The employability programme: Talent Match

The programme studied is Talent Match (TM), a Big Lottery Fund strategic employability initiative. The Big Lottery is a non-departmental public body responsible for distributing funds raised by the National Lottery to organisations in the UK to improve their communities. TM is therefore a non-government programme. TM was launched in 2014 for a five-year term with an investment of £108 million. The overall aim is to develop holistic approaches to combating worklessness amongst young people who are long-term NEET (not in education, employment or training).Footnote ³ TM has an overarching aim of moving over 29,000 young people closer to the labour market and over 8,100 (28 per cent) of these into secure, sustainable employment or self-employment.

TM operates through 21 local TM partnerships. The geographical level matches Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas in England. LEPs are city-region partnerships between local authorities and businesses and play a central role in deciding local economic priorities and creating local jobs. When TM was planned, working at this city-region level was relatively new but was considered appropriate given the growing importance of LEPs to economic development, employment and skills agendas. There are 39 LEPs in England, meaning TM operates in slightly over half of LEP areas. To be clear, TM is a separate initiative from LEPs and each TM partnership has its own, separate, board. However, given the relatively limited number of relevant actors at city-region level, TM benefited from existing relationships developed through LEPs.

There is a common structure for all 21 TM partnerships. Each has a lead organisation, which originally made the bid to the Big Lottery for funding. Reflecting Big Lottery criteria, all lead organisations are voluntary sector groups. These include national voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations, local infrastructure organisations (e.g. councils for voluntary service), local specialist VCS organisations and consortia-based organisations. Each TM partnership has a board consisting of the lead organisation, strategic partners (including employers), a range of delivery partners commissioned to provide services to young people and some young people themselves.

This model of sub-national governance marks TM as different from UK government ALMP, which is highly centralised, and this is of particular relevance in emphasising the importance of sub-national strategic partnerships in the context of devolution. TM has some other innovative features. For example, TM takes a person-centred approach including involvement of young people in the co-production of design and delivery activities and their participation on TM partnership boards. TM has a ‘test and learn’ philosophy, which enables local partnerships to abandon approaches which are not working and to implement alternatives. This contrasts with the more rigid contractual basis of many programmes and payment-by-results models.

For the purposes of this article what is critical is the involvement of employers. From the outset the Big Lottery Fund placed strong emphasis on employer participation within the local partnerships. This was expressed as an overall aim rather than a specific target i.e. there was no requirement that partnerships must include a set number of employers. It has been for each TM partnership to determine its own approach and in practice there has been variation in terms of the scale and nature of employer participation. Rather than thinking of employers as a single group a more nuanced approach is appropriate. Some TM partnerships sought to engage individual employers (especially larger employers where an individual with a dedicated HR function could more easily find time to be involved than in the case of a smaller employer), while others sought employer engagement via Chambers of Commerce, through organisations such as Business in the Community or through long established networks of lead organisations (such as the Prince's Trust). Once established, some TM partnerships set targets for various elements of employer engagement. Examples include number of employers engaged over the life of the TM programme and the number involved in programme delivery, such as providing work placements, training delivery, mentoring and job openings.

TM has been the subject of broad-based evaluations which focus on process and impact, and which also provide more detail about the 21 local TM partnerships (e.g. Powell and Wells, Reference Powell and Wells2015). Some consideration has been given to employer participation (Green et al., Reference Green, Atfield and Barnes2015) but for this article:

• • a new analysis of data has been undertaken;

• • the research is located in academic debate as discussed above;

• • a conceptual theme of employers as reactive gatekeepers and proactive strategic partners is identified; and

• • the implications of findings for ALMP generally, are posited.

Thus, the article goes beyond a programme evaluation approach and makes new empirical, conceptual and policy contributions.

