Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 52 How To Set Up An In House Recruiting Function

The popularity of moving recruitment in house continues to grow and is now something that is happening across all types of businesses whether they are large corporates, SMEs or high growth start ups. Setting up a in house recruitment function can be a learning experience both for the company and for the recruiters involved as the reality is often much more complex than the theory. My guest this week is Nick Yockney Head of People for Property Partner, a property crowdfunding platform. Nick has set up two new in house recruiting functions since making the transition from agency recruiter to in house recruiter and is very open and honest about his experiences. In the interview we discuss: • The Difficulties for recruiters when moving from agency to in house • The motivations businesses might have for bringing recruitment in house • The importance of understand the rhythm of the business and the value an in house function can add if it does this • The dangers of over-promising • Thinking strategically while realistically assessing the tools you have • Function over fashion in recruitment technologies. Nick also tells us what has surprised him most about moving in house, the tools he finds most useful and his views on the future. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 05 May 2016
Audio Format:: other

The popularity of moving recruitment in house continues to grow and is now something that is happening across all types of businesses whether they are large corporates, SMEs or high growth start ups. Setting up a in house recruitment function can be a learning experience both for the company and for the recruiters involved as the reality is often much more complex than the theory.

My guest this week is Nick Yockney Head of People for Property Partner, a property crowdfunding platform. Nick has set up two new in house recruiting functions since making the transition from agency recruiter to in house recruiter and is very open and honest about his experiences.

In the interview we discuss:

   •   The Difficulties for recruiters when moving from agency to in house

   •   The motivations businesses might have for bringing recruitment in house

   •   The importance of understand the rhythm of the business and the value an in house function can add if it does this

   •   The dangers of over-promising

   •   Thinking strategically while realistically assessing the tools you have

   •   Function over fashion in recruitment technologies.

Nick also tells us what has surprised him most about moving in house, the tools he finds most useful and his views on the future.

