TA Maturity: Why you’ll never get there

So let's get into. We don't have too long. I run a company called Social Talent and we're going to be sponsors of this stage. And I'm very passionate about talent acquisition, learning and talent in general. I want to share with you over the next 15 or so minutes some of the insights I've gained with some of our customers over the last few years that got me thinking about excellence and maturity as a whole. So let's get started. So, TA Maturity, I want to talk to you about what. What it is, why you'll never quite get there and why that's okay. I was inspired to talk about this a few months ago, talking to a customer of mine who was telling me that they are trying to move from level three in the Bursin model of TA Maturity to level four. And I was really intrigued to know what that meant for them. When I dug into it a little bit further, I realized they'd never get there. And that's what I want to share with you here this morning. So let's get started on this. So I want to talk to you about what's happening today in the world of work that's affecting talent acquisition. I want to talk to you about what it means for hiring organizations. And then I'm going to introduce you to you to a framework which hopefully will help you understand where you are in your journey and how you can get to the next stage. So jumping into what's happening in the world to work today, I'm going to talk about three core themes that I believe are affecting talent acquisition driving us today. The first is the unbelievably tight labor markets we work in. We are facing record levels of employment in most Western markets. Across most of Western Europe into the US You've got record lows in terms of unemployment rates, see it falling rapidly in the EU in particular over the last few years. Is anyone here recruiting the Czech Republic? Czech Republic has an unemployment rate of about 2.3%. Good luck finding talent in the Czech Republic. There's just nobody left. You get this. Yeah, you get this. So we all face these tightening labor markets. It's probably the number one reason why TA is having to transform. We used to be the only coffee shop in town. Now there's 20 coffee shops. There's a Starbucks on every corner. We need to be better and raise our game in talent acquisition to find the talent that's left. That's what's driving this number two trend is the global mobility of labor. It doesn't matter if you are recruiting in a country that has a high level of unemployment. The technical people in your country can move wherever they want. We live in a world where if you're paid well, if you're in a technically proficient role, technical IT or medical science, you can up sticks and fly a Ryanair flight for €39 to any city you want and, and work there and earn a wage instead. I'm finding that in a lot of the big multinationals based in Europe that hire highly technical staff, up to 80% of their workforce are individuals who do not or are not from that actual country. They don't rely on the countries they're in to staff their businesses. I talked to a good friend of mine, Tom, who runs sourcing for Microsoft globally, and I was asking him where he needs talent and he said, johnny, I don't care where the talent is. Today, 80% of the people we hire into Microsoft move countries to take their job in Europe. That's the environment we work in today. The talent is mobile. Even if your market has more of them, they'll move somewhere else if there's a better job. Third trend I want to talk about that's affecting us is the fact that digital natives, the workforce that grew up with the Internet, as of 2020, which is three months away, in three months, this part of the workforce will make up most of the workforce. So we'll reach a tipping point come January where more than 50% of the workforce grew up with the Internet. That means that they have a whole different set of expectations about how everything is done. It's different for Gen Xers like me, or if you're a different generation, baby boomers. We tolerate poor technology still because we didn't already always have great technology. This generation do not tolerate it. And they make up the majority of the workforce probably right now, today in our markets. And the fourth theme is this big focus we've had to have on experience. So in recruiting, we focus a lot on candidate experience. You're going to hear a lot on the stages around here today about employee experience, which is just a journey. You start as a candidate, you become an employee. An employee experience has become a big theme because it drives profitability in organizations and it's demanded by staff. If you want to keep the great staff and have them do wonderful things in your organization, they demand better experiences. So these are the four trends that are impacting talent acquisition today. But what it means for us as hiring organizations, I think there's six big core implications. These are things you just don't get to ignore. You have to accept these things. One is that as an organization, you cannot choose to have multiple different brands. So a lot of us would have worked in organizations where you have different ATS's in each country, different OPCOs or countries do their own thing. We decide what we're doing in employer branding, we've got our own career site, etc. But your candidates, these candidates who have lots of job opportunities, are mobile, can move anywhere. They will not tolerate different experiences. They, they will not go onto your website and say, well, I want to search for your jobs. And you tell them, well, you have a different portal for the uk. For Spain, you got to click over here. Germany, our job site looks different. It's over here. The experience is completely different. And you have to apply for all of those different career sites to apply in all those countries. They do not have the time or patience for that because they don't have to because there's another employer just like you who makes it much more easy, easy to apply and navigate. You have to have one brand, one career site and one experience for your organization. It doesn't matter if it's painful for hr. You got to do this because the candidates demand more. Second implication, we have to look not at other career sites and look at other employers to learn what to do. You have to look at what else candidates are thinking about. How are they, how are they basically framing their day? They're not going, well, I'm going to spend an hour looking for jobs. They