Transforming Talent Acquisition with Virgin Media O2
Sharron O'Donnell and Carrie Small from Virgin Media O2 discuss the integration of advanced technology in talent acquisition. They highlight the merger's impact on recruitment strategies, the importance of a customizable tech stack, and balancing automation with personal engagement. Learn about their approach to achieving stakeholder buy-in and the future of digital talent acquisition.
In today's episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we are joined by Sharron O'Donnell, Head of Talent Acquisition, and Carrie Small, Talent Acquisition Lead at Virgin Media O2.
Sharron and Carrie delve into the transformative journey of integrating advanced technology into Virgin Media O2's talent acquisition processes. They share insights on how their team navigated the challenges of merging two major brands and the critical role of technology in driving recruitment efficiency and enhancing the candidate experience.
🎓 In this episode, Sharron and Carrie discuss:
The impact of the Virgin Media and O2 merger on their talent acquisition strategy
The strategic importance of investing in a customizable and agile tech stack
Practical steps for achieving stakeholder buy-in and embedding new technologies within the team
Balancing automation with personal engagement to attract and retain top talent
The future of talent acquisition in an increasingly digital world
Create Digital Experiences With AI-Enabled Recruiting Automation
For organizations undergoing HR transformations, legacy recruiting automation does not support the marketing-based practices of modern talent acquisition or facilitate agility in a context where needs change rapidly. As such, many HR leaders are looking to implement recruiting automation that goes beyond cost reduction and supports agility and innovation.
Download this e-book to learn more about:
● How automation can enhance digital recruiting service delivery, improving hiring outcomes.
● The role of configurable workflows in ensuring adaptability and compliance.
● How portal apps drive efficiency by providing a user experience tailored to the needs of each stakeholder.
● The critical capabilities a modern career site should support to maximize conversion, including content management automation.
● How AI can boost recruiting automation through predictions.
● Key considerations to keep in mind when selecting a recruiting system vendor.
Carrie Small 0:00
A strange one as well for me, because on the one hand, we're talking about tools and technology, but it doesn't take away the human interaction of our own society, you can use AI to find great talent, you know, we can automate that. So literally, you could probably go through you know, a big part of our recruiting process without even having any human contact with anyone because the the tool, your application, all the automation is built and started, in many ways handles that you can never really replace that human experience.
Chris Rainey 0:32
Sharon Carrie, welcome to the show. How are you both?
Sharron O'Donnell 0:35
Good. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, really? Looking forward to spending some time with you today.
Chris Rainey 0:40
Nice. You got to be kind to me now, because I'm outnumbered today. All right. Let me know. Before we jump in, let's give on a quick intro, sort of your background, your experience and sort of the journey to where we are today. Carrie, you want to kick us off?
Carrie Small 0:58
Yes, thank you. So I am Carrie Small 20 years old of experience been working at VMO2 for the last couple of years part of Sharron's leadership team. I love all things TA or things recruitment related, particularly passionate about tools and systems. And my role really is about enabling the recruiters to do a great job, give a great experience to candidates or hiring managers, and really find the best talent there. BMAT. Nice.
Chris Rainey 1:30
After 20 years, you still got a smile on your face. That's good. Always. That's a good sign. Sharon. Yeah.
Sharron O'Donnell 1:38
Hi, Sharron O'Donnell, similar to carry on. I've had quite a few years in recruitment, straight talent acquisition. And I'm very lucky to have Carrie on my team as well. And I guess for me, I spent a long time in recruitment, aren't prepared to change it now. I love the the opportunities that it provides. But I'm particularly passionate about the transformation of talent acquisition, and how would it how it has evolved, and continues to evolve with the advent of new technologies and things like that. So yeah, great.
Chris Rainey 2:13
So and what are transformation, it has been right. From when I started to where we are now it's almost unrecognisable and I'm sure for both. For both of you, I'm sure you've posted constantly had to upskill and rescale, yourselves and the team to keep up because it is such a fast pace of change. And that really is going to be the sort of overall essence of our conversation today. So talk about the strategy and transformation journey you've both been on. Let's start with the why. What was the one for the journey? And then we can kind of jump into it a little bit more?
Sharron O'Donnell 2:46
Yeah, I'll um, I'll take that one, Chris. So I joined Virgin Media, the organisation was just over nine or 10 years ago. And we've touched on the fact that recruitment, talent acquisition has changed. And yes, it certainly changed in that time. But the real catalyst for this transformation for us was the joint venture between two companies, which was Virgin Media and OTT telecom about and the organisation came together and got married three years ago, will be on the first of June. And I was appointed six months prior to that and to role leading the entire acquisition team for link for the new harmonise company. And this was really the opportunity to it's a white paper moment, you know, when you can really set the standard of what you want for the future. And looking ahead at how recruitment is evolving. And of course, at that time, we were Postback sets in a pandemic, where I think everybody's heard the war for talent, the great resignation, and organisation we were really setting our stall out for what the future of our company would look like. He saw me there sorry, I just I don't know how no good. So this was a great opportunity for us to to really look forward instead of working in the moment it was around what do we want to do over the next three years and create something really special? Yeah, that was the catalyst for our transformation. We are two years into our journey. This is we're going into our third year now where we're really starting to see the benefits and the results that are coming out of that transformation.
