Smart resourcing

21 July 2010 | By DeeDee Doke

Resourcing is the vehicle delivering an employer’s key asset - its people. Depending on the organisation it serves, the vehicle can have any number of different tools, mechanisms and drivers. Is your resourcing operation well-oiled and running efficiently? Or is it in a state of disrepair? And are a few new parts needed?

Recruiter’s first conference for in-house recruiters, Smart Resourcing, aims to deliver depth and breadth of expertise of recruitment professionals from some of the UK and world’s best-known brands. Recently, Recruiter caught up with some of the upcoming event’s speakers to find out what was on their minds and to gain a bit of a preview into what they might address on the day.

The nervous uncertainty surrounding the economy is the most fundamental challenge facing many UK recruiters. One London-based resourcing professional summed it up this way: “The challenge, from a headcount and budget point of view, is to prepare for the future, without taking away the safeguards. When do we take the brakes off and put ourselves in a position to help our businesses do what they need to do and coach the business through it?”

That said, other dilemmas, question marks and needs for knowledge exchanges hover over the resourcing community in the second half of 2010.

Successfully navigating the tricky world of social media through its benefits and pitfalls, tops the list of issues for many recruiters. Paul Harrison, managing director of social network consultants Carve Consulting, sees two major issues dominating the social media landscape: one is employee advocacy, in terms of engaging them sufficiently to promote their employers via social media.

The other is equipping employees to engage in social media as part of an organisation’s online presence. “What do you do at a desk level to build that presence?” Harrison asks.

A current interest for Matt Alder, founding director of strategic business consultancy MetaShift, is the blurring that is taking place between the social and professional networks online “and the cross fertilisation between communities that didn’t happen in the past”, he says.

He sees more employers experimenting with their social media presence, adding, “It’s about taking themselves to the people” via brand outposts, such as by posting material on YouTube, instead of expecting people only to find their own branded sites.

However, employers often need to be reminded that exerting an online presence does take the investment of some resources. Often, he says, the initial early benefits are “vastly overestimated”.

The online world is also a key domain for internet talent sourcer Katharine Robinson, better known in sourcing circles as ’the Sourceress’.

Robinson was awarded the title of Grandmaster Sourcer 2010 in San Diego, California, an honour which means she is ’the best of the best at tracking down talent on the internet’.

Watching Robinson work her ’sourcery’ on the ’net’ opens a window on the various different ways of seeking out hard-to-find talent, and her skills have never been more in demand as the internet takes on ever more importance in talent searches. Robinson says that her skills can be learned by others, but that she says she finds many “don’t really explore websites” in any depth.

And as for that hard-to-find, unique talent? She says that a barrier to digging it out often has something to do with a person’s invisibility on the web, with limited connections on such sites as LinkedIn or little representation in communities with online presence.

Global management consultancy Accenture has no dearth of talent - in terms of numbers - knocking at its door with “tens of thousands” of candidates applying for up to 500 jobs each year, according to head of graduate recruitment Annabel Nichols.

However, that doesn’t mean that the job facing Nichols is easy. Declining numbers of students are reading information technology, a key area for Accenture, each year, and there is a continuing “difficult marriage” between women and technology, Nichols says. Further, “students don’t understand what management consultancy is”, she adds.

To combat the latter challenge, Accenture last year launched Boot Camp, a three-day residential course intended to “respond to students who didn’t understand what we did, to help them engage with us, and give students something of value”, Nichols says.

Described as an “intense learning experience”, Boot Camp is designed to enhance employability skills and expose attendees to a high performance business environment. Four sessions have been held to date, with 30 students in each. Nichols says that 85% of the participants to date have been offered jobs.

The recession had led to many graduates having a “gloom and doom mindset” about their potential work situation, Nichols says. But, she added, “there are actually far more jobs out there than they’re aware of”.

The recession has created an all-new experience for the current crop of graduates, in the view of a conference speaker who requested anonymity in this article. Today’s graduates have been “accustomed to being told how great they are, and they’ve never been in a situation where they’ve been told ’no’,” she said. The uncertainty surrounding their job prospects at the moment may well make them “more humble”.

The economic upheaval will also likely lead to a situation in which graduate candidates span at least a couple of different age groups and levels of experience. Older candidates with previous job experience in industries such as banking will have retrained into new careers and bring with them a commercial awareness that has not typically been seen in graduate candidates, she said. The new model graduate poses a new challenge for recruiters, she added: “A ’one size fits all’ approach to recruiting graduates won’t work.”

Whether or not to outsource recruitment is the question facing many employers, although Robert Leggett, managing director of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider Omni Resource Management Solutions, argues that that specific question might not be the one resourcing professionals should be asking themselves.

Often Leggett will be contacted by businesses in which the recruitment processes are in a poor state. In such instances, “when those companies want to outsource their recruitment, Omni will say, ’you’re not in a position to outsource. You need to have something that’s working first’.

“That’s when they get the benefit,” Leggett says. “Maybe you outsource initially by having an on-site team go in to develop sources and processes, maybe use pilot programmes. You need to get the thing fixed first, moving smoothly.”

At RPO provider Randstad Managed Services, managing director Kelly Quirk says the implementation of the Agency Workers Directive (AWD), which will treat agency workers much like permanent staff workers after 12 weeks on the job, is on the minds of her clients’. Major questions still loom over the implications of the directive, and mitigation is a worry, Quirk says.

Greater clarity is not anticipated until October, at the same time as spending cuts in public sector workforce will be announced. She went on to say that pay parity is less a question for her clients than pension issues.

Currently, 60% of Randstad Managed Services’ work involves contingent work forces.

At Smart Resourcing, attendees will also get their chance to make their voices heard at the conference. Asda head of resourcing Vikki Gartside, who oversees the recruitment of 30,000 people each year from 1m applications received, will facilitate a discussion about how far the in-house recruiter’s role should expand across the employment life cycle.

In her view, she says: “We’ve got to see someone into the organisation - how do we embed safely into the organisation? It’s important that resourcing stays involved with that individual until they are safely transferred into the organisation, almost like a coach helping someone into the business.”

Gartside says she looks forward to the discussion.

Smart Resourcing will be held on 22 September in London at a venue to be announced. For more information, visit www.smartresourcing.net