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.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:16]:
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 employers. 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 organizations should measure to ensure great recruitment practice, and how employers can align talent attraction and talent management.
Matt Alder [00:00:50]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest today is Adrian Thomas. Hi Adrian, how you doing?
Adrian Thomas [00:01:00]:
Hi Matt. I’m doing great, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
Yeah, I’m not too bad at all, not too bad at all. It’s Friday today and Fridays are always, always good. Could you start off just by introducing yourself, telling us what you do, you know, how you’ve got there, what you’ve done in the past, all that kind of thing?
Adrian Thomas [00:01:18]:
Sure. I’ve recently held a whole bundle of in house recruitment roles and covering some, some of the UK’s more recognizable names like GSK and World Bank of Scotland. And more recently I’ve been consulting and helping support organisations set up recruitment and that led me into my current role with the Cabinet Office, helping them introduce a talent management talent acquisition process capability across the recently formed project delivery profession. And they are very keen to have the very best project managers delivering what is effectively the country’s most important and largest and highest risk projects. And it’s important that they get their very best project managers assigned to the right project. So I’m brokering 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 into the private sector and 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 Recruitment Society and I think I’m a big advocate for recruitment and the role it has to play in companies and other organisations, wider public and private sector organizations today and the value that a really good recruitment practice can bring.
Matt Alder [00:02:56]:
So for those people who might not be familiar with the Recruitment society, could you sort of tell us a little bit about, you know, what it is and what it does?
Adrian Thomas [00:03:06]:
Yes. Well, a characteristic of incurred society is it doesn’t represent any one sector. Most of the other representative bodies have at their center, they’re either representing agencies or they’re representing in house, or they’re representing particular branches of recruitment, whether it is psychometrics or whether it’s advertising and so forth. The recruitment site 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, to comment on what is best practice, appropriate practice, because we have that independent review across all the sectors and are reliant on that.
Matt Alder [00:03:52]:
So I’m going to come back and ask you about best practice and, you know, your view on, you know, certain things that are going on in recruitment at the MOM from the kind of recruitment society perspective. But first I’d just be interested to, you know, to find out a little bit more about how working with the Civil Service is different from, you know, your sort of previous roles in the private sector.
Adrian Thomas [00:04:19]:
Well, I was delighted to be asked to help them set up their new approach to maximizing 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 both private sector and public sector really have a passion for hiring the very best and often haven’t really got a clear understanding of how best to reach out to get that best talent into their organisation. And they will usually take an approach to recruitment that is haphazard or the way they’ve always done it, or it’s part of somebody else’s responsibility. What I found that consistent between the private and the public sectors is that when you talk to them about what recruitment can offer and the differences, you have people. The one big difference is the Civil Service is very, it’s a difficult word to put it, but it is very open to public scrutiny. Whereas the private sector may move with a speed and focus that lands them a great person in the role. Recruiting in the Civil Service requires much more openness, transparency about how decisions are made and how appointments are made, and that can slow things down a little bit, but it doesn’t impact the final opportunity, the final bringing in the right people if it’s 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 all in encased in the recruitment process. I think the best of both worlds.
Matt Alder [00:06:26]:
That sounds like, I mean, yeah, that sounds like a pretty interesting combination, sort of changing direction and just wanted to sort of get your opinion on, you know, a few debates that are kind of out there in the, in the industry at the moment. And the first one would be RPO versus kind of in house. So, you know, what’s your view on outsourcing recruitment or having an in house team or you know, a mix of the two.
Adrian Thomas [00:06:58]:
I think the arguments here have been well rehearsed and can become quite polar in house professionals believing that they have all the answers and they can represent the company and the brand and there’s an element of that in that. Whereas RPOs talk about well actually that’s better business, they bring consistency in process and get control of a recruitment activity and can deliver a lot cheaper. I think there is 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 recruitment inside, it’s run based similar to the way they would run recruitment externally. Very process driven and based on service levels and driving that cost levels and service levels, time to turn around, time to answer calls, et cetera. What is missed in, and this is what I’m bringing in my current is actually this great challenge. In all organisations, companies have spent fortunes hiring in and developing and training, setting objectives and managing against those. They’re people in the organization 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 life without ever really discovering 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 organization. In house teams can do that. They can really work with other line managers and with HR managers to really build price leap between the role that people do, their development plan, their readiness for the next role, their stretch that they put into jobs and moving them in the organisation to the organisation’s best interest. In house teams are also there. If that movement isn’t working and they need to go outside, then they understand the role, they understand the culture, the brand intimately of the organisation and so they can bring all of that good practice with the knowledge of the brand and the culture, with an addition they want to be and finally impres. Teams who have seen them deployed really effectively also can help when organizations are struggling and they’re looking at how to restructure or to even in worst case scenarios, closing facilities, closing sites, reducing workforce, having a talented group of people who are, whose core role is interviewing, assessing, looking at roles and bringing out those roles as cue skills. They’re the same skills you use when you’re downsizing and you’re selecting people, etc. So I think in the fullness of use, an in house queue does trump an RPO outsourced agreement or any similar agreement when it’s looked at in the full roundness of the services it can offer. Often you don’t find them doing as much as I’ve just described and that down to companies to realize them.
Matt Alder [00:10:43]:
Okay, thanks. I think that’s a really interesting and useful answer and contribution to the debate. Basically you obviously mentioned at the start there about the sort of metrics that RPOs kind of measuring in terms of cost and speed and all those kind of things. What’s the sort of 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?
