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.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
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, onto episode three. In episode three, I met with Bethan Davis, the head of recruitment for Europe and Asia PAC for a company called rms. If you’ve not come across RMS before, very interesting organization, They’re a catastrophe modeler for the insurance industry. So what that means is they have some very, very difficult roles to recruit for. So in the interview Bethan talks at length about techniques they use and we also techniques they use to find these 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. Bethan Davies, Head of recruitment Europe and Asia PAC at rms.
Matt Alder [00:01:26]:
I’m here today talking to Bethan Davis at rms. Bethan, do you want to introduce yourself?
Bethan Davies [00:01:31]:
Yeah, hi, I’m Bethan. I’m the head of recruitment for Europe Asia Pacific here at RMS in London.
Matt Alder [00:01:38]:
Cool. And can you tell us a little bit about what RMS does? I know not everyone’s familiar with your great work.
Bethan Davies [00:01:45]:
So RMS is a catastrophe modeler. We build scientific products for the insurance market 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 organization. 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 in some circumstances we have to scour the planet to find a particular person, particularly for our scientific teams.
Matt Alder [00:02:34]:
So that sounds like it might be a little bit of a challenge. So I mean, how do you find those people? Where did you look? What are the kind of secrets to identifying that kind of niche talent all over the world?
Bethan Davies [00:02:51]:
We are really fortunate. We have on the scientific side very well connected heads of science, heads of modeling, 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, of course, we go out and network. We use agencies. A lot of referrals come through to us. I think last year, 25% of our hires came through with 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.
Matt Alder [00:03:36]:
That’s really interesting. I always think that 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?
Bethan Davies [00:03:54]:
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. @ RMS. We’ve also now moved one step forward and produce video. 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?
Matt Alder [00:05:18]:
Yeah, I mean, again, that’s really interesting. I think. I think that video job descriptions and video books, they’re 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 it?
Bethan Davies [00:05:43]:
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 ask 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 just go 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 us. So actually they’ve embraced it. I think more people are open to it now than they used to be.
Matt Alder [00:06:39]:
Fantastic. So I think where I first sort of came across your organization was maybe a colleague of yours in the States was doing a presentation about your amazing attitude and execution on candidate experience, which I know you’ve won awards from. So tell us a little bit about the candidate experience here. What is, what’s the philosophy? What’s the philosophy behind it?
Bethan Davies [00:07:08]:
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 great process internally, we wanted something that was robust, efficient and scalable externally 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 that 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 organisation 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. I don’t think we would be able, or 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, we 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’re aware of that when they’re sitting in front of a candidate.
Matt Alder [00:09:29]:
That’s great.
Matt Alder [00:09:30]:
And I think 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 don’t can’t engage of the managers in the same way. So I think it’s a brilliant case study. 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 of the candidate experience? Are things just going to stay the same? What do you think? What’s on your radar?
Bethan Davies [00:10:13]:
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. We’ve been doing it for a few years, as I mentioned, but I think a lot more companies now are cottoning onto 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 organization. And that’s what we we focus the video more so at the front end of the process as opposed to the interviewing.
Matt Alder [00:11:09]:
That’s great.
Matt Alder [00:11:09]:
Thank you very much for talking to me.
Bethan Davies [00:11:11]:
Pleasure. Thanks very much.
Matt Alder [00:11:13]:
Thanks very much for listening to episode three of the Recruiting Future podcast. You can subscribe to this episode and all future episodes using iTunes or SoundCloud. If you go to www.rfpodcast.com, that’s www. Rfp podcast.com. you can find all the details and all the links. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back with episode four very soon.
