Posted by Karen Mattison MBE
How one social enterprise is playing an important role in helping people find their ideal job.
Social businesses trade in the marketplace for social objectives. Often they find innovative solutions to problems inherent in society. When someone says "but we've always done that", social businesses ask "why?" and look for a better way.
With problems in the jobs market making national news every month, nowhere is fresh thinking more urgently needed than in the world of recruitment.
At present, the UK recruitment market is failing thousands of skilled workers who need jobs with less than full-time hours. Our hiring practices haven't kept pace with the increasing numbers of women who need to continue working after having children - or the fact that many need part-time hours in order to do so.
But what kind of jobs are working women with families in? And what kind of pay are they receiving? The answer is often jobs that are beneath their level of skill, ability and earning capacity. Research conducted last year by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Women Like Us revealed that of all openly advertised jobs on the market, just 3% are for part-time jobs, offering £20,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) or above. This means that skilled and experienced people who need part-time work have an incredibly small pool of jobs to search from. As a consequence, many feel forced to take jobs that involve a slide five rungs down the career ladder. Others feel locked out of the world of work completely. Those who do manage to find work with the part-time hours they need find that their salaries (when you look at them on an FTE basis) are still 36% lower on average, compared with men in the same roles.
Ten years ago, I came to live these issues myself. Despite 10 years of continuous employment, I found there was no place for me any more in the world of work. It wasn't because I lacked the skills or experience that employers wanted, far from it - but because I was now a mother and could no longer work full time. After six months of searching for a flexible job that was at least close to the level I had previously worked at, I realised I hadn't found a single relevant role to apply for. At the school gates I kept meeting women who were also facing a career brick wall. Some who had tried to return to the same job but had been refused flexible hours, some who for years hadn't been able to find a job with hours they could realistically fit with family, many who just didn't know where to begin their search in the first place. I realised that something, somewhere in the system, was broken. We were missing a trick - for here was an incredible pool of talent, that surely employers would want to recruit from, on a part-time and thus more affordable basis.
I teamed up with a former colleague, carried out some research and discovered that half a million women in the UK desperately want to work, but can't find part time jobs at the right level to apply for. At the same time, we discovered that employers are actually well aware of, and are indeed keen to recruit from the pool of people who want and need part-time work - they just don't know where to go, to find the talent. As traditional recruiters are financially incentivised to fill full-time jobs, part time means part fee, so such vacancies go to the bottom of the pile time and time again. Over the years, this has built and consolidated the - incorrect - impression that there are no high-quality candidates for part-time roles available, and thus no point in advertising such roles openly on the market.
It was clear to me that part-time work needed a status, and that employers and candidates alike needed a visible marketplace for flexible work. Last May, we launched two recruitment businesses designed to fill that gap - both fully focused on the generation and filling of quality part-time jobs (Timewise Jobs and Timewise Recruitment). Alongside this, we run an advice and support service for parents and carers looking for part-time work (Women Like Us), with money made via the recruitment businesses going into the provision of free careers advice and support for those from low-income backgrounds. We have a double bottom line - financial and social - which acts like a backbone that keeps us true to purpose.
This is the role of social enterprise in the recruitment sector - to help people find not just any job, but the job that's right for them, and that they will stay in for the long term. We aim to help people optimise their earnings in the hours they have available - by helping them to find part-time jobs that use all of their potential, rather than just a tenth. And we help employers to find talented, experienced candidates.
We now have an incredible 41,000 people registered with us, and we have advertised quality part-time jobs for some of the UK's most well-known employers, such as Virgin, EasyJet and Harrods and have recruited for hundreds of SMEs. We have received huge interest from across the public, voluntary and commercial sector, and what always strikes me is how the issue of quality part-time jobs cuts across so many different areas of society.
Stimulating more quality part-time jobs in the economy has the potential to create significant social and economic impact - important steps towards building a resilient and sustainable society. And our work is really only just beginning. The next big step is to tackle people's perceptions of part-time work, and prove that part-time hours don't just work for low-skilled roles, requiring little responsibilities. It's time to change all our thinking on workplace practices and how to get the best from people.
Karen Mattison MBE is founder of Timewise Jobs, a division of WLU C.I.C.
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