Q&A with Richa Ranawat of Avanade

In the run-up to the Christmas period, we are publishing the full transcripts from our interviews with finalists from the In-house Recruitment Manager (Individual) category at the In-house Recruitment Awards 2020.

Today, we profile Richa Ranawat, UK & Ireland Talent Acquisition Lead at Avanade.

Q1: 2020 has been an interesting year, tell us about your talent acquisition challenges and how you have been resolving these?

Covid-19 has altered the talent acquisition landscape as we know it, with hiring activity hit hard, but the quality of a new hire remains a top priority for the majority of businesses. Our experience was very similar. However as an organisation at Avanade we chose to use this time to upskill ourselves. Through training programmes namely HR and Talent Acquisition Advance all of us across Talent Acquisition have been part of over 40 hours of training with Social Talent. This has helped us to all refresh and recharge ourselves as recruiters and come back stronger to deliver to aggressive demand targets. Since Diversity and Inclusion is the very core of Avanade, through these training programmes my team and I have taken on board Unconscious Bias Training for ourselves as well as for our hiring managers and interviewers too.

The challenges we mainly faced were of engaging with candidates. The face-to-face meetings had to be paved away due to Covid. Whilst deploying the appropriate technology to engage candidates through virtual communication and interviews has been helpful. The team has implemented a number of virtual events, meet ups to keep up with engagement activities which are both useful and not very monotonous and providing a good preview into our beliefs at Avanade.

Q2: What would you say are your biggest accomplishments this year?

We worked to turn all of our business stakeholders into brand ambassadors, we completely rethought the way we engage with our candidates – and put their experience into the core of our recruitment processes, upskilled as a team, we worked to create a more organic, recruiting team where ideas and leadership come from all levels, we were able to tie Diversity and Inclusion all together and took great pride in achieving 42% Diversity in Fiscal Year 20 (Aug 19- Sept 20) hires, and currently tracking at 46%.

Q3: What advice would you offer others for 2021 and the slow return to normal that we are hearing about?

Become career advisors for your candidates and not just recruiters – be honest with the work challenges and opportunities so you don’t set them up to fail as 2020 has been a very hard year emotionally on many, empathy has to be at the highest – so do work on ridding ones biases as it is time to become a lot more human than we ever were. And mostly to take care of each other and our teams. As work pressures will mount so take a moment to ask each other how we are doing as it may be a little longer till we see each other physically in a near normal scenario.