The Brokerage The Overlooked Advantage - Flipbook - Page 15
What can employers do?
Few employers would disagree that socioemotional skills and qualities - such as resilience, drive,
a growth mindset or emotional intelligence - are valuable in the workplace. According to the latest
Employer Skills Survey, lack of self-management skills was partly responsible for about half of
hard-to-fill vacancies (52%), and lack of team working ability - for about a third (34%).[26] But, we
also know that not all employers are effective at designing the recruitment process to prioritise
and assess these strengths.
Over the past decade, organisations have begun applying so-called strength-based approaches in
their talent and performance management. These approaches seek to identify and develop
employees’ strengths as a path to increase their productivity, rather than seeking out and
correcting their weaknesses.
Yet, this thinking has not been consistently applied to shine a light on the strengths and potential of
young people that have been primarily defined by their experience of disadvantage. The existing
research means that wider society is much more aware of the negative impacts of growing up in
challenging circumstances, rather than the strengths that this experience can help develop. In the
words of one employer interviewed for this report:
“It’s nothing about them being disadvantaged. They are advantaged in so many ways, but they
don’t realise it themselves because they didn’t have the opportunities." - Employer
Negative perceptions of underrepresented young people can affect both individual recruitment
decisions, as well as the recruitment approach as a whole. At an individual level, this can mean, for
example, that hiring managers judge a young person’s ability on the type of university they
attended or the extra-curricular activities they did or did not do, filtering out candidates that don’t
fit with their perception of achievement. At the organisation-wide level a bias towards privately
educated, middle class candidates can inform decisions on how a job is described, where it is
advertised or the assessment and selection methods used, making a role appear less attractive or
even unattainable to young people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Not only do these approaches limit access to a wider pool of talent for employers, unsuccessful
experiences of the job application and selection process can also create and/or reinforce the
negative beliefs in young people that they are not “good enough” and these jobs are not for people
like them, causing them to abandon their career ambitions.
Based on recommendations from young people and employers who engaged with the early findings
of this research, Figure 2 presents a three-step approach to a more inclusive recruitment process,
from how job opportunities are positioned and described, to selection methods, to ensuring young
people thrive within the organisations once they join.
[26] Winterbotham, M., Kik, G., Selner, S., Menys, R., Stroud, S., Whittaker, S., & Hewitt, J. H. (2020). Employer Skills
Survey 2019. Department for Education.
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