TotalPicture Radio Paul Hamilton Podcast Transcript

Welcome to a special Talent Acquisition channel podcast on Total Picture Radio with continuing coverage from ERE Expo 2010 Spring in San Diego, California. Our coverage of ERE Expo is sponsored by Riviera Advisors, a leading human resources consulting firm focused on helping companies improve their internal recruiting and staffing capabilities. Riviera Advisors is not a search firm. Unlike other consultancies, the company's principals work directly with each client for each assignment. This approach enables Riviera Advisors to provide highly customized recommendations and solutions, not cookie cutter options. To learn more, visit Riviera Advisors on the web at rivieraadvisors.com

Joining me today is Paul Hamilton, Director of Talent Strategy for Canada's leading telecommunications company, Rogers Communications. In 2007, Paul led the sourcing transformation charge at Rogers by implementing a recruiting 2.0 platform that improved hit rate, reduced operating costs and enhanced overall sourcing and screening effectiveness. In his quest to discover the silver bullet solution, he developed a new proactive sourcing model called Sourced In that focuses on delivering measurable value back to the business.

Paul, welcome to Total Picture Radio.

Paul: Hey Peter, thanks for having me. Great to be here today.

Peter: You know, one of the cool things about podcasting is the fact that we have a global audience, so for those listeners in Australia or India who are perhaps not familiar with Rogers Communications, give us a brief overview of your company and its history.

Paul: Absolutely, Peter. Rogers is the leader in the Canadian communications industry, engaged in three primary lines of business - wireless, cable and media. The company was founded back in 1960 by one of Canada's greatest entrepreneurs, the late Ted Rogers. From a numbers perspective, our revenue in 2009 was close to $12 billion and our adjusted operating profit was $4.4 billion for that same period.

Some of the recent highlights that we are very proud of is the fact we were the first to bring the iPhone to Canada. We also brought the Buffalo Bills football team to Toronto to play in the Rogers Center, and we've got incredible distribution retail stores from the East to the West and we've got a phenomenal brand here in the Canadian landscape. So, that's the Rogers. We are a leader in the Canadian telecommunication space.

Peter: Paul, has the iPhone enjoyed the same level of success in Canada as it has here in the United States?

Paul: Absolutely. Phenomenal success. And it's not just the iPhone but it's just the transformation as we move from a voice-driven country to a data driven organization, as well as our consumers are demanding more in terms of Smart phones and new innovative technology. So, the iPhone along with some of the other innovative products that we released here at Rogers, are absolutely satisfying the needs of our consumers here in Canada.

Peter: Paul, how many employees does Rogers have?

Paul: We have a full-time employee base of about 28,000 employees across the country. We also have a strong contingent labor force that consists of about 10,000 contract employees, specifically working in our IT and engineering organization.

Peter: In my open, I mentioned you had launched a recruiting 2.0 platform back in 2007. You were clearly way ahead of the curve there, Paul. How did you convince management to invest in a new recruiting platform?

Paul: Great question, Peter. One of our key business priorities at Rogers is to drive continuous innovation that focuses on the customers or improves our cooperation, if you will. Myself and our talent strategy team, we aligned our priorities with that of the senior leadership team and determined that if we want to focus on attracting the next generation of top talent, we too need to make an investment in technology and at that time it was Web 2.0. We needed to make that investment early because it was important for us to be the industry leader.

It was also seen as an opportunity to reduce recruitment operating costs by eliminating non-performance sourcing tools and leveraging the new Web 2.0 sourcing platform. You know, one of the great things about working here at Rogers, is that our leaders encourage our employees to have an entrepreneurial spirit. Take chances, as long as it drives the right sort of performance and desired results. It's part of our culture. So to that end, we did show results. We increased our recruiter productivity by 46%. We reduced agency spend by $1.74 million and reduced the total cost of hiring by 57%.

Adding the Web 2.0 platform wasn't the sole reason for our success and our accomplishment, but it absolutely played a key role in achieving the results that we accomplished back then.

Peter: Those are some really impressive numbers, Paul. Are you able to really granularly track your source of hire. A lot of organizations will go out and poll their new employees and say how did you find us? And oftentimes they'll say well, you know, I came through your career portal, but you really don't know how they got to your career portal. Are you able to really go way back and say alright, this candidate came from this particular website or this source or from this ad we had on this job board.

Paul: You know, back in 2007-2008, the technology was somewhat primitive in the ability to really track ROI. But now you've got tools such as Google Analytics, you've got some great backend website analytics tool that you can plug in to your career site or to any of the sourcing channels that you're using to really tag and be able to quantify the results of your social media strategy. So, in a nutshell, absolutely, we've come a long way.

