Sharon Kardam

17 March 2010 | By DeeDee Doke

Sharon Kardam is a vibrant example of assured, but never arrogant, self belief, an life-loving adventurer who travelled across South America on her own during a gap year of sorts between jobs. Little fazes her.

But when Kardam joined Transport for London (TfL) in 2007, she was the sixth person to hold the job of head of resourcing within a two-year period. A ’one size fits all’ approach to recruitment had been set up to serve allof the very different units within a complex organisation. And it wasn’t working.

“So I’d come in and thought, ’hmmm, I’m not sure about this’,” Kardam recalls on a March afternoon at her North Greenwich offices.

But the irresistible lure of a worthy challenge soon overcame her initial hesitation. Kardam, a career interim resourcing specialist, signed on to troubleshoot, redesign and reconfigure the recruitment practice in the capital’s multi-faceted transport system - while at the same time trying to keep the function running.

“It was almost like trying to fix an aeroplane while it was flying,” Kardam says. “It was really tough actually because we are so critically dependent on our people, we can’t afford not to have the right people recruited. Not for the right people to be in place is just not an option for us. So keeping service delivery going, doing it well and also re-engineering the whole function was difficult - but essentially, that’s what I was tasked to deliver.”

It is not adding value, it is being part of the organisation’s values. You can’t ask for it, you have to create it, you have to be bold, you have to be prepared to be
counted

Describing her responsibilities as “difficult” might be a bit of understatement. Transport for London recruits 4,000 external and 1,000 internal hires each year across its spectrum of services, from London Underground to the London Transport Museum and Dial-a-Ride. Every day, more than 27m journeys are made on the TfL network. Few organisations are as visible to the public as TfL, fewer face as many public demands and even fewer transport systems are as well known as TfL by a global audience who have grown up with the iconic images of London buses and Underground signs.

As a result, TfL is an organisation that cannot afford to stand still in the face of ever-rising public need. “We’ve got a lot to be doing to respond to the needs of London,” Kardam says. “More people want to work here, more want to live here, our transport system is an oldone and needs a lot of upgrading. That puts a lot of pressure on us in that we have a finite amount of resource to deliver that.”

At the time that she joined, Kardam says, “We were just reacting and order taking; it’s all we could do. We still do some reacting but we’re in a position where we’re closer to the organisation, we know what’s needed, we partner a lot more, and we are predicting more , so we are able to think a bit ahead of the curve and coming up with solutions we think will really help the organisation. The last three years have been around getting to that position.”

Her first step was to identify and focus on “the biggest pain areas: where did the organisation have the biggest plans? where was the organisation most reliant on success? I knocked down doors, I made calls, I just kept going”, she says.

“Because we were in such a bad place, I started from the top. I went high, whoever I could get to who were decision makers - I am a bit like that,” she adds. “I looked at areas that weren’t performing, and I went and had those chats right away.”

But doors did not automatically open for her. “I’ll be very honest. When I joined, people were not interested in talking to me, because I was number six,” she acknowledges. “’Oh, you’re just going to be here a few months, we’re really not interested.’”

But Kardam persisted, and changes began to occur. An early, clear-cut priority was to give her customers greater visibility into their spending on recruitment. All of the recruitment monies were funnelled into “one pot, which drove some efficiencies. But we lost the ability to talk to each business area about what money they were actually spending in terms of their recruitment”, she says. So Kardam worked to rebuild her organisation’s financial set-up to deliver that transparency, along with growing a relationship of trust between recruitment and TfL’s businesses.

Redeveloping the shape of the recruitment/resourcing team was also critical to developing the level of expert customer service Kardam wanted to embed. Three years ago, the team consisted of 70% temporary employees and 30% permanent ones. “You can’t service a customer with that kind of turnaround, so we’re now onto a fully permanent team apart from two people, and that has been the case for about a year now,” Kardam says.

Today, her department has about 70 staff and “a couple of outsourced partners” who work on site.

With the basic essentials of a well functioning department under control, Kardam turned her hand to developing more sophisticated capabilities in-house designed to help her recruiting and resourcing teams build TfL’s future workforce. For example, a team of occupational psychologists is working in the assessment and selection arena to “really understand the capability requirements we have within the organisation and designing ways to assess that”, she says enthusiastically.

“We do a lot of work in terms of observing,” Kardam says. “So we’ll go into a function and observe how things are done, they will talk to people who have been in a certain job, they will go on the job, they’ll observe it and work with the managers to understand what causes people to leave and so on. Then they’ll come up with a profile, test it, then test it again to come up with what are the things that we can predict early.”

Looking ahead, the aim is to better understand the capability of existing employees, how to harness it, and how to help them move toward developing new skills. “It is not something we do much of right now but it… is going to be a hot area for us going forward,” she says.

Kardam also has introduced quality metrics to measure everything from customer experience, longlisting and shortlisting, to the quality of candidates. Today, the metrics are telling Kardam that “we are doing some things well, some things we could do better”, she admits candidly.

Where the feedback suggests her department could improve is in the area of processes. “Our managers say we may be a bit too process linked,” she says. “If you asked what is our challenge for the future, that is one of the high priorities.”

But where a strong improvement is evident is “just our capability around the type of candidates we position”, she says. “Our target is that for every two candidates, one is going to hit the mark for the manager. So it’s not the volume, it is absolutely the quality.”

“We started off with not a very good number,” she acknowledges. “We were presenting far too many candidates and taking up far too much of the manager’s time. There is time to be invested, but what I think we are doing more is investing the time up-front. The more time you can get with the manager, talking to them before you start the recruitment process, the better the results are going to be going forward.”

Sadly for TfL, wanderlust has again crept up on Kardam, and she will soon leave to resume her career as a professional interim. But a sustainable legacy - the capability to build TfL’s most renewable resource, its workforce - will outlast her stay. “I had quite a few moments where I thought, ’oh my god, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew,’” she says. “And I think I probably did, actually, in retrospect. But it worked out in the end.”