Addressing TA challenges in 2022 | with Andy Headworth

You're very welcome to episode 98 of the Shortlist. We're nearly at the big 100. Can you believe it? It's been a crazy couple of years since we started the show and we want to try and focus this week on addressing TA challenges in 2022. I had some time to think. I've been off the last few weeks and a huge thanks to Holly, who's held this chair for the last few weeks with some fantastic interviews. If you've missed them, do check them out on our podcast, which is available on Spotify or Apple or wherever you find your good podcasts. Or you can check out the links by going to socialtown.com forward/the shortlist. But the world has seen an enormous amount of disruption and continues to happen. Every single sector seems to be impacted and more particularly talent acquisition. In the last six to nine months, in order to thrive, talent acquisition leaders have had to ride from some troublesome waves, from downsizing their teams to then ramping back up and thinking strategically about how to best acquire and also influence the retention strategies of talent in their organization. Amidst an unbelievable amount of uncertainty and constant change. Our guest this week brings a rather unique perspective to this discussion and having previously worked in the private sector for the majority of his career, Andy Hedworth is now deputy director of TA at HM Revenue and Customs. I've known Andy for, gosh, nearly 15 years now, since we first met in a small room in the UK under the guidance of Bill Boorman. But as we joked before air when our my colleague and one of our producers, Rachel, said, feel free to disagree, Andy. I spent the last 15 years largely hearing Andy disagree with pretty much everybody, so I'm hoping we don't have an agreeable conversation. Even more interesting online, I want to get into the difference between recruiting in the public and private sectors. You know, how the closed borders in the UK in particular. What I'm referring to obviously is Brexit maybe has influenced talent acquisition and how can you get around that? So Andy, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Perhaps you might open by maybe giving our audience a little bit of a context as to your career, how you found yourself in HM Customs, and then we might dig into the news and the show from there.

Thanks Johnny, and an absolute pleasure to be on here. And number 98, my career is basically being a recruiter. You know, I started as a recruiter, went through a number of years on the agency side of recruiting that then transitioned into my own company where I then moved from recruiting into consulting with companies both in the uk, Europe and around the world on technology recruitment, strategy, processing that then evolved again into social recruiting. So if you think back to the early, early noughties, when we were at the embryonic stages of LinkedIn, the early stages of Twitter and even Google, about then how we use those channels, and I was very much trying, always trying to find out how we can use the different channels to engage talent and find people. And that's how I came across Johnny all those many, many years ago. And then there was a time about six, seven years ago where consulting was great, loved it, thoroughly enjoyed helping organizations, but I wanted to transition to a fuller life cycle. So as a consultant, you typically get involved in bits and pieces, you know, either at the beginning or the end or bits in the middle. Very rarely will we do in the full cycle. So a fortuitous phone call one day from my current boss or current boss again, I remember it was a 2 o' clock on a Friday afternoon, said, I'm working in HMRC, a massive problem on resourcing. Do you think you can give us a hand? So three months strategic consulting turned into nine months consulting and then turned into a permanent role. And six years later, I can say I've been in the civil service now six years. So my current role is head of Talent acquisition to make sure that we've got the talent we need for the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years across a number of our key skills as we see the aging demographic changing and we need to bring people in in different areas. But prior to that I was head of resourcing for four years, for the whole of HMRC as we went through the challenges of Brexit and then Covid, and now we're back post Covid. So that's a snapshot. So you'd never. I would never have believed all those years ago, Jonny, that I'd be a civil servant doing what I'm doing now, I have to say.

Well, Andy, I was wondering, just for audience from all around the world, maybe you could give some context to what does HMRC do? What kind of skills roughly are across the business and maybe what kind of a recruiting team you have to deliver on that.

Hmrc, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. We are the tax authority for the uk, support the government in terms of providing the tax for all the services that we provide in the UK. We are an organization that is 65,000 people strong across the UK. We've got. We're across about 22 different locations against a core location strategy. So all the major Cities we have 16 professions, 32 different divisions within HMRC, all different things. So it literally does go from the big areas are our call center operational delivery. So those are the people that you phone up or web chat with when you have a tax query. That's a large percentage. We then have our compliance side, which is the tax collection side. So those two make up probably 80% of our workforce, those two areas. And then we have everything in between, from IT to legal to estates. Obviously CPO is a large portion now, so we have every single range of professions outside our core core too. So the challenges for us are widespread. It's not just a question of sort of launching large campaigns for, you know, for call centers or looking for large numbers of compliance people. We get into the really new stuff and we sit on some really cutting edge platforms from a tech perspective. We've got the largest tech estate in Europe and the tech transformation program we've got going on. And that involves some of the real cutting edge cloud skills, which becomes a challenge because organizations or individuals in that space wouldn't necessarily associate us with the need for, you know, the latest skills and the latest technologies. So a big challenge for us has been, since I've been here is the first thing I did is start telling our story to candidates is, you know, when we pick up the phone and we source candidates and we talk to them and we identify them and then explain what we do and then talk about where we're going and the purpose of what HMRC is about in the uk, suddenly you get their interest. And then when you start talking about the tech stack and, and what we're doing and what we're doing with it and where we're going. That's how we've got the interest over the years and how we've managed to bring in a lot of people that would probably never have thought about coming into the civil service, to be honest.

