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Diversifying Talent Pools with Shaun Daly: The Recruiting Future Podcast

September 21, 2022
 
iCIMS Staff
4 min read
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Hiring a diverse and inclusive workforce is a key priority for most employers, but many are lost on where to start. Who is doing it well, and how much of a role can recruiting technology play in diversifying talent pools?

Shaun Daly, Head of Resourcing at The Open University appeared on The Recruiting Future podcast with Matt Alder sharing his insights on increasing the diversity of its organisation by rethinking its entire talent acquisition model, building an inclusive employer brand and utilizing disruptive technologies

Keep reading for Shaun’s thoughts on using Candidate.ID to transform The Open University’s talent acquisition strategy.

Pioneering innovation at The Open University

“The reason we’re called The Open University is because we don’t have the same entry-level requirements that other universities have. What that means is that The Open University is a leveler so that people in society that wouldn’t traditionally go to university can get an education. A lot of our students are people who perhaps didn’t get to go to university when they were younger. Maybe they’ve had a different career, going from one job to another, or maybe they’ve got involved in having a family and bringing up children.

“The Open University is famed for innovation and being ahead of its time.”

Recruiting challenges

“What I found when I joined The Open University was that they had always just recruited, no problem. They had one way of doing it – the team put out adverts and in would come the applications. No real effort. There was good direct sourcing, but it was supplemented by lots of agency hiring because the level of in-house capability and sophistication from a talent attraction and recruitment perspective wasn’t necessarily that high.

“When I engaged with my colleagues to get a better understanding of how this was all working, what I noticed was that they’d always done a lot of work on our brand, but nothing on employer brand.”

An under-representation of diverse candidates

“When we looked at the diversity profile of The Open University for the scale and importance of institution it is, we begin to realize, perhaps not all is well. We might have been recruiting so-called successfully all these years, but actually, we’d been recruiting people like us.

“That was the problem. We had significant under-representation for ethnic minorities, for black and Asian employees, a significant under-representation of people with disabilities and neurodivergent conditions and a significant under-representation of women in senior positions. When we started to play back all of that, we started to craft a specific employer brand and attraction strategy to focus on those that were under-represented. “

How marketing automation helped

“In the UK, it’s become harder to recruit quickly, but what we were able to do really well with Candidate.ID was we were able to find a neat way to funnel the type of candidates that we were looking for, and that we did need to engage more. As I said, mostly we don’t struggle to recruit. However, there are areas that have always been a struggle for us.

“I met somebody from Candidate.ID at a conference a couple of years back, and I was really impressed by the idea of recruitment marketing automation. That just made sense immediately to me. Once we got into conversation, their agility to mobilize a solution, which would really help where I was at and kill two birds with one stone was brilliant.

“We went out to market last year with our new ‘be so much more’ brand. Candidate.ID were able to host specific landing pages, firstly, for the generic teaser campaign that we did. Secondly, for the specific underrepresented groups that we were trying to target and then thirdly, for specific job and event campaigns. One of those, for instance, was an associate lecture online recruitment event, which we hosted there and promoted through social media.

The results of marketing automation

“The event generated a thousand event applications in four days. It was hugely successful and the Candidate.ID platform allowed us to do that in the absence of having other systems at hand. Whilst that was a real benefit to us, the real benefit we found was that people applying for the event, coming along to that event, or coming through our talent pool via the Candidate.ID platforms were now in a CRM system, which is much richer in terms of how we can segment that database.

“Through regular communications and asking people if they wanted to be in the talent pool, and what kind of events and roles they were interested in, we’ve been able to segment, focus, and target based on particular skill sets, particular areas for not just associate lecturers, but everything.

“That’s been a real benefit to us. We’re hoping that there’s a really neat way to continue our relationship next year.”

Diversify your talent pools with Candidate.ID

Candidate.ID’s award-winning product is transforming the way talent acquisition leaders attract, engage and advance talent. With diversity hiring at the top of recruiters’ priority list, Candidate.ID here to help you diversify your talent pool while increasing recruitment effectiveness,

To find out how you can diversify your talent pools with marketing automation, book a demo now.

Transform your talent acquisition strategy with marketing automation

Want to know more about how you can discover which candidates are cold, warm and ‘hire-ready’? Download our ebook here.

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