There is often a lot of confusion between tactics and strategy in discussions about talent acquisition. However, with so many employers facing challenges in hiring the talent they need, having a genuinely strategic approach to resourcing has never been more important.
My guest this week is John Wallace. John has driven resourcing strategies for a number of employers including RBS, Tesco Bank and Barclays. He has recently published a book on strategic resourcing which is full of highly valuable insights and case studies.
In the interview we discuss:
▪ What is resourcing strategy?
▪ The four key challenges for employers which mean getting resourcing right is vital
▪ Why building capability is much more important than cutting costs
▪ The three conditions needed for strategic resourcing
▪ How to make the business case for strategic resourcing
John also shares his thoughts on the role of technology and his predictions for the next 12-18 months in talent acquisition
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company Smart Recruiters is a full talent acquisition suite with candidate relationship management and an applicant tracking system all in one modern platform. With an extensive marketplace of more than 300 vendors and a user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters alike love, Companies from Ikea to Bosch to blah blah car leverage Smart Recruiters to attract, select and hire the talent they need to grow and expand their business. Visit smart recruiters@www.smartrecruiters.com to find out why companies across the globe consider them to be the number one ATS replacement.
Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 114 of the Recruiting Future podcast. There’s often much confusion between tactics and strategy in discussions about talent acquisition. However, with so many employers facing challenges in hiring the talent they need, strategic resourcing has never been more important. My guest this week is John Wallace. John has driven resourcing strategies for a number of employers, including rbs, Barclays and Tesco Bank. He’s recently published a book on strategic resourcing and shares a number of incredibly valuable insights in our interview. Hi, John, and welcome to the podcast.
John Wallace [00:01:55]:
Hello, Matt, how are you doing? Delighted to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:57]:
Yeah, I’m very good. It’s a lovely day. We’re actually in a golf club in.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
Scotland, looking out over the Firth of.
Matt Alder [00:02:03]:
Forth and as I say, beautiful, beautiful sunny Scottish afternoon. So could you introduce yourself and just sort of tell everyone who you are.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
And what you do?
John Wallace [00:02:14]:
My name is John Wallace. I’ve been been in the resourcing world for the best part of 20 years or so now. Originally worked in recruitment consultancy and then moved in house with the Royal bank of Scotland back in 2005, 2006 or so. And from there I went on to work for Tesco, headed up resourcing reward and talent at Tesco bank. And then after that I worked for a while at Barclays and then after that I’ve done some consultancy with various organizations, helping them and their resourcing function. So, yeah, been in the game, as they say, quite a long time and it’s been good fun. Learned a lot, made a few mistakes, made a lot of mistakes, learned from the mistakes, made them again. So, yeah, it’s been good.
Matt Alder [00:03:00]:
So you’ve recently had a book published.
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
Could you tell us the title and why you wrote it?
John Wallace [00:03:06]:
The title of the book is Higher Use Strategic resourcing to sharpen your competitive edge. That’s higher par, as in a pun. H I R E. Of course, the reason I wrote it was because I’d come out of consultancy. And the way I always explain this to people is I’m part of what you could call the squeeze generation. So I had elderly parents, I was consulting overseas and elderly parents in Northern Ireland and I had children in Scotland and I was consulting in the Middle east. And this wasn’t working out terribly well for anybody. So I came back to look after my parents and be there for my children. At that point in time, I was doing a lot, trying to get the family business working and doing a lot traveling back and forth between Northern Ireland and Scotland. So it made getting a proper job in inverted commas too difficult to do. But by the same measure, I didn’t want to give up my expertise or have expertise decay or have network decay by not being involved in human resources or recruitment. So I used the time to work my network extensively with the intention of perhaps writing a book at the end of it. And that was going around speaking to people who’ve been head of resourcing, HR directors, operation managers, anybody in the world of recruitment and where the book started off to be a kind of help guide for people running a resourcing function. What I learned by speaking to so many people was about the shared experience and part of what I would call the tribe of heads of resourcing or resourcing people. And actually some of the fundamental challenges we face in recruitment about how we have a voice that’s listened to when what we do is phenomenally important and increasingly important. So over the course of the year or so that I went about writing the book, what started off as a, I think was going to be quite interesting, but maybe not quite as deep a view of how to do recruitment turned into something that I think was more about why recruitment is a significantly important part of what HR is doing now more than ever, and what recruiters need to be thinking about to make themselves a more strategic function.
