Partnerships | Global TA, local precision: On brand, in context, and right the first time

Adam Gordon:

Thank you very much for joining. Nearly a hundred people signed up to join our broadcast today. Welcome. Thank you very much for taking the time.  I'm hoping that this is going to be really interesting for you. We're talking about the challenges of ensuring that everything is consistent on brand in context, et cetera. When you're running global teams, we're going to talk a lot about AI and a lot about hiring enablement and that type of thing.

I have a real expert in this area who's joined us today. This is James from Wilson. And James is going to answer a number of questions that I've got around the context of running global recruiting teams, because that's what he does for a living.

So, James Taylor, thank you very much for coming along today. Give us a quick introduction to you, first of all, and your background.

James Taylor:

Yeah, thank you. I'm really glad to be here. Thanks for positioning me as the expert in this. As you said,I've been doing this for a while now coming up for nine years with Wilson as an account director. They've been in recruitment for many more than that uh started off in an agency and um we've seen an awful lot of change over the years but particularly now the pace of changes is rapid so really pleased to be with you today thank you for the invite so that we can can have the discussion

Adam Gordon:

Okay um the other thing i'd like to ask you about is just give us a quick um intro to Wilson for anybody that doesn't  know the business. Wilson was known for a long time as WilsonHCG, global RPO company, of course. Give us a quick description.

James Taylor:

Yeah, that's right. Global talent solutions business. RPO is part of that as well as many other things. MSP, executive search, et cetera, headquartered in Tampa. But yeah, we're a truly global organization. We support a lot of clients for different  requirements across the globe.

Adam Gordon:

Yeah. Tampa where I think it's everyday summer, right? I believe.

James Taylor:

Yeah. I've had the pleasure to go over there. It's a lovely part of the world.

Adam Gordon:

Great. Okay. So we've got five or six specific things that we want to talk about. The first is to do with when we're running a global team, right? And we want to ensure that we've got global standards. We have to also take into account local nuances.

So there's the reality of being a recruiter in Germany versus in the UK versus in the USA around things to do with legislation, language, culture, the expectations on hiring, the nuances of employer brand, something that could be positioned as a great benefit in the USA, such as private healthcare insurance might be considered like, it's not so important in the uh UK where you know access to free healthcare is widespread you know as it is so what are the things that we need to think about when we are um either in talent acquisition or working in the kind of global recruiting context and we want to make sure that we're delivering consistency um without losing that sort of local context, what are some of the things we need to think about?

James Taylor:

Yeah, absolutely right.

I think it's a challenge that's becoming more and more apparent for a lot of people in TA. We're seeing a lot more companies globalized, the world's becoming a lot smaller. My team looks after forty seven countries, but I don't have forty seven recruiters.

So how do you do it? You've got far less to do that. I think another part of the challenge is that people that are hiring are changing as well. So you will have people with global teams.

So you might be based in one country, UK, US, Japan, wherever. But actually, you're doing a lot of your hiring outside of that country now. So as a hiring manager, I think it's becoming a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult.

So actually, you really need to have that trusted partner that can really provide the advice. So you're absolutely right from a TA perspective. Given that the demands are increasing and increasing, how do you do that?

You obviously start with the basics around good governance, good process. Of course we do. But how do we then utilize proper technology to enable the people to deliver things in a better way? It's not all about just standards, is it?

You want to have a personal feel to how things are done. You want to have a really good understanding to be able to give the right kind of advice.

Adam Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. So just in terms of like you've got forty seven countries you're looking after, you don't have forty seven recruiters that are working on that. So you've got individuals who are covering multiple different places. How do we make sure that they don't have to spend half their day every day just thinking about, well, how do I do a job ad in Germany versus Spain or whatever it might be?

James Taylor:

Exactly that, because for me, this is all about time. It's about time and value. Recruiters' time is getting more and more valuable. It's high value tasks that I want to do.

