With labor markets still undergoing unprecedented shifts and volatility, employers are increasingly strengthening their focus on retention and internal mobility. However, the shrinking life span of skills, changing attitudes to work, and the rise of AI are complicating factors here. So, how can employers ensure they support their employees' future development and drive internal mobility at a time of significant change that renders traditional career pathing irrelevant?
My guest this week is JC Townend, CEO at LHH for the UK and Ireland. JC is a strong advocate of Career Activism, giving employees the tools they need to advance their careers in the way that makes the most sense for them. This can drive retention, supercharge internal mobility, and help ensure employers have the right skills available at the right time.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Why HR should be building for the future for right now
- The end of linear career paths
- Giving employees the tools to advance their own careers
- Switching disciplines and industries
- Building brand and reputation
- What are the benefits for employers?
- The impact of AI on jobs and careers
- What will work and careers look like in 3 years time?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters smart recruiters is your all-in-one platform but faster smarter hiring making recruiting easy and effortless smart recruiters are making some big changes revamping their user experience adding AI features and refreshing the UI i know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner they understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support so it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates if you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition head over to smart recruiters.com and find out what they're up to trust me your team and your future hires will thank you there's been more of scientific discovery more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine and all the ages of history hi there welcome to episode 643 a recruiting feature with me mat alder with labor markets still undergoing unprecedented shifts and volatility employers are increasingly strengthening their focus on retention and internal mobility however the shrinking lifespan of skills changing attitudes to work and the rise of AI are complicating factors here so how can employers ensure that they support their employees future development and drive internal mobility at a time of great change that renders traditional career pathing irrelevant my guess this week is JC Townend CEO at LHH for the UK and Ireland JC is a strong advocate of career activism giving employees the tools they need to advance their careers in a way that makes the most sense for them this can drive retention supercharged internal mobility and helping sure that employers have the right skills available at the right time hi JC and welcome to the podcast hi it's great to be here an absolute pleasure to have you on the show please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do sure glad to be here my name is JC Townend I'm the CEO of LHH for the UK and Ireland LHH is a global recruitment and leadership development company we operate in more than 65 countries around the world across a wide variety of sectors in the UK in particular we are supporting 20,000 individuals per year with career coaching most often when people are made redundant we help them land their next new roles and we also have a major recruiting practice which helps all kinds of people land roles and tell us a bit about your background how did you get to do what you do now yes as you can probably tell for my accent I'm an American so I worked the first 20 years of my career in the US I grew up in New York and moved to the UK about 12 years ago I've always been in executive and management consulting working in areas from energy to banking and finance to health and to education and came into this role six years ago specifically to work in workforce areas so how do we you know think about employment companies company structures and how both employees and companies can be made successful so obviously your organization operates in all different sort of parts of the talent market as it were what are you seeing in in labor markets at the moment what are the trends and what does this mean for HR and how they think about the workforce yeah boy what a change we've been through over the last four years in in the marketplace I think it's the fastest pace of change that I've seen in my entire career both in the US and in the UK and globally I think starting with all the changes brought about by COVID from you know spikes in redundancies challenges with people quiet quitting to a massive recruiting market to a now very sluggish recruiting market so what we're seeing now I think US, UK and globally is a very sluggish labor market there's less recruitings for new roles there was a report that came out last month that said there's been 16 months of sequential decline in the number of new roles listed in the London area and we're seeing that in microcosms around around the UK at the same time we're seeing less voluntary moves right now of employees to external companies and so that is helping companies because they're not having as much change in their structure right now and what state jobs kind of response to that where should they be focusing what should what should they be thinking about yeah I think this is a really good time when workforces are slightly more stable than the average to really be thinking about how to build now for the future so one of the things I was just talking to a group last week about was that people you know we need to make sure that HR doesn't get complacent and think that their employees are going to stay with them for the long term unless they have really strong career paths so we're still seeing from our research that at least 50 percent of individuals are still actively looking at how to progress their careers mostly external to other companies even though they're not taking those jobs but we're also finding less than 10 percent think they can advance their careers within their current companies I mean it is a very disruptive time full concept of a career at the moment I know that people's attitudes to jobs in works at work is changing dramatically with dramatically changing times I know that you've been talking a lot about something you call career activism tell us a little bit more about that we're starting