Open Hiring? – I Think Not 😱 | @RobinSchooling on The #SocialRecruiting Show

What is Open Hiring™?

To begin, the principle of Open Hiring™ was first established by Greyson Bakery in 1987. This principle has been adopted by other leading retail brands. However, what is Open Hiring™ and why should we be interested?

This week’s Guest, Robin Schooling, joins us to illustrate why this model of open hiring is important and how we can learn from it. Regardless of the industry sector, we recruit across. As she tells us, Greyson Bakery started with a simple idea,

“Let’s make it as easy as possible to connect people to the job.”

More recently, it’s been reported that another retail brand has used the principle of Open Hiring™ for their distribution centre hiring too much success. As Robin says, “they measured the impact of this and their turnover was down dramatically”.

Naturally, we touch upon the subject of COVID-19 and its impact on the employment market. Robin thinks this is “the perfect time of companies to streamline their processes and get people in”.

However, never one to be satisfied with an assumption. She did some due-diligence herself on a major US brand.  Where she found “a beautifully branded website”. Then an application process that took,

“An estimated 26-30 minutes to complete!. That would have been one of the first things I’d fix!”

Getting your organisation ready for change

Following the theme of recruitment processes and changing to adapt to the current climate. Robin expands her opinion and tells us, “this is providing the greatest living case study, what we thought was impossible, out of necessity, we’re learning is possible!”.

We talk about the current virtual recruitment process that is being enforced on all companies. Robin comments it could have real benefits as,

“We might get rid of the Hiring Managers, because they do exist, who like to form their opinion on whether the person has a firm handshake or not.”

Which is a nod, the ongoing conversation about unconscious bias.

In contrast to this, we talk about digital adoption and her thoughts – “the digital divide does exist” and she illustrates this through the fact that in her home state of Louisiana, “40% of households don’t have access to broadband or wifi”.

The final question we pose to Robin,  is to get her thoughts on implementing Open Hiring™ into a business or leadership team,

“You have to make sure your organisation is a learning organisation.”

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Robin talk about:

• The merits of the Ban The Box campaign
• Is it time to review your application and recruitment process?
• Addressing systemic unconscious bias
• Is virtual recruitment going to be the new normal?
• How is the digital divide impacting applicants?
• Training Leaders to be ready for Open Hiring™