A QUARTERLY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP PUBLICATION FROM FUTURESTEP • NOVEMBER 2008

Welcome to the first edition of The Strategic Talent Acquisition Report, Futurestep’s quarterly thought leadership publication. In each issue, a feature article bylined by a leading industry practitioner will explore how a talent acquisition challenge was addressed and resolved. An accompanying article will offer commentary from a Futurestep subject matter expert, who will expand on details covered in the feature story, or discuss another strategic talent acquisition subject that may be of interest to our audience.

In this issue, Robert Marriott, General Manager, Human Resources for St. George Bank, one of Australia’s top 20 publicly listed companies, talks about how partnering with Futurestep enabled the bank to bring its employment value proposition (EVP) to life. St. George’s EVP now accurately reflects the bank’s unique culture and helps identify and attract the right candidates.

In the accompanying article, Mitzi Adwell, Talent Management Practice Leader for Futurestep, talks about the critical importance of strengthening your employment brand and how to ensure that it helps attract top talent to your organization.

We look forward to continuing to bring you this unique combination of customer and consultant insights from Futurestep.

Regards,

Bob McNabb

Good with Recruiting: A Top-20 Australian Company
Re-engineers Talent Acquisition

By Robert Marriott
General Manager, Human Resources (Corporate)
St. George Bank

“Good with people. Good with money.” It’s a fitting tagline for St. George, Australia's fifth largest bank and one of the top 20 publicly listed companies in Australia. Since 1937, our organization has developed a reputation as a grass-roots, relationship-focused bank with an extremely loyal customer base. But a strong reputation alone is no guarantee of success. Innovation and growth are essential.

According to recent  Australian workforce data, the nation’s finance industry employs just under 400,000 people—a larger sector workforce than that of major financial centers like Hong Kong and Singapore. When St. George began looking at refocusing its recruiting processes in 2005, a study by the Australian Bankers’ Association found that same sector was slated to boost its employment by approximately 70,000 over the next four years. This increase is predicted in the face of a very strong Australian economy, with close to full employment.

At the heart of St. George’s challenges was a recruiting process that, at the time, depended largely on individual hiring managers working with a collection of recruiting vendors. The old model had several shortcomings. First, the decentralized model limited the organization’s ability to ensure a consistent brand presence and candidate experience in the talent marketplace. Secondly, relying on multiple external vendors for the bulk of the recruiting activity was not cost effective. Finally, due to the distributed hiring activity, it was difficult for the company to gain visibility and strategic control over its entire recruiting effort. 

RPO Surfaces as Best Solution
To address these issues, St. George launched a strategic recruiting initiative focused on what we call an “engaged people” strategy. This strategy is driven by the core philosophy that engaged employees deliver great service, make St. George a compelling place to work, and, ultimately, make it a compelling place for customers to do business. A key ingredient to the initiative was establishing a partnership with an RPO provider.

The right provider needed to have depth of experience and service capability. An emphasis on innovation would also be critical for us to stay out in front in a competitive labor market. Finally, that RPO provider would need to align with our relationship-oriented culture. After considering several choices, St. George engaged Futurestep to address the permanent workforce recruiting effort.

Bringing the Employment Value Proposition to Life

The RPO model supports St. George’s effort to drive its employment brand in the marketplace. Reaching out to the employment market with an accurate reflection of our unique culture is critical for identifying and attracting the right candidates.

For St. George, the employment value proposition is viewed as more than a marketing effort—it is a fundamental piece to the HR process and the whole employee lifecycle. Futurestep played a key role in enabling a focused recruiting process that would bring that EVP to life and support the brand with a consistent and positive candidate experience across multiple sourcing channels. As a result of the focused centralized recruitment model and improved brand, St. George has now evolved from complete reliance on external agency sourcing to drawing on a diverse candidate pool that has grown to more than 25,000 in two years.

Improved Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness
The new RPO model also yielded immediate improvements in recruiting efficiency. From a functional perspective, the most dramatic result was the rise in direct placements. St. George established an original goal of cutting our nearly complete dependency on agency hires by half. After the first year, direct hires represented 66 percent of the total recruiting effort, and by mid-2008, that figure stood at approximately 74 percent.

While cost was not initially the central factor in developing the RPO relationship, improvements in cost effectiveness were significant. Since implementing the initiative, St. George has seen the average of cost per hire decrease by 62 percent, from approximately $14,500 to $5,500. Much of this improvement is related to the shift toward direct, non-agency recruiting and a focus on a dedicated multi-sourcing channel function—a move made much easier and faster by the cultural fit between Futurestep and St. George.