Employers as proactive strategic partners in TM

The research found evidence of employers taking a proactive strategic role within TM. There are four ways in which employers are involved in TM case study partnerships. First is direct involvement in core partnerships. This means being at the heart of TM, making strategic decisions affecting the direction and planning of TM partnership activities in the round. Second, employer involvement can be through membership of an employer forum/sub-group, still meaning strategic involvement but on a more specific topic/theme. Third, there was direct involvement in delivery ‘Hub’ activity including providing strategic and operational advice at a neighbourhood level. Fourth, there was more arms-length involvement in TM partnership activities e.g. providing advice on specific issues, including those of concern to employers, and on how best to engage employers, etc. Across the TM partnerships studied there was clear evidence of employers having involvement in all four of these different ways, with some individual employers involved in more than one.

These different ways of being involved are illustrated in the following quotations from employers. The first is from an employer who is a member of the TM Board at the partnership led by a large local voluntary sector umbrella organisation with previous experience of engaging in employability programmes. This is employer involvement at the strategic heart of TM. It is a greater degree of participation than even seen in van der Aa and van Berkel's (Reference Van der Aa and van Berkel2014) identification of employers as co-producers in a demand-oriented approach and involving employer participation in ALMP implementation. This employer's perspective was as follows.

This second example is from an employer in a TM partnership led by a national VCS body who was unlikely to recruit the kind of young people participating in TM, but still became involved, as a co-producer in implementation.

The way employer participation at strategy level helped shape TM was explained by the Partnership Lead in terms of bringing business realism to TM partnerships.

This was reinforced by another interviewee from a TM partnership with a dedicated employer engagement team:

In terms of the balance between employer participation as proactive strategic partners and reactive gatekeepers, however, it was still the latter that was more evident. This may partly reflect the profile of the interviewees and their immediate concerns, i.e. getting people into jobs, but it does perhaps suggest the reactive role is the more dominant, as discussed next.

Employers as reactive gatekeepers

The reactive gatekeeper role is about employers’ position relating to contact made by providers. Employers are therefore being reactive rather than proactive or, as in van der Aa and van Berkel's (Reference Van der Aa and van Berkel2014) approach, this is the demand-led element of ALMP in which policies predominantly aim to adapt services to existing employer demands, treating employers as clients of these policies and services. As noted already, the payment-by-results structure of the WP and WHP – plus judgement of success of other programmes on numbers of unemployed people helped into employment – means increasing competition amongst providers for employers’ attention and engagement.

Efforts to engage employers, in their role as gatekeepers, were highly extensive in TM. They were undertaken in three different ways: first, TM lead partner responsibility – sometimes through a direct employer/business engagement officer or team; secondly, delivery partner responsibility – with delivery partners, often with different prior experiences of employer engagement, having prime responsibility; and thirdly a mix of core and delivery partner responsibility – sometimes with the core partner taking responsibility for raising employer awareness of TM and delivery partners engaging employers to match the preferences of TM participants to particular types of jobs.

The offers made to employers by the employability programme delivery providers were often extensive. Not only were employers offered job-ready candidates but sometimes bespoke training relevant to a specific job could be organised and funded by the delivery partners – either through TM project funding directed solely at TM beneficiaries, or through non-TM programmes with a wider beneficiary base with which the host organisation or delivery partner was concerned. Via such programmes TM beneficiaries could gain sectorally- or occupationally-specific training and/or work placements. In a favourable comparison with other ALMPs, TM also offered more information about candidates and some in-work support: One employer explained how he saw taking on staff via Jobcentre Plus as being ‘high risk cos I don't know what I'm getting’ whereas:

Interestingly, some evidence was found of employers moving from a wholly reactive role to becoming more proactive, but still within the gatekeeper role. This relates to McGurk's (Reference McGurk2014) identification, as discussed above, of employer involvement in ALMP through new facility resourcing, decentralised externalisation and mid-range internalisation. An example of new facility resourcing was a number of vacancies being set aside for TM participants at a supermarket that was opening. There were a few examples where, as a relationship with an employer developed, the employer would contact the provider with information about upcoming vacancies as this retail manager who had a good personal relationship with the manager at the small TM partnership explained.

This perhaps fits best with the decentralised externalisation category in which employers are interested in ALMP as a means of meeting an ongoing localised need to fill low-paid temporary jobs with variable hours. There were also examples of mid-range internalisation – in part motivated by a desire for the workforce to reflect the local footprint.

