It’s becoming evident that we are at a critical pivot point for talent acquisition. While the debates around AI are sucking up most of the attention, massive shifts are happening in terms of the shelf life of skills, ongoing challenges with skills acquisition, and upskilling people for a very different future world of work.
So, how should employers think about skills, and how can talent acquisition gain the future focus it needs to drive organizational value?
My guest this week is Lisa Monteith, Head of Talent Acquisition and onboarding for HSBC in the UK. In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the skills challenges facing organizations and the importance of taking a long-term view.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Current talent acquisition challenges
• Selling work as a product
• The shortening lifespan of skills
• Providing easy access to learning
• Total talent thinking
• Learning agility, curiosity, and other skills for the future
• Failing education systems and disappearing entry-level jobs
• Individual responsibility for learning
• Neuroinclusion in the recruiting process and the danger of homogenization
• How does talent acquisition need to re-invent itself for the future?
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[Recruiting Future podcast theme]
Matt: Hi, there. Welcome to Episode 610 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder.
It’s becoming evident that we are at a critical pivot point for talent acquisition. While the debates around AI are sucking up most of the attention, massive shifts are happening in terms of the shelf life of skills, ongoing challenges with skills acquisition and upskilling people for a very different future world of work.
So, how should employers think about skills, and how can talent acquisition gain the future focus it needs to drive organizational value?
My guest this week is Lisa Monteith, Head of Talent Acquisition and onboarding for HSBC in the UK. In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about the skills challenges facing organizations and the importance of taking a long-term view.
Hi, Lisa. And welcome to the podcast.
Lisa: Hi, Matt. How you doing?
Matt: I’m very well. Thank you. It is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
Lisa: Absolutely. So, my name is Lisa Monteith. I am the Head of Talent Acquisition and onboarding for HSBC in the UK. I’m responsible for hires that would anyone outside of our grad apprenticeship or our exec level. So, responsible for a direct team of 11. We work with an RPO for our permanent hiring and an MSP for our contractor hiring. My team on the perm side are responsible of anywhere between 4,500 to 6,000 hires a year across retail banking, investment banking, corporate services, commercial banking, so on and so forth.
Matt: Tell us about some of the challenges you’re finding in those markets with talent acquisition at the moment.
Lisa: I think most organizations, as we shift towards a skills-based economy, finding those real more technical skills and also that ability, those communication skills, analytical skills, problem solving skills are quite challenging, because they’re very highly prized, and a lot of people are looking out for them. I also think some of the challenges that we face is it’s more of a commercial approach now.
Not transactional, but if you think about when you purchase a product or a service, you buy it because you want it fits with your lifestyle, and so on and so forth. But really, if the world of work is becoming much more like that, are we selling roles that people want to do? Does it fit with the other aspects of their life that they want to kind of manage in the round, in terms of how much time we want people in the office, how much time people want to work at home? So, there’s a lot of moving parts currently that throw up challenges within talent acquisition. I think part and parcel that lends itself to skill acquisition, skills growth, future skills, changing skills, all of that type of stuff.
Matt: I suppose digging a bit deeper into the skills conversation, as it were, one of the obvious challenges is that you’re recruiting people for specific skills. As you said, in some markets, that’s very, very difficult in terms of people have a choice and you need to obviously persuade them to join you rather than your competition. But we also live in a world where the lifespan of skills is getting very, very short. Is that something that you’re seeing in the recruiting that you’re doing, that you’re recruiting people with skills and those skills are going out of date very quickly?
Lisa: I think one of the great things about HSBC is that we have a huge commitment around skills growth, skills development, future skills and providing easy access to learning to help build that capability and skill. I think the OECD has just come out with a report and the World Economic Forum around the fact that the priority has to be about skills growth, about reskilling our workforce, because we’re just simply not developing the skills fast enough or those skills don’t exist in the external marketplace.
