Recruiting technology, data analytics, and employer branding are all regular topics on this podcast. However, we don’t always talk about strategic thinking that is needed to make all three elements work together to solve recruiting challenges.
My guest this week is James Edwards Digital Attraction Manager at Mitchells and Butlers, one of the largest operators of restaurants, pubs, and bars in the UK. Mitchells and Butlers have been working on several interrelated projects using technology, creativity, and data to solve their recruiting challenges.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The challenges of hiring 30,000 people each year with multiple consumer brands
- ATS selection based on hiring manager experience
- The importance of not making assumptions about technology features
- Combing data sources to identify workforce trends
- How a candidate experience audit identified the need for the new careers site.
- Career site systems
- The importance of content and job adverts that actually sell the role to potential candidates
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Social Talent. Social Talent is the training platform for hiring teams, giving you the knowledge and skills you need to find, hire and develop great talent. Designed for everyone involved in the hiring process, this market leading platform provides training through a comprehensive library of video content delivered by the world’s best hiring experts. Trusted by the likes of IBM, intel and Siemens. Social talent has trained over 80,000 people across a hundred countries and a thousand organizations. Last year alone, they enabled a million hires worldwide. Find out more@www.socialtalent.com. that’s www.socialtalent.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 246 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Recruiting, technology, data analytics and employer branding are all topics that we cover regularly on this podcast. However, we don’t always talk about the strategic thinking that’s needed to make all three elements work together to solve recruiting challenges. My guest this week is James Edwards, Digital Attraction Manager at Mitchells and Butlers, one of the largest operators of restaurants, pubs and bars in the uk. Mitchells and Butlers have been working on several interrelated projects using technology, creativity and data to solve recruiting challenges. There are lots of valuable insights and learnings in this interview, so keep listening. Hi James and welcome to the podcast.
James Edwards [00:02:06]:
Hi Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:06]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
James Edwards [00:02:11]:
Yeah. So I’m James, I work for Mitchell and Butlers. So we own and run around 16 pubs, restaurants and bars. So that’s across Miller and Carter all by one Toby Carvery, just to kind of name a few. I am the digital attraction manager for Mitchell Butlers. So that encompasses looking after the hr, tech, analytics and kind of everything digital in the recruitment space. So that’s kind of everything.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
I do fantastic stuff. So I’m kind of presuming with an organization like yours, you’ve got more than a few recruiting challenges. Tell us a little bit more about the sort of the challenges that you face.
James Edwards [00:02:55]:
So I’d probably say there are probably a handful of challenges. First of all, we’ve got the scale of the business. So we hire, give or take, about 30,000 people a year. That’s across those 1600 businesses across 13 brands. So all of those brands have their own kind of little niches and their own little quirks to recruit for. Then we’ve got all the various locations, which is a different factor. So recruiting in London opposed to Edinburgh is a very different game. And then just trying to engage all of those managers as a lot of our recruitment is decentralized. So that’s kind of some of our main internal challenges. And then you. Then the other challenges are the external market, the industry, all of those kind of good things which are always changing. Yeah. So they’re kind of our main challenges within kind of Mitchell and Butlers at this time. But it’s forever changing. So next year we will have to like, look at what our external market factors are, etc. So.
Matt Alder [00:04:05]:
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I can imagine it seems to be an ever changing dynamic. Dynamic in terms of that. Now, I know that you’ve recently sort of, in the last sort of year or so, undertaken a few initiatives to. I don’t know whether it’s to. To transform your talent attraction or to. To kind of really address these. Chall give us a brief overview of the things that you’ve been working on.
James Edwards [00:04:26]:
So we’ve been working on, I would say, three main themes within our team to kind of just kind of address some of those challenges. So first, the first project I was actually brought into Mitchell and Butler’s to manage and kind of implement into the business and that was moving from a legacy ATS to kind of a new ats, which was more fit for the business. So that was kind of the first project and that was very much about. We needed just to get the basics right and, you know, the managers engaged. So that was kind of the foundations. The next phase we looked into was around kind of workforce planning and analytics. So that was to inform us how we were performing in certain areas, but also the pipelines internally, externally, and then the last part of that is just tying it all up in regards to how we look from a external point of view. So I haven’t been leading it, but the team have been working on a big EVB project which kind of runs through everything we do, but to kind of convey that to our audience. We’ve landed a careers website very recently and also re redone all our adverts so it matches up with our tone of voice. So they’re kind of the big things which we’ve kind of done over the past few years, which kind of just helped to address some of those challenges.
