Putting the talent in the Sky pipeline

As staying in becomes the new going out, Sky is benefiting from this trend. DeeDee Doke met the team responsible for attracting the talent to cope with this new demand

Clear BSkyB thinking: (l-r) Tarryn Fisher, Emma Mirrington, Trisha Dhillon

Clear BSkyB thinking: (l-r) Tarryn Fisher, Emma Mirrington, Trisha Dhillon

Set against the backdrop of a wintry economic landscape, this was good news indeed: word that British Sky Broadcasting was set to recruit for 1,000 new jobs delivered a needed blast of optimism on the employment front.

Ironically, the recession itself is partly responsible for the new jobs at the TV and communications provider. “What we found recently is that people are staying in more instead of going out in the evenings,” explains Emma Mirrington, BSkyB’s talent attraction manager for the last year. “Sky is the one luxury they’re allowing themselves, so we’ve actually seen an increase in customer numbers.”

Last month BSkyB reported a 6% increase in revenue to £2.6bn in the second half of 2008 and a 31% increase in operating profits to £385m. At the same time, the broadcaster revealed the creation of the 1,000 new jobs for installation engineers and contact centre workers. “We’ve already started recruiting those people,” Mirrington says. “So we’re well on the way to filling those positions.”

But Mirrington and her colleagues at Sky aren’t only working to fill immediate requirements. The business of talent resourcing operates on a continuum of activity, with a team of more than 40 people based at Sky headquarters in Osterley, South-West London, and elsewhere around the UK. A lot of their activity involves networking.

“At the moment, it’s a great opportunity to spend more time with our third-party relationships — getting to know them, understanding their business model,” says Mirrington, who works from Osterley. “We’re building relationships with our competitors — people who are making redundancies at the moment, making sure we know exactly who’s doing what, making sure that we have connections in place.

“If people are losing staff, then we can be there as soon as possible. And we’re really listening to our candidates, learning about their experiences and how we can adapt accordingly. I think now more than ever, candidate engagement is really important. And engagement with the external marketplace is key,” she says.

Mirrington heads up a talent attraction team that was created a year ago to “very much look at how we can
proactively go out to the marketplace for things like employer branding and how do we proactively source people to ensure we have a pipeline of candidates coming through”, she says. “So rather than reactive vacancy filling which we had done in the past, my function is very proactive — sort of candidate outreach, you might say.”

The University of Hull graduate reports to head of resourcing Alex Symon, and sits alongside three talent resourcing managers whose areas of responsibility are customer operations, corporate and broadcast, and technology. Reporting to Mirrington are consultants for employer brand, future talent resourcing, channels and graduate delivery. And reporting to the three talent resourcing managers are a number of account managers and resourcers.

“Sky is very individual in the way that we are currently performing in the market,” says Trishna Dhillon, the talent resourcing account manager for corporate (finance, HR and legal) requirements.

The company’s current market performance is “driving my talent pools even higher, and candidates are starting to approach us more than we have gone about approaching them”, she says with a real sense of pride.

Dhillon is no stranger to corporate resourcing needs, having begun her recruitment career in Michael Page International’s graduate scheme. Today at BSkyB, she works with an HR business manager and a colleague in talent development as a ‘triangular team’ to look at talent pipelining. “We’re constantly trying to open new pools and just talking to people. I have to have my ear to the ground,” she says. “We need to pipeline so that we’re acting ahead of the game. When someone does resign or a new role is created, that timeline to shortlist or fill is very short because we’re already ready and prepared.”

At the moment, the candidate pools are growing and often at the more experienced ends of the marketplace. Resourcer Tarryn Fisher reports that “people that are way more senior than an advertised role are actually applying”.

When Fisher, a former Spring Personnel recruiter, encounters an application from an overqualified candidate, she “always calls” them herself. Sometimes the person will be interviewed for that role and other times, the candidate is flowed into the pipeline for future, more senior vacancies.

