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

Ep 20: A Strategic Perspective on Resourcing

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Adrian Thomas Chair of The Recruitment SocietyThere is a tendency in the social media world in which we now live for content published about recruitment to focus on instant gratification via tactical quick fixes. In reality the issues many employers face can’t be solved that simply and resourcing can be very complex.In this interview Matt and Adrian discuss a number of resourcing related topics including the case for In house recruitment over RPO, which metrics organisations should measure to ensure great recruitment practice and how employers should align Talent Attraction with Talent Management. Adrian also shares his thoughts on the differences between working with the public sector and private sector and what the future might hold for resourcing strategies. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes

Duration:: 21m
Broadcast on:: 21 Jul 2015
Audio Format:: other

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Adrian Thomas Chair of The Recruitment Society

There is a tendency in the social media world in which we now live for content published about recruitment to focus on instant gratification via tactical quick fixes. In reality the issues many employers face can’t be solved that simply and resourcing can be very complex.

In this interview Matt and Adrian discuss a number of resourcing related topics including the case for In house recruitment over RPO, which metrics organisations should measure to ensure great recruitment practice and how employers should align Talent Attraction with Talent Management. Adrian also shares his thoughts on the differences between working with the public sector and private sector and what the future might hold for resourcing strategies.

Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes

There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind, than all the ages of history. Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. My guest this week is Adrian Thomas. Adrian has held a number of senior strategic positions at some of the UK's largest employees. He is currently working at the Cabinet Office and is also Chair of the Recruitment Society. We cover a lot of topics in this interview, including RPO versus in-house, what metrics organisations should measure to ensure great recruitment and practice, and how employers can align talent attraction and talent management. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. My guest today is Adrian Thomas. Hi, I'm doing great, how are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad at all. It's Friday today and Fridays are always good. Could you start off by introducing yourself, telling us what you do, how you've got there, what you've done in the past, all that kind of thing? Sure. I've recently held a whole bundle of in-house recruitment roles, covering some of the UK's more recognisable names like GSK and Royal Bank of Scotland and Network Rail. More recently I've been consulting and helping sports organisations set up recruitment. That led me into my current role with the Cabinet Office, helping them introduce a talent management and time acquisition process capability across the recently formed project delivery profession. They are very keen to have the very best project managers when they bring what is effective with their countries, most important in Raj's and highest risk projects, and it's important that they get their very best project managers to find to the right project, so I'm very keen moves within the civil service to make sure we make maximum use, and sometimes when that doesn't work and we have to reach out to the private sector, I'm helping them do that recruitment as well. I guess the one consistent thing across my career in recruitment has been my membership of the recruitment society and in that context, I'm now chairing the system in the recruitment society, and I think I'm a big advocate for recruitment and the role it has to play in companies, and other organisations are wider public and private sector organisations today, and the value that really good improvement practice can bring. For those people who might not be familiar with the recruitment society, could you tell us a little bit about what it is and what it does? Yes, well, a characteristic of the recruitment society is it doesn't represent any one sector, most of the other representative bodies have at their centre either with their specific agencies or the representing in-house or the representing particular branch of recruitment or other type of metrics or whether it's advertising and so forth. The recruitment society is a really broad church and it's 8,000 plus members, reach across all branches of recruitment and then we've often been seen as a really great place to go to comment on what is that practice appropriate practice because we have our independence with you across all the sectors and then rely on months. I'm going to come back and ask you about best practice and your view on certain things that going on in recruitment at the moment from the recruitment society perspective. But first, I'll just be interested to find out a little bit more about how working with the civil service is different from your previous roles in the private sector. Well, I was delighted to be asked to help me set up their new approach to maximizing the use of the talent they've already got and reaching out to beyond the civil service for talent they've yet to acquire. What I found is that private sector and public sector really have a passion for hiring the very best and often haven't really gotten a clear understanding of how best to reach out to get that best talent into their organization and they will usually take an approach to recruitment that is haphazard or the way they've done it or it's passed some of the most responsibility. What I found and consistent between the private and the public sector is that when you talk to them about what recruitment can offer them and they think that you can have people at the list of the one big difference is the civil service is very -- it's a -- it's a difficult word to put it but it's very open to public scrutiny and where the private sector may move with the speed