Including yourself, Andy.

I class myself exactly in that bracket, yes.

So, Andy, I'm gonna jump into our news and just before I do, I'm gonna shout out to those of us, those of you listening live, we broadcast every week live on YouTube and LinkedIn. So if you're listening live, you're very welcome and feel free to use the comment section on either platform to ask Andy a question or make a comment into the chat. As we go live, we'll do our best to reel it and engage Andy on those. I want to cover our first news story, which comes from our friends at an undercover recruiter. Again, another site that started around the time that we all met, many, many years ago. But this is around 5 tips to remote cross border hiring post Brexit. So a lot of hash words in here. It's an interesting article and maybe I'll do my quick summary of what I got from this, Andy, and then get your thoughts. I guess the point is around how, you know, Brexit restricted the available talent pools for UK employers, but with the pandemic, maybe, and the change in culture to more remote working offers the potential to counteract that with remote hiring. And it gives some, some actually quite nice examples of how perhaps to get that. Now it does it from a legal recruiting slant. I know that the author hires lawyers and legal staff, but they're kind of saying from their world, any industry can learn from that. So maybe I'll ask you to kind of maybe start with the whole Brexit challenges over the last four or five years. How real are they, how do they manifest? And maybe if you wouldn't mind contrasting, if there is a contrast, approaches pre pandemic and post pandemic. Is there a difference there, in your opinion?

Yeah. Where do I start? I think the answer is it's had a major effect on us. I think the COVID aspect, I'm going to layer of COVID on top of Brexit as well, because I think that's the important part of it, because that has the double sword. I think from our point of view, we are in a unique position because from a Brexit point of view, a lot of the actions that needed to happen via Brexit were part of what we were doing. So from a border's point of view, from a vat, from a Customs perspective, obviously we're at the front end of a lot of the work that carried on and continues to carry on. So the changes to our tax system was phenomenal in a relatively short space of time. So the biggest impact for us at the time was to make sure that we had the systems and the capability to deliver the changes needed for the government. So from our point of view, it was a very quick, relatively quick ramp up of a lot of hard to find rare skills. So that was a challenge. So we had to bring the skills in to manage that. I think from a talent acquisition point of view, what we've seen is if we lay a Covid on top of that, so we were still trying to deliver Brexit, then Covid arrived. So we had that first year where we were still having to bring in significant numbers Covid then came along and basically shut everything down in terms of, you know, shut the inter. We had four and a half thousand people lined up to interview, for example, and then Covid hit and it was like, ah, so, you know, in three weeks we got a video interview platform, stood up and, you know, set the video interview up and got prerecorded interviews. And that was an immediate thing. Now, that was a massive cultural change for us. We've been talking about it, but suddenly we had to do something about it to deliver these people for Brexit. So it was an enabler for us to deliver some technology that would have taken us quite a long time to probably put in to allow us to make sure we still were able to facilitate that. So that was a, you know, that was a positive thing from our point of view, and we're continuing to use that. I think from a skills point of view, it's difficult because we didn't actually suffer apart from some rare IT skills. Brexit wasn't a problem in terms of attracting people at the time. We certainly some of my IT colleagues might disagree with me, but overall we were attracting a lot of people. We were doing fantastic, exciting work and we had plenty of people coming in. Covid hit us. And then, of course, everyone was looking for a safer job. They were looking for different types of work in different organizations and, you know, like probably a lot of other safer employers, our attraction numbers were just going through the roof. They were crazy numbers. So in terms of people coming to us, it really wasn't an issue at that particular time. It was other logistical problems about how do we, you know, how do we interview people, how do we bring people in, how do we onboard them, how do we onboard 2000 people and make sure they got a laptop on day one? And that was our scale problems at a particular time. And Covid has continued to sit on top of that. So when we get to the end of our Brexit period, where for many it stopped and we went in, you know, we went across and we transitioned out of the eu, from our perspective, the journey was still going and it is still going. So we're still very much working to deliver some of our objectives for the government on that. And Covid played a major part of that. So I don't think it's. It's had us. It made us busy, we were always busy. It helped us in some respects. I mean, it hasn't really hindered us too much post. Covid has caused more of a problem. We've closed our borders effectively. The Visa situation in the UK is now hard harder to acquire visas. It can still be done, but it takes more time and has a significant cost to it. We did have a number from the European Union that was working with the organization. A number of those went back that stopped our delivery of that resource. And so now we have effectively a closed border for our, for the talent we need to recruit, which is where our biggest challenge is. You know, we're in the same pool now for the rest of the UK tech companies, for example, going after the tech talent and some of the senior legal talent, et cetera, where we are not as competitive in that market as we would like to be when we're in comparison to some of the big tech firms.

