CONSULTANCY
SERVICES

DIVERSITY, INCLUSION
& UNCONSCIOUS BIAS

We are passionate about supporting and educating businesses to review their processes to ensure they attract and create teams that are diverse and inclusive. Creating environments that celebrate difference and ensuring everyone feels they matter is key to attracting, developing and retaining talent. We work with clients to limit unconscious bias and provide practical advice and training.

We provide advice, assistance, training and consultancy to get under the skin of the business culture, and ways of working. We will challenge and analyse every step of the recruitment process to develop a process that encourages inclusion.

We will deliver a full review of the end to end recruitment process from attraction, selection, onboarding to succession planning.

RECRUITMENT PROCESS
& SELECTION MATERIALS

1, 2 or 3 stages? Telephone or face-to-face interview? Assessment centre or panel interview? Testing or no testing? There are a number of stages and techniques in recruiting people into your business all of which can help find the ideal candidate, but roles are different, and one recruitment process does not fit all!

Through analysing your role or project need we can help you design a recruitment process that will give candidates the best opportunity to perform and showcase their skills whilst also enabling you to best assess a candidate’s suitability. This will include everything from the number of stages, the type of assessment, timescales & who we recommend the decision-makers are. Time is expensive, so we ensure every part of the recruitment process adds values and, if it doesn’t, we will remove it.

Key to this is remembering that every candidate may also be a customer so customer service through the recruitment process is as important as when they are buying a product or service, not giving time and thought to the recruitment experience can be a costly mistake, due to retention or impact on your brand.

We will also ensure that you are recruiting within the law and ensure all processes are non-discriminatory.

Selection materials

It is key to ensure a fair and consistent recruitment process that your selection materials are fit for purpose. We will review your current materials, whether you use them or not and assess if they actually deliver what you need them to do and provide a robust, reliable process for assessing and spotting talent.

We are experienced in designing and writing selection material, from screening forms for your in house team to structured competency-based interviews, frameworks to assessment centre material including group exercises, business analysis, presentations and role-plays. We will create an assessment that works within your framework and assesses the candidates against your competency criteria.

If you don’t have a criteria we will start from the beginning and create one for you. We will spend time in your business, with your business and deliver a workshop that pulls out your priorities, key skills, behaviours and cultural fit in order to create a bespoke product that really delivers what your business needs to assess candidates and develop your organisation.

The design will also ensure that we give the candidates the best possible opportunity to perform and share their skills and experience whilst critically evaluating their ability and potential. We will always take into account the needs of your selection pool and ensure when creating new materials they work with your industry and sector and assess only what is required to deliver a great job within your organisation.

Our bespoke documentation will support the interviewer/ assessor to ensure consistency in decision-making and provide a framework for candidate feedback.

TRAINING &
DEVELOPMENT

Our training team provides mentoring, coaching and group training across the UK. We deliver, develop and write bespoke and specific training for your business with your needs in mind, our training is practical, delivered with an engaging style and gets your teams involved ensuring delivery of your objectives. 

The training we deliver is practical and has clear tangible benefits. We use theory to assist in developing an understanding of a subject, but we know the best training is when teams feel involved and engaged on the day.

We are skilled in working with hiring managers, in house recruitment teams, training departments and HR teams.

When training in house teams we have seen excellent results such as a 25% increase in candidate retention, a 12% increase in candidate acceptance for direct hires and a 40% reduction in recruitment costs.

All training courses are developed in-house, written and delivered specifically to improve your efficiencies and give your key team members the tools to deliver exceptional recruitment. The courses are professional and detailed in their focus on delivering your desired commercial outcomes.

Examples of training courses we have delivered:

• – How to hire Great People
• – Interviewing and selecting the best talent
• – Legality and Ethics in Recruitment
• – Headhunting; methodology and techniques
• – Developing an Efficient Recruitment Process including Candidate Screening
• – Candidate Management
• – Understanding the Recruitment Cycle
• – Influencing and Negotiation
• – Successful Poaching
• – Redundancy workshops
• – Developing What Good Looks Like
• – 2 Day Recruitment Team Induction
• – Poaching for hiring managers

A recent attendee at an interview skills workshop commented.

“In my 24 years in retail that is the best most relevant workshop I have attended. The knowledge of the trainer, not only in our sector and recruitment but also for our business, was phenomenal. Bringing the best talent into our business is critical to our success; I now have the tools to do that.”

IN-HOUSE RECRUITMENT
TEAM CREATION

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your in-house recruitment team or do you want to put an in-house team in place? As professional and extremely knowledgeable recruitment specialists we can develop your in-house recruitment processes and your team through a number of solutions, which we guarantee will increase the % of direct hires, improve your efficiencies and reduce your costs for external recruitment.

We have successfully worked with a number of businesses to do just this and in some cases have set up from scratch a full in-house recruitment department.

Our first step is to get to know you through an analysis of needs and operational requirements. No one business requires the same support, however, this is a list of the various elements we have supported with:

• – Setting up and on-going management of applicant management and tracking systems
• – Review in house team structures and key responsibilities
• – Advising on candidate attraction solutions and employee brand
• – Maximising social media and attraction strategies
• – Analysis of current processes and candidate tracking – full audits where applicable
• – KPI management and delivery of reporting
• – Legality and Ethics within recruitment
• – 1-1 Coaching for Recruitment Managers and devising development plans
• – Devising and implementing new recruitment processes, drawing all recruitment into one central team
• – Recruitment and Induction of new Central Team
• – Panel member on PSL reviews and advisor for external recruitment support structures
• – Benchmarking and Assessment tool development
• – Training and Development of in-house teams
• – Candidate Referral Scheme

With a little help from us, you will be able to enhance your internal options and slash your recruitment spend.