and focus that land them a great personal role. But recruiting in the civil service requires much more openness and transparency about how decisions are made and how appointments are made and that can slow things down a little bit. It doesn't impact the final opportunity to the final, bringing in the right people if you've done appropriately and I'm aiming to try to bring a little bit of private sector drive to the great ethics and transparency that's forming in case we put the rest of the limits of the civil service to get the best of both worlds. That sounds like a pretty interesting combination, sort of changing direction and just wanted to sort of get your opinion on a few debates that are kind of out there in the industry at the moment. And the first one would be RPO versus kind of in-house. So what's your view on outsourcing recruitment or having an in-house team or a mix of the team? I think the arguments here have been well rehearsed and can become quite polar. In-house professionals being new that they have all the answers and they can look at the company and the brand and there's an element of that and that's where as RPOs talk about well actually that's their core business and so green consistency and process to get control of their recruitment and activity and can deliver a lot cheaper. I think there's one aspect that's completely missed in those polar arguments that is the most important part of it. RPOs very rarely offer internal recruitment services that are aligned to talent management talent development. If they are running in-house recruiting inside it's run based so that the way they run in-house recruiting is very processed within and based on service levels and driving that you know to cost levels and service levels trying to turn around and think, trying to answer calls and such and what is missed and this is what I'm bringing in my current element to the service is actually a great time to normal organisations or companies to spend fortunes hiring in and developing and training, fetching objectives and managing against those that people that will be in the organisation and they know who those great people are and it's really sad to me that the vast majority of people probably go through their lives without ever really discussing what they're really great at and I think organisations have got a real responsibility to help people find out what they're great at and to get that talent deployed into an organisation. In-house teams can do that, they can really work with other line managers and with HR managers to really build close blue between the role that people do, their development plan, their measurements for the next role, their stretch for people to enter jobs and do the minimally organisations for the organisation's best entry. In-house teams are obviously there, if that movement isn't working and we need to go outside then they understand the role, they understand the culture, the brand, intimately at the organisation and so they can bring all the back to a practice with the knowledge of a brand and the culture of an organisation they want to improve. And finally, in-house teams who I've seen and have deployed really effectively also to help organisations to struggle and looking at how to restructure or to even in worst case knowledge, closing of facilities, closing of sites, reducing workforce. Having a talented group of people who are whose core role is interviewing, assessing and looking at roles and bringing out those issues that are the same skills you use when you're down siding and you're selecting people, et cetera. So I think in the fullness of use and in-house teams as Trump and RPO outsource agreement or similar agreement, when it's looked at in the full roundness of the services, it can offer often don't only do as much as I just described and I'm not down to companies to realise they're missing the tree. Okay, thanks, I think that's a really interesting and useful answer and contribution to the debate, basically. Just you obviously mentioned at the start there about the metrics that RPOs are kind of measuring in terms of cost and speed and all those kind of things. What's the value of great recruitment practice to you and what do you think companies should be doing and how should they be measuring success in this area? Well, there's the one that all drop into the cost per hour, which is an absolutely crazy measure. We have to know, if you don't understand finance, you don't understand cost, you don't understand value. It's very difficult for heads of resiliency or senior recruiters or HR people to have those meaningful conversations with finance directly from the management of organizations. So we have to speak the right language and if we can speak the right language, we can get people to start painting a little bit more broadly and simply around office to hire. There's a great conundrum that people come up with all the time, I get all the time about quality cost and time. You can have high quality, you can have low costs, you can have fast time, you can't have all three together, pick two people often to say. A number of times I've been pitched to organizations, both RPOs and recruitment agencies or the DIC researchers, who say they can do all three, they can't and I don't believe anybody. They may be an exception and someone's going to probably comment on it, I'll try to say they can, but I'd be really shocked and I've been delighted to go and give it an organizational paper to get those two together. It might, in my view, it doesn't, if not a single metric, it really depends on the higher that you're making as to which of those metrics are important to you. If you're not hiring for high quality, then I'm not sure what you're hiring for, are you trying to recruit the worst applicants in our low quality? So, quality is an unusual one and how you measure that is a really interesting debate as well and how you align your recruitment processes to your talent management and your development process. I can perhaps talk more about that later. The quality cost time, I think, depends on the 20% of the students. If you're looking for an interim turnaround especially, this is going to come in and spend three months grabbing code of your most important project, it's more billions potentially lifetime costs and you just want