Covid-19 has changed the way we work; in many ways, it may well have changed the way we work forever. One really interesting question is how we might be able to use this momentum of change to help solve the more protracted crisis we face from the global climate emergency?
My guest this week is global talent acquisition leader Paul Maxin. A few weeks ago Paul wrote an article Recruiter magazine in the UK about the concept of a talent sustainability index which would allow talent acquisition leaders to be more proactive in helping business respond to the threat of climate change.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The acceleration of digital transformation
• That increased importance of recruitment marketing and employer branding
• The concept of a Talent Sustainability Index
• What will the index measure?
• The lasting impact of the pandemic on business outcomes
• The opportunity for Talent Acquisition to be proactive and drive the agenda
• Will, the process and technology changes, driven in talent acquisition by the pandemic last in the long term?
• What should Talent Acquisition leaders be doing right now
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 270 of the Recruiting Future podcast. COVID 19 has changed the way we work in many ways. It may well have changed the way we work forever. One really interesting question is how we might be able to use this momentum of change to help solve the more protracted crisis we from the global climate emergency. My guest this week is global talent acquisition leader Paul Maxin. A few weeks ago, Paul wrote an article in Recruiter magazine in the UK about the concept of a Talent Sustainability Index, which would allow talent acquisition leaders to be more proactive in helping businesses respond to the threat of climate change. Hi Paul, and welcome to the podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Paul Maxin [00:02:05]:
Sure. I’m Paul Maxin. I’ve been involved in talent and talent acquisition probably for several life sentences worth for certainly over 30 years. And in the last few years I’ve been the global Resourcing Director at Unilever, where you and I met. And when I Left there in 2013, I headed up talent and resourcing at the Financial Conduct authority. And since 2016 I’ve kind of been doing my own thing through Maxim Talent. The two biggest gigs I’ve had, I spent a year transforming talent acquisition capability and function at Zalando in Berlin. And I’ve recently finished a great two and a half years at Publicis Sapient and with true fatalism left there on the 28th of February. February.
Matt Alder [00:02:58]:
So I mean, what’s, what’s your take on the, the market at the moment? What, what are you seeing happening in talent acquisition?
Paul Maxin [00:03:05]:
Well, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s interesting through the, you know, as we speak, we’re speaking at the, the height of the biggest pandemic for, for 100 years and, and everything and everyone is affected by it. Interestingly, you know, I’ve come Out of a couple of digital companies, Zalando being one. And as I said for the last couple of years, publisher Sapient do digital business transformation end to end. And in some ways, you know, the last six weeks or since the end of February, I think things have changed exponentially. I think almost as if they’ve moved on in the last six weeks more than the last six years. It’s an extraordinary time. And from talent, I see stuff in employer brand. It’s funny, in some ways employer branding seems to have absolutely been at the forefront because as a number, unfortunate number of workers, people are furloughed and things and projects and recruiting is effectively in many organizations on hold. Recruitment, marketing and employer branding has really come to the fore and is essential for most organizations anyway, but particularly during this time. But I think the challenge for employer branding in many ways is that, you know, how do you project yourself as something and an organization that’s different with the USP when everybody’s communicating with everybody remotely and on the. And essentially on the same platform. So you’ve got some, you know, some nice. And showing photos of zoom meetings as opposed to what life’s like in the office. It’s quite interesting in terms of how culture is developing, but how culture can be or not differentiated in, in these strange times.
Matt Alder [00:05:03]:
Absolutely. I think that that’s a really interesting point. A few weeks ago you wrote an article in the Recruiter magazine in the UK about something that could help companies deal with this. And is, is a really interesting, is an interesting way forward. You called it the Talent Sustainability Index. Tell us about that.
