Matt Alder talks to Kevin Green Chief Executive of the REC
In this interview Matt and Kevin discuss the REC’s Good Recruitment Charter and their recently published report on the future of the UK Jobs Market.
The Good Recruitment Charter was created in conjunction with a cross section of UK employers and Kevin shares the insights that have come out of this process in terms of employer brand and candidate experience.
The REC publication, “Building The Best Jobs Market in the World” is a collection of essays from an eclectic selection of thinkers and is intended to give politicians and other policy markers food for thought in this election year. Kevin talks through the thinking behind the report and gives the REC’s own view on the future of the labour market
Links:
Building the Best Jobs Market in the World
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:44]:
Hi and welcome to episode 10 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Over the last few months I’ve been involved with the REC’s Good Recruitment Campaign and also contributed to their report on building the best jobs marketplace in the world. In this week’s interview, I talked to REC Chief Executive Kevin Green to understand the thinking behind these initiatives and to find out what the REC has learned from doing them.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another recruitment feature podcast Interview. Today I’m down at the REC in Southwark talking to Kevin Green. Hi, Kevin, how are you?
Kevin Green [00:01:21]:
Hi. I’m fine.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Could you start by introducing yourself and the recruitment?
Kevin Green [00:01:25]:
Yeah, so I’m the Chief Executive at the Rec. The REC is the professional body for the UK recruitment industry. We’ve been around for 80 years and we do, you know, we represent the industry in terms of interfacing with government and external stakeholders, but we also do things like standards and compliance recruitment companies. We also provide professional qualifications, training and also a lot of research into the jobs market and what’s going on in the recruitment industry.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
And I think that’s what I really wanted to talk to you about today. I mean, sort of. First of all, you know, we’ve had quite a few conversations. I’ve come to some of your workshops around your good recruitment charter, which I think is a really kind of interesting initiative. Can you sort of tell us a bit about recruitment charter?
Kevin Green [00:02:11]:
Yeah. One of the things that again became very, very apparent was from our members. So there’s some self interest. At the beginning, a lot of our recruitment businesses were saying, you do loads of great work about setting standards and about compliance, but our clients aren’t really aware of the REC good work you do on behalf of the industry. So it started off well, how do we engage with the clients of our members? And for us that was an important conversation. So what we did is we got about 20 businesses in the room. So we had HR directors and talent directors and some in house resourcing folks and we basically said, let’s talk about good recruitment. So we had three or four conversations and out of it became something which was for us, quite powerful, which was there is no kind of definition of what great resourcing and great recruitment looks like. And when we were talking to some of these organizations, most people recognized that they were very good at some parts of it and not very good at other bits. So we basically worked with them over a period of about six months to articulate a charter. And it was basically nine key principles of good practice. And we launched this last April, April 2014, where we basically then started to ask other organisations to publicly commit to the good recruitment charter and the principals. And along the way we got lots of support from the CBI, CIPD, Federation of Small Businesses, SIPs, which is the procurement body, because again, one of the things that we recognized in terms of what was going on in recruitment was that in terms of supply chain management, procurement were playing more active role. So we wanted to engage their professional body. So basically we’ve now got a charter, we’ve got 74 businesses signed up and many of them are sort of household names. So we’ve got Royal mail, we’ve got McDonald’s, we’ve got the first group, we’ve got Penguin, Random House, we’ve got small organisations, Circle Housing associations, we’ve got NHS employers and the list goes on and on. So we’re very pleased that we’ve got so many organisations already publicly committed from it. And the thing I think we’ve recognised is it’s got real legs. People are really interested. We are getting lots of requests for information and that sort of led us on to some of the new developments that we’ve done in the last six months.
Matt Alder [00:04:44]:
Cool. And from obviously quite a few employers signing up. I know you’re having sort of constant conversations around all this kind of thing. Have you got kind of any. Has any insight come out of it? What sort of surprised you from the conversations, from the sort of development?
Kevin Green [00:05:03]:
I think one of the things that. I think what the vehicle’s created. So we’ve created some subgroups, basically we’ve got one look at employer branding, we’ve had another one looking at the candidate experience, where we’ve basically gone out and brought together some people that have got some data to share or some perspective, and then we’ve got. And we’ve just enabled the organizations that are signed up to come along and participate. I think what’s interesting is that people seem quite isolated in their organizations and one of the real benefits that people are getting from the good recruitment campaign is the sharing of experience and learning from one another. So it’s turned into a real peer to peer learning thing where we basically say, let’s talk about the candidate experience. And I think you were at one of those sessions where we ended up with a very open conversation of people saying, well, we’ve tried this and this doesn’t work. And other people saying, well, what we found was this really worked for us. And so I think what we’ve discovered is that there’s a dying or a burning desire to network and to engage with people and to have some conversations around what good or great recruitment looks like. And I think that’s why this thing seems to have some legs, is that we don’t let any of our members participate, so we keep them out of the mix. So it’s very much client to client and it just seems to resonate. And we’re now starting to share publications and information and put people in touch with one another so they can have conversations outside of the room. So it seems to have been, we’re sort of facilitating a community that are interested in this whole thing around good recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:06:38]:
That’s great. And how’s it gone down with your members? Because you say they can’t sort of participate in those kind of conversations.
