In-house recruiters can make themselves “a bit more useful” by using their expertise to identify risks to their employers’ business strategy, members of the FIRM (Forum for In-House Recruitment Managers) have heard.

Nick Kemsley, co-director of Henley Business School’s Centre for HR Excellence, told attendees at a FIRM event in London that they were ideally placed to manage the risks of their organisation’s people strategy and to align it with the business strategy.

Using the example of the employer brand as a risk to  business strategy, Kemsley explained how recruiters could use their expertise to ensure that it [employer brand] contributed to meeting the skills needs that were driven by that business strategy. 

“We may need to change our employer brand, supplier and systems,” said Kemsley. “Are we feeding back our knowledge to help decision makers to define a strategy?” For example, he asked: “Does the CEO know how difficult it is to recruit in Southern Europe?” 

Strategic workforce planning could help identify the critical gaps faced by an organisation, said Kemsley, but recruiters had to be aware that it wouldn’t always produce “ nice neat numbers”. It was more likely to provide “a lot of ‘what ifs’”, said Kemsley, and this required recruiters to have “tolerance of ambiguity”.

Colin Cottell