Paul Maxin [00:05:22]:
Okay, thank you. Yes, I. Well, like a number of people, I’ve had more time to think over the course of the last few weeks than otherwise I would have had. So it’s at the moment quite conceptual. And I wrote that piece actually on the day that the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Health Secretary Matt Hancock had tested positive for coronavirus. And by the time the article came out in the Recruiter magazine two or three weeks later, things had moved on exponentially as well. And Boris Johnson had been hospitalized and then in intensive care and then came out of intensive care eventually. And at the time I was thinking, well, who knows by the time this article has come out what the world will look like? Things have changed so much. But before the outbreak, one thing’s for certain though, is that pandemics come and go. And whilst even when this one goes and our lockdown evolves and changes and however it goes, the world will not be as it was in February. 2020. So I got to thinking for once, talent acquisition, recruitment and talent management, we could be on the front foot here because we’re always often very reactive to changes of circumstances. So before the outbreak, I’d be giving, as I said, a lot of thought to what we can do and been given a lot of thought to the climate emergency. You know, our house is on fire. Scientists have warned the, you know, unless we probably already crossed a series of tipping points and to have any chance of meeting a commitment to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. And I had this contention that all organizations, certainly above a certain size, will have publishable targets set for them. And those targets will apply right the way across the supply chain and will impact how goods and services and indeed people are procured. So for an example, globalization will evolve or change. Certainly now it’s not sustainable to fly or ship fresh food items covered in plastic across continents. And I’m pretty certain when we come out of this, it won’t be sustainable to regularly fly big teams of people onto projects. Projects will be delivered differently and agile thinking and agile methodology would help, but essentially to protect lives. The pandemic’s fundamentally changed the way that we work. And some good things as we touched upon earlier have happened. Many more of us are working remotely. And whilst I did touch upon employer brands, quite nice how sometimes that remote working can, can lead to virtual, virtual workouts, virtual team drinks. And I think, you know, sometimes people got to know each other’s sort of families through this virtual work, even though there’s a kind of vanilla, same platform kind of stuff. So I think it will have, the pandemic will have a lasting impact on business outcomes. So I suspect, I also suspect that once the virus has been conquered or semi conquered, there’ll also be some kind of psychological shock which will be hard to overcome. So that’s, I know that’s a bit long winded, but my point is that the climate emergency will outlast the current contagion for sure. And, you know, so I was thinking of what are the changes that we’ve made now? Can some of those have a positive impact on the talent cycle, workforce planning and the way business plays its role in tackling that? I think that’s absolutely the case. So going back to what I said about, I’m sure organizations will be audited in terms of their own sustainability and, you know, that will, I think, become law then in terms of the supply chain, the talent supply chain, I think that will be the case as well. So what I’m Hoping to do or thinking about is how as an industry we could co create something meaningful during this time. And that was what I call the tsi, the Talent Sustainability Index. So it would apply for the whole cycle from capacity planning, recruitment, deployment of people and I think will feed into overall corporate governance. And there are lots of opportunities there. I think there’s opportunity for technology, I think there’s opportunity in terms of how it is applied, you know, and through the technology you could even have individual targets and you could score those and even gamify them. I know it’s pretty conceptual, but it is something where I think as an industry we can really be on the front foot rather than sort of react to events around us. And now is very much the time to think about and plan about how we come out of this and to do things differently when we come out of it. Since I wrote that article, a number of people, because it’s a UK publication, have been in touch with me, wanting to get involved and working together to think around the methodology of what that might look like and how it might operate. But it’s a global challenge, isn’t it? And I’m also looking to discuss and co create the thinking around that. So it goes from beyond the concept to something actual with, with people from different continents as well and then to trial that and to see how that might work in some companies. But I think it’s a pretty interesting concept, but a necessary one.
Matt Alder [00:11:08]:
Absolutely. I mean that is really interesting. And what really stands out for me from what you were saying there is talent acquisition, being on the front foot, moving forward. Because I think as an industry, you know, talent acquisition has always been very reactive, very active to, very reactive to events, very reactive to the economy. And that kind of sort of long term planning and long term thinking is something that hasn’t really happened. So if there’s an opportunity to do that, that’s absolutely fantastic. I realize that this is still very conceptual and you’re still thinking it through, but I just want to dig deeper into a couple of areas to help sort of people get some clarity and stir up their own thoughts around this. So tell us a little bit more about what you think an index would actually measure. What are some of the things that, some of the things you think people should be looking at, some of the.
Paul Maxin [00:12:03]:
Kind of specifics thinking that we’ve working very much on virtual teams now and that is something that will remain for some time. I think it could, you know, we’d need to feed in assessment to it. You know, I know Video interviewing and assessment and virtual assessment has very much come to the fore in recent times, and understandably so. But I’m also thinking about what we assess now because I think there’ll be in terms of culture and culture fit and values, they will evolve and change as we come out into a new way of working beyond 2020. I think about what we assess, how we assess, and how that will be done virtually. I also think people will travel a lot less. So again, in the sustainability index, you know, I talked about the, the supply chain, I don’t want to commoditize it too much, but the supply chain of people and how they are deployed at work, whatever work that is, whether it’s from consulting work to operational functional work, so how they’re deployed, where they’re deployed, but also what’s the carbon footprint as an example of. Of moving people around and moving people around to such an extent through transportation as well. So it is conceptual, but I think technology will be a fundamental part of how we measure that. I don’t know what that might look like, but there’ll need to be some kind of platforms or platforms and algorithms and machine learning that will eventually come to compute what these scores might look like. But essentially it’s the whole part of the talent cycle. So how we acquire talent, how we test and assess talent, and how we deploy talent, and to look at from an emissions perspective, how that impacts overall corporate governance. When it comes to sustainability. Yeah, when it comes to sustainability.
