Sharing our recruitment knowledge and stepping down

WE HAVE MADE THE BOLD DECISION TO RECENTRE OUR FOCUS IN RELATION TO RECRUITMENT CONSULTANCY - INSTEAD OF OFFERING ONE-OFF SUPPORT, WE ARE OPENING UP OUR CORE PRACTICES AND INSIGHTS FOR FREE THROUGH OUR RECRUITMENT GUIDE - AND HERE IS WHY.

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Alt text : A bird view photograph of green field with four paths cutting through it in an X shape and bark chunks scattered around.

We have made the bold decision to recentre our values: connection, choice, growth, wellbeing, courage and our vision of a world of work where everyone is valued and empowered in relation to our recruitment consultancy offer.

Instead of offering one-off support for hiring for specific roles, we are opening up our core practices and insights for free through our Recruitment Guide - an online resource full of prompts, templates and useful reading.

Get the recruitment guide

Those who have had a sneak peek have said “Thank you so much for the recruitment guide, I love it! It's thorough and logical and I love the openness. Also for the specifics on the notion page, really useful. I will use both as we work through the hires and as I build a recruitment process internally.“

In addition, we've devised recruitment workshops for your team to get all of our support and expertise you need to be able to easily introduce practices that help you grow diverse teams and build meaningful connections through your hiring practices. Our first remote workshop is taking place on 19th July.

view our upcoming recruitment workshop

We can tailor recruitment workshops to your organization too - get in touch if that is of interest.

As a result, we hope more founders, hiring managers and teams can benefit from our knowledge and practices, and that we can stay true to our values while building deeper partnerships with organisations ready to invest in truly transformational change within their team and wider society.

If you’re interested in what guided our decisions, keep on reading.

Our recruitment journey

When we first started out as an organisation we initially refused to engage in work around ‘recruiting for diversity’ as we felt that many organizations that start from this place were not yet ready to transform their organisational culture to be more inclusive, and we didn't want to place marginalised and minoritised people into organisations that didn’t value them deeply.

However, as our work placement programmes went from strength to strength, the partners that had invested in us and our work started to be inspired by our inclusive approaches to recruitment for those programmes. As a result, we decided to offer support to existing partners, such as William Joseph Design, who we knew were invested in real meaningful change, with recruiting for more specific and senior roles.

The word got out about our practices and bigger organisations with bigger budgets started to approach us for recruitment support. As an young social enterprise with big ambitions to build diverse teams that truly thrive, these opportunities seemed attractive, and we felt confident that we could guide people through our processes in a way that stayed true to our values and brought in a steady flow of income. In many ways we have achieved this.

Since we began our journey with recruitment in 2020, we’ve supported 10 organisation to hire 17 people through adopting our inclusive recruitment practices, which is impressive for a team our size. We’ve had feedback from candidates that reminds us time and again that our approaches to recruitment are empowering and thought-provoking even when they are unsuccessful;

"Maybe it's a strange thing to say, but it's been the best interview process I've taken part in so far. Everything was very well organised and professionally done. Even though I have not been successful this time, it's been much less stressful than usual as I was given clear instructions and time to prepare. Thanks for the opportunity!"

unsuccessful candidate

Learnings prompting change

However, we’ve also experienced a lot of pain. We work in a way that is open and mutual, and sometimes this has resulted in people extracting our ideas and approaches through initial chats and then implementing them without compensating us for our time. We’ve also been lulled into believing that organisations really want to do deep work with us around diversity and inclusion as part of the process of hiring, and then been stung when we realise they aren’t ready to invest in true change they just want to fill a role as rapidly and as cheaply as possible, while calling the process inclusive.

We’ve also wanted to price our support accessibly, because the organisations we love working with most are small, flexible teams who know the value of building deep relationships and building diverse teams where everyone can bring their best selves. With this in mind we adopted a model whereby if we don’t fill a role we don’t charge the second half of our fee - however this model is extremely risky for a team of our size, especially given how competitive the market is currently, and we don’t want to have to adopt pushy recruiter tactics with people - for us our authentic relationships are what make Collaborative Future a beautiful community!