Enhancing Your Senior Hires Strategy

Julie Griggs

Head of Talent & Resourcing

@jules_griggs

What we’ll cover today

• Background

• Where we were

• What we did

• Results

• Future

• Takeaways

The market is challenging…

• The sector is generally seen as a ”place of study” rather than a place of Employment

• More needs to be done to improve Employer Branding amongst Higher Education institutions

• We need to evolve our Academic recruitment marketing and messaging in a challenging UK Labour Market (lowest level since 1975 in HE)

• Challenges don’t just stop at hiring; REF/TEF, alternative providers, financial commitment

• Similarly in Professional Support where HE institutions have substantial hiring difficulties, with 35% reporting challenges in 2013 to 62% in 2017

• Advertising via our website and an Academic job board (ALL posts)

• Receiving on average 3 applications for Professorial positions and poor quality applicants for Professional Services

• Perception of the University as an employer, especially for Professional Services

• Assumption that it couldn’t be done in-house along with our ability to build our attractiveness

• Using Search and Selection for nearly every role

• PDF “candidate packs” not mobile compatible with a static feel

The beginning…

• As a Resourcing function we knew we needed to address agency spend

• Candidate Experience a concern; losing candidates

• Challenge from one of our Faculty PVCs to “wow” him

• Recent campaigns had struggled to impact with quantity and quality

• We needed a case study and showcase how this could work.

What changed?

• Understand our audiences

• External feedback and feedback from candidates.

• Playing to our strengths – great campus, great benefits and great colleagues to work with.

• What do international colleagues need to see from us?

• Create much more energy around MMU

• Seized free opportunities – claimed our Indeed page.

First things first…..What’s unique about MMU?

• A high profile role

• Lots of visibility

• We needed some help……

• Peters-Fox engaged to support

• Really had to work…

• It had to have serious ROI and actually prove the concept.

The first campaign

• Cost-effective – far cheaper than search and selection

• Mobile enabled - four clicks to apply, even on mobile

• Able to be read by text readers and therefore fully accessible unlike PDFs

• Able to monitor our pipeline of candidates – gender balance, reducing bias

• Something not done in HE before..

• It turned out to be something not done in the UK before…

It had to be…

An example of our E-magazine solution…

Results

Best Employer Marketing Initiative - GOLD

• Created better and more targeted content

• Taken the majority of our senior hires in house

• Cost Saving – huge reduction from pure search and selection

• Tech & market mapping – get a better feel for people out there

• Gaining more insight and intelligence.

• Targeted marketing – segmented communications

• Using our people to tell the story

• We stepped away from the (bad) ATS for some roles and brought in the human element

Outcomes

• Using real stories but creating aspirational career journey

• Showcasing the aspirational nature of Manchester as a location

• Appealing to an international audience – wider range of channels

• Wider use of videos and video job descriptions

• New ATS will enhance the journey and experience.

We’ve built upon this

• Candidate concierge – human interaction all through the process

• Partnering – understanding the role and challenging when necessary.

• Talent Mapping – we don’t have all the answers..

• Enhancing our mobility offering– Airbnb account – simple but effective.

• Better all round candidate experience – here’s the feedback:

“May I say also, that I am most grateful to you and your colleagues for an extremely professional and efficient recruitment process to date. I felt thoroughly engaged throughout the whole hiring process” Head of Health & Safety candidate, October 2017

Cool drone footage is not enough…

• Live chat functionality on new careers website

• New careers site with segmented content with an emphasis on UX and CX. Senior hires specific content

• Further leveraging our improved Employer Brand. Attracting the right and detracting the wrong. Leadership behaviours and expectations.

• Social Media and Content Marketing to continue to play a significant part in both attraction and awareness

The future; what’s next for us in the Senior Hires space?

• Create a different candidate experience for different audiences

• Segment the communications

• Bring the human into your process – concierge where you can

• Try something different.

• Think about the whole eco-system

• Definitely a business case for bringing in-house

• It’s not difficult get the tools in place

• It doesn’t have to cost a lot to make things work better

Takeaways