them to get in and deliver a new setup and team to manage that project. Then, you're not going to spend a month to month to month doing a full recruitment process based on who's got all the right cost skills for leading an organization. You want someone who can arrive on Monday, who can sample that and make the changes. So, their time has to be fact, when you compromise on maybe the cost because you will, the cost of not having that person is more than the cost of getting them into that. It's really to understand what the role that you're approaching is for and then a throw pretty pick to an entry. That makes a lot of sense. You talked a little bit about this before and you alluded to it there and the connection between talent acquisition and talent management, what is it that organizations need to be doing in this area to reap the biggest benefits? Well, I would say it's really stepped back and to actually think, is that it's really critical to us, is that it's really meaningful at the basic level. By that, I mean, do they actually take notice of that recruitment practice? The time that it's been building a really good brief for either an internal team or an external partner to use to reach against is really valuable. Understanding the role and understanding where to find the right people. If you think you put out that, you just cast a wide net and it's an advert to attract more than others and some advertising moves will attract more than others but actually what you want is to communicate very precisely the type of individual that you are looking for to join your organization and individuals know their own skills better than anybody else. The more information you can hear is the better you want to calculate the role in the right language, the more likely you are for somebody to say, actually, that's the role to me. I may be on the market, I may not be on the market but I'm going to apply, I'm going to put my name forward for that particular role and then we spend a lot of time and effort making people go through the prison structures as often and only to find the manager has made their decision on the first 10 seconds of somebody walking in the office. Yes. So that's really meaningful. Are we actually spending the right amount of time and explaining what the role is? Are we spending the right amount of time and effort affecting the right people? That the end of the day has the managers brought in to that program? Have they been trained? Are they going to make the decisions based on all of that time and data that we've either put in or we've collected and made the decision that we've gone to align the incoming individual with the team and the play got already, with the team and the children and the activities of the organization always it simply conducts here and that sounds a little bit weird that I've heard it time and time again where managers will ask them, say, "I know the right person is when I see them. I know it ends when they walk through the door." And time and again, I've seen people join an organization and leave within three to six months because they're the wrong individual. The ones that I've seen today and the ones that have been a really great recruitment practice really align the values and requirements of the organization with the individual and the individual who have gone through the recruitment process where they have met more than one person. When they have walked into the organization, at the end of the day, these things are two sided. An organization will offer a role within individuals that are accepted and if you want to have longevity, if you don't want to have a tension problem, then getting the right information to the candidate that will be vital into the candidate to decide if that's the company that they want to join. And finally, I'm stunned that a number of times I've seen the competency that it means to reprint people are not the competency that organizations use to develop them. To me, it is absolute no-brainer that the competency and the values that you use to measure your objectives against the role of developing your individual organization. They have absolutely passed to be the competency that you need to get. Otherwise, you're recruiting an apple to become a pet and to me simply that starts. So final question. What's next? What do you think we should be looking out for in recruitment in the next 18 months to two years? What's coming over the horizon? Well, I've had that conversation a number of times in fact by email, whether an ex-colleague of mine is in the network now this morning. And I think that it's a good vibe in the recruitment, there seems to be lots of people applying for lots of roles. And that often comes from a level of confidence that the competency has to recruit and increase that start when there's a degree of stability in the economy, when there's a hope that the economy is going to grow. And there's uncertainty of being removed and just maybe the reason for election has given some organizations and companies that's confident. But also on the candidate side, the desire to move jobs, to risk moving your pension from one company to another, to take a risk in a promotion, to move back to your comfort zone. All of those things are decisions that candidates think about, I think about me being a role in applying for another. I think again, when economy inflation can be very low, and I think it's a circuit year out at the moment in year one year, or certainly within the consumer party index anyway, those are two things, the two other disabilities economy and the companies are going to invest and candidates willing to put themselves forward. It means there's never been a better time for the recruitment to demonstrate a value it can add into companies and organizations in the further interest of building great people and great jobs for great causes. Fantastic. Thank you very much for talking to me. It's not a really enjoyed it. My thanks to Adrian Thomas. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes and read show notes at www.rfpodcast.com, and also subscribe to the mailing list there to get exclusive content and find out about future guests. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week, and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. Thank you. [music] (upbeat music)