Dive Brief:
- An article at Managers.com in the U.K. lays out a new way employers are taking on the recruiting and interviewing processes in the war for talent -- and there's good reason for concern.
- The article reports that according to recent research by the Prince’s Trust and HSBC, almost three quarters (73%) of British businesses believe a skills crisis will hit the U.K. within the next three years. Almost a third (32%) of organizations report skills shortages at entry level, while 72% believe that the recruitment of young people into the workforce is vital to avert a skills crisis.
- In order to try and deepend the talent pool, professional services firms Deloitte, EY and PwC are doing things like recruiting "blind" (not revealing academic details to recruiters) and dumping existing academic standards for job applicants.
Dive Insight:
Among the reasons behind these unconventional recruiting practices? Academic grade inflation -- employers don't trust student records as being accurate. At the same time, by loosening those recruiting requirements, the firms are boosting their diversity statistics, as more minorities and women, for example, benefit from those new criteria.
That's also a good thing, as research from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), New York City, offers evidence that more workplace diversity lifts bottom line performance. A 2013 CTI study found that American publicly-traded companies with significant gender and race diversity with their management teams were 45% more likely to increase market share in 2013.
