A crisis is always a catalyst for change, and the events of 2020 have the potential to drive some of the fastest and most significant change we have ever seen in talent acquisition. Long term effects and implications are still difficult to judge, particularly with such a mixed market picture and many employers still dealing with the initial fall out of a forced digital transformation in recruiting.
It is clear though that engagement and mobility are two powerful themes for the future as talent acquisition leaders reset and develop strategies for 2021
My guest this week is Gareth Flynn, Managing Director of TQ Solutions. Gareth is working at the cutting edge of change in talent acquisition and helping some of Australia’s biggest employers develop talent strategies and operating models for the changed future.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How talent acquisition has evolved in the past and where it is heading now
• Refocusing on talent engagement and mobility
• Total talent
• The role of technology
• Transitioning the talent acquisition service model
• The vital importance of organisational mindset and accountability
• Talent maturity model
• The future and the importance of taking a long term view
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Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by shl. From talent Acquisition to talent management, SHL has the people insight to help you build a talent strategy that achieves outcomes like increased productivity, internal mobility, engagement and leadership diversity. SHL brings transparent AI technology, decades of trustworthy data science and objectivity to help companies attract, develop and grow the workforce you need to succeed in the digital era. Visit shl.com to learn how you can unlock the full potential of your greatest asset, your people.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 296 of the Recruiting Future podcast. A crisis is always a catalyst for change and the events of 2020 have the potential to drive some of the fastest and most significant change we’ve ever seen in talent acquisition. Long term effects and implications are still difficult to judge, particularly with such a mixed market picture and many employers still dealing with the immediate fallout of a forced digital transformation in recruiting. It’s clear though that engagement and mobility are two powerful themes for the future as talent acquisition leaders reset and develop strategies for 2021. My guest this week is Gareth Flynn, Managing Director of TQ Solutions. Gareth is working at the cutting edge of change in talent acquisition and he’s helping some of Australia’s biggest employers develop talent strategies and operating models for the changed future. Hi Gareth and welcome to the podcast.
Gareth Flynn [00:02:11]:
Hey Matt, great to be here. I’m a first time participant but long time listener. So wonderful to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
Fantastic and fantastic to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Gareth Flynn [00:02:24]:
Sure. So Gareth Flynn, I’m the founder and managing director of a consultancy, a talent consultancy based in Melbourne, Australia. We’ve been going for 12 years. Started in 2008 during the last global crisis and our focus is helping companies build, transform and their talent functions, their talent operating models. So we work with enterprise clients and yeah, I’ve been really fortunate to work with some fantastic brands over the last 12 years and earlier prior to that I actually worked in RPO for Alexander man and in my very long past history I used to be a finance guy, so I’m reasonably good with numbers as well.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
It must have been really interesting to kind of track the the evolution of talent acquisition during that period of time. What kind of phases have you seen it go through? What’s your sort of take on how talent acquisition has evolved and, and where it’s heading now?
Gareth Flynn [00:03:24]:
Yeah, great question. We’ve actually been we actually have been mulling over this a fair bit and also thinking about where it’s heading. I think, you know, TA as a discipline, you know, it’s 20 years old really started obviously in that early 2000 period and it was really just about bringing agency recruitment in house in the early days. And I think, you know, the main focus in the first years was about building that capability within a company, people, technology, basic branding, career sites, et cetera, et cetera. And that first decade was about transformation from old, more agency driven models to more of the in house, what we call in house powerhouse. It really started during that first 10 years, I think, and particularly in this market here. We’re a pretty small market with some very tight talent scarcity, talent shortages. And so what, what then transitioned was a much more sophistication, more towards employer brand led recruitment from within companies. So it was a big push near 2015 onwards, really around EVP, brand sourcing as, as a real discipline and a bit of splintering of the recruiting role in house from your, you know, you’re a recruiter and you do everything to actually well as a sourcer and there’s a recruiter and there’s some data people and there’s some brand people. And I think where we were earlier this year was really interesting space. You know, we were seeing, you know, we’ve got this expression that clients were trying to automate this and experience that it was all about automation, digitization, but it was also, also about experience, hiring manager experience, candidates experience, recruiter experience and the tech evolution that’s taken place in the last five years, that’s really got us to the point where we can literally automate all of recruitment today if we wanted to, has just been staggering to watch. You know, the last five years has dwarfed the last 20 when it comes to technology advancement in the industry. So that’s kind of, if I was to summarize, that’s where I see the big phases over the last few years.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
I couldn’t agree with you more, particularly about the tech revolution in the last few years and, and the rise of the potential of automation. Although it may be the case that a lot of organizations haven’t quite got there yet. So how is 2020 changing things? What are you seeing now in terms of how talent acquisition teams are thinking and behaving and what should they be focusing on in the future?
