150 episodes, another milestone reached! A huge thank you to everyone who has listened, subscribed and supported the show over the last three years; I couldn’t have got to this point without you. To celebrate the 150th episode, I wanted to showcase a slightly different format that I have been working on for a while. This week’s episode is slightly longer, features a number of interviews and takes a real deep dive into its topic.
The topic I’m exploring this time around is recruiting capability in collaboration with experienced resourcing leader John Wallace who has previous lead recruiting teams at RBS, Barclays and Tesco Bank. In the episode you will find:
• The reasons why we are asking whether talent acquisition is good enough
• An interview with Simon Rutter, former Global Employer Brand Director at Takeda, about his experiences as a job seeker
• An interview with Fiona Alder, an experienced board level director in the drink industry, about her experience of recruiting as a hiring manager
• An interview with Craig Donaldson, CEO of Metro Bank PLC, about his strategic vision for recruiting as a function
• Mine and John’s thoughts on the steps that need to be taken to improve talent acquisition
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from SurveyMonkey for HR. SurveyMonkey helps solve some of the toughest challenges facing human resources departments today. From recruiting to retention to off boarding, SurveyMonkey gives you the expertise, speed and scale you need to collect any type of employee feedback. So whether you want to improve employee experience, increase employee engagement, or streamline program application management, Survey can help start collecting and acting on employee feedback to attract, engage and retain top talent for your business. Visit surveymonkey.com hr today and learn how to start building a better workplace.
Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 150 of the Recruiting Future podcast. 150 episodes. Another milestone reached. A huge thank you to everyone who’s listened to, subscribed to and supported the show over the last three years. I could not have got here without you. To celebrate the 150th episode, I wanted to showcase a slightly different format that I’ve been working on for a while. This week’s episode is slightly longer than normal and takes a much deeper dive into its topic. If it’s popular, I’ll produce more shows like this, so please let me know what you think. The topic I’m exploring this time around is recruiting capability and I’ve collaborated on it with experienced resourcing leader John Wallace who has previously led recruiting teams at Barclays, RBS and Tesco Bank. Listen on to hear a series of interviews and a link to download the mini white paper we’ve written to accompany this episode. Hi John and welcome back to the podcast.
John Wallace [00:02:18]:
Hi Matt, delighted to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
So we’re currently sitting in a coffee shop in Edinburgh, coffee shop run by a very well known brand on Princes Street. Looking out the window and see a beautiful silhouette of Edinburgh Castle against the the late summer sun. They’re packing up from the festival all around and you know everyone, everyone’s kind of agreed that it’s been a pretty amazing summer. You look slightly perturbed. What’s. What’s on your mind?
John Wallace [00:02:46]:
Thanks Matt. Yes, I am slightly perturbed, apart from the fact that I can now get parked in the city centre again, which is always a bonus and we’ve had a fantastic festival. The reason for my slight perturbance would be an article I read just the other day and it was a recruiter talking about the War for Talent. Clearly in an effort to sell their service and say how they could help you Win the war for talent. Now, what perturbs me is that this was an expression coined in 1997 by McKinsey & Co. And that feels like a long time ago. And I just wonder, why are we still talking about that? And actually, is there something in this about how the recruitment profession really needs to up its game to actually start dealing with this? I mean, is there really a war for talent? We still see in another couple of reports that was reading by Boston Consulting Group and Ernst and Young that when they do their annual leadership surveys, hiring, particularly hiring of leaders and senior executives, still ranks as number one or number two concern for chief executives. And we really have to ask your question, is, is this always external factors or is there something that recruiters can do better to make sure we help our businesses?
Matt Alder [00:03:59]:
So I think that’s an interesting point because we, you know, what we can glean from that is that recruitment is incredibly, incredibly important. And I think that, you know, time and time and again, you know, we’re hearing about skill shortages here and the difficulty in recruiting people and demographic issues and issues, issues with. Issues with immigration, you know, all kinds of things that are making recruiting difficult. So you’re kind of suggesting that, you know, despite all that, you know, recruiters could do better and recruitment could work better, Is that what you’re saying?
John Wallace [00:04:34]:
Yeah, I think that’s a fair summary. I mean, of course, it’s not a blanket approach. I’m not saying that everybody in recruitment is not doing a good job. What you see is some people doing a great job all over the place. But when you talk to pretty much anybody who has been a candidate at any point in time, they will have a horror story. If you speak to most line managers in most organisations, will they really say the recruitment team are doing a great job? For me, recruiters seem to be in the weeds a lot, as in running to stand still, doing lots of stuff. And other things that we hear about recruiters saying they can’t get the investment to do the stuff they want. Well, are they selling the business case? I mean, are we really building a powerful argument to say that avoidance of the cost of a bad hire is worth the investment to make good hires? Are we really aligned to the business plans for the organization? I mean, I really do think that, you know, for recruiters, if we want to be taken seriously as a profession, we need to take ownership of a process that we own, that in essence, we need to make sure that we put our stamp on it and it becomes an absolutely invaluable part of the business, as opposed to what it is quite often is an adjunct onto human resources, which is quite often not seen as an important part of the business in itself. Does that make sense, Matt?
