At the end of every successful search is a happy candidate. What tends to be forgotten is that there are usually a few unhappy candidates as well. Hopefully, they’re just disappointed they didn’t get the job. But sometimes the discontent runs a little deeper. In short, they’ve had a bad candidate experience.
This matters. For a start, you might want to hire these people in the future. But even if not, no company needs people out there saying bad things about them…Often such reputational damage can be long-lasting. A couple of years ago, I worked for a UK bank who were struggling to attract bankers in the north of the country because of a disastrous hiring process undertaken ten years previously.
So how do companies guard against this? Easy. Don’t upset candidates in the first place. Obviously, you can’t offer every interviewee a job, but it should be relatively straightforward to avoid the following six mistakes…
Mistake 1: Don’t Wait an Eternity Between Interviews
The most important aspect of any interview process is momentum. If a candidate provides good feedback on a meeting, you need to double down on that by scheduling the next stage as speedily as possible. And then don’t move it! We understand it’s sometimes difficult to align diaries, but too often senior leaders seem to think a candidate interview is the one thing in their calendar they can postpone or reschedule. Wrong.
The cost of dilly-dallying on that follow-up interview could be considered during the Candidate experience. In recruitment, absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. Candidates who are full of enthusiasm today might not be quite so enraptured next month. They may even have been interviewing elsewhere in the meantime. Wait too long, and they’ll drop out of the process altogether.
Mistake 2: Be Clear About the Process and Don’t Change It
The question I hear most often from candidates is a bit like the one my kids ask me on long-distance car journeys. Are we nearly there yet? In both cases, it helps to be able to give a straight answer. The problem is, companies can be frustratingly vague about how long an interview process might take and how many stages it entails. For senior roles, it’s not unreasonable to schedule many rounds of interviews – that’s fine, but make sure the candidate knows this from the beginning. And then stick to it. Really, it’s just about managing expectations.
But each stage also needs to feel like it represents genuine progress. If multiple interviewers ask the same question, a candidate may feel they’re just going around in circles. Worse, they’ll develop a notion of their potential employer as disorganized and spoil Candidate’s Experience. In summary, decide who needs to meet the candidate, work out who’s going to ask what, and be clear about the process right from the get-go.
There’s nothing more annoying than an underprepared candidate. But is it always their fault? They can only prepare if they’re allowed to. And this will depend on how much information they have. Is there a job specification, for example? Have they been told who they’ll be meeting and provided with a biography? If this is a follow-up meeting, do they know what the feedback was from an earlier meeting and therefore what points they’ll likely be quizzed on? Perhaps most importantly, have they been informed of the tone of the meeting? Occasionally, a candidate will be told they’re going into an ‘informal chat’ only to meet a barrage of competency-based questions. That’s a nightmare for everyone and crushes the candidate’s experience.
Of course, preparing a candidate is ultimately a job for your search partners but they can only do their job if they have the necessary wherewithal – that is accurate, detailed, up-to-date information.
Also, check our detailed analysis of “Money Talks” here.
Mistake 4: Be Clear About the Process and Don’t Change It
For some reason, companies are usually a bit coy on the subject of remuneration until they get to the offer stage. We recommend the precise opposite to improve candidate experience. Say exactly how much you’re willing to pay from the very start. This has two benefits. Firstly, it sends out a very clear message that you’re serious about hiring; secondly, it means you avoid wasting time interviewing candidates who are out of range.
But here’s the other important thing – don’t suddenly change the pay at the last moment. It’s surprising how often companies do this. Of course, it’s tempting to see if you can get that stellar candidate for a few grand cheaper, but it’s also the perfect way to create a PR disaster. Having committed several weeks to the interview process, candidates will be understandably angry if it all seems suddenly to have been a waste of time, creating a bad taste during the candidate experience. Even if you and the candidate iron out your differences and come to some sort of compromise, they’ll be starting day one of their new job with a less than favorable view of their new employer. Not ideal.
Mistake 5: Turn Off Candidates Promptly and Give Them Proper, Detailed Feedback
It’s slightly worrying how often and how fulsomely candidates thank us for getting back to them after a client interview. ‘Don’t all search companies do this?’ we ask ourselves…It seems not. Oh, everybody gets back to their favorite candidate, but what about the others? They still offered up their time and they’ll quite rightly want to know the outcome of their efforts.
Another related mistake is to turn off candidates and worsen the candidate experience without saying why. As recruiters, we can usually cobble together a few platitudes but far better if we can share precise, well-reasoned feedback. It won’t necessarily be flattering, but most candidates will appreciate a bit of candor. Not only does it provide closure on the process, but it also gives them something they can draw upon at their next interview. Better still, if you can season feedback with a sprinkling of praise (“They really liked X and Y but just felt you were a bit short on Z”) then that goes even further…
Mistake 6: Do Good News by Email and Bad News by Phone
In our tech-enabled age, there’s not much you can’t do via a computer. But can doesn’t mean should. If you want to tell a candidate they’ve been awarded an interview then by all means send them an email. But if you need to tell them they’ve been rejected, it’s far better to do it on the telephone. Immediately, you’ll come across as thoughtful, courteous, and compassionate – in short, all the values you’d want people to associate with your corporate brand.
Finally, never reject people on the same day they applied for a job. This sometimes happens with automated pre-screening systems. Very efficient, no doubt, but the optics are terrible. Most applicants will have spent an hour or more preparing their application, so to be sent a straight no almost by return email is bound to be dispiriting and may even be regarded as mildly insulting. The way around this is to build in a delay to the screening system whereby rejected candidates are only notified on day three or four. Better still, avoid automated screening systems altogether.
Who’d be an economist? Marshalling financial data is a near impossible task at the best of times, but throw in a pandemic, a global economy and energy crisis and the biggest European land war since 1945, and even the most experienced pundits are likely to be scratching their heads.
But, in a sense, data-points don’t matter. Markets, as we know, run on sentiment. Fear. Greed. Hope. Despair. This is as true in the labour market as anywhere else. That’s why WhiteCrow Research decided to find out what candidates themselves are thinking about the next twelve months.
We asked 107 respondents two simple questions:
Are you worried about the global economy over the coming year?
Are you worried about your own job over the coming year?
For both questions, we asked candidates to select from one of four answers: 1. No, not all; 2. Yes, slightly; 3. Yes, very; or 4. Yes, extremely.
We discuss the results in detail below, but our chief takeaways are as follows:
There is little sense of panic, with a majority of candidates either slightly worried about the global economy or not worried at all.
Candidates are even more bullish about their own prospects, with the huge majority confident they’ll keep their job.
The region where candidates are most concerned about the economy is EMEA; the region where candidates are least concerned about the economy is the United States.
Just six percent of candidates in the US are either very or extremely worried about losing their job; a whopping 74% are not worried at all.
The results suggest hiring managers could have some challenging months ahead of them, with candidates likely reluctant to engage in conversation during such uncertain times, especially when they already feel secure in their current role.
Takeaway 1: There is little sense of panic, with a majority of candidates either slightly worried about the global economy or not worried at all.
Perhaps the most surprising detail of these results is the 19% who have no concerns about the global economy whatsoever. Remember, our source pool consists of educated, often highly intelligent professionals who presumably keep up with the news and have a more than rudimentary understanding of inflation, energy prices and global affairs. And yet almost one fifth of these people are entirely relaxed about the coming months. We’re not saying they’re wrong. We just didn’t imagine there would be quite so many of them. Of course, you could flip these results on their head and observe that 81% of people are worried about the economy to some extent. But that’s why we filtered the results as we did. Nuance is everything. The fact is, a mere 15% are ‘extremely’ worried while a hefty 39% are only ‘slightly’ worried. So, yes, there is a sense of uncertainty, but candidates are certainly not panicking.
Takeaway 2: Candidates are even more bullish about their own prospects, with a clear majority confident they’ll keep their job.
If candidates are relaxed about the global economy, they’re almost supine concerning their own job prospects. A comfortable majority (53%) are not worried at all about being made redundant. The full import of this finding is illustrated in Figure 3. By comparing answers to both our questions, we see clearly that concern for the economy does not in any way translate to concern for one’s own job security. This is most evident when we look at the percentages of those either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerned. On the economy this combined figure is 42%, not far off half our source pool; but when we look at individual job concerns, that figure plummets to just 17%.
What is driving this dichotomy? Clearly, on some level, candidates are being complacent; it is inconceivable that a downturn in the economy (which many of them acknowledge is possible) won’t result in increased numbers of redundancies. Perhaps not enough of our source pool have firsthand memories of previous recessions. Or maybe they just imagine bad things only happen to other people. Still, as we always emphasize, hiring managers don’t need to explain candidate sentiment, they just need to know about it and respond accordingly.
Also, check our detailed analysis on “Money Talks” here.
Result & Analysis
Takeaway 3: The region where candidates are most concerned about the economy is EMEA; the region where candidates are least concerned about the economy is the United States.
Figure 4 shows there are significant differences in sentiment across various parts of the world. In the US, for example, our initial thesis – i.e. there is no sense of panic – is emphatically supported. Nearly a quarter of respondents are ‘not at all’ concerned about the economy and just 12% are ‘extremely’ worried. Just over half are ‘slightly’ worried which would seem a reasonable view to adopt at any stage of the economic cycle. However, in EMEA, the picture is more gloomy, with 65% either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerned.
Of course, the energy crisis has impacted far more on Europe than the US so perhaps this is reflected in our results. Also, recent US inflation news has been quite positive, another reason Stateside sources could be more bullish. Regardless, this is another example of why hiring managers need to master the science of what WhiteCrow calls ‘talentomics’ – that is, the study of all those factors which dictate
Result & Analysis
Takeaway 4: Just six percent of candidates in the US are either very or extremely worried about losing their job; a whopping 74% are not worried at all.