to realize that maybe the best way to help employees develop in their careers is to put the power and the information into the hands of the employees themselves so if you think of 30 years ago it was very typical for an organization and an HR department to create very linear specifically modulated career paths of some of how someone moves up through the organization and that would include an expectation of how many years in the role what training was required and people could really envision their company their careers at a company for 30 years now I'm hearing I spoke with one HR director of a major financial services company and he said they have actually stopped writing those career paths on paper because jobs are changing so quickly that the career paths are becoming obsolete as quickly as they can get them written down so what we realized is that if instead of the companies trying to create very rigid long-term career paths if you instead put tools right into the hands of the employees themselves they can advance in all kinds of ways so they don't necessarily just have to climb up the company ladder in one vertical but for example I'm mentoring right now a person in finance that wants to move into kind of more business leadership and so she wants to know what does she need to learn to make that change over the next 10 years and we're seeing a lot of individuals that want to shift their careers moving from finance to marketing or sales into delivery or accounting into legal or computers or coding the thing is companies can't really predict what an individual will want but the individuals will absolutely I know that your organization does a huge amount of coaching with people in terms of finding new jobs and what's going on in their career how do individuals need to think about this particularly I suppose you know within the companies that they're working for this kind of sense of career activism empowerment about the direction of where they're going I think this is something that we really started to think very proactively about three years ago because we were talking with one of our companies and we were giving them their annual report of how we were helping the redundant employees land new roles and suddenly they realized they were spending all of this time and money helping people that were exiting the firm developed these really amazing career paths and they weren't investing any of that internally but we learned a lot of those lessons are directly transferable internal to companies so one of when someone's made redundant one of the first things they need to do is really look about what you know look at what job they want next it's the same when someone's internal to a company do you want to move up vertically in the same path or do you want to move maybe to the side or diagonally into a whole other area then what we help them do is we help them figure out what are their transferable skills so what skills do you already have that are relevant to that kind of new career objective and what things do you need to learn so building those skills but a lot of companies stop there but we've realized that's not enough there are a lot of tricks to how to actually land the role in your company that are not part of just skilling and closing those skill gaps and that includes everything you know about how to find a new job so it's actually being able to brand yourself by having a reputation for the types of experiences and skills that you'll need in the new job it's learning how to network internally in the company so that when jobs become available or roles become available which are not always advertised someone's going to tap you on the shoulder and say hey you should be interviewing for this role it's also thinking about how to get what we call gig assignments in areas of interest so what are the small projects that you can volunteer for in the you know in the marketing department that start to give you both experience and reputation to be able to do that kind of work so that when a role opens in the marketing department you've already got those skills on your CD traditionally a lot of employers have not been very good at internal mobility in terms of spotting transferable skills being able to move people through the business and those kind of things how's that changing what are you seeing companies getting right in terms of supporting their employees with this approach and what can they still be improving on so i think what companies are getting right is number one acknowledging that there's no longer these rigid linear career paths second thing i think they're doing very well is understanding what skills are required in different types of jobs and offering really good training programs to skill employees to help retain them in the company so those are two things i think they're doing really well i think where they can improve is by helping employees to understand how to navigate the hidden job market within the company so a lot of times companies will post roles available but that may only be a fraction of the jobs that are really available in the company and sometimes roles are created specifically with a person in mind because they've really you know they've demonstrated a whole new area a whole new way they could take the the the business into and sometimes the company almost gets interested in creating a role because they see the potential of a specific person so i think that's where employers can do a lot better at kind of coaching their employees through that process help teaching their managers and supervisors also how to be career coaches and i think managers can be reluctant to do that because they don't want to lose the best people off their teams but i think giving them both the skills and the incentives to help their people develop actually paradoxically helps those managers attract the very best people to their own teams i think that's really interesting i suppose just following up and digging a bit deeper on that you know you mentioned right at the start of the conversation that you know they used to a perception that you join a company and you'd be there for 30 years and the company would would basically structure your career path for you obviously that is now completely out the window in terms of all the things that we've been talking about where does responsibility lie then to ensure that the employees have a good career in that in that company you kind of mentioned sort of coaching from from managers but you know is it HR is