When discussing talent market challenges and recruiting technology trends, we often refer to talent acquisition as a homogeneous activity with common challenges and processes. However, many organisations have highly complex hiring operations that deal with challenges that can be as unique as the employers themselves.
My guest this week is Lisa Scales, Talent Acquisition Director at Royal Mail. As well as being one of the UK’s largest employers, Royal Mail also hire 18,000 seasonal workers every Christmas. We discuss everything from supply chain management to sophisticated recruitment marketing and social mobility. Lisa gives us a fascinating insight into a highly complex hiring strategy.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The recruiting challenges at Royal Mail
• Scaling up
• Outsourcing and driving results via third parties
• Appealing to a younger generation of workers
• Purpose-driven work
• Using recruitment marketing to shift perceptions
• Social mobility and reflecting your customer communities
• Recruiting 18,000 seasonal workers
• Agile management of a contingent workforce
• The role of technology
• Robotic Process Automation
• What does the future look like for talent acquisition
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts
Transcription:
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[Recruiting Future Podcast theme]
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Matt: Hi, there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 557 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. When we talk about talent market challenges and recruiting technology trends, we often refer to talent acquisition as if it were a homogeneous activity with common challenges and processes. However, many organizations have highly complex hiring operations that deal with challenges that can be as unique as the employers themselves.
My guest this week is Lisa Scales, Talent Acquisition Director at Royal Mail. As well as being one of the UK’s largest employers, Royal Mail also hire 18,000 seasonal workers every Christmas. We discuss everything from supply chain management to sophisticated recruitment marketing and social mobility. Lisa gives us a fascinating insight into a highly complex hiring strategy.
Hi, Lisa, and welcome back to the podcast.
Lisa: Hi, Matt.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show again. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Lisa: Yeah, great. Thank you. And thanks for having me back. So, my name’s Lisa Scales. I am the Talent Acquisition Director at Royal Mail Group PLC.
Matt: Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about your background, because you’ve worked in lots of different facets of talent acquisition, haven’t you?
Lisa: Yeah, so, I think I probably said it before, I’m ancient. [giggles] I was trying to work out the other day actually, how long I’ve been in the industry, but it started getting into two or higher numbers for me to do it on hand, so I stopped. I can talk in decades. So, I suppose my background is probably quite usual to a lot of people out there in the sense of– I’ve done my time in agency side as well as in house, but I suppose the other aspect, which creates a triangle is I’ve also been on the vendor side as well. I ran a technology business for eight years, God, quite a long time ago now started setting it up in 2008. So, that gives me a slightly different angle, and possibly I do look at things through possibly a little bit of a different lens. I’m well and truly embedded in Royal Mail and so my background agency vendor in house and that’s where I am today.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. So, talk us through the biggest recruiting challenges you’ve got at the moment and what the market looks like for you.
Lisa: Yeah. So, probably give you some backdrop in terms of the size of the challenge that I have in my role in terms of just the scale of the organization. So, Royal Mail has approximately 130,000 employees in the UK and Northern Ireland, and with that comes 1,200 delivery offices, 85,000 frontline workers, and obviously a lot of skilled support workers as well. So, in terms of challenges, I think it’s probably a bit of a tale of two halves, Matt, in the sense of we’re scaling up for Christmas Peak from a contingent workforce perspective, and that’s basically recruiting approximately 18,000 additional people to come and work in our organization around our busiest time of the year ensuring that everybody gets their Christmas cards and parcels. Then similarly, our BIU recruiting is at a scale in the sense of we are continually recruiting on the front line. That’s your postie on the street that you see every day and give a wave to.
So, in terms of challenges, I think we’ve got a real issue. I would say this from a UK PLC perspective, not just Royal Mail, that sort of frontline worker. There is talent scarcity out there. I talk about talent as in even the lower skilled workers. Finding the right candidates with the necessary skill sets that we’d be looking for and experience is becoming a real challenge. I think we’ve probably seen– I’m calling it a bit of a Swiss cheese effect in the sense of over the last probably five years now. We’ve experienced so many– I suppose catastrophic events in the sense of Brexit, COVID. It’s all come to an aggregation of a really tricky labor market. We’re really feeling it in the sense of, we’re in quite a competitive market in the sense of, that last mile delivery piece as well as we’re a huge organization that needs support from extremely skilled people, from cybersecurity to finance professionals.
So, just the UK labor market, I feel is squeezed and compressed. It’s become a bit of a hotbed in terms of that high competition in all sectors. I suppose what I would say, not airspace, but that eye time on people looking at our adverts, how’s our employer brand, how are we setting ourselves apart to be attractive to that person? That’s definitely has a multitude of options.