We have already seen that most candidates, regardless of geography, are significantly less worried about their own job prospects than they are about the economy as a whole. But Figure 5 shows much of this optimism stems from candidates in the United States. There, 24% are ‘not at all’ worried about the economy, but a remarkable 74% (three in every four people we asked!) are ‘not at all’ worried about their own job. APAC also sees a sizeable leap in this cohort between questions, with 12% unconcerned about the economy but nearly half confident their own job is safe.
EMEA, by contrast, is the most jittery of the three regions. Just 23% have no concern for their job prospects whatsoever but only a minority (39%) described themselves as either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerned.
Takeaway 5: The results suggest hiring managers could have some challenging months ahead of them, with candidates likely reluctant to engage in conversation during such uncertain times, especially when they already feel secure in their current role.
So what does this all mean for hiring managers? Our view is they could be in for some difficult times. It comes down to what we know as ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. If you’re looking to lure someone away from another company, it helps if they’re slightly worried about their current situation. That’s the push. But if they’re also positive on the broader economy, they’ll likely have no concern that any new job will suddenly be placed ‘at risk’. That’s the pull.
Unfortunately, our findings suggest the very opposite of that situation. Instead of candidates sitting nervously in their seats, hoping for an opportunity in a buoyant market, we have very settled candidates who are reluctant to engage with opportunities in what they see as, at best, an unpredictable market.
Now more than ever, then, TA leaders must show the full range of their skills. They need to be not just recruiters, but also salespeople, brand ambassadors, reward specialists and – yes – economists. They need to understand the data on pay, prices, interest rates, unemployment and much more.
But most importantly, they need to understand candidate sentiment.
The heady days following lockdown were exciting times for talent leaders. As the global economy reopened, companies loosened their purse strings and embarked on what one business leader described as a “hiring frenzy” to get the executive search industry on board. It briefly seemed like that V-shaped bounce the politicians promised us was coming true after all.
And then it didn’t.
Faced with rampant inflation and a cost of living crisis, inhouse search professionals are suddenly finding their budgets squeezed. The problem is, there are still key leadership hires to make. In other words, the directive from on high is ‘do more with less’ and be an agile shape shifter.
That’s not so easy if your search partner is one of the many prominent firms who, despite the pressures on their clients, are unwilling to compromise and still offer the same model: exorbitant pricing and plain vanilla output.
But other flavours are available.
Indeed, many organizations are discovering the executive search industry can provide a range of innovative, affordable, even disruptive solutions.
Below, we list 9 questions every talent leader should be asking themselves about their go-to search firm.
Why am I paying such enormous fees?
The standard executive search fee is 30% of guaranteed first year remuneration, paid in three equal instalments on shortlist, placement and retention. This system rewards inactivity and failure. The shortlist fee is often just payment for sharing a few names from a consultant’s ‘black book’. Even if no candidate is placed, the search firm still waltzes off with two thirds of an enormous sum of money.
What’s all this about taxis and paperclips?
Of course, interviewing candidates is an expensive business. You need to take a taxi to and from the meeting place. That’s the Savoy, by the way. Then you need to buy the candidate some cucumber sandwiches and a glass of . . . oh, hang on, it’s 2023. I’ve got this funny icon on my laptop called Zoom!
So that 30% is only the starting point, now there’s the 10% (in “admin” fees) that are ratcheting up on your invoice. Let’s be honest, search firms should be paid for finding and placing candidates – nothing else.
Wow, you’ve got really nice offices. How do you afford them?
Where’s your search firm based? Their website should tell you. It might even have some glossy pics of their shiny, eco-friendly offices in Manhattan or Mayfair. Very nice. And slightly pointless. Sure, a few years ago a bit of expensive real estate was an important way to impress clients and candidates alike. But today? As more people work from home and the majority of meetings take place online, the need for uptown premises is fast diminishing.
So if your search firm’s still using them, guess who’s paying the rent? Alternatively, if they have downsized their offices, why aren’t they passing on the savings to you in the form of reduced fees?
I liked that person who led the pitch meeting. Why have I never seen them again?
You’ll never get the best candidate if your search firm isn’t selling the opportunity right. That’s a function of understanding you, your business and the role in question. You probably remember explaining all that stuff to the search consultant at the kick-off meeting. Impressive character. Partner in the business. But are you sure they’re the one leading the search? Or have they perhaps delegated the job to an up-and-coming junior?
That’s right, you’re paying champagne prices for sipping lemonade.
What happens if I hire two people from the same shortlist?
Well, this one depends on who owns the IP and too often the answer to that will be . . . not you. There’s only one set of research costs involved in producing a shortlist report so if you want to hire two people from the same list, there’s no earthly reason you should be charged twice over. But that’s exactly what’ll happen if the data doesn’t belong to you. Probably worth checking.
Where’s my market & competitor insight?
The most progressive search firms now have dedicated Talent Intelligence practices. Even smaller firms routinely provide clients with data on competitors, candidate sentiment and market trends. That’s because it’s easy to get this stuff. If your search partner’s speaking to candidates all day (and they should be) there’s no end to the market insight and intelligence they can learn. Not just idle gossip, but precious information that’ll help you hire better, smarter and faster. So if your provider’s end product is just a handsomely bound candidate shortlist, you should be asking why.
But also, beware those TI teams which are disconnected to their executive search colleagues, you will often find within firms they exist in separate countries with little to no communication. That’s a headache for clients. It means separate engagement letters, two sets of costs, non-aligned delivery schedules and a fragmented end-product.
How did you find these candidates?
Old-school search consultants rely on their network. To be fair, this can often result in a perfectly decent shortlist. But are these really the best candidates in the market or just the best in someone’s ‘black book’ or database? Also, how come they’re a bit . . . you know, similar? As organizations increasingly prioritize diversity, full-market scoping is essential. This can’t be achieved unless your search firm has a dedicated research and sourcing function with the ability to fully map out and benchmark the talent landscape.
Sorry, how long?
All industries like to draw a veil of mystery around themselves. It makes their work seem more important. And in the executive search industry world, it allows you to operate to a pace more befitting a think tank. This in turn discourages clients from asking such tiresome questions as “where’s my shortlist?” or “how do you know these are the best candidates?”. But here’s the thing – executive search isn’t rocket science. Of course, you should never rush a search – especially if you’re also gathering all that precious talent intelligence – but if it takes much longer than six weeks, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Six weeks from when exactly?
Ah, good point. It’s easy to imagine that the clock starts ticking on your search as soon as you sign off the proposal. And maybe it does. Then again, maybe your search firm are so strapped for resources that they can’t start for another month. Suddenly your six-week project is a 10-week project. Next thing you know you’ve got stakeholders demanding an update and berating you for missed deadlines. Slightly awkward.
Final Thoughts on The Executive Search Industry
Let’s be clear. There are many fine search consultants out there and they don’t all work for WhiteCrow. But it’s also true that too many of our industry peers are shortchanging clients with exorbitant fees, mediocre output and very little in the way of results.
Can they change? Maybe, but why would they? As private sector salaries surge upwards, those 30% commission fees are getting bigger and bigger.
And perhaps that strikes at the root of the problem. There’s an old saying that the most difficult task in the world is convincing a wealthy man he’s wrong about something. The same is true at the corporate level. After years of easy money, the old-school search firms and job platforms seem incapable of adapting to new realities. Inflexible, intransigent, and wholly lacking in creativity, they’re simply regurgitating the same inadequate solutions but with a winning smile and a whopping invoice.
Perhaps it’s time to turn to someone nimbler, smarter, more creative.
Fees decoupled from candidate compensation
Flexibility to commission each element of the search individually
No hidden charges/safe budgeting
No paying for legacy infrastructure
End-to-end delivery by seasoned Search Leaders
Highly networked
Co-data ownership
Integrated Talent Insights & Search Team
Market insights and intelligence as standard
Full-market scoping
Shortlist delivery in under 6 weeks
Scaled for responsiveness
For insight on how we helped world leading organizations in 2022, see our year in review:
In over 20 years as a recruiter, I’ve only twice persuaded a candidate to move for less money. One was a KPMG partner who took a role with a not-for-profit and the other was a successful investment banker who wanted to move back to his native South Africa. But if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a candidate say something along the lines of “of course, money’s not the most important thing”, I’d probably have retired from recruitment many years ago.
In other words, it rather seems as though money is the most important thing. This paradox is worth investigating for two reasons. Firstly, much of the world is suffering a cost-of-living crisis. Secondly, there is an opinion abroad that the various lockdowns have endowed us all with a more enlightened view of life and work. According to this narrative, we now care less about money and more about such things as culture, inclusivity and corporate purpose.
But how true is this paradigm? Can hiring managers really attract top talent without offering top pay? And if so, what specifically are candidates looking for instead? We attempted to answer these questions by asking 200 candidates a simple question: If you were offered a new role, what would be your most important consideration – the pay, the brand, the role or the culture? The results, we think, make for interesting reading. Here are our top five takeaways
1. Money is most likely to be a candidate’s top priority, but workers are still three times as likely to prioritize something other than money.
A cynic might interpret the graphic above as proof positive that the world’s workers are still primarily motivated by cold, hard cash. And it’s true, ‘money’ was selected by our source pool more times than any other answer. But two things are worth pointing out. Firstly, the results are pretty damn close. Secondly, if we flip the results on their head, we observe that 69% of respondents said something other than money. That means any employer looking to attract top talent merely by paying top whack, could be in for a nasty surprise. Nearly three quarters of their candidate pool is likely to be more interested in . . . well, what exactly?