So I would love if my team can be spending their time with managers at the front end discussing the right things. So is this role needed? What do we really need? You've got a five year old job description. So is that really relevant in the current market? So there's time that goes into that. There's then time at the end of the process. So the interviews, the offer management, the candidate experience. For me, it's taking away all the stuff in the middle.

So where do we find things? Where's the legislation? Where's the knowledge? Where do we hold it all? How do we distribute that in the right way between people? So having a system that everybody is working from that tailors itself to each country and has the right information that they can pull on, for me, allowing them to then have the time to do the high-value things, that's what I'm really looking for, and that's what I really love about the technology that can enable that.

Adam Gordon:

Yeah. So... I mean, I believe most people outside of the recruiting world wouldn't have any idea about the amount of tasks that recruiters need to do to get their hires made. And I don't think there's any other white-collar jobs that I... Certainly, I've never recruited for another white-collar job which has got such a breadth of tasks required and... You've got to use your left brain because you've got to be a real good data analyst.

You've got to understand how to make sense of a lot of information. You've got to use your right brain because you're going to be trying to overcome objections and trying to achieve influence with hiring managers and move them through a process.

You've got to do, even before you've advertised the role, you've got to do research. You've got to find out a lot of different information about the competition and where to advertise. And you've got to check the branding. Understand the local requirements you're constantly switching between systems what I call toggle tax is there's there's there's just a lot of different things that the recruiters need to do and that's why you get these people who are very left-brained and they turn you know they really kind of gravitate towards sourcing where they can use a lot of their technology skills and things like that and a lot of other people who are the classic sales people like like I probably was when I was a recruitment consultant.

They gravitate much more towards, I want to do the interviewing and the moving the hiring manager through the process. But yeah, I don't think there's many jobs where there is such a breadth of, you've got to be a counselor.

You've got to do an awful lot of different things. Would you agree? And what do you think about this?

James Taylor:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. There is an awful lot to get a requisition from when it starts to a candidate to actually start on the day.

I mean, I remember when I started out my career, I thought a really good use of my time is to spend three hours crafting an amazing advert that will go out and it will capture people's imagination and it will really get people involved and want to speak to me.

But actually, can we use those three hours for something else and can we use technology to create something that's just as good so Poetry that we've been using does that in such a good way so rather than spending all of this time creating all of this content having something that learns that's on gets the language right the tone right uses the right language for your recruitment marketing. That then allows other things to be done without time, but is using the left brain, the right brain, depending where you are, but those high-value tasks.

So something that was important before, yeah, it's still just as important now, but can we do it to the same standard, but quicker? That's what Poetry has really been enabling for us.

Adam Gordon:

Well, that's really great to hear.

I've got to say, one of the things that we've aimed to do with Poetry is to ensure that the recruiters who are particularly strong on one area, but maybe a little less strong on the other, we're kind of helping them to bolster that, bringing that up.

And like, not every I've never met a recruiter who's brilliant at everything. And, you know, we certainly we want to try and enable recruiters to be brilliant at everything by giving them what they need in all these, you know, different areas that we can support.

We have a comment in here working closely with the marketing teams to building a strong and sustainable employer brand value proposition across multiple locations. I mean, I think working with marketing is definitely a thing to be encouraged.

It's sometimes quite hard to get marketing's attention when they've got their own, you know, they've got to try and sell products and sell services rather than sell careers. But if there's an internal recruitment marketing team, for example, oh, absolutely.

I think working very closely with them and across multiple locations, one of the things, not just locations geographically, but geographically and in terms of different types of jobs, as I mentioned earlier, I think like, healthcare could be a huge benefit in the US, but not such a big benefit in Europe where people have free access to healthcare as it is. The type of like an employer value proposition for somebody that's working in engineering, often they're really driven by working on complex challenges and things that will affect a billion people and whatever.

Whereas people working in sales, they might be more driven by How much am I really going to earn in this type of job and all that sort of thing? Working with marketing teams, working with different stakeholder groups, that's something that your teams have to do all the time, I guess?

