To stay relevant in changing business environments, it is vital that talent acquisition becomes ever more sophisticated. Data-driven decision making is a hot topic in our industry but how does it actually work in practice?
My guest this week is Alan Agnew, Global Head of Talent Sourcing, Campus and Talent Analytics at Philips. Philips are pioneering a talent intelligence approach to solving resourcing challenges which makes this episode an absolute must listen for every Talent Acquisition Leader.
In the interview we discuss:
• The resourcing challenges that come from business transformation
• How Philips have restructured their resourcing team to meet these challenges
• What is Talent Intelligence?
• Designing personal outreach in sourcing
• Using high-value target battle cards to leverage the EVP
• The results and broader business value they are experiencing from intelligence centric resourcing
Alan also talks about the role of technology and gives his views on the future
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:06]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 122 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In order to stay relevant in changing business environments, it’s vital that talent acquisition becomes ever more sophisticated. Data driven decision making is often talked about in our industry, but how does it actually work in practice? My guest this week is Alan Agnew, Global Head of Talent Sourcing and Talent analytics at Philips. Philips are pioneering a talent intelligence approach to solving resourcing challenges, making this an absolutely must listen interview for every talent acquisition leader. Hi Alan and welcome to the podcast.
Alan Agnew [00:01:55]:
Hi Matt,
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and sort of tell everyone a little bit about you?
Alan Agnew [00:02:02]:
Of course. So Alan Agnew, Global Head of Sourcing, Head of Campus and Head of Talent Intelligence at Philips. I returned to the UK just recently after 10 years away. During that time been very lucky to hold a variety of roles within hr, working in some exciting places at some exciting times. I was Head of Executive Hiring for EVVA in the UK before a common opportunity came up to set up the Middle east office, working in Dubai and working on a joint venture with Emirates Bank. So I experienced the boom and bust of the region all in the space of 12 months, from being sort of first man on the ground buying office furniture with my credit card to trying to expense cash purchases for visas and that sort of thing. So that was an experience. I then moved to Singapore with Aviva as HR Director for apac, with a remit to localize the business, replacing expats who are there on assignment with local talent and really promoting a local culture, fitting with our customer base. My own expat assignment was then up and I wasn’t quite ready to leave Asia yet. So I joined bp, which was just after the Deepwater Horizon spill. I joined in a general talent role which as you can imagine quickly turned into a Very much an employment branding position. First of all, very much damage limitation, but then a real opportunity to get creative which is unusual for a big multinational company in that space. And then I joined Philips in Singapore as head of talent acquisition for the emerging markets. My scope included China which was experiencing double digit growth at the time. Africa which was unlocking new markets on a monthly basis. India was fast becoming a software hub for US and Asia. Asean which was a new market entry into Myanmar and to Brunei. So very interesting times. And then also during that time had a second base in Sydney to lead an HR transformation for the region. My current role has seen me relocate to Amsterdam, then on to New York and then finally back to the UK with plenty of frequent flyer miles back into Amsterdam. Initially set up a talent intelligence function, so centralized function, providing market and talent intelligence which really allows us to make informed decisions. We contribute to the M and A activity both through identification and assessment. Of course, our location strategy, trying to determine our buy versus build strategy through skills research and really sort of transforming the sourcing team as well. In light of the Philips transformation at that time that was on our agenda.
Alan Agnew [00:04:42]:
Fantastic. That’s certainly a very interesting background taken in a lot of different, a lot of different places and challenges as well.
Matt Alder [00:04:51]:
Before I’m really interested to sort of.
Alan Agnew [00:04:53]:
Talk a bit more about how the journey Philips has been on and you know, get some more insight into the talent intelligence approach. Before that though, could you perhaps just give us a bit of an insight into the sort of the resourcing challenges that a company like Philips, that Philips might, might face? What’s kind of going on within the organization?