We are able to not only track where people come in but where they actually drop off on our site. So for example, someone might come in and 40% might fall off on the second page of the application process. There might be some information in there that is non-relevant and people lose interest in that. So we are able to modify the entire candidate experience based on the feedback that we get from our analytics that we review on a monthly basis.

Peter: That's interesting because as we all know, it's the passive candidates that you are trying to recruit and it's normally those folks to be the first ones who dropout of completing these online job applications.

Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's important that your message is succinct, to the point, concise, and really hits the target audience. They need to be able to read things quickly and we're trying to adopt more of a Twitter-like approach. Less is actually more when it comes to content as well as completing the application process.

Peter: Something else I mentioned in my open was that you had created what's called a Sourced-In model. What is that and how does it help with your recruiting efforts?

Paul: Sourced-In is really part 2 of some of the things that we've implemented to improve overall recruiter productivity and results. I mentioned briefly what we talked about with Recruiting 2.0 or Web 2.0. Sourced-In is another component for our recruitment success and it's really about implementing rigor around the recruiting process and the recruiter-manager relationship.

Sourced-To-Win is a methodology designed to help the recruiter and hiring manager creating a sourcing strategy aimed at improving the talent acquisition process. It's really describes the key components required to successfully complete a full recruitment cycle while ensuring both parties are aware of their shared accountabilities in the sourcing process, and I think that's critical. It's not just the recruiter's job to fill but it's also the hiring manager and the hiring manager's team and they need to understand what their roles and responsibilities are upfront.

So when you think about the Sourced-In model, we look at four key components of Sourced-To-Win and they are setup looking at the planning process, looking at the outcome, understanding the recruiting channels best suited for the source and then, of course, the education process. In the setup section, when we look at that, we're really talking about things such as workforce planning, prioritization, understanding specifically your recruiter capabilities and when you have to potentially invest in leveraging third parties to get the source complete. Understanding your interview plan and recognizing the systems and resources that you have at your disposal to execute this transaction and finally in the setup, you also look at the budget, the money component, who's paying for what, who's got the budget, how much budget do we have.

When you look at the outcome, it's really about understanding your desired results early on in the recruitment process. So what are the key performance indicators that you want to looked at. Oftentimes, recruiters thinks it's constantly time to hire. Well if you talk to the manager, sometimes time to hire is irrelevant; it's more about the quality of hire or more about how much money you have to spend. So there's a bit of a trade off. It's important that you understand the KPIs out of the gate; you establish a strategic scorecard, so you understand how do you measure success so it becomes more of an objective conversation.

Really understanding the expectation and consequences, and I like this part because, for me, when a manager doesn't do their assigned responsibility, I also need them to understand the consequences of them not fulfilling their action. Likewise, with me, as a recruiter, they need to understand if I don't do this, here are the consequences. So setting the expectation and consequences out of the gate is also important.

When you look at recruiting channels - and we'll talk about that - but it's really important about understanding the real tools that you have at your disposal, whether it's a CRM tool, leveraging talent community, working with third parties, looking at succession planning, maybe there's an internal employee, you have to make sure that you expose all the recruiting channels and then create a strategy to determine which channel is best appropriate for this source.

And then finally, educate. It's our job as recruiters to provide some intelligence on the market, make sure that we understand what's critical, what's going on and then share that information with our hiring team. I think it's also important that we have a better awareness of what the business and how the business sees the criticality of this role.

One of the things I tell my recruiters to do interview your hiring manager's boss because it's important that if their boss thinks that role is important then you've got a good alignment. If their boss doesn't see this as a critical role, then you have to understand why is my manager putting so much pressure. One of the things I do is, obviously you notify your hiring manager that you're going to spend some time with their boss to get a sense what is this all about, and maybe you do it jointly, but it's important that everyone has a sense of how critical is this role because that will determine how much of a sourcing strategy want to put behind the efforts as well.

That's the whole Sourced-In methodology. It really helps to bring the recruiters and the hiring manager closer together for critical searches within your organization.

Peter: I think that's really smart because now everyone is really dealing from the same deck of cards and understands what is required from a recruiter's standpoint to bring in that individual, that talent, into the organization and really setting up the expectations and roles and responsibilities.

Paul: Absolutely. And that's the intent; it's really about getting to the right result in a shorter period of time but making sure that every step of the way is tracked, is measured, and there's accountability and you understand the key components that you need to get the job done.

Peter: Am I correct in stating that Rogers hires about 10,000 people a year?

Paul: Absolutely. When you factor in all of the hires that we do in our media world, and wireless and cable, plus the hiring that we do in our call centers, our retail and distribution channels across the country, yes, we hire about 10,000. Now what's interesting, last year with the economic challenge that our industry faced, we still managed to hire 8,537 people and made them happy by making them Rogers employees. So, it wasn't 10,000 last year. I think we're going to be in the same ballpark this year but on average, 10,000 is the number that we typically operate.

