Secrets of HR recruitment

19-Apr-2006

Thirty years ago, HR was simply an add-on function

of the organisation. Today, it’s a widely recognised profession, as important for most large companies as finance or IT. As a result, the challenges for HR niche recruiters

have evolved too, not least of which is the fact that they need

a sophisticated approach to selling their services to people who understand employment practice.

So what does an HR recruiter need to demonstrate to clients that it really can offer a highly specialised service?

“Professionalism is key because of the community

you’re dealing with,” says Jane Shaw, director of Resource Innovations, a high-end specialist HR recruiter.

“Dealing with HR professionals requires a level of understanding of the technical elements of the role. That needs to be at the forefront of every consultant’s mind.

“You need a thorough understanding of HR within the business and what different HR departments do. Every organisation splits roles within its department differently, different disciplines can sit within different job functions. For instance, learning and development and talent management might be co-located in one company.In another they’re separate. In a small company, an HR generalist might cover everything.

“But because you are talking to individuals who are recruiters themselves, effectively they do what we do. So we need to know what they do very well. To be used by HR in the first place is a bit of a tick in the box, because they might be thinking they could do it themselves, particularly within HR resourcing.”

John Maxted, MD of Digby Morgan, specialising in

mid- to senior-level HR, says HR is very idiosyncratic.

“It’s very different to other recruitment areas because it’s very much to do with relationships and it’s less knowledge-based than, say, IT – which is all knowledge-based.

“In HR it isn’t quite as easy to pigeonhole people. Obviously, there is a knowledge base in HR but it’s very much down to behavioural skills, how you can influence people and align business issues to people issues. There

are many more dimensions to it than there are in other areas. And, like any recruitment sector, you need to know the hot skills, the busy sectors – and the changes that

are possible in the sectors.

“For example, people in manufacturing HR tend not to be suitable for investment banking. Yet professional services people quite often move into the banking sector. That knowledge is crucial. So we do find that many of our best consultants are ex- HR people, because they have the empathy with other HR individuals.”

Penny Bailey at Sterling HR Consulting agrees. “HR people like to talk to other HR people. If you don’t

have that understanding of HR, ultimately you won’t be successful. HR people have come a long way from the

days when people just moved into HR from another part of the organisation or company. They’ve made sure that industry puts them right up there – and that their decisions are worth hearing.”

The key attributes of a good HR recruiter

“You have to be discerning in terms of being able to spot talent,” says Courtenay HR managing director Gareth Jones.

“Nowadays it’s an incredibly fast-moving market, top of the corporate agenda. They want more dynamic people, they want movers and shakers, not just people with best practice manuals. It’s not about models and practices; it starts with the business itself: what does the business need, what is the client all about? What are the business issues driving your people strategy? There is a general thirst in the market for HR people who really do understand and have passion for the business they are in – and maybe even have some non HR experience. Being able to spot and pull those people out and identify them is a key attribute of a good recruiter.”

First-class customer service skills are also important. And yes, an HR recruiter does have to out-HR HR.

“This is a marketplace. They get bombarded all the time across all functions, not just HR,” says Jones. “People buying from us are generally HR folk and they’re usually intolerant of traditional recruitment practices: they need a dialogue with people they can trust. A successful HR company understands that. And you approach them at a different level to the ‘let’s just throw the CV at the wall and see if it sticks’ approach. They won’t take that.”

Norman Burden, managing director of Imprint Search and Selection, agrees that high-end recruiters are increasingly aware that focus on the business itself rather than HR practice is also driving the market.

“We operate in the middle to senior management level areas where individuals need to be very aware of the composite parts of the strategy and employee relations; in addition, they have to demonstrate strategic skills, like what makes the business make money,” he says.

“In the past, those things were not attributed to HR people. And that is the key differentiator between HR people in, say, a resourcing or operational management role, and those in more senior management roles.”

Non -specialist recruiters are also seeing evidence of this.

“HR is one of our functions because we interface with HR people all the time as they tend to be clients advertising on our site,” explains Betty Thayer, chief executive of Exec-Appointments.com.

“What we find is that the more successful HR managers or leaders are people with a business perspective. The least successful are process-driven. The volume of recruiting for large blue-chip and financial services companies means they have to have good processes to ensure that everything runs smoothly. But those HR people who are stuck in their process where it’s completely black and white are not focused on the outcome of the business itself.

“For example, one firm recently told us that its HR department rejects 99% of its candidates – all they’re doing is trying to make the process look good.”

For most HR recruiters, the burning challenge right now is sourcing the best people.

“If you look at the HR director population level, fewer and fewer are career HR people,” says Burden. “More people are moving into HR at some point in their career. Accountants, for example, are increasingly doing this. So how do you tempt someone doing really well in a different career to move into HR?

“To do that you need to have fairly adventurous or creative resourcing tools at your disposal. Consultants have to be very good networkers. They too need to have a perspective on the business world, rather than purely HR issues, so they can understand the mindsets that are important in the space.”

Shaw agrees that, in a candidate-led market, while recruiters might be on target, they still need to be smarter in terms of talent management.

“It’s early days yet but there are signs that the traditional places to find the right candidates are coming back, like print media advertising, because the salaries are being pushed up,” she says. “So when candidates pick up the Sunday Times we’re finding we’re more likely to hook them that way than by placing an ad on a website.”

Finding the best – and hiring the best

Maxted argues that HR recruiters can only overcome the talent shortage by using every tool available to them. “Companies want the best people; the challenge is that there are very few people actively on the market who come into that category. So it’s all about building long-term relationships with HR people as well as using print advertising and the net – those two alone can’t be relied on to produce the best candidates. You really need to

know where the best people are, and make sure you go out and find them.

“Fifteen years ago, HR was a back office function; no one was quite sure what value it added. Now, it’s a much more rigorous profession. It’s much more tangible what HR actually does. As a result, people are much more concerned about getting the best HR people into their businesses.”

Jones says that while the skills shortage is the main challenge, there are other big strategic issues looming.

“The way the market works now is fundamentally different from even five or six years ago because now the internet has bedded in and is becoming increasingly useful, the market is much more competitive. Yet the traditional recruitment business model, unchanged for 30 years, may also be facing change. Interim management is getting bigger, clients are doing their own direct hiring. How do you continue to justify a price model when the market changes around you?

“It’s not about hiring bodies any more. It’s about working with organisations to build talent communities. Then our job becomes managing and refreshing that community, rather than going out and placing people on an ad hoc basis to fill those jobs. I believe the real challenge is: we’ve got to put ourselves in a different place. Change is coming. Yet a lot of businesses either in HR or general search models still have their heads in the sand.”

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