This is where the results get really interesting. The fact is, there is no runaway winner (or distant loser) among the four rival options – brand, pay, culture, role. That places recruiters in a quandary because they are unable to predict candidate sentiment with any degree of reliability. Pick a job applicant at random and there is a roughly even chance that he/she will primarily motivated by any one of those four key factors.
The conclusion is simple: in crafting an employee proposition, hiring managers must now give equal weight to every aspect of a role. Yes, it needs to pay well, but it also has to be a genuinely challenging opportunity with nice friendly colleagues at a strong, culturally progressive brand. Easy, right?
2. Although younger workers are the ones driving workplace evolution, they are actually far more likely to be motivated by money; meanwhile older workers place more value upon the role itself.
Social change is often created by the young. In the last half century or so, youth movements have highlighted such important issues as racial justice, gender equality and concern for the environment. In the corporate world, it is the junior ranks who have most often agitated for a more caring and inclusive workplace. But now they’ve got it, they don’t seem to want it very much. Or rather, they want other things slightly more.
Among workers with fewer than five years’ experience, just 7% said culture was their most important consideration when assessing a new job. In contrast, 48% opted for money. Admittedly, the statistics shift slightly when we look at workers with between five- and ten-years’ experience but even among this cohort money is comfortably the most popular answer.
What are we to make of this? Surely it can’t be the case that every young person who speaks up about culture and purpose is merely virtue signaling. No, a more plausible narrative is as follows: Our least experienced cohort (those with five years’ experience or less) will likely be in their first or second job. They may have college debts and they’re almost certainly paying high rents. Naturally, money is important to them. In addition, being at the start of their career, they are likely to view their current job as merely a steppingstone to better things. As a result, workplace culture is less of a priority.
By contrast, older workers are likely to be homeowners, possibly with substantial savings and relatively affordable mortgage repayments. So while money will be important to them (they’re also likely to have kids and college fees), it won’t be as urgent an issue as it is to a debt-ridden graduate. Also, having long since passed the job-hopping phase of their career, older workers are more likely to view their current role as a longterm thing. Ergo, they value it more highly.
3. Employer efforts around EVP may be misconceived if they’re simply aimed at attracting talent: culture is the top priority of less than a fifth of our source pool.
Out Talent Intelligence practice has worked on dozens of perception analysis studies, typically for clients who want to find out how their EVP lands with a particular candidate pool. At the outset of every project, we ask the same question. ‘Why do you want to know this?’ Often, it transpires that the client believes they will attract more and better candidates if their brand is associated with certain cultural values.
Our experience is that this more often works in reverse. That is, a company with a toxic culture will certainly fail to attract and retain top-level talent. But a company with a strong culture will not be noticeably more successful in hiring people than any of its competitors.
The results of our survey support this observation. Just 18% of the source pool said culture would be their primary concern when considering a new job.
Of course, it’s important not to misinterpret that statistic. It does not mean that 82% of workers don’t care about culture. It just means it’s not their first priority. In seeking to explain this further, we can draw again upon multiple perception analysis studies. One of the findings that emerges repeatedly from such projects is that most people believe they already enjoy their working environment. They may not be happy about every aspect of their job, but they typically think their employer is fair-minded, inclusive and culturally progressive.
In other words, a good corporate culture is now considered a given, just like central heating. You wouldn’t expect to attract more candidates because your office has double glazing and adjustable thermostats; nor should you imagine your hiring figures will significantly increase because you offer a gender-diverse workforce or an active network of in-work support groups.
4. Women are far more likely than men to be motivated by workplace culture.
Readers of our recent whitepaper ‘Is Hybrid Working?’ may remember an intriguing anomaly between the way men and women view the new workplace paradigm. Briefly, while male workers are more likely to want to work fully remotely, female workers are more likely to want to work fully onsite. We mention this here because it casts additional light on one of the findings of our latest survey.
As the graphics show, just 7% of male respondents opted for ‘culture’, but when we filter instead for female respondents the figure leaps to 44%. That’s a massive difference. But not perhaps surprising given many women’s preference to travel into the office rather than work from home. If you plan – or at least prefer – to operate from a laptop in your kitchen, it doesn’t really matter what the workplace culture is like. You’re never there anyway. Conversely, if you’re in the office every day, you’ll want it to be a nice, welcoming place.
It’s important not to generalize. We are not talking about most men or most women. We are simply saying that a certain attitude or opinion is more likely to be attributed to one or the other gender. The takeaway for recruiters is therefore one of nuance. When seeking to close a female candidate, it is worth bearing in mind that culture – even if it’s not their top concern – is likely to play a significant role in their thinking. By contrast, efforts to secure a male candidate by repeatedly emphasizing the corporate environment may constitute a tactical error.
Perhaps the best advice is to forget about the gender perspective and simply find out your candidate’s opinion on remote working. Would they, for example, be happy to work fully remote? If so, the concept of ‘culture’ probably isn’t that important to them. If, on the other hand, they’d happily come into the office five days a week, they’re probably someone for whom culture is a critical consideration.
5. Brand strength won’t hurt an employer but it’s unlikely to mean you can hire top talent for less money.
Seasoned recruiters will remember a time when brand was king. Approach a candidate with an opportunity to join a global player such as Citibank or Unilever and you’d be guaranteed a positive response. But times have changed. The 2008 financial crisis reminded us that some corporate gods have feet of clay. Meanwhile, the fintech revolution demonstrated that small is sometimes beautiful. Dial in an increasing focus on diversity, sustainability and purpose – not values that big companies always easily demonstrate – and it’s not surprising that ‘brand’ has lost some of its lustre in the world of talent acquisition.
That’s certainly what our results seem to indicate. Brand is still a relevant consideration for many – probably most – people, but it won’t often trump money or a challenging, well-defined role. Hiring managers should take heed.
Any illustrious company seeking to undercut its competitors on pay and rely on its brand to secure top talent, may be disappointed.
One suspects this is a lesson already learned by some of the tech giants. Netflix, for example, is well known for paying well above market rates for the best candidates. It’s also, we’d suggest, why many global companies seem to downplay their success and present themselves as folksy, down-to-earth startups. Think Ben & Jerry’s. In fact, you might almost say that the most farsighted companies are now seeking to develop a sort of ‘anti-brand’. By stressing their commitment to mission statements and corporate values, big companies are demonstrating a clear message: they no longer take their employees for granted. Another way of doing this of course is to pay those employees a lot of money
In the first of a series of occasional dialogues with senior business leaders, we speak to Arvind Sachdev, Corporate Vice President and General Manager at Colgate-Palmolive in the Philippines. As well as sharing a few stories about his professional journey, Arvind provided us with fascinating insight into leadership, diversity, and corporate purpose.
In a fascinating 30-year career, Arvind has established multiple businesses and worked with some of the world’s leading consumer brands. Multi-lingual, he has led digital and cultural transformation programs across Russia, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation and a video link to the full-length interview.
Whitecrow Research (WCR): Welcome Arvind. By way of introduction, perhaps you could tell us a little about your current role and share some of the highlights of your very successful career.
Arvind Sachdev (AS): Of course. It’s probably easiest if I begin in the middle. My career really picked up when I went to Russia in 1993 to establish a women’s hygiene brand, Tampax, which was later bought by P&G. The task given to me was to establish a distribution structure for the brand in the former Soviet Union. This was when Russia was still evolving out of the Soviet era. It was a very steep learning curve because I had to learn the language at the same time as setting up the distribution and also hiring people – people who had never worked in sales because there was nothing called sales in Russian businesses in those days. It was a tough journey because we were starting from scratch. We had to establish plants, procure cotton from Uzbekistan and launch a totally new product that Russian women simply weren’t aware of. There were two or three of us ex-pats and the rest of the team were local employees who we hired and trained. But we were extremely successful. We made it a $45 million brand in just two and a half years.
Then I was spotted by SC Johnson who asked me to establish their business in Russia. We went from importing a couple of containers to re-establishing the whole distribution and warehousing structure. Then, two years later I got an offer to join Colgate Palmolive in Russia. This was in the 1988 crisis when the Russian currency was getting devalued, so I had to go in and restructure the whole company. We did that, and then from 2001 to 2006, we turned it into a $240 million business with a brand share of 35% in toothpaste.
Next, I was offered a role as General Manager for the Central Asia business for Colgate. I opened up 11 Central Asian markets from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan to Tajikistan – and in four of those markets we established our own sales force in the country. We grew to be a $170 million business in those small countries, with a very heavy market share in each.
And then I moved to Paris with Colgate in a role which was called Global Export and covered the Middle East and some of North Africa. I did that successfully for three years, then I realized that we needed to restructure in terms of the business sitting in France. So we actually brought the whole Middle East and North Africa business and some of the French overseas territories under one umbrella. These were like 30 countries. We established a head office in Dubai and brought in around 90 people in sales, marketing, and supply chain. All those structures were established centrally but at the same time, we had localized executions, even in Israel!
Chinese puzzle: On setting up an E-commerce Business from scratch
Chinese puzzle: On setting up an e-commerce business from scratch
Within a year, I was asked by the CEO to move to China where they had some challenges with the brand. But they also wanted me to establish the e-commerce business. I actually knew nothing about e-commerce! The only reason they offered me the role was because of my curiosity and my willingness to learn. And then they also knew I could adapt quickly to local culture and work really well with local teams. I knew how to speak with people – I could interact for example with the CEO of Alibaba or Walmart . . . We successfully established the ecomm business in two years and now about 35% of our business in China comes via e-commerce.
I was responsible for building a three-year innovation plan where we kind of moved away from the mass market and gave the brand more of a premium positioning. And it was all done with a mindset of bringing high-end innovation into China, so we worked with Korean and Japanese companies who became outsourced innovators for us when it came to launching products like electric toothbrushes. It was a very challenging market to operate in, but it was also an amazing journey – the sort of journey you never forget. But the way I saw it, you ultimately needed a Chinese person to run the company because of the language and the geopolitical situation. So eventually I handed over to a Chinese GM and moved here to the Philippines to establish the e-com business and reorganize the company.
