How long did it take you to start your last job? Did recruitment feel like a fast, smooth process? Or was it a chore that seemed to drag on for longer than necessary? When you started the job, did you find it was not for you? Hiring can be a drawn-out process. It takes on average anything from 30 days to 90 days, depending on the industry, to fill a vacancy, and there are no guarantees you end up with the right person in the right role at the end of it – meaning it is back to square one for both employers and potential recruits. There must be a better way, and we are working hard to put the UK at the forefront of hiring. A STAGNANT SYSTEM The Better Hiring Institute (BHI) was started between government and industry just after the Covid lockdown, when it was recognised that we needed to quickly sort out hiring to keep the UK working during the pandemic. Before then, recruitment was not really changing. There was a complex cottage industry approach to the problem, with excellent human resources (HR), hiring and talent acquisition (TA) leaders in their own organisations who talked about the issues with hiring, but could only influence the way things happened in their own company. There was no incentive or opportunity for them to do it on a bigger level. In the nicest possible way, everyone was looking after themselves. Even government was not necessarily engaged or joined up, so there was no ability to implement policy change that could make a difference. The BHI has worked with 15,000 employers to bring HR, hiring and TA leaders together to take a strategic national view, along with civil servants, government and academics on policy change. Before the pandemic, there was not the opportunity to change hiring nationally, and there was not the vehicle to do it either. Now we have both. To begin with, we looked at things like making Right to Work checks digital. Before the pandemic, to get a job you had to go and see an employer with your passport in person. Changing this opened the ability to make hiring completely digital and remote, severing the link between where people live and where they work. The thenDepartment for Business and Trade Minister for Small Business Paul Scully said at the time that by 2030, 25 million people will have been able to get a job remotely and faster than ever before because of the change. But there was more. FASTER, FAIRER, SAFER Since 2022, the BHI has evolved beyond seeking pandemic solutions and developed a broader mission to make UK hiring faster, fairer and safer. We want to make UK hiring the fastest globally, the fairest in the world, and the safest it can be. In May last year, we launched the UK Hiring Taskforce, led by Viscount Camrose and supported by the likes of Peter Cheese, the CEO of the CIPD (the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), and Parliamentarians. In November, we launched the output of the taskforce, the UK’s first National Hiring Strategy. In that strategy, we outline how we get to faster, fairer, safer. Imagine if we could hire people in 10 days. That means people paying taxes to the treasury much sooner. That is reducing the costs of vacancy rates for employers. It improves productivity, and cuts waiting lists. If we could make hiring fairer, getting the right person in the job first time, we could also attack the massive cost of new starters who leave in their first nine months. The cost of broken hiring is £75bn annually, and we could help reduce the benefits bill by supporting those who want to be in work to get good jobs. The safer element comes in because the increased use of digital tools and technology in hiring is creating other safety problems. We have had misuse and abuse of AI – deepfakes in the hiring process, AI generated false qualifications, fake ID documents, candidates using ChatGPT in online interviews, and even fake job adverts. To address this technology element of the National Hiring Strategy, we launched the Association of RecTech 12 |
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