Matt Alder [00:06:00]:
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And it’s certainly something that’s come across on a lot of the other podcast interviews that I’ve, you know, I’ve spoken to a number of recruiting leaders who are having, you know, success in lots of. Lots of different ways. And all of them seem to be sort of taking a step up and owning the strategy and looking very, sort of very carefully at some of the issues that you mentioned. Interestingly as well, I was a talent attraction, talent acquisition conference in India a few months ago, and they actually did a panel of. A panel of CEOs talking about what they wanted from, you know, what they wanted from recruiters. And, you know, it was kind of, sort of very. It was, it was, it was very clear, and it was very clear how important recruitment was. And they were both being very clear that their door was open to, you know, the recruitment team to kind of remove blockages and, you know, get. Get things done. And interestingly, I’ve been talking to a recruiter in the audience just before that who’d been complaining that she couldn’t, you know, get anything done within her organization because, you know, because no one was listening to recruitment, it wasn’t important, and all those kind of things. So it seems that there’s some kind of disconnect there. I mean, what’s your experience of that? How does that sort of manifest itself in organizations that you’ve worked in?
John Wallace [00:07:20]:
I think that’s a really interesting experience, Matt. Firstly, the idea that they have a CEO, a business leader opening up a recruitment conference, I think is not something you see too often on this part of the world. So I think that that speaks volumes for perhaps an economy that actually recognizes that the fluidity of people from business to business is extraordinarily important to them. My experience and, you know, and again, I haven’t got things always right in my career. I’ve often got things wrong in my career, so I can hold this, hold the light up to myself as well, is that quite often I would be the voice that HR directors would want to hear when things were going wrong and what am I going to do to put things right? But when things were going well, there was less for me to talk about, and therefore the HR director’s attention would turn to other things. Now, perhaps that’s an indication of the firefighting nature of that particular role. But actually, what was I doing to make the HR director believe in the case for recruitment and how much we could contribute towards the business? And going back to the other point that you made about recruiters finding places to blame for things going wrong, how often have I heard my career recruiters talk about line managers not doing what they should be doing? How often have I heard agency recruiters talking about the in house team not doing what they should be doing? How often I’ve heard about CVs sitting on desk emails, not replied to candidate complaint letters and so on and so forth. And all these things seem strange to me because if we own the process, if this is our activity, then blaming other people for things that goes wrong seems a bit poor to me that we haven’t made the case for them. In the instance of a line manager not getting back to a declined candidate, we haven’t explained the importance of why they need to do that and won that particular argument, just rather than telling people it’s part of the process. So recruitment is incredibly important, particularly in the modern age where we see more fluidity about organisations. But it’s not just recruitment, of course, it’s that joining up within the organisation as well. Your internal job market, how talent moves, what you do with temporary staff, it’s the whole resourcing mix and actually just having recruitment in a silo that does this. Talent acquisition, external activity, again, it’s pushed to the periphery. But what are we doing to make sure we’re at the centre is the point.
Matt Alder [00:09:53]:
You talk about poor candidate experience, which is the, you know, the thing that’s kind of always, you know, always sort of cited when we’re talking about some of the, you know, the systematic, systemic issues with recruiting. What else isn’t right?
John Wallace [00:10:07]:
Yeah, absolutely, Matt. I mean, I think there are two sides to this equation. So that there’s the, the candidate side, the external side and then there’s the internal side is what services given to the business or more specifically, how does the line manager interact with recruitment, whether it’s internal or external. And actually from, I guess the top of the tree, from the real leadership point of view, what does the CEO say about talent coming through their organization? And again, I go back to the point when you look at all the surveys that comes through, the CEO always is saying this is one of their top priorities. Now they’re not saying that because it works, they’re saying that because they are frustrated by the leadership coming through the organisation or ability to attract leadership in. That’s a resourcing issue. No matter what way you look at it. So from the line manager’s point of view, there are frustrations with the process for the sake of the process, there are frustrations with not being given the right candidates. So from an organisation effectiveness point of view, there are adverts that don’t hit the mark, that don’t describe the job well and that has an impact on candidate experience as well. Of course, because you have very poorly worded adverts, jam, full of jargon, in fact, often just jammed full of words. Then from the line manager, again, finding a recruitment team that he doesn’t know quite what they do, he doesn’t get support for the interviews, she doesn’t find that they do the paperwork properly. And then when it comes to the offer and onboarding process, there’s a bit of lack of clarity about who does what. And back to the candidate experience. Our candidate arrives on day one and who is ownership of what happens then a handoff. So, you know, it’s obviously not every organization and obviously not these faults happen everywhere. But for me there’s a. There’s a kind of symptom here of generally poor candidate experiences which mean that there’s not investment in the recruitment or there’s not enough space to go around for the recruiters to do this. And that comes because we haven’t won the argument that we are a valuable function.