And so, for us, I think there’s that real challenge between what are you trying to buy in. Is that total workforce strategy or total talent strategy, where the old classic, do you buy it, do you borrow it, do you build it, do you bought it, that type of stuff. Those are all the things that we’re really having to– I think organizationally, we’re all having to grapple with, because it is about reskilling. A big part of what we do now is focused on reskilling.
Matt: Does that impact talent acquisition in terms of, are you looking for people who are good at that or open to that, or are kind of really into lifelong learning? Is that a skill, if you like, that you look for?
Lisa: I think we’re going to see more and more of that. That whole, how do you recruit for potential and the traditional methodologies we’ve used around selection and assessment, does that lend itself to us identifying that potential, that learning agility, that real curious mindset? So, those are very, very different things. Individuals won’t necessarily know that they recognize that in themselves, and they have that propensity to acquire what might be very, very different skills to the ones they thought they were entering the workforce with. I think that is going to be one of our big challenges.
One of the great stories I always tell was a friend of a friend who was an English graduate, went to work for one of the biggest tech companies as a general management trainee. They put them through an assessment for potential development center, and became their biggest big ticket item salesperson. They had no idea that they had that capability. We have to find ways of being able to tease out– Also people’s confidence to learn new skills as well. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges.
Matt: You mentioned curiosity, learning agility, all those kind of things. When you talk about future skills, those long-term things that are going to pull people through this. Tell us a little bit more about what you think they are or what you’re seeing at the moment.
Lisa: So, the big fear factor at the moment is around AI, isn’t it, and machine learning and is that going to take all our jobs away and are we going to be run by technology? I think for me, some of the biggest areas that we need to consider are things about that analytical capability, how do we embrace that digital resilience at speed or all of that. Everything’s moving at such a pace.
And so, it’s about that analytical capability, it’s about that communication capability, it’s about problem solving, it’s about building relationships, telling the story of, if we’ve got machine learning and we’ve got AI doing all this work for us, where’s the human intervention part of that, and how do we bring that to life and bring that in a meaningful way? So, I think those communication skills, that analytical capability and our ability to build relationships between those data points and with each other is absolutely critical.
Matt: I suppose if we look at this over the long-term. So, if we fast forward 10 years and think about what work might be like then, although it’s difficult to fast forward 10 months at the moment [laughs] and think about work going to be like. But in 10 years’ time, everyone who’s going to be at work in 10 years’ time is either already has a job or is currently in the education system. Where do you think the gaps are in terms of preparing people for either their next job or people in the education system for entering a very different world of work?
Lisa: So, I think we have to really think about what we do next and those individuals that are already in education. So, if I think about my own children that came out of education in the last couple of years, came out of university, they’ve got degrees that suggest are probably meaningless to the roles that they’re currently doing. So, therefore, was there any use in them going to university?
If we think about how we educate our young people, we still educate our young people in the way that we were educated, the way our parents were educated. Well, is that setting them up for success in this new world of work that they’re going to be entering, which is going to bear no resemblance to the world of work you and I started in many years ago, if you think about the types of roles they might come into.
A lot of my contemporaries went into a bank. They went into the local bank, one of the big banking firms. They started as a cashier and then they worked their way up through the bank, the same if you went into work in a supermarket. Well, now, how many people do you see sitting on a till in a supermarket? Very few, because it’s all self-service or you order online or it’s delivery drivers.
They’re very, very different roles now and very different opportunities. And so, therefore, is university the right route? Is it going to give you what you need? Is it going to build your skill and capability and make you right for the workforce? Is our secondary education actually providing us with what we need in order to thrive when we go into the world of work, is it setting us up for success? And are the roles there that we would traditionally have gone into?
These are all things that we need to grapple with. These are all things that we need to think about, because I don’t think any of that’s right. Unless we’re thinking– I know there’s new T skills, but there’s a big reliance on organizations to be able to provide the training foundation for that. I just think that apprenticeships or degree apprenticeships, those sorts of things are maybe the thing of the future, but very different to the ones that we might have traditionally done.
