IHG looks internal first for 400,000 hires

Claire Guberg, global talent systems manager of the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), has outlined that the company will "look at internal talent first of all" when filling all roles in the business - in particular those identified as ‘critical’.
Thu, 26 Apr 2012
Claire Guberg, global talent systems manager of the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), has outlined that the company will "look at internal talent first of all" when filling all roles in the business - in particular those identified as ‘critical’.

IHG including franchisees, which currently employs 345,000 people worldwide in nearly 100 countries, is due to make 400,000 hires in the next three years, which includes internal moves and promotions, as previously reported on recruiter.co.uk. It has 1,144 hotels in its pipeline, in addition to 4,480 hotels currently part of the group.
Guberg was speaking at a seminar entitled ‘Critical Talent Pipelines’ hosted in London this morning by recruitment software provider Taleo and assessments firm SHL.

As a result of current endeavours to source internally, in 2011 IHG increased the proportion of corporate roles filled internally by 33 percentage points to 44%. General manager roles sourced internally were at 71%, up from 61%, while hotel roles nearly doubled to 12%.

A critical part of the strategy is IHG’s Global Careers Week, held twice a year, in which events in hotels and offices ask current employees at all levels to create or upgrade their profiles on the company’s careers website and are made aware of new opportunities that might be suitable for them elsewhere in the business.

Before this started in 2010, Guberg says IHG was losing talent as a result of the fact that employees “were more aware of our competitors than they were of us”.

Internal sourcing also ensures roles identified as critical are more easily sourced, Guberg said. The notion of ‘critical roles’ was introduced at the event by Chris Phillips, vice president of marketing at Taleo.

He said that in the current economic climate, “this focus on critical talent, on the roles that are crucial… really has risen to the top of the agenda”, noting that according to Taleo data, 94% of firms have a definite notion of some roles being ‘critical’, but only 60% being fully confident that they have the right people in these roles.

This was corroborated by the comments of Dr Ray Glennon, senior talent management consultant at SHL, who said that while many companies “are doing a really good job of identifying” what their critical roles are, the next key question was to look at the current incumbents and ask “are they any good?”.

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