Peter: Well, you know, even 8,000 that's a lot of employees. Let's talk about your sourcing. Do you use job boards? Do you use third party recruiters, social media like LinkedIn or Twitter? Does Rogers have a Facebook fan page?

Paul: Our sourcing ecosystem is comprised of traditional methods, including employer paroles and agencies, mixed with the new digital recruiting 2.0 platforms. We use social networks, we leverage SEO, SEM, we invest in job aggregators and, of course, we align with our strong corporate brand to help convert customers into candidates.

The area that we are still working on and exploring next is really around mobile recruiting. Given that we are in the wireless base, we believe that there is a strong alignment between what we do on the consumer side and what we do on the recruiting side that is going to help us be more effective in leveraging our mobile technology. Plus, we also believe that this is where recruiting 3.0 will take us. It's about sourcing, leveraging mobile technology that anywhere anytime approach to recruiting is becoming much more of a reality.

But with all of our sourcing channels and all of our sourcing resources in our sourcing ecosystem, we focus on the three C's. The three C's in my mind are you have to be able to connect with your candidates, you have to be able to communicate - and communication now means bi-directional communication; your candidates need to have the ability to communicate with you as well. In the past, it was just a single form, you send out something and then they would apply. Candidates are becoming so savvy that they're asking the right questions before they even consider you as a potential company to work for. So you need to ensure that you've got the right communication channels and vehicles in place to allow candidates to have access to your organization.

And the final C is collaborate. Candidates are also leveraging other candidates and collaborating with other candidates to assess whether or not that company is a company that is aligned to their personal and professional values. So you want to foster a community where candidates can collaborate and chat with current employees and things of that nature.

The 3 Cs are critical when you're looking at any form of sourcing - connect, communicate, and collaborate.

Peter: Paul, does those three Cs resonates as well with Gen-Xers as they do with the Gen-Yer?

Paul: Absolutely. I think what happens is you need to be able to dial up certain areas and dial down. So maybe you need to emphasize with the current generation, the Gen-Y, maybe you need to focus more on the ability to collaborate. They're very much a generation that is information hungry. They seek at a lot of information and not information that is corporate bound in a nice package or presented on their website; it's more about the grassroots information. Collaboration is critical with that audience.

Whereas maybe an older demographic, it's also built the ability to communicate. They want to have direct communication, and it's not necessarily online. They want to be able to have a forum where they can sit and listen and dialogue with whether it's senior leaders or senior leaders of the recruitment organization or just a recruiter in general. Understanding your demographics and understanding the need of that individual from a broad perspective helps you determine which of the Cs you need to amp up or dial down to accommodate their requirement.

Peter: And of course, you're in a unique situation in that I would imagine virtually all of your candidates are also your customers.

Paul: Well, I would like to say that all of them are, but the reality is 72% of our candidates are also customers, and we do that analysis. We do a survey. And this is a challenge for us; it's one of the challenges that we are facing right now. Earlier on, I mentioned how we hired 8,537 new employees last year. With that said, we also turned away 218,229 applicants that didn't get the job. So for me, as the director of talent strategy, this a challenge because as I said, 72% of our candidates are also our customers. So we need to ensure that we provide the right level of engagement and connection regardless of the hiring outcome. And I'd say that's one of our biggest challenges that we face.

Peter: Well, that is a real challenge because you certainly don't want to make enemies out of those 200,000 individuals who applied for jobs at Rogers Communications and didn't get one.

Paul: Absolutely. They are customers. I mean they are continuing to provide revenue for our organization. And some of those customers have what we call a high ARPU (average revenue per unit). So it's important that we treat them and we recognize them, their value as a customer, just as importantly as a potential candidate. We need to ensure that from a marketing perspective that we are aligning our two organizations together to ensure that the right message is out there and it's very consistently applied.

Peter: That really is a challenge. What are some of your biggest hot buttons right now, Paul? What are the biggest recruiting challenges you're dealing with as we're moving into the second quarter here in 2010?

Paul: I would say there's a couple. The first one I mentioned earlier on and that's how do we deal with the other applicants that are in the candidate base.

Our second hot button is improving our on boarding process in getting all of our new hires productive on day 1, and I think that's important because there's some business relevance. We understand that if a new employee is not engaged and not productive on day 1, there's a cost associated with that in terms of how much are we losing in terms of total productivity.

We've come a long way since 2007 here at Rogers. We have integrated an on-boarding solution with our ATS which allows us to get offers out to candidates electronically via real time secured data feeding, and we've also implemented an e-signature offer acceptance process. So what previously took 11 days to issue and get a signed offer back is now taking one day.

Our employees have indicated that 95% are satisfied with the on-boarding process, but as a system owner, I can tell you right now that 5% is still a concern to me and I know that there are gaps and opportunities to improve. So our team is working diligently on getting that number up to a 100%.