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Support for this podcast comes from Guardian Jobs. Guardian Jobs provides a range of recruitment and branding solutions, with access to a monthly audience of 149 million users. They offer a range of innovative talent attraction and content options, ranging from the latest programmatic and behavioural targeting, to developing content partnerships on themes such as the future of work and women in tech, for organisations like Deloitte and Sky. To find out how they can help you, visit recruiters.theguardian.com. That's recruiters.theguardian.com. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind, at all the ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 52 of the Recreating Feature podcast. The popularity of moving recruitment in-house continues to grow across businesses of all sizes. Setting up an in-house recruiting function can be a learning experience for everyone involved, as things are often much more complex in reality than they seem to be in theory. My guest this week is Nick Yockney, Head of People for Crowdfunding Platform Property Partner. Since his switch from agency to in-house, Nick has been responsible for setting up two in-house recruitment functions. In the interview, he is very open and honest about his experiences and what he's learned. Hi Nick, and welcome to the podcast. Hey Matt, how are you doing? Very good indeed, very good indeed. Friday afternoon, I think we're both looking forward to the weekend. Absolutely, I'm currently sat in Morgan, London, tucked away in a little cupboard talking to you. So it's going to be a good day. Good stuff. So could you start by just telling everyone a little bit about you, your background and what you're doing now? Sure, so I think I'll do that in reverse order. I'm currently Head of People for Property Partner. Property partner for anyone that doesn't know is a crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to invest in property. My role here is a combination of recruitment and HR, more focused on recruitment than HR. Previously to that was head of talent for Chelsea Apps Factory, which is a software consultancy focusing on mobile technology that's based in West London. I was head of talent there for a couple of years. And before that, I was sat on the recruitment agency side for probably somewhere between nine and 10 years in various different companies across London and Bristol. So how did you find the transition from agency recruiter to in-house recruiter? It was an interesting one for me because I'd worked in agencies for a number of years. And to be honest with you, I never kind of got to myself into a position where I wanted to open up my own agency. And I was a little bit at a loss as to kind of what I was going to do with my career. I'm sure there's probably quite a number of recruitment agents that kind of go through this. So just to give your listeners some context, I'm 35 now. So I was approaching kind of just going past 30 when I had this thought that perhaps I ought to do something different. And the main thing that I found about going in-house was that it was really difficult to make the transition from moving, having worked in agencies for so long, into an in-house role. It was virtually impossible. I probably applied to about 30 or 40 jobs before I actually got the job at Chelsea Apps Factory. I had lots of interviews and I had a lot of very standard feedback, which was we think you've got some skills, but you've never worked in-house before, so we're going to go with someone else. So I think that that's the first thing I would sort of counsel anyone who is thinking about moving from agency to in-house, is that it's going to be quite a hard slog to make that transition, especially what I would describe myself as a relatively experienced level. So I wasn't looking to go in as a junior. So that was quite interesting to start off with. The second part of going in-house, the kind of initial part was, and this is something I'm quite keen to touch on, is that a lot of startups and businesses that will probably give individuals a chance don't necessarily know what it is that they're looking for, and that's through no fault of their own. It's just the fact that they normally have looked at their agency spend, thought goodness, that's very high. Maybe we could pay someone to do this for us, but if you've never been in-house before, it's very, very easy to turn up somewhere and to sort of over-promise, to say that you can fix everything and that you'll just work incredibly hard to make everything better when you actually don't have all the facts in your hands, and even now, kind of having been through it, this is my second time around setting up a department. I still think that it takes quite a lot of experience as an in-house recruiter to be able to ask the right questions to founders and to people involving you as to what it is that they exactly want and they need from you. Okay, that makes perfect sense. I want to talk about what it's like to set up a in-house recruitment team from scratch or in-house recruitment service from scratch. It sounds like you're working for a couple of companies who are having in-house recruitment for the first time. You mentioned agency spend. Do you think there's a particular trigger or a size of company that makes people suddenly decide they want to bring their recruitment in-house? Yes, I do. I think that when I think most businesses are happy to grow from, you know, one to say 10 or 15 people and spend a little bit of money on agencies because they tend to, you know, and look, I am talking generalizations here, so I'm not the authority on how businesses grow. But I definitely sort of think that, look, when you're spending, you might as a business sort of think, okay, it's all right for us to spend 30, 40,000 pounds on agencies while we're growing. But then when you're sort of looking at that and you think, well, it's cost us 40,000 pounds to hire the last, let's say five or six people, you know, let's just take that as a kind of, you know, as a rough number. And then you think, okay, well, we want to scale them. We want to scale by, you know, 30 people. You know, those numbers all of a sudden in their heads start to add up very quickly. And I don't think it's necessarily just about agency spend as well. I think, you know, I'm going to outright say here that, you know, there are some very good recruitment agencies out there who might not necessarily cost the absolute earth. But I think there's also as well, it's about managing that process, you know, about helping businesses scale really quickly and about having a, about bringing expertise in the house, which is around advising companies about how quickly it's possible to get people in through the door. You know, when you're looking at the relationship that recruitment agency has with a business, I mean, the ideal scenario is that they're acting in a, in a partnership, which, you know, I know that does happen on occasion. But I think, you know, the reality is, is that, you know, a business will get into