This is the last of six articles on how to identify HR candidates who are truly commercial. In these articles, I explore the difference between those who are just strong on delivery and those who really understand what difference they make to the company. Previous articles can be found on www.paskpartnership.com

This month, we look at the HR business partner.

As you can imagine, I’ve interviewed many HR business partners (HRBPs) and I’ve come to one simple conclusion about the difference between the truly commercial candidates and the rest. Being commercial is about choices. Choices about how you spend your time and what is going to have the biggest impact on the business. It’s not about the design of the role or the job title or it’s position in the hierarchy.

I’ve met candidates who call themselves HRBPs but in fact are HR generalists and trouble-shooters. There are HRBPs who report to the CEO or Divisional head but where the relationship is anything but a partnership one and more like a subservient one. The truly commercial HR business partner has earned the respect and status they have but their influence on the business may not be obvious from their position in the organisation. Instead, I look beyond this to the way they have conducted themselves.

Let’s start by exploring how HRBPs choose to spend their time.

The biggest choice I have observed the commercial candidate make in their career is over what work they get involved in. Are they an HR generalist, a jack-of-all-trades who can turn their hand to anything from handling disciplinary cases to facilitating team meetings? Or are they a business leader who focuses on how to create the conditions for high performance or on how to build the workforce of the future?

I’m deliberately describing this as a choice because those who try to do both, invariably have less impact on the business. The more time they spend doing the jack-of-all-trades work, the less time they have to add real commercial value.

Making this choice isn’t easy. There is a prevalent myth to contend with here – that HR needs to get the basics right before they earn the right to do the strategic stuff. This has more than a grain of truth in it – if the basic security and welfare needs of employees are not being met, then the organisation is failing in it’s duty of care and will ultimately lose the loyalty of its workforce. If these basics are missing, nothing could be more commercial, or strategic, than putting them in place.

But this doesn’t mean that the HRBP has to meet these needs personally. They do, however, need to ensure that the processes, services, systems and behaviours are in place to deal with these issues. The myth is thinking that, once these are in place, they have to “keep their hand in” and provide some of these services themselves to their senior colleagues.

So they first key factor I explore with candidates is what they choose to spend their time on.

The second is what impact they have had. The messages from my previous articles on how to measure commercial impact apply equally here:

• how did this improve the revenue or profit margin of the company or reduce risk?
• what commercially valuable behaviours resulted from this intervention and why was it the best way of achieving this?
• what other options were available to you and why did you reject them?
• what outcome where you trying to achieve and how did this directly relate to the business strategy?
• how did you measure the impact and what was the level of improvement over time?
• what was the relevance of using best practice or applying external benchmarks in this company and how did these drive the achievement of the business strategy?

Clearly, these two factors are interconnected. The more time spent on strategic issues, the more opportunity there is for having a commercial impact. The more time spent on service delivery, when there are other ways these needs could be met for less cost, the more missed opportunities there are for commercial impact. What differentiates the truly commercial HRBP is not whether they can demonstrate commercial impact – it is how they free themselves up to deliver more and more commercial impact.

If you need any advice on your search for your next truly commercial HRBP then please contact me on 07760 777 931 or via email debbie@paskpartnership.com

This is the fourth of six articles on how to identify HR candidates who are truly commercial. In these articles, I explore the difference between those who are just strong on delivery and those who really understand what difference they make to the company. Previous articles can be found on www.paskpartnership.com

This month, we look at the Head of Reward.

What could be more commercial than a function that focuses on numbers and what people get paid? Surely EVERY Head of Reward is commercially oriented, just by virtue of their proximity to the finance function? The rigours of the annual business planning cycle, the scrutiny of the Remco and the threat of activist shareholders and Trade Unions on the prowl for “fat-cat” pay packages – all of these pressures hone the commercial instincts of the Reward specialist. Don’t they?

Well, yes, as long as the only measures of success of the Reward function are: the accuracy of the salary bill against the budget; the competitiveness of the Executive reward packages; the quality of the market evidence under-pinning the reward framework. These measures favour competence in numeracy, pay process controls, benchmarking and presentation of logical arguments. In which case, why don’t you promote a finance manager from your company into the Head of Reward role and save yourself the expense of an external search?

That was a rhetorical question.

I would argue that these are just the basic skills of the Reward function and ones which could be somewhat outsourced to the finance function in any case. What differentiates a truly commercial Head of Reward is their ability to appreciate and forecast the impact of a wide range of rewards on people’s decisions and behaviours; to design reward solutions that drive the performance and reinforce the values of the company. It is the human factors   that should drive reward decisions not just the economic ones.

So when you are searching for your next Head of Reward or even reviewing the performance of your current one, look for evidence that they understand the personal and organisational behaviours that result from their solutions – both the good and the bad outcomes.

The common theme from these articles has been that commercial candidates understand why they have done something, not just that they have been good at delivery. The HR function does not add value when it just apes so called “best practice”. It adds value when it applies a knowledge of human behaviour, motivation and psychology to the challenge of how their workforce delivers real value to both it’s customers and shareholders at this time in this market.

So ask your candidates about the negative impact of variable pay (bonuses etc) in their last company. Ask them how they balanced the temptation to work in silos to achieve divisional financial goals against the ambition to drive collaboration and innovation across the Group. Ask them about the impact of Executive pay on company brand and employee engagement. Challenge them on how they have accommodated the non-financial reward needs of Generation Y and how they have educated the Board on these new trends and their impact on the company’s traditional reward principles. In fact, why don’t you just cut to the chase and ask them what are the desirable behaviours in their company, how these contribute to company success and how their reward strategies  have increased the frequency of these behaviours.