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Matt: Yeah. I think that I’m interested from I suppose a corporate perspective is like what can you do as a company to really support that sort of thing? Because 10 years is going to come around pretty quickly. As we suggested, the world that we’re describing of being the world of 10 years’ time could be the world of next year. So, where does the responsibility for corporations lie in terms of having that pipeline or that conveyor belt of talent coming through?
Lisa: I read a really scary fact today on a piece of research that in the next 10 years, and this was from 2020, and so by 2030, 90% of the UK workforce would need to be retrained, because there would be very different roles. Now, I think it’s incumbent on organizations to be able to provide availability to skills growth, skills development, new acquisition of skill. But I actually think we all, as individuals, have to take responsibility for that too. If we want to remain relevant, if we want to continue to drive our careers in the way that we want them too, then I think we have to drive our own learning for ourselves.
There’s this culture of, I am going to wait till I’m put on a training course or I am going to apply to go on a training course. That would be an in-person training course, and it will be for X number of days and I will learn this when I’m there. Whereas I think now is very much part and parcel of bite sized chunks. There’s bite sized bits, pieces of learning, there’s bits of research, there’s bits of– If you think about LinkedIn and the various different modules, you can pick up there. We have a degreed platform in the HSBC. So, you can do bite sized pieces of learning in a number of different ways to build your skill in the time that you’ve got available.
There is still an argument for that in person training, there’s still an argument for all of those different things. But I think as individuals, we have to take charge of our own destiny, because if we wait for organizations to convey that upon us, then I think we’re going to be a long time waiting. I’m not talking about HSBC. I’m just talking generically. In organizations, I think if we want to remain relevant, we have to take charge of our own learning.
Matt: Yeah. I think that you really identify the flip side of all of this. It’s like, “Yeah, skills are going out of date really quickly, but we’ve never been in a better position as individuals to learn new skills. You’ve got the access to all the world’s knowledge on your phone.” So, I think that’s a big part of this as well.
Lisa: Very much so. I just think that it’s very difficult, isn’t it? Because we’re also very busy. We’re doing more with less in the workplace. But we have to find those nuggets of time. We’re all multi-screen, aren’t we? So, you’re learning something, reading something while you’re watching something. So, those are the things that to continue to build that capability and skill within ourselves and organizations to make it available.
Matt: One of the other things I wanted to talk about is, as things have developed and we understand more about the brain, I think the world is finally coming to terms with the fact that a huge proportion of the global population is neurodiverse and doesn’t think the same way as everyone else. That might be people who’ve been officially diagnosed with specific things or just everyone’s brain in general being a bit different.
Earlier on, you were talking about assessment and having to assess people for potential, and learning agility and those kind of things. Obviously, there’s been a big move in the last couple of years towards some great assessment tools out there that can do these kind of things through technology. Do you think that there are issues or disadvantages for neurodivergent people when it comes to those kind of current ways that we do? I suppose the traditional ways we’ve done assessment, but also some of the newer ways that we’re doing assessment.
Lisa: Yeah. I say this as a parent of two neurodiverse young people. I think that historically, we look at assessment tools and say, “Well, there’s no adverse impact for people with disability.” But that’s absolutely predicated on homogenization. Homogenization of that disability. Actually, if you’ve met one autistic person and the needs of those individuals are so very, very diverse, I think that, we try and standardize a lot of selection methodology. We do have reasonable adjustments, we’ve got disability confidence schemes and most organizations do. I think there’s a balance to be had, because I think as one in five people are thought to be neurodiverse and that can look and feel very, very different depending on that individual.
The assessment techniques that we use, I think there’s a challenge with some of those and how can we diversify them and make them accessible whilst also having a barometer for what we’re a consistency around what we’re checking and what we’re assessing for. I think that there’s a perception issue both in terms of individuals. Should I declare, am I going, is that going to be a bad thing if I tell people I’m neurodiverse? And so, I think the pressure on some neurodiverse individuals for masking and mirroring is exhausting for them. And so, that can have real implications around stress and anxiety. So, I think that’s problematic. I also think from our knowledge and understanding as recruiters and as hire managers, we don’t fully understand what equity looks like more broadly.