Chris Rainey 4:28
Amazing. I wanted to add Carrie
Carrie Small 4:32
No, no.
Chris Rainey 4:37
So is it safe to say that the honeymoon is officially over
Carrie Small 4:45
the no honeymoon period but I think my parents I mean a long term transformation far right. So we like that call journey but it's still constantly evolving and there's a lot of stuff going on. So it's it's busy. It's a lot but it's a super exciting time.
Chris Rainey 5:01
Yeah, that's one thing. Well, firstly, it's an exciting opportunity, like you said, you know, most, most leaders only get this maybe once in their career, where they have the opportunity to come in and really build something from the ground up. So I'm sure I'm sure that's kind of what's kept you both engaged and excited. And energised throughout that ride, very rare, especially with two large organisations coming together with two
Sharron O'Donnell 5:25
very powerful brands. Yeah, you know, when you're talking about a virgin under no two brand, very much loved customer brands that coming together, and you've got a standard, you've got an expectation of what your customers expect from that. So that's the one thing when we actually set out the roadmap for that three years, and it wasn't three years transformation. Because you know, these things don't happen overnight. When you're talking about technology, dependencies, and harmonisation of teams integrations. It's a really big piece of work. Yeah. So yeah, it was really exciting for us. And like you say, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity, right. So bearing in mind, you know, talents. And I, I encourage everyone to think about this, the company is only as good as the people are employees. And if you want best time, and you want to be the best company, you've got to attract and engage with the best talent and to do that you've got to be the best that you can be. So that was Burroughs really important is how do we attract and engage and give great talent, a really great experience to join our company?
Chris Rainey 6:34
Yeah, love that. So obviously, a huge, huge amount of work to do. Could you walk us through how you, you planned it? And where do you start? What does that look like? We'll go through that?
Sharron O'Donnell 6:47
Well, yeah, that's an absolute, you know, obviously, I really, really struggled with you. On that one question. The visionary part of it and the elements that component parts of the transformation, were actually very, three, quite easy to define. I didn't find that particularly difficult, or what I probably hadn't realised as the appreciation of just how difficult some of the component parts might be. But we can ask that as a standard. And one of the the real catalyst is the technology that we use, right. And my previous years, I've taught to me that working within a core HCM tool, which many organisations do, right, and I'm not going to sit here and say, they don't work because they do. But if you really want to lead the way on talent, and be agile, and engage top talent, and really personalise your journey, and give you the recruitment team, the best tools that they can to be the best versions of themselves, you never gonna get that in HCM. And there are a number of those versions out there. And having gone through two transformations with core HCM, I knew for me that a one size fits all was just not going to want to work when we're hiring 6000 people a year, very different role types, from stores staff to Google Cloud architects and data machine learning individuals, you have to personalise that, you're never going to be able to do that. So that for me was always going to be our number one priority is that we could give the talent acquisition team the tools that they needed with the emerging market, I mean, that market is worthwhile 36 billion a year in talent acquisition technology. So we wanted to make sure that we've got the right tools. So our strategy was always around one platform. And we use that as our springboard. And rather than having multiple different systems, multiple different tools, it's all connected in our palm acquisition ecosystem. So our go to market approach, our brand occurs marketplace, everything was to hang on the back of the technology that we that we use. And that for me always had to be something that was future focused as well, that could adapt. And that could evolve that we'd have the technology and the capabilities to be able to evolve in the future, to keep us ahead because it moves such a pace as we all know, technology does, that it can be it can be obsolete within 12 to 18 months. And one of the things I didn't want is a white elephant in the room. I've seen those before. And actually you could kind of go out of them or move past them. I needed something that was going to take us into the future. So yeah, we set out our thought and then had to go knock on the door and ask for investment. Right. And that is never an easy conversation. But actually, those, you know, I'm very, very pleased that our Chief Digital Officer, our chief people officer, and our Chief Information Officer, they all kind of got that if you want the best you've got to invest the investment, I did have to knock on a lot of doors. And I had to explain to technologists that our HCM tool the proposed HCM that we were going to use would not be fit for purpose for our talent acquisition journey. Yes,
Chris Rainey 9:58
the reaction right right. is what why do we need to spend more money? We can already do all of that in our current tool, right? You're fighting? How did you? How did you overcome that?