You never know, you might find someone who understands the value of everything as well as the cost.

This is the second of six articles on how to identify HR people who are truly commercial. In the first article, I explored the difference between those who are just strong on delivery and those who deliver real commercial results to the business. In a nutshell, those who are less commercial will not be clear on why they chose a particular intervention or what difference they personally made to the company.

In this and the next four articles, I will be applying this test to five of the most common senior HR roles, providing a comprehensive guide to recruiting your top team. This month, we look at the Head of Learning & Development.

The first criteria to establish is what type of L&D professional the business needs. As one of my readers said in response to the first article, if you were recruiting an engineer you would need to be clear if it was an electrical or mechanical engineer you needed. The difference is significant and fundamental to whether they will be a success or not in your company. Likewise, there are a number of very different skill sets in the Learning and Development function.

Over the last 24 years of recruiting senior HR professionals, I have observed that L&D professionals tend to fall into three main archetypes. Each has it’s own strengths and potential for commercial impact if the business requires their particular skill set. Take care to choose the right one for your company, as placing the wrong archetype in the business can be disastrous for all concerned.

The Training Services Provider (TSP) This type is well versed in delivering training activities on a mass scale to a wide audience, either by designing and delivering the activities themselves or by procuring them from a third party. In some cases they may manage an outsourced training services provider.

They should be strong on training needs analysis, supply chain management and training design and delivery using multi-channel, or blended, learning processes. A truly commercial TSP will also be strong on evaluating the lasting impact such training has on both the individual and the business. They will be able to cite productivity improvements, such as higher success rates in task execution, and have a clear understanding of what that means to the bottom line. The key here is to watch out for candidates who quote an “x %” improvement in productivity but can’t identify how that delivered real money back to the company – either in increased revenue or opportunities for reduced headcount.

The commercial TSP may even have put their reputation on the line by running their function as a profit centre – making line managers the judges of whether what they offered was of commercial value or not.

The poorest candidates will be those whose achievements are quoted only as volumes of people trained or new learning methods rolled out e.g. e-learning. Ask them why these were a good thing for the business and see what answers you get.

The Behaviourist This type achieves results by helping learners change their behaviours, often by tackling learners’ mental models and assumptions about how various tasks should be carried out. This approach is most used to transform customer service attitudes or leadership behaviours. The Behaviourist will be both capable of delivering such interventions themselves as well as procuring facilitators and coaches who can deliver this.

They should be strong on the psychology of learning, usually with a relevant qualification or significant training in the associated methodologies. They will understand how to define and use competencies as a framework for both assessment and learning. They will almost certainly be passionate about their subject. A truly commercial Behaviourist will also be clear how to connect the desired behaviours with commercial success. They will be able to provide strong evidence of a correlation between certain behaviours and high performance in the company or that industry. They will be able to articulate why these behaviours are important to the company’s current business strategy and they will have evidence that without these behaviours, the strategy will not be achieved.

The poorest candidates will be very enthusiastic about the impact of behavioural interventions, will talk of their almost life-changing importance but when asked to prove that this has direct business results, will fall back on quoting from Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” or other management gurus. They won’t be able to apply the general observations of these management theories to the specific needs and business context of the companies they have worked in.

The Skills Strategist This type focuses on mapping the skills requirements of the business for both their current and future markets, products and service offering. They will put in place a skills acquisition strategy that incorporates resourcing plans, career paths and training interventions and they will deliver the training element in a planned and phased manner to drive company performance in new markets or just in time to support new products.  A Skills Strategist may drive large-scale Apprenticeship programmes, for example. The audience for such skills strategies is often the front line employees in manufacturing, sales, or service delivery.

The Skills Strategist will be strong in the disciplines of the TSP (above) and may also need to draw on Behaviourist interventions as well. They will use workforce analytics and workforce planning to inform their strategy. They will have a deep knowledge of the external labour market for the critical job families and will understand the education and qualification landscape for their industry.

A truly commercial Skills Strategist will take part in business planning discussions with operations, R&D and marketing. They will not just be responsive to the business agenda, they will help shape it with information on the skills implications of proposed plans. Whilst they will, of course, be able to explain the cost-effectiveness of their training interventions, they will also be able to explain the timing of their programme in relation to new products, market entry or business growth. The outcomes of their strategy will be time to market successes, or increased market share or production volumes.

The poorest candidates won’t have lasted long in their organisation. This sort of work is medium to long term and if their work is out of sync with the business timetable or delivers the wrong skills, it soon becomes evident. They will find it difficult to explain why the skills in their plan were important to the business at that time. They will be weak on explaining the timing issues of their strategy e.g. what the lead-time was for delivering a certain number of trained people in certain parts of the business to coincide with a new product launch.

In Conclusion When you brief your search consultant to find your next Head of L&D, start by discussing what type of L&D person you need for your business at this time. If you get this part wrong, even finding a strong commercial candidate is not enough, as their areas of strength will not be matched against the business need. Such is the diversity of L&D interventions and skillsets that many companies rely on external providers and there is a paucity of in-house experience as a result. This is leading to a shortfall in the market of strong L&D leaders and finding one requires patience and great networking. The good ones are valued by their companies and are difficult to prise away. If you need any advice on your search for your next truly commercial Head of L&D, please contact me on 07760 777 931.