Good morning, afternoon, evening or whatever time you were joining us for this event – welcome to our very first “Not Another %$#@! Webinar” about High Volume Hiring.
While I know I said I wouldn’t do too much of a long-winded intro, I did start off our event with a mini summary of how this new format and new platform (Hopin) was going to work.
The purpose of this event was for us all to have a conversation about volume hiring. And I really do mean conversation. Making a point of not just broadcasting stuff at our audience.
We really wanted our attendees to take part.
We kicked off the event with a 20min warmup panel session.
As I didn’t want to put anybody on the spot by asking questions to be submitted immediately, I started.
I was really keen to talk about the ‘L’ word – lockdown. Since we’ve all been stuck in one for so long.
Have resource teams suffered a massive impact? In regards to their future plans? The impact on the labour market? And non-secure start dates?
And as I and Oli already talked about this topic a little bit beforehand (in the green room) I was eager to get his opinion [4:05]
“We have to be flexible and understand that candidates do need work. So it’s been a lot of managing expectations. And making sure that they do what is best for them” – Oli Cavaliero
While Shilpa, Resource Manager for Veolia, UK leader in environmental solutions, mentioned their situation was quite different [7:31].
“We have been very much focusing on Employer Brand and really setting ourselves up for whatever this future is going to look like. The talent market is definitely going to look so different from what is what when we started. There is going to be a war for talent.”
With infrastructure construction being less affected by the pandemic, as they are classed as key workers, Ben talked us through what Thames Water has been focusing on during this never-ending lockdown [10:25].
“We’ve been very lucky as we have never really stopped hiring. So the key thing that we have really focused on is how can we turn hiring from a process to an experience. With the world, as it is today, applying for roles is even more stressful and we wanted to focus on looking after people throughout the entire process.”
We then moved on to our first attendee question from Sara Dale, who was eager to find out how everyone thought Brexit will affect volumes of applications [13.58].
“… We’ve actually seen that the talent market is completely different. We need looking at how we are influencing the younger generation. Start partnering with colleges and schools about the career opportunities in hospitality as an industry.” – Oli Cavaliero
“It’s about thinking of innovation and what we can do differently” – Shilpa Parmar
Calum Murphy then asked an excellent question around moving operations remotely and how has it impacted pipelines [18:48]
“Working from home for us will be long term. We think that is where the future of work is. However, we do understand that for some of our staff working from home is a dream and for some, it’s a nightmare. We are really focusing on the wellbeing perspective.” – Ben Gledhill
“We will not be rushing back to 5 days a week. But we are doing a whole lot around flexible working and creating a work-life balance.” – Shilpa Parmar
With only 5 minutes left before we broke off into the individual sessions, I wanted to give our experts one last chance to very quickly tell everyone who they were, what they do. And a bit of information as to why someone should go to their session to get their question answered [27.35]
Unfortunately, our breakout session with Ben Gledhill does not have a recording. We had a bit of a technical issue and a button didn’t get pressed. Sorry!!
I cannot begin to express how much I enjoyed this event and I really, REALLY hope you did as well.
However, as always, we are eager to get your opinions of the setup, the topic and if we should do any more → send us an email at editor@chattalent.net
Finally a BIG MASSIVE THANKS to our event partners ThriveMap. It was thanks to them that we made this event a reality. And to Zinc and PH Creative for promoting the event – you guys made up about 20 of our signups.
An equally BIG WELL DONE TO ALL OF US as for every registration we received we donated £5 to the Trussell Trust.
See you at the next one!
