In this episode Matt Alder talks to Bethan Davies the Head of Recruitment Europe & Asia Pac for RMS.
RMS are a catastrophe modelling company and as such have to search the globe for unique talent. Bethan talks about some of the techniques they use to do this as well as their innovative approach to brand communications. RMS also have an award winning "treat others as you would expect to be treated" approach to candidate experience and Bethan gives an insight into how they execute on this.
There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, at all the ages of history. Hi everyone and welcome to episode three of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Thanks so much for the feedback on the first two episodes and the podcast launch. It's brilliant that people are getting value from what I'm doing, so I'm going to carry on and bring you interviews with the most interesting people around in our space. With that in mind, on to episode three. In episode three, I met with Batten Davis, the head of recruitment for Europe and Asia pack for a company called RMS. If you've not come across RMS for, very interesting organization. They're a catastrophe modeller for the insurance industry. So what that means is they have some very, very difficult roles to recruit for. So in the interview, Batten talks at length about the techniques they use and we also, the techniques they use to find these are very, very difficult to recruit people. And we also talk about their award-winning approach to creating a world-class candidate experience. So here's the interview, Batten Davis, head of recruitment, Europe and Asia pack at RMS. I'm here today talking to you at Batten Davis, at RMS, Batten, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, hi, I'm Batten, I'm the head of recruitment for Europe and Asia Pacific here at RMS in London. Cool. And can you tell us a little bit about what RMS does because I know everyone's familiar with your great work? So RMS is a catastrophe modeller. We build scientific products for the insurance markets so they can quantify their financial risk around man-made and natural disasters. So if an earthquake were to happen or a tsunami or terrorism, then the insurance company is aware of how much financial risk they face should that take place. So it's a very niche organisation, the recruiting challenges for us are very much around hiring scientists and technologists and even our sales and service staff and even marketing team also have a background in earth sciences or engineering and some circumstances we have to scour the planet to find a particular person, particularly for our scientific teams. So that sounds like it might be a little bit of a challenge. So how do you find those people, what are the kind of secrets to identifying that kind of niche talent all over the world? We are really fortunate. We have, on the scientific side, very well connected, heads of science, heads of modelling development who are connected with a number of universities and alumnus across the world. And so we tend to attract great talent through referrals, through word of mouth, through reputation on the scientific side. On the non-science side we, optical calls, we go out to network, we use agencies, a lot of referrals come through to us, I think last year 25% of our hires came through via referrals. We're also very proud of our internal transfers as well. We like to promote from within and transfer across to our various offices. That's really interesting, I always think the companies that get referral recruitment right are doing a great job because I think that can be really hard. I'm guessing then that the company must have a really sort of good employer brand or reputation. Would you say that was a key part of it? This is an interesting one because we're not, you know, we're not a JP Morgan or an EY, we're not a globally known brand, we're not a consumer product and our market is very niche. And so I wouldn't say we have an employer brand out there, not on a sweeping basis. We have niche brand awareness, very targeted. And so one of the things that we started doing two years ago in order to raise awareness of who we are as an employer to broaden this very small pool of candidates that we can pull from was to use video as a way of attracting candidates. So not video interviewing, but video job descriptions, careers at RMS. And again it's an RMS that would sit in front of their iPhone and just talk to the camera and tell us what it is they do at RMS. We've also now moved one step forward and produced video blog so we have a handful of those available. And we'll embed that onto job descriptions, we'll put it into various groups on maybe LinkedIn or social media, and it just shows RMS as who we are as individuals. And hopefully people think, oh right, okay, that's an interesting organization, hadn't heard of them before, why not consider them as an organization to join as an employer? Yeah, I mean, again, that's really interesting. I think that video job descriptions and video blogs, there's something that lots of organizations talk about, but very few actually do. Did you come across a lot of resistance from managers and colleagues in doing that or did they just kind of embrace it and run with that? So I think we had most resistance from marketing, I think most marketing departments are protective of their brand. But