Matt Alder [00:05:26]:
Cool. I mean, I think that sounds very interesting. I’ve, you know, I’ve kind of read, read some of the book and you, you know, you’re talking extensively about the importance of recruitment strategy and you know, what, what, what people need to do to, to, to think about that properly. What kind of challenges do you think that resources function, resourcing functions are facing? Which means they, they need to think more strategically about what they do on.
John Wallace [00:05:52]:
A kind of global scale? I think there are Four things facing businesses right now that create this environment, which means that getting resourcing right has become increasingly important. I’ll kind of just flit through these four areas quite quickly. Firstly, there’s the economic environment that we exist in where despite what you read in the press and the media, if you actually look at the underlying statistics, the health of the economy is quite good at the minute, particularly from an employment point of view. The Office of National Statistics reported last month we got 74.2% employment in the UK, which is much higher than it’s been on a continuing upward trend for the last few years. It’s exactly the same in all the developed economies right across the world. So there is genuine strength in the economy with regard to jobs. Granted, there’s downward pressure on wages at the minute, but I think we’ll see that reversing. So there isn’t a strength in the economy or when I was working in recruitment agencies, what we knew as a candidate driven market, that is certainly the case these days. The other factors are about the pace of the modern world. So there is the pace of change of technology and actually specifically about how that impact work or how that impacts work and the jobs that people are doing. I think there is quite a lot of hyperbole about technology replacing jobs and there is undoubtedly going to be an element of jobs being replaced by technology, but I think there will still be an awful lot of jobs. The way that I look at this, haven’t been a reader of history. The Luddites and the machine breakers in the 17th century didn’t know that there would be engineers and steel workers in the 19th century. And the steelworkers of the 19th and 20th century didn’t know there would be webmasters and social media managers in the 21st century. Now there are winners and losers in this occasion. And it’s of little solace to the people in Motherwell who lose their jobs when Ravenscraig Steelwork closes down. But the reality is the overall level of employment continues in an upward trend. The example that I love to use with people is my dream job would be a Spotify Playlist compiler. Now that wasn’t a job that my careers master spoke to me at school about because it didn’t exist then. The technology didn’t exist to do that. So therefore my point is that technology is impacting the world of work in ways we actually just don’t know about right now. But we know, and this is the third point that I would make, we know that right now all organizations are reacting to technology. So there’s a fundamental change in the way organizations structure themselves and restructure themselves continually. I’m pretty sure that anybody who’s listened to this podcast will at some point in time either have been in a period of consultation through redundancy or have put people through consultation in a period of redundancy, will have reorganized their department, been subject to a reorganization, and a lot of that is technology driven. So we have the pace of this is increasing in organizations and actually the impact of organizations continually restructuring is a real dent in the psychological contract between the employer and the employee, where now the employee understands that this is part of the game, part of the role. So therefore this lifelong loyalty doesn’t exist anymore. And I would say in the developed world in particular. However, I think it is the final condition that I understand here that is the real kicker for me. That is the one that that tips us into a world where actually resourcing needs to be incredibly important for an organization. And that is the view of the younger worker coming into the workplace. Now, I’m not someone who’s necessarily wild about descriptors of Generation X and Generation Y and Millennials and all that kind of labels. I don’t think they’re terribly helpful. But there is a real sense in the younger workforce coming through that they will have 20 to 30 different jobs in their life. They will maybe change careers three or four times. What they want from a are things that you and I, Matt, probably didn’t expect from a job. Continual growth, learning, self development. We wanted a job and get paid, so on. And I think it’s more sophisticated these days. So the upshot of all this is that the average length of time that someone spends in a job, not necessarily with an employer but in a job, is very different these days. I did a piece of research on LinkedIn and I came up going through loads and loads of profiles of various different people across a multitude of sectors and industries and businesses. And I came up with a number of 2.79 years is the average length of time that someone spends in a job. So what that says to me, and it’s a gross generalization, but we’ll go with the generalization, is that that’s every organization or organizations are reinventing themselves about every three years. So you’ve got a choice as an organization. Do you consider this to be a massive threat to your organization, that you have to continually turn the handle to bring people and fill roles, be it internally or externally? Or is this an opportunity for you to actually have a Resourcing strategy that takes the capability of your business, looks to the future, understands what you need in the future, and then put in place design so that you get the capability you need for the future by design rather than happenstance. And that’s why I think resourcing is such an important thing to do now.