Matt Alder [00:12:09]:
If you could sum this up in one sentence, how would you put it?
John Wallace [00:12:14]:
It’s not that everything is wrong all the time, but it just seems that over 20 years after McKinsey were talking about the war for talent, lots of places still get the real basics wrong. That the adverts are written so poorly and full of jargon that the line manager doesn’t feel their job is being represented and the candidate doesn’t really read them or understand them because they’re just full of words. Communication doesn’t happen when recruiters say communication is going to happen. The process changes through the process all the time. An extra interview is added on and it’s just like all the real basics and all the details around onboarding and the offer and actually what happens in week one and all these things that we know contribute towards early tenure or the wrong person being put into the wrong job. Why are we still doing them all this time later, when actually they’re not Complicated answers for this, but yet so often, as any candidate line manager, chief executive will tell you, this doesn’t seem to work as well as it should.
Matt Alder [00:13:18]:
But if I pushed you for just one sentence, I suppose the one sentence.
John Wallace [00:13:22]:
Would be a question. Are we good enough at what we do in recruitment?
Matt Alder [00:13:27]:
Are we good enough? John raised some really interesting points in our conversation, but how can we explore this further? Well, I decided to speak to a candidate, a hiring manager and a chief executive to get their views. Simon Rutter is an experienced global employer brand director who’s currently looking for his next role. He was the perfect informed candidate for me to speak to. Hi, Simon, and welcome to the podcast.
Simon Rutter [00:13:58]:
Thank you, Matt. Great to be here.
Matt Alder [00:14:00]:
So could you just introduce yourself and give everyone a little bit of background about you?
Simon Rutter [00:14:05]:
So, until recently, I was the global employer brand director at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and prior to that I held a number of senior corporate communications roles in a variety of different companies and different industries, really at a number of elements of corporate communication, so internal communications, employee engagement, employee experience, the employee value proposition, so EVPs, and also a lot of strategic change communications. So have a lot of experience of working with leadership teams, both on communication side of things, but also on people strategy as well.
Matt Alder [00:14:35]:
So you’re currently looking for your. You’re currently looking for your next challenge. And, you know, I know that you’re, you know, sort of going through, you know, going through sort of various aspects of the recruitment process at the moment. Moment. What have your experiences been so far? What’s it been like?
Simon Rutter [00:14:53]:
It’s been a really broad spectrum, to be honest with you, Matt. I’ve had really positive experiences with employers that have been very open, very transparent, very communicative right through to employers that have been completely ghosting me. But I haven’t heard anything back from that. I’ve had a complete absence of any feedback that I’ve yet literally gone into that black hole that we all talk about so much. And I’ve had everything in between. So it’s been a completely, as I say, broad spectrum of the experiences, really, from highly positive to, you know, very negative as well, and everything in between. So it’s a real roller coaster every day. But it’s fascinating being on the other side of it now. And I’m going to take those lessons and really make sure I carry them into my next role because it’s been absolutely invaluable.
Matt Alder [00:15:42]:
What surprised you the most about. About being a candidate in sort of 2018?
Simon Rutter [00:15:48]:
I think it’s just the level to which organizations don’t communicate with you. I think, particularly when you get to my level, when you’re senior, you’re not applying for so many roles. There are not so many roles out there. But, you know, there’s not as many candidates out there for those roles. And it just surprises me that when you apply, you often don’t hear anything back from these organizations, no matter which route you’ve applied for it through, whether you’ve applied directly or via an agency or what have you. So just not to hear anything, I think has really surprised me. I know it’s happened before, but I think when you get to a certain level, you do expect some sort of acknowledgement of your application and at least some kind of communication on where it is in the process. So that’s just surprised me, that lack of communication. And I think as well, the second thing I would say, Matt, to add to that is the amount of ghosting that’s going on. So I’ve had situations where I’ve been into organizations. I’ve had maybe one, two, even three interviews. Then it’s been a kind of hurry up and wait. So there’s been a big push to get me inside, get the interviews arranged, and then I’ve not heard anything for weeks and I’ve had to do the chasing. And I think in a candidate driven market, when there are more jobs than there are candidates, you would expect employers, no matter how big or small, to be a lot more on the ball with this, to be certainly much more communicative. I think it’s, it’s a lack of respect for candidates for their time, for their effort, for their costs as well. And that’s something that’s really surprised me. Particularly as I say, when you get to a certain level, when you’re looking at certain grades, when you’re looking at a certain type of company as well, there’s an assumption that you will get treated better and you certainly will have open and regular channels of communication. And that has been a big eye opener for me.
