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

Ep 42: How In House Recruiting Leaders Can Drive Change

We live in changing times and change is certainly being felt in the recruitment industry at the moment. Technology is changing, communication is changing, candidate expectations are changing and for many employers the talent landscape is growing ever more competitive. Strategically driving the systems and organisational change needed to keep up is big challenge for in house recruitment leaders.My guest this week is Barry Flack . Barry has worked in senior HR and recruiting leadership positions within a number of fast changing industries.In the interview we discuss: • How organisations need to get on the front foot with their recruiting strategies and stop being reactive • The reason why many employers are stuck with legacy “record keeping” recruitment technology. • The importance of embracing technology that improves user experience, candidate experience and enables proactive sourcing • Ways in which recruitment leaders can drive the strategic change needed within their organisations.Barry also gives us his view on the key trends to watch in the futureSubscribe to this podcast in iTunes Find out more about Matt Alder

Duration:: 18m
Broadcast on:: 12 Feb 2016
Audio Format:: other

We live in changing times and change is certainly being felt in the recruitment industry at the moment. Technology is changing, communication is changing, candidate expectations are changing and for many employers the talent landscape is growing ever more competitive. Strategically driving the systems and organisational change needed to keep up is big challenge for in house recruitment leaders.

My guest this week is Barry Flack . Barry has worked in senior HR and recruiting leadership positions within a number of fast changing industries.

In the interview we discuss:

   •   How organisations need to get on the front foot with their recruiting strategies and stop being reactive

   •   The reason why many employers are stuck with legacy “record keeping” recruitment technology.

   •   The importance of embracing technology that improves user experience, candidate experience and enables proactive sourcing

   •   Ways in which recruitment leaders can drive the strategic change needed within their organisations.

Barry also gives us his view on the key trends to watch in the future

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Find out more about Matt Alder

