How Nielsen transformed a global TA function

Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to talk to you about the numerous lessons that we learned, many of them the hard way, as we went through this transition over the last couple of years. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Nielsen, we are a global market research company. We operate in over 100 countries worldwide. We have, I think, at latest count, just over 46,000 employees globally. So we're one of the biggest, if not the biggest, market research company globally. And what that involves is measuring what people are buying in the FMCG world, what they're watching on tv, what they're listening to on the radio, and then creating insight and helping our clients to understand what the trends are at the moment and what they need to be doing into the future. So Johnny talked a little bit about the. The TA landscape at Nielsen when I took this role two years ago. So I've been at Nielsen for just over 20 years, always in various different HR roles. And then two years ago, I moved into the COE role. And what attracted me to the role was the amount of change that was needed, that was required to pull the team together. And how I would describe the TA team two years ago is more of an international conglomerate than a global CoE. So it was a lot of different variations of how TA was structured, who did TA across the different markets, and it wasn't operating as a global coe. And so that was kind of the challenge and the fun of taking on this opportunity. And so about 50% of the people who were involved in TA weren't recruiters. They were HR people who kind of got recruitment lumped on top of them on top of their day job. They didn't opt into recruitment. I need to figure out how the slides move. Not that way, that way. Okay. So when I took the role myself and the team that I was working with, the TA leadership team, we spent a lot of time getting, collecting voice of customers, so talking to our hiring managers and our leaders around the business to understand what the pain points were, what the needs were, et cetera. We spent a lot of time talking to the recruiters to figure out what their view was and how they felt about TA and what they felt we could do to improve it. And we looked around the industry to see what was happening as well. And we talked to a number of people around the industry to get some feedback. So we did a lot of research. And from that research, we came up with our kind of vision for ta. And this was our vision. So what we wanted to do was build A globally connected team of experts, recruiting experts, who would try to work as efficiently as possible, leveraging technology where it's appropriate to hire the best people into our company. And we kind of split that down into three key areas. The first one was we wanted people to be talent experts. So we wanted people who had opted into recruitment as a career and who were focused on recruiting all of the time and on building their expertise and their skill on recruiting. We didn't want to underestimate the skill that's involved in effective recruiting. So we wanted those people to bring that expertise to understand how to get market insight and to deliver that back to hiring managers and to use that to create effective sourcing strategies and, and work more effectively with our hiring managers. We wanted to focus on candidate experience and on hiring manager experience and really highlight that and make some improvements there. We wanted to try and automate as much as possible and bring in technologies to support the process as much as possible. So that's our vision and we wanted to do that in a connected and consistent way around the world. So we came up with our vision, we communicated it out and then we worked on what's the plan to get there. So this was the process that we went through from about the start of 2018 through to the first half of this year. So the research I mentioned, we did a lot of Voice of Customer, we talked to hiring managers, we spent time shadowing the recruiters. So we did several hours of recruiter shadowing and we used that data then to look at where's the wastage in this process. And we found simple things like there's a lot of rework when we get to offer stage, there's a lot of rework because we didn't at the start of the process make sure we understood exactly what the budget is, exactly what the parameters are for flexibility on that, etc. So those sorts of things we wanted to fix. So that was the research phase. Then we went through a design phase and we looked at what do we want this to look like and what are the things we're going to need to do in order to get there. And then everyone in HR loves a good four box grid, right? So we got a four box grid and we mapped all those things out on a four box grid and we had our, like these are the things we're going to go after in the next six months and then when we get that done, we'll move on to these things. And we kind of mapped out our plan and I was looking at it recently and we did actually do everything that was on our plan, which is good. And then we went on to demand planning. So demand planning was looking at what are the hiring needs, the business we are working towards, strategic workforce planning. I would say we're not there yet. I'm sure many are in the same position. But we went out to the business and we said, here's what your attrition tells us. So looking at attrition, it looks like you're going to need to hire 100 people next year. Tell us if that's accurate. Don't worry about two people more or three people less. Tell us if there are 20 more or 50 less, that kind of thing. And we use that demand plan to predict the hiring needs of the businesses and to design our team. So how many recruiters are we going to need in what market, with what language, how many sources do we need, that sort of thing. So that was really helpful. And then we spent between Q4 2018 and Q2 2019 hiring a whole bunch of recruiters and sourcers across three main locations and onboarding those recruiters and sources. And so what we've got now is we've gone from this very spread out TA function half filled with HR people who aren't specializing in TA to six dedicated teams. We already had a team in India, the US and China. We kept those teams and then we've built three new teams in Poland, Malaysia and Mexico. And there are recruitment center teams. And those teams in Poland, Malaysia and Mexico cover 90 + markets around the world. The US team is US focused. The China team is China focused. The India team is India focused. But the other three teams cover all of the other markets that we have. So let me introduce you to the teams. So we've got Poland, Malaysia and Mexico. We have over 50 recruiters, 21 sources, six team leads, six administrators, we've 24 languages and counting across the team. And we have over 400 years of experience, of recruiting experience in that team. And year to date they've hired just these three teams alone have hired more than 3,000 associates. So things are going, they're going well. So far we have had a number of areas that have been difficult. Right. This was a huge change, massive change to undertake. So what I want to focus the next little while on is what we've learned. And I'm going to talk to you about six key lessons that we've learned. As I said at the start, sometimes quite the hard way. So in terms of leadership, what was really important I think in this change was getting the right leadership team in place to help lead the change. So what we did with the talent acquisition leadership team at a global level is we carved out two people from the team to be specifically focused on this. And one of them is sitting here in the front row who did an absolutely amazing job. So we had two people who were focused on strategy enablement. And their job was, I said, we took our