Matt Alder [00:17:43]:
I saw you commenting on LinkedIn that you were sort of involved in conversations where, you know, people were, companies were trying to, people were trying to. Recruiters were trying to, you know, sell the role to you and not the, not the company. And I think you were saying, well, I, you know, I know what the role is because, you know, it’s what I’ve been doing in my, in my career. Tell, tell us a little bit about that, about that experience.
Simon Rutter [00:18:07]:
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of, you know, I’ve worked in employer branding for a long time and I think a lot of employer branding is really focused on selling the job and recruitment marketing as well is really selling the job. And I think that that’s fine. But actually, particularly for Passive candidates, but also for active candidates. You want to get a feel for the nature of the company that you’re going to work for. Culture is so important these days. It’s often more important than salary and other benefits. So I think as a candidate, I’ve just been surprised by the. The lack of information around the company. What the company does, its why, its purpose, it’s meaning, what is it that differentiates that particular company? So even if necessarily the role might not be the one that you particularly want, you might consider joining that company, whether it’s now in a different role or at a later date. So just the lack of information about and clarity about what makes a company different from another one, because that’s often when you’re talking about salary. Often salaries might be similar. You might be in the same benefits range, it might be similar location, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing that’s going to make the difference is the culture is what the place is like to work there, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m not seeing enough of that in any job descriptions, in any job adverts, or even particularly when you necessarily might talk to recruitment agencies about the role as well. They don’t seem to necessarily understand and be able to articulate the culture. And even when I’ve gone into companies, I’m really asking that as filter questionnaire, you know, what is the culture like? I’m getting a really wide variety of answers. You know, some are very strong and very proactive and they manage that message very well. Others don’t seem to be very clear about that at all. And even within the same organization, you can get inconsistency of messaging around what the culture is. So I think given how important culture is these days, how many people are asking questions around it, I think it’s quite strange that a lot of companies still aren’t really owning that and defining it and articulating it for candidates, because it is an important filter.
Matt Alder [00:20:11]:
What’s the most positive experience you’ve had so far? You sort of said that everything was on a. You know, there’s a whole spectrum of experience that you had. What’s the. What’s that? What’s the best experience you’ve had?
Simon Rutter [00:20:20]:
Well, I’ve had one experience where the company has wanted to do a first interview with me and they got me on the phone and they wanted to actually be really clear from the very start about what the situation is. So they’ve wanted to hold a very open, informal conversation with me to just make me really aware of everything that’s going on. It’s very complex organization, it’s large, there’s a lot of change, there’s a lot of transformation going on. And the role that I was being interviewed for would have been stuck right in the middle of that. So there was a lot to deal with, a lot of things that necessarily aren’t actually worked out yet in terms of a roadmap and you’d be part of that. So there was a lot of ambiguity to navigate, a lot of difficult stakeholders. So a lot of what you expect in a matrix and environment. But it was refreshing to me to hear from a very senior leader to get on the phone, to spend the time and to be really open and honest and transparent about that. So that ultimately if I did want to go forward, my application, which I did, I’m going in there with my eyes open. So both of us are on a really even keel and we’re being open and honest with each other. And I thought that was a really. That made me then much more open about my previous experiences. Much more. It gave me a comfort that I could share the best of me in that, in that interview conversation and then further down the chain when I did the face to face interview. So that just kind of put me at ease and it set a precedent for me in terms of how I think interviews should be done. And that wasn’t something that, you know, when I was looking for my last role a couple of years ago, I didn’t have so much of that. So I think I’ve been really impressed with that. I’ve had that from a couple of organizations, but one particularly stood out just because of the, the level of honesty, the level of openness, and the willingness to really set me up for success or set any candidate up for success that goes into that role.
Matt Alder [00:22:09]:
And what, you know, what would your, what would your message to employers be? What, what should people sort of be bearing in mind and what should they be, what should they be doing differently when it comes to candidate experience?