Matt Alder [00:05:59]:
Now, I know that they’re all initiatives. Other talent acquisition teams are probably at various stages of undertaking at the moment, so it would be good to sort of dive into them a bit deeper to find out a bit more about what you did and what you learned. So you sort of mentioned that the first stage was the acs to sort of really get your sort of recruiting basics in place. Tell us a bit more about what you did and what you learned from doing it.
James Edwards [00:06:24]:
So the ATS transition was quite a big transition. We, we looked at, we first of all went out to shortlist and we, with the shortlist, we kind of drew up a criteria of kind of what we wanted. We had a legacy ATS which was okay, it was fit for purpose for some parts of the business, but not all. As I said kind of earlier, we’ve got a big population of probably 1600 managers who use our ATS, and we consciously thought about how we would select an ATS based on that. So that was kind of one of the main things we thought about when selecting an ats, that it was fit for purpose for the front line, the managers who were using it, not just our central teams, where a lot of ATSs our focus towards. So we, we went through the shortlist process. We had a real kind of strict criteria. We shortlisted down to around five suppliers and then brought them in and got them to present. So that was kind of how we selected. We selected a provider who were, who was very suited towards our kind of management population rather than just our recruitment managers. So we got all that out the way, signed all the legals, did all that kind of boring stuff, and then we kind of moved on to kind of actually implementing it into the business. So with such a big portfolio of businesses and different types of recruitment in the business, we couldn’t just switch off our old ATS and launch a new one. So it probably took us from start to finish about 18 months, going from first kind of phase to the last stage. So we did it in a phased approach in, in regards to, we launched different parts of the business at different times of the project. That was just to kind of just learn and develop throughout the project, rather than just kind of go with a one size fits all. The other thing that we did, which is kind of a big learning for that, was we, rather than rolling out to the 1600 businesses, we rolled it out to circa probably about 40, 50 businesses on a trial. We then ironed out all the bugs and all the issues and got feedback from them. And then that allowed us to then take all those learnings and then scale it up to the 14, 1500 businesses later on. Another learning I would say is there’s probably three learnings I’d take from this whole project is plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead. Because there’s a lot of moving parts and there’s a lot of impacts that you don’t consider, consider. And the other thing which I always say with tech, and I’ve taken a massive learning with this on tech, is don’t always assume it does what you think it should do. And what I mean by that is you assume it should have this function, that function, but not all. It doesn’t always, that’s not always the case. So always double check, triple check and then you won’t be, you won’t have any surprises when you kind of go to launch or when you start the project, etc. So they’re kind of a couple of.
Matt Alder [00:09:56]:
Learnings moving on to workforce planning. You know, presumably this was a big part of sort of informing your, your future strategy. Tell us a bit about that.
James Edwards [00:10:06]:
So without kind of delving into too much detail on this, so this came off the back of kind of we knew roughly our kind of external market, but we didn’t know it as much as we should and we didn’t know the hotspots, the, and all those kind of areas. So we worked with kind of the central HR team to look at historical data, higher data and also some ATS data that we have to kind of identify trends in regards to how many people, where we’re hiring in those areas. And what we looked at was our different brands, our different geographies and then it then allowed us to roll it all up into kind of one plan to say holistically we could see that there’s certain issues in certain areas, certain pipelines in other areas and it allowed us to then identify what we should be focusing on. And off the back of that we’ve been able to kind of identify key brands, key areas, key job groups which we have to focus on. But then also as importantly, also shows us our internal pipeline. So if we’ve got a strong internal pipeline, we don’t need to worry about the external talent demand and supply as much, but it just identifies and showcases the what we’re doing good and what where we need to kind of improve. Some of the data didn’t really tell us much more than we already knew, but it kind of just validated it. So we knew certain areas, the business or certain job groups were difficult and the data just kind of backed it up, which then allowed us to kind of speak with data to stakeholder suppliers rather than just kind of views and opinions, which are always quite difficult. And I think some of the learnings with this is very much around, keep it really simple when you’re communicating it because there are thousands and thousands of data points, but you just want to kind of go to the stakeholders and say this is the. Say what? And the other thing which we learned on this journey was very much about taking the stakeholders on that journey. So rather than just giving them the data at the end of the project, kind of take them on the journey, get their input, ask them what they’d like to know and kind of all that good stuff.
