Alan Gardner, IACPR Interview Transcript

Welcome to TotalPicture Radio's exclusive coverage of the International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment Global Conference 2011.

The new talent management, strategies for the future, this podcast from the IACPR Global Conference in New York is brought to you by Riviera Advisors, a premier global human resources consulting firm celebrating its 10th anniversary. Riviera Advisors delivers proven, real-world solutions designed to meet each client's unique talent management needs and challenges.

Visit RivieraAdvisors.com/podcasts to access interviews from the IACPR Global Conference as well as the new Riviera Advisors monthly podcast series INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED, featuring interviews with the movers and innovators in talent acquisition, staffing and corporate human resources.

Welcome to a special inside recruiting talent acquisition podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from the IACPR, that's the International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment Global Conference held in New York City. Joining me today is Alan Gardner, Vice President, Human Resources at Verizon Wireless. In this role, Alan is responsible for all human resources strategies and programs including compensation and benefits, employee relations, training and developments, staffing, diversity and human resources compliance. Alan participated in a very interesting panel discussion here at IACPR called Innovations and Compensation Attracting and Retaining Top Talent 2011 and Beyond.

Alan, I'd like to start by asking you to give us an overview and some feedback on your panel today.

Alan: It was actually a very good panel I think given that we're here with both professional and internal recruiters, it was good to get their perspective on some of the challenges that they face from a recruiting perspective. It was good for us as the head of an HR organization to be able to share some perspectives as I'm looking for talent and I'm looking to bring in executives that help us execute on our overall strategy to be able to explain to them some of the – our perspective, some of the goals that we have and how we can work together for mutual benefit.

Peter: Tell us about executive compensation which certainly has a certain amount of media buzz about it especially at the senior level, but you're an incredibly competitive industry; I would guess that you've got to pay your people pretty well.

Alan: Yes, I mean I think that's one of the things that gets missed in the conversation that most of the executives that we recruit and the executives that worked for these organizations if by and large are tremendously well educated, they put in a tremendous amount of time.

The analogy I use is that we don't seem to have problems with a professional athlete, a quarterback making millions and millions of dollars but we have concerns with these executives, and I think it's sometimes because we think that we can do those jobs, but those jobs are tremendously demanding. They have the responsibility in many cases of hundreds of thousands of employees kind of under their responsibility. They have the responsibility for running very large companies in a very complex environment dealing both with the execution of the company's strategy, navigating the economic climate, managing the concerns from the regulatory environment and trying to drive the organization to be successful while there is a clear expectation that they drive performance for their shareholders. These are very complex environments and the market is really what sets the requirement for compensation for these executives.

Peter: Is compensation going up in your industry?

Alan: No, I wouldn't say it's going up. I think that there are a number of factors that have allowed the compensation to remain fairly stable, but we are seeing as the economy improves, I think we will again start to see a situation where there is even with unemployment, there is still a very limited amount of talent in the marketplace for very key jobs and so as companies start hiring again and there's a lot of growth and development, we are faced with the challenge of more companies going after a very small talent pool which can have the effect of driving up compensation.

Peter: One of the very interesting panels yesterday was with Motorola talking about employment branding and how important that has become in this environment. Tell us from your perspective what your opinion was of that session about employment branding and how important that has become in the recruiting process?

Alan: Employment branding is very important. We get thousands and thousands of applications each year and one of the reasons that that happens is because people are very familiar with Verizon, but we also have an employee population. We get very high scores for our employee opinion survey results. We get numerous awards from Working Mother and a number of organizations who recognize us as an employee of choice.

When that happens that's what creates your employment brand in the marketplace. All employees want to work for a company where they can get good compensation and good pay, but they want to work for an organization that is successful. They want to work for an organization that is going to motivate them to want to get up and come to work in the morning. They're going to want to work for an organization that allows them to leverage their skills and to do creative and innovative things.

Right now, the wireless industry is probably one of the most innovative marketplaces in our economy right now. Lots of growth going on, lots of innovation taking place in this industry, still a lot of investment going on in the wireless space across all of our competitors even at a time on the market when the market is flat and economy is slow.

Peter: Alan, you get thousands of résumés every year from people who perhaps are your clients as well as job applicants. How do you manage the candidate experience to make sure that you're not making a good customer, giving them a bad taste in their mouth because of the candidate experience because they never heard back from you guys?