Matt: I’ll come back to the temporary worker Christmas piece in a minute, because I think that’s conversation all by itself, I think. But focusing on your business as usual and the challenges that you have, how do you scale up your strategy and TA resource quickly to deal with this now? Because obviously, this is a problem that is only seemingly going to get worse as we move forward.
Lisa: It’s a really good question. In terms of scaling up, there’s a real piece here around supply chain management, which you don’t actually hear in I suppose recruiting circles so much. We have to rely on outsourcing some of the activity to enable us to scale up. You have a recruitment team which has a capacity limit. Just asking people to work harder to scale up is not a viable option, and it’s a risky option because if it fails, it fails. So, you have to basically completely mitigate your risk outsource either part elements of that candidate journey or fully outsource it.
We have some brilliant partnerships with our preferred outsourcing partners. What I would say about that though is you don’t just throw away the problem and throw it over the door and say, “Right, that’s your problem. Go and find us 1,000 people in the next three weeks.”
This is about proper supply chain management in terms of driving performance through third parties. It’s quite hard, because I think as an industry, we’re quite latent at times in this process. We think because we’re paying a fee or whatever that pricing model looks like, we almost in some ways renegue ourselves from responsibility. I have to drive that performance, so that they can help us with the volumes.
The other thing that we do is we also turn the tap on our internal referrals. We’ve got a really solid– I suppose there is a slight friends and family atmosphere at Royal Mail, and actually being able to leverage our existing employes networks is brilliant, because if you think about it, we deliver to every single postcode in the UK, highlands and highlands. If you go to the Isle of Arran, you will still get your post. There’s a real community feel to working at Royal Mail which makes it feel very, very special. But similarly, it really helps us in those times where we have to scale up.
Matt: I suppose picking up on that bit and also the responsibilities that you have to get that performance from the supply chain and also the fundamental problem about the labor shortages and things like that, the job of delivering mail– I suppose the core work you do might not be seen by the younger people coming into the market as a job that is necessarily for them. How do you bring that next generation through to really deliver what you have to deliver?
Lisa: Yeah, completely, metaphorically, and physically. No, it’s a really good question, and a question that is probably at the top of certainly my CPO’s worry list in terms of we have a population that demographically probably just doesn’t reflect the communities we serve. So, that’s an issue in itself. But similarly, how do we encourage the next generation of workers to see it as a viable option in terms of a career and an extremely rewarding role? I think we’ve got to leverage and we do leverage that the younger worker, that next generation of worker, does often seek more meaningful work these days over just the paycheck.
Now, it’s all very easy for me to say that and it does sound a little bit like words when we’re in a situation where we have a cost-of-living crisis. So, I get it. People have rent to pay, they’ve got families to feed, but there is something around that purpose driven work and that’s something we really try and lever in the sense of the postie has got such an interesting and such an important job. That’s something that really attracted me from a value set to the organization. The fact is is that sometimes the postie is the only person somebody will talk to in a day. So, that gives somebody a lot of responsibility, a social responsibility.
I think genuinely, Matt, in a post COVID world, actually people are more interested in that purposeful work. So, that’s one thing. Then in terms of the postie job, it’s physically really demanding. We’re asking somebody to walk 20,000 steps to 30,000 steps a day. Now, as the young generation are increasingly focused on their well-being, we can really lever that as well in terms of actually get paid to stay fit, and that physicality of the role really plays into that. But also, you’re joining an organization the A, is not only just has the legacy of a 500-year organization. There’re not many people that can say your business was set up by Henry VIII. It’s the opportunities for growth and development. There’s a huge business behind you as a postie. You may be the feet on the street but there’s huge amount of opportunity for growth and development which is a massive incentive for somebody joining us.
So, with all that being said, it is still hard. Our ad campaigns in terms of the media is all targeted. We’ve won a couple of awards for it. It’s a brilliant campaign that we’ve created called For the People. I wouldn’t be shown it in terms of a programmatic perspective. I’m probably not the demographic, but actually, it’s on TikTok, it’s on Snapchat, it’s on Instagram. There’s some brilliant videos of, I suppose, that next generation workforce doing the job and actually what it gives them. In short answer is is how do you lever all those brilliant things together to just show that it’s not a role that is perceived, which it currently probably would be perceived as a bit of not a particularly sexy job to go into.
Matt: I think that’s really interesting, splitting what you’re saying about the programmatic targeting and things like that, because I’ve not seen that campaign in the world as it were, but I have actually seen the videos in another context. It’s really interesting and they’re really good. Just quickly, tell us a little bit more about the strategy behind that and how you’re trying to shift those perceptions using those short form social media videos.
