3 Best Practices I’ve Seen In #Apprentice Recruitment
You may well have read my article on the Trends in Emerging Talent for 2019; it’s going to be a fascinating year.
As well as the challenges of Brexit many of the issues that we have been raising for some time in the word of apprenticeships are (at last) being recognised.
You will undoubtedly have seen questions raised about the collapse in Level 2 participation as well as the astonishing forecasts of overspend on MBA and other management apprenticeships.
As we turn into 2019, I’m taking this chance to reflect on some of the best practices I’ve seen as I visited our customers. These are colleges, private providers, employers and media agencies who have all delivered effective talent acquisition for their customers.
Here are three of the best things I’ve seen recently:
1. Cross Platform Attraction.
I was with one provider last week who is delivering a great service for their employers across construction and engineering. They are doing this by sharing vacancies across a wide range of different channels. Yes, obviously Find an Apprenticeship and GetMyFirstJob.co.uk, but also an incredible range of social media, jobs boards and ‘physical’ adverts with schools and local jobs centres.
They had really taken this to heart, but by tracking all of their applications in one place were able to do this in an efficient way which kept admin and costs down whilst delivering great speed of service to employers.
2. Speed of Response
At the end of the day, one of the big motivations for creating the TalentPortal was to help those involved with apprentice recruitment to deliver the same levels of service to their customers as would normally be expected in commercial recruitment.
One college I visited at the end of November told me a wonderful story of an employer who had been waiting for 8 weeks for candidates from another college. Within 2 hours of being given the opportunity, they had carried out a shortlist, sent messages and spoken to candidates and had sent 5 CVs across for consideration.
This kind of story which ends up with employers receiving a great service and the TalentPortal being used to provide competitive advantage is the thing that we love!
3. Digital Engagement, not Volume
In 2019, we’ve really extended some of the work we’ve done with big employers. As well as working directly with a range of household names, we’ve also started to work more closely with some of the UK’s leading media agencies. This has been a new experience for us, and we’ve developed some great relationships based on both the insight we can provide as well as the speed of turnaround that is important in this market.
Working with experts in digital media has also helped us to develop a deeper understanding of the way in which digital should be measured and assessed. It’s easy to be taken in by a headline number – say traffic, or click throughs – but there are a range of measures that are arguably far more important, such as time on site, pages visited, bounce rate, and application rates.
We now focus far more on digital ‘engagement’ as it is a far better measure than simple volumes. In fact, if you want 30,000 hits on your website, you can get this by spending as little as £30 but will achieve nothing. Getting 3,000 hits from genuine and engaged traffic is far more difficult but far more important when developing a talent pipeline.
As a foot note, we were delighted to be told that against every jobs site in the UK, we delivered the 4th highest number of clicks, the second highest number of applications, and the lowest cost per application by far.
David Allison, CEO, TheTalentPeople and GetMyFirstJob
Copyright © 2019 FE News
TheTalentPeople is a Social Enterprise that is dedicated to helping training providers, colleges universities and employers find and recruit the next generation of Talent. Through GetMyFirstJob.co.uk, the UK’s #1 Emerging Talent website and our innovative Recruitment and Application Tracking System – TheTalentPortal – we have helped shortlist over 1.5 million applications in the last 4 years. In the last 12 months alone, this has led to over 35,000 people starting their careers.
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