The article references strategies that some of our listeners will of course be familiar with, such as, you know, being able to hire through a different domicile and different legal entity or employer of record to basically, you know, fill those gaps that can't be found locally, etc. Is that an option for the public sector in general in your experience in the uk?

No, not really. From our point of view it's. We have a. So HMRC are probably unique, unique in this service in that we have a. Understandably bear in mind the financial volumes of money that we deal with and we have a very, very, very high level of security in terms of what we will allow to facilitate outside of the HMRC domain. So when we start talking about third party providers, you know, we've both been used to using outsourced providers in different countries. We do use them. We have known to use them and still will do. It's a small number. But more importantly it's the, we will only do it when the level of security has been put in place to ensure that there's no. Yeah, nothing can happen. And that's something that we are fiercely protective of. So it's not something we, we do do it, but we don't do. We haven't done as much of it as maybe private sector firms would do.

Are you able to leverage then let's say some of the other methods suggested by that article, which were like short term placements, you know, having people on seconds and so on, so forth. Is that relevant for a public sector organization like hmrc? Are there alternatives that you have explored?

Yeah, very much so. The one thing we didn't do, we've always had. One of the other big changes was contractors. So we've always used it contractors, for example. We've had to because it supplements the demand and that's always been there. But one of the big changes for us was on our operational delivery areas where we had to bring in large numbers of people at short notice from a contingent labor perspective, to work with us on our customer service side and our compliance side. And that's not something really we'd considered up till that point, but we were able to mobilise significant numbers of people into the organisation. The Civil Service also now have put a formal secondment strategy in place. So we were doing secondments, not so many of them, but the. Ruth McNeill, the CPO has put an inbound and outbound second strategy in place now for people to use. We've used. We do use external providers, so we've had to supplement with third party specialist providers of resource coming in under service based contracts. So we have to. Obviously, as the tax authority, we are very conscious of IR35. So contingent workers all come through one framework, through the Civil Service and then outside that, any provider comes in via a service based contract. So it's made us be very precise in terms of where we get our resource from. And you know, going back to the.

Kind of your comments around the impact, unique impact perhaps of Brexit on hmrc, from tax changes and to the business model essentially and to the regulations, leaving the eu, et cetera, did that drive a surge in hiring? That. Because I would have the impression, of course, of HMRC and perhaps others, and maybe I'm casting all public sector organizations with the same brush, that hiring is fairly constant, solid, predictable, no massive changes. Was it a case of a big spike because there was a need for extra resources and was that temporary or what are those volumes looking like over the last few years?

So when I had my. When I spoke to the CPO and had that first conversation with her, when she talked to me about the role, she was talking about the wide picture of recruitment. And the last throwaway comment from Esther was, oh, can you just Deliver me the 5,000 people I need for Brexit this year, please? So that was an open. The last line of the conversation we had, which of course, yeah, no problem, of course I can, yeah. It has had a significant difference. I mean, if, you know, it's probably put our recruitment numbers up 60% a year from where we were. So, yeah, many thousands increase on what it was. And we always thought the first year there'd be a figure. 5000 was the figure and that's the well documented figure in the uk, but we expected it to be just a spike just for that first year, but it Didn't. It just kept coming. The more we grew into Brexit, the more that was understood about what was needed to be done. And Covid came along, the numbers just kept coming. We kept getting busier and busier and busier. So I would say we've probably been like this now four years in terms of our level of recruitment. In terms of. And that's both volume that's across the organisation in terms of contingent labour and also the range of specialist skills we had to bring in. I want to bring you back to.

The now for a sec, Andy, and reference our second article from Reuters which looks at data from recruitment organizations and the recruitment, which is the Recruitment Employment Federation obviously in the UK around data from March which suggests that UK hiring growth last month. We're recording this. The end of April 2022 has slowed and the reasoning behind it as put forward by the OREC and others isn't due to a lack of demand. According to the article, it's due to a lack of supply, the inability to actually make the hires. Do you agree with that? Is that that the reality on the ground or is there. Is it maybe more to it?