Alan Agnew [00:05:16]:
Sure. So we’ve been on a bit of a journey in terms of how our sourcing is structured. Our sourcing team followed the traditional model of all hard to fill roles with high volume. Now the problem there with Philips going through a transformation is that all or most roles were hard to fill. We had big variety, so one day we could be starting on our head of legal, the next day head of digital. And so more often than not we were starting with a blank piece of paper and we really were playing the role of order takers. We were receiving roles recruiters had been working on for weeks, so starting on a back foot and we were competing against the inbox of immediately available candidates and against agencies. And I think the tipping point came for me is when I heard on the telephone some of our sources speaking to candidates and putting the phone down quite quickly. And as they put the phone down they said, well, he was great, but just not right for the high volume of recruitment that I had on my desk at this moment in time. So with that we redesigned the scope of the sourcing team. My team is now functionally aligned against only three key segments which were carefully selected, identified as being key segments to accelerate our transformation. So digital being one whereby I think we need to be creative in our search because you don’t find these guys on LinkedIn. Research and development is another that’s full of new roles in the marketplace and the other one is qualitree and regulatory which by Philip’s own admission had gone through a bit of reputational damage sort of three or four years ago. And so real need for personal outreach to talk about our new strategy and our new leadership in that form. So three key segments only. We were engaged on an exclusive basis from day one. We reduced the volume to a maximum of 15 roles per sourcer and we did that by increasing the team size. So we’re up to 60 as it stands today, we are based in our global hubs and where the talent supply is located as well. And that allows us to importantly focus on 50% delivering against shortlists. And 50% of our time is on building talent intelligence and talent pipelines. And this enables us to build expertise in their field and to really play that strategic advisor role. So that’s what we’ve done in the sourcing space. I can give you one example of where we’ve been maybe a little bit strategic in that space as well. Philips as a business we’ve traditionally recruited from within industry and if I’m really honest, from the same three or four competitors. But the rapid digitalization in our industry has really ignited the demand for software enabled solutions. So we quote it as being around about $100 billion industry. And so what you’ve seen with Philips in the last sort of five, six years is that we’ve divested away from televisions, from audio and from lighting to now being an organization that just provide connected care and health informatics across health continuum. So that is things like wearables, technology, home health care solutions, mobile ultrasound. And the challenge for the recruitment team is that we now need to recruit new profiles from unfamiliar industries into healthcare and to accelerate our transformation and digitalise the industry. So we came up with what we call a high value target concept, HVT concept whereby as a recruitment function we prioritise where we select our candidates from from a select set of companies and we recognize those companies as being best in class for those skill sets. So we identify these based on their criteria. Of maybe they’re award winning, maybe it’s market sentiment. Certainly they’re going to be companies that yield a high quality candidate for us. In the past, they themselves, I’m sure, would boast strong talent development programs and I would hope they would complement our locations and our culture as well. So we do the research, come up with this list, we validate that with our leaders and our local recruiters. We have 100 companies in total and now you can give me a skill requirement in a location and I’d be confident that we could identify the top talent source in that space. One further point I’d add on that as well is the fact it’s been a bit of a change program because there’s been a big, big, big change in direction for Philips. So we needed executive leaders, sponsorship upfront, making sure we’re in line with the future direction of the organization. A lot of support from talent acquisition. So if you imagine a hiring manager who’s always interviewed a candidate from a competitor, it’s more a case of who you know and talk about the local regulations rather than interviewing somebody from different industry, which is going to be very challenging. Same with the induction piece as well. You can almost sit somebody down from a competitor and say, okay, it’s a similar type of work, get on with it versus you need to start learning about the regulations of healthcare, our processes, being able to navigate Philips as an organization. And then we’d also get the support from the leader because there’s acknowledgement that this is a longer time to recruit and longer time to be fully productive in this role as well. So in total, the recruitment is a shared decision and we of course do lots of reporting, sharing successes of candidate conversion as a result of our personal outreach.
Alan Agnew [00:10:40]:
I mean, that sounds like a really sort of, you know, major evolution and a kind of really interesting journey to have been on. How has the way that you actually sort of, you know, personally outreach to candidates changed as part of all of this?
