Bower Talent Brings Ethical Recruitment to the Table for Forward-Thinking Teams

Employers should recognize that every step counts. It’s about matching the energy you want to see from employees: getting creative with your rewards, giving actionable feedback, making reviews a two-way conversation, giving employees the autonomy to play a part in crafting their work, and helping your staff develop a career road map. These things lead employers to attract and keep valuable staff and will only become more important in our post-Covid future. London-based Bower Talent is bringing these things to the fore by harnessing technology, scientific profiling, and bespoke testing that enables it to go beyond the CV and get to the real depth and potential of the individuals it works with.

Established in 2014, Bower Talent is a proudly female-led support staff recruiter that puts technology, ethics, and diversity at the forefront. By using bespoke testing to battle bias, forming powerhouse industry partnerships, providing targeted coaching and workshops, and using hard data and technology to supercharge progress, the company is working to connect its clients with the top talent in the market. “We want to redefine who support staff are and bring their roles into a future where technical skill, career security and development, and progressive culture are a given,” said Georgina Bale, Founder of Bower Talent.

In an interesting interview with us, Georgina talked about how Bower Talent adapted and evolved as the COVID-19 pandemic set in and helped its clients. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. A major reason for the complexity in recruitment event is the constant changing of requirements. Do you have a solid process and line of communication to ensure that the outcomes align with expectations and requirements?

Communication is both our greatest focus and strength. We approach both our clients and candidates with transparent communication and a consistent goal of maintaining integrity at every step. We know that no one is perfect, and that unfair preference and prejudice has the ability to creep in, even when the best of intentions are present. For this reason, we are constantly making efforts to look for and mitigate bias with our clients, and we diligently raise flags with clients when we see issues.

In order to help our candidates find work, we don’t just throw their resume into as many inboxes as possible — we make an effort to understand them, address their needs, and help them to better understand the current market in order to place them in a way that benefits them as much as the client. All of this, from holding one-on-one meetings with candidates to providing open job hunting clinics, comes as a result of open, frequent, and clear communication.

Both candidates and clients refer and return to us due to our transparency and collaborative approach. We also have a Head of Candidate Experience who is responsible for refining the quality of our process and communications.

Q. How do you recruit the right talents to maintain the quality of your services?

Throughout our business, we have found two elements that bring consistent success: transparency and ethics. We begin by carefully and frequently researching market trends and analyzing competitors, continuously looking for ways in which our approach can be updated to better serve our clients and candidates within the current landscape. We keep a diverse roster of sources from which we recruit, including LinkedIn, graduate job boards, Secsinthecity, Guardian, Women in Tech and Technojobs. This list is always growing as we seek out new resources and form new relationships in an effort to center diversity in our recruitment process. Overall, letting our principles serve as a guide to our approach leads to quality that our clients and candidates appreciate.

Q. There are other recruiters in the talent acquisition segment. How do you diversify yourself?

Our embrace of technology to enhance our recruitment, and support our commitment to integrity in recruitment, is one thing that sets us apart in the industry. By using the latest technology, science-based profiling and bespoke testing that measures factors from hard skills to emotional intelligence, Bower is able to go beyond CVs and the box-ticking method of ethical hiring to deliver authentic results.

Our level of investment is another key to our uniqueness. In addition to implementing testing and technology to help us make better placements for candidates and clients, we hold regular one-on-one meetings, provide educational and training resources, and get an in-depth sense of both client and candidate needs to provide truly helpful, progress-building solutions. Our relationships with candidates and clients are not transactional, they are partnership-based. This only helps drive our commitment to communication, training, research, D&I building and candidate advocacy. Our small team works round-the-clock to offer a listening ear to any questions, concerns and aspirations and immediately gets to work on solutions. Both our clients and candidates feel that they are championed by us, and this creates a feeling of confidence that is both much needed in our industry and that has resulted in numerous recruiting wins.

Q. As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe, recruitment companies have undoubtedly felt its impact. How are you dealing with the repercussions of the pandemic?

With the pandemic turning every aspect of our lives upside-down, we landed on flexibility as our number one focus, in addition to helping ourselves as well as our clients and candidates increase efficiency and maintain productivity. 

As a startup, we knew exactly what our clients were going through. In response, we worked to maintain our existing client partnerships and build new ones to the best of our ability, factoring in the pandemic’s impact on businesses. One of the central points to achieving this goal was maintaining flexibility in our terms and fees. We had open conversations with our clients about their new budgets and looked for areas where we could reduce pricing and keep giving them the support they needed until they recovered. We extended particular flexibility to our startup and charity clients, for whom we lowered fees and offered better payment terms.

The pandemic was an exercise in pinpointing what we had to share. We leaned into the opportunity to donate our time and knowledge. On the candidate side, we launched free bi-weekly job hunting clinics as well as our ‘What You Need to Know Right Now’ webinar series, a donation-based series created in partnership with Leadership Through Sport and Business (LTSB), featuring industry leader panelists from companies like Google and Spotify.

On the client side, we adopted an ultra-transparent communication style in order to help them succeed. With the pandemic taking a financial and emotional toll on us all, we noticed some of our clients beginning to slip in terms of their organization and professionalism when trying to take on new staff, and this impacted how interested our best-in-class candidates were in open roles. We chose to be very clear with these clients and address these issues directly, and the result was that our clients got better candidates.

Q. Do you have any new services launching soon?

Firstly, we have Tech Warriors: ‘the Netflix of Tech’; Tech Warriors is a tech learning platform dedicated to supercharging the performance of individual professionals and every team within a business or enterprise through bite-sized tech and software training videos, subscriber-only events and webinars and more. Tech Warriors was launched in beta earlier in 2021, but will soon be launching in its gamma phase.

Secondly is Good Eggs. Powered by a passionate team of optimists who see how today’s job market is changing for the better, Good Eggs was created to vet and gather companies who deliver on what today’s employees want to see — well-rounded transparency and a backbone of care — onto one job board. Good Eggs is a response to what I see as the future of recruitment: one in which talent who know their worth want to know what an employer has to offer in terms of ethics and integrity. Look out for a launch in the near future.

The Leader

Georgina Bale, Founder

Georgina is a London-based entrepreneur and the founder of Bower Talent and Good Eggs, as well as the founder and product lead of Tech Warriors. A self-taught tech student and advocate, Georgina’s appreciation for the power of tech-fluency began during her work as an Executive Assistant. With over a decade’s worth of experience working for high-powered individuals in the UK finance industry, Georgina’s enthusiasm for tech in her own work began when, at the age of 21, she landed a job with Home Secretary David Blunkett. Blunkett was the country’s first blind senior Cabinet member, and in order to adapt to her employer’s needs, Georgina began using some basic technologies to manage the admin of Blunkett’s job. She quickly found that exploring the ways in which tech could enhance her work in every arena was a no-brainer. Tech-savviness became her superpower, helping her perform more efficiently. Today, Georgina works at the intersection of the tech and recruitment industry.

“We approach both our clients and candidates with transparent communication and a consistent goal of maintaining integrity at every step.”