Matt Alder [00:12:44]:
Moving on. You mentioned your new career site. Career site projects seem to cause lots of companies kind of lots of problems. So tell us a little bit about how you sort of went through the process with the, with the, with the new career site and what’s sort of different about it compared to other career sites that might be out there.
James Edwards [00:13:03]:
Yeah, so the careers website has actually got quite an interesting story how we actually came to moving towards to a new. A new careers website, etc. So we, we weren’t planning on getting a new careers website so we actually started a kind of a work stream within the team to look at candidate experience. And we started with the candidate experience audit. Out of that audit came that actually the, the functionality of the website and how our kind of ATS kind of worked with the current website at the time was kind of the biggest bottleneck of candidate experience and branding. So we then did a big storytelling piece in regards to, with regards to the team on how those two things weren’t working as well as they should. We then got the team on board with actually saying we need to have a look at how we can get that working better. So we explored kind of what I’d class as one size solutions. So out the box solutions or actually what can we do with our current website to kind of improve that? The decision was kind of then made that we needed to kind of go to one solution, kind of out the box solution. So we went out to various suppliers. We decided to go with format. So format I actually heard first on this podcast interestingly and then I kind of just did a little bit of research, reached out to them and you know, saw what their product was going back to the its project. I took some of my learnings from that to say actually is it as good as they’re saying it is? And it is in my opinion. So. And that’s just a big learning for me which I take through all my projects now. So around don’t assume it does everything you think it does, but double check, triple check. So yeah, we signed all the contracts, did all that kind of good stuff. And then we moved on to kind of the implementation. So the implementation was first all around the branding and then the functionality and all the site map. So the main thing for the new Careers website we really wanted to kind of dial up was diversity of brands, EVP and also the functionality. And when I’m talking about functionality, I’m talking about a personalized experience. So when we pitched the idea internally, we kind of took the team through how they, how they do things in a consumer world, so how they buy an Amazon, how they buy, how they do their weekly shop, etc. And that’s all personalized and we wanted to kind of get that same same approach in the recruitment process. So format solution allows a lot of that. So and all the branding. So that was a big, big piece of what we wanted to do. So with the branding on the website, we’ve got 13 very strong brands with very strong branding and colors, which we didn’t want. We wanted to showcase all those brands, but we didn’t want them to conflict. So we had to go around the houses a little bit and kind of see different styles, different kind of approaches with kind of how we did that. And what we have decided to do off the of that is keep our strong brand colors in for our individual brands, but then keep our core body of the website quite neutral, but still on our kind of core brand colors. So that was a big learning in regards to that. The other thing that we wanted to do with the website is keep our candidate on the website, not going out to an ATS page. A lot of websites that I see have a really nice glossy front end, but then get direct to a Teleo or an ATS page which kind of just is a real conflict in my opinion, from a branding and experience point of view. So we haven’t fully finished the Careers website project, but we’re, we’re well into phase two where we will be integrating our whole apply process. So the candidate never ever leaves the Careers website when they apply. And we, it keeps them in the kind of ecosystem of the careers website, which allows us to serve up a lot more content, a lot richer content and just improve the experience fourfold in my opinion. The main learnings from kind of that part, that project is very much around don’t underestimate the branding, the content creation. So it’s great having a website with 50 pages, but you have to create content for 50 pages. So don’t underestimate how much content a website needs and also keeping it fresh. So photography, new content, it’s a Full time job, just kind of keeping it fresh and alive and just making it fit for purpose.