Alan: We try to make sure that we contact every one that puts in an application with Verizon Wireless. Our recruiting structure is set up so that we do that. Now, as we go through the hiring process, clearly the number of people we hire is a function of the openings that we have and we work very hard to try to find the right fit for the organization. I mean everyone is not a good fit for the organization, so we go through a series of interviews and discussions with the HR organization and the leadership team. We also try to make sure that the candidate is exposed to what we do and how we do it, understand the culture of the environment. Our success and our ability to perform in the marketplace is a function of hiring great talent. Hiring people that are also performance-driven and that strive for excellence every day and so as we're going through the recruitment process, we're trying to find those individuals that exhibit that exact same kind of passion for whatever it is their doing, whether it's a customer service rep or a marketing person or a cell site technician, etc., we are looking for individuals that are going to bring that level of commitment and passion to work because that's the only way we can be as successful as we've been.

Peter: What kinds of efforts does your organization go to from the standpoint of employee retention and how are you going about measuring how satisfied employees are working with your organization?

Alan: Every two years, we do an opinion-employee satisfaction survey, so that gives us kind of a broad gauge of how the employees feel about us and about working for the company and quite frankly, where they may have concerns that we need to care for, then every several months we do what are called pulse survey.

We pulse a segment of the employee population on things like whether or not their manager as a result of the performance review process sit down and had a very detailed discussion with them, whether their managers talk to them about their development, aspirations and goals, after compensation, do they feel that the increases that they received were fair. As changes are taking place in the organization, we want to get some feedback from them as to whether or not they believe the organization is successfully implementing new programs and processes. We also have a program called Ideas at Work, where an employee – we used to call them I guess a long time ago, Employee Suggestion boxes but now that's all electronic. Employees can go online and if employees have an idea about how we can improve our business, how we can improve our delivery of our service to the customers, we get that feedback through that program and there are people in the HR organization, the marketing organization, etc., who will review those suggestions and look for opportunities to implement those things and for those things that are implement, we recognize employees for providing those great suggestions.

Peter: Do you slice and dice data from the standpoint of different generations, so maybe you look at how a Gen Y or a Gen Xer is responding to these surveys? Do you get that granular or is it just overall?

Alan: Well, so the surveys tend to be overall surveys, but we do know for example, the average age of our employee population is about 34 years old. We have a fairly young employee population, and because we hire a lot of college hires and recent college hires we do have a pretty significant population of Generation X and Generation Y employees.

Where that manifest itself is that in our call centers, in a lot of our environments, we do things to try to attract and retain those employees, it's not uncommon for you to see ping-pong tables and Xboxes in certain environments, so that an employee break that they can use that as a way of kind of unwinding and relaxing. We have 43 fitness centers throughout our footprint, so we have a large population that participates in our fitness centers. We have softball leagues and various other programs that we believe are conducive to creating a really good work environment for that population. Now, that's not to say that people of my age are people that are over the age of 34 don't. Certainly, they do take advantage of the fitness centers and a lot of these other opportunities we have but a lot of that is geared toward our younger population.

Peter: Do you have a large virtual workforce?

Alan: I wouldn't say that we have a large virtual workforce. A large part of our employee population are in call centers and in our stores. And so because they're in our call centers and in our stores, it requires them to be at that work location.

We do have a number of programs that allow people to work from home depending on what the demands are for their job. You tend to see that mostly in maybe the IT environment, sometimes in marketing areas across a number of other functions or disciplines and then on an occasional basis, if someone has a need to be able to work from home, we have online access. I mean we have tablet computers that we sell and we have wireless access, so many of our employees are wired and they can do their work from just about anywhere.

Peter: And I would imagine that that's a big attraction, especially with the Gen Yers, right?

Alan: Yeah, so it is. The fact that we're viewed more now as a technology company than a telephone company because of the handsets that we carry which are now really just mini computers. We have tablets. Most of our younger employees love the technology. That's one of things that draws them to our company. They take advantage of the technology. They embrace the technology. That's one of the reasons why a lot of employees come to work for us. They want to work for a technology company. They want to be on the forefront of all the innovations that are taking place in the wireless industry and because they're very good, good at that, that's one of the things that we look for when we're hiring an employee, because in many cases, those employees already are already very familiar with being out on the blogs. They're familiar with using social media. They know how to maximize the use of their cell phones. They really understand the use of computers and tablets and so, to the extent that they can bring that natural curiosity to their job and then we provide the training to help them take that to the next level and it allows them to be very effective with servicing our customers.

Peter: How does mobile factor into your recruiting efforts?

