Rick Badgley
TotalPicture Radio Interview Transcript: IACPR Global Conference

Welcome to the TotalPicture Radio’s exclusive coverage of the International Association for Corporate and Professional recruitment Global Conference. The theme of this year’s event, 2010 and Beyond: Forging New Talent Paths.

This podcast from the IACPR conference in Philadelphia is brought to you by Riviera Advisors, a premier global human resources consulting firm that helps organizations worldwide improve their internal recruiting and staffing capabilities. Visit rivieraadvisors.com/podcasts to access interviews from the IACPR Global Conference and other thought leaders in HR and recruiting.

Welcome to a specialTalent Acquisition channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from the IACPR Global Conference 2010 in Philadelphia.

Our guest today is Rick Badgley, he’s Senior Vice President of Selection Staffing and University Relations at Wyndham Worldwide. He has global responsibility for how the company attracts and hires external talents, selects and promotes internal talent and all university relation initiatives. He is also responsible for establishing the direction of the company’s career messaging and diversity recruitments.

Peter: Rick, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Rick: Peter, thanks for having me.

Peter: You participated in Jeremy Eskenazi’s panel here just a few minutes ago on the real world challenges of global recruitment. How do you go about recruiting senior leaders from your office in New Jersey for assignments in Asia or Europe or South America?

Rick: It’s a complex issue and there’s not a simple answer, Peter. I will tell you we leverage search partners where appropriate where we don’t have the ability to kind of have the reach, but we also rely on our associates to kind of be the ambassadors for us to kind of refer talent up through the organization, but ultimately it’s about building brand awareness for us and in some markets where we haven’t had that, we partnership with our communications team to make sure that we get out in front and that we have a positive message going into a marketplace where they may not have heard of Wyndham Worldwide or many of our brands.

Peter: How do third party recruiters or staffing agencies figure in to your recruiting process, especially on a global basis?

Rick: We are not designed, we have a lot of moving parts of my organization for recruiting but we, per se, do not have an executive recruitment department. So they factor in pretty significantly.

All SVP and above and a lot of our VP level searches are put out to retain search, and so it’s important that I have great relationships with my search partners both here in the States and then in the certain geographies around the world.

Peter: What has changed, Rick, in the last 3-5 years in recruiting, especially at the senior level? Is there anything fundamentally about the way you go about doing your job today than you did it 3 or 5 years ago?

Rick: I mean it’s no secret that social media is playing the big role today and we leverage that, I think, more than a lot, not just our presence on Facebook and LinkedIn, but kind of how we go about pursuing talent or how we remind even our senior managers within our organization, remind them of their second degree relationships and can they help us reach out. We incent them to give us out those relationships. We have proactively been building a passive candidate database for the last several years, and these are relationships that we’ve built through referrals, through social media, and that ability for us to do that today is bigger and brighter, and that future will even present more opportunities for us in the future where we’ll be inviting people to work for our organization rather than chasing them all around the globe to beg them to work for us.

Peter: One of the things that I found interesting in your panel discussion is bringing up LinkedIn. It’s so easy now to just go on to LinkedIn, do a search and you can find 5 or 10 candidates that really fit into the profile of what you’re looking for, but are they going to culturally fit within your organization and are they people that you can even as a senior executive within Wyndham approach?

Rick: We are not comfortable in a lot of scenarios proactively just reaching out to people blindly and that’s where we do leverage search partners. I will tell you though where they have a relationship with a current associate, we leverage that.

The other thing that we use LinkedIn for is really benchmarking and understanding kind of the landscape of talent that is out there, should we go to search, are there people in that space, what do we know about them in certain marketplaces. We use it not just proactively to recruit, but really to educate ourselves. And you always have to remember, Peter, that we’re relying on that information being accurate and it’s self-input, so we’re well aware of that.

Peter: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Another one of my takeaways from this session, which I find very interesting, is that it seems there really is a push to consolidate and not use 400 search firms across the world to do this stuff, to find and create real partnerships with these people, and one of the words that was used a lot today was transparency.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s a word I tell you, we have in our organization, I mean the government uses it. We’re really asking and demanding for transparency. One of the things that in developing these relationships with our search firms is we need a select group that knows how to tell our story and as you mentioned earlier, which LinkedIn doesn’t do, that cultural fit, that EQ, that emotional intelligence, all those things that can’t be measured by a website, we need a search partner and we need somebody out there kind of measuring what that “fit” is for the Wyndham organization.

