Employers failing to consider voluntary experience when they recruit

Nick Elvin

Employers are missing out on candidates with valuable skills by failing to recognise volunteering and social action experience during the recruitment process.

That’s according to a new joint publication from the CIPD and the #iwill campaign, who recommend that employers should embed social action, which can include experience of volunteering, fundraising and campaigning, into their recruitment practices in order to allow candidates the opportunity to talk about skills they have gained outside of education and traditional work experience. This, they say, will provide employers with access to candidates with improved work and life skills, such as teamwork, communications and leadership.

The report, “Unlock new talent: How can you integrate social action in recruitment?”, was published as a result of a recent survey from CIPD, which found that 67% of employers report that entry-level candidates who have social action experience demonstrate more employability skills. The top three skills cited by respondents were teamwork (82%), communication (80%) and understanding the local community (45%). However, despite this, less than a fifth (16%) of employers currently ask any questions about social action experience in their applications forms and only 31% ask about it during interviews.

Integrating social action into the recruitment process, the report argues, allows employers to tap into a pool of talented individuals that otherwise might be overlooked, at the same time as demonstrating to young people that social action is worthwhile in terms of helping them to develop key skills that will be of value to employers.

Peter Cheese, chief executive of the CIPD, said: “Historically, concern with social action, including volunteering, typically fitted within organisations’ corporate social responsibility agenda, and was often seen as a bridge between companies and the community. However, we believe that there is a strong case for social action to be integrated more widely into organisations’ people development and resourcing strategies.

“A key challenge for recruiters is that candidates often fail to highlight their social action experience, unless given the opportunity to do so, as many still regard traditional work experience as being more important to employers.

“With the difficulties that many young people also face in terms of securing good quality work experience, it is clear that social action has a huge role to play in terms of skills development. By failing to uncover this experience during the recruitment stage, employers could be missing out on enthusiastic individuals who have precisely the types of employability skills organisations tell us they need and struggle to find.”