Now it's time to talk about sourcing a more diverse applicant pool. If you think about it, traditionally, most organizations have had to do very little in terms of sourcing applicants. It's been quite a passive process for organizations. You advertise a job and people who are interested apply. As we've seen in some of the other modules, the effort that's put into the recruitment process has often been quite high, but the returns have been low. That's potentially because the effort isn't going into the right places. That's probably to do with the fact that we haven't really come to terms in many cases with the challenges of the new world, the demand for skills and attributes and experiences and ideas that are going to help us with the challenges. For those organizations that continue in a passive way to just post an ad and wait to see who applies, these organizations are going to be left behind. Because if you have a very narrow applicant pool, it's going to be felt further down the track in terms of an organization's capacity to make the challenges. Let's look at what we mean by sourcing candidates. These days, there is a lot going on around social media. We've talked about how applicants, whether they're actually seeking a job, but applicants that are sometimes described as passive applicants. They are people who just keep an eye on what's happening around the place, who might look up an organization to find out its background. If you're involved in some of the online platforms like LinkedIn, you are often automatically sent information about different jobs that are right at the moment and whether or not you actually are interested and want to apply. The fact is that provision of information is actually being taken in by you at some level. A strong diversity sourcing strategy is one that again goes back to your diversity and inclusion strategy and your recruitment strategy linked to your workforce plan. If you in fact have an objective of becoming more diverse, what does that actually mean? Well, if you've done your analysis internally and you discover that you have a skewed age profile, a very old organization. Given that people may in fact retire in the future. Here in Australia, people have tended to retire between the ages of 60-70. People will be thinking about retirement. What are you doing to replace those skills or to use the opportunity to think about new ways of working and your people in the organization. If in fact you find that your demographic is significantly in the older bracket, then you will be thinking of ways of attracting younger people. Now, this could be done in number of ways. Again, if we're only going to go for young, then we're going to get an amorphous group of people aged between, whatever 20-40. What do you want to do with the sourcing strategy is to know the type of skills that you want, the type of experiences and you need to know pretty much the type of role you want these people to play. If in fact part of your strategy is to attract graduates, to attract people who are coming out to probably their first professional career job, then you're going to target as part of your sourcing strategy, those areas where these graduates will be training. They could be universities, they could be apprenticeship programs, technical colleges, and so on. But sourcing isn't about just going into a topic area. Sourcing is thinking about how the group of people or the groups of people that were interested in that we need to be able to create a much more of a mosaic in our organization. We need to think about where these people go. What do they do? How do they communicate? Now you might quickly say well, young people, social media, that's where I'll go. In part that's probably an important strategy for you to think about. Later we'll talk a little bit more about social media in particular. But social media is a very large entity. There are all levels. For example, Facebook is quite an active recruiter. Some of us think mainly of LinkedIn. We also know that some work is advertised and people are sourced from Twitter. You need to be pretty clear about if you're going to use a sourcing method like social media, are you targeting a group that uses it? The search engines are also connected to actual recruitment agencies and functions. If you take Sync, for example, which is different to LinkedIn, what you have there are jobs being advertised. But also Sync have a very strong professional development element. You can actually put in a CV. You've got people there who are constantly looking at jobs and looking at the people who are pulling in their CVs, putting in resumes that sit in that great social media volt, and where jobs come up that look as if they might suit safe like the candidate know. You can use a whole range of areas. For example, on Facebook, they're not just job boards, and they're not just specifically areas that are allocated to particular recruitment activities. But you will find that through interest groups, jobs will be advertised. You may find jobs advertised through sporting groups that are represented there, through the hospitality saying, and so on. There are six things that you probably need to do to establish a good active sourcing strategy. The first one is to learn absolutely what's required for the role. For example, if you're looking at somebody with some established experience, then you're not going to be channeling into graduate sources. You're going to be looking at alternatives. If you're watching people who've been in the workforce for some time, you might source them through professional associations. For example, if you're looking for accountants and you look at the Chartered Accountants, you're looking for engineers similarly through Engineering associations, but they're also strong professional groups, service groups and you need to look at, and the data is available who are the people that belong to these groups? Who were the people that are active in those particular networks? You need to also think about personalizing your message. By that, we get back to that idea of branding. For people to take notice of you, it's really important that there is a branding exercise which they associate with your company, your organization. That is not necessarily a slogan. It can be the write-up of words, can be made up of images, but they need to be consistent. There'll be some examples for you to look at within the module if you think about what the reputation and the branding of companies like Apple might be. Here in Australia we see a lot of sourcing of diverse channeled through the defense forces. These are quite different organizations that develop a brand and a reputation that when people see them, they