Stevan Rolls

Colin Cottell interviews the head of HR at Deloitte

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For someone who has spent much of his professional career designing candidate assessment processes, Stevan Rolls, head of HR at accountancy and professional services firm Deloitte, has a surprising admission.

Structured interviews, psychometric tests and assessment centres are not all they are cracked up to be, he declares, as we sit chatting in Deloitte’s light and airy glass and steel citadel near the City. “All of these things explain much less than half of what makes one person successful and another unsuccessful,” he says.
Later in another surprising revelation, the man whose responsibilities include recruitment at one of the UK’s ’big four’ accountancy firms, adds: “I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be an HR director.”

Publicly airing such views would normally come as a surprise, especially from the head of HR at a firm which next year intends to hire around 1,300 graduates and hundreds of experienced hires. But coming from Rolls they are entirely plausible. For while many might regard a career path up through the ranks of HR as a prerequisite for his role, Rolls has confounded convention in his somewhat convoluted progress to the top.

“I have never really at any point done anything in a conventional way,” he says of a career that has taken him from apprentice at the Midlands Electricity Board in 1981, to head of HR at Deloitte today. This via occupational psychology and a large dose of recruitment along the way. As Rolls himself acknowledges: “It’s quite a long journey from an electricity sub station to head of HR at Deloitte.”

And it’s this strange portfolio of experience that has undoubtedly both given him his unusual perspective, but also impetus to his career. “I was an atypical recruiter because I didn’t start in recruitment. I started in occupational psychology. I was an atypical HR leader because I didn’t start in HR and work my way up.So it has always been a different profile,” he says, summarising his career trajectory.

Following his stint with the electricity board and a period as a student, Rolls worked as a consultant at business psychologists Selby Millsmith, then on to ASE as an occupational psychologist, where he developed computer-based assessments. “I was just interested in people, what made people tick, how to get the best out of people…that’s what attracted me,” he says

Rolls then moved to Ford Europe, as head of occupational psychology and organisational development. After working on graduate recruitment, and some other areas of learning and development, Rolls “got a call from Arthur Andersen” to move into recruitment. “I thought recruitment would be a great opportunity to take the academic side of what I did and get some practical experience, and working to help an organisation be successful,” he explains.

Before its demise, Arthur Andersen, where he set up the experienced hire function in audit, didn’t disappoint. “It gave me the opportunity to learn a whole bunch of new things,” he says. Among these were how to deal with agencies, working with candidates and the marketing side. “All of that I really liked,” says Rolls.
Rolls was also able to draw on his “bread and butter” core competencies, such as assessment centre design that others found more difficult.

With “not a lot of recruitment going on” at Arthur Andersen following its merger with Deloitte, Rolls moved to Ernst & Young as head of recruitment. Here he centralised the recruitment function, introduced new processes and technologies, and built the team. Then, attracted by a request to “help out” with recruitment, but also with the expectation of being given “lots of other things to do”, it was on to Deloitte.

“That’s just how it happened,” he adds, while simultaneously hinting that his career was not totally unplanned. “You need to say ’I am going to do something different’; you need to plan that to a certain extent and most importantly you need to make the most of opportunities that are presented to you.”

However, while his career has been unusual, that is not to suggest that as a recruiter Rolls deliberately flies in the face of convention just to be different.

“We are innovative enough around recruitment,” says Rolls citing the firm’s early adoption of RPO with Alexander Mann and its long-time use of online applications for graduates. “But we are not innovative for the sake of it. If a basic screen of applications and an interview is sufficient, that is what we will do.”

It is clearly a pragmatic approach, with Rolls arguing that “being creative and light of foot” will enable Deloitte to attract the best talent from under the noses of competitors as the economy picks up - though he refuses to reveal his hand at this stage.

Rolls is less reticent about predicting the challenges ahead. “I think there will be an underlying shortage of great talent. You don’t have to go back too far to when everyone was doing a large amount of recruiting and fighting over candidates - that’s going to be a big challenge,” he says, though as he points out this “is not territory Deloitte is unfamiliar with”.

As the number of hires rises, Rolls says Deloitte will increasingly focus on the quality of recruitment. Not only through the use of regular metrics of efficiency, such as cost per hire, but also by looking at the correlation between what was assessed during the recruitment process and performance during the first year of graduate training.

For experienced hires, the emphasis will be on the performance of new staff, compared to their peers within the firm, and with staff retention rates.

Although passionate about the essential nuts and bolts of recruitment, which is the responsibility of a 50-strong team including 30 staff from RPO firm Alexander Mann, Rolls, perhaps as befits his wider HR role, seems keen to talk about recruitment in broad-brush terms.

Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of assessment techniques, he suggests, for example, that recruiters need to understand the limitations of what assessment for selection can tell them.

“You have to live with somebody [after they have joined]. You don’t know until they join. Some of the people who you think are great turn out not to be, while some of those you thought might not be turn out to be brilliant.”

Although structured interviews, psychometric tests and assessment centres are clearly better than unstructured interviews at predicting success in a role, “all of these things explain much less than half of what makes one person successful and another unsuccessful”, he says.

“At the end of the day you have to make the judgement. A psychometric test isn’t going to make that judgement for you. It’s a human process.” That said, rigour and process are hugely important for Rolls, and he gives short shift to recruiters who say they can tell within the first 30 seconds whether someone is going to be a success. “That is rubbish,” he says unequivocally.

Encouraging and helping everybody else to be successful and thorough that success for the function to be successful and for the firm to be successful. That is sort of my principle

Yes, there are scientific elements to recruitment, but it is also an art, he says. That’s why he insists that recruiters need to take a broader approach. For example, in graduate recruitment by asking: can we train this person; how will the candidate work in teams; and are they fit for the organisation?
With experienced hires, Rolls says recruiters have more information to go on, such as their previous roles, enabling them to give “a more holistic picture of the individual”.

Overall, however, he says recruiters should realise the limitations of selection through assessment. “You get just as much if not a bigger effect” through great induction, on boarding, as well as coaching and mentoring, and generally helping new people to find their feet, he says. “Assessment and selection is about identifying the good seed, but you have got to place it in fertile ground.”

At the same time, he is rock solid on the importance of the recruitment function. “Getting the best talent into an organisation, people who match the job, who can stay and be productive, and have great careers is a really direct contribution of the success of the business.” That said, recruiters can maximise their influence by focusing on what the business is trying to achieve and by being realistic about what recruitment can do. And importantly, recruiters have to be “really good at what they do”.

Recruiters also need to understand that the nature of careers has changed, with staff often staying for four to five years, before going off to do something different and then returning. “You are talking about identifying people you are going to have a life-long relationship with, and that’s about the kind of emotional commitment and engagement between the organisation and the individual.”

Whether this view is right or wrong, if anyone wanted clues to the way recruitment is going then a look at Rolls’ own peripatetic career might be a good starting point.

Curriculum Vitae
2007-present
UK head of HR, Deloitte
2006 National director of resourcing (UK and Switzerland) Deloitte
2002-05 National director of resourcing and employee integration/relations and HR core business services, Ernst & Young 1997-2002 UK director of recruiting, Arthur Andersen
1994-97 Head of occupational psychology and organisational development, Ford Europe
1991-94 Consultant, ASE
1989-90 Consultant, Selby Millsmith BSc Behavioural Science, Poly of Wales; MSc and PhD Applied Psychology, Cranfield Institute of Technology

 

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