James Taylor:

Yeah yeah absolutely and what we're really keen on doing is to try and pull all of that information through one source because what traditionally we find is that marketing teams work across different countries everything's held in different places so the way that you get the information, the way that you ask for the information, the way that you use the information is different. So for me, where we really see advantages is everything funnels through the same place. That's marketing, that's recruiters, that's managers.

And everybody has access. So you're using the same tools, the same information to really drive that consistency and quality. Define what good looks like, use tech to make sure it continues to learn, and then give the right people access to that so that those tasks can be done really, really quickly and really, really concisely.

So as a hiring manager, wherever you are in the world, you're getting access to the same type of information, the same data. It's going to be geographically specific and actually that might inform what you're doing at the front end.

If you're a manager and you're recruiting somewhere with traditionally six months notice periods, wouldn't you want to know that upfront? Might that not inform some decisions about location strategy and things like that? All of this access, all of this data being used in the right way through the right platform really helps.

You don't want to bump into these problems when you're sixty days down the road and you've got a candidate to offer. Let's do the advice at the front end with the right data in the right way, make the hiring manager journey fantastic by doing that, and then enable the right outcomes.

Adam Gordon:

Yeah, absolutely. And I've got to say, I often describe recruiting as a team sport. I think it's collaboration is really vital. The recruiter can be the expert around aspects of like, what's the right process to do?

What's the right talent pools to go fishing in here? What's the right element of messaging to use to get people's attention, to bring them into the process? It is the hiring manager and the hiring team who have got the expertise around the work that's involved in the role itself.

It's the HR business partners who have got the expertise around what's the career paths following this and what's the development opportunity for an individual coming into this. And then in a lot of large teams, you've got people who are dedicated to recruitment marketing, dedicated to talent intelligence, dedicated to talent sourcing.

You've got third party suppliers, so you're going to have recruitment agencies who are suppliers to either the talent acquisition team or to the RPO team. So I don't think there's been a more I don't think it's ever been more important with so many stakeholders that, as you said, everyone's working in the same, you know, with the same information and they've got the same kind of starting point for a role itself.

James Taylor:

Yeah, and we try and we talk about feel quite a lot.

I think it's really important, particularly from a manager perspective, is how your recruitment feels. And when you've got lots of different countries and people do things in slightly different ways, the risk is that it will feel different depending on who you're working with, where you're working.

That for me is a real key that my team solved really well in that wherever people are, It feels very similar. The expectations are very similar. The quality of the data and the insight is very similar.

And the positioning of that is very, very similar. So for managers, you know what to expect. You know what your journey is going to look like. You don't think, oh, I'm recruiting there. I need to remember that or I'm recruiting there.

Yes, there will be differences. Yes, the recruiter will guide you through that, but actually the feel of how it all comes together is really, really similar. How are we going to talk about the market?

How are we going to talk about the insights? What am I going to expect from you? So we're removing all of those barriers that sometimes you find across different countries by utilizing the technology in the right way that really learns from what we're doing.

Because for me, that manager in today's world, today's global world, that manager experience is so key.

Adam Gordon:

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I think around how it feels. So there are elements of like consistency, consistency of experience for hiring managers and consistency of experience for candidates and consistency of experience for recruiters, I think is really vital because if it's familiar to them, they know what to expect and they probably have less to think about and they can therefore really spend their time working on the margins, which is where we can achieve the optimum value.

And if all the bits in the middle are consistent and familiar, then that's great. What we don't want to do is, I don't think we want to, we don't want to completely automate a process because that takes personality out of it.

We don't want to reduce recruiters to click this, then click this, then click this. I think there's an important role for individual personality and individual charm in the way that a recruiter goes about things.

James Taylor:

I don't disagree. And actually, I think this is what we're talking about. Because yes, there's a load of stuff that recruiters do. But the key for me is who are they talking to?

Adam Gordon:

Yeah.

