Some people just seem a natural fit for where they work. Matt Berry, resourcing director at energy giant Centrica, is one of those. “I am really passionate about energy,” he says as we chat in a conference room in Centrica’s impressive UK headquarters in Windsor.

Similarly, Berry has that ’can do’ attitude that you imagine the early pioneers of the gas industry would have loved. “It’s about approaching every challenge as if it is imminently do-able, even if the first thought is my goodness, this is going to be nearly impossible,” he says. With a list of challenges as long as a gas pipeline, including 400,000 candidate applications a year, and 4,000-5,000 hires, that attitude is not so much an optional extra as a necessity.

Berry’s responsibilities, which are primarily focused in the UK, include recruitment of all new joiners, graduates, interns, MBA and professional roles, as well as interim and contract staff. Not forgetting internal hires. “A pretty diverse spectrum of roles really,” he says, a little unnecessarily.

In recent years, Centrica has begun to throw off its rather stuffy, gas utility image, as it faces the challenges of a sector undergoing significant changes and one that is never far from the headlines.

Berry faces the challenge of being part of an industry that has come under increasing fire in recent years. The oil & gas industry may be vital for nearly everything we do as a society, but as BP found out last year, energy companies can easily become the whipping boys for ’greens’, and for politicians alike.

Spend any time in Berry’s company, however, and even the greenest and most sceptical critic is in danger of becoming convinced not least by his unbridled enthusiasm for the industry. Though, coming from a man who has spent his entire UK career in the sector, initially as a recruitment consultant, perhaps this should come as no surprise. Before this, Berry worked as an engineer for mining giant BHP Billiton in Australia.

So does the sometimes negative perception of the energy sector put people off applying to Centrica? “I am not sure whether it stops people applying,” Berry replies somewhat non-committal for once.

Perceptions are changing, he explains, and the fact that energy issues are so much more in the public domain makes it easier for him “to get other people excited” about a career in Centrica than a few years ago.

And in his experience, candidates are increasingly attracted to a company where the ’green end’ of its business solar panels, wind farms and designing new energy-efficient products is increasing “exponentially”.

Secret of my success: It’s being open-minded and looking for positive ways to find solutions that are beneficial to everyone. It’s just a matter of finding what the solution is. Taking the reverse attitude seems to stop you in your tracks

Berry says that presenting Centrica as an opportunity to work throughout the “whole life cycle of energy”, including the green end, is “extremely compelling” to graduates. And increasingly to experienced hires too, he adds.

As he points out, one of Centrica’s biggest drivers is to help its customers use less of its product. An increasingly common view, he says, is ’Yes, I could go to an FMCG company to develop a new toothpaste, but one sector in which I can genuinely make a difference to the way the world operates in is in energy’. “It is my job to sell that in a very positive way,” he admits.

Utility companies also face criticism for raising prices as soon as the price of oil & gas increase, while being strangely reluctant to pass on these reductions to their customers. Berry admits this is something that he has discussed with members of his team and with candidates. “It’s a challenge,” he says, and something you have to be aware of, but “it doesn’t have a massive effect on us.”

If Berry is a man working in a sector that he clearly loves, then his enthusiasm for his current job is no less marked. “I genuinely think of it as one of the most interesting jobs in the business. It’s all about people, a lot of it is about growth, and about making sure we have the talent to grow. That is really exciting,” he says.

And since joining Centrica in 2003, Berry has been involved in or led a series of measures to secure the talent that Centrica needs.
In a video on the Centrica website, he talks of the freedom he has in his role to try out new ideas, as long as he can demonstrate they add value to the business.

When asked for an example, he cites the switch from using third-party suppliers to in-house recruitment, particularly for professional roles. “At the time, four years ago, the general view in the business was that outsourcing was how to drive value,” he explains. But all that quickly changed after Berry and his team put forward “a simple and robust business case” that it could be done better and cheaper in-house.

Berry says third-party suppliers were doing the job asked of them, but that he had concerns. “You can’t differentiate yourself [from your competitors] in oil & gas,” he explains. “It’s completely about the people and the quality of the people that are driving the business, and to have no direct control over your access to that talent feels like a very large risk to the business.” Added to that “it was a significantly expensive way of procuring talent”.

Beginning with IT support, the model has quickly become a fixture, with up to 25 of Berry’s 100 staff working on this aspect of resourcing. The switch saves Centrica a cool £1.5m a quarter.

Internal hiring, also previously outsourced, has also been brought under Berry’s wing. With 2,500 internal hires a year, this represents a significant increase in workload in the last 12 months. This is still a work in progress, says Berry. Nevertheless, he points to a tripling of internal usage of the in-house team and a 50% improvement in hiring manager satisfaction. What was previously “viewed as a process” is now “a real relationship with a real recruiter”.

That said, there is more work to be done in improving the experience for internal candidates, whose satisfaction rating has risen by only 10%. “It’s about helping hiring managers understand that there is only so much that a recruitment team can do for them,” he says. The recruitment team should not replace the candidate/hiring manager, he adds.

The key to improving the candidate experience is to upscale hiring mangers, for example, on giving feedback, so they can build better relationships with candidates.

Berry’s team have also successfully adopted social media, with LinkedIn directly responsible for recruiting between 10 and 20 staff a year. Berry agrees that freedom to make changes like this has the potential to be a double-edged sword, particularly if things go wrong. However, he says the prevailing culture at Centrica is supportive: “If you make a genuine effort to do something to make the business more productive or a better experience for customers and it doesn’t work, the attitude is learn from it and move on.”

Matt Berry’s philosophy: When people are considering a career with us, the process they are really going through is building a relationship with out organisation that is what differentiates a good recruitment experience from a poor one

Another aspect of Centrica’s culture that influences Berry and his team is its emphasis on attitude and behaviour rather skills. “We hire for attitude and train for skills, we really do,” says Berry. That said, Centrica would expect the person running a power station to be a mechanical engineer, he says.

The ’hire for attitude train for skills’ mantra is most apparent in British Gas’s apprentice scheme. “A very significant amount of their assessment is for attitude, particularly towards customers, and their ability to communicate and engage with customers in a top-class way,” he explains. Assessment involves both psychometric testing, as well as an array of face-to-face customer and team-focused scenarios. “It is much easier to teach how to disconnect a boiler in a safe way than it is to be courteous and polite to customers.”

Away from the nitty gritty of assessment, Berry’s mind is never far from the ’big picture’, and how this impacts on the volume and quality of talent. Berry has particular concerns about “basic numeracy and general communication skills” among graduates. He believes this comes in part from many students receiving a purely academic experience, and not having an opportunity to deploy those technical skills in a real-life work scenario.

“We need to put our money where our mouth is, and provide those real life experiences,” he adds. Centrica offers students a variety of ways to get practical experience, ranging from engineering projects, to providing analytical support to its ’high potentials’.

Berry’s team is also working with a number of universities, who want to build employability skills into their degrees. Asked whether this is an appropriate role for a recruiter, Berry responds that while it shouldn’t all be down to employers, “we have a responsibility to help articulate what we are looking for and what we need”.

Centrica is also working with sector skills councils to develop the new green apprenticeship, due to come on stream next year. “It’s about creating new channels into the business that are not via higher education,” says Berry.

At this stage, you can imagine Berry lapsing into the vernacular and describing these myriad challenges as ’a big ask’. But for a man versed in the energy industry, securing a talent pipeline seems perfectly appropriate.