’m all about micro steps. Look at what you’re doing today and be 1% better tomorrow and keep adding to that. You don’t need to revolutionize the entire structure and recruitment policy and spend millions and millions of pounds. But start small, and over time, you’ll start building confidence in what you’re asking for and what you need. And that’s my biggest advice to listeners, is, look at where you are today, look at where your gaps are and what’s missing, and then fix it by 1%.
Matt: Yeah, 100%. I think that’s great advice. Now, as you say, it’s a very complicated, disruptive time at the moment. Lots of very strange things going on in the job market. So on the one hand, we’re seeing skill shortages all over the place. On the other hand, we’re seeing people struggling to, who’ve been made redundant, who’ve been laid off struggling to rejoin the workforce. As a Comms professional, one of the things that is constantly kind of flagged up is that there is still so much poor communication in the recruitment process. I mean, what’s the impact of that? And what do you think employers, but also individual recruiters should be doing to fix it?
Advita: Yeah. Poor communication means that you’re not going to get the high-quality applications that you need to come through into your kind of inbox or however you’re doing that recruitment. And that’s because you’re trying to find somebody that covers a multitude of skills rather than actually thinking about what is it that we need and not having clarity and not having concise messaging or not even explaining what that role is, is going to cause challenge. Now, I don’t know about you, and I’m sure other people have experienced this, but when I see on LinkedIn and you see those jobs appear on LinkedIn, they’re never clear. They’re not really asking you what it entails. They’re not really describing the culture of the organization. They don’t often talk about the values. They don’t often talk about all the purposes of that business, and you end up just kind of mindlessly, I suppose, just getting folks just doing apply because it’s quick.
And that’s great. You know, the simple process is great, but not clarifying and not having clear explanations about what that job is and what that means, and not having clarity in terms of expectations, you are not going to attract the right quality or caliber of that candidate and that is a fall in terms of Comms and how you’re communicating that job advert. And I can tell when something has been written by AI, which is fair because I think that is a tool that we should adopt and adapt. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but we also need to be quite mindful about how AI becomes quite generalist in terms of what they’re spouting out. So, you have to be quite mindful about what you’re asking. And there’s lots of recruitment organizations and recruitment teams using AI and you can easily spot the symptoms which makes the job application not very clear.
Matt: Absolutely.
Advita: So being concise and clear on what you’re asking for, and that’s a downside because you’re not going to attract that caliber. You’re not going to attract the right kind of addition that you need for your culture. People are just going to miss what you’re asking for because it just sounds the same as everybody else’s. So, you need to kind of tap into that unique selling point. What does make you different from other organizations out there? What benefits are you going to be giving to folks when they do decide to contribute their career to your organization? What’s your employee value proposition? What does that mean? What does that look like? How are you going to kind of– you do need to work a bit harder at that first stage to get the caliber. There’s no doubt you’ll get hundreds if not thousands of applicants. I have no doubt about that. But are they the right caliber and that’s what you kind of need to think about?
Matt: Absolutely. What about communication through the recruitment process? Because that seems to be particularly problematic for people at the moment.
Advita: Oh, it’s shocking. The stories I hear about how communication has broken down between the candidate and the recruiter is awful and heartbreaking. So there’s so many people who have been in my– I only did a LinkedIn post about it a few days ago, actually, because over the last couple of weeks I’ve had a few DMs from people because I’m also a coach, a confidence coach, so I help people kind of boost their confidence and self-esteem. So, I’ve had a few people inquiring about that based on the fact that they’ve had a terrible experience through a recruitment process. So, they’ve applied for an opportunity, they’ve gone through several rounds, and then they’ve been ghosted completely. Or the feedback that they received from the recruiter has been really generic and not quite meaningful. Or they’ve applied for opportunities and given the heart and soul in the covering letter and not heard a thing at all from anybody about anything. And they’ve chased time and time again and there’s been no response. It’s just awful.
Like we’ve kind of lost this skill of how to communicate well with people and understand that the human beings at the end of that CV or the end of that covering letter that they’ve gone out their way to send in to you. And I get it. I understand that when you get hundreds if not thousands of applicants, it’s really difficult to get back to every single person because of resourcing or whatever. But you need to put it into your process. You need to recognize that. Actually, our reputation as an organization is at risk here. These people may come back in the future, and what are they going to be saying about us publicly? We’ve got these Glassdoor now. We’ve got LinkedIn, we’ve got X. We’ve got all sorts of social media platforms where people are now not fearful of calling out organizations for poor practices. And I know most of it’s not down to maliciousness. Most of it is down to broken processes and broken Comms. But you need to do a proper process and a bit of a standard operating procedure to be honest in terms of what happens the moment a candidate applies for an opportunity, what is their– In my opinion, your employee experience starts then?