And so, therefore, when you start talking about reasonable adjustments, when you start talking about levelling the playing field, that might be that somebody has the questions ahead of schedule. It might be that you have to make sure you’ve got text– If it’s the Zoom interviews you’ve got text, or you give the written questions during the interview, or you give more time or you allow time between the–
There’s all these different things that you can do to try and improve from an interview standpoint. But I think some of the maybe the psychometric tools that we might use more broadly, let’s step away from this homogenized notion of no adverse impact for disabled people, because there’s a nuance around language, and syntax and all that kind of stuff, and decoding that can have a material impact.
Matt: Yeah. I also think that there’s a lot of stereotyping in terms of how people will be and how people present themselves at work. So, for example, all autistic people are going to be amazing at math and statistics. Everyone with ADHD has got this incredible hyperfocus superpower that’s going to power them through. I think there is a lot of stereotypical thinking, which also puts pressure on people as well to, again, behave in a certain way.
Lisa: I always tell this story. I’ve got three children, and I’ve got one who is neurotypical and two that are neurodiverse. So, if you were to give all three of them the questions before an interview, that the neurotypical one is so focused, they would have the questions, they would have answer down pack and they would probably max score it.
My second child would be able to do that, would be able to answer the questions, but would be so anxious and worried that they were getting it wrong and that would cause them immense anxiety. The third one would still be trying to decode the question, because she wouldn’t be able to– That third child is doing biochemistry at uni. It’s those assumptions and those perceptions and that bias.
So, my third child is ADHD. She’s dyspraxia, dyslexic, ADHD, but she’s on a tennis scholarship in the states doing biochemistry. So, this superpower thing is just a myth and a misnomer. It’s people think and do differently, and that’s the bit that we need to embrace. It’s a bit like, “I wear glasses.” That’s just the norm. People accept me with wearing glasses. But actually, I’ve got a different prescription to maybe you, Matt. But without our glasses, [laughs] we can’t do what we do.
Matt: [laughs] No, I think that’s very true. At the end of the day, everyone’s brain’s different. I think that’s the message from all of this. Just to tie everything together, because we’ve covered a huge amount of topics in quite a short period of time. Obviously, some of the things that you’ve struck me talking about future skills also that total talent approach, work as a product, plus things we’ve been talking about in terms of education and neurodiversity, lots of change ahead in the world of talent acquisition. What do you think talent acquisition might look like in a few years’ time as these things take hold and companies have strategies to deal with some of these issues?
Lisa: I think part of the challenge for talent acquisition in itself is we’re going to have to continue to reinvent ourselves, so if we think about the use of AI inferred skills about being able to find people with particular skills or inferred skills from their CVs and stuff like that.
I think that we have to have some responsibility for helping individuals be able to navigate those skills as well, so that our ability to communicate has to improve. I think that even if we have AI pulling together recommendations for shortlists or skilled people with specific skills, I think that human intervention value piece is going to be the bit that makes the difference.
And so, we’re going to have to up our game. You see people talking about it on LinkedIn about being ghosted by recruiters. [unintelligible [00:22:46] children, aren’t we? We’re not very good at recruiting our own people or treating our talent acquisition colleagues in the best possible way. I think we are going to have to get better at doing that.
The value proposition that we offer and where we can determine that value piece is going to be how we bring that skills agenda that comes out of AI to life for our businesses and our view of what that future always being able to anticipate the future around the business plan and what that’s going to mean in terms of skills, where that skill is within a given geography or in the globe depending on how we’re looking to recruit for. I think we’re just going to have to be far more– Futurist, I think was the term I heard quite a lot at LinkedIn conference, a lot of futurists about. But as a talent acquisition team, I think we’re going to have to start being much more future focused.
Matt: Lisa, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lisa: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s been a joy.
Matt: My thanks to Lisa. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and 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.
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