I do agree. And they split it into two halves and they split it into blue collar and they split it into the specialist area. Not on the, not on the, not on the entry point. For our customer service side we do have spot locations that become a problem but finally we are getting enough candidates through on that side and so we're hiring that on the specialist side or the non volume side. That has become a bit of a challenge. It has. I would, I would say the, the article is right. There's a lot of interest, there's lots of conversations, we're doing an awful lot of recruitment. It's taking longer to find the right people. It's not. As you know, there is a. There's a large. So we're in some of the spaces where the tech companies are and some of the big employers and so on the big five certainly. And what we're finding is things have slowed down a little bit. So three months ago, pre. So January time, there was crazy times, it was going loony. Large numbers, lots of activity in terms of candidates applying, wanting to get things done quickly. But what from my perspective we've seen is that things have taken a step back since March. We've slowed it down a little bit and candidates now they realize that I think the market is as buoyant for them as it is and every single one of our candidates that are coming through once we get to interview stage and then an office stage have got four or five on the table and they're having four or five interviews and they're playing us against everyone else at the moment. And I think that for the candidate driven market that it now is, it's making it more challenging. So I think the article is really interesting and some of the. I was thinking about this this morning. We've had to back a bit, a bit of old school really in terms of the recruiters and how we actually engage with talent. You know, just relying on an ATS to do automated messaging and the false nature of some of that is just not delivering the people. So the recruiters have had to go back to. It's much more time spent talking to people. It's much more time spent cultivating that relationship because you know when it gets to that office stage you're going to have a counter offer for a start, if not two or three. And it's, you know, it's things we were taught 15, 20 years ago that funny enough have come full circle again and we're having to adapt the way that we engage the people that we want to work for us. And that's the biggest change at the moment.

Yeah, from talking to people I get that same sense where to your point there may be in some industries and some companies there have been a return to post and pray because it worked, it was fine, it was okay. The numbers, you know, worked. You know, you get away with it and you know, high growth businesses like people always talk about the tech companies, whether it's the Googles or Meta or whomever. Any massively high growth company can never afford a post and page strategy. They have to have to have adapted a different model consistently so they never, never let up and they, they often show the most innovation. But some industries just did fine. But I think that's been the big thing. It's so many industries and not nearly all industries and sectors talking about the public sector are now facing this issue that the tech high growth companies have always faced, which is that you're going to have to have more innovation on these things. And the article post of salaries, it talks about a bunch of things. Salary increases and there's absolute evidence of massive wage inflation out there. You know, we see inflation generally gone up. But it also points to Covid still being a factor. It talks about Ukraine being a factor, it talks about a bunch of things. You know, how much of a. Which has the biggest effect do you think? Or is it just everything equally? It just makes it really a real maelstrom of problems.

Well we haven't mentioned the other A word or R word I should say, which is also affecting all the companies including us, which is, which is attrition and retention, you know, so when there's a short market, you know, what do people, what the recruiters do? They go knocking on the door and they go, you know, they go, you know, to all the places and know where all the good talent is. So you know, we've lost, you know, we've lost a number of fantastic people certainly in the tech space and the program management space to the tech companies and you know, they're paying salaries we can't even match anywhere close to and that's supply and demand that happens. And we've been in recruitment all our lives and we know that. So I think from our point of view it's then how do we look at the way we're working? So we've got the situation now in the UK where the hybrid conversation is in place. So we've got two years of working from home, we all did that and of course a lot of people developed a taste for that and a way of work and the way they change their lifestyles around. Now we're into the, we've now transitioned into the hybrid working where you've got a number of organizations that are like ourselves, doing several days a week from home and several days a week in the office. Others in the tech space, as we've said, are still doing the, you know, working from home fully. So we've got a really interesting situation where we've got a flexible workplace that is different with every single employer and their own employers desires and wishes to where they see their long term strategy and whether they're going to push people back to full time, whether they're going to go flexible, whether they're going to go fully remote cloud based or continue with a hybrid. And then how do we frame that in a space where we are looking to obviously retain our talent at a time where they're getting headhunt calls regularly and they're getting contacted and they're getting encouraged to, you know, test the Is the grass greener on the other side and should I leave the Civil service? The one thing we do have going that no one else has and why I sort of fell in love with the Civil Service to be honest with you, when I discovered it is as an organization, you know, we've got, you know, 400 organisations across the civil service, we've got 16 professions, we cover every single you know, role known to, known to anybody across all the different departments, across all the, you know, not just in the UK but around the world. That is something that many companies don't have the opportunity to offer people. So we're having to look at what, you know, what we can sell to people, how we bring people in, talk about the long term career, talk about career paths. You don't have to leave to further your career. You can look internally, you can go across the whole organization. You know, we've invested this year. Big thing we're doing is looking at our employer brand and our, you know, EVP and what we need to do going forward to make sure that the great talent working for us stays working for us or at least if it leaves us, it stays within the civil service. So that's been a big change for us is how we address this issue of, you know, making sure that we retain the talent we need. Because if we didn't and we don't, then we're gonna, we're gonna be in the, you know, we're going to be in that bear pit fighting for the talent like everybody else.