Kevin Green [00:06:44]:
But how I think what they accept is within the charter, for example, there are a couple of principles that are quite important for our members. One is people really think about good recruitment along the supply chain. And, you know, lots of people have outsourced recruitment or they’ve got intermediaries involved and they don’t really think about how do you ensure that if these people are your brand ambassadors, they’re really selling your story. So I think there’s some real benefit for our members in terms of that. And it also enshrines some of our standards that, you know, you want recruiters that are signed up to best practice and codes of practice so they can see the benefit that when employers start to really look at the charter and sign up for it, it does engage them in a different conversation. So it’s not all about price, it’s now about quality and the service ethic. And also I think what we’ve done is we’ve. We’ve given our members a piece of marketing and sales collateral to talk to their clients about where they’re saying, here’s a way in which we can add some value. Why don’t you get involved in this? And of course it’s all free, so there’s no cost associated with that. And I think we Recognise that there’s lots of value for companies and I think our members are seeing that it’s quite a useful thing for them to use to add some value to their customers and the experiences that they’re providing.
Matt Alder [00:07:59]:
Absolutely. And where are you taking it next? What are the sort of. What do you think the sort of key topics are for this conversation over the next?
Kevin Green [00:08:07]:
Well, I think there’s a whole range of things. I mean, we’ve started off these two sort of subgroups which have gone very, very well. We started to write that up so we can share the stories more widely. We’ve got a conference which is happening in June, which is very much about building on the good recruitment campaign that’s called. So again, we’re going to bring together speakers and actually have a very public conversation. And I think what we will then find is we’ve done a couple of pieces, research particularly aimed at this. We did one with the CIPD and cips about supply chain management in recruitment. And one of the things we saw in terms of that research being downloaded was it wasn’t just downloaded by our members, but it was downloaded by a much wider spectrum businesses. So for us, there’s lots of things we’ll go where the people that are signed up want to go. Two areas that seem to be, I think, most probably prevalent. One is about engaging younger people in the labor market. So there’s stuff about millennials and multi generational workforces. I think the other bit that’s interesting in that is perhaps employers have forgotten about graduate programs and apprenticeships in the last few years. And I think people are starting to think about, well, if we revisit this, how do we do it differently? How do we create some opportunities that perhaps we haven’t done for a few years? So I think that’s one area and the other one I think that we are likely to explore in some detail is this whole thing about female progression within organisations. We did a piece of research last year around executive search playing a role in getting women on boards. Clearly out of that came a lot of issues around female progression within organisations in relation to senior management positions. And so I think we’ll most probably do a little bit of work around that. And the final one is the whole stuff around the candidate experience. We’ve commissioned a piece of research that will be published this summer into getting lots of data from candidates.
Matt Alder [00:10:20]:
Right.
Kevin Green [00:10:20]:
So rather than talking to employers about candidate experience, we’re going to go out and just do a really deep dive.
Matt Alder [00:10:26]:
Okay, that’s really interesting to see. What People really think, absolutely.
Kevin Green [00:10:29]:
And then we’ll most probably try and start to align that with some of the thought leadership around candidate experience. Because I think there’s a real dichotomy and I think there’s some stuff happening there that.
Matt Alder [00:10:41]:
Cool, fantastic. Kind of moving on to some of the other research and publications you do. So you recently published a series of essays called Building the Best Jobs Market in the World. Now I’m familiar with this because I wrote one of the essays. But what was the story behind this? Why did you put this bit of work together?