Adrian Thomas [00:11:21]:
Well, there’s one that will drop into the cost per hire, which is an absolute crazy measure. It’s one we have to know. If you don’t understand finance, you don’t understand cost. If you don’t understand value, it’s very difficult for heads of resourcing or senior recruiters or HR people to have those meaningful conversations with finance directors in the management of organisations. So we have to speak the right language. And if we can speak the right language, we can get people to start thinking a little bit more broadly simply around cost per hire. There’s a great conundrum that people come up with all the time. I hear all the time about quality, cost and time. You can have high quality, you can have low cost, you can have fast time, you can’t have all three together. Pick two people. Often take. A number of times I’ve been pitched to by organizations, both RPOs and recruitment agencies, and the decresearch firms who say they can do all three. They can’t. I don’t believe anybody. There may be an exception and someone’s going to probably comment on this podcast and say they can, but I’d be really shocked and I’d be delighted to go and visit an organization that says they can get those three things together. In my view, it’s not a single metric. It really depends on the hire that you’re making as to which of those metrics are important. Quality is the one that most. And if you are not hiring for high quality, then I’m not sure what you’re hiring for. Are you trying to recruit the worst applicant? Then I want 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 processes, I can perhaps talk more about that later. But the quality, cost, timekeeping dependent on the type of recruitment. If you’re looking for an interim turnaround specialist who’s going to come in and spend three months grabbing hold of your most important project that’s worth billions potentially in lifetime cost, and you just want them to get in and deliver a new, setup, a new team to manage that project, then you’re not going to spend months and months and months doing a full recruiting process based on who’s got all the right soft skills to lead an organization. You want someone who can arrive on Monday, who can stump the debt and make the changes. So their time has to be fast and you compromise on maybe the cost, because the cost of not having that person is more than the cost of getting them in. So you need to understand what the role that you’re recruiting is for and then, and then appropriately.
Matt Alder [00:14:20]:
That makes a lot of sense. So you, I mean, you, you sort of talked a little bit about this before and you, you kind of alluded to it there and you know, the sort of connection between, you know, talent acquisition and, you know, talent talent management. What is it that organizations need to be doing in this area to kind of sort of reap the biggest benefits?
Adrian Thomas [00:14:44]:
Well, I would say they need to step back and actually think, is their recruitment process, is their recruitment meaningful at the basic level? And by that I mean, do they actually take notice of their recruitment practice? Yes. The time that is spent building a really good brief for either an internal team or an external partner to use to recruit against is really valuable. Understanding the role and understanding where to go find the right people. If you simply put adverts out, you just cast a wide net and some adverts will attract more than others and some advertising groups will attract more than 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. So the more information you can give, the better you can articulate the role in the right language. The more likely you are for somebody to say, actually that’s the role for 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 money forward for that particular role. And then we spend a lot of time and effort making people go through recruitment processes often and only to find the manager has made their decision on the first 10 seconds of somebody walking in the office. So what do I mean by 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 assessing the right people? At the end of the day, have the managers brought into that process, 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 a decision that is going to align the incoming individual with the team they’ve got already with the team that they’re joining and the activities of the organisation? Or is it simply abruptly? And that sounds a little bit weird, but I’ve heard it time and time again where managers will often say I know the right person is when I see them. I’ll know it is 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 were the wrong individual. The ones I’ve seen today are the ones where there’s been a really great recruitment practice that’s really aligning the values and requirements of the organization with the individual and the individual has gone through a proper recruitment process where they have met more than one person, where they have bought into the organization. At the end of the day these things are two sided. An organization when oh role the individuals that are expected and if you want to have longevity, if you don’t want to have retention problems, then getting the right information to the candidate is absolutely vital into the candidate to decide that that’s the company that they want to join. And finally, I’m stunned that a number of times I’ve seen the competencies that are used to recruit people are not competencies that organizations use to develop them. To me it is an absolute no brainer that the competencies and values that you use to measure your objectives against when you’re developing your individual organization, they absolutely have to be the competent people you recruit against. Otherwise you’re recruiting an apple to become a pet. And to me simply that’s dark.
Matt Alder [00:18:37]:
So final question, what’s next? What do you think we should be sort of looking out for in recruitment in the next 18 months to two years? What’s coming over the horizon?
Adrian Thomas [00:18:51]:
Well, you know, I’ve had that conversation a number of times in fact by email. Worked with an ex colleague of mine from Network early this morning and I think that there’s a good vibe in recruitment. There seems to be lots of people applying for lots of roles and that often comes from a level of confidence, companies prepared to recruit and increase their staff when there’s a degree of stability in the economy, when there’s a hope that the economy is going to grow and uncertainty is being removed. And just maybe the recent election has given some organizations, some companies, that 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 out of your comfort zone. All of those things are decisions that candidates think about when they think about leaving a role and applying for another. I think again, when economy inflation is very low, I think it’s circa zero at the moment, year on year or certainly the consumer price index is anyway, that sort of, that’s sort of those sort of two bits. The two elements of stability, the economy and the companies preparing to invest and candidates willing to put themselves forward means there’s never been a better time for recruitment to demonstrate it’s done. It can add into companies and organizations in the further interest of building great people and great jobs.
Matt Alder [00:20:49]:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Adrian Thomas [00:20:52]:
Thanks, Matt. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Matt Alder [00:20:54]:
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@www.rfpodcast.com and also subscribe to the mailing list there to get exclusive, exclusive content and find out about future guests. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