four box grid and we mapped everything onto the four box grid. Lisa, who's here, and Mary, her counterpart. Their job was to go after all of those actions and projects that we wanted and to make sure that we achieved them. The other important role we had on the leadership team was, was a BPI role, so a business process improvement role. And we were able to take somebody from our BPI team to come and partner with us on this transition. And that brought a huge amount of process clarity and skill in terms of taking the large amounts of data that we were collecting and organizing that into something meaningful and useful. So that was hugely important. The other massively important roles are HR leaders and partners. And I don't want to differentiate between TA and hrs if they're two separate functions, we're one collective function. But just for clarity in terms of who we're talking about, the HR leaders in the markets and in the regions were massively important in this as well. And that partnership between HR and TA is really critical. And where we see strong partnership, we see strong successes. And where the partnership isn't as strong, that's where we tend to have more struggles. And again, one of our HR partners is sitting in the front row as well. The other side of leadership, I would say the other lesson learned on leadership, outside of the kind of senior leaders who were involved, is identifying leadership in the recruiters. Do I need to do something to make that come back on? Okay, I'll just ignore that for now. So identifying leadership in the recruiters, because what we find is when we have recruiters who are showing strong personal leadership skills, the consultation, the partnership, the engagement with the local teams is much stronger. So that I'd say is another key learning for us on leadership. Just identifying that strong leadership skill among the recruiters themselves, the middle box that was there was communication. And when we started this process, we did a lot of communication out to our leadership teams about what we were doing, what to expect, what's coming, coming. And then when we got through the transition and started to get towards a BAU stabilization, which we're still in the process of getting to, we pulled back on communication and in retrospect, that was a mistake. So we should have continued that communication. And we will. We're going to pick that back up and start doing more communication back out. Because if we don't drive the narrative on what the successes have been and where things have gone well, what trickles up to the top or bubbles to the surface is the aged wrecks, the number of open wrecks, et cetera. And so we want to make sure that we are managing the narrative on what has been successful and what's not working, what we've learned and what we're doing to fix it again. Massive change process. And we had something like seven months from the first recruiter hired to the last market transition. So we did it really quickly. And so we want to make sure that we go back out on that communication again. So that's our second lesson learned, is to not drop the communication, keep the communication strong. Even if people are sick of hearing about us, I'd rather that than have them not know what's going on. And so part of that process, part of that recommunication is looking at each of the markets and traffic lighting those 90 plus markets, traffic lighting them, and then highlighting the plans against, you know, the markets that are green, everything's good, things are working where it's orange, what are we keeping an eye on and what are we, what actions are we taking to make sure those things don't go red and then where it is red, what's the recovery plan to get these markets back on track? Hang on, I need to move forward. The last area on this slide is the biggest area of learnings. I think for us it is area iterative. There isn't a magic plan that you can take and implement and everything's going to work perfectly first time round. So the third lesson I would say is we hired an awful lot of people at the same time. They didn't all work out. And you need to move really quickly when there are performance issues. You need to move really quickly to make changes and fix the performance issues. Because when you're going through a large change like this, it doesn't take an awful lot for people to get disillusioned with the change. And we're at the point in the change curve where people are still in that fear zone and they're still in the zone where they're trying to revert back to how things used to be. And so dealing with those performance issues and making sure that we do that quickly is a very important lesson that we've learned as well. Fourth lesson I would say is regardless of what your plan was, people are human and how things actually evolve may not be exactly how you'd envisioned it. So Lisa and I spent a lot of time with the rest of the leadership team talking about what the sourcing function should look like and how we build proactive sourcing. And a couple of months in, two, three months in, we realized that's not actually how the sourcers in the team are operating. They're operating more as assistants to the recruiters, which wasn't the vision, it wasn't the plan, it wasn't the problem we were trying to solve. So we've had to go back and kind of reset on the sourcing, remind the sources what their role is, remind the team leaders what the role of the sourcing function is, and make sure that we level set that and get the right focus on sourcing. And the other thing that we've had to do this is we're on lesson five now. I think lesson five was you need to be really agile with this. So where things aren't working, you have to be ready to change quickly. Listen to the feedback that you're getting from your colleagues like Joelle here in the front row and just act quickly. And sometimes that might be a quick plug. It might be, let's get an agency in to fill that role quickly while we figure out what we need to do for a long term solution. And other times it is the longer term solutions. So that I would say is lesson five and then lesson six is this is bloody tough, right? It's really hard work. It takes a huge amount of great grit and tenacity and persistence. You know, you're bringing a lot of people through the change curve, not just the people who are working directly for us, but the rest of the business as well. It's really hard work. And anyone who tells you differently is either lying or they haven't done it right. So those are the six kind of key lessons that I would call out from it. And I wanted to finish by talking about what's next for us. I'm going to challenge channel a little bit of my inner Bob Geldoff for this. So we need to embed the model. We need to get to a steady state BAU and a stable bau. And so a lot of the work that we're doing now is around getting there. So I mentioned traffic lighting the different markets, making sure that we get everyone onto green. We need to measure with metrics. We've come from a situation where we didn't really have a huge amount of metrics because we had so many different processes, so many different people involved recruiting, some people using the ats, some people using a spreadsheet, et cetera. So we didn't have a great benchmark of metrics. But now we're at a point where we've got everyone on the system, everyone using the same processes. We need to start measuring it with metrics, because, as you all know, recruitment is a very emotional role. It's very emotional job. And so we want to be able to bring fact based information in, and then we need to improve continuously. So I said on the last slide, this is iterative, and we'll continue to review, change, adapt as we go along and as we take feedback. And I think here's my inner Bob Geldof with all of that. We need probably a little bit of magic as well. Thank you.