TA professionals flock to RecFest 2022

This year's RecFest drew thousands of talent acquisition professionals to the event.

Insights about recruiting Gen Z candidates, making diversity & inclusion beyond gender issues relevant to employees and staff, and putting internal mobility to work in your business – these were among the themes drawing standing-room only crowds at RecFest 2022 this summer. 

Held on the Knebworth House grounds in Hertfordshire, the daylong event, which ran into the evening, drew coachloads of in-house recruiters and suppliers, including some international attendees.

Attendance ran to 4,000 talent acquisition professionals, 1,000 resourcing leaders, 500 technology experts and 100 thought leaders, according to Recruitment Events, the organiser. 

Common concerns raised included the lack of candidates, bringing D&I initiatives to life, skills gaps, and recruiting in specialist areas such as engineering and technology.

Take a look at just some of the highlights from the event, which Recruiter attended.

The pros and cons of internal mobility

Moving skilled employees into new jobs inside your organisation is often cited as one technique of motivating and retaining valued staff. But is career development of that type for the workforce always important to the people you work for and the organisation’s forward-moving strategy? Not always, Paul Bowles of Nokia acknowledged in a discussion about internal mobility with Kingsley Aikins, CEO of the Networking Institute. “If your organisation is not valuing the idea of internal growth, you’re working against the tide,” Bowles admitted. “And if the organisation is in a phase where it wants to ramp up and increase the headcount, it’s probably not the right time to really be pushing internal mobility.”

However, at Nokia, the approach to internal mobility is both pragmatic and sensitive to current employees who might worry about running into trouble with their current manager if they express interest in a new job inside the company. “There’s no obligation for an individual to tell their manager they’re applying for another role,” Bowles revealed. “They only have to tell their manager about the other role at the point when they’ve been offered it.

“So,” he added, “there are some cons with that as well. I think it depends on your culture, because if you’ve got a high-trust culture, ideally, you might want the individual to talk to the manager before [they are offered a job]. But at the moment, we’ve decided where we are is to actually maintain the confidentiality.”

Bowles recently lost a member of his own team to a new internal opportunity. “They’ve got the other job – brilliant, congratulations to them. I’m really pleased Nokia is going to retain them. I’m devastated that I lost [this person] for my team, but also, it frees up a space where you can develop someone else,” he said.

“It’s just getting to that mindset in the organisation… getting people to say you’re custodians of talent in your organisation, and you have an obligation to grow people, and you have an obligation to lose people to other teams within your organisation,” Bowles went on to say. “If you see managers that are trying to keep holding on, then you have to deal with it – for us, it’s almost a red flag on behaviour. So we deal with it.”

Aikins put forward the idea of a chief networking officer for organisations, to enable and encourage people to share their information with others internally. “It has to be front and centre, I think; the organisations that do that really thrive,” the Ireland-based Aikins said.

Country culture v D&I

Achieving real-life diversity & inclusion in the workplace involves more than gender and race, sometimes reflecting whole countries’ challenges to embrace new attitudes and approaches in the face of economic, political or other trends. From Amazon came examples of how the global retail giant is taking on D&I in different countries, where needs and realities can be very different. For instance, Middle Eastern countries are increasingly moving toward developing their national workforces, seeking to have greater percentages of their countrymen and women in jobs than before. Sourcing methods must be developed and refined to identify and reach out to people who left their particular Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country on government scholarships and might be willing to return to take up work. 

In Australia, where indigenous people and other population subsets may be wary about how they will be treated in a workplace, Amazon offers candidates the opportunity to speak with someone working at the company from a relevant affinity group for an hour or so “in a really frank and honest conversation”, said Liz Jamieson, who has recruitment operations responsibilities for Amazon in Australia and Singapore.

“It has abs

olutely no impact on the candidate’s outcome. Of course, it’s completely off the record.”

Amazon is also involved in a Reconciliation Action Plan, a formalised process between the First Nations, the traditional owners of land in Australia, and the organisations that work on the land. “It supports employment, it makes sure we have really important discussions about how we can support communities that we work in,” Jamieson said. As well as immersion in the emerging markets’ D&I issues and situations, Amazon has adopted neuropsychology tests – examining the relationship between the physical brain and behaviour – to help members of its workforce better understand themselves and their colleagues.

The Amazon talent acquisition team elements focused on emerging markets will have grown by from 50-70% this year.

Hospitality finds out what attracts recruits

Hospitality has been one of the sectors most affected by staff shortages in the global Covid pandemic as well as the so-called Great Resignation. To remedy the situation at its own 1,500 premises, pub and hotel operator Marston’s have brought on recruitment app Placed in an effort to understand what makes their target recruits tick and apply. In conversation with Placed founder Jennifer Johansson, Alice Barriball, Marston’s director of talent acquisition and employer brand, shared recent learnings with the audience. “Up to 80% of our workforce is probably under the age of 24, very transient, very high turnover as you’d expect. And the speed at which we need to know how these guys are looking for work and how they want to interact and the platforms on which they want to react is critical,” Barriball said. “We need to change the tone of voice that we use.”

Recalling her own early jobs, Barriball said: “I was fortunate to have a job. I felt lucky. I think there’s more of a ‘what’s in it for me’ culture now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a choice that’s available to all these guys.”

With eight seconds the average attention span of Generation Z constituents, employers have to grab attention fast, Johansson and Barriball agreed. “They want the recruitment process to be fast, they want it to be streamlined, and they will scrutinise your employer brand and your online presence in ways that you can actually control,” said Johansson.

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