We live in changing times and change is certainly being felt in the recruitment industry at the moment. Technology is changing, communication is changing, candidate expectations are changing and for many employers the talent landscape is growing ever more competitive. Strategically driving the systems and organizational change needed to keep up is big challenge for in house recruitment leaders.
My guest this week is Barry Flack . Barry has worked in senior HR and recruiting leadership positions within a number of fast changing industries.
In the interview we discuss:
• How organizations need to get on the front foot with their recruiting strategies and stop being reactive
• The reason why many employers are stuck with legacy “record keeping” recruitment technology.
• The importance of embracing technology that improves user experience, candidate experience and enables proactive sourcing
• Ways in which recruitment leaders can drive the strategic change needed within their organisations.
Barry also gives us his view on the key trends to watch in the future.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Wreckfest. In the summer of 2016, as the eyes of the world turn to Rio de Janeiro, Wreckfest brings its own style of street carnival to the recruitment industry, taking over borough market in London. Now in its third year, RecFest is a one day celebration of all things in house recruitment and resourcing. With an emphasis on the power of sharing, Recfest creates one of the largest conversations of in house recruitment professionals in the world. To get a discount on your ticket, head to www.thisisrecfest.com and use the code PODCAST16.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 42 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Our industry is living through changing times. Technology is changing, candidate expectations are changing, and for many employers, the talent landscape is growing ever more competitive. Strategically driving the systems changes a lot of employers need to keep up is a big challenge for recruitment leaders. My guest this week is Barry Flack. Barry has worked in a number of HR and talent leadership positions within several fast changing industries. Keep listening to hear his thoughts on driving transformational change.
Matt Alder [00:01:42]:
Hi Barry, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Barry Flack [00:01:45]:
I’m doing absolutely great, thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
Good stuff. It’s Friday morning, so nearly the weekend, which is always good. Could you, could you introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a bit about your background and what you do?
Barry Flack [00:01:58]:
Of course I can, Matt. Yeah. I’m an individual with a fairly varied background now, stretching some 20 odd years in the HR industry. If there was one thread that ties together my entire career, it’s been an appetite for change and a guy who I guess has been seen as helping organizations transform themselves. That’s taken me on a rapid journey through the health service in the beginning, through to a telecoms provider during the 90s, through an enormous amount of change and certainly into that rapid transformation that’s taken place as we approach this particular century across such organizations and industries as financial services, telecoms, tech startup businesses, retail, utilities. With a real clear thread in there that, as we all know, and as certainly our listeners are very aware of, we’ve gone through in that period some rapid and fundamental change in the workplace.
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
Absolutely. Specifically, how do you think in house recruitment has changed in the sort of last three or four years from your experience?
Barry Flack [00:03:15]:
Yeah, I guess what has pleased me in many respects in terms of what I’ve seen is a very clear realization that the reactive manner by which we as organizations have tackled recruitment Tackled talent is no longer sustainable. So I’ve gone through a whole series of organizations that I think have sat content realizing that getting themselves through either a high volume of recruitment or specialist recruitment in some, you know, lesser degree has been very much about answering any distress gaps in the organization and a recruitment who, you know, I think has suffered historically by being somewhat siloed and silent, frankly, has suffered by being almost a service delivery arm required to make sure that the business operates just within its own potential reach. What I’ve seen over the last few years is a clear acceptance that the world’s changed, that what we now need to do from a recruitment point of view is get on the front foot, that we’ve got to be proactive. Technology has clearly helped move what was previously a debate that was massively centered around efficiencies and cost to one where we’re incredibly enthusiastic about the emerging technologies that have come through. But now the challenge happens to be that that’s an opportunity and some organizations are grasping it, some industries are, some are waking up late to the game. But there is a common perception that we’ve now got to get onto the front foot and be in front of an agenda rather than being content with the old resourcing function that literally had a series of numbers to deliver, typically most distressed. Inside a business that’s trying to deal.
