The Talent Labs Collaborate Manchester: Key Takeaways

This week Evidenced joined Talent teams, Recruiters, and People leaders at The Talent Labs Collaborate event in Manchester, for a day packed with insights and open conversations.

Our Key Takeaways

The Reality Check: An Early Careers Crisis

During the talks we learnt about the sobering fact that graduate job openings have fallen to the lowest level in seven years. And whilst there are multiple political and economic reasons for this, one key problem is that 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks, decisions which disproportionately affect graduate roles.

We also learnt that for candidates, job security has become the number one priority when applying for roles - clearly a reflection of the uncertainty many feel about their career prospects.

Against this backdrop, organisations are facing a dual challenge: fewer opportunities for young talent, and greater competition (and cost) to attract and retain them.

The Communication Gap

Another recurring theme was the communication gap between Talent Acquisition teams and Hiring Managers - a familiar friction point that continues to undermine hiring outcomes.

A Leadership IQ study shared during the event was a stark reminder of what’s at stake. Of among 20,000 new hires analysed, 46% failed within 18 months, yet only 11% of those failures were due to a lack of technical skills.

The clear takeaway is that most hiring failures aren’t about capability - they’re about alignment, communication, and expectation management.

Insights from the Evidenced Roundtables: Data & Metrics That Matter

As part of the event, Evidenced hosted roundtables exploring how TA teams can better use data and metrics to drive smarter decisions.

Participants discussed what to start, stop, and continue measuring, and a few clear priorities emerged:

Talent teams wanted to start:

• Measuring Hiring Manager efficacy and efficiency via a Licence to Hire initiative

• Focusing on quality of hire by measuring first-year retention and assessment stage drop off rates

• Balancing time-to-hire metrics by benchmarking them against role complexity

Talent teams wanted to stop:

• Measuring metrics that don’t drive action such as candidate demographic data

• Putting an overemphasis on time-to-hire

• Manually collecting data

Talent teams wanted to continue:

• Tracking metrics that inform strategy, such as sourcing quality, application-to-offer time and hires on budget

• Monitoring data from exit interviews

One of the strongest takeaways from the day was that whilst the more data collected the better, it's crucial to ensure that it's still being used strategically to improve hiring outcomes.

A big thank you again to The Talent Labs for bringing the Talent community together, and to all the attendees for openly sharing your struggles and successes.

Thank you also to Eploy, Talogy, Day One and Creed Comms for your expert insights throughout the day.

It’s clear that whilst the hiring landscape is changing fast, collaboration will be the key to building stronger futures for both candidates and employers.