It's Talent, Stupid!

Recruitment is recruitment – it doesn’t change?

So here is the line – we will find the best job for you, or if you are a client, we will find the best candidate for you. It is all the same. It is recruitment.

Or is it the same? Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a person who knew an industry very well, had experience of that industry and had actually done the jobs he was recruiting. He had a high level of knowledge about roles, companies and good understanding of the needs of people within a recruitment process.

Or so he thought.

Then he saw the difference between a “standard” recruitment process and a good one. The difference was startling. How could his previous processes have been so shoddy and inaccurate, with so little data and information to back them up? This new and shiny process had in-depth understandings of the people, the business, and delivered real quality in terms of service. And ultimately, it really did provide the right person in the right job within the right business. That person stayed within that role and has progressed within the business that is absolutely right for them.

This is the story of a converted Recruitment Consultant – me!

What this shows is the difference between a normal recruitment agency and a good quality one. I have been at Chemistry now for 3 months since joining from a leading search & selection firm. I have seen a difference here like I never thought I could. Honesty, openness, quality – a recruitment company that people really like and recruitment consultants that actually care about people and not just revenue and selling advertising all of the time.

And there is the difference. Caring. Caring about the people we deal with and what the outcome is. I have been astounded by the difference between Chemistry and the rest of the recruitment industry. Other recruitment companies are starting to take notice of how we do things and try to emulate it, and our customers are telling us what a refreshing change we are within the industry. People are realising that they don’t have to accept low standards, or bad service, or inaccuracy. An aggressive sales culture will breed aggressive sales people and they are not the people who should be managing recruitment processes.

An important part to add here. Other recruitment companies are very successful businesses and have a business model that works brilliantly for them from a commercial point of view. However, the model does not take into account the people most important to it – customers. Somewhere along the line, something was missed and people were forgotten. People who are looking to find a new job, and people who are looking to recruit great people.

So to the company. Chemistry has been a revelation to me in terms of working. A truly great environment with superb people and a set of values and attitudes that are brilliant. We care, we want this business to be successful, and that success depends on how well we deliver to our customers – and we intend to deliver very well.

A Footnote

Mark, who wrote this blog, did name the company he worked for but hey they are "big and powerful" and we are just the small kid in their playground .  So they, in a very nice, not in a threatening way at all (much) legal letter asked us to remove their name from the blog...which as you can see we have.  A victory for the big guy ;-)

Isn't it all about IQ?

You may have heard a few other ideas bounded around, the emotional intelligence idea, personality tests, motivation questionnaires, but what is it all about? And does it really matter after all? If someone is clever enough, they’ll be good, right?

People can react negatively when they first learn that the way we are has been set for quite some time. Probably before we started school, let alone before we started work! Unfortunately, while we feel we learn a lot as we travel through life, all we learn is experience. Our values, motivations and personality have been there long before we started thinking about them, we’re just discovering more about them.

People also seem uncomfortable with the idea of measuring these things in a recruitment process. Somehow understanding someone’s more intrinsic needs and preferences seems a bit personal and unnecessary. In fact, these types of assessments are simply helping you get into the psyche of a potential recruit. A person who, let’s not forget, you are planning to trust with key information in your business, deliverables and targets that the business will depend on and the development and growth of the talent in their care. You need them to be successful, so why not try finding out what success looks like for them and what they need to achieve it?

Why wouldn’t you want to know how someone feels about change? How much support will they need from others? Whether they can they work on their own? How they will make decisions? How much personal ownership they want?

When you think about the answers to these questions, you might think  it advantageous to know about it. However, you might also be thinking that that’s all very well but you’d rather know that someone has the intellectual capacity to do the job – understand the right data and make the right decisions. Isn’t that more important?

Well, actually it isn’t.

Research continues to show that how someone does something is as important as what they do. Making an independent decision is great but if you can’t persuade others, you don’t listen to their concerns, you get angry when they disagree and then haven’t got the inclination to follow it through, how much value is in that decision?

While I would never discourage businesses from measuring the intellect or processing power of those they want to hire, it is important to remember that it is not the only thing worth looking at. In fact, it may be the least important thing to understand about them. Research done by Chemistry has shown that for some businesses being too bright is a disadvantage, in fact a predictor of poor performance. The key is really to know what you need in the first place and then seek out ways to measure those traits. Throwing in an intellect test for good measure, because it kind of seems like a sensible thing to do, might not help improve anything. You’ve got to know what you need.