it managers is the employees themselves you know where who who's kind of responsible i would say all three and i think if you ignore any one of those three elements in the equation you're going to have a problem so certainly HR still has a really important role in building helping employees build careers in companies so HR it's still there but we're very narrow-minded if we think it's only HR's responsibilities i think we do need to put responsibility in the hands of the managers as we discussed i mean they should they're the closest to their employees and being able to understand their career aspirations in a non-threatening way and they're also best connected to help those employees kind of make the connections networks and get the assignments that will build their ability to grow their careers but this third element of the employees themselves i think is something that has been vastly ignored and i think it's only um you know i've been at this company at lhh for the last six years i've realized within number of people we're offering this career coaching to every year sometimes people will contact me they'll send a thank you note to me as head of the company and say i'm almost happy i was made redundant because i've learned things about how to build my career and how to land jobs that nobody ever taught me before and i think that is absolutely the secret to improving kind of talent development and career growth for employees and companies and hence um increasing retention of your best employees is to really give them those skills for them to map out their own careers and i think that yes it helps them grow their careers and one thing that we've discovered in our own company is it also makes them more patient because rather than that knowledge about what their career path is being in the hands of hr and their managers that knowledge exists in their own heads so they can exactly see how what they're doing today is going to lead to their next job and that makes them more um more patient and more likely to stay in their current job i mean as we said it's a very different way of thinking for employers than that we've kind of seen in the past you kind of mentioned some of these already but what are the benefits of companies if they if they get this right i think the first benefit is retention right i um i talk to a lot of chro's and they have up there's a lot of um development programs for employees um that are out there but they tell me the people that tend to be in those development programs tend to be the very first ones that competing companies are coming to and trying to steal away from their firm so i think by empowering your employees so they don't just feel like they're part of a program but they feel like they own their own careers within your company and it's unlimited i think you can really improve retention of your very best employees i think you also gain reputation as a really good place to work and that's why um employees want to even apply to be part of your company to begin with so if you think of some of the digital and tech companies it had such a good reputation of a place where you wanted to land your career um when you hit the job market that's the kind of reputation i think every company should be aspiring to have it's obviously illegal to have any kind of podcast interview these days without mentioning AI so i'm going to go ahead and mention it what impact does AI have on all of this how do you think it's going to shape jobs are you seeing people being displaced by AI already what's the you know what's your take on this first i think the pace of change is seems to be getting faster and faster as soon as we think like that jobs and roles and are changing you know faster than we can imagine AI is impacting every single job um and i don't just mean AI i mean all kinds of tech robotics sensors etc i just i had gone to a car manufacturing plant and boy what tech is doing that employees used to have to do through manual labor is like dramatically transformed am i seeing jobs being lost i would say i'm not seeing that many jobs being directly lost where a new tech comes in and immediately you see a lot of redundancies but i do think we're edging towards that so there's lots of discussions especially in the financial services sector about how um tech and AI is going to take over more of those jobs that were typically required kind of humans to do that but i don't think people should be worried i think they should be excited because i think AI can take over those really mundane parts of the job that allow humans to do the really interesting very human centric things on top and i think that's where you can have a really um you know a really strong benefit from AI um i've said and i hope they're like tech could increase so quickly if it increases our productivity um fast enough it could be the thing that actually allows us to finally realize the dream of a four-day work week without reducing salaries because we will have increased uh our productivity that much just through the use of technology and that leads me on nicely to my final question which is what do you think work and careers are going to look like in in the kind of medium term in sort of three to five years time in three to five years i expect that certain industries will have changed dramatically um i expect changes in some of the service industries it could be things like accounting banking and finance um and and things where those kind of language um compatible uh software programs can be introduced i think there will be other industries that really don't change at all and when i go and talk around to executives in terms of their strategy of how are they going to adopt AI a lot right now are in between they're trying to decide do they want to be a first mover getting ahead of the crowd but also making the mistakes or do they want to be a follow-on mover letting others make the mistakes and then they come in and put in place the type and tried and tested technology um after uh it's really been developed and tested and i'm seeing people fall into those two camps right now i'm seeing more in the second camp so we'll see where it goes jc thank you very much for talking to me great thank you it's been fun to talk my thanks to jc you can follow this podcast on apple podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting feature feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening i'll be back next time and i hope you'll join me this is my show you [BLANK_AUDIO]
