The guide, ‘Returners Programmes: Best Practice Guidance for Employers’ highlights a range of benefits offered by such initiatives, including:
- A return-to-work programme can help you tackle skills shortages by giving you access to an untapped pool of talented and willing people.
- It can help to address the ‘brain drain’ whereby highly educated women drop out of work before they reach senior positions. This can lead to your decision makers not understanding female customers’ needs properly and can skew your gender pay gap figures, leading to reputational damage.
- Many people who have taken a career break have high levels of experience and maturity.
- Many returners can offer a different way of looking at problems, particularly if they’ve been volunteering or running their own business.
- Such a programme can have a positive impact on your brand and on recruitment and retention, signalling your support for employees juggling work and home commitments.
- Such a programme can be a cost-effective way to hire experienced staff because you don’t need to use a recruitment agency.
A 2016 report estimated that of 427,000 female professionals
on a career break, 60% were likely to return to jobs for which they were under-qualified. That’s almost 250,000 women who will end up working below their potential and whose skills you could benefit from if you reached out to them.
4 Tips for a Cost-effective Programme
Only a fifth of returners surveyed last year said money was their key reason for going back to work – most missed the sense of achievement and the social side of working and were looking to
regain their professional identity. Returners did expect to be paid in line with their experience but a return-to-work programme can still be a cost-effective option if you follow these 4 tips:
- Returners are often keen to work close to home to help them manage their other commitments. Use this to your benefit by advertising locally and on your website and getting employees to spread the word, thereby minimising your recruitment costs.
- Take advantage of returners’ desire to work flexibly. For example, if you tend to be quiet over the summer, offer additional unpaid leave over the school holidays. Or consider a returner if you’re
struggling to find someone highly skilled for a part-time role. - Although you should generally pay returners the same as comparable staff to avoid equal pay claims, there may be some room for manoeuvre during an initial trial period, as long as you provide support and training to attract high-calibre applicants.
- If you’re a small business, you may be able to recruit highly skilled candidates, even though you can’t pay as much as a large company, by offering the flexibility and support that returners are seeking.
How to Design Your Programme
There are 2 main types of return-to-work initiative. The first is a returnship, which is a fixed-term contract, usually for 3 to 6 months, with the likelihood, but no guarantee, of a permanent role at the end if the placement goes well for both parties. The second is a supported hiring programme, which involves recruiting a returner straight into a permanent role.
In both cases, it’s best practice to provide coaching, training or mentoring to help the individual update their skills. It’s therefore a good idea to avoid starting your programme at a busy time when managers would find it difficult to offer support and feedback (such as the end of the tax year for an accountancy position). You should also avoid the school holidays, as many applicants may not have time to put childcare in place before the scheme starts. For a returnship, there should be a genuine opportunity to move into a permanent role afterwards. Even if you don’t opt for a formal
scheme, you could consider advertising jobs as flexible or welcoming applications from those who have taken a career break.
5 Key Ways to Attract and Recruit the Best Candidates
- When promoting your scheme, avoid using language like: ‘a programme to help women get their confidence back’ or ‘a programme to help returning mums’. Apart from sounding patronising and discriminatory, this terminology fails to recognise that not everyone who takes a career break is a woman or a mother and limits your pool of applicants. As an example, the Civil Service scheme states that: ‘Applications will be open to any individual who has had a period of absence from the workplace and/or, due to absence from the workplace, is currently engaged in work that they do not feel complements their skill-set or aspirations.’
- Make it clear you understand applicants have a lot to bring to the table. For example, engineering firm Aecom’s advertising says that successful candidates will ‘have a wealth of experience’ and it ‘looks forward to you bringing a fresh perspective’ to its teams and projects.
- Be clear what you’re looking for: set out what fields or roles candidates must have experience in and what skills and qualifications they need. You want to avoid being deluged with irrelevant applications but, on the other hand, bear in mind you could miss out on a strong candidate if you’re too prescriptive.
- Flexibility will be a high priority for most returners. To increase the choice of candidates, say in your advertising that you’re willing to be flexible – but be clear what level of time commitment you expect to avoid unsuitable applications. Raise the issue proactively at interview and use the trial period to find out the pattern that works best. You don’t have to bend over backwards – even minor adjustments like flexible start or finish times to accommodate school runs or occasional homeworking tend to be very welcome.
- Allow more time than usual for the recruitment process to increase your pool of candidates. Returners may need time to rework out-of-date CVs and put care arrangements in place.