what I would call it, some sort of hiring crisis, and then they'll go through an agency and they'll be pressurizing that agency to deliver CVs incredibly quickly. And what you, what you then end up is in a situation where maybe you're not getting the best people, or maybe the agency is looking at their fee, you know, in terms of, we want to earn money, there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, maybe someone who's working in house might be able to say to look, you'd be better off looking at a different opportunity here, like trying to think of a different solution, because actually the cost and the time you're going to put into spending, you know, trying to find something through an agent, you might as well have got the job done in a different way. Does that make sense? So I feel like I've rambled on a little bit. No, that makes perfect sense. You know, obviously, it's something that happens on a case by case basis for a lot of, a lot of companies, but I think particularly in the startup world, they're obviously, you know, the obviously, there's sort of triggers that you, that you talked about that causes founders to, to think about setting up their own, own recruitment function, basically. I was going to say, man, as well, I think that one thing that I would say is I think that it's become a lot more normal now for startups to hire in-house teams. You know, certainly when I was, let's say when I was growing up, when I was, when I was, when I was working as a recruitment agent, there was, there was less of a focus on someone being an in-house recruiter and more of a focus on, you know, kind of HR taking over that function. And I think now that certainly within the startup world, with such a kind of view on cost and speed and, you know, quality of delivery, that founders are probably more and more inclined to look at who is going to be able to help them build and scale their companies quickly from a talent perspective. Okay. So how'd you do it? You, you go in on day one, hopefully you, you haven't over-promised. How have you got about it in the, in the sort of two companies that you've done this for? So I'm going to be, I'd like to be as honest as honest as I can with you. In the, in the first company that I worked at in Chelsea Apps Factory, it was very much, you know, a little bit by trial and error. You know, it was an awful lot of hard work that I was having to do an awful lot of late nights in order to make that work. You know, and it was just graft, really, because I was my first job as an in-house recruiter. I got all the skills that I brought with me from an agency. So I knew about sourcing and kind of how to go about looking, looking for people and on the about sort of interviewing. But apart from that, I was, you know, I was kind of learning on the job. And I think that that's, you know, the one thing that's interesting from, from me from a perspective of economy, having moved in-house is you're constantly now learning again. It's like learning a, learning a new job in certain, in certain respects. The first thing that I would advise anyone to do, you know, and this would be during the hiring process, is to understand exactly what it is that your company's looking for. You know, is it, is it that they're looking to increase headcount across all divisions, is there a specific division? When I worked for Chelsea Apis factory, we were hiring across a vast range of different skillsets. You know, that's everything from creatives to iOS developers, project managers, business analysts, and some roles that I've never even heard of before. So you've got to really understand where your strengths are, and to start to try and get a feel of the rhythm of the business. There were certain roles that I knew, even though that they were deemed as urgent, that, you know, that they wouldn't stop the business from operating, whereas there were other roles which we had to prioritize hiring on those because we knew that a project wouldn't be able to start because we didn't have that skill set available. So you've got to be really kind of, you've got to be quite strategic to start off with about what it is that you're going to do, and then you've got to look at what tools are available to you and how you're going to kind of bring all of that together. I think that, I think that kind of when you consider you're going to arrive in a startup and there's no date, there's no database of people, there's no, you know, there's literally nothing, you know, maybe a few spreadsheets and maybe a few CVs that people have received over the last, you know, kind of six months before you got there. So the reality is that you're not going to arrive on day one and fill all the roles by week four, you know, you have to kind of look at that. So if I had my time over again, I think I'd probably have looked back on that and said, right, I'm going to take the first three months to fill some of the roles, but I'm also as well going to build up systems and lists and databases of contacts around the specific areas that we were going to hire. And what's the thing that surprised you the most about being in-house? The pressure, definitely the pressure of being in-house. It's something that you you aren't aware of when you sit on the agency side of the fact that if you don't fill a role, a project can't start. If a project can't start, the company can't make money. You know, it really is kind of quite a different type of pressure from, I mean, the key difference that I always kind of feel that I felt from an agency, when I was sat in the agency side, there was a personal pressure, you know, based around your targets around, you know, the money that you bring into the business. But when you're sat in a building with, you know, I sat next to the CTO, which I was the apps factory, for a number of months, while I was working on his roles, you know, and he could see that I was working on them. And he could see that we were, you know, that we were doing our very best to find the right people. But in some cases, it was just proving very, very difficult. And you're all of a sudden very aware that, you know, because you can't find one person, one person, one individual set of skills, that there's a whole team, you know, downstairs of maybe seven or eight people who aren't able to start their project. You know, and I think that's, I think that's the thing that I've always found most surprising about it. And also as well, I think the other thing that I always find surprising is the lack of understanding about what it is, you know, that recruiters do, you know, and talent people can do for a business. I think that in, I think the neural companies that you speak to, you know, I've got a good network of friends who are all working, you know, in the same type of job as me, where there's still a lack of understanding from hiring managers about just how recruitment works, you know, in kind of reality is that, you know, even if you need some to start in three weeks time, you know, that person might not be available. So it's always been, it's always been quite