Support for this podcast comes from Reckfest. In the summer of 2016, as the eyes of the world turn to Rio de Janeiro, Reckfest brings its own style of street carnival to the recruitment industry, taking over Boroughmarket in London. Now on its third year, Reckfest is a one-day celebration of all things in-house recruitment and resourcing, with an emphasis on the power of sharing. Reckfest creates one of the largest conversations of in-house recruitment professional in the world. To get a discount on your ticket head to www.thisisreckfest.com and use the code podcast16. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 42 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Our industry is living through changing times. Technology is changing, Canada expectations are changing, and for many employers, the talent landscape is growing ever more competitive. Strategically driving the systems changes a lot of employers need to keep up is a big challenge for recruitment leaders. My guest this week is Barry Flack. Barry has worked in a number of HR and talent leadership positions within several fast-changing industries. Keep listening to hear his thoughts on driving transformational change. Hi Barry, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm doing absolutely great. Thank you Matt. Good stuff. It's Friday morning, so nearly the weekend, which is always good. Could you introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a bit about your background or what you do? Of course I can. Yeah, I'm an individual with a fairly varied background, nice stretching, some 20 odd years in the HR industry. If there was one thread that ties together my entire career, it's been an appetite for change, and a guy who I guess has been seen as helping organizations transform themselves. That's taken me on a rapid journey through the health service in the beginning through to a telecoms provider during the 90s through an enormous amount of change, and certainly into that rapid transformation that's taken place as we approach this particular century across such organizations and industries as financial services, telecoms, tech, startup businesses, retail utilities with a real clear thread in there that as we all know, and as certainly our investors are very aware of, we've gone through in that period some rapid and fundamental change in the workplace. Absolutely, specifically, how do you think in-house recruitment has changed in the last three or four years from your experience? Yeah, I guess what has pleased me in many respects in terms of what I've seen is a very clear realization that the reactive manner by which we as organizations have tackled recruitment, tackled talent is no longer sustainable. So I've gone through a whole series of organizations that I think have set content realizing that getting themselves through either a high volume of recruitment or specialist recruitment in some lesser degree has been very much about answering any distress gaps in the organization, and a recruitment who I think has suffered historically by being somewhat siloed and silent, frankly, has suffered by being almost a service delivery arm required to make sure that the business operates just within its own potential reach. What I've seen over the last few years is a clear acceptance that the world's changed, that what we now need to do from a recruitment point of view is get on the front foot that we've got to be proactive. Technology has clearly helped move to what was previously a debate that was massively centered around efficiencies and cost to one where, you know, we're incredibly enthusiastic about the emerging technologies that have come through. But now the challenge happens to be that that's an opportunity, and some organizations are grasping it. Some industries are, some are waking up late to the game, but there is a common perception that we've now got to get under the front foot and be in front of an agenda rather than being content with the old resourcing function that literally had a series of numbers to deliver, typically most distressed inside a business that's trying to deal with change. And you mentioned technology there and technology change and innovation and the things that are going on. There are a number of organizations where technology or the older technology that they're using is actually potentially holding them back. Would you agree with that, and if so, why do you think that's happening? Well, we went through six, seven years ago, you know, a much smaller market where we had clearly, you know, I would argue, you know, two big main players and what was an applicant tracking system market. And if you take a wider HR function, there was almost a parallel debate going on in what were big HRIS systems. And inside those, of course, had hidden, all was a module on recruitment that was being developed. Both of those were in terms of today, clunky, you know, they were record keeping machines, they were there to help us deal with the volume and understand that volume. And what we've tended to do is we haven't caught sight of the fact that the market now from a systems perspective is all clearly about user experience. We flipped at some point between having a user experience at work that couldn't compare with the, you know, the lack of technology at home that is flipped. And when I left, I think, in some respects, with contracts in established organizations with legacy systems that are giving us very limited ability to impact upon the user experience, the candidate experience, and frankly go after that proactive talent strategy around sourcing, you know, that we equally need to get in front of to give ourselves some competitive advantage. From a broader sort of HR technology perspective, which you touched on there, do you think that organizations are still in that mindset that they need to have all of their HR tech from one supplier? And, you know, if that means poor recruitment technology, so, so beer, or are you seeing, you know, more of a change in attitude in HR in general towards sort of more flexibility and agility? Yeah, I mean, it's a good, really good question. But my theory on this is, you know, we're held back by a system. And this is not, I would suggest a technology system. This is much more about how the rooms of engagement of work hamper us to be a little bit more enlightened. I think what that means is an awful lot of the decision making par, clearly, as you would expect around HR directors, have them from a legacy of being business partners. We don't have enough, I think, people who've risen to the top, who've got the fabled seat at the table, allowing, you know, real good judgments on what the technology landscape looks like. And of course, you know, also within that system, we've got our procurement functions in house, who've got a very clear sense of what good looks like. That's driven very much about simplicity, about cost, about scale. They naturally dislike standalone systems sitting in a part of HR that they don't understand. So, you know, you then got into a CEO who frankly is utterly overwhelmed by some of what we're dealing with today. And what you've therefore got is, you know, a need to have a, you know, a characteristic inside the recruitment function that pushes a corner that literally says, you know, the functionality that we're getting in some of those old legacy systems will frankly not give us a desired strategic advantage that we've gone after to promote our own brands, to collect and engage with our own talent communities and to convert, you know, talent into our organization on an ongoing 24/7, always connected basis. But that's hard and I have a lot of sympathy