Episode 77 of the Shortlist (recorded Wednesday 24 November 2021). Johnny Campbell interviews Colin Donnery about the unemployed as an untapped, diverse talent pool amid the pandemic and the Great Resignation. Colin describes FRS (a cooperative with recruitment, training and agri-tech arms) and Turas Nua (a government-contracted employability provider) and gives scale: FRS's agri product HerdWatch serves over 15,000 farmers; Turas Nua employs just under 300 staff across 40 offices and has had ~150,000 people through its program since early 2016. The conversation frames unemployed candidates as an opportunity for employers and a focus for diversity and inclusion efforts.
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Sam.
You're very welcome. It's episode 77 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host for this podcast and live show which broadcasts Every Wednesday on LinkedIn and YouTube. For those of us joining us, joining us live, you're very welcome. We really appreciate your comments and questions as we go through the show. And this week we're going to be talking about an untapped pool of diverse talent, the unemployed. But before we get into that, it's Wednesday, the 24th of November. We're heading towards the end of 2021. The pandemic is beginning to rage. And as I'm broadcasting here from Dublin, Ireland, apparently Europe is at the epicenter of this next wave. In fact, in the Campbell household, we've had my eldest son of 13 in quarantine for the last 10 days as he got Covid and thankfully the rest of his didn't. And he's been isolated in his bedroom and comes out tonight and passes his 10 days. And that's a story, unfortunately, that many of us are living through again, as the pandemic surges and rages in Europe and probably the rest of the world, if it hasn't hit those same numbers. So we're still talking about this unique world that's been driven by the pandemic. And we want to talk today about kind of the culmination of what's been called the Great Resignation, which we've talked about in the show in many weeks, combining that with elements of diversity and inclusion and how certain populations are marginalized.
Right.
And it's always, of course, important to be on the lookout for underutilized sources of talent. That's what the recruiting and talent acquisition industry tries to do. And given how competitive the market is, you know, being able to attract star candidates is going to be a huge boon for any organization. Of course, that's the dream. But there's one pool that that often gets overlooked and is often very much not talked about or forgotten, and that's the unemployed.
Right.
And with an unemployment rate of around 7% in the EU right now, this offers, we think, a huge opportunity for companies to find really amazing employees. And when you look at the fact that minority groups typically are overrepresented amongst the unemployed, it's perhaps also a great opportunity to go find a diverse and creative group of people to attract. So to kind of tackle this topic. And join us today with someone who not only holds this cause very closely to his heart, Colin Donnery. Colin is the incoming group chief executive of the frs Network which is a cooperative social enterprise with subsidiaries in the recruitment, training and agricultural sectors. So he runs a recruitment agency here in Ireland but he's also the founder and director of Turas Nua which for those of you not in Ireland, which I know as most of you is the leading provider of employability services to help the unemployed get back into the workforce. So working on behalf of the government of Ireland to help the unemployed and long term unemployed get back to work. So it's a really unique perspective Colin has in one hand, you know, running a recruitment agency that has been paid by employers to find talent and the other half running are part of an organization that is trying to get the long term unemployed back to work. I think it's one of those most unique perspectives perhaps in the world in this talent space. And I want to have a conversation with Colin today about how important it is to build confidence employed, how that vital service is empowering a sector of society back into positions of employment. Why this service is going to become more important perhaps in this evolving world of work. Colin, you're very welcome, thanks for joining us today and you might start by telling us where you're joining us from because.
Hey Johnny, how are you? Great to see you. I'm in Florence and if you look up at the ceiling there in the sort of place I'm staying you can sort of tell it's sort of an amazing place to be. I'm here just on a bit of a holiday so you know, just literally got off a train, jumped on a and ran here to get to talk to you which is, which is great, you know, delighted to be here.
And Colin, can you maybe introduce FRS on one side just tells a little about the size of FRS and the focus of recruiting you do there, the teams and then a little bit about Turras Nua and that perspective and maybe you might mention also your involvement in the wider kind of recruiting bodies across Europe and the global network because I think I want to just stress it's not just an Irish perspective you have on this.
Yeah, sure. So, well FRS is, we're a cooperative first of all. So set up in 1980 we started off I suppose supporting farmers in Ireland, you know, so it's really unique sort of story in the 80s and then naturally we moved into the recruitment sector so we, we had people specialists on farms and then organizations came to us and goes, you know, can you get us people for you know, sort of driving and you know, warehousing and retail and you know, we, we've since built up one of the largest recruitment companies in Ireland, FRS Recruitment. We've diversified into many different areas. So we, we have a, a large training company as well. We've actually one of the fastest growing agri tech businesses in, in the world now called Herd Watch. We've, we've over 15,000 farmers between Ireland and the UK use it. And that's, that's really for another day. When you drive down the motorway here, when you see fences at the side of the road, we erect those sort of fences and we, we. So we do lots of weird and sort of wonderful stuff. So back, back in 2013, 14, after the last major recession, I was president of the National Recruitment Federation and we've been sort of talking to the government about how we could help, I suppose, the unemployed. Just to give you the exact. We had what, over 17% unemployment in Ireland at the time. We had a catastrophic construction boom and deterioration after that boom, which just devastated the country here much more so probably than most other countries countries after the, after the last major recession. So in order to I suppose support people back into employment, we set up an organization called Taurus Noah, which is a Gaelic term and it means new journey. We employ just under 300 people in that business across 40 offices. And I suppose we started really in early 2016. So we've had approximately 150,000 unemployed people through the door since then. So it's quite a large number for Ireland, maybe not for other places, but. And we basically keep those people on our program for a whole year and support them, help them, help them back into employment across all sectors, across, you know, every type of customer background, every, you know, every type of role, you know. So literally we see everyone coming through the door and I can, I can talk to you a bit about how we, how we sort of, how we sort of do that, you know, as well, if you like.
Well, let me come to that. I want to start off, Colin, with a recent news article that came out in the Washington Post and this was published earlier this month and the headline from the Post was why Millions of Job Seekers Aren't getting hired in this Hot Job Market.