Sharron O'Donnell 10:08
A lot of presentations, the slide deck. And a lot of conversations with a lot of people. And you know what, it's, there was a battle. So there were some challenges. And I'm going to use that because there were some really tough conversations to be had. We'd invested millions of pounds in HCM. So we had the HC Angelo's, we can do all of this. But actually, when it came to it, and I gave them the opportunity to showcase what they could do, that actually is where they couldn't do it. And our chief digital officer, who very much at the time, obviously, very front facing very future focused, actually totally got it. And that was, that was huge. But it was a lot of money. You know, when you're talking about spending in excess of a million pound on technology for talent acquisition, a lot of people often say, oh, yeah, it's time acquisition, what the heck. But I was very fortunate that our senior leadership team kind of got that. And they saw the vision and understood why talent is really important, though, after a lot of conversations, and quite a few challenging battles. Yeah, they signed off again, cash, right. So the C, work good with that. We were in a position to start a journey to you on that, but I think that's the one piece of advice that I would give to anybody. If you're really serious about having the best talent in your company, enable your talent acquisition team to be the very best versions of themselves and don't bore them with using technology that is not fit for purpose, and that cannot take you into the future. Because you will always be behind the curve. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 11:44
no, I love that. And it's constantly, as you can imagine, several 100 of these episodes, and it's a reoccurring theme. That investment, what did you learn along that journey, you could share in terms of how to best approach leaders, bring them on board? You know, that that in itself is such an underrated skill that many HR leaders don't know, resourcing leaders don't learn until the moment to realise? Yeah, I
Sharron O'Donnell 12:12
think there's a number of there's a number of things that don't address to me that people actually don't know. You'd be surprised at how many people don't don't kind of understand or know the difference between the technologies. But also don't underestimate the fact that there may not be actually too interested in it, actually, either. But I think things that I learned from most of that is, it's always about the benefit, what's in it, what's in it for me, what's in it for the business, but it's always about the benefit. And be that you can be more agile, how you can be faster, how you can save time for the business, how you can save money for the business. And keep repeating that. And get as many stakeholders as you can on board with this journey. And then don't underestimate how long it will take as well. That's the other thing I would actually say. It's not something that can happen quickly. Yeah. And there's a little bit of divide and conquer in there. You know, you might need 10 people to come to the table to make this decision. But the one to ones to have that time with them to explain those benefits and get them on board individually. It's much harder, then in a collective environment, or objections. Maybe I'm just giving away a little bit too much at that point. But yeah, of course, definitely some of the things that I would, I wouldn't recommend.
Chris Rainey 13:31
And also you have to understand, convey what it means for them individually. What this means for you, Chris, don't get that beta don't make that connection. They may actually understand what it means for the business. I kind of find that bit they get first. Normally they don't understand what does it mean for me? Why am I doing this? As well, Sharon, what about you? Carrie, sorry, Carrie. I knew I knew I was gonna do it once. She shouldn't be doing that. It was sorry. Yeah.
Carrie Small 14:02
I think I'm, I mean, I, I started after this journey with Sharon had done a lot, a lot of the hard work and a lot of the graft, right. So when I when I came in, and I started the organisation, we literally went live with the new HCM tool. And then we had the plan to put in place the new recruiting system by July. And that was ultimately a hard stop because we had two legacy recruiting systems, one that was going to be decommissioned. We need to bring the two teams together. So I kind of came on board from the kind of that say that delivery perspective piece. But I think in terms of you know, my a lot of my day to day stuff is about embedding it with the teams and with the recruiters. So that's been I think a lot about hard graft in terms of, as you said, What's the benefit? What's in it for me? Why do I need to change the way that I'm working? Why should I trust in automation? Why should I trust in technology? Why can't I still send my CV to the hiring manager via email. That's what they like, you know, a lot of that kind of gatekeeping stuff, and they've a lot of conversations. And it's a change journey, something to Sharon's point. It's a lot about, you know, selling the why, but it's about it's about the change base as well, and what's in it for me. So we're still I think we're still on that journey. But we just shift there. We shouldn't stakeholders, I think, ultimately from a senior level to the people that are doing their the day to day stuff. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 15:28
But you have to realise that this is not like, a end date. We're all doing this project. No, I think needs to change a word is ongoing. Right. And it's constantly iterating you're learning along the way? Was there also an element of fear maybe from the team? You know, when a new a new technology comes along? Yeah,
Carrie Small 15:47
yeah. And let's be honest, our recruiters are absolutely brilliant, right? So there were brilliant bunch of people that heart, their heart is always in the right place with everything they do. And they're in that kind of juxtaposition where they, they want to serve the needs of the business, their hiring managers want to do work by the candidates and all the other kinds of pressure that they're under. I think, you know, it's been a difficult time for them, because, you know, they've literally, you come in III think recruitment is a to be, you know, your patch, you know, what you're doing, you know, your business area, the skills you're recruiting for. And then in many ways, the blankets pulled up at, you know, the rug pulled out from underneath you. So you've got a completely new way of working new tools, new systems. But I think, I think they're doing I think they're doing really well with it overall. But it's been it's been a tough time. You know, it's it's not been, it's not been easy that it's about embracing the new and almost like taking that kind of leap of confidence as well and a leap of faith and thinking, right, I'm just gonna jump in and try it. And we're still we're still doing that, literally, to this day, aren't we found there's still a lot of
Sharron O'Donnell 16:51
Yeah, and we're very early days in our, in our journey from when we deployed, there were eight months, eight months. And the approach that we took, we really did a phase one, phase two, and beyond for continuous improvement. So yeah, there were some of the learnings that we took from from that, as well. But overall, I think, the mere fact we've had half a million applications in that time, we've hired 4000 people. It's worked for us.