Our transformed recruiting operation was recognized by an industry award in 2007: Best In-House Recruitment Team. The RPO team at St. George provides a foundation of recruiting excellence that supports our business strategy, delivers  candidate care to support our employment brand, and effectively utilizes multiple sourcing channels. Futurestep will facilitate nearly 1,000 hires at St. George in 2007/2008, up from 530 in the first year of the engagement. With the right RPO relationship in place, St. George can identify the right candidates to drive the company’s customer brand while maintaining the productive and cost-effective model needed to compete in a rapidly growing financial services industry. That’s good for recruiting, and it’s good for business success.

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Your Employment Brand: Asset or Liability?

By Mitzi Adwell
Talent Management Practice Leader
The Newman Group, A Futurestep Company

What comes to mind when you hear or read “Google”? Perhaps among your first thoughts are: “strong brand,” “search engine,” “innovation”… and maybe “would probably be a good company to work for,” even if you’re not looking for a job. That’s what brand perception is all about, and a direct extension of brand impact is a company’s employment value proposition, or EVP. Every organization has an EVP but, like employees, they differ in shape, substance and effectiveness.

Does your employment brand attract high-quality job seekers, or is it driving top talent to competitors? What attracts a candidate to a particular company, and, more importantly, what encourages him or her to stay there once employed? How is your company viewed by potential candidates? How does your consumer brand relate to your employee brand? The perceptions of both these groups, as well as targeted prospects, dictate your brand equity.

At first glance, EVP may sound like it falls into the emotional realm, and that belief is reinforced by recruitment advertising that relies solely on anecdote versus fact. Conversely, an effective EVP involves a purposeful combination of science and creativity.

A Scientific Methodology and Disciplined Approach

Over the past several years, I’ve seen a great increase in awareness of the EVP factor among companies as they examine their talent operations. Our clients, particularly those that have leveraged Futurestep and its Newman Group talent management strategy services, have come to recognize that EVP can be the differentiator they need to successfully attract hard-to-find talent for key positions.

Experience has shown us that the key to understanding EVP is to look beyond subjective evaluation to develop objective quantifiable analysis—i.e., turning opinion-related research into quantifiable “scores” that can be measured, managed and improved. Toward that end, we developed and refined an EVP evaluation and development framework that is now the standard among our clients for building an EVP strategy.

Several key concepts underlie that framework, and they reflect the realities that determine how well an EVP helps an organization secure key talent. First, in order to construct an effective EVP, you need to understand how your employment brand is perceived today. To do that, you need to capture data from employees and prospective candidates, compare it to industry benchmarks, and develop a new EVP that more effectively positions your company in the talent marketplace. Then, it is important to implement programs to measure and manage your promise of value. All these steps contribute to quantifying, qualifying, and tracking the impact of your EVP.

Marketing the Message: Articulating the EVP
After identifying the most important attributes for your company and industry, the challenge is to isolate the attributes that your employees say you’re best at delivering. These are your competitive differentiators in the war for talent. These attributes are the core to an effective communications effort. They help you describe what it’s like to be an employee at your company, and that targeted messaging becomes the foundation for branding efforts on your careers site and in recruiting collateral, as well as your end-to-end talent acquisition process.

For all EVP efforts, the desired goal is organizational fit. No matter how intelligent or skilled a candidate is, if that candidate’s comfort factors and career goals don’t match your company’s culture and guiding principles, it’s a mismatch. In addition, the focus of an effective EVP is not only on the unique attributes that add up to competitive advantage for attracting desirable candidates, but on the full lifecycle of an employee’s tenure with the company. Does the employee experience (i.e., performance management, career development) mirror your promise of value? If so, you will have more committed, satisfied employees and higher retention rates. All the elements of an effective EVP interact and connect to your business strategy. The good news is that EVP development is an effort of expanding returns. As you attract and retain the best available talent in your industry, you build your brand strength.

Employment brand has become so critical in today’s tight talent market that established, reputable companies with powerful brands are looking to “get smarter” about their EVPs. Attracting qualified candidates is not enough; they want to attract and retain the best talent available in order to maintain or gain a competitive edge.  Successful companies understand that a conscious and continuous focus on EVP is vital in competing for talent. Companies that do this well dominate their industries.

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