James Taylor:

So we need less admin, more talking. There's so much value in a recruiter and a sources job, their role. And that for me is all around the managers and the candidates. What are they saying?

How are they saying it? What's the experience like for these people? What's the advice that we're giving to people? And recruiters have so much, to your point earlier, there's so much to do. There's so many systems to work in.

There's so many trackers that need doing. There's so much stuff that needs working on internally, the job descriptions and ads and all of that. So remove all of that, as much of it as you can.

Poetry has been greater. The quality stays. It actually really drives quality and consistency globally. But let's get all of those hours in the day having conversations because that's where the value lies and that for me is where it will continue to lie as we go forward it's really be seeing as those we talk about trusted pilots in recruitment a lot right but what actually is that and that comes from the time that you spend with the people that you need to be spending it with managers candidates.

And that's the the real value that we're seeing from Poetry is it's allowing people to spend more time doing the right things

Adam Gordon:

So we're going to come on to the topic of recruiter tasks in a bit more detail. You've covered a little bit of it there, but I want to dive into that in a bit more detail in a few minutes.

But I want to talk first about AI. AI has really caused, it has generated some benefits for recruitment and the way we work in recruitment. And it's generated a vast amount of chaos at the same time.

And I believe that context is one of the most important elements of AI. So for example, we've all done this. You've gone on to ChatGPT and you've typed in, give me X and Y.

Then it gives you it back and you look at it and you go that's not what I need um and I'm not really sure the best way to phrase why it's got it wrong because it's just it's not right so you have to sit there and think about it and i think that's a bit of a waste of time um and I massively believe that context is really vital. And the context of see recruiters have to be very mentally agile, because their context switching all the time.

You know, the recruiter who I mean, it sounds like a cliche, but the recruiter who's working on, you know, ten different technology jobs, plus a part time receptionist, a group financial controller and a lifeguard for the conference centre at the same time.

And they're switching context in so many different ways. And it's so important because if I'm recruiting in a different country, there's all the country nuances. If I'm recruiting in a different team, there's the team nuances.

If I'm recruiting for a different hiring manager, they've all got slightly different personalities and team setups and things like that. So certainly from our perspective at Poetry, the AI has to really understand a lot of that so that it doesn't produce kind of generic content.

I'd love to know a bit about your, you know, experience or comments on the AI context.

James Taylor:

Because you're absolutely right. The risk here is that you push everything through AI. And that's not what we're talking about here at all.

We're not talking about AI generated job ads. We're not talking about using tools where actually you've saved an hour, but then you have to go and spend an hour and a half checking it and rewriting it.

That's not what we're talking about here at all. We're talking about something completely different. And that's why it's so important to, I guess, to distinguish.

Taking away three, four hours of work just to either have something that's not the right standard or something that just needs to go and be checked isn't any use to anybody. There's a lot of tech that, you look at the journey over the past couple of years, there's a lot of tech that you can plug in.

Great, it does what it says, but actually, where's the value? How do you measure that? How do you measure what you're doing? And for me, it comes back to that concept of time and time utilization.

What we're seeing with Poetry is that we're not running things through AI and getting a response. It's learning. It understands the context. It understands the business. It understands the teams. And actually, what we're using it for is elevating delivery in a consistent and quality fashion.

So we're not going to have to go and double check it. We've got people. Everybody's different. Everybody has better different strengths and weaknesses. And to your point earlier, it's how do we elevate one side of somebody's game to the standard of somebody else's, given that recruitment has so many facets to it.

Nobody's perfect at everything. That's the value we're seeing. And that's the consistency and the quality part. You want the quality to be there with the consistency globally, knowing that it's very difficult.

And not everything can do that. Yeah, there's lots of things you can plug in that promise that, but we get a different value from Poetry.

Adam Gordon:

A lot of times when people are thinking about technology in recruiting, they're either compromising speed for quality or quality for speed.