Carrie Small 17:28
You don't do these things in isolation, we've had a massive team kind of supporting us all the way through the build as well. And I think prepared and I literally day one, we were like, we got our first application. And I think it was a real like a high five moment. Yeah. And there was a part we thought, oh, great, I can crack on with my day job now, whatever that is, but actually, Winslow in that kind of buying, you know, build and continuous improvement mode and stuff, which actually, I think is just a brilliant opportunity as well to, you know, never, never rest still carry on making it might have been a source of fun, actually, strangely,
Chris Rainey 18:05
you mentioned in the beginning, the reason for the transformation is to ensure that you're constantly evolving, innovating. And obviously, of course, you have that war for talent that you're all competing for. What is this new technology? What benefits? Is it brought both to the candidate experience? And what benefits is it brought to your actual recruiting team that you've now seen come to life? Yeah.
Sharron O'Donnell 18:27
Oh, you want me to make a song man answered? Maybe you can be on some of that. I think you know, from for me, Chris, the ease of being able to do your job, using the technology and leveraging things such as G AI or AI to help things move faster, and to be able to get to the results quicker. And then some of the things that we've already seen huge benefit, personalization of the automation, taking some of the heavy lifting, and lots of really
Chris Rainey 19:02
specific example of how it shows up. Yeah, so
Sharron O'Donnell 19:07
I'm, I'm going to use the AI that were looking at where we can do person to person or job to job matching. So we have a CRM within there which most companies have go out no problem current communities, surface talent easily LinkedIn connect with our ATS tool there. So you can see the the talent that you've got on LinkedIn, whether it's in your Yeah, oh, really kind of kind of stuff in there. Where we've got jobs with skills, you can ask the system to actually surface the other jobs that are actually got the same skills across the organisation. So we got 1000 jobs on there, okay. It's not going to start wading through all of that or searching. But actually, you can very, very quickly ask it to surface the jobs that actually match that job. And then you surface the candidates that actually match that profile straightaway. So what you've got is silver medalist seal, but it is not within that talent pool. And then you can Actually looking your database and actually your your CRM and actually started talent that matches that. So you've already got a shortlist there, we're not we're Long gone are the days where we're posting them on pricing. I referenced that a lot is the other part of the transformation, right, you know, post a job on a job board and pray to God that the right person actually applies though. No, no animal that might take a week, 10 days. This way, you can actually have a shortlist on the same day, though you're in a particular business pressure, you've got someone who's leaving your business, by the time you've got that roll approved, and we're ready to go. People want to move fast in today's market, right? So if you're able to then say it, Mr. Manager, let's have a look at four or five of these profiles, whilst you're actually having a conversation with them, because you've been able to do that search. That's a game changer, right? The pace at which you can move, being able to rapidly find talents. As a starting point, that's the difference between using a very bespoke ATS that's built for your needs versus a core HCM tool that just may not quite ever be able to do that. That's about being able to be fast and agile and rapid in this business, and not have to go out and post a job on a job I found protocol developer. And that's one example. I think, Karen, you can also build on that currently with the lucky searching for candidate side of it.
Carrie Small 21:23
Absolutely. So they're all a lot of our recruiters to come from an agency background. So they used to kind of, they're used to working with a database and having a, you know, a group of candidates and their CRM that Sharon mentioned. So that's really about building talent communities, but kind of take a step back from that, I think one of the biggest shift that we've been able to explain to the team in literally around their ways of working right, so let's go back, let's say a year ago, or something like that, without really realising, you know, they're working in a way that's really really admin heavy, isolated to spending a lot of time on administration tasks, their universe, they're sitting there, they're reviewing see things, and you can literally spend a whole day writing a job advert posting the job calling some candidate adding a shortlist, etcetera. And, you know, in many ways, you still you still get to the end result, right, you still ultimately you put that, you know, new candidate, wherever that would be make hire, etc, you close down the job, you move on to the next one. And I think kind of what the technology has enabled us to do is really set the shift with recruiters as well. And that's much more around, you know, and we've done it kind of stage by stage. So we've not gone on really heavy handed and said, right, that's it, we're transforming the way that we work. But what we have done over the last kind of six months or so we should be enabled by the system is to be able to take away some of the administration tasks, so they can really concentrate on the business partnering, you know, the the really strategic course with their business, you know, active sourcing, building these talent communities, using the features like AI, stepping back from arranging, manual interviews, all that kind of stuff. We've got a feature within our portal, which essentially allows the candidate but there's an interview slot, really nice seamless journey from the candidate, they can see five slots that have been paired with them in conjunction with the hiring manager, a couple of clicks for the recruiter, then the candidate can put themselves in all the interview confirmation, everything's automated. And I think just the right one of the massive wins has been taken from those admin tasks away from the team, enabling them to concentrate on the more exciting parts of their job. So having the conversations with the talent speaking to the business, etc. I think that has been kind of one of the that's probably been one of the biggest shifts, I think, but we're still on that journey as well, right? Because it is, you know, it's hard you got to buy into it. I think the recruiters have to kind of buy into it from heart and mind perspective. But then the bottom line impact for businesses, we serve as a talent quicker than business have had a better experience to candidates had a better experience. And you kind of think, you know, we're in this market and we're really in this kind of war for talent space. I don't know about you, but if I was looking for a new job, I'm probably more than likely could we engage more with the company that has given me a great recruiting experience where I've had some really meaningful conversations I've progressed really quickly magnification, and that may be the company that I'm gonna go for more than you know, any other organisation where the recruiting process takes months
Sharron O'Donnell 24:23
for example that's been a big one that's been a big one.