I think as we move forward collectively with our search partners, we need to kind of narrow it down and be focused, and the biggest fear I have, frankly, in dealing with a search firm is they’re not articulating our story the way we would want it articulated. That’s a huge problem when you don’t have true partners.

Peter: Absolutely. What are some of the unique challenges of your organization in the hospitality industry that perhaps like Rod Moses from RIM doesn’t have?

Rick: I think it goes to attracting talent. We’re a company that represents over 7200 hotels over 65,000 vacation destination points in our exchange and rental business. And then we own a 150 timeshare resorts throughout the globe. We’re the largest hospitality company in the world and people don’t view us as an employer of choice that way; they view us as having jobs in the front desk, which we do have, which are great jobs, and general manager jobs, which we do that are very rewarding, but when it comes to more of the corporate type, the strategy jobs, the IT jobs, the finance jobs, we’re a very complex organization. We go toe to toe with competing against Taleo, against RIM, against American Express and the likes, and I think people don’t view us as that. They think that we’re just making beds and serving hamburgers and that’s just not the case.

Peter: I know that you play a key role in selecting and implementing technology solutions for HR and recruiting. One of the things that I keep hearing, especially at the HR conferences like HR Tech that I’ve been attending this year, is integration, how are we going to get all of these systems that we’ve got all over the world talking to one another, our Oracle database doesn’t talk our PeopleSoft database, people have their information in their silos on spreadsheets. Talk to me a little bit about how you use technology and is it becoming easier, and are you really able to integrate all of these systems and use it to your advantage?

Rick: I’m passionate about this subject, Peter. Is it getting easier? No, it’s getting harder.

The one thing that I talk about and it’s systemic in a lot of organizations, it’s not just the technologies but it’s the common day language and vernacular that people are using. There’s a disconnect there, and the only thing that’s going to bring us closer together, whether you’re calling it an account code or department code and the different parts of the organizations, technology has to bring that together. I think that is one of the biggest benefits we’re starting to see as we make some of these moves, but the complexity of bringing Oracle to Taleo… where does the employee’s information reside and how it all works is very complicated.

I’m very optimistic and have been to a lot of meetings about cloud technology. Now people are throwing that term out there very, very loosely, but I think if the next generation of web technology is cloud and we can put things in a repository and pull out with different applications, it’s going to be a win-win. I think if that comes to fruition in the coming years, we’ll be in a much better place.

The challenge that I see in having these meetings is we’re going to spend less somewhere else. We’re not going to spend more. So if you look at the cost of an ATS or an Enterprise Oracle platform or PeopleSoft platform, we can’t keep on adding to this, and so there’s going to have to be a break even point somewhere where something is going to have to give and I just don’t know where that will be for our organization yet.

Peter: Being in travel and hospitality with a global footprint, I would guess Wyndham certainly has a pretty good pulse on the economy out there today on consumer spending, growth opportunities. What is your organization projecting out over, say, the next 6 or 12 months? Are we on our way out of this recession? Has businesses started to spend again at your resorts doing conferences and this kind of thing?

Rick: We are, and without projecting forward, looking at statements I will say that we are seeing positive growth, our chairman is always subscribed to that we are on a gradual climb out of the recession, that we won’t see a double dip. I think we had a small scare recently with that blunder on Wall Street, but we are seeing a steady climb out of it.

Our brands represent from economy to luxury. We’re seeing improvement. Our biggest industry in the hotel business is the ADR (Average Daily Rate) and how we track that and occupancy per room, and so we’re seeing some positive indicators coming out that we are seeing those rates go up and occupancies go up. So we’re optimistic.

In Europe and in Asia we’re seeing a lot of new trends in vacationing. The rental side of the way that people vacation in Europe and Asia is in a big uptick right now because they can go to a destination and make their own food and have all of those amenities without having all the cost of a hotel and going out to eat. We’re starting to see some of that translate in North America as well. So we’re very optimistic

Lastly, I’d say, we are selling the living daylights out of timeshare right now. There’s a value proposition there and our teams throughout the country are selling it and people find value in it and so if that’s a sign of consumer confidence, then we’re pretty confident.

Peter: That’s really great news. I’m really happy to hear that because timeshare last year, you couldn’t get arrested on a timeshare.