Gareth Flynn [00:06:04]:
Yeah, and I think for us this has been our main focus of the last six months. I mean we’re here to advise companies on their strategy for their talent Functions. It’s something we’ve had to really think about ourselves as a business. I think the interesting thing Matt, at the moment we have a really multi speed economy at a global level. Not only regions are open, more open than others, but actually we’ve got here, I mean, let’s take Australia as an example. Some of our industry sectors have never been busier and so they are, they’re in full on acquisition mode. You know, supermarkets, technology businesses, essential services. I mean they are operating at levels that they haven’t seen in the last 20 years. So you’ve got that, that part of the market is just coping with crazy growth and then you have other areas of the market that’s completely flat and actually talent acquisition is redundant and irrelevant to those organizations. And so, you know, when, when you reflect on that question, you’ve got to look at the context of the industry you’re facing into. You know, I do think companies that have generally been impacted by Covid to some degree will be moving more towards business resilience and people risk reduction across the board. And I think we’ve seen a big move towards companies trying to get visibility of their workforce. You know, we’ve seen some very big businesses who have operating units that have been really impacted and some that haven’t and they’ve been desperately trying to move workforce to other areas of their organization but they’ve had no line of sight over the skills and people in their business. So we are seeing a big move towards workforce visibility initiatives and programs that ultimately will fuel a mobility strategy for these companies moving forward. So for us we’re seeing a really a pivot from talent functions being very acquisition focused and really that being their service to talent functions that are focused on talent engagement and mobility. And talent is total talent. Doesn’t matter whether it’s perm or contingent or gig or statement of work, it’s total talent engagement and the experience they’re trying to create is a key focus area. But it’s all about mobility and about talent retention and talent moves within the organization. I think that’s a really key difference in the latter part of 2020 as companies start to develop their mobility strategies.
Matt Alder [00:08:42]:
Let’s break that down a bit because I know it’s part of a model that you’re currently working to. Talk to me a bit more about the engagement part of that.
Gareth Flynn [00:08:51]:
Yeah, sure. So I mean engagement’s obviously been a critical part of more progressed talent functions in the past and for us engagement is any, any touch point in the life cycle of the relationship. Talent has with a company is engagement. So that could be, you know, going back to the sourcing function we talked about earlier, that could be the initial reach and touch of the brand from a sourcing perspective. Your talent nurturing, your talent pipelining, that’s an engagement play. Your recruitment process and your onboarding process is an engagement play. And that’s obviously what we’re most used to. But what we are seeing where I think and actually what I’m most excited about from an industry perspective is that we’re now moving into a phase where traditional talent functions are getting more involved in the development and the mobility of talent within an organization and helping people with their careers with opportunities with moves internally or externally. And so this is the, this is the area we’re now moving into which is a world of more career coach, career advisory, helping the business identify talent within the organization and being the, the conduit towards those moves internally. And ultimately when they leave, it’s still about engagement. When you’re running alumni programs and communities post post the work itself, that is also engagement. So as we automate process and admin, what we want to see is talent functions stepping up into high value work. And a lot of that work is about engagement and the experience that’s created between the talent and the organization.