may look for a job, they may look at your company or they may go on Instagram or they may go shopping or watch Netflix. The experience you have to define online is not driven by other career sites. It's driven by the likes of Amazon, not as an employer, but the shopping experience by Domino's and my Apple Pay. Now explain the three of them. A lot of us hands up here, whose career site has a search field, search and drop downs and fields to try and find your job. Yeah, brilliant. So a lot of us build career sites around a search experience. Sites like Amazon don't build around search, you land in Amazon. It suggests things to buy and it's largely right. You're like, yeah, that's what I need. And you click yes and it comes up with a new suggestion. You're like, I want that too. When you live in that kind of a world and you go onto a career site that forces you to click options and search for words. People don't tolerate that anymore. They expect your career site to just know what to recommend to the candidate. I think you'd like this job. Yes, I would like that job. That's brilliant. And you should also look at this. Thank you. That drives the experience expectation. Domino's. Has anyone here ever used the Domino's app to order a pizza? You can order a pizza for €12 and track it through the oven as it comes out of the oven, into a box, into a driver, into. Into a car or a bike, and you can follow it all the way to your home. What happens when you apply to a job? Can you track your job application that way? It's crazy that we can track a pizza through the entire process. Yet when we talk about our careers, one of the most important, defining things in our life, we cannot track where we are ever. And we don't want to ring a recruiter and talk to her God. We don't want these experiences where we have to deal with people. We expect everything to be available instantly and we trust the technology. If you're not giving that kind of an experience about your process tracking, people are going to walk away and then the transaction. I've got four boys, right? Four young boys. My youngest is 11 months old. My eldest is 11 years of age. A few weekends ago, I was on my own for four days and I was in a supermarket. And those of you who've tried to navigate your way around a supermarket with four young children trying to pay for stuff, I'm holding a baby bags. I have twin boys who are four who are running in different directions. But I go to pay and my payment experience is this. And I walk away. That's my transaction when I go online. I was shopping for a T shirt recently and I went to a site I've never been on before. I wanted to buy a T shirt. I clicked Apple Pay and the whole thing was done. My shipping address, my credit card, my billing address was just done. Yet people come to your career side or to your web pages and you have them fill out new information, re upload their resume and cv, fill out your name and salary expectations. And countries. This is not the world we live in. The transactions we expect are instantaneous. If I've given my information to LinkedIn or indeed I expect you to use that. So these expectations drive this again from a TA process. And I'll talk about this in a minute. Many of us are organized by country, by silo, by opco, different ways TA works globally. The only way that works for global organizations is global talent acquisition. That's global systems, global processes and global agility. It is madness that in many of your organizations, I expect you might have a country where your recruiters are quiet. Think of July and August in Europe, right? July and August in France and Germany, when nothing pretty much happens from a hiring point of view. Yet you have colleagues in the US or Norway who who are overwhelmed and busy. It is crazy that an organization cannot redeploy those resources. Recruiters can recruit for any market from home these days. They don't need to be in the country. Yet we are hiring contractors in this country while these guys can have extended vacation because we have nothing for them to do. It's mental. Fourth thing we are all talking about working as partners. Partners in hiring is not just the recruiters or the talent acquisition professionals, but also hiring managers and HR business partners. Partnership is required to deliver excellent hiring. Great recruiting is done by recruiters, don't get me wrong. But great hiring is done by teams of people and they don't partner together. You're not aligning their skills, their interviewing techniques, their candid experience, training and knowledge, their understanding of inclusion and diversity. Then you are basically introducing a weak link. Misalignment is the root of all evil in hiring. You will not achieve good hiring without alignment. And the fifth thing is, when you think of it more holistically, when you look at talent acquisition even. I'll talk about this again in a later slide in more detail. Talent acquisition is but one solution to the problem for a hiring manager. Maybe acquiring talent isn't what she needs. Maybe she needs retraining. Our next speaker after me did a fantastic piece of work with her colleagues around retraining and upskilling versus hiring. Hiring as a solution. But most of us can't do that because we just acquire talent. These organizations in the last two years have merged talent acquisition and talent management into a talent team. A unified talent budget where you can solve problems by looking at L and D resources, D and I, internal mobility and acquisition as one unit. And it's working for them. And the sixth thing I want to mention in terms of the implications is that as you scale and as you look at the candidate and employee experience, you start realizing that we need to move towards hiring for potential and hiring for global roles, and not just hiring for experience and hiring the local position. So a candidate, when she applies to you, wants to be available to everyone in your organization if there's a job. If I do three interviews in the UK and a job comes up in Madrid, I expect to jump in at stage three or four in the Madrid role and not go Back to zero. Because you know, we've met, we did the interview. Back to why you need this alignment on a global level, right? But it's also about hiring for potential. If you let hiring managers make the decisions for just their roles, your unified talent organization is trying to plan for the future. And if hiring managers only hire for the present, we'll never solve those