Now we are the market leader by far in oral care brands. When I came here, it was a 63% market share and now it’s 75%. We especially built strategies to increase penetration in rural areas and now we’re one of the best-known brands in the country, better even than Mcdonald’s. It’s a $500 million business and it’s growing six to 10% year on year.
That has been my journey from a business point of view. One thing I learned about myself early on is I like a challenge. It makes me more vibrant, and more enthusiastic. I’m an extrovert by nature. I draw energy from people, so I tend to surround myself with the best people possible. I consider myself a progressive thinker because I’m somebody who came out of a family business in a small town and ended up working in really challenging environments where you need eight bodyguards just to move around! Always though, I wanted to deliver and learn at the same time.
“One thing I learned about myself early on is I like a challenge.”
WCR: Much of what you speak about there pertains to leadership. What is your concept of leadership and how do you apply this in your career and your personal life?
AS: I have a straightforward leadership perspective embedded in my heart and soul from a young age. It goes back to how I was trained by my father. Leadership is about listening to people. You need to understand the fundamentals and make sure strategies are designed which can actually be executed. They might be people management strategies, business strategies, or supply chain strategies. But you can’t deliver them unless you are listening to people more than you are talking to them. Then you need to go back to them with a clear action that they trust is the right action.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a customer, an employee, or an external partner, you need to listen as much as possible and make sure the whole organization is listening too so that your viewpoint is 360. At the core of all this is empathy. If there is no empathy – if you don’t have the passion to listen and solve people’s problems – you can’t propel the business forward.
Solving Tomorrow’s Problem Today: On Leadership and Thinking Ahead
“Leadership is about listening to people.”
Solving tomorrow’s problem today: On leadership and thinking ahead
The second point which I always tell people is that leadership is not only about today. You have to be able to visualize the future. You may be wrong but you must at least have a point of view. How do we bring brands into the country? Who are our partners of the future? Who is my future successor? Let me give an example from here in the Philippines. I have a relationship with the top ten families here and yes, they move in a different circle from us, but I can still sit down with them across the table and have a discussion because they know I’m listening to them and they know I will go back to them with the answers they need.
But if I have to sum up my leadership philosophy in one sentence, I think leadership is about feeling the earth before you start to aim for the sky.
Power of Progressive Thinking
WCR: Let me ask you about something else which seems to run like a thread through your career – transformation. What are the characteristics of a successful transformation and how as a leader do you bring these about?
AS: I think earlier I used the term ‘progressive thinking’. A leader can never settle for the status quo. Otherwise, everybody will become lethargic and the business will fall behind. My approach to transformation is that if I’m asked to achieve X, then I want to know, can I achieve X+3? And how? And can I drive my organization to think in terms of X+3?
Let’s take an example from my current role. When I came here, it was a highly traditional organization that worked with distributors and retailers and sold about four or five hundred SKUs. And that was it. E-commerce was probably .0001% of the business. Coming out of China, I knew e-commerce was warming up in southeast Asia. The Philippines was still not there with e-commerce but we had to be ready. Then I understood very quickly that Facebook has 85% penetration here and Instagram has 65% penetration and I started asking questions. Do we advertise on Facebook? Do we advise on Instagram? The answer was kind of yeah, we do it, but not really properly. So I decided on a strategy whereby we should be number one when it comes to digital transformation. Of course, it took resources. I had to go to my bosses and say hey, this is what we want to achieve. But I got the blessings and today 60-65% of our media spend is in digital.
The power of progressive thinking: On transformation and digitization
So I have completely transformed the organization here. And the way I did it was through progressive thinking, but also have a very clear idea of the environment we wanted to transform to. Digital transformation was the framework. We set ourselves the task of digitizing everywhere, not just e-commerce. The first thing we did, was we got a company from the UK – they’re one of the best trainers for e-commerce – and we gave them a contract to train every single person in the company whether they work in ecommerce or not. 126 people were trained in just 12 weeks. And suddenly the buzzwords started! Everybody understood that they can make use of this training somehow in their own work. So today, everybody in the organization has accountability to digitize part of their business.
You need to create an environment where the organization can transform itself without you pushing on a daily basis and create a resounding leadership. If you give people the resources, you give them the environment. They feel comfortable enough to take charge of it and they also see the benefit.
I did this also in Russia. When I left in 2006, the company was the same size but it was delivering six times the sales. Because the people were different, their approach was different. Then, in the Middle East, I had these 30 countries doing small amounts of business and I thought, how can I provide them with the resources to deliver the same sort of marketing concepts we use in Dubai or other developed markets? So we said, let’s centralize and give them those marketing concepts which they can execute locally . . .
Diversity and Inclusion
“Transformation always has to be one step ahead. You can’t chase it or it won’t work.”
WCR: I’d like to ask you now about diversity. I’m particularly interested to hear your thoughts on this subject because I know you’ve worked in many different countries. Given this experience, what have you learned about how a global organization can draw upon its diversity of resource?
AS: One of the reasons I joined Colgate initially was because the company was quite diverse. Wherever I’ve worked as a GM and a Vice President – whether it’s Latin America or India or China – there have always been about four or five nationalities in my management team. That helped me to form my own diversity principles. But also when I was growing up in a small, down-to-earth family, we always had diverse people working with us. Rich, poor, different abilities, and different cultures . . .
One thing I have learned is that if I go into a country, the first thing I must do is learn the language. Now, I’m not an expert in any language, but I speak Russian very well, I read French slightly better than I speak it, and I know enough Arabic that I can make sense of it and really understand the culture. That’s what language gives you. You get to know the culture, you understand what’s really going on in the place . . . If you take the Philippines, there are probably three or four distinct cultures here and if you know this, then you can do your marketing differently.
“That’s what language gives you. You get to know the culture, you understand what’s really going on in the place . . .”
But you also want to bring in certain global principles, you want to broaden people’s minds. One of the things we’ve done here is around ocean plastic which is one of the biggest issues in the Philippines. We started working with other companies – some competitors, some not – and we formed a plastic alliance. We said let’s try and solve this problem together. I was part of the initial founding group. We lobbied the government, we worked on the Extended Producer Responsibility law which recently got passed, and now we are setting up the regulations around that. I’m very proud of that. In Colgate, we’ve set up our own sustainability principles in the Philippines and one of our priorities is plastic neutrality, so we’ve started to recover plastic and work with partners to start recycling that plastic.
We’re also working with Pride organizations here. The Philippines has a lot of challenges around equal employment opportunities. We’ve set up our own community where people can speak openly and listen to external speakers. Then, we’re starting to embark on programs looking at physical disability and we’ve also installed women’s scholarships in ultra-poor areas. There are lots of things you can be doing across the diversity area but at the same time, you do need to be a little bit focused. It’s something very close to my heart, but we still have our business to deliver. So what I try to do is make sure programs benefit society but also strengthen our brand.
Corporate Responsibility
WCR: Well, you’ve anticipated my next question, which is about corporate responsibility. I know that Colgate-Palmolive ranks very highly in this regard. You’re near the top of most sustainability indices and your 2025 Social Impact Mission is a very detailed document. But what is the balance between purpose and profit?
AS: Yes, that’s always a debatable question! I believe that you know, we exist as a corporation to make money for our shareholders. But I also believe that while you’re making your money, you can also deliver on your responsibility towards the community. And if you take the community seriously then you know that sometimes you need to behave like an activist and other times you need to contribute more passively. But I think you need to choose your battles and make sure there is a longer-term benefit for society. If you’re just doing ad hoc social responsibility, just ticking boxes, I don’t think that’s the idea at all. The idea is to make sure there is a sustainable and manageable investment going into any program so that it’s delivering good for the community but also helping the business to grow and develop.
“If you’re just doing ad hoc social responsibility, just ticking boxes, I don’t think that’s the idea at all.”
So when you talk about purpose, I would say it shouldn’t just be transactional purpose. There should be a brand-level effect. I want to make sure our brand is loved, visible, distinctive, and clearly at the top of people’s minds. If we donate a million bars of soap with our brand on them to the right people at the right time, we’re sending a clear message to consumers that we’re with them on their journey during the good times and the bad times.
Balancing act: On reconciling purpose and profit
And you must also be very clear about your purpose. You cannot state a purpose and then go off and do something totally different. And of course, there is a lot of cynicism around it. Many people think the corporate purpose is just a sham, they think we just exist to make money. But you know, for certain brands I think social responsibility and business are very closely linked because, frankly, if you’re not making any money, you can’t hope to make a difference either. Otherwise, you might just as well be an NGO, although even they need money!
WCR: I’d like to look forwards to my final question. What does the future hold for you and how do you see your leadership journey evolving both professionally and personally?
AS: Well, look, I’ve given 25 years to Colgate so it may be time to look for something else which is similarly challenging and purposeful, and enjoyable. I want to continue learning and moving ahead. I’ve been in the FMCG industry for a long time but my leadership approach has broadened so much during that time and I feel I could move into any other industry and make an impact. I’ve shown I can learn quickly and adapt and still deliver big. I want to get into something where my leadership can be utilized, whether that’s in transformation, building communities or building businesses . . . I think all leaders need to guard against becoming bored and just working on autopilot. I don’t want that to be me.
Learning never stops: On the future
So, yes, it would be interesting to have a totally different experience but also one where I get to give something back. For me, learning should never stop. It’s a lifelong journey. I’m happy to jump on any ship right now but of course I want to have fun at the same time. I must have a passion for any opportunity because that’s what will make me really go after it. There needs to be both achievement and personal satisfaction.
