Adrian Thomas

12 May 2010 | By Colin Cottell

Like painting the Forth Railway Bridge, which is never finished before you have to start again, maintaining and renewing Britain’s railway infrastructure must sometimes seem a never ending task.

Adrian Thomas, Network Rail’s head of resourcing, admits he has got a job on his hands to recruit the engineers and project managers needed for major projects such as Crossrail and the East Coast Line. “In recruitment, there are days you plan for and days you actually have,” says Thomas, from the company’s London offices overlooking Kings Cross station.

Half a mile away stands the gleaming glass structure of St Pancras International from where Eurostar trains speed to and from Paris and Brussels. “The next couple of years we have an awful lot of projects that all need resourcing,” he says. “Getting the right people into those projects will be key to getting those projects delivered.”

But it’s not only the UK’s perennial shortage of engineers that makes Thomas’s job daunting. When it is put to him that some candidates see Network Rail as a rather old fashioned and rule-bound organisation, and not necessarily an employer of choice, he doesn’t deny it. “People do have some views of the company that are outdated,” he suggests.

Thomas first cut his teeth in recruitment at GlaxoSmithKline in various HR roles. And it was his experiences there that not only shaped his future career, but also informed a lot of his work at Network Rail. “At a strategic HR meeting, I put forward a proposal to reduce costs by creating a centralised recruitment team,” he explains. Previously recruitment had been just part of all the HR managers’ roles at Glaxo. And with separate HR teams at GSK’s factories dotted round the UK, each working independently of one another, this had led to a multitude of different approaches. “The HR teams would contract with agencies, and we found the same agencies were charging double the rates to two different parts of the business.” Thomas’s plan to centralise recruitment was accepted and he was asked to take charge of the new team.

Secret of my success: It’s down to me thinking about recruitment in a business context. I am very comfortable talking business language. I dislike bureaucracy, and I like to make things as simple and as consistent as possible, and I find that this often aligns to the business philosophy

More than 12 years later, it’s a strategy that Thomas has repeated at Network Rail, where 15 months ago, he set up its 50-strong dedicated resourcing team.

Last year the team, which is located throughout the country (though mainly at three centres in London, Birmingham and Manchester), made 6,000 appointments, with roughly half being external and half internal.

Among these, around 1,000 were project managers, 200 signallers and 220 apprentices. In addition to the technical roles, the team is responsible for hiring the full range of positions in any large company, such as IT, finance or HR.

Thomas says the big advantage of a centralised recruitment team is that everyone works together so that when one part of team is busy another less busy part can take the strain. “This ensures there are no gaps in service and that we can accommodate the number applying, the number of selection centres and the number of interviews we need to do,” he says. Where there is a demand for complex blended teams of project engineers and managers, he says he can have a dedicated recruitment team assembled within 24-48 hours.

One immediate impact of the recruitment team and its focus on direct recruitment has been “the virtual elimination” of use of “costly” recruitment agencies. This has plummeted from 80% of spend to a point where only 1.5% of candidates come via that route.

“We only fall back on the agency PSL [preferred supplier list] for very difficult or hard-to-fill roles, or for very senior executive search,” says Thomas.

Thomas credits his time at RBS, where he spent six years in senior resourcing roles, as helping him focus on the value of detailed data as a way of enhancing the quality of hiring decisions. “We can see the things that we do that are expensive and the things that we do that are most cost effective,” he adds. This was key in revealing how reliant Network Rail had become on agencies for permanent staff.

Thomas is now able to show the success of the new strategy of direct recruitment, using a wide variety of job boards, supported by a few media adverts both national and trade, as well as the company’s career web pages.

In 14 months, time-to-hire has halved from 88 to 44 days. At the same time, he says the company is looking to recruit the 200 project engineers it will need over the next six months at a cost of £500 each. “We have driven a coach and horse through the performance indicators,” says this dedicated railway industry man, unaware of the irony of his words.