Matt Alder [00:10:43]:
And just to dig into the technology side of that. So you talked about automation, we’ve talked about the rapid progress of technology in the last five years. What role does technology play now? What should companies be thinking about in terms of the technology that they have? What does fit for purpose look like? Where should they be investing?
Gareth Flynn [00:11:07]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I probably Matt, would reframe this question slightly so I’ll share. I won’t mention the name but we were working with a big global financial service company last year and we were, the project scope was help us with our tech strategy for the function. And we pushed back a little bit on that and said that’s the wrong question. The question should be what’s the strategy for the function and what are the services that you want this function to deliver to the business? And once you identify the service model that you want to build, you go looking for the enablement which is the technology. And I think for us we have to get the strategy right and we have to get the service model right and then the technology is the plugin that makes it happen along with the people. But the other critical question, and because you can automate everything in recruitment today, I mean there’s my RPO company, Alexander man, have recently launched a product that automates the entire recruitment process for casual workers. You can do it today, but it doesn’t mean that you should. And for some brands the question they need to ask is what are the critical moments that matter around engagement and experience and is there a human involved or is it just going to be technology? And if technology, what’s the tech? So that’s the sequence we normally work through with clients to help them understand what they’re tech, tech stack or their tech strategy should be. But it’s always in support of the service model and the overarching strategy of the function.
Matt Alder [00:12:43]:
Absolutely. And that, that really is critical. Lots of talent functions going through a huge period of change at the moment. As you said, markets are different by country, markets are different by, by industry. And there’s just a sort of a huge transformation going on at the moment. Talent acquisition, leaders who are listening and a kind of a plan where they go next, how their team evolves, how their service model evolves. What advice or tools could you, could you give them to really help with that transformation?
Gareth Flynn [00:13:15]:
Yeah, look, I think the first thing we would recommend and you know, it’s almost the scope of a consulting project that we would run but they can do it themselves if they have the adequate resources to do it. The first thing they really need to do is understand where, I mean obviously it’s a no brainer, but understand where the business is at, what are the priorities for the organization. They have to unpack where they sit in that multi speed economy. I think I’ve seen a lot of TA leaders increasingly frustrated recently because they can’t get their agenda through and they can’t get the things they want to do through. But there’s actually a bit of reality here Matt, that it’s just not the business’s priority at the moment. For some of these businesses, cash flow and survival is the priority. It isn’t a nice to do in talent. So I think, I do think pausing and taking stock and listening to the business priority is the first place to start. The other consideration is getting feedback from stakeholders really understanding what they’re thinking about the service model or the function itself. So they have to invest in that voice of customer. You know, we have a number of clients that you know, poll hiring managers and unsuccessful and successful applicants or new hires. That’s just a critical thing to do is they think about their services they want to build. And I think actually understanding the baseline of how you’re performing is critical as well. So really lifting the lid on your function and Giving it a critical eye on what’s working, what’s not. And the other thing, Matt, which we’ve actually developed a tool to help and I’m sure unpack this a little bit more, but we’ve developed for the industry a self diagnostic tool that a talent leader can. And it’s free. This is not me selling it, it’s free and we want to give it to leaders to use. But it will help them identify what their problem is that they need to work on rather than just assuming they know the problem. It will really give them some guidance on where they’re performing from a maturity perspective or from an enablement perspective. And that’s what we call our talent maturity model.
Matt Alder [00:15:35]:
So talk us through that in a bit more detail. So I know that there are sort of various levels and aspects of the maturity model. Can you sort of talk us through it to give people a bit more of a sense of what they can get out of it and what it’s actually measuring?