One example that illustrates these points, from the TM partnership led by a national VCS charitable organisation with previous experience of delivering specialist employability initiatives, is a company providing stewarding, traffic management and security for large events (football matches, music concerts, etc.). The company requires a very flexible supply of labour available in sufficient numbers to cover specific times but otherwise not required. The company works with TM and a Sector-Based Work Academy at a local college, which provides a six-week programme of sector-specific pre-employment training, a work-experience placement and a guaranteed job interview for unemployed people, with an emphasis on customer service skills. TM participants who pursue this option receive training, a qualification and can get employment with the company (but on zero-hours contracts). The company's role is as a gatekeeper to jobs, yet it undertakes this not in a reactive way but as a proactive co-producer with TM.

A final point regarding the reactive gatekeeper role is that, while the examples above show TM providers valuing employers’ involvement at strategic level, they (providers) also saw one element of success as being what in effect was the expansion of the gatekeeper role. Employers, as partners in TM, helped raise awareness of the programme and enabled providers to connect with employers and employer networks with which they had not previously been in contact. This enabled providers to access more work and job related opportunities – often referred to by providers as (previously) ‘hidden vacancies’. The gatekeeper role, from the perspective of providers, remained important.

Employers’ motives for participation in TM

As discussed above, employers can have different reasons for participation in ALMP but, in the empirical evidence here, two were dominant: TM as a source of labour; and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The company that provides stewarding and other services for large events is a clear example of an employer whose motive for engaging with TM is its demand for labour.

Other examples involved companies that had a vacancy and for different reasons wanted to recruit an unemployed person, each something of a bespoke situation. For example, the director of a new start up business explained their rationale for engagement with TM as follows.

However, it was CSR – or what smaller employers tended to refer to as ‘local community spirit’ – that was found to be a key motivation for employers both in relation to being proactive partners in ALMP and reactive gatekeepers. Unlike WP, payment by results is not a primary driver of TM activity and this was a pull factor for employers. The TM ethos of finding local opportunities for local young people was appealing in relation to CSR and additionally tied with the aim of some employers to have their workforce better represent the local demography (and customer base). This fits with a dimension of McGurk's (Reference McGurk2014) mid-range internalisation categorisation of employer participation.

A very clear example of CSR as the reason why an employer got involved in TM was provided by a store manager, part of a large national retailer with numerous branches across the country.

A second example was provided by a different employer, who explained:

The case study evidence suggests that a committed individual (with support from their employing organisation) lies at the heart of some of the most time-intensive employer involvement with TM. As one employer put it:

Another employer explained:

Two additional points emerged strongly from the case study evidence. The first was about the practicalities of employer participation and the amount of time required for employer involvement and the consequences thereof – in particular, relating to the size of companies that became involved. It was certainly felt by interviewees that only a few (mainly large) employers had time to be involved in a core partnership, or to have strategic involvement in TM in some other way, as outlined above. The potential time commitment of intensive employer involvement was noted as a barrier by a small employer who, in principle, would have liked greater involvement with TM: ‘it's that dilemma of [we] really like to help out but at the same time if it adds a huge work burden it becomes problematic’. There is, therefore, a major question as to whether employer involvement is actually limited to small numbers of (mainly) large companies.

The second additional issue is one notable mainly by its absence: employer behaviour in relation to the recruitment of unemployed people. Despite arguments, as noted above, that this is a significant issue, the bottom line in TM remains an individualised approach to participants, seeking to address specific issues related to that person in order to move them into employment. One example was found of an employer having adapted their standard recruitment processes to consider TM young people but this was an exception. While it might be imagined that programme providers would wish as a matter of course to discuss with employers changes to recruitment practices to make them more relevant to programme participants, routinely this did not form part of the TM approach. The majority of interviewees were clear that while there was a case for recruitment and selection processes to be demystified, recruitment norms and standards should be maintained. As one interviewee from a TM Partnership Lead organisation emphasised, the role of TM is in preparing young people for employment and to get them to a position where participants ‘are eminently employable on their own merits’, rather than to be seen as ‘special cases’ requiring different treatment.