recognize something about them. If you think too about companies like Google and Apple and lots of others, you can actually find on platforms like YouTube, you can actually see them talking about their sourcing strategy, talking about the people that they would like to be part of the chain. Your sourcing is not a singular strategy, but again, it's a number of strands depending upon who you're after, how much you know about that group, and how much you know about how to source them. Now, you also need to have a regular and maintained sourcing strategy. Yes, you can have a campaign that might be because of this launch of a special product. But you want to become a constant and that's normally irritating, but a constant part of the market set you're looking at. You need to have a presence there. That's important because that in itself provides people that you might be interested in. Provides them with a sense of security that there's a maturity to your organization and the way that it's promoting itself. You need to nurture candidates for future positions. When you source candidates and they actually apply for your job or even if they don't apply depending on the system you're using, it's really important that you keep in contact with them. There are easy ways to do that. It's not just sending them a note. But many organizations think about inviting different groups to different company activities. Might be that you've got a speaker, it might be that you're launching something. Keep those people alive, if you like, keep them as part of an active network. Because even if they haven't applied for the job this time or in fact they weren't suitable this time, the fact is that they're engaged and it's a pity to lose that and just start again. That becomes another sourcing strategy that you've got resumes, you've got information, you've got candidates that you've used before or that you've seen before. I also want to talk about something which is to do with going where the candidates are. I'll give you some very simple examples. In some parts of Australia, people had been keen to invite older but more mature age workers back into the workplace. For example, one case study I can think of is a call center that was being set up by one of their large banks. They thought that they needed people who were mature, life experience and that they would be answering information about a new retirement financial product. They decided that they would try and attract a mature age demographic to this job. What they did was, they wrote down how this group of people might work. A lot of them were retired. There were over 60. What the bank did was, it did a bit of analysis, and it found out that people who are retired like to be able to do a range of activities. Here in Australia prior to COVID, we had old people traveling around the country in caravans and they're called Grey nomads. Here was a group of people who were spending part of the year traveling and there was a potential for them to spend another part of the year working. People were aware that there are restrictions, laws about how much money people could burn if they're on a government pension. Part-time was also useful from the point of view of pay. But a call center. This isn't just answering phones. This is using screen technology. The bandwidth job that while older Australians are growing uses of the Internet of media, it tends to be the Facebook came out chart. They're not using a range of different software for professional work purposes. What the company did was it developed a sourcing strategy, which was that they developed a seminar, and it was around afternoon tea. They targeted capital cities of Australia, they targeted places where they knew older Australians bars go to regular basis. One was the local library, another was Bowling club. Lawn bowls very popular in Australia. What they did was they set out to our workshops around an afternoon tea, and it was an information session. They went there, they had the afternoon tea, they talked about the job with people, and they then asked people the next day "If you were interested in coming and see our call center, come down and have a look and have a play with the equipment." That was the next step. Not everybody who've been to the morning or afternoon tea went, but some did. From that group, they then show people how to use the equipment, and then they talked about applying for jobs, whole range of things. Anyway, they staffed their centers around Australia using in the Maine, older Australians who had retired. What they did was to go out to the places where they knew. They knew these people were active job seekers. Why would you use active job seekers sourcing ideas? That's just one example. If you are looking at, for example, recruiting more people with disability, and again, that's a big term. What you probably need to do is to go and talk to agencies, government or otherwise who are involved in disability recruitment. You need to know what your organization is prepared to do and probably going through those channels. We also find that a lot is done through communities, through schools for non traditional groups. If you're looking at diverse cultural groups, have a look at community organizations, have a look at newspapers, which is still produced in many parts of Australia for migrant communities, think about the migrant resource centers, think about the online websites. There are lots and lots of ways to target groups, but you'd need, as I said, to do your homework. You need to be able to evidence-based develop your strategy. One of the things I do want to talk about as well is if in fact you have got your language right, your presentation right, your branding right, you should be able to grow across a range of sources and maybe tell the age of them. Remember that when people look at your material, look at the language, and look at the images, that'll be their first idea about whether or not they think that they can go and work with you. We have some very good examples, and there was one from Singapore a couple of years ago, encouraging older people to return to the health workforce. It was a series of newspaper advertisements that had photographs, images of all the people, doctors, nurses, and so on. This was an actual community campaign and not specifically only targeted at the particular diversity group. There's all things to do. But again, you need to have the evidence, you need to have the strategies, you need to know why you're doing it, and also, you need to evaluation. I mean, for the bank, if they got nobody from those groups, then they've got the wrong strategy. Make sure that you evaluate just as we do with everything else. Thank you.