Matt Alder [00:11:41]:
What’s become clear to me, doing, I think it’s 114 podcast interviews now, is that there are a number of different views about what resourcing strategy actually means. In fact, about what strategy actually means. Give us your definition. What do you mean by resourcing strategy?
John Wallace [00:12:03]:
That’s a great question, Matt. I think I’ll start by giving my view of what a resourcing strategy is not. And what we quite often hear being put forward is resourcing strategies. It’s not an employer branding exercise, it’s not changing your operating model, it’s not implementing a graduate program. It is not putting in new assessment processes or an ATS or using video interviewing technology. Much as all these things are fabulous things and perhaps the right things to be doing a resourcing strategy in my mind is the answer to a very straightforward question. And that question is, how do we build the capability to meet the long term plan of the business? There are a couple of key parts of that that I think are really important. Firstly, it’s about capability. It’s not about cutting cost. And so much resourcing strategy is about doing things cheaper, but this is about building the capability of the business. The second thing is that it’s about long term plan. And the long term plan is not the one year annual planning cycle that we’re all beholden to. And I recall in my times as heads of resourcing or head of resourcing in various organizations, I got that 10% haircut year in, year out. Do more with less was always the question. And I think when you start explaining a resourcing strategy as something which is about cutting cost, well, that’s going to have an impact on quality. And the other thing for me, it’s the long term business plan. Resourcing needs to get close to what the business strategy is and where the business strategy is going. So we can help define what we can do to support that business strategy better. And that may sound like a really obvious thing to do, but how often, how many people on the call know that you get the order and you’re an order receiver and you deliver on the back of the order and how that fits into the grand picture, you may know, you may not know but actually being part of that grand picture is extremely important to my mind. It is a supply and demand problem. The demand is the answer to the question, how do we meet the capability? How do we get the capability to hit the long term plan? The supply part is the resourcing mix, and that is your temporary staff, your internal moves, your promotion, your graduate program, your apprenticeship program, your external experienced hires, your external senior hires, and so on and so forth. And it is understanding what that supply element looks like, what the capability or what your markets can bear from that supply side, your internal markets, your external markets and how that meets the demand side, and your resourcing strategy and your operating model and how you deliver in the back of that understands how those two things talk to each other.
Matt Alder [00:14:57]:
So what in the book, I noticed you kind of go through some of the sort of key elements of, you know, of building a strategic plan.
Matt Alder [00:15:05]:
Could you sort of give us an overview of what those, what those might.
Matt Alder [00:15:08]:
Be, what people need to think about when they’re, when they’re kind of, you know, they’ve done the work that you’ve described and they’re sort of moving forward to the next stage.
