Thu, 17 Mar 2016 | By Colin Cottell

FROM APRIL's RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Bringing on future resourcing talent so they can really take off needs a regimented mentoring scheme, resourcing experts believe. Colin Cottell reports 

As a fully-fledged profession in its own right, resourcing has reached the stage in its development where it needs to develop innovative and fresh approaches to how it fosters its own talent. 

That is the view of Isabelle Hung, director of resourcing strategy and executive recruitment at enterprise software solution firm Sage, and one of a small group of senior resourcing and talent professionals (see list below) who have launched a new initiative they hope could one day become a feature of the industry.  

“I think everybody just needs somebody to bounce ideas off, to get advice from someone who’s just got a bit more experience,” says Hung, speaking to Recruiter to launch Resourcing Mentors.  

The new scheme will give talent and resourcing executives the opportunity to receive confidential advice and support, and to tap into decades of experience from some of in-house recruitment’s foremost practitioners, working at senior levels in companies such as The Co-op and Capita. There is no charge for the support. 

“It could be that you are doing a massive project that needs support, or that you just need someone to touch base with because you have reached a point in your career where you are not sure what to do,” Hung continues.    

According to Hung, the time is right for such an initiative. “Recruitment has moved on from the days when people just fell into it,” she says. “Today, you see people entering recruitment who have made a choice to do so straight out of graduation, which is very different to how it was 15, 20, 30 years ago. Then, it wasn’t really an industry, but I think now it is an industry in its entirety.”

But while recruitment may have many of the trappings of a profession, Hung questions whether enough is being done to equip this new generation of middle management level in-house recruiters for what is often a tough job in a challenging work environment.   

“Take a manager in a business who is reporting into someone who maybe doesn’t have a recruitment background. No offence to HR, but it could be to someone in HRD [human resource development]. You are taking your first head of resourcing role and sometimes you just want to know ‘Am I doing the right thing? If I’m not, there is no one to check in on because I have been hired as the expert’. 

To compound the issue, those who reach the ranks of management are often reluctant to confide in their boss for fear of “negating themselves in some way” through appearing stupid. And alongside this is people’s wider reluctance to ask for advice and support. “I recently had an email in which someone asked me for my advice on their CV. But you so rarely get this. People are so reticent to do that now because they are scared of what the repercussions might be.” 

Hung speaks from experience. “I have been through some difficult jobs and challenging environments, and we all know what that feels like when we stand alone for a long time,” she says.    

The sense of isolation felt by many in the industry has only been compounded by technology, which far from fostering better communication is actually creating barriers to meaningful and vital personal interaction, says Hung. 

“We just don’t think that people connect enough anymore. Before we all had the internet and everything like that, we were much better at connecting. When we were at conferences we did actually talk to people, and there wasn’t an iPhone to hide behind,” she says.   

Together, Hung says, all these factors make this an apposite time for more recruiters to benefit from mentoring, something that she and her group of fellow senior resourcing executives have each gained much from in their careers.   

“We were just lucky enough to have people in our previous [working] lives, who we could go to and be comfortable enough that we could ask the stupid question, or to say ‘Look, I’m having a difficult time in this situation and I don’t want to talk to my line manager because it wouldn’t feel right’. 

“Some people are very career minded, and want to know ‘How do I get to become head of resourcing, or when am I going to be a business partner?’ And part of that is saying, ‘Well, you are a great recruiter but becoming a business partner comes through experience, it doesn’t happen overnight’.”  

If this advice came from a mentor rather than “said to them internally” say, by a line manager, Hung says the employee might be more likely to take it on board. “You hear stuff slightly differently,” she says.   

While working at TMP, Hung says she gained enormously from the experience, support and wise counsel of Andrew Wilkinson, current chief executive of TMP Worldwide UK, with whom she still keeps in touch. “Looking back at that point in our careers, it was when we started to question our own judgement that we reached out to our own mentors,” she adds. 

After more than a year discussing it within the group, Hung says Resourcing Mentors is ready to go, giving talent acquisition and resourcing managers the opportunity to be mentored by Hung and the other seven members, with each mentor taking one or two mentees — without any fee or payment involved. 

Hung accepts that the initiative might not be popular with some line managers. “I think some will think it is interfering,” she says. However, she counters: “I think if anybody says ‘stop’, they are not properly understanding what a mentor is. This is not to replace the line manager. A line manager is a coach and a developer of skills, who looks at performance and KPIs, but sometimes you need that ‘no connected view’ of what you are doing.”  

She continues: “What we want to do is to give people the opportunity to engage with someone confidentially for up to six months and just get some advice and direction and someone to go to know that they are doing the right thing.” 

“It’s not coaching because coaching is about helping people to find answers themselves,” continues Hung. “The difference is, mentoring is not a regular thing. You don’t set an appointment every Wednesday as you would with a counsellor or a coach. It’s as you feel like it. Let’s go and have a coffee together, let’s meet for lunch.” 

Interested in being mentored? Email [email protected] 

The eight Resourcing Mentors are:

Gregory Allen, global head of resourcing, Lloyd’s Register

Louise Gallant, founding partner, The Talent Group

Andy Hill, executive vice president talent and resourcing, The Sage Group

Isabelle Hung, director of resourcing strategy and executive recruitment, The Sage Group

Charu Malhotra, global EVP lead, employer brand & digital projects lead (interim role) Primark Stores  

David Mason, self-employed consultant, previously director of recruitment, Capita

Cath Possamai, director of talent and resourcing, Capita 

Adrian Shooter, director of executive talent, resourcing & diversity, The Co-op

The Resourcing Mentors initiative has the following stages:

• Potential mentees, resourcing and talent acquisition managers will be invited to submit their interest in being mentored, including describing the challenges they face, initially by email and later via a special LinkedIn group
• After a matching process, up to six months of mentoring support will be agreed
• Mentees will continue to have ongoing support via webinars 
• A quarterly review process to monitor progress

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COLIN COTTELL