Simon Rutter [00:22:22]:
Well, I think you’ve, you touched there on candidate experience. I think a lot of recruitment functions and a lot of companies are talking about candidate experience. I don’t think a lot of them are actually really getting clear on what that actually means. And a lot of their recruitment functions, a lot of the recruitment processes are still designed around the business need. So the business need is to get people into the door to replace candidates or to fill new roles, but they’re designed from the inside out. So they’re designed from what is the Business process, what’s the challenge that we’re trying to meet and then how do we get somebody in to meet that candidate experience means you need to start thinking from the outside in. You need to build the process around the candidates. You need to have a much better understanding of how candidates are operating and working these days. So I think my message to companies would be to spend a lot more time understanding, researching and building your process around candidate experience that is genuine out there in the market at the moment, not what you might think it is, or not what you think you need for your business process. It’s actually what does the candidate need? Because the candidate experience will drive the number of candidates you get and the better quality of candidates. So that’s the first thing I’d say, I think. Secondly, I’ve definitely seen a huge range in terms of EVPs and employer brands when I’ve been out there. Some have very clearly defined employer brands that are well managed and consistent, some don’t have any, and some have some that are, I’d say, inconsistently managed at best. So I think get really clear and own your employer brand. So make sure you’ve got a differentiated position and that that is consistent across all your channels. Because I’ve had some cases where I’ve been on a company’s career section of their website and it’s entirely different to the social media presence, which is entirely different to what they tell me when I get in the door, whether it’s first, second interview stage, third interview stage. So I think that’s that consistency and clarity around your employer brand is the second thing I’d say. And the third and final thing, Matt, is I’d say get much more proactive around your recruitment. It constantly surprises me that talent acquisition and HR functions are just so reactive. I understand there is a natural element of that because of the nature of the business. You can’t always predict who’s going to leave because people are emotional beings. Right. But there is a level of which I think the business and talent acquisition need to work together to get much more proactive around the hiring needs. Because if you do that, then you can start to get on the front foot, then you can start to build out your employer brand, get building those talent pools, get pipelining and mapping. All of that makes you a much more strategic and proactive function. That’s adding value and getting therefore better candidates through the door, because that’s ultimately what you want. So those are the three things that I would say.
Matt Alder [00:25:03]:
Simon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Simon Rutter [00:25:05]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:25:06]:
In 2016, the following job advert was posted to LinkedIn’s job board marketing Director. A couple walk into a restaurant for a drink. They sit at a table in an awkward silence. They look towards the bar and a waiter hands them a drinks list. What happens next is down to you. It’s down to you and the team you lead. These award winning marketeers are the beating heart of one of the UK’s top drink suppliers. The team works across every part of the drinks business. You influence couples in restaurants, shoppers in the high street, sports and music fans at events, wine lovers, beer drinkers and spirits aficionados. You will excite, motivate and inspire a multidisciplinary team. They are rising stars to nurture experienced marketeers looking to you to support their careers. Your leadership will maintain their reputation for creating the drinks industry’s most innovative marketing. This means fostering a culture of creativity, sharing great ideas, relentless innovation. Your team breathe new life into paper and digital execution. You will apply blue chip discipline and process to traditional media and new technologies. You’ll be custodian not only of the company’s brand, but also its personality, voice and soul. It won’t be easy. This is a fast growing business evolving within a changing marketplace. But you have the ambition, character and vision to influence that growth. And the couple in the restaurant, Your team inspired them to try something new. They’d never heard of it before, but they loved it. They chatted about it. There were no more awkward silences. Turns out it was more than just a drink. That job ad generated an outstanding response for the company who placed it, but it was actually the result of quite a negative experience of recruiters. Fiona Alder is a highly experienced board director who works in the drinks industry, was the hiring manager for this role and is also my wife. Hi Fiona and welcome to the podcast.
Fiona Alder [00:27:33]:
Hi. I’m delighted to finally make an appearance. I’ve been waiting for 149 episodes.
Matt Alder [00:27:38]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show, obviously. So could you tell everyone the story behind the advert? So what, what, what, what job are you working in? And, and how did this happen?
Fiona Alder [00:27:50]:
So my previous role was brand director. We had 11 trading companies and a very large multifunctional marketing team covering all disciplines. And we needed a new marketing director for one of our, one of our biggest companies. So in the traditional way I approached a leading executive search firm. I gave them the brief, spent lots of time talking to them about the role as a hiring manager, but also with my head of HR and I was pretty confident that they understood what I required. However, I was sent the marketing materials for approval and took a sharp intake of breath. I was just bored. Our company had a very specific culture. I was hiring for a creative role, and I just didn’t feel that it was going to cut through. And it sounded like the other thousand adverts for a marketing director that you would find on LinkedIn. And what I really believe is that cultural fit is one of the biggest indicators of success in a role. So I ripped it up and started again, and I had an idea and I worked on it, actually, myself and my head of communications at the time, we wrote a script. And, yeah, we. We read it pretty quickly. We sent it back to the search firm, and I could hear them kind of going, really? Really? You want us to run with this? And I said, yeah, do it. This is. This is what I want. This is going to attract the people I want. I think there was a debate around whether senior people would connect with that type of copy, but it turned out it was their most successful, one of their most successful ads in terms of responses ever. So I quite enjoyed that review meeting. And we got a really strong list of candidates, all of whom ticked the cultural fit box. They really understood the scope of the role, and we went on to hire pretty quickly somebody who made a real difference in the organization.
Matt Alder [00:29:58]:
So from my understanding of this, the person who was hired actually responded directly to the job ad rather than being found by the search firm. So effectively, you’ve written the copy for them. The copy’s been one of the most successful ads that they’ve run, and someone’s hired, he’s fit the bill. What happened next out of the search company? Respond to that?
