Recruiting your strength

Recruitment is the foundation of effective people management – if you don’t appoint well to get the right person in the right job, then allocating further resources such as training, reward schemes and energy from managers is just throwing good money after bad. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimates that the potential financial cost of getting it wrong ranges from £5,000 to £50,000, depending on the seniority of the post and the decisions the post holder might be making.

However, it appears that nobody finds recruitment particularly easy, with recent research¹ showing that it is a problem common to most organisations:
• 84% of organisations experience recruitment difficulties;
• The key reasons for recruitment difficulties are a lack of necessary specialist skills (65%) followed by higher pay expectations (46%) and insufficient experience (37%);
• Appointing people who have the potential to grow but who currently don’t have all that’s required is the most frequently used initiative to overcome recruitment difficulties (70%);
• The average recruitment cost of filling a vacancy per employee is £4,333, and corporate websites have now broken even with local newspaper advertising as the most common method for attracting candidates (75%). Indeed, according to People Management², when it comes to graduates, 89% of them only search for jobs online.
So what approaches are organisations in other sectors taking to address some of these difficulties successfully? Here are three examples from outside the arts. The first approach tries to avoid the recruitment problem in the first place by providing career progression for highly talented staff. The second approach is about increasing the pool of people you can recruit from by taking a creative approach to flexible working, and the third approach is about developing an employer brand that reflects the values and skills you are seeking, which makes it more likely that you are going to get the right fit between people and posts.

[[Effective retention is a great way to avoid having recruitment difficultiesin the first place]]Talent puddles
Nestlé had always tried to promote internally, spending thousands on internal IT systems to create a ‘talent pool’ that few used because it had inadequate search facilities. It cost them £56,000 to place 13 internal people. Nestlé then introduced ‘talent puddles’, where managers identified tiny groups of staff with a high level of potential. These staff were then interviewed and kept warm until an appropriate role arose. This cost them £700 to place 14 people. In this example, Nestlé has taken a pro-active approach to hold on to good people. Effective retention is a great way to avoid having recruitment difficulties in the first place. Are there aspects of this approach that larger cultural organisations or combinations of organisations could try?

Benidorm leave
Asda has developed a brand position as a strong community business, so the translation of that brand to employment terms means that staff need to reflect the diverse communities that use the stores. In practice, this has meant that the company has developed a range of flexible practices that make working at Asda attractive – particularly to older people. Two examples – are grandparents leave, offering employees a couple of weeks off when they become grandparents, and ‘Benidorm leave’, offering three months unpaid leave during the winter months. While the prospect of having swathes of front of house staff on holiday during the panto season may leave many theatre duty managers in a cold sweat, the idea underlying the approach – developing policies that encourage applications that represent the communities with whom an organisation is seeking to engage – is a sensible one. This could work successfully in arts organisations that have a high number of customer-facing staff. In this example, Asda has addressed a potential recruitment difficulty by maximising the pool of prospective applicants through the provision of attractive flexible working policies.

Mount Everest
The corporate markets division of the Royal Bank of Scotland³ has a daunting goal: to generate 50% of the Group’s profits with one-seventh of the Group’s staff. The organisation has looked at the HR implications of this goal, and translated this into an employer brand that is designed to attract ambitious, high performing and resilient staff. The division has made an analogy between the difficulty of its goal, and the difficulty of climbing Mount Everest. When staff join the division they receive a rucksack containing a compass, a Thermos flask, a miniature radio and a book called ‘Everest: Reflections from the Top’. Within their sector, this is an approach that has worked for them. Context is everything, and in our sector a welcome pack like this might at best be regarded as an innovative piece of installation art. However, what we can take from this example is that successful organisations put enormous effort and thought into developing an employer brand that increases the odds of recruiting people with the right skills, knowledge and expertise