Kevin Green [00:11:00]:
It sort of, some of it was. It was about influencing the political debate and the conversation that’s been happening about our jobs market. And it seems to be quite polarized. On one hand, people are saying we’ve got an incredibly flexible labour market, it’s the envy of the Western world. We’ve got record employment, falling unemployment, and then other people saying, but we’ve got precarious work, people being exploited. And actually what we wanted to do was to articulate something which was about we’ve all got a belief in having a great jobs market, we want to have a really well functioning labour market. And so what we did, it was quite, I don’t know, quite a range, I suppose, quite an eclectic mix of people that we invited to participate. So we had some economists, we had David Smith from the Sunday Times, Danny Blanchflower is very much a left wing economist. But we had some demos and some think tanks, we had some academics, we had the Work foundation, we had the TUCA cas, we had Charlie Mayfield from John Lewis. So a real, I would say eclectic, but other people have called it a rag bag. And what we said to them is what we want you to say is about your perspective on what we could do to make this, if it isn’t already the best jobs market in world, the best jobs market over the next decade. And I think from it came quite a lot of insight. I mean, the first insight is that even though people sit on the different side of the political spectrum, for us there was commonality around we want to make it easy for employers to hire people, we want people to get stepping stones into work and we know we need different sorts of jobs, but also a view that we need to make sure that people can progress and that they get lifetime learning. And whose responsibility is that? Is that government or is that employers or how do they work together? So there was lots of consistency and there was differing views. But the thing that I suppose we’re really pleased about is when we’ve Engaged with the politicians and talked to them about this. They’ve sort of taken a step back and we hope explored some of the themes and we may have changed some perspectives and some views about what’s currently going on, what’s working and what we need to do more effectively over the next five to ten years.
Matt Alder [00:13:34]:
Yeah, so I mean there are lots of, there are lots of different views in the, in the, in the book, which ones you kind of most aligned with. What’s the sort of REC’s take on the future of the jobs market?
Kevin Green [00:13:46]:
Yeah, I mean our take and I suppose it was partly not saying informed by that. I mean for us, you know, you’ve got to go back and look over the last five years, you know, we had the worst recession in living memory we’ve had, you know, and it went on for six quarters. A very different recovery with most people at that time in 2008, 2009, predicting mass unemployment, three and a half million, 11 12%. In reality it didn’t get above two and a half million and so our labor market responded very positively to a very different environment and we kept a lot of people in work and I think that’s something that we shouldn’t forget as a country. That’s quite important that you know, if you look at other European countries that have got unemployment, you know, Spain and Italy and places like that have got youth unemployment at nearly 50% and unemployment at 20 odd percent, you know, so to, you know, to keep it about 7 or 8% which you got to I think was a great result and some of that was because employers have gathered and I think over the last few years that actually you need to hang on to your talent and skills. So I think employers behave quite differently. They recognize that they need to take cost out so we’ll get rid of bonuses or perhaps we’ll let people have sabbaticals. But actually I want to hang on to my real skills and talent within my organisation. So I think employers behave differently and I think the other thing that we’ve got, and if you think about our labour market, we have a lot of people that work as freelancers or contractors and that’s very different than certainly most of continental Europe. And I think that’s something that again works for businesses but also works for individuals and I think we need to recognise that and sometimes it’s sort of swept under the carpet as self employed, just people that can’t get a permanent job. Well actually we know that there are lots of individuals that choose to work that way. I’VE got lots of friends, I’ve got lots of. Of people that are HR directors that are working as a. They might call themselves self employed or a freelancer or a contractor or running their own consultancy business, whatever you want to do. But. And I think that they do that because that suits what they want to do. They want to have a rewarding job and they want to be in control of their own destiny. At the same time, businesses have got a driver, I think, in the UK economy, as it is globally, which is talent up, cost down.
Matt Alder [00:16:05]:
Yes.
Kevin Green [00:16:06]:
So a driver for that is that means that tends to. Well, I keep my core workforce quite small, but I can flex and bring capability as and when I need it. So I think there’s some structural change going on within businesses and I think there’s some social change going on about how people want to work and how they want to engage within the labor market. And I think that creates a diversity and something that’s very powerful in the uk. So for us, I think what we’re saying is, for God’s sake, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. And the thing that we’re aware of with politicians is sometimes they act with good intentions, but there’s a lot of unintended consequences. So you get regulation, which then ends up with lots of cost and bureaucracy on businesses and on recruitment businesses, which sort of stifle their ability to do what we think is important. So for us, it was quite an interesting thing where I think a lot of the people were agreeing with us and there were some people that were disagreeing with us in the essays. But I think that’s what we want to do. We want to facilitate the conversation about what does the best jobs market look like in the world. And that means you’ve got to embrace divergent views and you’ve got to bring them together and have the debate and see if there are things that we can agree on and build some consensus around that.
Matt Alder [00:17:26]:
Cool. Kevin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Alder [00:17:29]:
That was Kevin Green. I’ve put links in the show notes to the REC’s Good Recruitment Campaign and the report on building the best jobs market in the world. As ever, you can subscribe to the podcast in itunes and on Stitcher, or alternatively in any good podcasting app. You can listen to past episodes@www.rfpodcast. thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