Chris Rainey 24:29
And that you can own a company that comes back to them quickly.
Carrie Small 24:33
Sounds Around and gives feedback as well. You know, we know that doesn't happen all the time. So for
Chris Rainey 24:41
me it hardly ever right now it's kind of you both touched on so many things there. Firstly, I the first thing that came to mind is also this shift to becoming a Squarespace organisation that you kind of mentioned earlier, which is really really is the future and it's important, and it also allows you to tap into your internal talent, right, like you mentioned, that you sometimes don't even know exists, because they may not. They may not be, you know, there may be in a different function, but those skills are fully transferable, right. And the fact that we'll be able to match that both internally, externally for the, for the integration with LinkedIn, talent solutions, that's really exciting. And also allows you to nurture that talent internally retain that talent, right, because they feel empowered to take charge of their own career. So there's so many benefits from from that perspective. And I think you mentioned a couple of things about your freeing up recruiters time, but they may sound like small things. But something like as simple as the calendar feature is hours and hours and hours of work, right that they used to have to manually do to set up those, I shall not create this time you create that time. I remember doing that. And it's just a lot of time that it takes to be able to do that. And again, that candidate experience now it's such a differentiator to have. Yeah,
Sharron O'Donnell 26:01
I did on the candidate experience. So I'll come back to on the skills based on just that. But the candidate experience so we also have integrated within our pulling suite is our NPS, again, not unusual. But we have seen a marked increase in candidate NPS and Internal Manager NPS in terms of response times speed of response, that has definitely improved. And communication, we are already seeing we've really benchmark results on candidate almost stupid, you know, surprised they exceeded my expectation, our expectation hasn't carry in terms of the response that we're getting. But we also get real time we get real time feedback from candidates in the moment, every day, they're able to tell us if we need to adjust something or something isn't quite right, or say interview scheduling, automated, they can't find a slot, or there's a theme coming out we can adjust in real time. And when we've got volume recruitment, which we've got a sizable volume estate, we need to be super fast, particularly in our retail stores, of which we've got over 400 retail stores across the UK. And any retailer will know if you can't recruit, you can't open those stores. Right. And that is really tough in that marketplace. Certainly, obviously, we know post Brexit. And there's been some implications on some of the the workers that certainly within a demographic profile, it's really tough, that you've got to be fast, you've got to be quick to be able to access that talent. And we've definitely been able to improve response times through using the the automation that we've got within the tool. But let me just come back to the you talked about the interesting point on skills base. I think definitely there's a huge shift, right. And we started that journey over a year ago. In fact, we started the conversation on skills based 1218 months ago, certainly from a talent acquisition. And we how do we surface the skills? And how do we evaluate validates and assess those skills, and that's part of our wider transformation is within one or the other features that we will have access to very soon with our internal talent marketplace, which actually were our internal talent and create their own internal talent profile. And they can add on their skills, skills, adjacency, within there, from the big skills ontology, are never able to create this. And actually what that will give our power and position team is the ability. So when we've got the skills profile of the vacancy, we can really look at eternal talents. As a first and foremost, one of the key drivers for retention, we know is development opportunities. So it's not always, it's not always vertical, it can be lateral as well. But short term gain, because in the comments where we've got those opportunity, we can proactively go out and identify name talent that we've got within the business, say, Hey, here's a lunch, you've got this, rather than them having to sign up for skills alert for job notification, we can actually nudge those. And that's all part of the longer term thinking for us in how we also support the business to retain best talents. Because we can build that skills product is part of our journey throughout is the third year of our transformation journeys. Is that part of it, and we're just enabling the technology element of that now this year, so yeah, really exciting. doesn't get boring.