JOB SPECIFICATION
& DESCRIPTIONS

People are key to organisational success, but the wrong people, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing will hinder business performance & growth.

Job descriptions are the foundation of a solid recruitment process, they set the agenda and identify expectations and, a well-written description will deliver a clear message about what good looks like for your organisation.

We can help you identify your deliverables and review your current materials to ensure you have accurate, fair and non-bias job descriptions with the right accountabilities and responsibilities to ensure success in a specific role. This can be achieved through meeting team members, your HR teams, research or through delivering our “What Good Looks Like for You” workshop which assists in the development of expectations and competencies.

Once we have identified the key deliverables and expectations for your roles, we will create specific job descriptions with clear competencies that will enable you to measure performance, develop individual training plans and recruit the right people.

This can often lead to a review of the recruitment process and design/benchmarking.

REDUNDANCY
OUTSOURCING SERVICE

We can provide a complete redundancy and outplacement service, offering a range of services to help clients manage the difficult aspects of restructuring or resizing initiatives.  This includes analysing employees required skill sets, providing detailed, impartial reports assessing each employee, designing and implementing assessment schemes, training programmes and advice seminars for employees facing redundancy.

We deliver training workshops for employees facing redundancy ensuring that they have the skills required to go out into the job market and successfully secure a new position. This workshop is practical and provides sound advice on CV writing, managing your emotions, delivering an interview, understanding your skills and future job needs along with building a LinkedIn profile, managing recruitment agencies, and job boards. The feedback from the workshop is always very positive and really gives the attendees the belief and skills to go and build on their experience and get the role they want.

We also offer 1-1 coaching and career counselling services.

We have conducted these workshops for Aldi, TK Maxx, bathstore, and various other large businesses that have gone through change and transformation projects.

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
& RETENTION

Having a happy engaged and motivated team is the ideal we all strive for, recruiting new team members is one thing but retaining your talent is equally if not more important.

At McCarthy, it is something we pride ourselves on in our own team but also with our partners. We aim to help you ensure that you are recruiting the right people into your business and provide you with advice and support about what you need to do to retain your talent initially through their induction and beyond.

We work with businesses across a number of sectors including other recruitment businesses to advise on how to make their cultures and workplaces a Great place to Work. We work closely with you to understand your business objectives and how people retention and engagement will enable you to achieve them.

We will analyse your current strategies and ways of working and understand with you if these are providing you with the required outcomes and also establish with ROI you are achieving for your initiatives. In our opinion there is no point in doing anything for the sake of it – if your employees don’t like fruit, why are you providing a fruit basket, clichés and rewards that don’t impact are not worth anything.

Experts in health and wellbeing as well as assessing engagement and delivering results we will get to the bottom of what your leadership team needs to do to improve your retention and achieve a high employee satisfaction score.

• Review of learning and development
• Succession planning review and people plan
• 360 feedback
• Employee satisfaction surveys and reports
• Full analyse and reporting including advisory board reports
• Review of recruitment processes, onboarding and candidate expectations
• Assessor materials reflective of the right fit for the job
• Leaver review and leaver interviews
• Induction and probation processes and success review
• Health and wellbeing review
• Delivery of various team workshops including cultivating grit 
• Teambuilding days and workshops

TALENT &
SUCCESSION PLANNING

Hit by unexpected vacancies? Key roles vacant, putting your business at Risk? Top performers leaving to work for competitors? We can help you minimise this risk by developing a robust succession planning process which will enable you to plan movement within your organisation offering exciting career paths for top performers and prepare for movement out of your organization enabling you to forecast where and when gaps are going to arise, giving you the time to source, select, induct and train your replacement ideally before the vacancy actually arises.

Of course, there will be times when a vacancy arises and no amount of planning could have prevented it but many vacancies can be planned for by reviewing performance, potential and aspirations of your existing employees. You may choose to do this for your entire workforce, your management teams or just for key roles, whatever you decide it will deliver a whole host of business benefits;

• Retain talent in the business through offering development and promotion opportunities to existing employees, reducing your Labour turnover and improving your retention and stability.
• Manage risk through forecasting movement giving you a clearer idea of where your ‘future vacancy requirements’ will be which shapes your attraction and generation plan.
• Manage poor performance in a timely manner knowing you have a succession plan in place.
• Ultimately fine-tune the recruitment for your business so that as and when a vacancy arises you have a fully trained & competent replacement ready and waiting.

RE-STRUCTURE &
CHANGE SUPPORT

We have been offering support through change and transformation for over 15 years. Many organisations when they go through a period of consolidation or review need assistance with managing their people through this period. Often recruitment and talent management are a key part of business change and we support in various ways including research to assist in the decision making and change process;

Examples of research we have carried out include:

• Competitor research
• Market analysis
• Understanding candidate attraction strategies and if they are working
• Review of job roles and job titles
• Examining structures and advising on changes
• Benchmarking current team members against external talent

To help drive your business forward, we can support you with comprehensive overviews of the market including such things as salary surveys and recruitment practices.  We want to share with you the best practice we have learned over the years and from business to business; because we are leadership specialists our best practice is relevant and specific to your needs.

Whatever your focus for this year, whether it is staff retention, direct hires, process development or employee branding, we will have advised on it before and have a wealth of experience and suggestions that will assist you in reaching your goals.

It may be that you just can’t seem to attract the right caliber of candidate and you are frustrated and want to raise the bar. Whatever the issue we will have a suggested solution for you that will improve your capability and recruitment strategy.

As demonstrated the support in these circumstances can come in so many ways, what is important though is that you have a trusted partner who you can confidentially discuss suggested business changes and draw on our experience to assist you with this.

This part of the change agent’s role is often part of a wider project and can include training and benchmarking services alongside private and confidential recruitment services.