Alan: We have a very strong presence on Facebook and Twitter and on the internet and so the fact that you can now access those web pages just about anywhere, that creates mobility. We actually are working on – we have some trials out for some mobile recruitment applications as well as so we're going to be going more and more mobile. Even in our stores, we are starting to look at our POS devices and instead of having those POS devices kind of tethered to the floor, they're now moving to tablets. So even in the store environment, the sales reps can be mobile and use our various tablets to service customers and to execute a sale. Many of us who travel with the job have tablets, so we're becoming a mobile workforce. Everything that I can do just about in the office with the exception of reaching into a file cabinet, I can now do just about any place I travel.

Peter: Speaking about retail, retail traditionally has a lot of churn and a lot of employee turnover. You have so many Verizon Wireless stores, do you have a better retention in your retail space than the industry standard?

Alan: Yeah, actually our retention is better than the industry standard, so to your point retail is high. Most retail – I haven't seen statistics lately but retail turnover tends to be depending on what industry in the high 20s and in some cases can be even higher than that. I won't give you a specific number but our retention number for retail tends to be in the low to mid teens.

Peter: That's pretty good.

Alan: Yeah, so we have had a lot of success in the retail environment and I think it's a function of just the organization doing well. People like to work for a winner. The organization, I believe, is on a tremendous ride right now. We've had tremendous success in the marketplace and the momentum is continuing to grow and that's really a function of our employees and the talent that is coming in the organization, phenomenal, phenomenal talent that we're bringing in the organization. They're curious. Again, they have good technical skills. They're very technically savvy so they embrace the technology focus we now have as an organization, and they're very good at being able to impart that knowledge and service our customers so that our customers understand how to maximize the value of the products and services that we're providing them.

Peter: Back to social media for just a second, do you sub that out to an agency to build your Facebook page and manage your Twitter feed or is that all done internally, and do you have specific employees who tweet for Verizon?

Alan: Yeah, that's done internally. The IT organization kind of supports our platform and our structure do that and then we have members of the HR team that they post on those sites, watch those sites, provide feedback to potential employees that post on those sites. Sometimes customers come into those sites. We make sure that information gets over to the marketing department or to the customer service department, so we do most of that internally.

Now, we do have some external relationships with the external recruitment boards, etc., where we link in or tie into what's being done externally. We also have relationships with companies that help us develop our sites for maximum influence in the marketplace, but most of that work is done internally with our IT organization.

Peter: The session this morning was all around diversity and a lot of organizations talk a good game, but when you really get in there, you don't find much diversity. I know this is part of your charge, in your role. How is diversity viewed within Verizon Wireless especially at the senior executive level and talking about your board?

Alan: Diversity is very important to our organization. I think one of the members of the panel this morning mentioned that she worked for a bank and at that bank, that their executives are partially compensated for the execution of diversity. That is the case at Verizon as well.

A part of our senior leaders' compensation is tied to our ability to make improvements and our diversity from a hiring perspective and from a supplier diversity perspective to make sure that we are working very hard to identify diverse suppliers and minority vendors, and we have a good, adequate amount of spend with those organizations.

We have a very diverse employee population from top to bottom. Our board is very diverse. If you would look at the Verizon executive population, you will see a very diverse organization that is really fairly reflective of the markets that we serve. Now, with that though there is still opportunity for improvement, so we don't believe that we've completely solved that problem. There's always an opportunity for us to create an environment where we could see more underrepresented individuals to move up in middle management positions. We also are starting to see, as we're focusing more on the organization going global, we have to think a lot more about global diversity in addition to just diversity in the United States as well.

Peter: You Alan, you have an added complexity in recruiting in that so many of the talent that you would like to be able to recruit are working with your partners, the Motorolas and the BlackBerrys of the world, right? Can you tell us a little bit about how you go about finding candidates? Do you use executive search firms, use staffing agencies, how do you go find those really-hard-to-find candidates that you need in your organization?

Alan: The answer is we use all of the above, so we have internal recruitment resources that are canvassing the marketplace for talent but we also use external recruiters now. Now we tend use external recruiters more for what I would call niche jobs, our jobs that are more hard to fill and we sometimes do get candidates from our partner organizations. We have to manage that, that's some a delicate balance but if they're in the marketplace and they are looking for employment, we're careful about that but we do have employees who previously worked for some of our partner companies and I'm sure some of our partner companies have employees that previously worked for Verizon.

Peter: Do you use job boards?

Alan: We do use job boards but we use them – the job boards are really more – the boards are connected to our website, so you can post on Monster and it would transfer into the Verizon Pulsing and Verizon Sites and come in to our information, so Verizon jobs may be available on a job board from a posting perspective, but it will eventually find it's way into our internal recruitment process.

