In this episode Matt Alder talks to Melanie Hayes Head of Organisational Development at Compass
Over the last few years an increasing number of employers have been developing apprenticeship programmes to address long term skill shortages in their industries. One company who are doing this very successfully are Compass who have offered over 3000 Apprenticeships in the last five years and have achieved a Grade 2 Ofsted rating for their programme.
My guest for this episode is Melanie Hayes Head of Organisational development at Compass and it was very interesting to hear more about the programme and the value it brings to her organisation.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why Compass have an apprentice strategy
• The different types of value it brings to the business
• How apprentices are recruited
• Differing candidate expectations
• The number one reason why every employer should invest in apprenticeships
Mel also talks about the changing landscape in experience hire recruitment and shares her thoughts on the future
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Support for this podcast comes from Format. Format provide award-winning careers websites to employers such as Vue, Atkins and Muller. Working with Format can help you attract and engage higher numbers of better quality applicants. They get these results by their complete focus on the candidate experience, fantastic technology that enables long-term passive candidate engagement and seamless integration with your ATS. For more information and to get in touch for a free review of your career site, please go to www.format.com/podcast. Format is spelled with a number four, then MAT. The web address again, www.format.com/podcast. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind that of all the ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 24 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Over the last few years, an increasing number of employers are developing apprentice schemes to address long-term skill shortages in their industries. One company who are doing this very successfully, Acampus. My guest this week is Melanie Hayes, Head of Organizational Development for Acampus, who shares some insights on what Acampus is doing in this area. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Mel Hayes from Acampus. Hi Mel, how are you? I'm good. Thanks Matt. That's cool. Could you sort of introduce yourself to everyone? Tell us a little bit about your background and what you're doing for Acampus. Yeah, absolutely. So I am currently the Head of Organizational Development at Acampus Group, which covers resourcing, learning and development, talent, doing some work around diversity and then some other kind of bits that I think nobody else picks up, but exciting. Big company, Acampus is or in place 60,000 people in the UK. We are a FTSC 30 company, and we're also going through a massive period of growth. So it's a really, really exciting time at the moment in the organisation. And prior to that, I started my career in retail, so I'll just give a very brief overview. I started my career in retail and then I moved into equipment, so made quite a tactical decision, which I think is unusual. And I've told a couple of roles as Head of Resourcing and Talent, and each of those roles I've always gone into organisations to build resourcing teams or restructure resourcing teams so that they are delivering direct sourcing, improve quality, et cetera. Cool. Okay. Thanks for the overview. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, but one of the main reasons that I wanted to talk to you on this podcast was the work that Acampus have been doing with apprentices. Could you tell us a little bit about your apprentice strategy and what you've been up to in that kind of area? Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is one of the things that I am probably most proud of when it comes to my team. The young people agenda as whole is really, really important to campus, and we put a lot of effort in, even down to employing an early careers manager. And so his role within that is to cover things like work experience, how we are getting children or kids of school age to understand about careers within food services or FM. And following on from that, we do a huge amount of work around our apprenticeship program. So I was delighted to be a part of our graduation, our apprenticeship graduation this year, where we graduated 542 apprentices. Yeah. Yeah. So really exciting. And it covers a number of things. So we do anything from our functional roles. We have a very specific chef academy, which really enables young people to get good quality training within food service and not necessarily restaurants, but actually that could take them up to mission and style quality. We had one of our apprentices this year, who won the national apprentices of the year. Okay. And we are looking over the next few years to significantly increase the number of apprentices that were putting through the program on an annual basis. We also deliver our own qualifications. So we draw down funding and do a lot of the work ourselves. Just because we think it's really important that we get some of these things right. Yeah. I mean, that was going to be my next question. I mean, do all these people kind of go on to careers in the company? Is that the sort of next step after the apprentice graduation? Yeah. Well, that's the plan. So when we bring them on board, we hope then to place them into roles within the organisation. Some of our apprentices that completed the chef academy have all gone into chef to party roles, which is kind of we'll take them on their journey. And we're doing some work around career pathing, actually, which helps them to understand that what the apprenticeship can give them in the longer term. So lots of opportunity, we're going through a significant period of growth in the business and it's really exciting. So actually that opens up even more opportunity for these young people. Fantastic. And what do you think the sort of value is to your business of putting so much effort into into apprentices? Is it purely a kind of a future talent initiative or there are other things other things that you think the business benefits from, you know, round, round, round doing this? I think there's a significant part of it for us covers future talent. We're in an industry and I've worked in previous food service and FM organisations. So I kind of understand the challenges across the industry or the sector, should I say. And I don't think schools do enough around vocational careers, so there's lots of conversation around academic careers and not really enough around vocational. And so what this enables us to do is to help people to understand what it's like to work in a contract catering environment. It helps them to understand what career progression we are filling a pipeline. If we're honest, you know, we have a growth plan that's exciting but also a little bit scary from a recruitment perspective and I forgive you one example alone that there's been some major contract wins in our business and we are looking for one contract alone in the next 12 months to recruit 220 chef managers and that's just one contract win. So to start focusing on building a pipeline that supports a number of other channels of course is really important and actually not only that, we do a lot of work with the education sector. Chartwell's is one of our big sectors within the organisation and to be able to work with some of those schools and colleges that are also our clients, it's good for business as well. But I think predominantly we're just really focused on making sure that we're giving support whether that comes from work experience programs right the way through to our graduates. How do you sort of find and select your apprentices, what sort of process or methodology or strategy you use to get the right people on the programme? So we use a couple of methods, we use some internal methods, so for example when we've had people coming through work experience programs with us, we offer them