“For me, learning should never stop. It’s a lifelong journey.”
WCR: Well, we shall keep a close eye on your LinkedIn page. You’ve had a fascinating career so far and we’re certainly keen to discover what you do next. Thank you for talking to us.
In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, the ability to adapt and evolve is crucial for success. Those who can navigate through the uncertainties of the future and remain resilient are the ones who will thrive. This is where the concept of shape-shifting comes in. Shape-shifters are individuals who can adapt to any situation, change direction when needed, and thrive in the face of adversity. In this article, we will explore the characteristics of agile shape-shifters and how you can develop this skill set to succeed in your personal and professional life. Let me start with Tale from some time ago.
Also, you can check out our detailed article on “Hybrid Working” here.
I was abruptly woken by howling winds and a stormy gale, that violently rattled my single-pane window. It was 1987, and the Great Storm had whipped and battered Southern England. Entire trees were yanked from their roots.
At 7 years old, this was my first experience of a natural disaster and terror. I had no idea that winds could be so merciless.
And then the world went on. I went back to school and those fallen tree barks were sawn and repurposed into something else useful.
Tales From My Mama
I grew up in the UK, and mum would often tell me tales about India where she grew up. I remember her reciting the story about the India/Pakistan partition. Our family (along with millions of others) had to uproot and move across new borders, leaving our homes, belongings, friends, and dreams behind. She was just a little girl then, but she witnessed the division.
And then the world went on, and our family repurposed and re-established themselves in their new home.
Also, check our detailed analysis on “Money Talks” here.
1990’s Recession
As the early 1990’s recession hit, I saw my parents lose their business, life savings, hopes, and ambitions. They eventually relocated and pivoted their careers by re-skilling.
Again the world went on, and my parents repurposed themselves into something else useful.
2008 Economic Downturn
In 2007, I arrived in Singapore full of wild ambition to launch an employment agency. Little did I know that 2008 would be the onslaught of a global recession leading to mass redundancies. These were not prime conditions to launch an employment agency
Still, the world went on. We repurposed our goals and rebuilt our value stack. We spearheaded a change in conversation with clients.
During a recent call with a client, I invited him to look at his personal value stack to see if it ‘held water’ in line with the pace of change, and his company’s grand vision. I shared three words to help him focus his leadership strategy. Futurist, opportunity, and shape-shifter.
1. Futurist
Imagine what the future may look like for your line of work in 1-5 years. Now visualize a cautious, pragmatic, ambitious, zany (or your choice of adjective) view of the world. How would each of these worlds be functioning?
2. Opportunity
In all imagined futuristic worlds, the most agile shape-shifters will lead the way. Ask yourself what opportunities you see in all future concepts of the world. What role could you/your company/your team/your family and your friends play in a new world dynamic?
Then re-evaluate your value-stack, by up-skilling, re-skilling, and growing in value.
3. Shape-Shifter
By definition, shape-shifting is the ability to transform. I believe this will become the most critical skill to master in our work and personal lives. Consider the superpowers of a shape-shifter:
· A shape-shifter can repurpose themselves to take advantage of current times.
· A shape-shifter is agile and can anticipate different scenarios.
· A shape-shifter can emerge from calamities, as they shift their shape just in time.
Imagine, those fallen trees from the Great Storm of 1987, their barks repurposed for fuel, houses, furniture, paper, or perhaps books to inspire the greatest of minds.
It is those who are able to repurpose themselves by constantly re-examining their ‘value stack’, who will survive violent storms of change. This is the essence of being a shape-shifter today.
Stacking Value
Whilst anxiety envelopes many of us, I invite you to consider a life-long vocation of being an agile shape-shifter. Continuously growing our value stack will become the key focus for leaders and organizations, to keep pace with change and really show their mettle.
Who are the people currently focused on shape-shifting? Who is busy repurposing on purpose? Who is evaluating their value stack?
When this pandemic moves to our history books, so perhaps shall the stories of the agile shape-shifters.
Every January, Collins Dictionary selects its top ten words and phrases of the preceding year. Among the publisher’s picks for 2021 was ‘hybrid working’. Most talented professionals would agree it was a great choice. Pre-pandemic, 90% of the world traveled into the office every day, whereas now the very idea seems like something from a bygone age.
But it would be wrong to see this change as merely the result of COVID. Rather, the virus was a catalyst. What actually enabled the upheaval in our working habits was two converging sets of opinions.
Our recent whitepaper Is Hybrid Workingdemonstrated that men are far more likely than women to want to work fully remotely.
Firstly, there was an increasingly vocal group of (mostly younger) professionals who were demanding more flexible forms of working. This was the same prescient generation who made much of the early running on such ideas as corporate purpose, sustainability and work/life balance. But their preference for working from home was often seen as a step too far.
Secondly, there was a group of (mostly older) professionals who were finally persuaded that remote working needn’t mean a drop in productivity. Indeed, many of these senior leaders were pleasantly surprised to discover other benefits to working from home. They got to spend more time with their kids, for example, and they didn’t have to dress up in a suit every day. With both these cohorts finally in agreement, the brave new world of WFH was upon us.
But as the memory of COVID recedes, it’s worth checking on whether sentiment has changed at all. How are those younger professionals enjoying working from their bedrooms? Are they as enthusiastic as ever or is it a case of careful what you wish for? Alternatively, are the managerial community having second thoughts? What is the data saying about productivity? And what is the impact on training, mentoring, team cohesion and workplace culture?
We spoke to over 100 professionals across all sectors, asking them for their thoughts on remote working and measuring whether these aligned with those of their employers.
The results seem to suggest we’ve arrived at a delicate balance between what workers want and what employers are willing to provide. Nevertheless, certain tensions are also apparent.
As Figures 1 illustrates, 61% of our sample group are currently working to a hybrid arrangement – that is, some days they go into the office and other days they don’t. This accords impressively with the same group’s actual preference, with 65% saying hybrid working is their favored option.
This prompts an obvious question: what do the other 35% prefer – fully remote or fully onsite? Here, we see some surprising results. Most eye-catchingly, only 13% of people want to be fully remote. Admittedly, this is still more than those who are actually remote (11%) but it still shows that the vast majority place considerable value on onsite or hybrid working. We can also confirm that many of the remote working enthusiasts were in the tech sector, often performing contract roles of relatively short duration. It makes sense that these people would place less value on getting to know colleagues and contributing to a specific workplace culture.
Conversely, when we quizzed the 87% on why they disliked the idea of fully remote working they tended to mention the same points: the importance of building relationships with colleagues; the opportunity to benefit from formal training; or simply the enjoyment that comes with being part of a shared enterprise. In fact, so important are these notions in some people’s minds that they would actually prefer to be in the office every day of the week. Nearly a quarter (22%) of our sample group said they favoured this arrangement – a far higher percentage than we would have expected, albeit lower than the number who are actually working fully onsite.
We also thought it might be interesting to filter our results by gender. Much of the great work that companies are doing around diversity focuses on workplace experience, so it is important to understand what sort of workplace women and men prefer. Is it an office or a coffee table? What we discovered was that males and females are closely aligned in their overall preference for hybrid working, but surprisingly far apart when it comes to the costs and benefits of remote working.
Fig. 2: Current & preferred working arrangements (Women)
Fig. 3: Current & preferred working arrangements (Men)
Let’s take hybrid working first. We saw in our overall statistics that this was the preferred setup for most (65%) of our sources. This aligns closely with the result for both men (67%) and women (62%). However, while 17% of male sources said they’d be happy to work fully remote, only 7% of females said this would be their preferred option.
This being the case, it is not surprising that we also see a wide disparity between men and women when it comes to fully onsite working. Here, the tables are turned, with 31% of women stating this as their preference but only 16% of men saying the same.
Check out our Quarterly Published The WhiteCrow Whisper to help you with Recruitment here.
This has implications not just for recruiters but also for professionals engaged in work around inclusivity and corporate culture. What is driving this disparity between men and women when it comes to workplace preferences? Do females attach more value to building relationships with colleagues? Are men less team spirited or are they just more likely to enjoy working on their own? Obviously, we are wandering into the realm of speculation here, but the questions are surely pertinent. If we agree that some industries suffer from a lack of gender diversity, it appears we may be compounding the problem by allowing the practice of fully remote working to become more established.
And what of the future? We spoke earlier of productivity and the widely held concern that this might be depressed by allowing people to work from home. The consensus now seems to be that this was an unfounded fear, but is the evidence really in on this point? True, OECD figures show that the most productive countries are not necessarily those with the longest working week – Luxembourg, for example, is far more productive than Greece, but has an average working week of 29 hours compared to Greece’s 39.1 hours.
But our focus in this paper is not so much upon the numbers of hours worked as where they are worked from. It may take another few years of hybrid and remote working before we see the full effect on output per capita.
Then, of course, there will be new developments which further complicate the picture. One work-related concept which is gaining increasing traction is the four day week. This was famously derided as a “crackpot idea” by Boris Johnson, but some companies claim to have adopted it without any noticeable drop in output. If the practice catches on more widely, what effect will this have on workplace preferences? If you’re coming into the office three days a week now, will you drop to just two days? If so, how is that going to land with your employer? But if not, you’re suddenly spending 75% of your time in the office – probably not what you signed up for when you agreed to hybrid working.
To summarize, the great majority of workers enjoy hybrid working. This is also what the majority of employers provide. So far so good. But there are also reasonably large numbers of people who’d prefer to work from home five days a week. The majority of these are men. By contrast, significant percentages of female workers would be happy to work fully onsite. These findings show that the global workplace’s seemingly placid ‘new normal’ is shot through with a delicate network of tensions. It is only the companies who understand – and carefully address – these tensions that will thrive in our post-COVID world.