John Wallace [00:15:16]:
So as I was going through my research for the book and talking to people, it became pretty clear to me that there were three conditions, as I described in the book, that you need to have in place for success when you’re building your resourcing strategy. And actually, when I was writing the book, I wanted to list them. 1, 2, 3. I don’t know why, you know, it’s almost like a goal of the season competition. What’s the most important? And I kind of got to the end when I thought, well, actually there isn’t one that’s more important than the other. If you fail at one, the other two don’t carry you through. They all have to be in place. So in no particular order whatsoever, one condition is to have planning that is long term and linked to the business plan. I’ve already talked about that. And that is a planning process that has a horizon of more than one year. It’s not your workforce plan for the year. It is a greater, longer term strategic plan about the capability that the organization needs and the plan needs to flex and it needs to roll with the business plan. The second part is what I call excellence in execution. And that’s actually doing all the bits that we talk about quite a lot in terms of getting our employer branding right, getting our candidate generation right, getting our assessment right, getting our onboarding right a bit. That is so Crucial, but so typically forgotten about and making sure there’s that integration with your first year performance and so on and so forth. What we’re trying to recruit here is capability as opposed to getting good candidates and getting on to the next job, which is so often the way. The final point is less tangible. And although I say that none of these points, none of the three conditions are more important, it’s that the final one I think is the real challenge that we have to face in the industry. And that’s about the culture of resourcing. And by culture of resourcing I don’t necessarily mean what is the culture of your organization. What I’m talking about is how is resourcing or recruitment or your job as a recruiter viewed by the organization. And I can give you examples throughout my career of where I’ve seen bad resourcing culture is when you have a manager who says I can spot a good candidate within five minutes of coming into the room. It’s when you hear an HR director saying, well, that’s just recruitment, isn’t it? It’s when you know that recruitment is treated as an operation that is just given your order and then you scurry off and deliver and come back with it. It’s when you don’t have sight of long term plans. It’s when you’re target three things, which is time, cost and quality. But really you’re only targeted on two things, which is time and cost. And the quality is a negative measure. Like how many people joined and left within six months, for example, is a typical quality measure, which isn’t really a quality measure. It is just a very negative way of measuring that. So that culture of what does quality look like in resourcing or what does an organization, when they really embrace a resourcing culture is the opposite of that. They understand it’s important, they know that what we do is technical, difficult and extremely important for the long term health of the organization. So for me There were the three conditions. This is not one of your LinkedIn 5 Ways to do perfect recruitment. It is just simply the three conditions you have to have in place to be successful and that’s planning, culture and excellence in execution.
Matt Alder [00:18:42]:
Picking up on your last point there obviously there’ll be lots of people listening from organisations that don’t have the resourcing culture that you, that you talked about. What would your advice be to resourcing leaders who are trying to make that business case to the leadership of their organization that resourcing is actually a really important strategic Activity.
John Wallace [00:19:05]:
I think that’s the real problem. I think it’s a great question and I think it’s a real problem that people struggle with. And I think we sometimes need to have a look at ourselves within the industry and have a look at our own capability and understand do we treat ourselves as a profession? Do we really think that we are a profession or are we just the order takers and job fillers? Next job, please, and move on. I think we have to be able to speak to a business in a sense that really commercializes the value of the proposition that we have. And the complexity in that is the notion that actually money that is spent in my function in resourcing actually benefits the business way over there in marketing or in operations or in risk or in finance or sales or whatever. If we recruit better salespeople, we have better sales performance, we make more money as a business. One of the things that I like to say that is if you get your resourcing right, the benefit is that you will manage risks that you don’t know exist yet, and you will unlock possibilities that you can’t imagine, because the capability across the business will be much stronger. How you go about articulating that as part of a business case is the real challenge. But the first thing you need to get your head around is how do you measure capability within the business? How do you demonstrate that what you’re doing is raising the bar of capability that takes you outside the normal performance management cycle, which of course will be on a normal distribution, so your resourcing is on a normal distribution, so you’re not proving anything. And that’s your starting point. And the starting point, therefore, is to make sure that you have something in place that helps you demonstrate that by putting a focus on resourcing, you can raise the capability. And I think after that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But it’s not easy and it’s a real hearts and minds thing. And we need to talk in business language and return on investment.