Matt Alder [00:05:21]:
With change, and you mentioned technology there and technology change and innovation and the things that are going on. There are a number of organizations where technology or the older technology that they’re using is actually potentially holding them back. Would you agree with that? And if so, why do you think that’s happening?
Barry Flack [00:05:47]:
We went through six, seven years ago, a much smaller market where we had clearly, I would argue two big main players and what was an applicant tracking system market. And if you take the wider HR function, there was almost a parallel debate going on in what were big hris systems and inside those of course had hidden always a module on recruitment that was being developed. Both of those were in terms of today, clunky. They were record keeping machines. They were there to help us deal with the volume and understand that volume. And what we’ve tended to do is we haven’t caught sight of the fact that the market now from a systems perspective is all clearly about user experience. We’ve flipped at some point between having a user experience at work that couldn’t compare with the lack of technology at home. That has flipped and we’re now left, I think in some respects with contracts in established organizations, with legacy systems that are Giving us very limited ability to impact upon the user experience, the candidate experience, and frankly go after that proactive talent strategy around sourcing that we equally need to get in front of to give ourselves some competitive advantage.
Matt Alder [00:07:17]:
From a broader HR technology perspective, which you touched on there, do you think that organizations are still in that mindset that they need to to have all of their HR tech from one supplier and if that means poor recruitment technology, so be it. Or are you seeing more of a change in attitude in HR in general towards more flexibility and agility?
Barry Flack [00:07:45]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really good question. My theory on this is we’re held back by a system and this is not, I would suggest, a technology system. This is much more about how the rules of engagement at work hamper us to be a little bit more enlightened. I think what that means is an awful lot of the decision making power, clearly, as you would expect around hr directors have them from a legacy of being business partners. We don’t have enough, I think people who’ve risen to the top, who’ve got the fabled seat at the table, allowing real good judgments on what the technology landscape looks like. And of course also within that system we’ve got our procurement functions in house, who’ve got a very clear sense of what good looks like that’s driven very much about simplicity, about cost, about scale. They naturally dislike standalone systems sitting in a part of HR that they don’t understand. So you then got into a CEO who frankly is utterly overwhelmed by some of what we’re dealing with today. What you’ve therefore got is a need to have a characteristic inside the recruitment function that pushes a corner that literally says the functionality that we’re getting in some of those old legacy systems will frankly not give us a desired strategic advantage that we’ve gone after to promote our own brand, to collect and engage with our own talent communities, and to convert talent into our organization on an ongoing 24 7, always connected basis. But that’s hard and I have a lot of sympathy for recruitment leaders out there who have that to battle against. But I would also say that a huge part of the skill set to be successful has got to be about us pushing as leaders doing the right thing inside a very crowded marketplace.
Matt Alder [00:09:56]:
What would your advice be to a recruitment leader to help them drive that change? Because I know that there are a number of recruitment leaders I know who are excellent at that, but actually there’s probably a much bigger number of people who either don’t want to or don’t know how to drive that kind of change. What would your advice be?
Barry Flack [00:10:19]:
Yeah, look, I think the advice has got to be that underpinning everything we talk about, the advantage technology gives is this is still very much about a people relationship business. So any of our recruitment leaders has got to recognize that they’ve got to join up the dots with a wider strategy of the business. They’ve got to be able to really understand how to build a business case that understands frankly the fears. If it calls that out of a HR business partner of a HR director within the business, we’re still caught up, I think in a bit of a malaise where the business, the wider HR community frankly don’t care how things get done because they equally are overwhelmed by other things that they need to do. But what we’ve got to do is, and I don’t think we’re very good at this is building that business case and that business case is about a longer term relationship build. We’ve got to put aside some of the mantras that come up every so often about leaving HR behind and looking longfully and blissfully at the marketing departments. And without the history of building a silo around a very important functional area, that social capital of helping the rest of the people organization get back to basics will pay dividends. But that has been something I haven’t seen as a core competence in too many of our recruitment functions.
