Transforming the hiring process with automatic feedback with the Leadership Skills Foundation

Since its establishment in 1981, the Leadership Skills Foundation has been dedicated to nurturing the skills development of young individuals and fostering the growth and empowerment of future leaders.

All programs offered by the Leadership Skills Foundation are meticulously crafted based on a research-backed Skills Framework. These initiatives aim to equip learners with essential life skills such as communication, self-belief, teamwork, self-management, and problem-solving. Empowered with these skills, each young participant actively engages in delivering impactful activities to their peers, be it within their school, friend groups, or the broader community, contributing to positive change in their local surroundings.

As a not-for-profit organisation, the Leadership Skills Foundation annually supports nearly 100,000 young individuals through 2,500 delivery centres, including schools, colleges, and their local community. Despite having a relatively small team of approximately 40 employees, the foundation collaborates with around 7,000 tutors who are crucial in delivering programs within these centres.

“Everyone is empowered to shape their future and lead their communities.”

Leadership Skills Foundation joined Applied in 2021, has since hired 9 candidates for a range of roles at different levels and has given feedback via the platform to 312 candidates.

"A very easy process, with time to access answers and replies, amend and correct where required. This is a simple and easy-to-apply application, that does not cause stress! It demonstrates that the company values its applicants and is trying to make the process accessible for all This ethos should be at the heart of all companies." - candidate feedback

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The Leadership Skills Foundation’s hiring process looked very traditional before joining Applied. Like many other organisations, they often found themselves dusting off outdated job descriptions due to the long tenure of their staff at the charity. While low turnover can be a great thing, it can mean that job specifications and salaries become outdated over time.

Before the company's recent rebrand to the Leadership Skills Foundation, prospective candidates eagerly sought positions with 'Sports Leaders,' with certain roles attracting attention from hundreds of applicants. Richard Norman, CEO, discovered that, despite the flood of CVs and cover letters, securing high-quality candidates who were genuinely aligned with the role proved to be a challenge.

With a plethora of applications to sift through, this caused headaches, manually filling in spreadsheets, inevitably leading to bias creeping into the decision-making process. The sequence in which applications are evaluated can often have a big influence on how they are scored. Not only did the hiring team have to whittle down who to invite for interviews, but they were often asked for feedback— which was hugely time-consuming for a small team. Feedback often felt generic and insincere, leaving the team feeling like they were merely offering candidates empty platitudes.

As a small company that doesn’t recruit often, the Leadership Skills Foundation had several reasons to move away from traditional hiring practices. They wanted a digital platform to help them reduce unconscious bias and to be “efficient and effective at the same time as delivering on the inclusion and belonging agenda that we have”. Additionally, they were looking for a platform that could provide automated feedback for the candidates who weren’t successful.

“We want them [candidates] to feel a sense of belonging, we want them to understand what the role is and help them with that onboarding process, and so I think any organisation can benefit from implementing something like that [Applied] regardless of sector."

Richard had experience using Applied before, as a candidate for a non-Executive role. He enjoyed the experience of applying, even though he wasn’t successful, and appreciated receiving detailed feedback on why he wasn't the ideal candidate for the role.

The Leadership Skills Foundation has found Applied to be a great tool for providing feedback to all unsuccessful candidates. Giving feedback truly aligns with the organisation’s values. In fact, it’s Richard’s favourite feature!

It enables the organisation to provide feedback to unsuccessful candidates while presenting a positive view of the organisation. The team also loves the Sift assessment, which allows them to gain a deeper insight into a candidate's suitability for the role. The team enjoys understanding how someone will perform in the role they are applying for rather than solely relying on their past experience. Previously, CVs were used in their hiring process, but they are now only requested as an additional check in a multi-layered approach to hiring.

Applied’s built-in Job Description Decoder helps the team ensure they’re using gender-neutral language in job descriptions.  It also means they can identify any jargon or unnecessary complexity in their job descriptions that might discourage potential candidates from applying.

“It's given us an opportunity to challenge the wording that we use to describe the jobs…so yeah, it's been a real positive for us and part of that journey for us to try and make sure that we've got a workforce that reflects the community of people that we work with because that ultimately is going to help us produce a better product for the audience that we work with”.

Although some members of the team at the Leadership Skills Foundation were hesitant to change, they've now seen how using Applied's platform has transformed their recruitment for the better - resulting in higher-quality hires.

“[Using Applied has] formed a major part of our people and culture strategy. It’s important for us to demonstrate that we’re hiring through this anonymised process and have tried to reduce unconscious bias. As well as the good social responsibility element, we’re giving ourselves the best possible chance to get great talent to join the organisation and be the best fit for the role that we're hiring for. “

When asked how the CEO of the Leadership Skills Foundation would describe his experience with Applied, he said, “Positive, innovative, reflective”.

Richard is seeing a much broader and more diverse skill set being brought into the roles, and he’s really interested to see how this journey continues and the impact it will have across the charity. The organisation continues to enjoy challenging the status quo around recruitment.

“I think it has played out as we sort of expected it to really, and seeing people really adapt to it, really value it, really start to use it, start to think of it as just the way that we do things which is probably the ultimate litmus test."

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