problems. Organizations like Amazon and Google have pioneered this where they've got hiring committees who make decisions for the whole organization. So when you have a rec, the hiring committee interviews for that rec because they're thinking about the long term, the next two or three jobs for the organization. That's how you really do talent planning. It is a maturity of where you will go as you go up the scale here. So looking at this, the macro environments, the, the implications for a local level force us to look at where we are in our TA maturity framework. And I'm going to not dwell on this slide for too long, but essentially what I see in the world are three core models of talent acquisition. You are either a local hr, which is typically a more immature team, which is HR during recruiting for the country, or OPCO they work in and they report to the local hrd. Right. This model is very, very familiar with most of us. Most of us start this way as we realize the implications that I share with you there. You start going, you know what? We need some global processes. And a lot of organizations look at a center of excellence model where they start to look at global employer branding, global interview processes. So you have a global head of talent, but she doesn't necessarily own any of the recruiters roles. Recruiters still typically work for the local hrd, local function. They try and abide by global standards, but there's a real problem there because they don't work for the global head of recruitment. And when there's a crunch and when there's pressure, they look at the boss who pays their wage, decide their bonus and they ignore the global COE group. That happens a lot. The next progression is often the global TA team though you look at Lee from IBM will be speaking tomorrow talking about global ta. Barbara from Nielsen will be on this stage later on today talking about global ta where you work in a situation whereby your recruiters may still work on site in the OPCO for the local team, but they report into a global TA team. They don't work for local HR because the organization is aligned globally for all the reasons I mentioned. And you find that all of us typically work somewhere either in one of those three models. Or as a hybrid of one of those three models. Some of us move into COE as a bridge to global ta, but most of us are probably heading that direction. So I'll push back to what I started with, talking about the Bursin TA Maturity Framework. This has been around for a good number of years. Josh published this about six years ago. And it's a really good framework to understand where you are as you go up the TA scale. But there's a big challenge with this, right? The challenge is this, that it's about recruiting, it's about talent acquisition. And if you only look at this, which is, you know, going from that local HR spray and pray to hiring dedicated recruiters, splitting out the roles to a recruiting team, all the way up to the partner level, it's brilliant. And most of us work around this framework, but it ignores the fact that we have a whole group of partners who we need to work with to deliver hiring. Which is why I propose that this falls down after a while. And about halfway through your maturity in ta, you need to start looking at your hiring maturity, so taking in those colleagues and, and thinking about structured interviews and bringing in HR business partners into your hiring practices, bringing in mandatory interview training for hiring managers, developing robust rubrics and guides for them to ask great questions, listen for great answers, teaching them hiring, selling skills and moving towards hiring for potential and hiring committees. But even then, when you start thinking about this separate maturity framework for hiring, there's a challenge halfway here, which is the fact that you're not thinking holistically about the bigger problems the business is trying to solve, which is a bigger talent problem. You're not thinking about the fact you need to be doing workforce and skill planning, you need to be delivering training, which is probably only for onboarding and hypos at this point, but bringing in bottom up personalized learning, looking at an organizational structure built around the employee experience, and all the way at the top of skills solutioning. So not just doing hiring plans, but talent plans, bringing the L and D resources, the TA resources, the TD, internal mobility, DI resources together to really figure out how we deliver talent and skills across an entire enterprise for the next year. And you have to mature towards this. You can't just jump in here because you can't be this organization until you solve some of these problems. So that's the kind of new framework I wanted to introduce to you guys this morning to think about. And most of us, the reality is it's not linear. We live somewhere here and somewhere here whilst we're also doing this. But it's a framework to start kind of giving yourself some milestones and goals towards to understand where you are going as a TA team and TA function. And to me it leads to a kind of bigger view that we have in social talent, which is around this concept of hiring excellence. To do hiring excellence well, you got to nail your process, which is very much a TA organizational thing. But you also got to build the smarts around your hiring managers, your recruiters, around culture diversity, knowing the business as well, looking at your culture, the culture you're bringing people into. Do you have an inclusive environment, putting inclusivity ahead of diversity, which most of us don't do, and also thinking more holistically at our brand, which of course is our employer brand, but also our hiring manager brand, our recruiter brand as well, and even our employees brands. Hiring excellence is where you end up and most of us will never get there. But it's the journey towards hiring excellence, which is what we're trying to achieve by looking at the maturity levels and building ourselves up within the organization. And it's hiring excellence we'll be talking about on this stage over the next two days and introducing stories from excellent leaders and practitioners who've given their own piece of hiring excellence in some of these areas across their businesses. So that's me. It's my time to hand over. I thank you for listening. I really hope you enjoyed that and given you something to think about. Do stay on. We've got some great speakers all day. I'm going to hand over to our first speaker.