You talked about you previously spending an hour writing a job advert. You're putting ultimate quality into that, but you have sacrificed speed for doing that. And then when you've got thirty reqs land on your desk the next day, you can't spend an hour writing the perfect job ad on each of these.

So what you really want is the opportunity to scale, to really scale quality. When you and I started in recruiting, Just back to the tasks thing that you'd covered a little bit earlier.

Let's go into that in a bit more detail. When you and I started in recruiting, a lot of the things that we did then you don't actually need to do now at all, right?

Because everything's changed. But if we think about like, what are the, when it comes to AI, not specifically Poetry, but in general, when it comes to technology in general and the way things are changing in the world, what do we believe are the recruiter tasks and recruiter skills which are going to create the most value for the future?

And what are some of the things that we have been doing and we're maybe still doing today which are maybe going to become less important?

James Taylor:

I think there's a few ways you can approach that because I think there's a lot of skills that recruiters and sources possess now that they'll just have to use in a different way. So what do I mean by that?

So data and insights are always going to be important because that's the basis of your advice, right? But how is that data put together? How are those insights put together and how are they delivered?

So can we get the data and the insights quicker and in a more consistent manner that's at the level that we expect rather than spending more time doing that? And can we then spend more time delivering it and advising, so using that in order to empower managers to  make informed decisions.

So we're taking away the time to do some of the tasks, but then putting it into advice so for for recruiters it's I'd love them to be in front of managers all day going this is what the data says this is what the markets say.

I know this because rather than spending two hours researching the market and putting it all together and putting it in a deck and then getting ready to present it and then the meeting gets pushed by thirty minutes you know what it's like all of the wasted time, if you can compact all of that and then really have them driving the right decisions and becoming that true partner what I want managers to say to me I speak to them a lot about the team obviously as you can imagine is to say I couldn't do without them it's so insightful when i get feedback by that it's fantastic and doing that across that's a challenge.

But for managers to sit there and go, they really knew what they're on about. They understood the local legislation.  They understood exactly what we needed to do. They got me to the end of it. That's what recruiters are, that's where we need to be going. And the more time you can spend with the right people, the more you're going to get that type of feedback.

Adam Gordon:

I mean, certainly from what I know from managers I speak to, are working with teams from Wilson I do know that Wilson's um among the best when it comes to that shift from just being like a transactional bums on seats to becoming that genuine talent advisor and I know that Wilson's been highly committed to that over the last few years not just on the accounts that you look after but like right across the organization and you know, others can learn a lot from that.

I just want to quickly. There's a couple of areas where I think like beyond Poetry, which I just want to quickly get your opinion on. So I think that scheduling is an area is low-hanging fruit for AI.

Is this an area that you have any insight into? What do you think?

James Taylor:

Yeah, I think it is. I think you need to use the technology in the right way because it needs to integrate.

Again, if you don't choose the right thing, it's going to cause you more problems and ultimately more time. So again, it brings me back to the whole theme of time. Is it saving us time?

It shouldn't be saving us people. It's allowing people to be doing different things. So yeah, absolutely agree with you if it's the right tool.

Adam Gordon:

And the one other is around like interview transcription and interview insights and that type of thing.

Again, is that an area that you've had any experience with or got any opinions on as another opportunity for AI?

James Taylor:

Yeah, and we're seeing all of that value now with what's available to hiring managers.

Again, I think from a hiring manager experience perspective, what I would love is to not just drive TA consistency and quality, but also hiring manager. So what are the expectations of them? How useful is it to them to be led properly through that process?

Again, regardless of where they are. So yeah, you'll have to do things slightly differently, but if you can make that feel fantastic and feel that you're really getting them to the end of that, that again is a real value add that we're seeing by pushing everything through something  like Poetry.

Adam Gordon:

Brilliant. Okay. James, it's been really great to talk to you today. Thank you very much for sharing your insights and looking forward to catching up with you again soon. Really good to see you.

James Taylor:

Thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it.