CA3 Cup of tea series

Seenit and Eli have partnered up this Autumn as two organisations focused on creating exceptional candidate and new hire experiences. Creating content that connects and inspires people in order to elevate the onboarding experience is so important. So for this month's podcast, Sarah Wardle from Eli interviewed Emily Forbes, the Founder of Seenit, to understand how organisations can create content that truly connects with people during the critical onboarding phase.During this podcast you will learn:Why storytelling matters in today's workplaceHow to create content that connects for preboarding and onboarding purposesReal life examples of content that engages new hiresHow to measure the effectiveness of your content, and the impact it has on engagement and retention

Over the last few months we have been running a series of employee experience-themed podcasts, each aiming to give insight into several different aspects of employee experience. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Christabel Mensah Stapleton, an expert in employee experience who is currently on secondment at Dalkia. With an impressive career spanning over 20 years at EDF in various roles, Christabel has continuously evolved her career within one of the world’s leading energy companies, ensuring her work stays exciting and impactful.What’s even more inspiring is how her passion for employee experience has shaped her career path. At Dalkia, she is leading on a project to ensure employees feel supported and engaged. She’s also a champion of initiatives such as Good Day at Work from Robertson Cooper, which promotes wellbeing and satisfaction in the workplace.With Dalkia’s big hiring plans this year, Christabel is uniquely positioned to talk about the importance of employee experience and how to get it right from the start.We cover a multitude of themes throughout the podcast, and if you'd like to discuss these further either with Sarah Wardle at CA3, or Christabel Mensah Stapleton at Dalkia, please get in touch via LinkedIn.

This month we have Ruth Miller on the podcast, our very first returner to the pod! For those who don’t know Ruth, for the last 15 years she’s been a Talent Acquisition and HR Consultant, helping a wide range of private, public and non-profit sector clients to navigate employment challenges. A few years ago I spoke to Ruth about offboarding, and how employers can stay true to their employer brand in times of crisis. In this episode though, we focused on AI. With a huge number of candidates and recruiters using AI in the application process there is anxiety on both sides about the integrity of the process. Not least from managers who need guidance on how to manage this huge cultural change. I wanted to ask Ruth about her experiences of AI, the issue of bias and the legal implications.We cover the following topics:The impact of AIAI and biasThe legal pitfalls businesses should watch out for when using AI in recruitmentAutomating the candidate experienceSupporting hiring managersCreating an AI policy for your workplaceIf you'd like to find out more about Ruth's work in the consultancy space, you can find her on LinkedIn or Instagram.

This month we had David Dand on the podcast, the Founder and MD of Coreus. Coreus provides talent acquisition solutions for professional services SMEs who want to attract top talent. David is passionate about strategic hiring and his 5-step framework, which focuses on the five key things all candidates want to know when looking for a new role.In his recruitment process David focuses on these elements to help achieve long-term 'fit' within an organisation. Sarah and David discuss some key topics in the latest episode of the Cup of tea series, including employer branding, authenticity, onboarding, culture fit vs culture add and how teams can build more diverse and high-performing teams.To find out more about Coreus you can visit the website, or find David Dand on LinkedIn.

For Episode 24 we have Bel Germon on the podcast. Bel is a Talent Associate at Zinc, one of Eli Onboarding’s partner technologies. Zinc is background checking software that supercharges the capabilities of HR and hiring teams with the candidate experience front of mind, and DE&I is a hot topic for their customers. Bel has some strong views on DE&I and how many businesses are going about it all wrong! So we wanted to get Bel on the podcast to hear more. To find out more about our partner Zinc, you can visit their website, or get in touch with Bel on LinkedIn. We hope you enjoy Episode 24!

In this episode, we're lucky enough to have Christian Hughes on the podcast, who’s the CEO at MyPeople Group. MyPeople specialise in measuring the environmental, behavioural, and psychological factors that affect teams. They were formed in 2014 by a group of analysts, psychologists, and data scientists that supported some of Britain’s greatest sporting teams. And today Christian’s past work with the GB Cycling team has enabled him to help organisations understand their culture, better develop their people, and allow them to better assess the ‘fit’ of new hires. During this episode we explore the idea of environment, and how it can affect people performance. Christian and Sarah discuss: Learnings from Christian's experience in elite sport How environment plays a key role in people performance How this can be applied to HR and skills-based hiring Specific case studies from Christian's experience To discuss this topic further with Christian, you can get in touch via LinkedIn, or find out more about MyPeople Group on their website.

Our topic for this episode is internal marketing and mobility – should we be doing more for our own people? Charu Malhotra brings her thoughts and views on internal marketing to the podcast, along with her cup of masala chai! Charu has held global leadership roles across employer branding and recruitment marketing at organisations including Unilever, McKinsey, Primark and Ferrero, and she specialises in culture & comms, branding and employee and candidate experience. So she’s perfectly placed to discuss this key subject. During this episode, Sarah and Charu discuss: Internal marketing and its importance EVP & culture Internal mobility & career moves Onboarding ...with specific examples from Charu's global and varied industry experience If listeners have questions for Charu about anything you've heard, you can find her on LinkedIn. Charu is also actively seeking her next role in talent marketing, comms and culture, so if you are looking for a senior leader to guide your organisation in these areas, please do get in touch.

During episode 21, we have Nicole Mundy on the pod. Nicole is a senior research analyst at Talent Tech Labs, an independent, unbiased research and advisory firm focused exclusively on Talent Technology. Nicole focuses on evaluating the market for emerging talent technologies. She helps talent acquisition and talent management professionals optimize and future-proof their tech stack, and provides bespoke research advisory services to a number of fortune 500 companies globally. In this episode, Sarah Wardle talks to Nicole about the trends she is seeing in the talent tech space, and the common challenges organizations are coming up against when it comes to their HR tech strategy. To hear more from Nicole Mundy you can find her on LinkedIn, or explore the Talent Tech Labs website for more info on how they help businesses evaluate the market place.

Eli Onboarding has recently partnered with AssessFirst, a soft skill assessment tech solution. So to celebrate, Lauren Tait joins us on the podcast! Having qualified with a 1st class degree in psychology, Lauren has been in the industry for a decade, currently working at AF as an HR Business Partner. AF identifies a candidate’s natural talents, motivators and decision-making skills and tells you how well they align with your organisational culture. This increases quality-of-hire, reduces time-to-hire, and increases diversity of teams by reducing bias in the process. During episode 20, Lauren and Sarah discuss gender bias and equity in the assessment process, how you can neutralise bias, and how AI can be used to improve gender equity within organisations. If you've enjoyed our conversation and want to hear more, you can contact Lauren on LinkedIn, and you can read the extremely informative whitepaper on gender equity that Lauren mentioned here.

I've often wondered how small tech start-ups manage to maintain their strong ethos and culture when they grow to large unicorn levels. It's easy enough to manage when there are only a few employees, but when you get to 700+, surely something changes? Well, I had my chance to find out when I spoke to Lorraine Metcalf, Chief People Officer at Quantexa, in March 2024. Lorraine has extensive HR and Talent experience leading teams at businesses such as Zoopla and Notonthehighstreet. She has been awarded several prestigious HR awards throughout her career and has some fascinating ideas on employer brand and culture. During this episode of the Cup of tea series, Sarah quizzes Lorraine on how she's fostered company values and culture in a business that's faced rapid growth and expansion over the last few years. They discuss employer brand and how this has been instrumental to their success, as well as how she and her team onboard new hires into Quantexa. If you'd like to find out more about employer branding, or discuss any of the topics you've heard in the Cup of tea series, please do get in touch. www.cathree.com