Matt Alder [00:18:54]:
And I think the other thing you’ve done, which is, which is interesting because I think it’s something that most employers desperately need to do but don’t seem to do because maybe it just gets pushed to the last thing in the list or it’s too difficult is you’ve kind of really sort of overhauled your adverts and your advertising. Tell us a little bit about that.
James Edwards [00:19:12]:
Yeah, so the adverts came out the same candidate experience audit we, we ended up doing with our careers website as well. The view on this was very much that we didn’t want to have a really nice careers website but then really dated, really old, really not fit for purpose adverts. So what we did with this is we reviewed all of our adverts and we have probably about 30 volume roles which we had to review. We then also had our ad hoc roles which are more corporate roles which are all different, each and every one. So we reviewed it from a tone of voice point of view that actually we wanted to realign it with our kind of EVP and make it really fresh and quite fun to kind of reflect our evp. The other thing that we did with the adverts was very much about optimizing the structure. So how long do we want them to be? What do you want to serve first to the candidates, all that kind of stuff. We then also looked at how we could personalize the content in regards to, we’ve got a lot of businesses, a lot of brands, how do we kind of make those variations in the, each advert kind of pull through. So that was quite a big task as well. And then the, the most important thing, and I might be a little bit biased with this because I’m a bit of a techie, but just kind of optimizing it for tech. So SEO, just all those kind of basic things, but also optimizing it for your job board. So not many people may know, but job boards have a preview of every job and it will only normally display probably around the first two lines were about 150 characters of the job. Everything else you would have to click on that job to see. So those two sentences or 150 characters are kind of the most important part of the advert in my opinion. So just having that intro was a real big focus on us because we kind of optimized it just for getting the most important information over to the candidate on all the, all the kind of digital Kind of forums such as Indies and all kind of the traditional job boards. So that was kind of the, the nuts and bolts of kind of what we did. Some of the learnings on this was very much it’s a very big task and it took a lot of resource to do. Again, when I was referring to the content, never underestimate content and kind of rewriting content because it does take a lot of time and a lot of creativity today. And the, the other thing with that is don’t try to do it all at once. We did it in baby steps and that just allowed us to make a few changes, reflect on it and then kind of go again. With the different job templates and different job groups. We have volume roles which we can write the full adverts for and they’re just a copy and paste job. And then in regards to some of our ad hoc roles, we provided the hiring managers and recruiters templates which they could build their adverts within our framework but also add in the information which they wanted to within, you know, some rules of engagement. So some of the rules of engagement were we don’t want, you know, over five bullet points for roles and responsibilities, all those kind of things just because we didn’t want to kind of steer too far away from the framework which would develop for the volume roles. So just a few learnings, but a big task, but definitely worth it. And as you said Matt, there’s not many companies for whatever reason focusing on the adverts. They’re very job description focused rather than candidate centric and selling the job to the candidate. And in this kind of market it’s a candidate led market so we need to be thinking about how we sell it to the candidate rather than telling them what the job is. So yeah, just some key learnings and you know, a really, really fun project to do. And I couldn’t have done it without kind of some of the guys I worked work with because it was a huge task and yeah, credit to credit to them.
Matt Alder [00:23:45]:
Final question, you know, what’s next? What are you going to be focusing on over the sort of next year to 18 months?
James Edwards [00:23:51]:
So the main things we’re going to be focusing on kind of over the next 12 months are optimizing some of those kind of projects that we’ve been doing. So the careers website is very new, the adverts are very new. We will kind of let those embed for a few months but then look to optimize them again to get those marginal gains. The other thing we’ll be focusing on is around home manager capability and education. So they have some really good tools that have all the foundations in place, but we want to drive full usage and really get them to utilize and get the full value out of those tools. And again, you know, in a year things will have changed. We need to kind of be at the top of our game. So it’s just about having the right tools, having the right technology in place, but then also having the hiring managers also reflect the recruitment journey in what they kind of do.
Matt Alder [00:24:55]:
James, thank you very much for talking to me.
James Edwards [00:24:57]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:24:59]:
My thanks to James Edwards. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.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.