what we wanted to do is not hinder the brand, we wanted to embrace it but show the individuals within the company see beyond the logo and the brand marketing. Internally, most people we approached actually said yes, I'd be happy to do it. There are individuals that don't like sitting in front of a camera, it's quite intimidating and that's understandable. And we asked our graduates every year to pick up the mantle and run with it and talk us through their first year with RMS and actually they've just gone with their iPhones now and pop into a room, do a quick five minutes and then it lands on our desk or we get an email through to it. So actually they've embraced it. I think more people are open to it now than they used to be. Fantastic. So I think where I first sort of came across to an organization was, I think it was a big colleague of yours in the States who's doing a presentation about your amazing attitude and execution on Canada Experience. I know you've won awards from. So tell us a little bit about the Canada Experience here, what is it, what's the philosophy behind it? In a nutshell, treat others as you expect to be treated. When I joined RMS six years ago we didn't have a talent acquisition function here. And so I was able to start from scratch and sit down with key hiring managers and interviewers to really understand what had worked, what hadn't worked in the past in order to pull together a great process. Internally we wanted something that was robust, efficient and scalable. Internally for candidates we wanted to make sure it was clear there was an element of respect, timely, open and honest communication. And so there are two, how I would see it, two kind of cornerstones of what we do here in terms of candidate experience. The first one is you may have an amazing process, but unless you've got a team that's committed to delivering it, the care, then that process isn't going anywhere. So we have a good team. The second cornerstone I think is the relationship we have with the hiring managers and the interviewers. We work in partnership, there's a mutual respect there that when we're going to market we're doing so as a partnership and we're able to really dig down into the talent piece that they're looking for, the gaps in their teams, understand the long-term view of where they want to take their organization or their business unit, and then what that means to the candidate and having that relationship, we can go to the market and say, okay, we can give you a good candidate experience because we have this partnership. And I don't think we would be able, I don't believe we would be able to deliver what we do now if we didn't have that mutual respect. So hopefully that kind of gives you a bit of an insight. We've also taken it one step further and again, this all kind of started back six years ago in training the interviewers and training hiring managers and reminding them what it's like to be a candidate. We've all been in the situation where we've had poor candidate experiences. It's not pleasant. And so we wanted to make sure that when we built that relationship and partnership with the hiring managers that they were aware of that when they're sitting in front of a candidate. That's great and I think it really kind of underlines the importance of hiring managers when it comes to candidate experience. I think that so many recruitment and talent acquisition functions sort of focus on what they do and can't engage with the managers in the same way. So it's a brilliant case today. Final question, what sort of recruitment trends have you got your eye on at the moment? What do you think might be big in 2015? Is it video interviewing? Is it more development to the candidate experience? I think it's just going to stay the same. What do you think? What's on your radar? Oh, gosh, I think the last few years we've seen a lot on candidate experience. I think video is certainly stepping up to the front now in terms of a trend. I mean, we've been doing it for a few years, as I mentioned, but I think a lot more companies now are cutting on to that and using it as part of their process. We don't do video interviewing here in Europe. We do it in the US. It's not right for us here as a market, but as the business grows, we may take that on. But right now, we're using video in a very informal way just to showcase the great talent we have here and the great culture that we have here as an organisation. And that's what we focus the video more so at the front end of the process as opposed to the interviewing. That's great. Thank you very much for talking to me. Pleasure. Thanks very much. Thanks very much for listening to episode three of the Recruiting Future podcast. You can subscribe to this episode, all future episodes using iTunes or SoundCloud. We'll see you next week with episode four very soon. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode Matt Alder talks to Bethan Davies the Head of Recruitment Europe & Asia Pac for RMS.
RMS are a catastrophe modelling company and as such have to search the globe for unique talent. Bethan talks about some of the techniques they use to do this as well as their innovative approach to brand communications. RMS also have an award winning "treat others as you would expect to be treated" approach to candidate experience and Bethan gives an insight into how they execute on this.