Somebody to you, Andy, but I have been asked recently, I was going to say I'm regularly asked but actually I'm not regularly asked. It's only been recently but I mean very, very much asked this question over and over again every couple of weeks by people, what are the big trends, right. Coming. Maybe people think it was, didn't and, and that joined up thinking is to me has to the biggest trend. Right. It's like not trend. It's a necessity. Right. And, and folks listening might have the impression, well, civil service, you know, it's a whole world of bureaucracy, how do you get, how do you get things done, etc. My experience is private enterprise and the big tech companies struggle to get joined up thinking around talent because these silos still exist and they're so defined where talent acquisition are told to mind their mind their nose when it comes to retention and potentially do their own thing. Retention is in the department first of all. Right. So that's a real challenge, right? Have you found that there is an appetite for joined up thinking around these, these things and if so how there.

Is an, there is an hmrc. I can't comment for the rest of the civil service. So I'll talk from our point of view. It's taken a while to be honest. I think that the joining of retention and levels of attrition and then recruitment and talent acquisition, I guess the simple answer is the Fact, I'm doing the role I'm doing now, which is the first one we've done before, to look at the talent acquisition for now and for the next 10 years probably answers that question. The fact that the board have recognised that we do need to do something about it and then how do we do that? Make sure we've got the right people. You mentioned the private public sector conversation because there are challenges and there are sort of. Well perceived. That's the right word, I don't know, well perceived thoughts that how different we are. But it's, it's been interesting in the last two years as part of this project or kicking off this, this, the research for this work. I've spoken to a number of companies at Amazon and Nestle and, and others and it actually appears that our approach to recruitment and the way we're looking at talent is no different to the big organizations. I was talking to the guys point at some Dyson, we had exactly the same problems, albeit they were bringing in people from all over the world, but the problems were the same. We just have a few challenges around, as you say, bureaucracy and some of our process and some of the way we work is a bit slower. But outside that, the way we're looking at talent, the way we're looking to engage it and join some dots up around future talent, making sure that we attract, we train, we develop people and we retain them. We're all in the same area, I think, which is. Which surprised me. I was expecting the guys at Dyson to be doing some. Well, they are doing some good stuff, obviously, but on Amazon, Amazon is just bigger than us in terms of scale. But everything else, it was quite similar. So it's not as strikingly different as people would think.

Well on that point about differences and similarities, you know, when you take a step back and I know you're only speaking on behalf of hmrc, not the whole public sector, what have you seen to be the big differences between the private and public sectors? Ivani? And then what are the surprisingly similar things that folks might expect to be different but really aren't?

Well, first thing is process, so that we are a process organization. So one thing I'm trying to change in HMRC, in terms of how we attract people and engage people on the different platforms. So that's something that's big machine process. So that takes a bit of time, which is a bit frustrating. It's quicker than it was when I first started. But we've still got a bit of way to go so we lose the Agility. So one thing is the agility between some of our processes and some of our ways of working and all security, vetting, etc. Can seem a bit lengthy compared to a private sector company that is able to make decisions, sometimes on the fly at very short notice. So give you an example, private sector could turn around two or three interviews in two or three weeks, four weeks. Ours might take, you know, eight to 10 weeks, sometimes longer, depending on the security. So that's a problem when we're going after talent in a tight market. Salary is, you know, that's probably at the moment, one of our challenges in terms of if we look at cold package against private sector, against public sector, but we've accepted we can't play in that top 20%, we just can't match anyone there. But what we can do is we know we play on the career, we play on the civil service, we play on the purpose of why we're here. So we come at it from a different angle. We're learning to engage people and if the person wants 20, 30 grand more, we can't touch that. But there's plenty of others that don't. So we're coming at that. So although we have a salary package, some of my colleagues in the IT department listening to this will probably be shouting, saying, yeah, there is a problem and there is in some skills, and we're having to adapt to how we do that. I think the thing that surprised me when I walked through the door here, I just thought it was my perception of it was very straight, narrow, very, you know, civil service pinstripe suits. And people are going to hate me for saying this, but that was my perception when I walked in here. But when I came in here, the diversity, the. The range of things that we do, the scale, it just blew my mind away. I remember having a meeting with an HR director just after I took the head of resourcing role. We sat there and while we were talking, he had two jobs pop up in his inbox and as a joke, said, look, this is the things we've got going. We've got a job in Azerbaijan and we've got a job on the Ascension Islands. Do you fancy either of them? You know, we were joking around, but. And then you start thinking, actually, we've got this stuff all over the world, we've got people working everywhere as other people in the civil service app. And it just really opened my eyes to. Just because people see us as the tax collectors, the people that they pay the tax very much as soon as you open the door and look in. We have every single career opportunity that anyone could want. Now you've got to find them and get them and apply to them. The other thing for me is around policy and this will apply to all the civil service. So private sector company will have their, will have their policies and the ways of working probably very slim, slim book and is totally flexible and they can pretty much do however they want to do it depending on the chief exec. Ours are very historic policies that have been in place for a long time. It's a very policy driven as you might imagine in the civil service attached to government. And that was the thing I found the hardest thing to get used to that there was always a policy for something. Everything has a policy and that's the bit that's still in place. A policy affects procurement. So if we want to get things done quickly and bring a, a new platform in. So if we go to a show and we see a great product, it's not as easy just to go click your fingers right there's. Yeah, let's get that in and let's really improve our EVP or branding or marketing whatever with that new tool. We have to go through the rigorous procurement process. So the policies that sit behind that have been probably for me and probably for most people are the most frustrating thing.