the opportunity to go for the apprenticeship programmes, we have people that have jamed us as part time employees that show an interest in wanting to progress their career and again they go through the selection process and we also do some external advertising where we're going out and we're working with schools and colleges and actually we're working with other third party providers so we work with springboard, we work with BITC, we do work with a number of other third parties and we go to things like the big conversation which just helps to raise awareness about what we do. And how do the candidate expectations differ from the kind of experienced higher recruitment that you do, what differences are there? In the main, our apprenticeship programmes go 16 to 24 year olds, but in the main you've got people with very little work experience and so I think you have to do much more of a sell on the business and an opportunity. I do think apprentices that are really interesting because location can cause issues, so actually we have a number of apprenticeship opportunities in central London and central London always appears to be much harder to recruit for. Okay, and imagine that's to do with travel and all those kind of things is it? Yeah, I think that adds to it and we're not so we're not an organisation that pays the apprenticeship rates so apprenticeship rates are quite low and I know they're intending to put those up and actually we don't, we pay more. So we hope that that makes it a much more appealing package so to speak. So you kind of mentioned the apprentices in the catering services sector which is obviously where you guys are working. I mean more broadly, do you think every company should have an apprentice strategy or is it only appropriate in certain sectors? No, I think everybody should love to do it. I think it's important. You hear, you go to lots of events and you hear lots of people talking about skill shortages and I just think it's really important that we all then commit to the future. I know this requires investment for a lot of companies but if we're not helping to support a pipeline then the skill shortages are just going to get, it's going to get harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely and what advice would you give to a company sort of looking at their strategy here or looking at doing this for the first time? I would always go with a case study example so I would always just think about an area where you can add some value where actually the individual gets the opportunity to see the job properly but you can give that person time so you need to give your apprentice time which I don't think everybody understands fully so I think you need to give the commitment to people. Okay, thank you and it's sort of stepping out into kind of the wider recruitment market. How are you, what's it looking like at the moment, how are you finding it, is it easier to recruit at the moment, is it harder to recruit at the moment, what's sort of changed over the last 18 months or so? I think it's getting harder, I think salaries are here to be going up so I think there's more negotiation when we get to offer. We've had more people counter offered than I think I've seen in a few years. I think on the flip side of that though we're starting to see more movement so that generates a better quality of candle it. I'm not sure that's the right way to put it actually, I just think more choice should I say. Yeah and are you sort of noticing any changes in candidate expectations or behaviour or where you're finding them, is that changing as well? I think in some, not an all actually but in some cases our candidates are becoming much more demanding. Okay. And interestingly we've worked on a few senior roles recently and some mid-level roles whereby I think historically if you've given several options and in two dates people have tried to make it work. I think there's so much opportunity going on for people and people are out with other companies that getting candidates into process sometimes it's harder and it used to be getting hiring managers into process was harder. Okay so it's kind of sort of a complete flip from two or three years ago. Cool. Okay that's interesting and you know what's next for Compass, what's on your radar at the moment, what are you looking at over the next sort of 12 to 18 months? So it's really exciting for us. I joined the company in January and we've gone through a restructure. So we've reeled our resourcing function to support the business. We've had five years of kind of no growth and this year massive growth. So the structure that we've put in place is there to help support the growth and actually we've created a scalable model which is which is exciting. So we've spent the last kind of seven months looking at process and kind of getting back to basics. And next year I think for us is some real focus on how we're taking it out to market. So what's our brand? We have so many different businesses within the Compass family. How are we going out and promoting those? And I'm also focusing on how we're educating our recruiters. You'll know this because I think I've talked about this quite a lot but I have a real passion for us actually doing something with recruiters to help them develop and I don't think there's enough out there. Okay. So I'm using a couple of products at the moment and we're testing a few things out but that's with a view to making our recruiters better at sourcing. Cool. Fantastic. I suppose that kind of leads on quite nicely to my final question which is about trends and tools and technologies and what's kind of happening in the industry. What are you sort of looking at at the moment? What trends do you think are interesting? What tools and technologies do you think might develop as we sort of go through the rest of this year and next? So at Compass because we've been doing a lot of work around putting the basics in and getting the basics right, I think we're just starting to focus on different technologies. I think the ATS that we've got is good and it works well but we're thinking about what we're linking in with that so for me it's around, in some roles we've got a huge volume of applicants so we're looking at ways that we can help the resourcing process to auto-screen through various kind of tests, online tests that are kind of linked through. We're looking at video interview at the moment so we're just about to do a trial with a number of roles that cover some of our volume and then just some other tools that are really there about to help the recruiters with sourcing which I think I've already mentioned. Cool. It sounds like a very exciting time. Mel, thanks very much for talking to me. Lovely. Thanks Matt. My thanks to Mel Hayes. For show notes and past episodes of the podcast, please go to www.rfpodcast.com. You can also subscribe to the mailing list there and find out more about me on the work with Matt Alder page. You can of course subscribe to the podcast itself on iTunes and on Stitcher. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode Matt Alder talks to Melanie Hayes Head of Organisational Development at Compass
Over the last few years an increasing number of employers have been developing apprenticeship programmes to address long term skill shortages in their industries. One company who are doing this very successfully are Compass who have offered over 3000 Apprenticeships in the last five years and have achieved a Grade 2 Ofsted rating for their programme.My guest for this episode is Melanie Hayes Head of Organisational development at Compass and it was very interesting to hear more about the programme and the value it brings to her organisation.In the interview we discuss: • Why Compass have an apprentice strategy • The different types of value it brings to the business • How apprentices are recruited • Differing candidate expectations • The number one reason why every employer should invest in apprenticeshipsMel also talks about the changing landscape in experience hire recruitment and shares her thoughts on the futureSubscribe to this podcast in iTunes