Fiona Alder [00:30:19]:
They sent me a bill for 20% of his salary.
Matt Alder [00:30:21]:
And how did that make you feel?
Fiona Alder [00:30:22]:
Not creating great value for money? I have to say, I didn’t negotiate around the marketing costs, but that’s not the main. That’s not the main cost when it comes to recruitment fees. So a lesson learned, really. And I think that both, actually, both the recruiter and us as an organization learned from that experience. But did I get value for money? No. Did it take an unnecessary amount of my time in terms of steering it in the right way? Yes. But we got a good result in the end. Yeah, but just not value for money. And I would hesitate if I could. You know, in all honesty, if I could write another ad, put it on LinkedIn, and do it ourselves the next time, I would seriously consider that option first to see which Candidates we flushed out before we went to an executive search firm.
Matt Alder [00:31:11]:
So how does a chief executive view the current state of recruiting as a discipline? And what vision might they have for its future? Craig Donaldson is CEO of Metro Bank PLC in the uk and I spoke to him to find out his views. So, Craig, as a CEO, what do you want from a recruitment team?
Craig Donaldson [00:31:33]:
First and foremost from a recruitment team, I want them to recruit people who fit the culture of the organization and who will share the values and bring them to life. As the organization grows, of course we can develop technical skills, we can develop the ability to do the role over time, but you can’t teach people culture, so you’ve got to hire the people with the right attitudes. So that’s what I really want from my recruiters.
Matt Alder [00:31:58]:
And do you feel that, you know, recruitment as an industry is sort of is delivering, is delivering that to you?
Craig Donaldson [00:32:05]:
At the moment, I think my recruiters, or because, you know, for our, what I would call our mass market roles, our recruiters are absolutely part of our business. They live in the business, they work in the business and they’re part of it and they understand the culture and they understand what we’re looking for and they are constantly challenging themselves whilst working with the colleagues who will end up leading the people they’re recruiting to make sure that we don’t compromise on the attitude and the culture of the people we bring in. And to me, recruiters need to understand what we’re trying to get by living it. And also they need to be supported by the people who are going to ultimately be leading these people so that we’re always holding people to account for what we bring in.
Matt Alder [00:32:46]:
And from a sort of a candidate experience perspective, is giving people who the recruiters are reaching out to or people who’ve applied for a job at Metro bank, is giving those people a good experience as important as finding that sort of proper culture fit?
Craig Donaldson [00:33:03]:
Absolutely. It’s so important when people walk away, whether they’ve been offered a role or whether they haven’t been offered a role that they say, what a great organization. So when we’re recruiting people, there are a number of different phases people go through, from the application to a telephone interview, to doing sort of the gamification assessments online, through to then an assessment center which we call M Factor. And we have M Factor because like X Factor, we want people to be at their best, we want to see them perform, we want to see them bring their best traits to life. And so during that process, what we want is that people want to continue through the process and no matter what the outcome, that they become fans of the organization. It’s so, so important.
Matt Alder [00:33:46]:
And final question, you know, what does the future look like? What do you think the future challenges are going to be for a recruiting function?
Craig Donaldson [00:33:56]:
Well, I think recruitment is the way to drive retention and therefore I think the people want to attract and retain the best quality. But what you’ve got to do is make sure the best quality is the best cultural fit. And therefore I think that over time we’ll see more and more focus and more and more investment in driving the right quality and the right culture so that organizations have the right people for the long term. Because ultimately, you know, we’ve all organizations have said it’s our people are our biggest asset. But I think that more and more that is becoming true with the advent of technology, meaning that people genuinely do make the difference.
Matt Alder [00:34:37]:
Craig, thank you very much for talking to me.
Craig Donaldson [00:34:39]:
My absolute pleasure, Mark, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:34:41]:
So it’s a few weeks later. I’m back with John Once more we’re in, we’re in Scotland once more. We’re sitting, having a coffee and once more we have a great view and it’s not Edinburgh Castle this time, it’s the Firth of Fourth, but autumn is well and truly here and you know, it’s a bit foggy. So. John, how are you?
John Wallace [00:35:03]:
Hello, Mark. Good to talk to you again. I’m great, thank you very much. And my word, don’t you know it’s autumn when you step outside these days. That wind is certainly blowing in now.
Matt Alder [00:35:12]:
So you’ve had a chance to listen to the three interviews that I kind of recorded on the back of our last conversation. What are your takeaways from that? What’s the most, what are the most interesting things?