for recruitment leaders out there who have that to battle against. But I would also say that a huge part of the skill set to be successful has got to be about us pushing as leaders doing the right thing, you know, inside a very crowded marketplace. And what would your advice be to a recruitment leader to sort of help them drive that change? Because I know that, you know, there are a number of recruitment leaders, I know, who are excellent at that. But actually, there's probably a much bigger number of people who, you know, either don't want to or don't know how to drive that kind of change. What would your advice be? Yeah, I think the advice has got to be that underpinning everything we talk about the advantage technology gives is this is still very much about a people relationship business. So any of our recruitment leaders has got to recognize that, you know, they've got to join up the dots with a wider strategy of the business. They've got to be able to really understand how to build a business case that understands, frankly, the fears, if it calls that out of a HR business partner or a HR director, you know, within the business. We're still caught up, I think, in a bit of a malaise where, you know, the business, the wider HR community, frankly, don't care how things get done. Because they equally are overwhelmed by other things that they need to do. But what we've got to do is, and I don't think we're very good at this, is building that business case. And that business case is about a longer term relationship build. We've got to put aside some of the mantras that come up every so often about leaving HR behind and looking longfully and blissfully at the marketing departments. You know, and without, you know, the history of building a silo round, a very important functional area, that social capital of helping the rest of the people organization get back to basics will pay dividends. But, you know, that has been something I haven't seen as a core competence in too many of our recruitment functions. You mentioned the whole concept of kind of experience a couple of times of that, that's a usual experience or in employee experience or business experience in general. Well, what's your sort of specific view around that? Because I know it's, you know, much discussed as a big business and HR and recruitment trend. Yeah, look, there's some, you know, if I think of one particular anecdote in an organization I walked into, they had been putting into their annual people report, you know, front up front and center page one that one of the things they were so proud about was the volume of applicants that they were attracting to their organization. That was some false sign of their validity, importance, brands, you know, was the number of people who seemingly wanted to go into their applicant tracking system and get lost in there. The debate at the board table, you know, amongst incredibly clever business people that that was just the wrong lens to go after, that the indirect consequences of what that meant for them, especially given that they were, you know, a high street retail organization, was crippling. You know, they were in danger of diluting everything that their consumer brand was trying to build as they were fishing in exactly the same pool. But it's not on typical, there's lots of old mantras that have not been challenged. And look, frankly, us in that recruitment profession have got to be the people who got to take the lead on that. We can't sit on LinkedIn and bury it constantly and we can't sit around in our own silos, shrugging our shoulders. We've got to take that battle on because, you know, we get it. We've got to understand that some of that legacy technology that frankly was put together by technologists and not recruiters that was incredibly good at allowing us to move into it and tracking it from a record perspective, 90s to build a case that resonates with a board and with a business that has other, you know, other concerns. It's not going to happen on its own. It's got to be awesome. We've got to take some leadership. No, I think that's a, that's a, it's some really sensible, proactive thoughts there. Final question, what trends, whether they're technology trends or other trends, are you seeing at the moment that you're most interested in for the future? What do you think it's going to, you know, take hold and where is everything going? So I think, you know, I would talk about a couple of things. You know, I think if you look at the constituent parts of what makes up the landscape for the internal recruiter, my conversations and my observations suggest that everybody is now into building levels of capability to up their game. So I've had a long history in the, in the market of RPOs. You know, there's a, there's a very lazy, almost sort of reactive to be it around their value in the market, which I think needs challenged. I think some of them are clearly building strength in their organization beyond a transactional numbers game, which is one of the criticisms they've had in the past. You know, you look then across in terms of what we are looking at in relation to the internal recruitment function. And I think, you know, what we are in danger of is how much can we make up in ground after so many years of under investment? So, you know, I do believe that we should clearly be learning the sort of art and science that, you know, has been used to an extent around marketing. We should clearly be knowledgeable about what's in that technology market. And I'll mention some of those things in a minute. But what we're not good at is we don't really have an investment in ourselves mentality that allows us to walk with these things. You know, the talent stroke recruitment marketplace, the ability to be successful now, I'd say is three or four times more complex than it was a decade ago. And with that hand-in-hand means that if we are not willing to put a level of investment in the people, you know, that is in there, at the right level, and you know, what I mean by that would be we've created a little bit of an industry and noise around sourcing and sourcing techniques, which is absolutely right. But I think somewhere amongst it, we've lost that old legacy scale of sales. You know, this is stellar relationship business. This is still about connecting with individuals in a manner that we're moving slowly from, you know, the content that we're able to push out to the increasing use of video from an employment branding perspective that truly, you know, engages with us much more than reading it in black and white. But frankly, we're not going to need to move the debate and dialogue along to find a way of putting an element of human and back into a process that we were forced to have years ago when we sat around with our older decks, you know, on our telephone lines. And how his survival was very much about how we were sweet talking the secretary of the chief executive or otherwise. I think the generation that is coming through at the moment has got some great skills around mining and the technology. But frankly, we need to be striking a level of balance around how we are converting, you know, some of the biggest decisions we're making at the moment, which is, you know, where we're going to pitch up from a career job perspective on one of the skills that will help us convert really good people in the marketplace. Barry, thank you very much for talking to me. That was all. My thanks to Barry Flack. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher to listen to past episodes, get email updates and find out more about me, go to www.rfpudcast.com. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]