Two heads are better than one right? Why not consider a job-share arrangement?

What is a job-share arrangement?

When two employees share a traditional full-time role and effectively deliver on the responsibilities of that one role.

They may each be assigned full days across the working week or one do the morning shift and the other cover the afternoon hours. At Working Parents Connect we often see job-share employees either work two or three full days or both work three full days and share a “cross-over” day. The latter can prove very valuable in terms of the job-sharers developing their working relationship, communicating and collaborating, sharing knowledge and skills, assessing their performance, supporting one another and forward planning.
We most commonly see job-share arrangements within business support and administration based roles along with key industries including Customer Service, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, Education, Health and Community. We’re hearing from an increasing number of employers who are considering job sharing across senior level and management roles within their businesses too which is a promising sign of change.

How can a job-share arrangement benefit an employer?

  • You will tap into a wider talent pool and connect with a highly experienced group of candidates who are often overlooked during the recruitment process on the basis they are unable to commit to full-time work.
  • “Two heads are better than one” – you are gaining double the talent and two skilled and committed employees who will compliment one another.
  • Research suggests that employees who work flexibly are often less stressed, highly productive, more loyal to their employer and therefore retained in the business.
  • During times of annual leave or sickness, the job-share partner may be able to provide cover with less disruption and impact on the business.

Working Parents Connect – Success Stories

During our work we’ve been fortunate to successfully fill many job-share partnerships and from our experience, can clearly report a win-win outcome for all parties involved. Here are a couple of projects we have worked on:

Our recruitment team were engaged by a large city based bank to source candidates for a full-time technical role working on the IT Help Desk. The hiring manager wanted to trial a job-share arrangement to manage this role and was genuinely excited about how this may look within the business and how it would be received across the company. He also had a commitment to gender diversity within his team and particularly wanted to target female ICT talent, believing the role would be attractive to two working mothers coming off parental leave. Despite the role being quite specialised particularly in the required skill-set, by going to market promoting two part-time opportunities as opposed to one full-time position enabled us to attract a significant number of high quality candidates to the vacancy. We were incredibly pleased with the outcome as successfully placed a husband and wife team into the role and they remain with the business today. In this case, the family no longer had to use private childcare as when one was at work the other was at home with their young son, so the overall benefits were significant.
On another project our team were asked to support a not-for-profit with a full-time Office Administrator role. They had experienced difficulty filling this role largely due to the low salary in comparison to other roles in the market. They were attracting very junior or inexperienced candidates as a result and the role had been vacant for 4 weeks, placing much strain on the business.  As 80% of our talent pool are seeking part-time work or reduced hours we suggested that they would tap into a highly skilled talent pool if they were to consider employing two people to share the role, to which they agreed. Our team were inundated with applications and successfully filled the role with two “career administrators” who ended up becoming very close friends. When one went on parental leave 18 months later our team recruited her replacement too.

Contact our Recruitment Team today

Role sharing provides working parents with the opportunity to continue to enjoy meaningful careers without comprising on their family responsibilities.

If you would like to discuss how a job-share arrangement may work for your business or would like our team to support you with the recruitment process contact us here.