Within its own field of global engineering services, CH2M Hill is well known for its involvement with prestigious projects, including the widening of the Panama Canal and the London Olympics. These “cool projects” - as David Mason, the company’s international talent acquisition director, likes to call them - are one of the key selling points for the company as it seeks to attract the cream of talent it needs.

As Mason, who is responsible for all the company’s recruitment and resourcing outside the US, explains, even in the midst of a global recession, the company is still expecting to take on 2,000 people this year -; albeit this is down from more than 3,000 last year.

While it may be a candidate-rich environment, Mason faces a challenge to attract the people the company needs. “It’s all about the quality of individuals you recruit into an organisation but the facts are that the top talent, the passive candidates, are not moving.”

However, Mason, who first entered recruitment as a consultant with HR recruiter Morgan and Banks after a career in the Army, seems to take the matter in his stride. “There is no golden bullet,” he says as he outlines various actions being taken: an Alumni site, keeping experienced staff on as consultants, continuing to invest in graduate recruitment, and taking “a much broader of view” of where to source talent globally.

Mason seems much more exercised by the broader challenges of his role. “You cannot go anywhere unless you have the right people - it’s the fundamental start of everything that is done in HR before you can train them or develop them,” he says.

Mason is a big advocate of the in-house model, describing it as “a strategic activity for the business”. So it is important, he argues, that the organisation itself should be in control of all those elements to find the right people - if only because they are more likely to more motivated than external suppliers.

Mason’s philosophy: A very customer and commercial approach to resourcing, and making sure it sits with the business strategy and is part of it

Looking back, he is clearly proud of his time at AXA Life, where he set up a centralised in-house function, serving four operating companies within the group. In doing so, he says costs were reduced by an average of £2m a year, primarily through less reliance on agencies. By better managing the internal supply of candidates, AXA moved from 5% internal hires to 40%, and 45% to 80% among senior executives.

For Mason, having a commercial mindset is key if resourcing is to maximise its contribution. “It’s about having a very customer and commercial approach, and ensuring it sits in with the business strategy and is part of it,” he says. “If we don’t get the right quality of people at the right price for projects in the Middle East, then that affects our pricing to customers,” he says, by way of example.

Hardly surprising, then, that Mason refers to hiring managers within the CH2M Hill as customers. “That is always the focus I have brought to my teams. This mindset helps them to deliver an efficient service, and to provide value in delivering what the business needs,” he explains.

The key sign telling him he is engaged with the business is when senior executives are after his time. “It’s a great place to be,” he says. And he clearly revels in the central role talent acquisition has in the company. “Whether it be a new project or developing a new business we are always part of the conversations.”

That said, Mason accepts that to some extent recruiters will always be judged by their ability to cut costs. However, he argues there is now growing recognition among “the wiser heads” in the recruitment industry that this is changing.

“Cost is always a running theme, but the value of a recruiter is in the quality of individuals that you put into an organisation, and the impact they have. While some would say that has always been the case, now it’s more how you measure that successfully,” he says.

One example is to ask what additional costs a company would be prepared to pay to find a sales professional who can do “£1m of business rather than £1.5m”, he suggests. Mason admits it is “tremendously difficult” to persuade internal stakeholders that recruitment is not just about cost, though he clearly believes that those at CH2M Hill are among the enlightened ones.

Yet the evidence is there, he says, pointing to one project at AXA, where specialist software was able to predict attrition rates to about 80% accuracy by “crunching up all the information from the company’s HR, financial and applicant tracking systems. The key is being able to provide much better information to the business, which starts to put a value on people because you can see the quality of hire”.

Secret of my success: A willingness to learn and keeping an open mind. There are not many books written on recruitment and resourcing and how to do it

This analytical approach is extended to resourcing teams. Mason says that according to research, consultants perform best when the number of assignments they are working on at any one time averages between 20 and 22. Beyond this number the quality of hire goes down and the time to hire goes up as the consultant becomes over loaded.

Mason is always looking to ways recruitment can be improved. One area is in selection, which he describes as “probably the most poorly done element of all the recruitment processes because it is done by us humans”.

New technologies coming onto the market can help recruiters make increasingly accurate decisions about whether candidate A is better than candidate B. Mason describes one piece of technology, Savvy Recruiter from Effectivate, as “effectively throwing the kitchen sink at your internal population” to produce a profile of what success or poor performance looks like in your organisation. It can then tell, for example, that a person who scores above a certain level in a verbal reasoning test might not be suitable for a customer-service job because they would get bored.

Bored is not a word one would ever associate with Mason himself. Describing his career as “exciting and challenging”, he clearly relishes being part of a function that is “continuing to develop in the value it adds to its clients”.

Although admitting to “a very aggressive policy” of developing his career beyond the military, by “taking the opportunities to move onwards and upwards”, Mason has tempered his approach in the last few years by staying put longer. “You get to understand that to achieve and put something in place takes a number of years of hard work - not two years, but probably three or four,” he says.

You understand that to put something in place takes a number of years of hard work

Having joined CH2M Hill just over a year ago, Mason says one of the key challenges is “to get down to a narrow base of candidates that we can push in front of the business”. To do this his team focuses its efforts on social media, internet networking, developing its own website and research-based techniques.

That said, there is no blueprint and CH2M Hill’s recruiters around the globe are allowed the freedom to work in ways which fit in with the way they do things in those cultures. For example, referrals and networking are “the natural way” to recruit in Latin America, he says.

However, there is a balance to be struck if the company wants to able to operate globally, adds Mason, which is why applicant tracking systems and training for recruiters are exactly the same in Latin America and the Middle East as they are in Europe. By the beginning of next year, Mason says the company hopes to have a global service centre (at a location yet to be decided), which will focus on sourcing and sifting candidates for the firm’s consultants. The consultant’s role will become more one of managing candidates from a wide range of sources - be they internal, external, or contingent, he explains.

While Mason is keen to stress the benefits of technology for recruiters, he acknowledges that the advantage over competitors is usually short lived. “Technology will give you an advantage for two or three years but then everyone will buy it,” he says. To keep ahead of the competition, the quality of the employer brand and the company’s employability become key. In the case of CH2M Hill, one strong selling point is that it is employee-owned, with 14,000 of the company’s 25,000 employees owning shares that are not tradable outside the company. “That’s a unique selling point, and these things become important when talking to candidates.”

While technology is undoubtedly important “it’s not the be all and end all”, says Mason. “Recruitment is still sitting down in front of somebody and persuading them that the job is right for them,” he says.

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