Rick: No, but I think we have a points based system at Wyndham Worldwide and I think consumers are seeing that there is a value there. I think a lot of people associated timeshare with the real estate bust. It is a regulated business and there are some similarities, and you do own a deed, but the value proposition is much different and how that plays out over a lifetime of vacations.

Peter: The IACPR Conference wraps up tomorrow with a session on social media and like I said in the intro, you head up the university relations. Does Wyndham have a social media strategy for recruiting. You have a Facebook career page, I know that. How does social media integrate into recruiting at Wyndham and is it becoming more of an important platform to you?

Rick: We have one foot in the water – in the proverbial water right now. We didn’t jump in with both feet, but we are following this. We are cautious, and the one cautionary tale that we have – and this comes from our chairman – is how do we start and end the two way dialogue of social media? That is something that we are sensitive to, and who controls that conversation?

We don’t always want to control it but we want the feedback and so, understanding how that works is important for us before we go too far down the path. I will tell you in the recruiting landscape, social media will play a bigger and bigger role every single day, whether it’s on a Facebook or a LinkedIn; I think the presence of career messaging needs to be where people travel the web and they’re traveling it in the social networks. Going to My Career site or going to a Monster or Career Builder is not the way people use the web any longer.

I think it’s critically important, and we will continue to have a larger presence. We’re getting to roll out a larger strategy this year. We are tying in a whole hierarchy of our websites and how we talk to our social media and how we manage our SEO and how we’re indexing pages. We’ve spent the last year learning a lot, putting our foot in the water. We’re going to deploy a more aggressive strategy going into 2011 now.

Peter: When you looked at sites like Facebook, first of all, we all know and it’s well advertised the whole privacy issues around Facebook and guess what, they control that platform and tomorrow Facebook could say, “Well you know you have this really great career site, we’re going to start charging $2000 a month to keep that up there,” because you don’t have control over it. These are real issues you have to deal with.

Rick: Yeah, and how they control it, I think it gives me confidence though, look, I’d rather pay a few dollars in a controlled environment than to have it be the wild, wild West. In social media, there is still an element of out there, and I think the biggest thing that we have to overcome is trust in those environments. Do they trust the brand, do they trust our messaging, and I think if it’s not controlled by companies like Facebook, I just think it needs to be for that credibility factor, so I’m okay with that.

Peter: How does the geo location services, the Foursquares of the world, factor into your business, or does it? Is this on your radar screen, the Foursquares and Gowallas and how you could perhaps use that in recruiting?

Rick: Yes and no. Elaborate more on that question for me.

Peter: I go to all of these conferences and the media conferences I’ve been to this year, everyone is salivating over Foursquare because they figure, all right I check in to the Rittenhouse Hotel here, well why not have the restaurant here send up a bottle of wine, because I checked in here. It’s basically in marketing and advertising that they’re looking at these location-based services as ways of extending their brand offering them premium services, offering them a little gift or a bottle of beer or something if you check in to some restaurant somewhere.

Rick: The way that it will affect us – and we’ve talked about it internally about offering premium services as we build passive relationships – we’ve talked about incenting non-associates to get closer to Wyndham and learn more about us and if a friend or family member is interested, it does take a premium. It does take something to incent these people. So I think we will all gravitate closer to that model. The web has opened up a wonderful, wonderful way to communicate with people, but the fact of the matter is, everybody’s… they all want something and you’ve got to figure out how you want to play in that, and I’m cautious but I’m optimistic.

Peter: Rick, what have you heard here at this conference that you’ll be sharing with your colleagues back in New Jersey?

Rick: I think one of the biggest takeaways is how human capital is on the forefront of analyst on Wall Street’s minds and how that plays such a critical factor into how they’re waiting out stocks. I think it’s such an important message, not only for me to bring back for everybody in human the capital space, to share with because sometimes it needs to resonate up and down an organization. There’s a lot of CEOs that say that people are our most important asset. There is only a select few that really walk the walk.

Peter: Exactly.

Rick: So you’ve got to share that and something like that, and ours does by the way, Steve Holmes is – he’s the keeper of our culture. We’re very blessed to have a leader like that. Something like that, that truly hits home how analysts are looking at leadership and leadership potential when they’re are evaluating publicly traded companies and now that there’s data on it, I think that’s pretty cool stuff.

Peter: That is. Rick, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today and TotalPicture Radio. It’s been really great meeting you here in Philadelphia.

Rick: Thanks for having me Peter, I appreciate it.

Peter: Thank you.

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This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.