Recruiting in an employee’s market

For education technology firm Bedrock Learning, making recruitment and retention easier was a key driver for shifting to a four-day work week.

“Being brutally honest, it is a retention and recruitment piece,” its CEO and founder Aaron Leary told CNBC’s Make It. “It has been very much an employee’s market through the pandemic and there’s been a lot of movement, a lot of changing and Bedrock was also sort of susceptible to that,” he added.

Like many other companies, Bedrock Learning struggled with the Great Resignation and the shift to flexible working, which made maintaining a company culture more difficult while making it easier to switch jobs. In early 2022, job vacancies also hit an all-time high in the U.K., according to the country’s Office for National Statistics, increasing competition for workers and therefore making recruitment harder.

Marketing agency Loud Mouth Media, also part of the four-day work week trial, was also affected. “That’s why we got involved,” said Managing Director Mark Haslam.

“During Covid our guys were just getting tapped up, left, right and centre,” he says, adding that competition for talent also intensified as companies started adding new perks for employees.

The shift to the four-day work week has been game changing for both companies.

“I would say things have completely sort of stabilised compared to what they were in terms of like retention,” Bedrock Learning’s Leary said, adding that only one employee has resigned since June, when the trial began.  

More applications = better candidates?

However, the surge in applications doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to find the right candidate, Haslam said.

“If somebody comes to me and says I want to work for you because you do a four-day week, we don’t entertain them remotely. Because it’s not a genuine driver for somebody and that just means somebody wants to work less, you know, it makes you kind of question their ethics,” he says.

Haslam said he wants to hire candidates who are aligned with the company’s values and goals, and that goes beyond the four-day week.

Tyler Grange has had similar experiences.

“We get an awful lot of people apply because we’re a four-day week trial company and not because they’ve got the right skill that we would actually be looking for in our business,” said Human Resources Director Brittain.

Read the full report here