What does great look like?

You know I will always describe Chemistry as the only recruitment company that can tell you what great looks like.  The others well that can tell a wrong candidate and then can also take an educated guess at a good candidate, i.e. if they like them, they are good, if not...well you get my point.  Try it out, next time a recruitment consultant sends you a CV, pin 'em down to 5 good reasons the candidate is right for the job?  And only 1 of them can be experience? And then ask them to give 5 reasons why the same candidate might be wrong for the job?...now that'd be hilarious :-).

The reason it's hilarious is two fold; 1. The recruitment consultant will not have enough data to give you 5 reasons either way and 2. the whole thought of the candidate not being exactly right fills the recruitment consultant with fear!

The reason why it is not hilarious is that our recruitment industry is a £23billion roulette wheel...the way hiring is done today by the vast majority of recruitment consultancies is gambling, the good news for the consultants is they don't risk anything, it is the client and candidate bearing all the risk.

Spending time understanding what great looks like and importantly how you can measure it will payback a thousand fold when hiring.  At Chemistry if we can't measure it we don't report it, because we don't trust it.  The great thing about hiring a better way is that it is simple and a damn sight easier :-)

Energis, now there's a story...

Energis was a company that was taken from insolvency in 2002 by a group of banks who owned the company’s debt. Energis was a telecoms company operating in an industry where the sky was falling in, competition was fierce, and the owners, sitting on about £700 million of loans, were not feeling particularly patient.  Fortunately the guy who was asked to turn it around was Archie Norman, wow!

Our job at Energis was to attract people to the company to help turn it around. We began by making an assessment of the situation and the environment in which recruits were being asked to work. Here is how we would describe it:

We started our thinking from the business end – what was the environment?  What best characterised the world in which our people were having to live?

•    Ambiguity was everywhere; no day was the same; priorities changed hourly
•    Pace of delivery was beyond rapid; a year-long objective had to be delivered in three months
•    Change was the norm – the only one
•    You were judged on what you delivered
•    Feedback was frank, honest but brutal
•    Pressure was relentless
•    A manager was expected to make quick decisions
•    Planning was not valued
•    80% was OK except when it wasn’t … but you never knew when it was or when it wasn’t
•    Everyone was dealing in a customer service environment where nothing less than 99.9% was acceptable.
•    The business was under-resourced with no cash to staff up to 100%.

In order to determine the performance behaviours of Energis' Great People, we asked ourselves some key questions: What did the organisation value? How was this mirrored in the behaviours that were rewarded or thwarted? A great example was in the area of planning and project management. Planning was something not valued at all at Energis. In order to succeed you had to be able to deliver and plan simultaneously. You couldn't stop to reflect and contemplate your next move, there was not time. If you valued planning then you couldn’t join. It was that simple.

Then we looked at motivation. What type of person would be attracted and motivated to work in Energis? People who worked well at Energis were motivated by non-hierarchical structures, autonomous decision-making and being part of an intellectually challenging peer group. People who liked structure, hierarchy and set goals and boundaries for decision-making did not perform well. Performance accelerators were motivated by Energis. People whose behaviour focused more on sustaining performance often found the company less comfortable.

The answers to these questions allowed us to define what people needed to look like in order to be Best. The behaviours that defined Best in a majority of jobs were centred on accelerating performance – i.e. on driving change, on achieving a vision, on increasing effectiveness, on driving things forward. We turned all this analysis into a three-stage process for identifying Best people. We asked the question: “Where are these talented people? Where would we source them from?” The surprising answer was “Anywhere”. We had broken the War for Talent myth. The issue was not what people had done but how they had done it and what environments that had done it in. Energis had redefined the rules of engagement; they had taken the war to the competition’s backyard. We hired from the FMCG, financial services, consulting, aerospace and automotive sectors. There was no shortage of people to select from because we had shifted people’s thinking about what Best was about.

The next questions we asked were: “How can we get the talent interested in us? How can we attract the people we want?” To answer this we created an Employee Value Proposition which we could put to people. It went like this:
•    Do you want to work in an environment where people will be smarter than you?
•    Do you want to work in a place that is broken beyond understanding?
•      But where the strategy is clear and you will be able to personally impact the business up or down by 20% every day?
•      It’s not a career move; it is two-three year project where you will learn more than you would have done in the last 10.
•      Oh, and you may well make some money from it.

