Anyone in the business of hiring young talent has most likely faced a multitude of problems in 2018, issues which are set to grow over the next two to three years. Of these problems, there are three major that are affecting businesses across all major industries that are becoming more and more difficult to solve.

The problems are:

1. Increasing workplace diversity

2. Improving the retention of young employees

1. Improving the efficiency of graduate, and junior intakes

Each of these problems are very closely linked to a businesses intake of young talent, and current recruitment practices are not adept at solving them. However, this may be due to the lack of emphasis on an individual’s transferable skills when employing young talent.

Over the next few weeks we’ll explore how skills can help to solve each of these problems. First up, it’s the most talked about problem…

Increasing workplace diversity

The Highfliers report (2017) showed how important increasing diversity is to employers, with increasing diversity of graduate intake being the number one priority for graduate employers. However, although there are processes that have been created to increase diversity, few methods consider the skills that an individual is bringing to a role.

In recent years, we have seen companies begin to diversify the way in which they recruit young talent. Examples of this include adding psychometric testing to applications, creating scoring systems to identify good candidates and introducing blind applications to combat unconscious bias. However, despite these novel efforts which have shown some positive signs many employers are struggling to employ diverse talent that is suitable for their vacancy.

We at Occumi believe the answer to tackling these issues, without the use of games that can have mixed results or positive discrimination that can lead to tokenism and a negative impact on company culture, ultimately lies in the accurate representation of the skills applicants have built up over their formative years.

Every applicant, regardless of variables such as race, gender, class or cultural background will have experiences both from their education and entry level positions or internships that formulate the most transferable skills they have to offer companies. This is why we believe that using research to create algorithms that can accurately represent candidates from all backgrounds is key to driving recruitment forward.

It is this thinking which led to Occumi, our algorithm features insights from over 400 academics and industry leaders to ensure that whatever experience a candidate does have we can show employers what skills an employer can expect from said candidate.

By focusing on helping employers understand the skills of the applicant in front of them we can increase job fit by highlighting the candidate with the right skills for the role, increase efficiency of the process by quickly highlighting those who don’t and improve diversity by showing employers exactly what skills diverse candidates in addition to the alternate thought processes and experience they can already bring to the company. No tokenism just a meritocratic system that ensures everyone in the role knows they are there because they had the skills that employer wanted.