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: If you see that somebody applies-
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: -what experience do they have being part of our world, our organization, even if they’re successful or not, how do we want them to feel and how do we want them to talk about us if they are successful and not successful. And right now, it’s absolutely horrific in terms of the experiences that candidates are going through when they’re applying for opportunities, and all because recruitment teams are not having the decency to go back and explain the rationale about why. In my opinion, takes a couple of minutes.
[music]
Matt: Hi, it’s Matt, and we will be back to the interview very shortly. In several decades of working in this industry, I’ve never seen a time of greater disruption and change. And we really are still only at the beginning. With technology advancing as quickly as it is now, there’s a tendency to believe that we have no control over the future. This is wrong, and I passionately believe that this is the precise time when we should be inventing the future. I want to see talent acquisition thrive, and I want recruiting to be transformational in getting everyone into the right job for them with the right skills at the right time. So, I’ve built a course to help, and it’s called Trend Spotting. Trend Spotting is an on demand digital course that examines the forces driving change and assesses the emerging trends in talent acquisition. It also teaches a simple but robust model to help you understand, plan for, influence, and invent the future. Trend Spotting is for everyone in talent acquisition. It will help you future proof your career, create future-focused talent acquisition strategies and build your influence within your business. I’ve split Trend Spotting into nine short lessons to easily fit into the flow of your busy day. The feedback from the TA leaders who’ve taken the course so far has been amazing. You can find out more by going to mattalder.me/course. That’s mattalder.me/course.
[music]
Matt: I think it’s interesting as well because pretty much ever since social media has been on the see, we’ve talked about this reputational damage, people talking about bad experiences online. And I think in recruiting, up until very recently, up until the pandemic, it kind of wasn’t happening. People weren’t actually doing that. They were talking about it privately, but they weren’t calling people out necessarily.
Advita: Hmm, right.
Matt: And I think we can safely say that has all changed now. And I think there’s a few reasons for it. I think there’s a generation coming into the workforce who have no issue with being vocal about the experience they’re receiving, and I think that’s shocked a few people. And we’ve seen the TikTok’s that people have filmed of them being laid off live and all that kind of stuff. So that’s now a reality. But also, I think everyone’s kind of attitude to work and various things like that have changed since the pandemic anyway. So I think, yeah, we’re definitely seeing much more of that.
Advita: Yeah. People are not scared anymore, really. Before you worried about your own reputation as an individual, what if an organization put off by me calling out a poor experience and they think that I’m just like this troublemaker who’s coming into an organization? So you did keep it below the radar a bit, and you told maybe a couple of your mates or you might have anonymously ranted about it somewhere on Reddit or something.
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: You’re so right, Matt. The generation that’s, you know, the Gen Z generation, I suppose coming in so much more confident in not allowing people to treat them in that way. And I know, I’m not fearful, really, of speaking up. It’s the digital native. The way they communicate. And also, I’m not the biggest fan of generational theory because I think it does depend. But generally, you’re learning from the Gen Zs in terms of nothing bad is going to happen if you do speak about your poor experiences. And even if it does, that’s probably not an organization that you want to commit to-
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: -If they’re going to judge you on that based on the horrific experience you’re going through, then maybe that organization is not somewhere where you’re going to thrive.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Advita: So you probably don’t want to work there anyway. So, people are now getting a bit more confident and the TikTok, I don’t know how I’ve seen so many those videos where people are getting fired, and they’re covertly filming.
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: They’re quite clever with it because they’re not showing the face of the manager or anything. They were just there on the side.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah, it’s very talented that [crosstalk] [00:22:25 [unintelligible].
Advita: No. Yeah, they’re not breaking rules, really. Your organization can have all sorts of policies in place, but technically, legally, if you wanted to go down that route, you probably could take them, but who’s going to? I would say.
Matt: They’ve just been fired, so–
Advita: Yeah. They don’t care, whatever.
Matt: Exactly. And I think this leads us nicely onto the next question, which is really about those expectations of work and the workplace and how they’ve changed. They were changing anyway, but pretty much they’ve changed significantly since the pandemic. How are you seeing employers react to this kind of new reality? And what do you think they could be doing better?