I also believe that we have the same issues that the rest of our industry is facing - how do we drive more productivity with fewer resources. We have to look at the drivers that we control, whether it's people, processes, or technology, and determine what's the optable mix to get us the desired results. It's an exciting time for us.

The other challenge that I see as well is that we are truly entering a global economy and as a result of that, there are new players and new competitors, both traditional and non-traditional competitors, that are entering our mix. How do we ensure that the message our employee value proposition is resonating with the right audience and that we remain a desired employer for our candidate, for a passive candidate and for a candidate who doesn't even know that they are unhappy in their current job but they are top level employee. How do we get that message out?

So there is a couple of challenges that really fuel the excitement energy that I have about entering this next period in recruitment here at Rogers.

Peter: One thing I find very interesting, Paul, is that there still is a war for talent and to your point that this is a global economy, not only that, you're trying to hire the same people that Microsoft is trying to hire, that Intel is trying to hire, that RIM is trying to hire. Right?

Paul: And I think there's an added layer of complexity in the sense that RIM is also one of our partners.

Peter: Right, exactly.

Paul: I mean, we are one of the largest distributors of the RIM product. So, you don't want to create any sort of cannibalism in your sort of business ecosystem but at the same time, you're right, we are approaching the same candidates and providing different value propositions and different opportunities and we have to recognize that, in some cases, we need to support our business ecosystem, as much as we need to hire the right individual for our organization. And I think that's one of the key messages that I walked away with from the ERE conference, from one of the keynotes, that you've got to think now beyond just doing what's right for your company but think about the companies, your supply chain, think about what they do and how you can help them to drive recruitment success because ultimately, if the stars are aligned, by you helping them, you're actually helping yourself in return.

Peter: Right. Of course, RIM is the manufacturer of the ubiquitous and popular Blackberry. Speaking about ERE, one of the themes this year was cautious optimism. Is that consistent with your attitude?

Paul: I believe we are in a period of recruitment like never before. I think this is truly foreign to many of us who have been in the recruitment space for 10+ years. So absolutely, there is an amber light flashing right now. However, I also believe that when the dust settles, the recruitment landscape will be stronger than ever before. I'm excited about the new talent in our space, those who were at this year's ERE conference. I'm excited about the fact that recruiting is now seen as a professional function that is required in order to help a business achieve critical success. When you factor in things such as workforce planning, succession planning, competition, both internally and externally, recruiting is now playing a critical role in achieving that.

So absolutely there is some a cautious optimism out there, but I think when the light hits green and the rubber hits the road, I mean we're going to see a new appreciation and respect and value placed on the talent acquisition and talent strategy function for many organizations worldwide.

Peter: Paul, this has been a terrific conversation and thank you for taking time to speak with us today on Total Picture Radio. In closing, is there anything, perhaps something else from ERE Expo, that you'd like to share with the audience?

Paul: I mentioned earlier on that I'm really excited about the new talent that is coming out of organizations from a recruiting perspective. A couple of key takeaways that I walked away with from this ERE include an excellent presentation by Russell Kronenberg from Australia. I think his opening keynote that describes how corporate social responsibility needs to be integrated into talent acquisition because there is a true differentiator in our space right now, I thought it was fascinating. I'm still sort of digesting the message as it was very powerful and a compelling case.

I think Kat Drum's presentation, Kat from Starbucks, was brilliant. She talked about their social media strategy.

I think though, however, the biggest takeaway for me was simply this - it was a confirmation. It was a confirmation that there is still so much passion that exists in what we do, that people truly believe that science and art can come together, and when it does, it's called recruiting. I'm excited that we collectively, in our space, we're upping the level of professionalism recruitment, and through the results of hard work that we're delivering, recruiting is now being invited to the leadership table. I think there are more senior VPs of talent strategy or senior VPs of recruitment out there and people are inspired and want to become truly great recruiters. I'm excited about where we're going as an industry, as a function, and I'm inspired by what's coming behind us in terms of some of the new recruiters that we're hiring in to our organization.

The next year is going to be great. I think a year after that is going to be sensational and I continue to enjoy my ride on the roller coaster of recruitment.

Peter: Thanks again, Paul, for all your great insights today.

Paul: Thank you for your time, Peter. I appreciate it.

Paul Hamilton is director of talent strategy for Canada's leading telecommunications company, Rogers Communication.

Once again, we want to thank Riviera Advisors, the premier strategic talent management advisory service for making our coverage of ERE Expo possible. You can learn more about Riviera Advisors at rivieraadvisors.com.

We welcome our listeners to join the conversation. Visit Paul's feature page in the Inside Recruiting Channel of Total Picture Radio. That's totalpicture.com to voice your opinion. This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to Total Picture Radio.