Alan Agnew [00:10:56]:
Yeah, it’s hard to Matt. I think technology within talent acquisition and HR in general is leveling the playing field in terms of candidate search, I think, meaning potential candidates are approached continuously, which probably explains why there are so few software engineers on LinkedIn for example. And I think that puts additional pressure on that very first outreach to potential candidates. So I think aligning our sourcing team to be functionally aligned is important because it ensures our candidates are talking to the recruiting experts in their field so we can talk the language of what they do, we can talk about Philip’s strategy For exactly, both as an organization and also what they do. And we can talk about our global footprint in that space as well. But we use talent intelligence to personalize outreach as much as possible. And I’m not talking about automated emails, Quotes, back your LinkedIn profile, which is around at the moment. But we do want them to be more excited about Philips and having a reason to get excited about Philips. So to complement the high value targets, we have developed high value target battle cards. So continuing the war analogy, each company then has a comparison of what they do as an organization versus the EVP or Philips. So it could be anything around career progression, work, life balance, growth strategy. And we make a direct comparison to the company that they work for and the EVP of Philips. And it’s the intelligence that we source from places like Glassdoor from the company annual reports. It could be insights from candidates that we actually interviewed in the past ourselves. And from that we’ve got what we call a battle card that without scripting our recruiters, highlights some of the areas that the candidates may be interested in. So we already ensure that the recruiter talking to the candidate has the functionality that speak their language. We highlight where Philips is strong in our EVP without of course being critical of where they work. We may talk about the latest financial results or whatever is in the market news at the moment. We would of course highlight employees that have recently made this successful transition from the company X to Philips. We’d be very, very open about the projects they would work on and refer to some of our marketing campaigns. We have one called Code to Care at the moment for Digital Software engineers, which was really trying to attract software engineers from the games industry to come and code and help save lives and basically prioritizing our approach by personalizing it as much as possible.
Alan Agnew [00:13:38]:
So you, you mentioned talent intelligence sort of several times as a, as a kind of a central core of what you do and something that informs everything that you do. Can you sort of tell us a.
Matt Alder [00:13:50]:
Little bit more about it?
Alan Agnew [00:13:51]:
I mean, what, what does that, what does that mean to Philips? What does it cons of and what other ways does it help you?
Alan Agnew [00:13:59]:
Sure. So we’ve made talent Intelligence one of the foundations for pretty much everything we do in talent acquisition. And I guess at its most basic and most tangible, we bring talent intelligence every time we take on a new position with a hiring manager. So he or she would list some criteria that they are acquiring for the individual and then we would bring the data to help redefine some of those roles using in particular Talent pool insights and talking about what is possible in the marketplace. And that could be anything from okay, I need somebody with a master’s degree and I need them located in Eindhoven. We would bring some of the talent pool insights to say, okay, well the pool in Eindhoven is very small. However, if we start looking at less of a master’s degree qualification, but more maybe just a general bachelor’s degree, this is how it increases your talent pool. We may look at having two coding languages experience rather than the three that was initially asked for, making sure that that could be served maybe somewhere elsewhere in the organization and it would make our life a lot easier. But importantly, we’re managing the expectations of the hiring manager. Now the next step of that is to develop what we call a total workforce demand solution. And that’s really starting to assess the needs of the business versus hiring solutions. Meaning do we need a permanent hire within that role? Could it be aqua hiring as a solution contingent or contractors or even contracting out? And we’re looking at sourcing all of these different channels ourselves within Philips then probably may be at a more strategic level in terms of talent intelligence. Well, we’ve always historically made decisions based on macroeconomic factors such as the location move. It would be based upon cost basis, maybe tax incentives, the political climate or even following the competition at times. But I believe the TA function has really firmly earned a seat at the table, such as the importance of talent supply in location strategy. I think it was PwC a couple of years ago put a figure of $150 billion, what they call talent mismatch, whereby organizations could not recruit according to their strategic workforce plans. And that’s really the role that we play to try and bridge some of that gap. So as a result, any location change within Philips needs to go through my team, our team study the talent supply on locations, both the current supply and also the future state as well. We do that using everything that’s in the public domain. So migration trends, we look at university graduate volumes, we look at the skills development, et cetera. And then we can extend that to being not just location specific, but general market specific as well. So a general skills assessment comparing the future demand of Philips and our competitors as well, that’s who we’re competing against versus the future supply. And that combined helps us start determining our buy versus build strategy. So that’s probably two examples at both extremes where we’ve used talent intelligence to start impacting some of those commercial decisions where I’m very keen for the function to go Next is looking and working closely with our sales and bid teams as well and what talent insights can provide into those teams for competitive advantage in sales or bid management.
