On June 15th 2023, Keely Straw and Cameron Davies held EMEA Recruitment's first Talent Acquisition Roundtable in Switzerland. Keely shares insights into the event below...

The focus was to bring together senior Talent and Recruitment professionals to discuss relevant topics. We had identified that there aren’t many events focused on Talent and Recruitment specifically from a networking perspective.

The event topic was Breaking Barriers: Unveiling Unconscious Bias in Talent Acquisition. In partnership with Swiss Marketplace Group, Oerlikon, we were joined by Talent and Recruitment professionals from companies such as Syngenta, ABB, Takeda, Lonza, Glencore and Julius Baer, to name a few.

The roundtable began with an engaging introduction from Tshidi Khunou at Swiss Marketplace Group and Madlaina Brogt at Lonza, both emphasising the importance of recognising and challenging our unconscious biases, particularly in the context of Talent Acquisition. Their insights set the stage for subsequent discussions and debates - how can we influence hiring managers?

Throughout the event, participants had the opportunity to reflect on their own companies’ biases and gain a deeper understanding of how these biases can influence decision making within the recruitment and selection processes.

We explored a range of topics, including application processes, interview structures, Diversity & Inclusion efforts, influencing hiring managers and ATS/HRIS systems. This brought us nicely onto the topic of AI and how that will impact selection processes moving forwards.

The structure of the event allowed us to have a true discussion, with respectful debates and questions; we truly delved deeper into practical strategies and best practises for unconscious bias within Talent Acquisition.

One highlight of the roundtable was assessing applications and selection processes and the role that plays with unconscious bias, whether it be language capabilities, industry experience, age, or gender. There were some interesting concepts on how to utilise automation scoring techniques for candidates’ applications, which are then forwarded to the designated recruiter to follow up with a screening interview. It was a very interesting process, which provoked a debate on whether that would improve unconscious bias or have a negative impact.

The event concluded with a collective agreement that we could discuss unconscious bias for a lot longer, and that we may need another event to continue the topic. Following feedback from the attendees and local market, we will be focusing our next event on AI - positives, negatives, and whether we should embrace AI within our recruitment processes.

The next Talent Acquisition Roundtable will be held in October. If you are interested in attending, please email me directly at [email protected]

This International Women’s Day, we want to highlight the importance of supporting females every day. We’re using the hashtag #ItsNotJustADay to remind other organisations that championing strong women is an ongoing commitment.

We want to celebrate all the female leaders within our network that we have the pleasure of working with, through a snapshot of the past 12 months:

Read more about our fantastic events, as well as keeping up to date with future plans, here: https://www.emearecruitment.com/events

All past episodes of the EMEA Recruitment podcast are available here: https://www.emearecruitment.com/podcasts

You can also find out more about the wonderful members of our team through their profiles: https://www.emearecruitment.com/our-team-members

We’re also proud to reveal our latest initiative to promote Diversity & Inclusion in the workplace. We are supporting the Boardroom, an exclusive, members-only club for senior women leaders in Switzerland, founded by Diana Markaki.

According to a recent PwC report, Switzerland lags significantly behind the international field in terms of gender diversity; only 16% of board members at the 100 largest Swiss companies are women. the Boardroom hopes to create and cultivate an active pipeline of qualified female leaders to fill corporate board positions.

the Boardroom is a strong network that supports and encourages women to achieve their professional goals, enables companies to retain and promote senior female talent, and helps boards achieve gender parity.

Not only does the Boardroom help female leaders land a board seat, but it also helps them succeed when they get there.

Are you looking to promote gender equality in your organisation? Your female leaders could benefit from the education, coaching, networking and inspiration of the Boardroom. Please contact Diana Markaki to find out how to apply or to ask any questions you have: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-markaki/

If you have any questions or comments regarding Diversity & Inclusion, please contact Charlotte Cruise, our ED&I Ambassador.

EMEA Recruitment is proud to be working in collaboration with St. Gallen University’s Institute of Cognitive Automation to bridge the gap between humans and machines.

This research intervention is working with project leaders across Switzerland’s leading businesses, who want to help close the gap between automation and human augmentation.

We know that 70% of digital transformations within businesses fail, but the failure rate has actually increased with technology. St. Gallen University has found that 85% of Data Science projects add no value to a business.

We know that the Future of Work is not solved by one company. Therefore, St. Gallen University’s Cognitive Automation Institute has worked with us to find companies who want to optimise human augmentation.

Project leaders from these businesses are now participating in research to find out where and how they’re going wrong.

The project is broken down into two phases:

Phase 1: Structured Interviews

All participants will receive the critical human and machine teaming design criterion, using a method of inquiry to identify the design challenges in cognitive automation.

Phase 2: Empirical Study

For selected companies, a human and machine solution that addresses the criterion would be defined at a pragmatic level, e.g. process level or judgment level. To impact the company on the criterion identified.

We are delighted to be collaborating with St. Gallen University’s Dr. Chantelle Brandt Larsen on this research.

We look forward to supporting the Institute of Cognitive Automation and our partner businesses throughout this research project, and to working towards a human and machine solution to change the Future of Work.

You can read more about our ongoing partnerships here: https://www.emearecruitment.com/partnerships

If there is anything you’d like to discuss with us or for more information, please contact Mark Robinson in our Swiss recruitment team.