Matt Alder [00:20:58]:
Absolutely. Again, that makes perfect sense. One of the reoccurring themes that we talk about a lot on this podcast is technology. What do you think the role of technology is strategically within resourcing?
John Wallace [00:21:13]:
I think technology has an incredibly important part to play, of course, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that we do have to be cognizant of cost and all the things that we do, of course. And in my experience, one of the things I’ve always wanted to do is to make an operation scalable. And technology helps you make Something scalable. So you can deal with 10,000 applicants, you can deal with 1,000 applicants. And the two things don’t necessarily correlate to an increase or decrease in your cost. And technology enables you to do that. It’s fundamentally important. However, one of the things that I talk about in the book is about the capability of line managers. This is a kind of example of where I think technology really helps is the capability of line managers. I quote in the book a really interesting piece of research that a company did on the recruitment effectiveness of lawyers, lawyers recruiting other lawyers in a major. One of the golden circle law firms. Long story short, they effectively got it right 47% of the time. Now, 47% of the time is slightly worse than tossing a coin. So one of the things that I think that we need to look at very seriously is how do we make sure that we deliver to the hiring manager candidates at that stage in the process that they literally cannot make a mistake by choosing one of the last three, what I call Tombolo recruitment. Put the three names in the hat, pick one out, you’ve got it right. But of course, they will still want a role in the process and a lot of that heavy lifting on the way to generating the right number of candidates from the right place, managing through a process. Because to my mind, the future of recruitment is about building communities rather than point of need recruitment. So you build a community, so you’ve got to manage them in a technological way. Then you’ve got to put them through a screening process in a technological way. Lots of neat things like video interviews that do situational judgment tasks, for example. There’s some of the neat technology that someone was demonstrating to me recently, which I think is really good. There’s lots of ways technology can do that heavy lifting at the front end. However, technology can’t do it all, of course, and there is still fundamentally a role for human relationships in this, because we have an emotional journey for the candidate, an emotional journey for the manager. And in the middle of it, there will probably be a recruiter of some description who has to manage this and make sure the relationships and the understanding and people’s emotions are looked after as we go through it as well. So technology does the heavy lifting. People will, in my view, always be needed to do the emotional side.
Matt Alder [00:23:59]:
So, final question. What do you think the next 12 to 18 months holds? What’s going to happen in 2018, going into 2019?
John Wallace [00:24:09]:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question, because unless things change, I think it’ll be pretty much more of the same. And I don’t mean to sound negative, but the reality is that the problems that we’ve been facing in recruitment have been the same for years and years about not being taken seriously. And I say that it’s quite deliberately provoking. When I was away consulting overseas and then came back and then did the stuff with my parents business, which an old people’s home, and then started talking to people in recruitment, it was almost depressing that people were saying the same things that I knew I’d been struggling with 10 years earlier about getting a seat at the table, for example, that old one again. So I think that unless if you keep, keep doing what you’re doing and then expect a different result, that’s the old Einstein version of insanity. The reality is that we need to be having different conversations or else it’s just going to stay exactly the same. We need to take ourselves more seriously. We perhaps need to look at our own capability and the capability of our teams to make sure that we’re taken seriously, seen as that real commercially critical driver for a business rather than a cost and an operation that sits somewhere in HR and is the thing that you kick when things go wrong.
Matt Alder [00:25:31]:
So where can people find the book?
John Wallace [00:25:33]:
Thanks, Matt. That’s actually the best question you’ve asked so far. The book is available on the world Wide web so you can buy it from the top online bookseller in each of the geographical locations. And if you like it, please let me know. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter. I’m quite happy to answer any questions. And if you don’t like it, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter. Please tell me what you like or don’t like.
Matt Alder [00:25:58]:
Fantastic. And I’ll put links to the book in the show notes so people can get to them easily. John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Wallace [00:26:05]:
That’s great. Thank you very much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:26:08]:
My thanks to John Wallace. You can subscribe to this podcast in.
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Matt Alder [00:26:41]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:26:43]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