Advita: I think there’s a bit of reckoning going on right now. I think employers are definitely realizing that before the pandemic, they could put a job advert out and they got a number of applications, they did an interview and whatnot. But people want more from their organizations now. They want flexibility, they want policies that shows that the organization cares about them. They want their organizations to step into this kind of whole social responsibility part. They want folks to comment on things, they’ll be judging organizations on where they’re committing their energy in terms of public support, even down to the political stuff, which organizations used to avoid many times and some still do. But people are asking questions of the organization, “What is the social responsibility that you have? What flexibility do you have? How you support in working parents? How you support in people who have disabilities? How are you helping those who are underrepresented in the workplace? How are you supporting those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds?”
People want to know, and they’ll be asking those questions in interviews. They’ll be asking those questions around, “What happened to the last person that was in this position. Where did they go? What happened to them?” And even though the job market is challenging for some people right now, the reason it is a little bit more challenging is I do honestly believe that people are a little bit more cautious about where they’re committing their time. You know, before you may have just taken an opportunity because it was a job. I know when I was growing up, it’s like just get first job that’s offered to you because [chuckles] you need to earn money, that kind of world. But I think people are definitely being a little bit more cautious about where am I going to go and how is it going to help me. And mental health and well-being is an incredible part of the workplace right now. And all of that feeds into how included people feel. Because when they don’t feel included and they don’t feel that they belong in a workplace, they’re going to have a knock-on effect on how they’re feeling mentally. And then the mental impact will impact the physical. And a lot of folks have experienced this through COVID and the pandemic. So, they’re being very cautious about is this organization going to help me just survive or is it going to help me thrive?
Matt: Absolutely. Makes perfect sense. And a final future-focused question. We mentioned AI already earlier in the conversation and how it can be misused, but also what an important sort of tool and resource it is. As we move forward and we see more adoption of AI in talent acquisition and HR, and also the technology gets more sophisticated, is that going to make things better or is it going to make things worse?
Advita: To your point, Matt, it’s how you use it. So, AI is, I honestly believe it’s an incredible tool. And if you are inputting good quality information without bias and you’re aware of what bias looks like as well and how it shows up, it can be incredible to help you kind of get rid of that human emotions and human bias that you may have when you’re sifting CVs, for example. Let’s be honest, we all have bias. And if anyone says, “We don’t, it’s a lie. We all have it.” And when you are looking through CVs or you’re looking through covering letters or you’re watching, if you are one of those organizations that has multiple ways that people can apply. So, lots of organizations now to support those neurodivergent do videos or audio as well as covering letter and CV, so they’re giving people choice about how they apply. As a human being, you will have a certain element of bias.
So, whether that’s the education route that they’re taking, their background, even as down to what schools they went to, what area they live in, what hobbies they have, you will find this kind of connection to that individual which may unconsciously or consciously push that person forward because you felt this kind of connection with them. Now, AI can be a great tool in terms of removing that and looking at somebody anonymously in terms of are they the right addition for our culture? And in order for that to happen, well, you need to train it so it doesn’t look at the biases. Because obviously AI is based on what we’ve inputted as human beings, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Advita: If we’re inputting bias ourselves, it’s going to come up with bias, but we need to train it in the right way. So, when we’re making sure that the bias doesn’t show up when it’s doing the sifting for us or if it’s just looking through applications for us, but in order for that to happen, we need to be consciously aware of our own biases-
Matt: Absolutely.
Advita: -because we need to be able to spot them on the AI system. So AI, I do 100% believe is going to change how we recruit, hopefully for the positive. If we do tune into the fact that there is bias existing within that system and as individuals, we need to be aware of that. So initially you may need to do a bit of a mystery, kind of sifting yourself to see if it is the bias and keep training it and keep training it. The more you train it and the more you work with it, the more it will get rid of those biases and be quite functional in terms of what you’re asking it to do. But right now, I would say that we’re just not there in understanding how this system can help us and we’re just accepting, I would say, the outputs it delivers without actually thinking if this content is sharing with you or this output is giving me, is it peppered in bias?
And how do I make sure that next time I sift through it doesn’t have that. But yeah, I do think that AI is going to revolutionize again how we recruit, how we retain, how we support our colleagues through the whole employee experience cycle and what that looks like. And I am also hopeful that it will give people opportunities to belong and feel more included in an organization because it’s done, I suppose, tuned into the humanness side of it, but come up with fair results, I would hope.
Matt: Advita, thank you very much for talking to me.
Advita: Thank you so much, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Advita. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and 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.