John Wallace [00:35:25]:
I think the takeaway from me, Matt, is that a lot of what we hear in those interviews are things that we’ve all heard before, actually. I mean, we’ve all heard the horrible candidate experiences and the idea that in this day and age when technology makes it so easy to communicate with candidates, we still hear about the black hole, I think, is what Simon said in his interview. I mean, that’s unforgivable. You know, what are we doing? Why does that happen? And also the thing that came out for me most about what Simon said is he wasn’t talking about isolated incidences here. This was kind of a common theme in his experience. And also knowing the job that he does, he’s not applying for roles at a junior level in small organizations. He is applying for big jobs in a big organization with the full knowledge that he has a network of people that he will speak to about his experience as well. There’s a blind spot there. I find that absolutely extraordinary and depressingly unsurprising. Fiona’s story is hilarious, but not hilarious at the same time. I absolutely love that ad copy and I think that shows us that in recruitment sometimes we get a little bit too closeted in our own world and actually looking at people who are professionals in other areas can help us. I mean, because in recruitment, remember someone who runs a recruitment function actually runs a great number of departments. There is marketing, there is operations, there’s all the stakeholder management, there’s the whole process management of it as well. So actually learning from people who do these things in their particular industries is really interesting. And of course Craig tells a great story about Metro bank. And I interviewed Craig and his head of HR for my book and I know the story behind why they’ve managed to be so successful in their recruitment. And the great thing about that is that their success in recruitment is a straight line relationship to their success as a business. And Craig’s involvement in that is absolutely fundamental.
Matt Alder [00:37:50]:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think there was some really interesting, really interesting things there. You know, I think, you know, Simon’s story is, is all too familiar and I think I’ve seen lots of people have very, very similar experiences, you know, when they’re looking for jobs and kind of document them as they’re, as they’re going through and we don’t seem to, you know, nothing seems to really be changing there which is, which is quite, which is quite depressing. And I think Fiona’s story is interesting because you know, there’s always this talk about, is recruitment marketing and you know, the importance of recruitment marketing. And I think that actually when recruitment meets, let’s, let’s, for want of a better word, proper marketing, you know, it seems to come up, it seems to come up short. Now I know that there are some fantastic pieces of recruitment marketing work out there, but I think it tells us on a day to day basis the way that the industry is going about trying to attract candidates, particularly in these really hard to fill roles, essentially isn’t good enough. And actually, you know, when people have to have to pay for that, for that service, it leaves that, that sense that they’re not getting, they’re not getting value for what they’re paying for, which is, which is terrible. What was really interesting about listening to Craig, you know, there was that sort of you know, he’s obviously having a positive experience of the way he’s recruited teams, working, but it was, it was that, it was that challenge that, the fact that retention is absolutely critical and you know, is all very well finding and, and, and recruiting and getting people on board and giving them a great process but actually if they don’t stay with the business then it’s, it’s kind of pointless and it’s not something that you, you sort of hear discussed very often, is it?
John Wallace [00:39:36]:
Yeah, I think you raise a number of really interesting points there, Matt. Firstly, on the marketing side, one of the great learning experiences for me when I worked at Tesco bank was the opportunity to go down to Welland Garden City where Tesco head office was and actually spent some time speaking to the marketing people there who worked in the retail business. Tesco being, you know, this massive UK retailer of course. And when you listen to what they do in product marketing and their understanding of the customer base and their use of data to understand their customer base, it does make you look at your own efforts in recruitment and think we’re really behind the curve here. What these guys do is really, really clever. The use of data, their insight into customers, how they segment what their customers do and segment it in a behavioral sense is really, really clever stuff. And I thought that was really interesting. So the way we can learn from other people. Absolutely and we should be. And I think Fiona’s experience is really, really interesting. The other point on that is when you talked about the value of the work that was done. The reality is that when any hiring manager gets an experience, a poor experience from a recruiter, internally or externally, it actually, dare I say, brands the entire industry. It makes us look like, no disrespect to this other industry but it makes us look like the double glazing sales of business to business sometimes. And because so many ex agency people work in house, there is that impression. Sometimes we get that actually it’s not as professional as it should be. It is a little bit fly by night, it is a little bit take advantage of and I know there are in house recruitment teams and in house recruitment managers who feel they’re at war with some of the sharp practice in agencies. But likewise, you know, agencies are a really valuable part of the supply chain. There’s a lot of people out there doing really good stuff. Having said that, it’s really easy to make money in a recruitment agency right now because of the economic situation. So you know, some of the behaviors there aren’t great and perhaps the Service isn’t great that people are seeing. So, you know, there’s that whole branding thing. And your final point on retention, I think that’s really, really interesting observation there by Craig as well. If you have what you perceive to be extremely successful recruitment but you don’t have sticky employees, I think there are a couple of approaches to that that you need to think about. Is, firstly, is this fluidity a good thing and just a natural part of my business now? So actually, should I be worried about it or should I just have a resourcing plan that actually compensates for the fluidity? Where am I losing people? If I have a span of control of 1 to 10 in my contact centre, I can expect people to leave because that’s only one person can get the next big job out of 10 people. So therefore it’s understandable, but it’s making sure we understand this and we plan for it. And again, that’s part of the professionalism in the industry or perhaps actually in our desire to get exactly the right person for the job all the time. One of the critical things that we’re not looking at is their stickability in the business, the absolute match they have in the business. So therefore, do we need to think about that a little bit more? So it’s either embrace the fluidity or do something to challenge the fluidity.
