A bit of a special episode this week. As regular listeners will know, “Exceptional Talent” the book I’ve co-authored with Mervyn Dinnen has just been published.
With so many of the themes covered in the book crossing over with those that get covered on the podcast I thought it would make sense to give you a deep dive into the book’s content. My guest this week to help me do this is, of course, my co-author Mervyn.
Topics we discuss:
• What is the book about and why did we write it
• Our definition of Exceptional Talent and the Talent Journey
• Getting Talent Attention
• Recruitment and Marketing
• Art vs Science in the reinvention of Assessment
• Continuous Onboarding
• HR as Talent Producers
• Developing The Employee Experience
• Engagement and Retention
• The implications of more technology in the workplace
You can buy the book here directly from Kogan Page and if you use discount code FHRET20 you’ll get 20% off.
If you want to subscribe to the Exceptional Talent mailing list to be kept updated on addition content and workshops we will be developing you can do that here www.exceptionaltalent.io
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Wreckfest. Wreckfest 2017 takes place on July 6th and is the definitive destination of the summer for in house recruiters to be celebrated and educated. This year Recfest is taking over industrial foodie haunt Hawker House in London for a forward thinking exploration of an industry awakened over the three stages. Thirty speakers will be sharing their vision of the future of recruiting, case studies and insight with over 600 in house recruiters. So if you want to join the Recfest revolution, you can find all the details and book your place@www.thisisareckfest.co.uk. that’s www.thisisrecfest.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 90 of the Recruiting Future podcast. A bit of a special episode this week as regular listeners will know exceptional talent. The book I’ve co authored with Mervyn Dinnen has been published this month.
Matt Alder [00:01:29]:
With so many of the themes covered.
Matt Alder [00:01:31]:
In the book crossing over with those that get covered on this podcast, I thought it would be interesting to give you a deep dive into the book’s content to help me do this. My guest this week is my co author Mervyn Dinnen. Enjoy the discussion.
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
Hi Mervyn and welcome to the podcast.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:51]:
Hello Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:53]:
I’m very well. For, for the benefit of everyone listening who who may not have heard your dulcet tones before, could you just very quickly introduce yourself?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:02:03]:
I can do. My name is Mervyn Dinnen. I work with primarily HR and recruitment technology companies investigating and writing and analyzing the trends happening in recruitment and hr, how we attract hire, retained and developed people. I also write kind of white papers and blogs for people and I will work in collaboration with you Matt, working with a small select group of HR technology businesses looking at their content marketing and help to produce produce thought leading, research, led content marketing. And I’ve just written a book with you as well.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
You have just written a book with me and that’s really the purpose of this week’s show. What I wanted to do is I wanted to talked about the book a few times on the podcast, sort of run adverts for it, told people that they should buy it. So I thought what would be great would be to actually sort of talk through what the book’s about and go through some of the chapters so people can really get a sense of what value it might give them. And you know, I think it’s just, just a, a bit better way of sort of digging into this than just, you know, blankly saying, please buy our book. So with that in mind, we’re going to sort of talk through the key themes and talk through some of the, some of the, some of the content in the chapters. So I’m going to get you to start off, Mervyn, if you could just tell everyone what’s the book called and what’s the book about?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:03:39]:
The book is called Exceptional Talent and it is a look at the way that the attraction, hiring, retention and development of the people we need is changing in the evolving world of work, or evolving in the changing world of work. The book opens with the introduction in which we kind of set the scene. And the book is written for HR people, recruiters, small businesses, teams in larger businesses, owner managers of businesses, general business people who maybe want to understand how these things are changing. So the introduction is a bit of a, I suppose, a general introduction to some of the themes that some of your listeners probably talk about most days, which is about kind of mobile, digital, how technology is impacting the workplace, how transparency is impacting the way that people find out about companies and what it’s like to work in companies. And a general look at how the shifting demographic changes without the focusing on one particular age group. Looking at how the four or five age ranges in the workplace are interacting and what digitisation means for one might not mean exactly the same as the other. And looking at the challenges that that brings in for hr, who obviously want a. An agile, flexible, curious, committed workforce and how they bring that together and how they let that develop. And we also look at the definition of talent itself because it’s probably the most overused word that there is in the modern labor market, in the modern HR and recruitment world, normally just implying somebody who’s good, somebody who special, someone who’s a high performer, the very best of the best, we need to try and find and keep. But actually everybody has got talent. The way work is evolving is redefining what talent means. Jobs being hired today that didn’t exist two, three years ago. We’re looking for skills that we didn’t look for before. And just focusing on specific kind of types of people and recruiting to very tight job descriptions of previous experience and accomplishments overlooks the way other people can grow, develop and contribute. And I think we are taking a much broader definition of finding people who are right for the business, right for the culture, irrespective of career trajectory, irrespective of background, people who we can support and allow them to grow and develop.
