Fair Hiring - Blog
Thoughts, Rants and Announcements...
Scott McRae from Candidate ID an HRTech firm, was kind enough to invite Fair Hiring Project Founder, Olivier Vidal onto their #TalentTalk series to debate with HR leaders about how to embed inclusion and diversity best practice into hiring, promotions and wider corporate culture.
Anyone interested in the business case and complex issues around better diversity and inclusion in resourcing should enjoy this webinar.
Fair Hiring Project is pleased to part of the Candidate ID community.
As a partner to global RPO leader AlexanderMann Solutions, Fair Hiring Project was profiled in the inaugural Catalyst Magazine — alongside psychometric assessment and selection experts Sova.
"Catalyst was created to be an agent of change, inspiring innovation, encouraging collaboration, provoking debate and showcasing best practice - our own and that of our customers.
At Alexander Mann Solutions, we work across countries, sectors and industries, enabling the sharing and cross-pollination of ideas and practices, and supporting business transformation through our consulting arm, Talent Collective.
The magazine is designed to reflect the significance of technology as we enter the 'fourth industrial revolution', the ongoing need for organisations to develop their people, and the challenge to look around corners in order to stay ahead of the game."
You can request a physical copy of the magazine by emailing us — enquiries@fairhiringproject.com
Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey from the Resource Group Podcast, was kind enough to invite Olivier Vidal, Founder of the Fair Hiring Project on his podcast series.
We discussed several things including:
You can download summary slides here
Podcast host: Dr Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey
“Olivier has a very interesting perspective on recruitment as a discipline, he’s clearly thought long and hard about his field and I found that he has a very meta level approach.”
Fair Hiring Project is a partner to AlexanderMann Solutions and it's consulting arm - Talent Collective.
In July 2017, we were pleased to present our work to RPO executive leaders in the EMEA, APAC and North American markets.
We had great feedback on work and potential ways that Candidate Education can be integrated formally in RPO delivery models and work the ATS or other HRTech platforms. We were pleased to present alongside video interview platform HireVue and recruitment assessment experts Sova.
“‘It is vital that recruitment leaders work to ensure all candidates get fantastic support — leaving this to be done ad-hoc is not enough.””
We were delighted to support this year's Future Talent Awards — a celebration of inspirational women who are on their way to leading businesses. Nominees came from a diverse range of sectors, from Engineering, Health to the City, though each had a unique story to tell and aspirations to do business in their own style.
Every nominee was given access our learning platform and many finalists accepted our offer of one-to-one coaching support, to hone their messages to judges and build their self-confidence. We are very thankful to all those who gave us feedback on their user experience.
Here’s an honest list of lessons learnt from their feedback:
We look forward to supporting the Future Talent Awards 2017….
A great deal has been written about autism in the last few years —with time dedicated to how businesses can harness the unique qualities of autistic candidates — those with savant qualities particularly.
Our learning and development platform for candidates has recently been enhanced by advice from Jonathan Andrews, a soon-to-be-trainee lawyer at Reed Smith, who has become a speaker and advocate for autistic people in the workplace.
His advice has been added into sections on Selling Yourself, Being Authentic and Disclosing your Challenges — subjects which are core to any interview and potential much more demanding for anyone who is different from their peers.
We passionately believe businesses should support candidates with best-practice advice from experts, rather than hoping in-house recruiters or agents will give good advice to everyone. By co-operating with experts we’re building a learning platform that is truly inclusive.
Jonathan is, by his own admission different from his peers — but this is unlikely to be the detriment of his career (or his employers). Another reminder that difference is not an indicator of a persons capacity to contribute to the bottom line.
To see Jonathan’s advice to candidates, please just get in touch.
As part of our growth, the Fair Hiring Project is delighted to announce that we are getting support from leading experts in their fields.
Each of these amazing people have give us their time and experience for free to ensure candidates get great advice. We are hugely grateful to them all – it feels like we’ve got influential people all starting to pull in our direction.
……and many more coming soon!
“Partnerships are a fundamental part of our strategy – we believe collaboration is the quickest route to build a game-changing product” said Founder Olivier Vidal.
The Government recently relaunched their 2013 “Disability Confident” scheme, whereby businesses are able to make the most of the opportunities offered by employing disabled people. There are three stages to the scheme, the first two of which are achieved by issuing statements and conducting self assessments claiming that your business can see the benefit of employing disabled people and by saying that you are doing the right things to keep them. The third stage – being a Disability Confident Leader – means you have to be validated by a fellow “Leader” company. You should be acting as a ‘champion’ in your local and business community and your networks. Disabled people should be seeing you as leading the way to employment equality.
Speaking of equality, some would argue that this initiative – being voluntary – barely even covers what employers are supposed to be legally doing under the Equality Act anyway. But as our MD Olivier Vidal states “The Government “Disability Confident” scheme focusses on reducing bias, reducing discrimination and improving the confidence of businesses to bring in talented people, who happen to be disabled — this is some way behind actually supporting people to overcome their own challenges — but none the less it’s a great step”
At The Fair Hiring Project, we are focussing instead on a different step in the road businesses can take to become fully inclusive. You can be open to hiring people with disabilities – but if these people don’t have the know-how or confidence to let themselves shine in an interview, then the recruitment process is going to fail them before they even gain employment. A business can have as many Disability Confident badges as it can, but until there is more support from the ground up, both the businesses and people with disabilities are going to miss out on the mutually beneficial relationship that comes from inclusive employment.
It’s been proven without a doubt that diverse businesses are more successful than their rivals. They make more money, they have happier employees – they are just better. McKinsey research suggests that businesses that are diverse are 35% more likely to be outperforming their peer companies that are not diverse. The Fair Hiring Project offers candidate training that puts everyone on a level playing field. Disabled people will be given the confidence that their rivals may naturally have developed through significantly better life opportunities and education up to the same point. If everyone you interview has the same confidence coming in, then you will have a naturally diverse candidate pool to choose from.
By offering structured support in recruitment as well as within employment itself, businesses will truly be able to reap the benefits that come from that all-important diverse workforce. As our Jane Hatton from Evenbreak states “structured support should be commonplace amongst employers that take disability and the candidate experience seriously
Social Mobility in the UK is pretty shocking — that’s the unsurprising conclusion of the ever-impressive Bridge Group‘s latest report. Particularly amongst the graduate population there’s significant evidence that social class impacts on careers, irrespective of academic achievements.
Fixing such a many-sided problem will be a sticky business, but I applaud their recent efforts to try and foster an industry wide lexicon for discussing classifications of disadvantage – something in which Rare Recruitment are ahead of the field.
We believe the Fair Hiring Project, or at least the approach we advocate (investing to level the playing field wherever possible) can be a part of the solution. That’s not just a hypothesis, but based on the fact that both McKinsey and Grant Thornton are now quietly intervening in their graduate candidates’ experience with one-to-one coaching support. Both of have done so without fanfare, but to us they provide evidence that leaving candidates to fend for themselves will reinforce advantages of social privilege and damage attempts to hire the long-term best in our fast-changing economy.
We are delighted to see world-class companies intervening to support candidates. Whilst we believe that a sophisticated learning platform offers better-value and a scaleable solution where coaching programmes canoot — we can only applaud their commitment and hope they will share some statistics about the positive impact they are having on social mobility or their brand amongst young people.
Finally… we believe that graduate or formal hiring schemes are only one route into corporate and professional life and that’s why a ‘catch all’ online solution ,whilst imperfect, is the most realistic and powerful way to start changing norms in hiring.