Gareth Flynn [00:15:50]:
Yeah, sure, sure. I think it’s also just reflecting briefly on the history of it. So we were working on a project with, it was with Australia Post, so a very large government business service over here in Australia and we were a part of a PricewaterhouseCoopers project and we were the SME in the talent vertical and we wanted to assess how well Australia Post was performing. And I had a maturity model is very, very traditional in nature at the time and very similar to lots of maturity models out there. Four levels descriptions and you kind of pick where you were. And we didn’t think it was very useful. So we, we pitched the idea of co creating a maturity model with our industry networks and using it to assess Australia Post maturity and to help build a roadmap for them to develop their model. And so we, we were, thankfully our stakeholders signed off the program of work and we got 30 to 40 industry leaders, mostly from talent acquisition leadership roles, some of some vendors locally. And we built a maturity model based on different criteria that PwC and TQ solutions kind of wordsmithed and made it pretty. And then we used it as a tool in our consulting business for the last three years. But it was great at the time and it was very acquisition focused, which was a bit of a miss back in 2017 and it wasn’t useful for the industry more broadly. So last year I picked up the phone to PwC and said, hey, can we get back together? I want to do a version 2.0 and I want to make it more focused on acquisition and mobility and I Also want to create a tool, a survey tool for the industry to use. And so we can actually make, we can, we can share it much more easily in an open source way. And we did that. We got 40 to 50 people together to get some more input from the market and we co created this with industry and we were launching it in March this year when the world all changed and we thankfully paused. And then post post Covid hitting TQ solutions has recalibrated it even further and made it relevant for post Covid and also with a talent, engagement and mobility flavor to it. So that’s the history of it. I think it’s important to know that it’s a co created piece with industry. It’s not just our thinking. We’ve built this thing with practitioners like your audience. And one of the big changes we made in the second version and TQ, we probably used it 20, 30 times over the last few years. And one of the things we realized quite early on is that the first iteration didn’t have enough weighting with organizational mindset and leadership mindset towards people and talent. So the new model is split into two. It’s got three dimensions that talk to organizational mindset and then five dimensions that talk to enablement, you know, technology people, brand policy, analytics. But where what we’ve seen is the mindset is by far and away the most important ingredient for talent transformation.
Matt Alder [00:19:28]:
That’s really interesting and I can see why that would be. I suppose just, just to finish off on this, I mean could you break down that, that mindset a little bit, A little bit more what elements of it?
Gareth Flynn [00:19:38]:
So I think for me it’s, you know, we’ve got three categories, I mean people and talent strategy. So this really talks to, is the people and talent strategy coherently aligned to the business strategy. Does the business input into the people and talent strategy? So where, where in some companies, you know, people and talent almost operate in this, in this world of their own, in this silo that is, is just, it’s just distant to the actual business reality. So these two being glued together is so critical and it’s again Coke is co created in, in progressive companies where we see this working. The people and talent strategy is actually part, is part of the business strategy is one and the same. The other one is the accountability. Again, a lot of immature businesses we hear when we’re interviewing business leaders, oh that’s HR’s problem or that’s the people team’s responsibility. Oh no, I get my talent acquisition folk to do that for me and they’ve almost sort of passed all of the responsibility and accountability to a central service. And for us, again, in mature companies, you see the CEO going, well, actually, no, recruitment’s my responsibility. Developing people is my responsibility. Yes, I work with people in HR to help, but actually that’s my job. And so that’s another piece. It’s around accountability and people’s views of who should be doing what when it comes to people and talent. And then the third one for us is around decision making. How decisions are made relating to talent, engagement and mobility, how data feeds into those decision making processes. Who makes those decisions in the organization, how are those decisions made? Again, that’s another piece around mindset. It’s almost like a ways of working that has an influence over the model. So they’re the three measures or dimensions we measure. And each of those would have in the survey, sort of six to seven questions that you would respond to that would give you an aggregator score for that dimension. But mindset is an accelerator or it’s a handbrake. And I think for us, too many companies in the last five years have been trying to fix enablement, but they haven’t focused on the big prize, which is mindset.