Lisa: The strategy is that we are trying to change that perception. Royal Mail, from a mainstream media perspective, probably hasn’t been seen in the best light over the last few years in terms of– Some of the challenges we’ve had around industrial action. There’s quite a lot of coverage in terms of our quality challenges, in terms of how often people are getting their post or whether they’re getting their post. There’s quite a lot of negative press out there. What we’re trying to do is almost change that narrative. It’s not about hoodwinking. It’s about actually just showing with all those things, it actually doesn’t matter. There is a huge opportunity to have a brilliant career.
So, in terms of our strategy, it absolutely was about how do we engage the next generation. But similarly, it isn’t just about that demographic of age. This is about diversity. This is about social mobility. This is about having people that are working for us that absolutely reflect who we serve in terms of our customers. The strategy behind it was absolutely you have to do the right targeting [giggles] in the right places. And Matt, I know your background of old, you will know exactly this. There is a bit of a persona development in terms of who we’re trying to attract.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Just to pick up on something you said there about social mobility, talk us through the social mobility aspect of what you’re doing.
Lisa: Yeah. So, at the end of the day, we are– I’m not going to start quoting with the largest whatever, whatever, but a company that is the organization, the size it is, with 130,000 people, 1 in every 763 jobs advertised is a Royal Mail job. There are low barriers to entry to work for us. I think that gives people a huge opportunity that maybe haven’t had the opportunity and privilege to go to further education, have a job where they need to turn up in a suit every day, etc. The Royal Mail is the perfect grounding in terms of joining an organization and having that development.
So, there is a piece here about a lot of the social mobility issues are around, well, how do I get to work? Well, there’s 1,200 places you can work across the UK. You’re not very far from a delivery office wherever you live. I think that is a really big opportunity for us to engage with people from a socioeconomic background that maybe don’t see themselves working for a brand like Royal Mail. It’s crucial for us as industry leaders to ensure there is a fair and equitable society out there in terms of the job market, but also from our point of view, promoting social mobility. We are socially responsible as a business, but actually that is an advantage to us as well, because if we are viewed as socially responsible, then job seekers with that purpose and that value set will want to come and work for us. So, it’s a win-win everywhere. There’s no downside to it. I think there’s a huge opportunity for people to come in and have a fulfilling career with us and potentially progress and thrive as we want them to.
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Matt: Coming back to the temporary workers and the 18,000 people that you have to recruit before Christmas, [laughs] talk us through– How does that work? What are the challenges of recruiting temporary workers all at the same time at that scale?
Lisa: Yeah. So, it’s a really, really interesting challenge. I’m smiling because it sent me into a slight– When anybody ever says that, it sends me into a slight tear. But do you know what? It’s about having some amazing planning. I know that sounds extremely boring, but we have an amazing, I suppose, machine in the sense of our resourcing approach to engage with this amount of workers is a blended model. So, we have a direct hire campaign where we will have upwards of 12,000 that will join us just on a seasonal basis that we have a lot of people that return to us on annual basis, and then we have our agency partners that back up our resourcing approach.
We also have a JV, and we run our own staffing business as well. So, we have a pool of candidates in that business that we can also pull on. So, we have campaign. We’ve got some brilliant imagery. I would ask anybody to go and have a look at it that’s already out there. The imagery in the advertising that we’re doing this year is all on theme of a slight different take on songs from Christmas. So, for example, Signed, Sealed, and Sorted, All We Want for Christmas Is You, Tis the Season to Be Earning Fa la la la la. and all that. So, it’s a brilliant, fun campaign that’s doing brilliantly because we’ve already engaged 20,000 people. And so, planning is absolutely key. So, there’s a lot of fun things to do, but there’s a lot of supply chain management, engagement, and planning.
What we actually do is we look at the plan and we look at where that plan needs to be in terms of deploying it. What actually will happen is is that we will create a pool of people. So, for example, if our demand plan is 18,000, we will go out and recruit a pool of 20,000, so that we can pull on that pool, so that we have an on-demand profile which enables us to not have any gaps. We can’t afford to have gaps. There’s no wiggle room on failure on this. We have to deliver. I hate saying that, [laughs] but we absolutely can’t fail. How we do it is exactly as I’ve said, there’s a three-pronged approach. There’s a lot of planning, supply chain management, but the key thing is is creating a pool big enough that you can pull on.
What I would say is we do agile management of our contingent workforce. For example, in the Midlands, if one of our hubs, for example, is short, we will bus people towards that hub from other areas. So, we’ve got a whole logistics piece around it as well.
Matt: Wow, that sounds like a massive operation.
Lisa: Yeah, and the peak team, my peak team, are just absolute experts at it. They know exactly what they’re doing and everybody knows their roles. It’s one of those really brilliant teams where there’s a huge amount of honesty. It’s just, this is what’s on the table. We need this to tackle this problem, and they absolutely lean into it.