Matt Alder [00:43:04]:
In our last conversation, we, we kind of left with the question, are we good enough? And you know, the sort of, the, the evidence that, that we’ve got from these interviews is, you know, there are some, there are some positive things going on there. You know, recruiting is, is a very challenging, you know, thing to do with lots of moving parts, but kind of what’s coming out is, is a little bit of a resounding no, we’re not, we’re not good enough. But there’s obviously an opportunity, there’s obviously an opportunity here for organizations to kind of really look at their, their approach to recruiting and, and, you know, and kind of improve it and also, you know, get competitive advantage by, by being better than the, the companies that they’re competing with, with talent for what? You know, what’s the solution to this? What, what should companies be thinking about? How, how can we be good enough?
John Wallace [00:43:58]:
Wow, that’s some question, Matt. I think the resounding no is something that we’ve seen, and it’s where our conversation started, is that continually there are endless articles about the cost of bad hiring, about my recruitment doesn’t work, about high turnover. So the evidence does point towards that this isn’t being done brilliantly all over the place, but yet there are pockets where actually it does happen really, really well. So therefore, it’s not that there isn’t an answer out there, it’s that perhaps we’re not asking the right questions in a lot of places and we’re not adopting the right approach. I think the first step is to really be honest with yourself. Now, I know having done the job, sometimes I wasn’t terribly honest with myself in terms of where were my shortcomings, what was I not doing right? Where could I actually learn, rather than being in a bubble which thinks, well, I’m doing everything right. And that bubble can actually extend to even learning from other people within the industry as well. It’s that looking outside and seeing external influences and being big enough to actually look at yourself and say, well, here’s the bits that I’m not good at. And actually. But I know someone over here, either in the business, in a different department or externally, who can actually give me the support to actually help myself become a little bit better at those gaps. And I think that’s quite a difficult thing for some people to do, but it’s a really important step is to recognize, well, where in the pantheon of skills that are required to run a recruitment function, which is an extremely complicated task and almost universally underfunded and under resourced, what do I need to do to make myself and therefore the function, and therefore what we do for the business, better? Another starting point for me is that as an industry, as a profession, and as people who run recruitment and businesses, I think we really do need to make a stronger case as to why we are a critical part of the business and not this cost function that sits on at the side of human resources.
Matt Alder [00:46:10]:
Absolutely. So if, if you could kind of summarize in a. In a couple of sentences, what are the. You know, obviously we can’t go into all of the. All of the detail because this podcast would go on for probably literally hours. But you know, what, what are the top line? What are the. What are the. What are the sort of key points that people really need to think about if they want to improve the capability of their recruiting function?
John Wallace [00:46:32]:
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I think this is a complex beast and it covers a number of things, but there are a couple of headlines for me, and they’re not true competencies in the sense that we like to write competencies, but just a couple of the headlines for me, I think there has to be a greater commerciality, an understanding of the pound, shillings and pence value of what it is we do when we get it right and what it is we do when we get it wrong. And actually that, I think, tends to sharpen people’s attention as to what the value of the function is. That’s the language finance departments use, for example. Also, I’ve always felt that a good recruiter really does two things. They manage relationships, be that candidates or be that managers, and they plan. And when that plan doesn’t work, they have a plan B, and when that plan doesn’t work, they have a plan C. So they have an ability to plan, an ability to replan an understanding of contingency. We work in a business where things change very quickly and people do funny things in recruitment. So therefore we need to be able to understand that. And I think the final headline thing that I would put in is resilience. The reality is that this is a job where you are going to get blamed when things go wrong, where things are going to go wrong, where you’re not always going to have all the toys at your disposal that you want and you have to make sure that you get up each day and love it and be really resilient and actually understand that what you’re doing is important. And I think that core resilience and passion for it are things that are absolutely that what I see in really great recruiters that comes out very, very clearly.
Matt Alder [00:48:05]:
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Wallace [00:48:07]:
Thank you, Matt. Always a pleasure. Speak again soon.
Matt Alder [00:48:10]:
I hope you enjoyed this special edition of the show. To help continue the conversation, John and myself have produced a mini white paper which identifies the nine common character we believe that every head of talent acquisition needs to have. You can download the Anatomy of a resourcing leader@www.bit.ly resourcingleader. That’s www.bit.ly resourcingleader and resourcingleader is all in lowercase. My thanks to Simon Rutter, Fiona Alder, Craig Donaldson and of course John Wallace. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts 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 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.