Alan Agnew [00:17:27]:
That’s an absolutely fascinating approach.
Matt Alder [00:17:30]:
What kind of results have you got from it?
Alan Agnew [00:17:32]:
What are you seeing in terms of what’s coming back from this sort of intelligence centric way of approaching resourcing?
Alan Agnew [00:17:40]:
Well, a couple of things. So in the location example that I just gave, we’ve actually vetoed and blocked some of the locations simply because we didn’t think there was enough talent available longer term there. And again that was one of maybe three or four different factors why we actually didn’t go ahead with those locations in the end. But I think it was an important contribution that we made from an M and A perspective. We are asked to do an assessment on organisations we’re potentially targeting or acquiring, I should say, and we assess the talent that currently exists with that organization and what they would be looking for in the future. And again that’s sort of rubber stamping some of those acquisitions. And then in Aqua hiring as well, where we’ve been asked to look at particular skill sets, how long would that take to build versus to buy? We realized that the candidate market was particularly small in that space and so we actually recommended a couple of acquihires of some smaller organizations that had that talent in abundance. And so a couple of those are actually going through due process as we speak.
Alan Agnew [00:18:45]:
You mentioned technology earlier as being something that’s kind of rapidly sort of changing and influencing the resourcing and talent attraction space. How do you guys use technology to kind of support these, these, these processes? What sort of, you know, how does it help you deliver, deliver on all of this?
Alan Agnew [00:19:06]:
So I think obviously the data piece is huge. Data is available to anybody that wants it, that wants to go looking for it. For some of this data you can pay an additional premium of course, and have it consolidated. But I guess the real key piece is how do we interpret that data and what does that then mean for Philips as an organization? And that’s where we sort of, I guess really sort of earn our pound of flesh, as it were. So translating whatever is available in that marketplace that could be through a variety of sources. It could be through some basic LinkedIn talent data, it could be something a little bit more advanced, such as a talent neuron data assessment and then we translate that and put it into a business context. So what does that mean for Philips?
Matt Alder [00:19:52]:
Final question, what’s next? I mean, where do you take this next?
Alan Agnew [00:19:56]:
How do you See it developing over the next sort of 18 months, two years.
Alan Agnew [00:20:00]:
I think if you look at the foundational pillars that TA is based upon, I don’t think much has changed in recent times and probably even longer times as well. I think certainly if you compare to other industries, we watch our TV on demand, we stream our music, we download our books and we rate our Uber drivers. I think recruitment is crying out for that consumerism approach at the very least. So transparency through our recruitment process and career paths, so knowing exactly who you’re going to meet, how long that’s going to take, when there’s going to be a decision. For example, personalization is a big one. The targeted outreach is a basic example that I gave us. But I see that advancing personalization through assessment, through induction, through reward. I think it still amuses me how there’s a one size fits all policy in organizations that is expected to benefit the five generations of employees, whilst at the same time we are all aiming for a diverse workforce and I think continued data driven decision making as well. If you look at the employment trends, the big two are very interesting. The concept of the gig worker to me is a realization simply of the flexible firm concept, which was coined by Atkinson, I think, in the 80s, which was having a set of co workers and peripheral workers. And then the other big trend featuring in the media at the moment is the demand for talent, how it’s outstripping supply. It’s what keeps us awake at night. And of course was exactly that concept predicted by McKinsey in the War for Talent and that was published in the 90s. So I think these secular trends may have peaked at the moment, but may not have matured. And so I’m sure probably in the next 10 years or so that we will still be planning for changing demographics, changing our workforce composition. I just hope and pray that we would all agree by then that AI and robotics will augment our workforce rather than be taking over our jobs. Because that’s a continuous debate.
Alan Agnew [00:22:01]:
Absolutely. We live in very interesting times. Alan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Alan Agnew [00:22:07]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:22:08]:
My thanks to Alan Agnew. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by Searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find 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. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