Matt Alder [00:11:54]:
You mentioned the whole concept of experience a couple of times. That’s user experience or in employee experience or business experience in general. What’s your sort of specific view around that? Because I know it’s much discussed as a big business and HR and recruitment trend at the moment.
Barry Flack [00:12:16]:
Yeah, look, there’s, if I think of one particular anecdote in an organization I walked into, they had been putting into their annual people report, you know, front up front and center, page one, that one of the things they were so proud about was the volume of applicants that they were attracting to their organization. That was some false sign of their validity. Importance brand was the number of people who seemingly wanted to go into their applicant tracking system and get lost in there. The debate at the board table amongst incredibly clever business people that that was just the wrong lens to go after. That the indirect consequences of what that meant for them, especially given that they were a high street retail organization, was crippling. They were in danger of diluting everything that their consumer brand was trying to build as they were fishing in exactly the same pool. But it’s not untypical. There’s lots of old mantras that have not been challenged. And look, frankly, us in that recruitment profession have got to be the people who’ve got to take the lead on that. We can’t sit on LinkedIn and berate it constantly and we can’t sit around in our own silos shrugging our shoulders. We’ve got to take that battle on because we get it. We’ve got to understand that some of that legacy technology that frankly was put together by technologists and not recruiters, that was incredibly good at allowing us to move into it and tracking it from a record perspective now needs to build a case that resonates with a board and with a business that has other concerns. It’s not going to happen on its own. It’s got to be us and we’ve got to take some leadership.
Matt Alder [00:14:11]:
No, I think that’s some really sensible, proactive thoughts there. Final question. What trends, whether they’re technology trends or other trends, are you seeing at the moment that you’re most interested in for the future? What do you think is going to take hold and where is everything going?
Barry Flack [00:14:35]:
I think I would talk about a couple of things. I think if you look at the constituent parts of what makes up the landscape for the internal recruiter. My conversations and my observations suggest that everybody is now into building levels of capability to up their game. I’ve had a long history in the market of RPOs. There’s a very lazy, almost reactive debate around their value in the market, which I think needs challenged. I think some of them are clearly building strength in their organization beyond a transactional numbers game, which is one of the criticisms they’ve had in the past. You look then across in terms of what we are looking at in relation to the internal recruitment function. I think what we are in danger of is how much can we make up in grind after so many years of underinvestment. I do believe that we should clearly be learning the sort of art and science that has been used to an extent around marketing. We should clearly be knowledgeable about what’s in that technology market and I’ll mention some of those things in a minute. But what we’re not good at is we don’t really have an investment in ourselves mentality that allows us to walk with these things. The talent recruitment marketplace, the ability to be successful now, I’d say is three or four times more complex than it was a decade ago. With that hand in hand means that if we are not willing to put a level of investment in the people that is in there at the right level and what I mean by that would be we’ve created a little bit of an industry and noise around sourcing and sourcing techniques, which is absolutely right. But I think somewhere amongst it we’ve lost that old legacy skill of sales. This is still a relationship business. This is still about connecting with individuals in a manner that we’re moving slowly from the content that we’re able to push out to the increasing use of video from an employment branding perspective that truly engages with is much more than reading it in black and white. But frankly, we’re going to need to move the debate and dialogue along to find a way of putting an element of human back into a process that we were forced to have years ago when we sat around with our Rolodex and our telephone lines and how survival was very much about how we were sweet talking the secretary of the chief executive or otherwise. I think the generation that is coming through at the moment has got some great skills around mining into technology, but frankly, we need to be striking a level of balance around how we are converting some of the biggest decisions we’re making at the moment, which is where we’re going to pitch up from a career job perspective. And what are the skills that will help us convert really good people in the marketplace?
Matt Alder [00:17:56]:
Barry, thank you very much for talking to me.
Barry Flack [00:17:59]:
Not at all.
Matt Alder [00:18:00]:
My thanks to Barry Flack. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes and on Stitcher. To listen to past episodes, get email updates and find out more about me, go to www.rfpodcast.com. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