One of the four pillars of BSkyB’s talent resourcing strategy is to explore and optimise all available talent pools. An area of critical interest to Mirrington and company at the moment is the 55+ population. “That’s a key strategy for us on the customer side of things moving forward, so we need to make sure our own employee population reflects that of our customer population,” Mirrington explains.

And there’s no room for a 55+ ghetto at Sky, where focus groups were recently held to understand what kinds of recruitment advertising employees in that age group believed would successfully attract their counterparts to work with them. “We want to make sure that every area of the business represents our customer group and the population in which we’re working in — it’s absolutely across the board,” Mirrington says.

“You know, at Sky, we want the best people to work with us. I work with really talented people, and I don’t think it matters what your background is, where you come from, how old you are — it’s your ability and your passion to do your job well. That’s the important thing.”

Whatever the role, any successful candidate for a job at Sky will have to have clearly demonstrated that they share the company’s four values: tuned in, irrepressible, inviting and fun. “Trying to select against ‘fun’ can be interesting,” Mirrington admits.

Asked how someone might reveal an ‘irrepressible’ tendency, she says: “Irrepressible is around resilience. So it may be that you get knocked back, but if you are a Sky person, you won’t necessarily take ‘no’ for an answer, and you will look at alternative ways around it — creative solutions to problems. It’s bouncing back when you have difficult times.”

Mirrington adds: “People within Sky care passionately about what they do. It’s about pushing boundaries, going above and beyond the call of duty — the belief that anything is possible.”

Believing anything is possible goes hand in hand with innovation and Mirrington looks to Sky’s technology teams to help her expand her own capability to innovate. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with them to see how they apply innovation within the workplace and to think about how we in recruitment can learn from them,” she says.

But cold, hard numbers and credible metrics are equally critical, and for Sky, “reporting, reporting, reporting” is “absolutely key”, Mirrington says. “So many organisations don’t know source of hire, cost of hire, time of hire,” she says in disbelief. “How can you renegotiate or leverage your supplier agreement? Reporting is key so we know exactly where our candidates are coming from and we can make decisions as a result of that. As an example, in March this year, there will be a lot of job boards that we won’t be renewing because they just have not been effective for us this year,” she reveals.

She declined to name them, but said they fell into both niche and generalist categories.

Meanwhile, Sky’s own online careers presence is receiving considerable attention from Mirrington and recruitment advertising partner SMRS. “We have our main careers site, workforsky.com, but what we wanted to do was to target niche areas,” Mirrington says. “We want to give people the opportunity to find out what it’s really like to work in, for example, a contact centre at Sky. SMRS is working on that — skycontactcentres.com. They’ve rolled it out for Leeds [home of a new Sky contact centre] and they’re working on other locations.”

Mirrington has the kind of high praise for SMRS that most suppliers can only dream of from a client. “I regard them as an extension of my team,” she says. “We have a really close relationship.”

In terms of the main workforsky.com site, the priority now is to increase its “magnetic” factor, or luring visitors back to the site again and again. “We’re looking at iPod downloads, web chats and we’re going to put more video on the site,” she says. “That’s quite a big project this year.”

Mirrington recognises that her organisation stands out as an icon of rude good health while others are faring less well. She doesn’t take Sky’s current situation for granted. “For me,” she says, “the challenge now is to make sure we have continuity in the recruitment marketplace, maintaining the reassurance that we’re a stable organisation, and that it is a great place to work. We’re not complacent.”

EMMA MIRRINGTON: A SNAPSHOT

Professional experience

Talent attraction manager, BSkyB: Jan 2008 -
European talent manager, Unilever: Nov 06 - Dec 07
Graduate recruitment manager, Unilever: Jul 04 - Nov 06
Recruitment manager, Unilever: Aug 03 - Jul 04
IT recruitment manager, Unilever: Oct 02 - Aug 03
Graduate recruiter (contract), Centrica: July-Oct 02
Career break: Jan-Jun 02
Senior recruitment consultant, Zebra Managed
Recruitment Services: Jul 2000 - Dec 01
Recruitment officer, Sitel UK: Aug 1998 - July 2000
Resourcer, Hays - City: Jun-Aug 1998

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