While cost management is a key concern for organisations operating across STEM, innovation remains business critical.
60% of UK organisations are concerned about new product development and are prioritising new ways to improve innovation in their workforce, despite ongoing cost concerns.
Leaders face navigating an intricate balance between building powerful teams, reducing costs and ensuring business continuity. To succeed, reducing recruitment risk when hiring, and optimising talent management practices to ensure that the best people are hired and retained will be key.
In this article, we explore three methods leaders can take to reduce recruitment risk in STEM organisations.
Read on for advice on focusing on the following challenges -
- Scaling at pace
- Avoiding a mishire
- Optimising talent management
Scaling at pace
In today’s business climate, STEM organisations need to be able to scale quickly, both in terms of expansion and downsizing according to project requirements.
When considering costs, personnel are typically one of the most expensive resources for an organisation – however, they’re also essential to continuity and innovation.
To successfully reduce full time workforce (FTW) expenditure, while preserving the efficacy of teams, organisations in STEM are increasingly reviewing where they can restructure hiring to reduce costs to become more agile and focus on ROI. This can mean looking at temporary labour options, as well as considering outsourcing and insourcing teams to supplement the workforce in a flexible way, without the same HR risks involved with downsizing permanent teams.
Avoiding a mishire
An efficient, accurate and timely recruitment process is key to ensuring you secure top talent and avoid a mis-hire.
Research from CareerBuilder reveals that employers hire the wrong person for the role due to:
- Time pressure
- Difficulty finding suitably qualified candidates
- A focus on skills over cultural fit
- A lack of recruitment tools
- Incomplete background checks
When building an in-house recruitment team, or working with an external organisation such as SRG, it’s important to assess your vendor’s ability to manage the above challenges.
At SRG, as expert recruitment partners with over 30 years of experience supporting STEM businesses, some of the ways we help our clients streamline recruitment include using psychometric assessment tools alongside video assessments to ensure cultural alignment with the wider team.
Meanwhile, our established specialist talent networks enable us to help our clients unlock access to labour pools across the wider STEM industries.
Optimising talent management
In a study led by PwC, 67% of UK businesses said upskilling and retaining existing staff was their highest priority.
Mitigating recruitment risk extends beyond just improving the way you recruit, through to the way your organisation activates meaningful talent pathways that inspire engagement, performance and retention.
While many STEM organisations build their own recruitment teams in HR under their full time equivalent (FTE) headcount, in my experience, HR leaders working in STEM often note recruitment as a challenging aspect to maintain alongside internal HR responsibilities. Rather than emphasising recruitment, I’ve found HR leaders express a focus on culture, progression opportunities and training.
In this context, talent acquisition specialists can play an instrumental role by lifting the recruitment time burden from internal HR. This can help ensure that your HR teams have the resources they need to strengthen internal capabilities and reduce the risk of talented employees joining and then leaving the business.
Unlock your workforce’s potential with SRG
As scientists, engineers, clinical and tech experts, our consultants at SRG are equipped to go beyond industry jargon, and action impactful recruitment solutions that make a difference.
Working with niche skills, multiple industries and all experience levels, we apply technical expertise across them all. Our full spectrum of roles and talent solutions cover temporary and contract projects through to niche senior leadership recruitment.
Click here to get in touch with our solutions team
About the author: Robin has 14 years of experience managing a plethora of recruitment services, teams, and in-country operations across the life science recruitment industry in the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium. From supporting high-volume strategic accounts, providing regional site support, and running executive search, through to qualifying as a Statement of Work Contracts Expert to support both service, and project-based scopes of work packages across the laboratory and manufacturing space under Synergy, Robin has extensive experience in delivering and optimising recruitment services. Robin currently works in SRG's client services, where he is driving our strategic workforce management frameworks, including bespoke workforce management programmes to accommodate today's diverse generation of talent, while enhancing customer efficiency through maintaining fast access to talent as and when required to help establish a truly agile, scalable, engaged, productive and competitive organisation. You can connect with Robin in Linkedin here.