“I’ve been with the company 32 years. You’d think they’d give me a nice, easy job at my age. Instead, they made me Head of Investor Relations – the goddamn hardest role I’ve ever had!”
The Wheel of Fortune Reversed!
For many years, Investor Relations (IR) was every global firm’s forgotten function.
If businesspeople thought about IR at all, they usually assumed it was some sort of glorified comms job, a necessary buffer between an overworked Finance team and information hungry investors. There was certainly little glamour attached to the role. For the average Head of IR, access to ExCo was limited, direct reports were few and pay was unremarkable. And one thing was for sure . . . IR provided no steppingstone to any of those coveted Board- level roles.
But that’s all changing. Today’s Head of IR is a strategist. He or she works hand-in-glove with the CEO and is often one of the first names mentioned when other C-suite roles become available.
So what has led to IR’s happy reversal of fortunes? Our resources point to activist investors, increasing ESG-related pressures and a global technology transformation which has forced companies to react to ever increasing amounts of data.
Nowhere are these trends more evident than the Oil & Gas sector.
WhiteCrow Research’s Latest White Paper
WhiteCrow Research’s latest white paper examines some of the precise challenges facing heads of IR in oil & gas firms and oilfield services providers. We also discuss the fast- evolving skillset that heads of IR must now showcase in order to be truly successful. Lastly, we look at the IR talent pool and discuss the feasibility of an energy or energy-related business hiring someone from out of sector giving rise to importance of Investor Relations (IR).
Important Highlights
The balance between environmental sustainability and financial sustainability has never been more precarious. But now that energy prices are rising, some investors are sounding a slightly different note on ESG.
Technology is a game-changer. Perhaps its most under-reported effect is the need to maintain constant trust with stakeholders.
It is increasingly implausible for a Head of IR not to have a background in Finance. The role is now deeply entrenched in commercial strategy and often acts as a steppingstone to a CFO role.
The Head of IR should report to the CFO but regular, strategic-level interaction with the CEO is crucial.
The only out-of-sector IR talent pools that provide strong, relevant candidates for energy related companies are metals & mining and (possibly) financial services.
Challenges to World’s Energy Supply
As the graphics on this page display, an overwhelming majority of our sources named ESG as the biggest challenge they face in their professional lives. This is perhaps no surprise. With the current incumbent of the White House having been elected on a promise to “end fossil fuel”, there is clearly much work to be done to convince investors that oil and gas firms have a key role to play in the energy transition.
What is your biggest professional challenge?
Fig 1A: All mentioned
Fig 1B: First mentions (%)
True, some sources noted with satisfaction the new realism which has emerged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but others were of the opinion that public memory is short: in the event that the world’s energy supply problems are resolved, they reckon it won’t be long before oil & gas firms are once again perceived as the ‘bad guys’.
Accordingly, heads of IR must continue to weigh their words carefully, balancing concern for the environment (innovation, clean technology) with a smartly articulated argument in favour of traditional energy sources. One of the people we spoke to – the head of IR at a supermajor – was reassuringly bullish about this challenge:
“ . . . the Venn diagram between ESG and arguing for a fossil future isn’t as bleak as you might think. The overlapping area is quite large. The key is to show investors that you get their concerns. Best advice I ever got given in this role was “Seek first to listen . . .”
Other sources struck a more despondent note, with one bemoaning investors’ “cognitive dissonance” and despairing that the market can ever have a “sensible, grown-up conversation” about ESG:
“Look, we’re lightyears away from having the technological knowhow to build a workable grid purely from renewables. Everybody knows that. And then there’s a massive question around how environmentally friendly renewables actually are when you take into account the land footprint and the rare metals and all the rest of it . . . But the ESG lobby is still, you know, “faster, faster, faster” . . .”
Ranking second among IR professionals’ concerns is technology. This requires some explanation. Our sources were not Luddites complaining of an inability to work the company intranet. Rather, they were referring to the huge volumes of data available to institutional and retail investors and the public at large. This subjects oil and gas firms to constant scrutiny. One source summed it up neatly:
“Twenty years ago, you only felt the full glare of public scrutiny once every quarter. Now you’re responding to events the whole time.”
But some sources acknowledged that technology is as much a blessing as a curse. Leveraging data is key to understanding an increasingly broad investor base, not all of whom necessarily take an identical view of each issue. IR heads can also use technology to keep abreast of hot button topics and track the activities of their competitors. However, this is all time-consuming. Indeed, some sources suggest big data is one of the reasons that IR teams are getting larger. As one person put it:
“If I had to do all the data gathering myself, I’d never do anything else. Any serious IR head needs to be building people around them.”
Our top two challenges – ESG and technology – would probably be namechecked by IR professionals in any sector. However, the third placed challenge is surely more specific to oil and gas: volatility. A cursory glance at energy prices over the last few years shows a dizzying, rollercoaster inconsistency. But against this topsy-turvy backdrop, IR heads need to maintain a consistent and coherent message. This touches not just upon a company’s long-term financial stability but also its strategy concerning a whole range of industry issues. Here, of course, we are circling back to one of our earlier topics. This was elegantly pointed out by an IR source in one of the top oilfield services companies:
“Everybody thinks ESG is important until the share price soars . . . then suddenly it’s just a nice-to-have.”
Skills to Perfectly Hone the Responsibility
When asked to list the qualities which define today’s successful Head of IR, our sources came up with an intriguing combination of hard and soft skills and Be an Agile Shape Shifter. This in itself makes the point that IR has become a highly nuanced role, requiring not just a set of qualifications but also a specific type of personality.
Top of the list is trustworthiness. One might point out that this is a desirable trait in any role, but sources were talking more about credibility in front of investors. This quality might also be sub-divided into professional and personal credibility. It goes without saying that your IR head needs to be across the numbers, but they should also resonate the virtues of plain-speaking and integrity. The need for trust, says one source, “is directly proportional to the volatility of your sector”. They expanded on the point thus:
“People need to believe you in the good times and the bad times. The first is easy, but the second is not. If there is any sense that you’re telling investors what they want to hear, that can be fatal. The market is always going to go up and down but your messaging has to be consistent and that’s an incredibly difficult trick to pull off if you haven’t got good faith with your audience.”
Given the importance of trust, it’s not surprising that “a good network” also features highly among our responses. It is for this reason that many of our sources were sceptical that their role could be performed effectively by someone without an energy background. Most IR heads are former analysts or bankers who spent many years broadening their network and garnering respect for their depth of sectoral knowledge. Once in IR, they were able to draw on their earlier career to establish credibility.
What are the most important skills required to do your job?
Fig. 2A: All mentions
Fig. 2B: First Mentions (%)
Several sources also stressed the importance of a background in finance. This is interesting because it touches upon the delicate matter of reporting lines. One occasionally hears suggestions that the Head of IR should report into the CEO. That might seem reasonable, given the enlarging of the role we have previously discussed. But sources were almost unanimous that this would be a strategic error. One quote serves as a useful summary of this majority opinion:
“Do I have a close relationship with the CEO? Absolutely, and that’s crucial, but my direct report is into the CFO and that’s as it should be. Otherwise, you just can’t get into the details.”
It’s interesting that this source, while strongly endorsing his upward reporting line, nevertheless stressed the importance of working closely with the top man. This hints at the last quality that sources mentioned in large numbers: strategy. Instead of characterising the Head of IR as someone who comes in after the event to shape messaging or undertake some sort of damage limitation exercise, sources were keen to emphasize the forward-looking aspect of their role. This is further evidence that today’s Head of IR is no longer a mere messenger or PR specialist. He or she is someone who can – indeed must – think and act like a senior executive.
This is consonant with most, if not all, of the qualities covered by the 18% of responses we have listed under “Other” in Figure 2b. Usually, these referenced some soft quality such as perseverance or commitment, although “excellent communicator” was another oft-mentioned term.
Before concluding this section, it is perhaps worth checking that our sources were not speaking about some mythical figure. In other words, how do the people we spoke to measure up against their own definition of the ideal Head of IR?
Actually, quite well. The adjective we would use to describe most of our sources is ‘impressive’. Yes, they came across as intelligent, technically expert professionals. But more striking was their charm, their thoughtfulness and their ability to communicate complex ideas in simple, but meaningful terms.
In a word, the modern Head of IR is a leader.
Talent
If we now know – in theory – what makes an effective Head of IR, the next obvious question is where an oil & gas or oilfield services company might find such a person. Clearly, the most likely hunting ground is represented by other direct competitors. Indeed, in-sector candidates are abundant because IR teams in the top oil & gas firms tend to be larger than those elsewhere. Our research shows that the average IR headcount at an oil major is 12, considerably higher than we see in most other industries. This means that even if the Head of IR is not open to a conversation, he or she is likely to have several direct reports, some of whom might conceivably be ready for a move into the top role.
There are also impressive IR individuals sitting in oilfield services firms. Admittedly, the teams here are smaller (often just one or two people) but the quality is by no means lacking. In most cases, the relevant IR head will have an earlier career in finance or M&A, excellent knowledge of the broader energy sector and a wide investor network.
If we wander out of the energy sector entirely, talent is somewhat thinner on the ground. However, metals & mining is certainly worth a look. Here again, there are some reasonably large IR teams (occasionally upwards of ten people) and incumbents are likely to be grappling with the same issues: ESG, volatility, regulation etc. For the same reasons, financial services might also offer some interesting talent.
We are well connected with all these talent pools, so if you are looking to develop your IR capability and/or appoint a senior IR leader, we’d be happy to share our insight and expertise.