Peter: A lot of major organizations over the last couple of years had been investing very heavily in talent management platforms, applicant tracking systems and trying to find ways of integrating and connecting all of these very diverse platforms together, is that something Verizon Wireless has been working on.

Alan: We definitely are working on that, so because of number of people that we recruit because we hire a large number of employees a year, we have to use all of the resources that are available to us, so we certainly have an applicant tracking system. The first part of that is we have to have that in order to be able to manage our compliance requirements.

Peter: Exactly.

Alan: But in addition to that, we use the applicant tracking systems. We use the external posting boards. We use our websites where people applied for jobs, all to help us better manage our talent. Now, those platforms definitely could be better, so we have some work underway right now that is directly focused on improving our overall recruitment platforms not just in Verizon Wireless but across the entire enterprise, so we can better mine that data. We're putting in things like optical character recognition so we can better scan résumés to pinpoint where we have very critical needs of specific talent, so that we can search the thousands and thousands of résumés that we can get in a more precise fashion and so there's lot of work. I've talked to my peers across many companies. Everybody is trying to figure out how to bring together all these various disparate platforms for maximum benefit.

Peter: Alan, what keeps you awake at night?

Alan: I get asked that question often, and I think it varies from week to week and from month to month, but I think the real challenge and the opportunity that we have right now is in the wireless industry and extremely competitive marketplace.

Peter: I don't think there's a more competitive industry out there than the wireless industry.

Alan: It's very competitive. There are a lot of things taking place based on what happens with the T-Mobile and the AT&T merger. That could change the overall dynamics in the marketplace. You have spread in the marketplace that is also very aggressive. We have continued to be very successful in this marketplace in spite of the competitive nature. We're doing very well but we don't rest on our laurels, and so what that means is as the technology gets more complex, as the curve on evolution of technology in the marketplace takes place, it is incumbent on us to make sure that we have the kind of technical talent that can help us be successful.

One of the challenges that I think often about is making sure that we can find the right kind of talent that we need in the organization to help us be successful. Our footprint of products and services is not the same than it was five years ago and five years from now, it will not be the same, so we are increasingly – we use the cliché – We're a technology company, but we are increasingly becoming a more technologically advanced organization.

As the handsets get more complicated, they tend to look more like PCs than they do old phones. There's a much larger software element to that which based on applications. I think at some point in time, we're going to start to see challenges like viruses on cell phones and things of that nature, so we do have an evolution of the kind of talent that we need in the organization to help us as the technology is starting to evolve. Our networks are becoming more complex, so even the networking engineering environment, the kind of talent that we need to recruit is very important. We have labs or innovation centers on the East and the West Coast that are working with other partners to help bring new innovations to 4G network and so we need the kind of talent that can effectively work with a variety of vendors in the marketplace who are looking to use our wireless platform as a venue for innovation and change going forward.

Peter: One last question, do you get calls from hiring managers saying, "Hey Alan, I need a near field communications engineer. I've had this wreck out there for 90 days, what's going on? Can't you fill this job?!!"

Alan: Sometimes, yes. We do get that and so it's a combination – so they definitely want a person hired yesterday.

Peter: Right.

Alan: But it's a combination of things as I talked about. (1) We need to make sure that the person is the right fit for the organization and so that when they come, that they're going to stay. We try to make sure for those managers that we don't have wrecks out there too long and by and large, the recruitment organization is pretty good about being able to meet those needs but there are some jobs that take longer to fill than others and we just ask our managers to continue to work with us. They're a part of the process, so they're seeing the candidates come in as well, and they're heavily engaged in the selection process, so by and large, I think they understand the challenges with recruiting certain key talent.

Peter: Great. Alan, thank you so much for speaking with us today on TotalPicture Radio. It's been great meeting you here at the IACPR Conference.

Alan: Thank you for having me.

Alan Gardner is the Vice President of Human Resources at Verizon Wireless.

Please make a point to visit RivieraAdvisors.com/podcasts for the monthly podcast series, INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED. You'll find a complete library of thought-provoking interviews on each RN recruiting including the complete transcripts from these in-depth discussions with leaders in HR and recruiting at the IACPR Conference. While there, please join the conversation with recruiting and staffing professionals on the Insights from the Riviera Blog. To learn more about Riviera Advisors' real world experience in leading and managing corporate internal recruiting and staffing functions, please call toll-free 800-635-9063.

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