Added Value for Employers
Older workers give employers many added value attributes, above and beyond any technical competence required. Your organisation can benefit from staff who are reliable, courteous and loyal. According to research, a more mature worker is likely to stay with your organisation, on average, for up to seven years, whereas a younger counterpart will probably move on to new opportunities after three years. Therefore, recruiting a more experienced person will give you increased stability and retention value that adds strength to your structure and planning capabilities.
Be a Champion
To gain access to more valued services, support, and free recruitment provision, join our ‘Champion’ membership through our sister organisation, The Age Diversity Forum. For an annual subscription, our members support age diversity in the work-place, working with us to set the standards to address widening participation and inclusion. By providing an influential voice for members, through our policy and campaign activity, we ensure that the needs and views of an age diverse work-force are heard by government, policy makers, and other relevant organisations – together with our members, we work to bring continuous improvement to removing barriers to employment.
Champions membership is achieved by organisations who commit to behaviours, actions and values, that engage an age diverse workforce through policy and governance for retention, retraining and recruitment.
To become a Champion and take advantage of the member benefits, including the use of the Champions mark, we ask organisations and employers to commit, meet, and be accountable to a number of criteria and behaviours, ensuring your organisation:
- has a clear age-diversity employment policy that is set out in your governing documents
- seeks to retain an age diverse work-force, giving balance to technical and life-skill attributes
- invests in your recruitment strategy to ensure you are able to access all demographics when considering the search to fulfil a new vacancy
- will provide training, up-skilling and redeployment opportunities for all employees, whatever their age
- facilitates an improved culture of awareness, to encourage all staff to integrate and recognise the range of values provided across all employees
Here’s Katie Dominy, Head of HR at The Castelan Group, sharing her views on how Prime Candidate provide value and benefit to their recruitment practice:
Commercial Value for Employers
If we take the assumption, based on the research mentioned above that, for a younger resource, you may have to go through the recruitment process twice in the same period as for an older worker, you will also achieve a significant economic benefit. There are different ways to evaluate the actual costs, for example:
- recruiting via a ‘traditional’ agency, who will charge fees of around 15% of salary….your cost for recruitment on a salary of £25,000 will be £3,750
- if you were to choose to advertise in a local paper, prices range from around £400-700 per week, dependent on the size of advert, and you will never know what type of response you will receive and who may actually apply
- other on-line, flat-fee recruitment sites can range from £500-1,700 fees
However, none of these methods will give you the direct access to experienced applicants. But, if you advertise your vacancy with us, it will be seen by a database of individuals offering the added value attributes. According to the examples above, on average, if you recruit through Prime Candidate, you will make an incredible saving of over £7,000 against traditional recruitment routes.
Cost Savings for Charities and the Third Sector
We make our service accessible for all size of employer, from the micro, 1-10 people business, to large corporates, and across all sectors, including charities and social enterprises from the third sector. For charities, our service will significantly reduce your costs, and create a more stable and sustainable platform to deliver your services. It is an affordable and straightforward process of advertising new roles, we don’t have any gimmicks, just an effective and efficient system to match the right candidate to the right role.
Another myth to dispel about older workers is the capacity to re-train. Research shows that more mature workers are just as productive and effective at up-skilling as their younger counterparts. And here’s another myth dispelled, younger workers will have more time off with short-term illness than their senior counterparts.
Employer HR Benefits
We also support employers with their commitment to Age Diversity programmes and Corporate and Social Responsibilities, as well as creating employer benefits through our specifically designed Outplacement Service, ARM™. When tough decisions have to be made, this service provides added value to the employer and employee, in that the released employee can join our ARM™ programme to assess and consolidate new career avenues, whilst also joining the recruitment programme and accessing new opportunities. Again, we have designed this unique programme to provide ultimate value to both candidate and employer, with hope and aspiration for the candidate and an affordable package for the employer that helps them offer significant value to their HR and Employee benefits model.
As a Social Enterprise, we recognise the social and community benefits of driving employment equality and we lobby and seek influence for continuous improvement in employment opportunities for the mature worker. Employers working with us meet their age diversity and CSR commitments.
Employers benefit from:
- Quality attributes of experience, reliability, loyalty, ethics, communication
- Technical competence and know-how
- Dedicated staff ready to train and up-skill
- Accelerating business development
- Plugging skills gaps
- Affordable and sustainable recruiting
- Achieving Age Diversity and CSR objectives
The Prime Candidate services have been adopted by Jobcentre Plus offices across the UK, where jobseekers in the mature demographic category register themselves through our interactive on-line environment. This approach, together with our expertly SEO’d digital platforms, has created a vast database of available candidates, candidates with various skills and talents that will see your new posts when you advertise your roles through Prime Candidate.