Chris Rainey 29:36
There's always something new, I think it's, I think it's a must have every company I think every company's gonna have to have a tonne of marketplace internally, especially also in order to be an agile business and move quickly and bring those different skills together or risk different projects or like you might mention a gig bringing people from a gig economy in you're gonna have to think we know we're no longer going to see functions. We're really gonna, that's gonna sort of the hierarchies Then the functions is going to start to disappear. And it's going to be for all focus on skills based and project based work. And you're going to have in order at a large organisation, Laurel to move quickly, you're gonna have to move that way. So I was so glad to hear that you're going along that journey. And as you said, it really is, it makes your employees feel empowered, and in charge of their career. In my day, when I first started, you know, you're just waiting for that tap on your shoulder for your promotion, right? Like, you never really feel like you're in control of it. And the only reason I left my last company after 10 years is I felt like there was no room for growth, and I couldn't see any opportunity. So if I had a company where I had a talent marketplace, and I could see offer opportunities to me, I probably you may not have left. And if you speak to most companies, the ones that retain comfort people for long, they have something like that in place, wherever it's really tall, or something they're built in companies like Unilever, you let the average person in Unilever has been like 15 years. So it's a long time we've had multiple careers in that same organisation. Yeah.
Sharron O'Donnell 30:59
That's the key, isn't it, being able to have multiple careers, and different opportunities, keep you engaged, keep you interested. And I think that's where talent acquisition, as a team can really champion that, that strategy and enable that to happen in a business. And it's partly why Burroughs having that agility within our technology to enable that to happen, is also part of the reason in the business case, right? Because it's not going to happen unless you've got a way to make that happen. You can't just rely on people to think that, hey, you know, I'm going to do this, you've got to actually know them put some thought behind how that happens.
Chris Rainey 31:33
Yeah, talking about a business case, you mentioned earlier about the traditional, you know, I was gonna say something really rude. They're throwing eggs at the wall and getting nothing back. Let's just say that. From in terms of the posting the job to job boards and stuff like that. Have you calculated the savings on that? Have you ever? Do you have any numbers you could throw out there in terms of, because I'm sure the business has a million pound.
Sharron O'Donnell 32:00
Which actually, when you think about not spending million pound on something that actually just generates a lot of applications, but it doesn't actually produce a lot of output? Wow. Yeah, it's huge. We talking big numbers here on huge, huge numbers. So that million pound is actually what it costs to buy an implement this, this technology, right. So that's me was also a driver. And you know, it's not always about, it's always about the money, but I still like to spend a million pounds, but I'd like to invest it in a better way. In a in a better way, working with different technology. But for the business, of course, yes, of course, they, they want it, they want to save the money. But posting on job boards, they're absolutely a place for job boards, no two ways about that 100% They're all with it. But to have it as a singular option or outside of a LinkedIn maybe was never going to work for that size. So yes, there will always be a place where we will continue to work with them. But it won't be the go to approach for us to post a job advert spend hundreds of 1000s of pounds doing that. And then just as I say, Pray that the right person apply, you can't you can't work like that in this evolving technology landscape where the skills, those individuals with those types of skills do not sit on job boards looking for jobs.
Chris Rainey 33:28
It's kind of it's kind of laughable, isn't it? In that sense? Like yes, not gonna work anymore. Remember, random question, and the last me Yes, but this is an overview. How's it make you feel to see how far the professional and your function have come?
Sharron O'Donnell 33:45
Well, yeah. Carry on. When I started in recruitment, its mass markedly changed. But I think our profession, we still got some way to go to the talent acquisition to be really recognised as a strategic partner to the business. I think there's still work to be done in that. But I think of them as an evolving function of future acquisitions, really exciting. What we're able to do the broad scope of the work that we do, it changes a company, it can actually influence the outcomes of business performance, is having a really great ta function. That might be anyway, I rather passionate about it, as you can probably tell, but Carrie, you might have a different view, I'm sure you don't
Carrie Small 34:30
know it's funny because you often get asked a question or was, you know, do you want to go into a bit more of an HR generalist role? Do you see that as a, you know, your next step, etcetera. And I think, you know, Sharon and I are on the same page on this thing that we're kind of to licence visit work. So I don't see kind of a big a big change in that respect. But, you know, there's many different parts of being in the TA industry, right. So, absolutely, you know, the people that are really smashing it, you know, that are in the agency space. And after seeing some great talent, we, you know, we do have some strategic partnership with our agencies, we've got a really low, you know, agency cost per hire, which is brilliant, because the team are, you know, often X agency workers themselves, is that where they've come every in house. But I think the thing for me is that you instantly from my personal perspective, so I worked as a headhunter, I worked in house kind of living recruitment, I came up through the recruitment manager role into bit more strategic role. And I think you almost find yourself in a space where you just really like transformation. So all of those roles, there's still a place for all of those skills in anyone's journey. But I think, you know, the industry is changing so much, and I think it's about shattered, it's about having that seat at the table, right? So you can probably still go out and do your role and be and be a decent recruiter, you're posting the job of screening CVS, you know, there's there's all there is a place for that, ultimately. But I think it's the more strategic part of the role now, there's growing more. And these tools, systems, things