I've got someone from AJHR is listening on YouTube and I have a question for you. Andy around. I guess I'll give context to this question. You know, you talked about the TA or what your team is doing, but how have you created some of that buy in with hiring managers, you know, and saying it's a challenge in the, in the oil and gas or that that AJ runs has been a good deal of turnover in the roles there. But like if you're doing the right things in recruiting and transforming recruiting, how are you translating that back across the business to all those hiring managers to get them to again sell to the different sellable elements and to buy into the philosophy that you have in the recruiting team?

It's taken a while to be honest. You know, we've. The first thing I did was bring the outside in. So is bring external recruiters who know how to recruit in the external marketplace into the organization, bring in external recruitment marketing skills into the organization. And I've got a fantastic team of recruiters that have walked the walk and they can deliver. And what we found was by actually sitting down with some of these, you know, because most of hiring managers were sort of long standing civil servants who have probably never recruited externally themselves and showing them data, showing them how it's done, showing them the results, working through and simple things like the way that they use job descriptions, the way they interview people. And we went back to basics with a lot of things because once we showed them that actually there's a different way of doing things, you don't just have to stick something online and hope someone comes and someone applies for it. Actually engaging people in a different way and introducing them to the world of LinkedIn and sitting there and you and I have done this many times, it's sitting down with a hiring manager and actually showing them the marketplace and what's there and the insights of the different jobs and where they're coming from. And if you, if you change different job titles, the difference that makes. And some real, you know, I guess taking them, taking along on the journey, holding their hand, showing them and repeating that consistently, it's not just doing it one off and then it's delivering for them. And it was the delivery that worked. So in our first year in the IT department, which is when I first started, we brought in 685 hard to find digital and architecture skills, unheard of. And they've been trying for two years to bring in a couple of hundred. And we did that by headhunting and going out and finding these people. After that, the business were very happy to use us and were happy to tell their colleagues and other hiring managers that if you've got a problem, go to this team because they'll go and find it. And that's a big thing we did, was just try and bring an outside mentality in and keep repeating doing it.

But the credibility is really important. You have to have the credibility to back it up. As you said, the results. I'm gonna go to another question here from Simon Johnson, who's on LinkedIn. Put your consulting hat back on. So Simon wants to know, do you think the gap in IT and IT salaries will get wider? There seems to be growing ripple among smaller businesses outside the top 20% that are addressing the cost of living challenge to attract talent. So I guess interpret that question as you may, but what are your thoughts on that?

I think it will get wider in the short term. I think for some people, I think there's always a percentage that we work on 80, 20 principle. So we can't touch the 20%. We'll go on the 80% and then grow that 20%. I think it will probably get, personally, I think it will get bigger. I think we've Got a closed border. We've got some if anyone in the cloud marketplace looking for cloud skills at the moment and they all are. As everyone transitions as an example, the rates just keep going up. When we look at contractors, I can use that as a good benchmark. Our contract or the requests for increased salaries are probably going up 15 to 20% at the moment for you know, IT skills. So I would say that's probably a fair, a fair assumption. Yeah. I'm not sure there's anything else we can, we can add to, to that other than we recognize the, the cost of living issues at the moment, we recognize travel costs and I think that's where you know, I alluded to earlier one of our challenges. If we look at the hybrid model we, we operate well, we've got a hybrid model operating against a working from home model, 100% for that pool of talent and if it means that they are not going to have to travel and spend £500 a week on travel, that's the challenge we're up against in that space at the moment.