The final question that we asked was “How do we know which people to hire?” The approach was simple: put the bar high, and don’t compromise. We used assessment centres because they allow critical and important behaviour to be observed. We also used behavioural event interviews designed to probe, with the focus on evidence, how people achieve results. And we used intellect and values screening, bottom line is that Intellect was a predictor of success, no point ignoring it, it was fact!

Energis was an abject lesson in understanding what you had to hire, defining it in a measurable way, measuring it and trusting the data because the data on our Great people was fact. We never compromised, I mean it, not once.

If you have any questions on it, email me [email protected]

PAG's

Getting things done that are not business as usual activities especially in a rapidly growing firm like ours is a nightmare, i could write a list as long as my arm on all the things I like to do, "if only i had the time!".  However we have it solved, eureka!...I was reading Alan Leighton's book, On Leadership and at Asda he had something (it was probably Archie Norman's idea) he called PAGs or Positive Action Groups, this were groups of individuals from different disciplines or departments or both that were brought together to solve some of the key business issues of the day, even better the issues were derived from the employees themselves.

Chemistry have used PAGs now in two quarters and the last set of 3 PAGs are and will have a dramatic impact on the business.

The PAGS we are carrying out at the moment are:

1. Customer Satisfaction - how we embed it's measurement in the culture of the business
2. Health & Well Being (shit title but what can you do) - how we make our environment the best place for employees to do their best
3. Talent Labs - our dead cool facility for assessment or development, check it out at http://talentlabs.co.uk. The PAG is looking at how we can market the facility more effectively.

The CSAT PAG is having an amazing impact, first proper sets of learnings are presented next week and I will bring the results to the blog!

The H & WB PAG is also producing some amazing data.  We first and foremost ran an anonymous questionnaire with our employees to see how they were feeling about things ranging from the environment they worked in, to how they were rewarded, recognised and how were they equipped to be the best they can be.   The results in themselves were enlightening, the movie at the link below gives an idea of what we did and what we found:

Downturn or not?

GIven that the doom mongers and general pessimists have it in for the UK economy it seemed rather apt that i was called today by Recruiter Magazine (http://www.recruiter.co.uk) and asked for a 100 word contribution, the question and my response is shown below:

How do I motivate my team in times of corporate/economic uncertainty?

The key to motivating staff is always communication.  We choose to be open and honest about the company’s position, whether times are good or bad, this consistency creates an environment of trust and in turn loyalty.  A core reason why people work for Chemistry is the passion we have for our customers and the focus on doing what is right for them (unique in our industry).  By maintaining this integrity led approach through a downturn means we motivate not only our people but also our clients.  When the good times return our amazing people will still be here, enthusiastically delivering for great clients.

So that's my view.  What i didn't say was that actually both Chemistry Recruitment (http://chemistryrecruitment.com) and Chemistry Consulting (http://chemistryconsulting.biz) have never been busier, so whilst there is no doubt our business climate is changing, it doesn't meant there are not opportunities out there!

R

What War for Talent?

I believe the War for Talent talked up by headhunters  is phoney.  There is enough Talent for any role, it depends how you define the talent required.  Let me give you an example, we are frequently asked to hire sales people, the conversation with the sales manager or sales director frequently goes like this:

"What type of person are you looking for?" - Consultant

"Well, they need to be bright, dynamic, on the way up in their career, an achiever, have a high degree of initiative, creative with an ability to think on their feet, blue-chip background and clearly experience of selling in our space" - Sales Director 'X"

And there you have it, a War for Talent because that's clearly what everyone wants to hire and the type of people who fit that mould will undoubtedly be small but is it what they "want" or more importantly what they "need"?

Let's for one minute suggest that not all sales people are the same and that not all organisations need the same sales people, if they aren't and they don't, why do we prescribe to one "great" type of sales person, surely there must be other types?  We found this to be the case with one FTSE 100 client, upon analysis the types of sales people that performed best in their environment, were not as depicted above, actually their best sales people were neither stereotypically bright or creative, actually it was definitely better that they were not!  For this organisation a better understanding of what made a great sales employee (not a general assumption) opened up a whole world of potential employees previously untapped, they defied the War for Talent, because for them it was phoney.