Matt Alder [00:06:20]:
Oh absolutely. And I think that that’s, that sums the book up very, very well. And regular listeners to the show will recognize a number of those themes as things that we’ve covered on the podcast and you know, things that lots of my previous guests have talked about. In fact the book cont. Large number of case studies and lots of the case studies come from people.
Matt Alder [00:06:43]:
Who’Ve been guests on the podcast.
Matt Alder [00:06:45]:
So the, the, the. The the the content will will seem very familiar to people who listen to the show regularly. So moving moving through the book, we start with talent talent attraction. So and, and move into the recruitment process. So the, the first three chapters are are about the that start of the talent journ of the exceptional talent that they that they need for their businesses and how they move those people through the recruitment process. And really we kind of split this into three sort of distinct areas. So the first chapter is about a concept that we’re calling talent attention. And talent attention is a way of thinking about the very, very noisy world we live in with all of the digital distractions that people have through their mobile and really exploring how companies can cut through that noise to get the attention of the people that they need to, they need to come and work for their, work for their business. So some of the sort of specific things that get covered. We look at the, the evolution of recruitment advertising, moving from recruitment advertising to talent attraction and now to talent attention. Look at some new models for talent acquisition that we think speak, you know, speak to the current labor market and the current economic environment and very much chime with the practitioners that we spoke to and interviewed for the book. Talk a little bit about recruitment’s persuasion problem. The fact that recruiters are very, very good at persuading people that their company is the right person to work for them on a one to one basis. But how does that happen on a one to one, on a one to many basis with the digital tools that are available. Look at the key key building blocks of social media and then talk about the employee voice in employee in employer branding. And really one of the key themes that goes through this chapter is using trust as a way of getting attention. The second chapter looks kind of more specifically at talent attraction. So once you’ve got someone’s attention, how do you actually bring them into your recruitment process? It kicks off with an exploration of the debate about recruitment and marketing. Is recruitment marketing, Are they the same thing? Are they different disciplines? What’s the relationship between them? And that was a really Interesting kind of piece to write to look at how recruitment’s evolving and what its relationship to or with marketing is. There’s a lot in there also about redefining some of the terms that we use. So really looking at phrases like passive candidates and active candidates and why they’re out of. Why they’re out of date, there’s a, a look at sourcing some of the, some of, some of the ways and the ways and means that people are attracting talent through that channel. And then a real kind of dive into what we might call social recruiting. So aspects of social media for talent attraction. Then looking at things like career sites, emerging practices like talent relationship management and what’s going on with technology that’s driving new ways of running referral schemes. So a real kind of dive into some of the tools for talent attraction, how they’re changing and how companies can make the most of them, obviously complete with case studies of people doing it. Chapter three really looks at recruiting itself. So it’s looking at the recruiting process and sort of trying to deconstruct that to work out what the most effective way of bringing the most appropriate talent into the organization can be. Got a lot in there about the battle between art and science in recruitment that personally I find really fascinating. So is recruitment a science that you can deconstruct or is it an art form that, that you can’t? And you know, I think without giving too much away, we kind of, we kind of think it might be a bit of, a bit of both. Some of the specific things that we cover in this, in this chapter, Applicant tracking systems. What’ going on with thinking around candidate experience, reinventing interviewing. This was a really, this was kind of, you know, this, this kind of got into a really interesting area. So looking at interviewing, looking at unconscious bias and looking at how technology can or can’t help in the assessment process and really just kind of reaffirming what we covered in the introduction about what is exceptional talent and the fact that anyone can be exceptional talent if they’re in the, if they’re in the right role. So that sort of really takes us through the, the recruitment half of the book, if you like. But really this is a seamless journey. So I’m going to seamlessly pass back over to Mervyn who’s going to sort of pick up and talk about how the rest of the book flows from there.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:12:05]:
Thank you, Matt. Yes, I, I think the seamless journey is an interesting point to underline that we, I mean, what we find in this, much of the Opinion is that the new talent journey is very much a journey. It used to be a series of events that we did to people. We created a vacancy, we advertised it, we collected applications, we interviewed, we made an offer. Somebody pitched up on day one and then after three months, we told them that they’d passed the probation. And then kind of a year later we reviewed them and told them if they’re in line for promotion or not. And this is now just a seamless journey that starts before there’s even a vacancy. Attention. People know about the business and goes all the way beyond so to retention, to keeping them and beyond. Because even when people leave a business, they still have a relationship with the business. They are still advocates, they are still ambassadors, they can still refer business customers and clients, they can refer other employees. And as they go and develop and get more skills, they can come back and work with us in another capacity. And so that’s very much the flavor of the book. And so, moving from the recruitment process, chapter four, it looks at the onboarding process and how this in itself isn’t just a first day event with somebody pitching up and kind of nobody knowing there, no one expecting them, no one having a