What does it take to achieve a 75% female shortlist in a male-dominated industry?
Arctic Shores
Helping disruptive TA leaders navigate a new era of recruitment with task-based assessments
When it came to advancing DEI, Molson Coors’ Head of Talent Acquisition, Joe Sidley, had pretty much done it all. Bias workshops, gender decoding, blind CVs. Think of an innovative strategy to improve hiring equity and inclusivity and Joe’s team had probably tried it.?
But Joe wanted to do more. He wanted to push the boundaries of what an inclusive and equitable hiring practice could really look like. To break new ground.?
He decided to scrap the CV, hire for potential, and evaluate candidates based on their skill-enablers –– core strengths which predict candidates' ability to adapt and acquire new skills –– as well as their transferable skills.?
But what lessons did he learn along the way? This week TA Disruptors is diving deep into Joe’s insights on how to guarantee your skills-based hiring process is a success.?
Lesson #1 –?think about ways to reduce the psychological leap hiring managers need to make to embrace CV-less, skills-based hiring
Joe knew that hiring managers were engaged and motivated by the company’s mission. But he also knew their mindset – they thought that the best candidate was someone who had worked in the industry.?
This could have posed a major challenge. Just like in almost every organisation, CVs had become a crutch and a comfort blanket for many Molson Coors’ hiring managers – simply because they were what people were used to.
This is a trend we see everywhere. Hiring managers with lean teams and big targets are desperate to have the best people coming through the door. So the job to be done is to help them understand that best rarely means industry experience, and that the TA team will make the transition to a new way of doing things feel easy.
?Luckily for Joe, his team had already done a lot of the groundwork. CV-less hiring was already a common practice in Early Careers at Molson Coors, and taking steps to embrace a more inclusive hiring process aligned well with the company’s value of ‘putting people’ first. This made applying the approach to other roles less of a psychological leap.?
Joe chose to make the case that sifting for skill-enablers not experience, using a Task-based assessment instead of a CV, and giving hiring managers a more detailed, accurate insight into things like a person’s thinking style and potential to acquire skills, would help them uncover better quality talent.?
And he wasn’t wrong.
Lesson #2 –?pilot on your own turf first?
Joe started off deploying this new approach with just one role to ensure he could get the Molson Coors process right before rolling it out more widely.??
To really prove his commitment and faith in the process, he chose to trial the new skills-based hiring process in his team first.?
And the results spoke for themselves. Joe received 100% more applications with the skills-based approach. At the interview stage, 75% of the candidates were female ––? ‘unheard of’ in the beverage industry.
What’s more, he could have hired half the people shortlisted.
Due to the success of the trial, Joe made two new hires and restructured his team to accommodate them. The added benefit? By piloting in his team first, Joe was able to help the business and the TA team deeply understand what best practice needed to look like and iron out any kinks in the process quickly.?
Joe was now armed with great hires and great data to prove the effectiveness of the process and help the doubters see that this bold change would make a positive difference. Just in time to initiate a wider rollout.
Lesson #3 –?Be deliberate in who you involve in the process?
One of the things we admire most about Joe’s approach is that he was very tactical about which stakeholders he was involved in the process, when, and how to get their buy-in.?
He sought buy-in from senior sponsors who he knew would be able to help him convert doubters into believers early –– those with big, burning hiring challenges, as well as those who’d demonstrated a real commitment to promoting inclusivity at Molson Coors.?
He recognised that TA teams and HR functions have also been conditioned to rely on the CV –?so ensured the whole function understood the key principles behind and benefits of skills-based hiring from the beginning (helped by the delivery of a pilot in his own team).?
And finally, to decrease the time to impact for those hires without industry experience, Joe involved his L&D team in the conversation from the beginning. Together they were able to quickly adapt the onboarding process so that new hires felt supported to learn and grow.??
The final result? High-quality candidates who are thriving in the role and would never have been sifted in using CV-less hiring, and hiring managers who are now asking to be involved in the rollout of this approach. And who wouldn’t be proud of that?
For deeper insights on these topics and many more, check out the latest episode of the TA Disruptors podcast.
If you’re keen to soak up even more practical wisdom from Joe and understand more about how he scaled his rollout, get detailed tactics for winning over hiring managers, and understand how to figure out where CV-less hiring does and doesn’t apply, you won’t want to miss this episode.
LISTEN NOW ??
3 nuggets of wisdom to take into next week ??
?? Willo recently published their "Hiring Humans: AI in Talent Acquisition" research report. It includes expert interviews, valuable insights, and frameworks to enhance the quality of hires, streamline the hiring process, and elevate the candidate experience.
?? New research by KPMG, revealed that six in 10 (61%) employees reported wanting generative AI training, and a third of 25-to-34-year-olds reported they had already used generative AI to learn new workplace skills.?
?? The impact of AI on recruitment continues to balloon: in Recruiter Magazine, academics and members of the APPG outline how employers need to be more transparent with candidates about their stance on AI usage to ensure a level playing field for all.
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