Matt: You mentioned right at the start of the conversation about your background in technology. Tell us about the role technology plays across the board in everything that you’re doing.
Lisa: So, probably what I would say is that we have some really exciting stuff in track in terms of technology, but we are also engaging with robots all over our processes. So, from an RPA perspective, they all have Christmas names to the peaks once. So, we have Nick, and we have Vixen, and we have sorts of all different names for our robots and they do a lot of the heavy lifting. We are SAP house, so we have success factors and we utilize that technology absolutely to its outward capability. And similarly, there’s also other things that we have in terms of our Christmas chatbot which enables people to apply for the peak work that I was talking about.
So, in terms of technology, we are levering it as much as we possibly can. We know we’ve got lots more to do, and I suppose that’s one of my big challenges coming into this role is where can we see the opportunity for more. I suppose it’s the perfect organization because of the scale that we’re working at. So, from an AI and automation perspective, we will absolutely be overlaying existing technology. So, I would say it’s more overlay and augment as opposed to rip out and start afresh. That’s not the strategy. We really utilize, I suppose,s our own inhouse expertise from a data science perspective as well. So, there’s a whole industry of reporting that we have to do on the operation.
But the biggest, I suppose, future advantage is I suppose the AI piece and how we’re going to manage that to enable us to scale our recruiting efforts, and make our processes more efficient, and help us to make more data driven decisions. There is something very exciting afoot, but I’ll wait for another episode because I think you will absolutely love it, but I’m just going to say neuroscience to you.
Matt: Oh, nice. I so want to know more. I so want to know more. You have to come back and tell us all about it. [Lisa laughs] I want to ask you one more question. Before I do though, just clarify exactly what you mean by robot in this context, because I’ve got lots of different things in my head now when you said that.
Lisa: Yeah. So, we have robots that are doing basically the rapid automation piece. We’re using robotic process automation tools to do some of the work for us. It is big lifting and shifting of data, pushing people’s details into that system there, whether it’s going through to a payroll system, whether it’s going to a third-party or whatever. So, it’s RPA in terms of process automation stuff.
Matt: Now, that’s exactly what I thought you meant,-
Lisa: Yeah.
Matt: -but I couldn’t help thinking it might be robotic recruiters and things like that. [Lisa giggles] So, with that in mind and what we’ve just been talking about, as a final question, what do you think the future of talent acquisition looks like with all the technology that we’ve seen coming in, and also the challenges that every company is having with talent at the moment?
Lisa: Yeah, it’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I know you ask every guest [laughs] and I’m just going to have a quick check at my crystal ball. But I think the thing is is AI and automation, it is absolutely– Whether it’s coming here, already been here, or whatever guys it’s in– Again, it’s all that buzzword, whether it’s actual just language processing or is his proper AI. This is going to play an increasingly significant role in streamlining all processes from my perspective. I’m sure my team will be delighted to hear that. I’m not looking to replace them yet as a robot. There is human interaction required, and we will always have that human element. However, what I would say is is the heavy lifting can be done, and this is about giving the candidate as much of a better experience as well as the recruiter and our hiring managers and just going to that candidate experience.
The reality is especially in, I suppose, final mile roles, you are interested in getting a job and earning money quickly, if we can get you through that as quickly as possible. And bearing in mind, my team currently have a time to offer of nine days. We’re pretty good at it anyway. If I can challenge the team and get that down to three, even better. And sometimes it is three, but on a consistent basis. So, that is a key for me. I think the DNI piece will never go away and it shouldn’t, and I’m hoping that it will go away in the sense of we don’t talk about it. That is increasingly becoming far more, I suppose, embedded in terms of what we do and it’s becoming more commonplace and that will only continue. I think what will happen in the future is that recruitment will be tied and this may help with automation and AI far more to the overall employee experience.
So, the recruitment, I suppose, metric may go further into the employee journey than it will just stop on say, day one or month or whatever they talk about. So, about shifting from that hiring employees to retaining them through those better overall experiences from day one through to year five.
Matt: Lisa, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lisa: Thank you so much for having me back.
Matt: My thanks to Lisa. If you’re a fan of the Recruiting Future Podcast, then you will absolutely love our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. Not only does it give you the inside track on what’s coming up on the show, you can also find everything from book recommendations to insightful episodes from the archives and first access to new content that helps you to understand where our industry is heading. Sign up now and also get instant access to the recording of my recent webinar on the future of talent acquisition. Just go to recruitingfuturefeast.com/webinar. That’s Recruiting Future Feast dotcom slash webinar.
You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please find and search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
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