desk ready, no one having their laptop ready and kind of the manager forgetting to have scheduled any work for them. And that this actually starts in the interview phase, because once you select your final interviews, you’re actually one of those people is going to join, you are beginning to onboard them. And nowadays through technology, we are able to give so much information or make so much information available to people before they join. They can do all their paperwork, they can do all their forms online, they can scan them, they can sign them digitally and have everything done and all clearances done before they start. They can begin to learn. A lot of companies have got onboarding portals now. There will be videos from directors welcoming them, there will be kind of the legacy and history of the company in visual form. They’ll get to meet their team members, they’ll get to connect with them socially through the main social networks. And it’s all about making them feel welcome and included. I mean, if you look at the research on people leaving jobs, kind of one in four people quits within their first six months. And the main reason will be that the job wasn’t what they expected. They didn’t think they fitted in, they didn’t like their manager or their team and they didn’t like the culture. And whilst some of that gets dealt with during recruitment, onboarding is the bit that really should be underlining that. So the onboarding process is really the bit that makes them say, yes, I’ve made the right decision here and that we need to get leaders involved. And a lot of it is around social integration, building those internal relationships from day one so they have a support network. They don’t feel that they’re going in cold with people that they’ve never met before. And it’s also looking at ways that we can create a better onboarding experience. And there’s lots of app based technology in the marketplace now which allows people to do a lot of this stuff through an app. It replicates the kind of consumer experience, if you like, when they’re a new customer of a business or they’re coming into some kind of club or group and it kind of replicates that kind of feeling. Chapter five takes us obviously onto the next stage, which is development and how we now develop people. It kind of starts off with a little delve back historically about the end of the job for life is it? And looks at kind of 40, 50 years ago, kind of what happened when somebody joined a big company, what kind of career paths that they took and how they were developed and how that has begun to change. And in fact, we hear about the restlessness now of people kind of not wanting to commit long term to one business. And this is reflected back to us as if this is kind of a new generation of millennials who want this. But if you look back at research that guys like Peter Capelli were doing in the US 30, 40 years ago, this was happening in the 70s and 80s, that every new generation entering the workforce has a restlessness and kind of wants to try different things and doesn’t necessarily want to join a company and stay there for 30 years. And so that has been that’ large part of the start of the book. And then looking at the ways people are now developing, that individual employees are now take more responsibility for their own development. The newer ways of learning are very much self directed. People can learn in a way that suits them, reflects the way they learn other things in their lives. There’s an interesting interview with Souk Pabil looking at how the role of head of Learning and development and OD their role is changing, how they’re more supporting managers in a variety of areas rather than traditional training, if you like. And then looking again at alternative career paths, how a lot of people nowadays would prefer to kind of move around an organization broadening their skills and development rather than the traditional linear promotion becoming a manager, but they want to broaden their skill portfolio and learn how to experience tackling new projects and assignments. And then this manifests itself in the role of managers as talent producers, which is a concept that I write about. As opposed to creating people for their own teams to make their teams bigger and better, is actually creating people for the business as a whole who will then move around. And therefore that almost recasts the HR person as a curator of skills as opposed to a developer of skills and a builder of skills. Now a lot of that is being done by the individual. They’re curators of skills. So it’s more about workforce planning and particularly with more of the, I suppose freelancer, a non employed economy is ways to bring skills in to support projects as and when we need them. Which takes us on to chapter six, which is about kind of engagement and retention. And this very much tries to define for a modern audience what is engagement. And looking at kind of the concept of ongoing attraction as opposed to specific engagement, which sounds like something you do to somebody. And looking at retention, you know what makes a great place to work? Yeah. It’s not ping pong tables, it’s not fresh fruit every Monday morning. It’s more than that. It’s an organizational soul. It’s a whole kind of culture that people want to be a part of. And we look at different ways of how people try to measure this. So we talk about the rise of the Pulse survey and modern app based technology with people almost checking in on a regular basis about how they feel about things. And they’re looking at recognition, the science behind it, the power of recognition in the workplace, it means to have that. But also looking at the role technology plays as well, because there’s a tremendous stat. Recently I saw 93% of people say that technology affects their satisfaction at work. And so we look at kind of technology, the concept of the overwhelmed employee, that we’re piling stuff on them, we’re relying a lot more on tech, giving them tech to do things, but this is actually giving them more things to do. We’re actually putting more pressure on them. And so it looks at that and then looks at how we treat them towards the end. So, you know, if the journey goes beyond retention, it’s the importance of exiting them well so that they remain advocates and ambassadors and they can return in some stage. And that is kind of, I suppose, the close of the book in that it doesn’t, the talent journey doesn’t technically have an end. It’s from attention to retention and beyond. And it kind of continues. There’s still a relationship there and that then leads on to the conclusion.