Asked how it is that he can achieve this figure, Thomas answers succinctly “because we are good”.

However, he is already looking further down the tracks. “The real challenge is how far can we really take it? Can we get time-to-hire down to 20 days and cost-per-hire down to the low hundreds?”

Thomas already believes he has the answer: innovation. “We have probably got as far as we can using the current approaches,” he admits. “We now need to think more innovatively.” He has now set up a new innovation and guidance team within the HR department to do just that. “There are always ways to improve our output, the quality of our hiring processes and reduce the costs of doing so to the business. This is a mantra I don’t give up on.”

One initiative already underway is the introduction of managed candidate pools. Covering apprenticeships, graduates and project engineers, Thomas says that rather than waiting for a vacancy to be authorised before recruiting, Network Rail plans to be continuously active in the marketplace. “We want to manage those candidate pools so that when we decide to call them in to interview there is a short period between that moment and the subsequent job offer,” he explains.

Thomas emphasises the importance of keeping in touch with candidates and making sure the resourcing team know who are the best people for any role. That said, even with such innovation, he clearly has his work cut out.

The problem is not that applicants who go thorough Network Rail’s recruitment process turn the company down, he explains. Indeed, only 1% reject a job offer. But that as he acknowledges, Network Rail has more work to do to convince candidates that it and engineering are attractive career choices.

Thomas says one solution is to cast a much wider net by getting its message out to as many qualified candidates as possible. And not only from those within the railway industry talent pool. In a significant change in recruitment strategy entitled ’always on’, he says the key will be to get Network Rail’s message consistently out there in the candidate market. One strand is to provide candidates with a lot more information - for example, about the sort of traits that will make them successful at Network Rail.

Another albeit long-term solution is to convince more young people, especially girls, that engineering is an attractive career. “We shouldn’t be afraid to call for a change in society so that more people take up engineering as a career.” He says it is important that this message gets through to those who influence young people’s career choices, such as careers advisers.

“We need to make sure that when we say we are open for business we have people knocking our door down so we have to have to have the widest possible talent pool to enable us to make high quality hiring decision.”

Everyone is talented, but so many people go through life without discovering what their talent is

As a board member of both the Recruitment Society and the Association of Graduate Recruiters, Thomas’s passion for recruitment just can’t stop showing through.

And it is not simply because of its role in meeting the needs of organisations. It can be a powerful influence for good in the lives of individuals by unleashing their unrealised potential. “One of my philosophies is that everyone is talented,” says Thomas. “One of the saddest things is that so many people go thorough life without discovering what their talent is.”

But this is not simply an altruistic hope. Thomas says that by ensuring that people perform well at selection and interview, talent “can flow though” and be identified.

At Network Rail, he says it is not unusual for his team to refer an individual to the part of the team that deals with a different job cluster to the original application.

The other way that Network Rail helps applicants to decide that perhaps they would be better off doing something else is by giving them as much information about the organisation and the different roles.

That said, Thomas argues that recruiters will only maximise their influence when the function is fully integrated with the business. In his own case, this ranges from spending time with senior managers and aligning the resourcing teams’ objectives with those of the business.

“As a consequence of getting the right people into the organisation you have high performance, lower turnover, high employee engagement and motivated people. All of these help people deliver the essential national railway infrastructure that his vital for the country.”

Company Profile:

• Not for dividend organisation founded 2002
• Took over maintenance of the UK’s railway infrastructure in 2004.
• Turnover, year to 31 March 2009: £6.16bn
• Number of employees 36,000
• Annual appointments 6,000
• 2007 Revenue £5.79bn

Curriculum Vitae:
2008 - present
Head of resourcing Network Rail
2002 - 2008
Head resourcing policy & governance, RBS Senior manager resourcing, RBS
1988 - 2002 Director of recruitment manufacturing division at GlaxoSmithKline
Education: MSC in Toxicology, University of Manchester
Board member: The Recruitment Society, Association of Graduate Recruiters