I spoke to a senior software development manager today based in Spain whose team is literally in every corner of the earth. And this has been a strategy for them pre pandemic just they hire where the talent is kind of indiscriminate. Where is the talent go for it. It ends up with cost savings of course. And whilst the a 20% increase in salary in country X might be tough if you're hiring in the local economy when you're in a, I guess high cost, a high, high revenue center, as in your invoicing from a country that gets decent revenue and the revenue is going up, the incremental impact of a salary increase in a lower cost country is not going to hit you as much. And I, you know, one of the questions I had in our, in our list before we started was how are companies dealing with this? And I know at the start of the pandemic organizations were really private organizations were particularly taxed with, pardon the pun, with the challenge of not having perhaps subsidiaries in different countries to hire for. But the EOR company, the employer of rec of record companies, businesses like remote.com and tons of others have sprung up to offer a solution to that. Much easier even for the small companies because again we often talk with large enterprises but the small companies can be priced out of this. They don't have the benefits, they don't have everything else. But I think it's down to yeah, you know, you made the point, you know, you have to accept the facts and in, in the public sector, I guess it's probably one, it's one benefit to go. The salary is the salary. You can't really fight that or it's going to be very hard to fight that and take a long time, which forces you just to move on and say, well, how can we position ourselves in a different way and what kind of candidate will go after that? I think this, you know, as long as we've both been doing this, people talk about, yeah, no, you go out there and you hire the best talent in the market. That's kind of BS because there are constraints to every organization, every team, as to what you can hire. What kind of an organization are you? The growth rate will appeal to somebody saying we want to hire the best. And, and this psychology of every hiring manager thinking we should go out and hire the best, as in best in the world, is mental because you can't afford the best.

But there's also, but there's also the thing to that though. If you go out and you flash the cash and you go out for the best of the best, if you manage to acquire that best of the best and you pay them 20 grand, 30 grand more, you give them share options, whatever, they're mercenaries, they'll do the same again to you in two years time and years time. You know, what we're trying to do is create a great place to work at the same time as looking for the 70, 80% skill set, including in some of the really hard to find things. They come in day one. We've already got the training, you know, preordained training programs for them. So that allows them to provide instant growth, it gives them an incentive to learn more and then they might come in for two or three years. We accept that it's a two or three year lifespan and if they choose to move on, as I said earlier, hopefully they stay within the silver service. If not, they'll move on to another, another, another organization. They go and raise their skills and hopefully at some stage they'll come back. And that's what we've accepted. We've accepted a more portfolio approach to people coming in now rather than thinking it's a job for life, because it isn't. You know, I want to bring in skills for, you know, I've got a big tech program to build. I want them for the next two years. At the end of it, I probably haven't got anything for them that's going to meet their skills. But we've given them a fantastic experience, hopefully they walk away with a smile on their face and that when we've got the next project in three or four years time and we're doing something else, we can call on those skills again. They come back and come back again and come back again. So it's a whole mentality change of the way we're looking at talent and recruitment going forward. As opposed to you join an organization for life and you get kicked out at 60 and you go take your pension. That doesn't work anymore. Especially in tech. It doesn't that agree.

Claire Tanner's on LinkedIn saying hire for capability. That's a mantra that many folks are talking about. Forced to. But maybe we should have always looked at that. I have to rethink what the requirements are. Andy, we're coming towards the end and I want to maybe I have two questions left. My philosophy question for you is again thinking about the CPO CHRO HRDs out there. When you're looking at the wider talent strategy, what's your advice as a talent acquisition? I'm going to use the word you hate, expert. But like you are right as a ta, whatever word you want to use instead of expert. But you know, you've been in this industry, worked with lots of companies, had great success from that perspective. If an organization has decided talent is really important to them, they need more, they need different talent. If you're advising a CPO chro on what her focus should be to help solve those talent challenges, knowing what the market's like at the moment, what advice would you give her or him?