Matt Alder [00:20:27]:
Yeah, and I think you’ll get the sense by now that we, we cover a lot of ground in the book and, and that’s really deliberate. We’re covering a lot of topics because HR is changing very quickly at the moment and there are a huge amount of issues and things that people kind of have to consider. We wanted to, we wanted to sort of give them a context of this new talent journey just to try and join, join a lot of content and up that sometimes in the past might be delivered as kind of, you know, very, very separate standalone things. So really we’re kind of looking for this theme of a journey to really help people contextualize change and also the, the role of technology in all of this. So in the conclusion, obviously we summarize everything that’s got everything that’s gone before in, in the way that all good conclusions should. But also we take things a little bit further. So we. Employer branding is perhaps something that can help tie all of this journey together. We look at some of the issues in employer branding, things like how do companies get the external way that they talk about their employer brand to reflect what really goes on internally. You know, just getting across that transparency and various other issues that are pertinent to the narrative of the book. So, so that’s the book. I hope very much that you will buy it, enjoy it and find it useful if you are interested, are interested in getting a copy. If you go to www. Exceptionaltalent.IO, that’s www. Exceptionaltalent.IO. you can find out all the details you need to know about ordering the book. We’ve also got a mailing list there you can subscribe to. We’ll be producing extra content content, designing workshops and doing a number of things throughout the rest of the year round this topic. So if you want to find out more about those, you can sign up for our mailing list there. We’ll also, we’re also out and about in the next few weeks at various events and conferences, speaking, meeting to people generally sort of talking about all things exceptional talent. Mervyn, whereabouts are you going to be in the next few weeks?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:22:49]:
Okay, well, well the rest of this week I’ll be at the CIP’s Learning and Development show. I’ll actually be on a kind of a meet the author session with Kogan Page, our publishers. But we’ll be there kind of hanging around for the two days chatting to people. Towards the end of the month, 24th of May, I’m over to Bucharest for their HR summit week and I’m doing a keynote around the new talent journey there. The following week I shall be at Work Human in Phoenix courtesy of Global Force, whose work on recognition is mentioned in the book. And I’ll be there for the week. And the book would have just been published in the US So hopefully we’ll be in their bookstore at the event. And then later on I will be, I’m chairing Talent Leaders Connect in London later on in June where some of these themes no doubt will be discussed that day. And I will be also at the HR 360 summit in Vienna at the end of June.
Matt Alder [00:23:56]:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot of air miles you’re racking up there. I’m going to be, I’m going to be at Rec Tech in Barcelona next week actually with the podcast. So I’m going to be doing a show from, from, from, from that event looking at sort of various aspects of recruitment technology. I’m around in various other places. I’m going to Rome, I’m going to Poland. I’m doing all kinds of, all kinds of other stuff, details of which I’ll kind of so confirm and talk about more on the more on the podcast and of course you can find me on this show every week. Mervyn, thank you very much for joining me and thanks very much for, you know, hopefully helping people to understand a little bit more about what this book’s about, why we’ve written it and most importantly, what’s in it.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:24:43]:
It’s, it’s my pleasure, Matt. And hopefully people buy the book and enjoy it.
Matt Alder [00:24:49]:
My thanks to Murder Irvin. Exceptional Talent is available now on the Kogan Page website. I’ll put a link to that in the Show Notes where you can get a 20% discount by using the code FHRET20. It’s also available from Amazon and most other places that books are sold. There’s also a Kindle version if you’re in the U.S. the book has a separate publication date and will ship from 28th May, but you can pre order it now. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting future in your app store. You can listen to all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me.
Matt Alder [00:25:40]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:25:41]:
I’ll be back next week week and I hope you’ll join me.