Matt Alder [00:22:16]:
I’ll come back and ask you where people can access the model in a second. Sure. But before I do, let’s talk about the future just a little bit. Obviously, impossible to make accurate predictions about what’s going to happen, but interested in your perspective. What do you think 2021’s gonna look like? If we were doing this interview this time next year, what would we be talking about?
Gareth Flynn [00:22:42]:
I sincerely hope I’m not still in lockdown in 2021, which we currently are in Melbourne. Yeah, look, it’s a fascinating question. I think 2021 is going to be a pretty ropey year, if I’m really honest with you, Matt. I think the economies around the world are going to really struggle. We’re going to have periods of the virus coming backwards and shutdowns. I think they’ll continue drawing 2021. And so again, depending on the industry sector you’re in, the impact is going to be very different. So it’s, I think for a lot of companies it’s going to be about surviving through that period. I don’t think anyone’s going to thrive through 2021. I think they’re going to survive 2021. But I do think the clever organizations are the ones that are really thinking about when this crisis is diminishing and they want to get on the front foot and I remember hearing about the Atlassian story that in 2008 when everyone else was firing their people, they started hiring aggressively because they knew the crisis would end and they wanted to start to get the rub on their competitors and they went to market and hired some of the best talent in the market. They took a long term view of the, of the business cycle. I think companies that are approaching the market in that way and are thinking about recovery and how to get ahead of the game, both from an operational perspective. So how we set up and how we’re going to work, but also strategic hiring capability build upskilling your people and your leaders now in preparation for when the market moves in the future. So I think we see a real opportunity in the next period of time for companies to start investing in leadership dev, leadership development. Really working on that mindset view. So I’d love to see this time next year. Several of my clients here locally firstly help moving the dial on leadership development and maturity when it comes to people and talent. And I’d also love to see a few of our clients here locally who are making some strategic bets around mobility. And I must admit I know a couple that are looking at it right now. I think they’ll move ahead of some of their competition, which I’m really encouraged by.
Matt Alder [00:25:21]:
So final question. You’ve given us a really good flavor of the maturity model. How can people access it?
Gareth Flynn [00:25:26]:
Yeah, when we produced v2.0 I spoke to PwC just about comfort levels on this, but we just wanted to open source it. You know we’re a relatively boutique consultancy here in Australia and I think one thing Covid has taught us, Matt, is that we can actually have a bit of global reach and a global voice. And the crisis has been great in giving us the confidence to do that. So we just thought well let’s just, let’s just publicize it and stick it on our website. So we’ve shared it on social channels and LinkedIn etc but any of your audience can hop on to our website which is tqsolutions.com there’s actually in the top navigation bar, maturity model is one of the headings. And in there they’ll find an industry briefing pack which gives a bit of history on the maturity model and how it was developed and who was involved. And the actual self diagnostic is a wireframe in our website. So people can just hop in, they can complete the survey and providing they give, then they do have to give their name and email because we actually have to send it to them. If they do that, we’ll send them a complimentary outputs report which they can share internally and digest. And what I’d encourage, Matt, which we’ve seen great success with some of our own clients here is if four or five different people from within the same organization sit the self diagnostic and they can start to compare and contrast some of the differences and responses, which is a really interesting conversation in itself and helps to calibrate the results and also for the company to really work out where they genuinely sit. So yeah, it’s public, it’s on our website, it doesn’t cost anything. We don’t want anything from people for it. We just want people to use it and hopefully add some value to their strategic decision making as they evolve their talent functions.
Matt Alder [00:27:31]:
And I’ll put the link to that in the show notes Gareth, thank you very much for talking to me.
Gareth Flynn [00:27:35]:
It’s a pleasure, Matt, thank you very much and look forward to continuing to hearing your podcast in the months to come.
Matt Alder [00:27:42]:
My thanks to Gareth Flynn. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify 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 search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