Well, the first thing I do is make sure you're on the top table. Make sure that you're sitting there with the CEO and you agree with the CEO, the strategy. Because there are too many times when I was consulting that, as you know, the, the talent side is not on the top table. It has to be because that's the future of the organisation. So that's the first thing. Make sure that you find your way to that top table and you, you know, you ensure that the board understand the importance, I think and then it comes down to a little bit of real basics. Is really starting to understand where the organization's going, what you've got, where the gaps are. I know this is nothing rocket science on this. I don't have a magic answer other than to understand your organization and to understand where your skills, your skills gaps gone, the capability you currently have and where that is now. The reality is there's a mix that has to be done. There's the Buying in of the skills to plug the short term gap. There's having a development program to develop the skills for the future. Whether that's from an in house apprentice style or a training perspective. And again, something we're doing more of and we've not really done before over the years is really look at how we can ensure we build our own and we retain that. Not a magic answer, Jonny, I'm afraid. It's a mix between understanding the short term problems, the issues and that might have to be. You cut your losses and you have to pay for some expensive short term talent. But make sure behind that there's a backed up training program or longer term strategy of how the talent's going to come in and then work with the parts of the business that are looking to the future in terms of the skills they need and the technologies you're working for and then start to try and develop those through the organization. But again, we're having to do it ourselves because there isn't a magic answer. Especially in the UK with a closed environment at the moment. It's really understand your short term, near term and then future skill set.

I've heard the word, I've heard the word sustainability used in this context. It's kind of sustainable talent. As to, you have to, you can't just buy in forever. You have to think about usually that more sustainable talent.

But it is. Yeah, it is. I agree with you on that. It's a mix though. You've got to get the blend right. But as I said earlier, but then we have the catch 22. If you're in that niche or if you're in those niches where you have areas in your business that sit within those, you know, those skills that are in massive demand, you've still got to keep on working at, to keep those people on, you know, in your organization. Because as soon as they get a certain skill, you know, we've got a particular qualification that we, that we run in our organization. You can probably guess what it is. And once the, once the graduates have gone through the program, you know, a number of the big five just sit there waiting for the program to end. Okay, thank you very much. Brilliant training. That's just what we need.

I've sat with their recruiting team.

It's exactly that. I know that and I did it myself. So I'm, you know, and we, we do that in other organizations. So, so I think there's, there's. The big thing is you've got to have a sense of reality. You've Got to get a blend. You've got to have a mix and understand that talent's going to ebb and flow and skills are going to ebb and flow, but fundamentally, you've got to, you know, you've got to try and build a spine. It's a bit like the football. You've got to have a good goalkeeper, a good center back, good midfielder, and a number nine. And if you've got that spine through the team, you're not going to be bad.

As a person who watches no football, I have no idea. Which is what I ask every guest on the show. I've asked 97 times before, and that is to perhaps share with you one last piece of advice. You've shared lots of advice and insights today, but perhaps considering our audience out there, if you leave one tip or piece of advice for them, what would it be? Today, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna borrow something slightly tailored from a Mandalorian, which I'm sure you know. I'm a big Star wars fan, so for me, it's. It's very simple. There is always a way. Now, it's that this is the way in the Mandalorian, but for me, there's always a way. And what I found coming in here, if. If you've got a blocker, if you've got something in front of you that you can't find a way around, there is always around there. And I've discovered that. So it's. You've not considered everything. You've not thought about everything. You've not looked at every data angle. You've not considered every part of data. You're not asking the, you know why, the who or the how enough. And there's very rarely a permanent blocker. And I found that certainly when I came here, people kept saying to me, you can't do that. You can't do that. And I was like, who said that? And why? And I'd find myself going back six or seven times through a chain, and I'd find out. The person said, well, I just invented that policy on a Friday afternoon. I wrote it down, and then someone adopted it. So. Right, okay. So we don't need to do it. No. And if I hadn't challenged and keep going. There is always a way to get around something or to do something or to bring in the latest technology. Just not asking the right questions or considering the right data. I love it.

Who'd have thought that growth mindset would be borrowing from Mandalorian quotes? It's been an absolute pleasure to catch up and have you on the show. Congrats on all the success of the team and what they've been doing. Keep fighting the good fight for that tech talent. And thanks for sharing your insights with us today.

Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks very much Johnny.

And thanks to all our listeners who put in some live questions. We always really appreciate that. And for you for listening, either live or as the podcast. We'll be back next week, next two weeks time with episode 99. We're skipping a week next week. Not that I need another break, but I'm going to be at the In House, the In House Recruitment Expo in the uk. So if you're in London next Wednesday, do join me live at that event. You can find out more more or you can join me the next day online at our next Social Talent Live. So thrilled to say that next week we'll be putting a lot of time and attention on May 5 to engaging and retaining top talent. Exactly what Andy was talking about there towards the end. And we've got a panel of amazing speakers and experts and practitioners who we sharing their insights over 90 minutes or so on May 5th. That's going to be at 4pm Irish UK time. That's 11am on the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast of the US and you can register@socialtown.com live. There's some reason you can't make that time register. We'll send you on the recording and you can check out those insights from next week. So I'll see you live in London next Wednesday or I'll see you online next Thursday. Thanks for listening.