Samantha Sales – The fixer – grapples with readers’ thorny issues
All at sea over CEO’s recruitment strategy
My CEO has asked me to update our recruitment strategy to reflect “where the business is going”. We’re a multichannel retailer but most of our growth is coming from web and mobile. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this, but I don’t know how to approach it. I think I’ve got a good understanding of the business, but I don’t want to ask too many basic questions or intrude on anyone’s time.
Samantha: First up, let’s drop the idea that you’re intruding or that your questions will be unwelcome. It’s part of the remit of any HR leader to question assumptions – if the finance director was asked to scrutinise the accounts, they wouldn’t hesitate to knock on some doors, and you need the same sort of confidence. So let’s banish those doubts.
Your CEO has asked you to take on this task because it is important – though it might be useful to clarify why he thinks it matters so much, what his own views are and what sort of analytics are already available. A recruitment strategy is a big task, and the key will be conversations at different levels of the organisation: senior leaders will tell you what’s coming tomorrow, middle managers know what works today and from staff on the shop floor – particularly recent hires – you’ll get an idea of what’s bringing people through the door, and why they leave.
The strategy itself can broadly be broken down into three areas. There are the big issues: where the business is going and what skills are required for its future direction. You indicated you have a good handle on this already. But you then need to think about the external aspects of recruitment – what the process will look like for candidates, including application, interview and pre-boarding, as well as your employer brand and how you’ll use technology – and the internal aspects, such as onboarding, induction and the experience of new hires.
When all that’s in place, you can examine how agencies and other third parties are assisting in the process, and whether you currently have the right partners. Are your managers involved in hiring? They can be great salespeople for the business if they are. And finally, don’t forget process: you’ll need to put a system in place that delivers and accurately records your strategy and checks it’s actually working.
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She wants her ex kicked out of town
A divisional head in my organisation wants to bring a high-performing team member back to work for us. She left the business because a very public relationship with a co-worker ended, but she is well-respected and has been missed since she left. Unfortunately, she will only come back if her ex-boyfriend is moved to another division and, ideally, another location. Her team leader wants me to try and facilitate this move but I’m uneasy.
Samantha: A big red klaxon is going off as I read your email. The very notion of recruits dictating how working relationships are structured is ridiculous. And what you’re being asked to do as an HR professional is to act as the parent in a parent-child relationship with employees, which never, ever works in the long term.
Let’s consider for a moment that you do make this move happen. It sounds to me like it verges on constructive dismissal, particularly if you ask someone to start in a new location detrimental to their professional or personal life. You say the relationship was public, so other employees are bound to guess what’s gone on. What sort of message does it send out about their employer? And that’s without considering the male staff member: is he really so disposable that his career doesn’t matter in all this? Why is it all about his ex?
The situation has arisen, I suspect, because a line manager has taken the easy way out. I doubt very much this woman is the only person out there who can fill the role, unless you’re working in thermonuclear astrophysics. My suggestion is to run an open recruitment process and invite her to apply. You might end up finding a third party who’s an even better fit, but if she is successful she is going to have to understand the organisation won’t bend for her and she will need to hold a conversation with her ex-partner like the two adults they are supposed to be, to work out how they can sit in the same building for the foreseeable future.
It’s situations like this that have prompted many larger organisations to introduce “no relationship” clauses in contracts. But they never work in reality – you just end up losing good staff because the heart rules the head and they hide their relationships or slope off to pastures new. Your only option, unpalatable as it might be, is to manage occurrences like this with as much maturity and patience as possible and resist the temptation to crack heads together.
✶ Samantha Sales is managing director of Cambridge Interim HR and is a former HR director of a FTSE 100 company with extensive HR and OD experience. Her replies are written in a personal capacity and do not reflect the views of People Management or the CIPD, nor are they a substitute for professional legal advice.
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