interesting to me from that perspective. But I don't suppose that's news to anyone that's been doing the job for a little while, I guess. I think it's very good to have that perspective on it because I don't think people think people really talk about it very, very often. You know, it's not something, not something that I hear discussed. So it's, you know, very interesting to, you know, get your thoughts on it. You mentioned sort of setting up tools and technologies and things like that. Now, especially in the tech space, there's almost a kind of a bewildering array of recruitment technologies that are out there. What's your view on that? What do you think people, what do you think people should be using? What techniques have you found most useful? And what's just kind of noise that should go away in the sector? Yeah. So I'm going to be slightly ambiguous with my answer here. And I'm going to say that you should use what works for you. But I do think that this is something that people rush into. You know, there's, there's almost a trend at the moment within recruitment where, you know, it's cool, or no, I say cool, you know, it's, it's fashionable to be seen to be using some niche sourcing technique that, you know, is, you know, looking at a very, you know, particular section of, you know, sort of niche section of the internet. So looking for this, these tiny pockets of like sort of untapped talent. And I think the reality is, is that we don't need to reinvent the wheel as recruiters. You know, I still think that LinkedIn works, you know, I know that lots of people are on there. You know, maybe the in-mail section of that is less, you know, is less useful than they would like you to think. But, you know, certainly is a kind of, you know, as a kind of place to find names of people, I don't think it's a bad place to start. You know, there's, you know, there's millions, there's millions of people on there. I also as well just think that, you know, just people just need to learn one tool, one or two tools, and get really good with them. It's a bit like going to a restaurant, you know, you know, when you, if you've ever been into one of these, you know, these diners where there's, you know, 500 things on the menu and you kind of think, are you good at making all of these? You know, I'd much rather someone would be able to kind of come to me and say, look, this is, I use, you know, I'm really good at writing adverts, and I'm really good at x-ray searching with LinkedIn. You know, I just sort of think, what's, you know, what's the problem there? There's always going to be, regardless of how many tools you use, there's always going to be roles that you struggle with. You know, the simple fact is, is that we, we as recruiters are not in, in charge of the supply end of our business. You know, the supply end is, the people are out there, you know, and, you know, it takes an awful lot of time in order to do that. But I guess that in terms of tools that I've, tools that I've used and I've, I've got something else of, I really like Recruitant, which is a free open source tool, which is very easy for doing Boolean searches on, on, on to LinkedIn and Twitter. I've used a paid for product called Open Web, which is by Dice, which I thought was actually pretty good. It was in the early days, Gary, who's there, one of their sales managers, I've met and, you know, he, he's showing the product and I thought, give it a go. And it was very good for kind of searching things like Twitter and stuff like that. But it all depends on what your budget is as well. You know, I know that there are, you can spend as much or as little as you like. But I, the things that I really don't really, particularly appreciate is LinkedIn's recruiter account. I think that's incredibly expensive for what it is. And I always says, well, don't particularly like the, the, the cost model around, you know, getting involved with that. I've met with those guys a few times and it just sort of seems that, you know, if you want anything, it's, you know, it's multiples of thousands of pounds, which I'm, which I don't really agree with, to be honest with you. So, so yeah, so I guess that's, that's my kind of, you know, very brief comments on tools. No, thank you. Some, some useful insight there. What about the future? Where do you think in house where recruitment's going? You know, what, what's going to happen? How do you see the next 18 to 24 months planning out? Oh, I think, I think I'd look, I think I'd look further ahead than that, actually. I think that, I think that there's definitely a move where talent and HR are now starting to merge. I think that, I think that recruiters are now being consulted more by the business, which I think is a really, really positive thing. I'll give you an example. You know, we, when you're looking at potentially assessing a new technology for a project, I think it's a really good thing when it recreates a consultant about how available are those people in the marketplace? You know, what sort of cost does they have? Because I think previously, you know, technology businesses would quite rightly be, be led by the CTO and still should continue to be so. But it's no good turning up to a recruiter in requesting a very, you know, 100 of these types of developers if there's a very niche technology associated with it. So I think that I think the future for recruitment is that I don't think it's going to be, I don't think it's going to be reinvented. I think that you're always going to need the human element of it. I'm always a bit frustrated whenever something comes out with a new algorithm or sort of tells me that, that they're not, you know, you're not going to need people. I think recruitment is always going to need people. And I think now it's also, as well, the in-house route is now, you know, has a real kind of career structure to it, which I think is a great thing for people to be able to enter the industry and to grow. I think that the roles now are becoming more diverse. You know, I mean, my role now is does include HR, which is something that I've, you know, dambled with when I was at Chelsea Abstractory and now taking on much more of within Property Partner. But I don't think that there's anything that's, I don't think there's going to be a fundamental shift. I don't think there ever really has been in the last three or four years. You know, recruitment is to do with supporting your business and the supply of people. It's quite simple. You know, it's quite simple as a basic construct of the job. I just think that we don't want to get lost in the noise of technology trying to, trying to disrupt it. It's, it's great to have tools, but they'll never replace the people. Nick, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks, Matt. My thanks to Nick Jockney. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or in your podcasting app of choice. You can find all the past episodes of the show at www.RFpodcast.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. [MUSIC] This is my show. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]