To discuss any of the issues covered in this document, or to obtain additional information on Whitecrow Research’s Talent Intelligence capabilities, please contact:
Matthew Pitt Global Head of Talent Intelligence Email: matthew.pitt@whitecrowresearch.com
The other day I watched a famous TV Chef make the Italian classic, Spaghetti Bolognese. He appeared ‘screen-ready’, with the exact utensils and ingredients he intended to use, all laid neatly in front of him. The pots and pans were ‘stage-ready’ on the hob, ready to be whipped to use, just in time.
This got me thinking about the Japanese Just in Time (JIT) philosophy made popular by Toyota in the 1970’s. I learned about JIT when studying Economics at University. I remember thinking how cool it was that cars could be produced in a lean fashion and in record time to meet customer demands ‘just-in-time’. Of course, since then our lives, expectations and consumer habits revolve around JIT products hence the rise of the entire ‘last-mile’ industry.
Think Amazon, Deliveroo, and the host of apps that deliver everything from milk to petrol, Just in time.
So, what can Talent Acquisition (TA) teams and leaders learn from organized Chefs who cook using just in time philosophy?
Grab a cuppa tea, and let’s weave through kitchen analogies and recruitment scenarios, to serve up something palatable.
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Prepping the Kitchen
Cooking a meal with pre-prepared ingredients on the counter, clearly makes things easier for any Chef. Imagine grabbing what you need when you need it. Organized Chefs can plan their ‘kitchen time’ with precision and minimize unpredictable outcomes (eg: missing ingredients).
Switching to the recruitment world, how strategic are companies with their hiring plans? How prepared are Leaders and Talent Acquisition teams prior to a job becoming life? Of course, there will always be unplanned attrition, though does it need to take us by surprise entirely?
In an ideal world, companies would invest in building a long and healthy Talent Pipeline (particularly for evergreen, niche/technical roles.). This would then replenish their Talent Pool, allowing them to locate talent fast and reduce time-to-hire.
Given that 77% of recruiters go back to their Talent Pool to hire candidates that initially didn’t appear to ‘fit’ the job (Jobvite Recruiter), I’d want to know about the quality and depth of the Talent Pool they ‘go back to’.
According to Jobvite’s 2018 research, 75% of recruiters experienced candidates changing their minds when it came to offer acceptance. This isn’t a new phenomenon even if the research is circa 4 years old. What it shows is that recruiters desperately need to ensure they are building a strong enough Talent Pipeline and Talent Pool, to be able to ‘go back’ and ‘recheck’ candidates after their initial choices reject offers.
Building Talent Pipelines is a smart precursor to all hiring.
With a healthy Talent Pipeline, companies can create qualified talent pools to dip into JIT. Just like pre-preparing ingredients, so cooking is a whizz!
Let’s bounce back to our TV Chef and imagine the planning and preparation that goes into cooking on a TV show. As the cameras roll, there can only be a certain number of retakes when the onions are already sizzling and spluttering………………Golden brown not chargrilled please Chef!
Consider the steps our Spag-Bol Chef (or his production team) went through before the camera take. Someone prepared a shopping list. Someone scoured and shopped for the ingredients in the exact quantities needed. Someone ensured the correct utensils, pots, and pans, etc. were all at hand. Someone washed, peeled, and chopped the onions and tomatoes. Someone grated the parmesan and placed all the ingredients in pretty-looking bowls. Someone checked the appliances, cleaned the kitchen, and preheated the oven. Someone filmed and edited the show etc.
The time-consuming pre-prep, non-glam, often thankless part of the job, draws parallels with ‘top of funnel’ Talent Research and Sourcing elements of recruitment activities.
I mean before a perfect candidate can be presented, someone has to do candidate research, mapping, sourcing, talent engagement, qualifying, and shortlisting.
And let’s face it, this is the super time-consuming part of recruitment, which must remain ‘switched on’, if recruitment is an ongoing activity within an organization.
According to research (McLean & Company), recruiting has remained a No. 1 priority for companies since 2020 to date. However, HR, talent acquisition effectiveness has gone down by 8%, even though talent acquisition teams are spending 25% more time on talent acquisition compared to 2021.
So why are TA teams less effective despite spending more time on recruitment activities?
Or put another way, what recruitment activities are draining recruiters’ time to make them less effective?
Efficiency
I watched Spag-Bol Chef with ‘envy-eyes’ wishing life in the ‘real kitchen’ was as easy as he made it look. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had helping hands lining up bowls of chopped, sliced, diced, and grated ingredients, exactly when we wanted them, in the exact quantities and temperatures required….JIT baby!
How incredible would it be to have everything pre-prepared and laid out, as one tries to rustle up the kid’s dinner whilst the dog whines to be walked?
In reality, any of us home-Chefs can follow the TV-Chef’s example and aim to arrange our cooking activities in such a way, that our dish is cooked with efficiency.
Though also in reality, many of us well-meaning (but somewhat disorganized) home-Chefs sometimes begin cooking only to realize a key ingredient is missing or our knives are so blunt that our onions resemble chunky cuboids over tidy dice.
Perhaps most can agree that pre-preparation is key when it comes to meal-planning.
So how does all this cookery malarkey relate to talent acquisition?
Recruiting and Cooking
An organized Chef can teach Talent Acquisition teams, Hiring Managers, and Leaders a great deal about talent research and strategic talent pipelining. If Talent Acquisition teams used their time, resources, and bandwidth to create talent pipelines strategically, then like the Chef’s ready-prepared bowls of ingredients, they could aim to create ready-made talent pools.
With a well-defined level of preparedness, Talent Acquisition teams could dip into their pre-created talent pools to engage with talent with the right skill set, at the right salary level, within the right locations, who are ideally ‘warmed-up’ and ready for engagement, just in time.
This is how some of my super-strategic clients design their recruitment processes. It can be done, if hiring is prioritized across the board and the right skills are deployed on the right tasks.
With ready-made talent pools that have either:
Been pre-prepared some time ago or
Prepared in record time on demand, response rates and time to hire can be shortened.
Since recruitment (and the cost of making a wrong hire) can be eye-watering, activities focusing on reducing open ‘vacancy days’ should be front and center.
Research shows that 55% of companies who keep hiring ‘switched on’ consistently slash their time to hire (Accurate). This makes total sense since their talent pipeline is constantly moving, and their talent pool is refreshed on a real-time basis.
Done well, streamlined talent acquisition activities can become the game-changing strategy that enables organizations to win more work and scale.
On the other hand, if companies turn away work, due to not having the right people just in time, then someone needs to whip out the magnifying glass and look at the entire span of recruitment activities and retention strategies and culture.
When countries like Singapore have headlines stating that “Manpower (shortages) will pose challenges to growth in the longer term” (Singapore National Employers Federation- SNEF President Robert Yap – April 22), leaders really need to dissect how macro policies will impact micro-level hiring, and strategize around it.
Chaotic ‘Kitchen’
Imagine how the busy talent acquisition and recruiter feels when various stakeholders ask them to hire talent across divisions, in multiples of x, with an urgency of ‘tomorrow’. Worse still, if the talent acquisition team has a limited budget, tools, skills, and experience, and/or a lack of a decent ATS system, then talent researching, mapping, shortlisting, sourcing, and engaging people is like running a sprint shackled to the hilt. Good luck with that.
This explains why 4 out of 5 of the recruitment challenges companies faced during the pandemic have put talent acquisition teams on the back foot. According to Talent Lyft’s 2020 research, recruiter’s top 5 challenges were:
1) Volume hiring
2) Difficulties filling jobs
3) Digitization of recruitment
4) Hiring budgets cut
5) Firing staff
If hiring budgets are cut, clearly this sends ripples throughout the entire recruitment process , ending in an eruption somewhere off the Richter scale.
Using our Chef analogy, it’s obvious that a Chef with limited ingredients in tight quantities can only do so much, regardless of skill.
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Extra Hands – Light Work
Some companies engage external partners to help build their talent pipeline and talent pools. This makes total sense when bandwidth (and sometimes skills) are challenged. However, partnering with external specialists needs to be done with a careful lens on ROI.
Though when LinkedIn research tells us that 89% of talent accept jobs faster when contacted by a recruiter, it’s probably wise to haverecruiters (internal/external) partnering with you and helping with outreach.
At the same time when we hear that 40% of employers kept their recruitment process in-house to save on costs (LinkedIn, 2019), you kind of wonder if the whole ‘penny wise pound foolish’ scenario would ultimately play out.
I mean sure, you could ‘save’ costs by outsourcing less, but what if the result is increased time to hire, how much would that cost? If vacancies remain open longer, then what is the daily cost of that ‘hole’ internally and on other colleagues taking up the slack?
What if the inability to recruit fast enough, results in your business not being able to pitch or win work? How does that impact growth?
‘No money, no honey’ comes to mind.
Here, data and diagnostics, with a keen eye on ROI should be applied, instead of a blanket ‘in-house’ only policy.
Rolling Boulders Uphill
I have seen many talent acquisition teams buckle under the weight of rolling lofty boulders uphill. It’s a common theme to see internal stakeholders adding their talent requirements to the ‘shopping list’, at disproportionate levels to provide the necessary support and resources for talent acquisition teams to actually deliver.
I mean just because the shopping list is huge, doesn’t mean the load can actually be carried efficiently, even if there is an army of in-house recruiters.
And if recruiters are spending more time on recruitment activities but are less effective, then it doesn’t really matter how many open jobs the company has. The outcome will be increased time to hire, and eventually an unhappy team member.
Activities must be viewed strategically, with bold leaders performing pattern-interrupts, and possibly entire pattern-disrupts on parts of their hiring process.
It’s Their Job!
Sure, TA teams are hired to go to market and undertake talent research, outreach, source, talent engagement, shortlist, interview and submit candidates to their stakeholders. It’s their job!
But if an individual/team hasn’t been sufficiently ‘enabled’ to carry out those time-consuming tasks, then it’s no surprise when CVs can’t be submitted in time (forget about Just in Time for the moment).