Matt Alder [00:14:18]:
So just, just a little bit more about technology, because you’ve kind of mentioned several times that we’re doing virtual interviewing and virtual onboarding, predicting the future is incredibly difficult at the best of times, but probably impossible at the moment in terms of how everything’s going to kind of play out. But based on your experience of being a global head of resourcing and also run recruitment transformation projects in big organizations, how much do you think of the technology that’s been adopted in distress, like virtual onboarding and video interviewing? What extent is this going to stay in the medium to long term?
Paul Maxin [00:15:01]:
Oh, I think it’s absolutely going to stay in the medium to long term. One of the challenges, and going back to one of the earlier podcasts, a recent podcast that you did with Alan Whitford, much of which centered around sort of transformation and deploying of systems and ats and big ticket systems, I think one of the challenges is actually how we sort of plan for those deployments and implement those solutions. Because my sense is what’s probably happening at the moment is a sense of almost panic buying and panic implementation. And that might well not serve all of those products too well. It’s often not the product that’s at fault, but it’s not the what. It’s often the how. And I think now is very much the time over this period where certainly enterprise organizations should be, if they’re including this in terms of their thinking, but should also be thinking about what platforms are they using, looking at their processes. And it’s not just about speed, but it’s, it’s looking at the overall value chain of their processes and using this kind of fallow time to make some significant changes because those, the processes are there to support business outcomes, not to determine or dictate what those business outcomes should be. So I would contend there should be quite a lot of thinking now as ways of working is changing, and I’m sure a lot of organizations are now thinking about what that would look like as we come out of that. Then again, from a talent and talent acquisition perspective, we should be looking at that and supporting the organizations that we work within or for to make those adjustments. And those adjustments are very much around people and processes, but also the kind what platforms and what technology do we actually need with these revised processes to succeed in the business outcomes that we want? And they may well fundamentally have changed and changed for good over the course of the last six weeks or so.
Matt Alder [00:17:24]:
Final question. You’ve talked about employer brand all the way through this and how, you know, it’s a challenge for organizations at the moment. And we, you know, we’ve talked about the future in terms of talent sustainability. But you know, what should organizations be doing right now in terms of recruitment, marketing and employer branding?
Paul Maxin [00:17:44]:
Investing in it and absolutely investing in it. From a talent supply side, clearly it may well be the case that there’ll be a significant increase in talent supply as we, as we come out of that for many unfortunate reasons. And I think a number of people will also have had some shock through the experience, whether they’ve been furloughed or laid off or even remain. But from a corporate perspective and an employer brand perspective, now is really the time to absolutely invest. And the challenge that I’ve seen repeating on something I’ve said earlier is that suddenly many employer brands are looking absolutely the same. Because in the world of virtual working, all we’ve seen over the last, arguably over the last six weeks from some organizations are pictures of virtual zoom meetings. And it’s from a cultural perspective, there’s no sort of unique identifiers in that. But I do think in terms of coming up with the challenge of not just creating but amplifying a culture and corporate culture to talent markets at this time is quite challenging because many organizations working the same way. But as we come out of this, the one key area for talent acquisition to really, really focus on has got to be employer, brand and recruitment marketing and programmatically assessing what the right channels will be to reach talent and also to have a program of communication to the talent that you know you’ll need and want when you come out of that, on the assumption that you’ll be surviving. So actually within talent acquisition at the moment, I think there are two areas to really focus on. One is I said the process and the platforms, but the other is I cannot see none of it will be worthwhile unless you’ve got your employer brand and recruitment marketing in really good shape.
Matt Alder [00:20:05]:
So how can people get in touch to talk more about the Talent Sustainability Index?
Paul Maxin [00:20:10]:
Thanks for that. I’m really interested to I’ve had some colleagues and professional colleagues in the UK get in touch with me looking for others so they can they can contact me either through LinkedIn, Paul Maxin or you know, I’m happy to receive emails in that old fashioned way. Paulaxintalent.com but I’m out there on LinkedIn or send me an email. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be putting an international group together and once we’ve done that then we’ll, we’ll properly start to crowdsource it, to brainstorm it and come up with plans. It’s not just about I’m not looking to make money out of this. It’s not just about me leading something. I think it needs to be done in a collective and collaborative way. So I’ve come up with the concept but it’s up to that group, me included, to put the meat on the bones and and hopefully to deliver the outcome. So LinkedIn is the easiest way or.
Matt Alder [00:21:20]:
Paulaxintalent.Com Paul thank you very much for talking to me.
Paul Maxin [00:21:24]:
Thanks Matt. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:21:26]:
My thanks to Paul Maxin. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.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 time, and I hope you’ll join.