like you know, LinkedIn, etc, is about enabling you to do that and have this when a student conversations. So, you know, a lot of the work that we're doing with our team at the moment is, okay, you know, you're you're going to have a, an initial briefing with the hiring manager. So, you know, we're going to kind of bring forward some really strategic questions to ask about hiring manager briefing, literally, that's the time when you build that relationship, you cement what the next steps are, you understand, you know, what's, what's the true strategic nature of the role, how you can recruit for it. And that's when you're, you know, you're really talking about what's happening in the market, and what competitors are hiring, and what talents moving and, you know, you might challenge a, you know, a decision around, you know, what's what's, what's the makeup of your team? Like? How can we, you know, find more diverse talent, for example, from different backgrounds, or whatever that looks like. And it's really about enabling the team to have those strategic conversations. And I think, if anyone's in ta not having those conversations, and adding that value to the business, I think that's the next step that will, we'll be getting into having, you know, really those kind of conversations also. But you know, it's a strange one as well for me, because on the one hand, we're talking about tools and technology, but it doesn't take away the human interaction of our roles as well. So you can use AI to find great talent, you know, we can automate that. So literally, you could probably go through a you know, big part of our recruiting process without even having any human contact with anyone, because the, the tool, your application, all the automations built into that, in many ways handles that. But you can never really replace that that human experience and the candidate experience, the manager experience, etc. And the technologies never really take away from that. But that's a massive part of the, of what we're trying to do with the team. And I think, you know, as a really decent recruiter, you need to understand the business strategy, or to be able to sell that to anyone that's joining your company, or people that are moving internally, it's actually what's in it for them. But you'll use the technology as your friend, right? Don't be afraid of somebody that comes through AI, don't be afraid to say, I'm getting loads of applications, you know, what I this role, someone has to speak French for this role. So I'm gonna put a question is the application profile that asked if they speak French, and you know, what, if they don't, I'm going to, you know, automate and remove and remove them out of the process. So it's kind of trusting that technology as well. But remaining kind of keeping that the human aspect of your job. And actually, for me, that's the part that I really like. So it's
Chris Rainey 38:39
interesting, because the, the assumption is, is going to replace with technology, but what we're finding is actually it's freeing your team up to have more human conversations. Yeah, right. You
Carrie Small 38:54
can do that. Yeah. So
Chris Rainey 38:56
it's the opposite, right? It's like it was oh, we're gonna replace by I know, you're actually you're actually being freed up to have more meaningful conversations with candidates. It's actually kind of reversed. The opposite, right? The initial knee jerk reaction is that but for most recruiters, I'm speaking SUTA. utilising these tools, they're loving it, like once they finally kind of get to grips with it. They're like, wow, okay, she expend time, having this conversation with the business having conversation with the candidates thinking more strategically. And they're kind of almost found, like a second wave of energy in their career, or moments that I'm seeing from people like because a lot of my friends have been working in recruitment for 20 years plus, and this is like a game changer. For them. They're like I'm reenergized. Again, actually, I'm excited again, as well. So would you I know, you're still on the journey, both of you, as you sort of start to wrap up, you know, having I know, there's probably a long way to go. There's a lot more things you already clear. What advice would you give to others to starting a similar journey? You know, they're going to be going through this journey. On the way, looking back, maybe anything you would have done differently. advice you could give to them as they start to reimagine, and transform in a similar way to you.
Sharron O'Donnell 40:12
Really great question, what advice would you give to anyone, um, I think be realistic on the timescales. Be really clear on what it is that you want to achieve. And just test that all the products that you're considering, will be able to deliver that point. And I think ask for advice. And don't, don't be afraid to go and network and talk to people about their experiences, working with the different suppliers or working with the different technologies, go and talk to other customers that are using it. And get firsthand. This is how we did it. That was really valuable. And we did that, you know, we've very thankful I've got a wonderful network, I was able to reach out to talk to people got some views and thoughts on there. And the actual suppliers, and providers should be able to also help you with that, as well. If they're good, they will
Chris Rainey 41:11
be excited to stay should it take good, they should be very excited for you to ask your peers, right. They're the ones living and breathing it like you get their advice and guidance and
Carrie Small 41:22
everything to go. Yeah,
I just think for me, it's about it's about bringing the right people to the table at the right point in time and almost road testing it right. So you're building a hiring manager portal, where the hiring manager is going to do whatever recruiting tasks, bring them in, get get some feedback, you know, have people there that feel part of it, because then when you come to go live, it just helped massively from adoption perspective. And don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to train the team and embed that change with the team, you know, to our teams call where they get a demo, and there's a slide deck isn't going to cut it. It's actually probably the, you know, you can build some it's amazing, but if people aren't going to use it, because you just don't trust it. Or, you know, they'll tell you Yeah, I'm fine. I know what I'm doing. But actually, it's that kind of real one on one learning by doing and building enough time into that as well. Because you can have the most fantastic tool, but you know, it's the it's getting it really embedded in the team that is probably there that really realises the benefit. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 42:30
almost need to build on that.