Oh I hear the cries from the technical people that that theory is all very well but in some technical areas, such as Women in IT, the War for Talent exists because the talent doesn't exist at all.  Actually i kind of sign up to that, they are right it doesn't exist.  So you have a choice, engage in a non-productive vicious cycle of attrition, i.e. we'll just steal other people's talent and they'll steal ours etc. Or create your own, be brave, don't engage in a war, take a different path...at Chemistry Recruitment (http://chemistryrecruitment.com) we have a choice steal other people's recruitment consultants at a price or create our own, as a small business the temptation to "buy" people who can hit the ground running is great, think of all that early revenue!  However for our brand and business it's the wrong choice, so we invest in hiring individuals with the right level of Intellect, Values, Motivation and Behaviours and we then train them on the experience required.  Our retention and individual performance figures speak volumes about how right our choice is, we have a team of loyal, passionate people who have no preconceptions about how recruitment should be delivered, they are fantastic.

Saying all of this hiring great people is not easy, it doesn't have to be expensive but it's not easy...

Cheers

Roger

Who doesn't hate recruitment agencies?

So my first post, got to be a bit controversial or at the least interesting, so here goes.

My industry stinks...no seriously name another industry that impacts on an individuals life more than recruitment?  Midwifery possibly, undertaker maybe, parents/wife/husband/partner well clearly that depends :-). To most people the single biggest factor on how good they feel, how successful they are, how prosperous they are, the car they drive, the house they own (if these things are important), the person they settle down with is impacted/determined by the job(s) they get.  So in that context current recruitment practice is tantamount to a 2 minute test drive in a £100,000 car or a 2 minute visit to a new home you will buy.  The people facilitating the recruitment transaction are frequently ill-trained (if at all), incentivised on placement (not the quality of it) and have absolutely no qualification to do the job bar possibly being naive or vunerable enough to accept it...it's rubbish. Name another industry with that burden of responsibility that has no regulation or even governing body.

How do I know this, well two things I have worked for those agencies and been at the crappy end of their service as a client.  In addition Chemistry Recruitment (http://chemistryrecruitment.com) carried out a proposition project with one of the coolest companies on the block, Dave (http://dave.biz). The findings were staggering we (recruitment consultants) were hated and the service offering ripped apart, really, we are, and i quote, "a necessary evil" - FTSE 100 CEO.  Nice, that's what I wanted to be when i grew up :-)

Of course it's partly the recruitment consultants clients fault because despite the fact that the service to the client is shoddy (unreturned calls, inappropriate CVs, irrelevant and ill-informed candidates presented to interview being the less provocative complaints) and the service to candidates is well just nonsense, seriously laughable nothing has been done by the buying community to stop it, where's the "push back"?  It needs to change but i believe the customer needs to lead the change...the recruiters won't, Christ they are making too much easy money doing it the current way, where's the incentive!

In the meantime if you are a hiring manager to get the best out of your recruitment supplier, know the animal you are dealing with:

1. They play closest to the fee, if you are not paying a competitive rate you will not get to to see the best candidates, fact!  It may save a few pennies up front screwing the supplier down on their fee but you will lose more by having to hire from the least relevant bunch of candidates.
2. They work to the principal of least effort.  If you are easy to deal with, have a quick interview process, provide speedy feedback (note I said speedy not detailed) and don't ask them to fill in reports or interview notes you will get a better level of service.
3. If you don't like the recruitment consultant you are dealing with, get him/her changed.  On the whole recruitment companies are rubbish, however every now and again an individual might be brilliant.  Of course they will leave and the relationship with the agency will die a death but hey that's just what happens, right?

Follow these simple rules and you will get the best of a bad lot.

So where's the good news?

Well there are a couple of good 'uns out there:

Martin Noakes at Christian Timbers (only search practice i know who audit and publish their placement stats) (http://www.ctnet.com/ctnet/)

Curly Moloney at Bright Young Things (http://www.byt.com)

and of course if you really want to do it properly contact Chemistry Recruitment (http://chemistryrecruitment.com), I know a cheap plug :-).

Cheers

R

Recruitment - gotta love it!

This is a promo animation we did for the launch of our new QA service in January.