Who does a better job at creating talent pipelines, an enabled Talent Acquisition team or a restricted one?
It’s not that talent acquisition teams aren’t capable, quite the contrary. It’s about looking at the activities they have to perform, and figuring out where time is best spent.
More time spent on recruiting doesn’t always result in equitable output. It depends ‘where’ the time is being spent.
There are certain parts of a job that may be best performed by someone else. In the TV-Chef analogy, the Chef may be better at cooking than filming/editing his own show. Likewise, a recruiter may be better at talent engagement than researching/sourcing. Talent research and sourcing activities require different skill sets entirely.
Where should talent acquisition teams focus their time? Where is the ROI best crystallized? How can talent acquisition teams be more streamlined and look at all activities to drive Just in Time efficiencies into their recruitment process?
The question isn’t ‘Can this be done in-house’, the question is ‘Should it all be done in-house’?
I’m fortunate enough to have a cleaner to help me manage my home. It’s not that I can’t clean the house myself, the question is should I clean, or free up those hours by outsourcing, so I can spend more time with my kids instead?
One may be able to do the entire gamut of recruiting activities, but should they?
Hot Market
Imagine a hot talent market where everyone wants to attract the same skills in the same place. Recruiting in a tight talent market requires different skills all together. Finding talent is not the issue (anyone can search LinkedIn). Attracting talent is a different story altogether.
This requires innovative recruitment strategies (everyone and their dog is trawling LinkedIn, sending stale vanilla InMail’s).
How is an overburdened (hopefully not burnt-out) talent acquisition team supposed to go up against competitors, plus other recruitment agencies and headhunters (who are specifically trained to hunt heads) in a hot market looking for the same skill set, in the same market at the same time?
And no, having a LinkedIn Recruiter license isn’t the holy grail to talent research and sourcing talent, when everyone is doing the same thing and candidates are inundated with messages.
Supermarket Mayhem
Taking our Chef example, reactive recruitment is akin to starting to cook a dish, only to realize you have missing ingredients, causing you to rush out to buy the missing ingredients, the same time as everyone else, in the same store, at the same time. That’s mayhem!
Now imagine if there is only 1 unit of that ingredient left on the shelf. Fastest (aka most enabled), and sometimes most ‘aggressive’ (aka most persistent) Chef wins!
Or imagine if one store is ‘out of stock’, then the Chefs need to run around finding other suppliers, or just delay cooking the dish all together. Not ideal if you are expecting guests in the evening.
This is no different to what challenged talent acquisition teams do, when they are on the back-foot having to source talent with urgency and limited resources with no/limited/stale talent pipelines and talent pools to refer to.
It’s not uncommon to see talent acquisition teams hit the market, using similar approaches, similar scripts/templates/outreach with the same licenses to the same job portals.
Maybe that’s why LinkedIn research shows that most people discover new jobs through referrals.
Wouldn’t you rather avoid an over-crowded supermarket, fighting for the same ingredient?
A dollop of ‘recruitment creativity’ is required, with sprinklings of skillful persistence.
And in my experience at least, some talent acquisition teams simply don’t have the time, resources or bandwidth to work at crazy hiring pace at crazy intensity, non-stop.
In our Chef example, assuming they have the required skill and equipment, they simply need the right ingredients at the right quantity stored at the right temperature to be able to execute their dish.
Consider for a moment, a disorganized Chef (aka my son last week, who randomly decided he wanted to try and bake banana bread, till he realized there were no bananas in the house).
If the Chef appeared on TV without having done their preparation, then the entire show would be a mess. If the Chef wanted to spontaneously cook Spaghetti Bolognaise, they would first need to have the right ingredients and tools at hand.
If they began cooking the sauce, and realized they didn’t have the pasta, they’d have to quickly pop out to buy the pasta.
This disorganization would create delays, inefficiencies, kitchen-chaos, frantic panic-buying for potentially sub-standard ingredients (whatever is left on the shelf on the day) and could effectively ruin the entire cooking experience.
Granted sometimes everything turns out OK in the end, but in business, we don’t really enjoy leaving things to chance and luck.
Perhaps a little pre-preparation would make all the difference.
Energy-Game
Where talent acquisition teams tend to differ in output, is in what I define as their ‘energy’ to create active talent pipelines and talent pools with depth. This ‘energy’ (or fuel/gas if you prefer) is dependent on many factors but broadly speaking it comes down to 3 things:
1) Individual skills
2) Tools and resources
3) Efficient hiring processes
Cookie-Cutter
Recruiters using ‘cookie-cutter’ methods to research/source/engage talent will continue to struggle as the market for certain skills just gets tighter (think tech/pharma/IT/renewable energy/fintech sectors right now).
It’s clear to see the recruitment world is being urged to think creatively. Just imagine how recruitment will look when the #metaverse kicks in (more on that another day).
HR as the Heart
With HR functions not placed at the heart of the business, it’s not a surprise when I’m told about the lack of budgets allocated to hiring teams.
If talent acquisition teams are to be successful, then organizations need to set them up for success in the first place. We wouldn’t expect a Chef to slice onions with their hands tied behind their back.
Or perhaps we can give the Chef an onion with no knife, and they can gnaw it to pieces….since budgets are tight and all that.
Leadership should consider how to enable talent acquisition teams to create talent pipelines for:
a) Active roles
b) Strategic roles
c) And gather insights to make better-informed hiring decisions.
An enabled hiring team should have the resources to deeply research the market using an array of tools. This research part can’t be skipped, since the success of the talent engagement outreach, is dependent on how the initial research was mapped out.
Like our plucky-lucky TV Chef (who probably outsourced parts of the preparation process to a production team), talent acquisition teams should map out the time-consuming parts of their recruitment process and decide how they can deliver the best results Just in Time.
Should they focus on repetitive, time-consuming (yet critical) tasks like market research and mapping, or can they be released somewhat to focus on the higher-value-add parts of their job i.e.: creating an excellent candidate experience, listening and advising internal stakeholders, solving hiring challenges, improving talent attraction ratios and hiring experiences, creating a great interview, orientation, and onboarding experience, etc.
If the TV Chef can focus on cooking, instead of research, planning, preparing, filming, editing, marketing his show etc, then he’s using his skills where they add most value.
Now of course, some of you may be thinking ‘Well Dee, not all of us have the luxury or budgets to hire kitchen help to prepare pretty little ceramic bowls of chopped tomatoes’, and that is a fair point.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t work towards preparedness in all areas. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and pre-plan and pre-prepare strategically. In the recruitment world, if a talent acquisition team is overstretched, the first thing they need to ask themselves is not always the ‘How can we fill 1000 jobs by tomorrow’ question, but the ‘WHO can help us fill 1000 jobs by tomorrow question’.
It’s the WHO over the HOW that can make strides when there are surges in workload.
If a Chef has to cook for 1000 guests, they need all the extra hands they can get, to deliver tasty, hot meals. If they don’t have the resources, then diners can expect cold, sloppy, mediocre meals……or worse no meals at all.
Who can get those 1000 meals ready with the Chef within budget?
Now of course I’ve massively over-simplified the comparison of an overburdened Recruiter to that of a disorganized Chef. In reality, there are multiple challenges that in-house Recruiters face, that my simple analogy just doesn’t give credence to.
However, instead of being drawn into the missing parts of my admittedly simplified analogy, I encourage you to consider the question of WHO over HOW which is the crux of this article.
Who can help increase your recruiting bandwidth, so you can focus on the most impactful parts of recruitment?
Should talent acquisition teams time spend the bulk of their time on candidate engagement, improving the hiring experience and stakeholder management, etc? Or should they be cutting/pasting their 70th LinkedIn connection message, whilst waiting for a response from the previous batch of 100 they messaged yesterday?
WHO then HOW
I invite talent acquisition teams, recruiters, and leaders who are currently under pressure to meet recruitment demands to consider the following questions:
Who can create a talent pipeline and talent pools (internally or externally)?
Who can approve resources to enable effective Hiring?
Who has the tools (vendors/partners) to improve the candidate’s go-to-market strategy?
Who can help upskill my talent research, talent sourcing, and engagement skills?
When budgets allow and bandwidth is thin, you can also consider asking:
Who can help us research talent in the market?
Who can do the initial outreach for us?
Who can deal with the to/fro with initial candidate messaging
Who can conduct first-level engagement to weed out the non-interested?
Who can present interested and vetted candidates to me?
Who can feed leads into our ATS system and save us time?
Who can give us talent insights in real-time on my target talent landscape?
Who can help us reduce our time-to-hire?
In Summary
A Chef can single-handedly cook for a certain number of guests. When quantities go up, the Chef needs assistance, extra hands, ingredients, utensils etc.
It’s not about the ability of the Chef to handle everything single-handedly or with limited help, it’s about the Chef being efficient by using their time on the most critical aspects of running their busy kitchen.
Likewise, talented talent acquisition teams may be fully capable of running 360-degree recruitment activities. But should they? With a data-driven HR culture, companies should be able to identify which recruiting levers to switch up to ensure ROI.
If businesses can meet hiring demands by sufficiently enabling their talent acquisition team, then they may be best placed to run end-to-end recruitment internally.
If however, businesses are stretched with surges in hiring, thin on bandwidth, and have the budget to get support, then who can provide this whilst proving ROI?
If you were given ‘ready-prepared’ talent pools, all sourced, vetted, and ‘warmed-up’ ready to speak to you (assuming quality is on-point), that would save swathes of time.
Let’s face it, open vacancies are rarely good for business.
I’d love to see the industry adopt more Just-in-time principals, so talent acquisition teams could work towards having access to what they need when they need it.
Then perhaps they can minimize recruitment mayhem and focus on actually cooking their next culinary masterpiece.