Sharron O'Donnell 42:31
There's a couple, we've got really early adopters that when you were talking upfront, wonderful, go live, they're absolutely brilliant. And then there's some reputations that weren't, you know, from some people, and I think it's the quiet ones actually, though. Yeah, they're the ones that are the ones that say, Yeah, I'm okay. But when actually they do need more support. So not everybody learns in the same way. Yeah, that was the I don't, that's the other thing that we've taken from this, as well as it carry different styles of learning. And in this, you know, obviously COVID, or post COVID environment where people are working far more remotely learning. And scaling your team, when everybody's remote is actually a lot harder to create opportunities to come together, wherever you can when you're going through this transformation journeys, particularly around technology, so that you can capture those individuals, and you can show and tell them more. And you can actually peer to peer learning, as well that I've one of the things that well, you've got great adopters, early adopters, encourage them to become more Africans. And honestly, I train the trainer's to a degree that super users and coaches, buddies that actually helps accelerate the journey. And I'm probably sharing what most people do as a standard Bau here, right, but it's those things actually. Right. Got it, we'll do that.
Chris Rainey 43:53
Yes, great reminder, maybe a reminder, but you can't miss those things. The small things that are things that come that people miss that they become a disaster. On the radio, last thing I also want to do is lose people's trust. Because it's very, very difficult to regain a lot of takes a long time to earn. Very, very difficult, very easy to lose. Thinking about the journey you've been on so far, what would you say that you're, you're most proud of?
Sharron O'Donnell 44:23
Oh, one other quick question. You have these great questions for me off guard. And it's gonna sound almost benign to say this, but the first thing I will in terms of our achievements, you know, the output of that number of hires that they're making the candidate NPS, the hiring manager, NPs results, the team the adoption of the team, carry on her team in terms of the execution and delivery, the partnership approach that we have We've been able to reduce how many efforts we don't have posted in the marketplace. Yeah, just yeah, a lot, right. And I'm proud of all of that. That I think, you know, we still on a journey, we still got a lot to do and not perfect. But that's great. I'm really good with not being perfect, because that means that we've got something to aspire to, to continue to evolve. Carrie, what would you build on has been most proud of?
Carrie Small 45:30
I say, they're probably two things. So the first one is really granular. And that's literally when we got our first application. Yeah, and it looks like, oh, okay, this is good. Okay, this is gonna work great. And it was literally when you know, when you're cutting off to career sites, which is Sophia money, 81. And you're going to mark it with a brand new site, you know, a new company, if it were, with that first kind of front door, when we got our first application through that was probably, I mean, proud, also sense of relief, right. But I think the thing that I'm that I'm really proud of is just the way that we bought a really big team together to work on their the build. So we pretty much built it around within about a six month period. And, you know, there's lots of people that are obviously involved in that from a branding perspective. You know, you're up late at night, literally, you are in Canada, emails, rejection emails, in testing everything. And that was really, really, that was really, really rapid. So I think from that perspective, we're really proud of that as well. And then we launched the team. And you know, you say, kind of a couple weeks later, oh, how are you feeling? Yes. All right.
Chris Rainey 46:40
I'll take it, I'll take it. I'll
Carrie Small 46:42
take it because it was not alright. They're really gonna shout and they do. Yeah, that's probably pretty things. But for me, that's, that's the main part. And obviously, Sharon's talked about, you know, realising the business case, and being able to go back after the product line and say, This is what we built, this is the same thing. This is how it's impacting us. From a talent perspective, this is how we're able to track and monitor all of our metrics. So we've got a Rooney kind of a quick time to hire our MPs through the experience piece has gone in a really great way. So I think they're the kind of the big bits, but you know, the sheriff said it's all of it, really. But this is, this is a unique opportunity. You don't get the chance to many of these kind of projects and went and see it through as well. So yeah,
Chris Rainey 47:27
well listen, and I got some point. And this is just, just just the beginning, right? Like he both said, right, there's so much more, I'll have to do a part two, and I'm gonna message you both in a year's time and be like, okay, totally feel free to tell us about your market place. But honestly, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been congratulations to you in a team on a journey so far, as well. And I love the fact that you both study your life as I am laughing because everyone who's been watching or listening right now can see the energy and passion you both have, as well. And after that many years that you're constantly developing yourselves and you still have the same passion. Congratulations to both of you. And I wish you all the best until next week. Okay.
Sharron O'Donnell 48:17
Thank you can't go first. Thank you. Thanks so much.
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
Rachel Druckenmiller, CEO of UNMUTED.