Articles – Pask Partnership

7 ways HR Professionals can radically improve their CVs and LinkedIn Profiles

7 ways HR Professionals can radically improve their CVs and LinkedIn Profiles

If there’s one thing I know I’ll do this week, it’s give people CV advice – or resume advice as my North American clients say.

That and fall asleep watching Graham Norton on Friday night.

Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 28 years (the CV bit). Almost everyone’s CV, resume and LinkedIn profile can be improved.

Here’s how…

Make your CV and your LinkedIn profile one and the same

Your LinkedIn profile is your online CV. So spend as much time refining it as you do your CV. Ask for recommendations from relevant colleagues – the more senior the better – as well as from those you managed. Once your profile is rich with quality testimonials and contextualised evidence-based experience (more on that in a minute) make sure you link to it from your CV.

Have a good photo on your LinkedIn profile

Your CV shouldn’t have a photo but your LinkedIn profile should. Remember to dress appropriately for the sector you work in too – if you work in media and don’t wear a suit for work, then you don’t need to be suited and booted in your photo. Please make sure that your photo is appropriate and looks professional – this is not Facebook! So no photos of you living it up on a boat, cuddling your child/dog/cat/horse, or holding a bottle of wine at a party. Yes, I have seen all of those. No, I’m not exaggerating.

Treat your CV and LinkedIn profile as sales documents

Amazingly, even the most senior level candidates I work with (such as those commanding 250k+ salaries) still don’t always know how to sell themselves. A CV isn’t merely a list of jobs and experiences; it is a proven record of success. And it must read this way. Every experience on there should be backed up with evidence of your success in that role.

Start with a functional summary

It’s essential that you get the opening summary right; recruiters won’t read on if you don’t! These few lines should sum up your unique experience while neatly angling you towards the role you’re applying for – so remember to adapt your summary accordingly. The summary is usually split into three parts, starting with what you are – e.g. “A commercial FCIPD qualified Group HR Director with considerable experience managing restructuring, M&A and related integration activities”– followed by your unique selling point “Creating and implementing dynamic strategies for corporate remuneration committees” and finishing with your top three to five ‘value added’ skills (more on those in a minute).

Include a quotation from a previous employer

You could follow your summary with a one- or two-line quotation from a previous employer (you can always lift this from a testimonial). This will make your CV and profile stand out, and is particularly useful for timid candidates who struggle to shout about their achievements. Use something short but impactful like: “Debbie drove commercial performance across the organisation. She had had a profound impact on our bottom line,” Joe Bloggs, CEO at A Company You Worked For.

Showcase your ‘value added’ skills

These are your skills that add value to employers. You should have three to five of them listed in your functional summary as concise bullet points. Think of these as commercially as you possibly can. A company is investing in you, after all, so spell out your ROI – what did you do personally that made a difference? If you can, specify how you identified the problem, designed a solution, tested it, implemented it, and measured its effectiveness. You want an employer to read this and say, “Wow, look at what this person could do for us!”

Add context – without it you’re nothing

Beyond your summary, will come your career history – which is where people always fail to add enough context. You worked at a FTSE 250 company for two years as an HR Business Partner? Fantastic! But what is the company and what did you do for them exactly? Remember to briefly describe the business (its size and sector) before explaining whom you reported into, managed, and how your performance was assessed. Paint a picture of the company and your time there and include KPIs. Do everything you can to better demonstrate the critical impact you had.

Paskpartnership Ltd is an independently owned HR search and selection company, specialising in the recruitment of permanent and interim HR professionals across all of the functional HR disciplines and in all industry sectors. To understand more about us and how we work, please visit www.paskpartnership.com

Why your fast-growth start-up needs to overhaul its HR

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Like many children I used to suck my thumb.

So much so, my parents said it would turn square. And it kind of has. My left thumb is shaped ever so slightly differently to my right.

Aside from dashing any hopes of a glamorous hand-modelling career, my quirky left thumb bears no influence on my life whatsoever. Sucking my thumb was a childhood phase I grew out of. End of story.

But for the fast-growth tech and e-commerce start-ups I work with, early habits can be much more damaging.

In these rapidly expanding companies, misdirected pressure prevents managers from channeling energy and effectively developing teams. Too often, leadership is compromised.

Add to this the challenge of recruiting fiercely in-demand skills, the changing demands of a young workforce, and the rapidly evolving backdrop against which all this is happening, and you have a perfect storm.

A storm that can shake the foundations of the most committed workforce and result in waning motivation, falling productivity and your best people leaving.

What to do?

Moving from a flat structure to a progression culture

So your start-up is suddenly 500 people plus. Email addresses have surnames and you have people based in multiple locations. For your founding team members, there’s one burning question: what happens now?

Transforming the relatively – and often necessary – flat structure of a start-up into one that nurtures progression, leadership and succession is crucial if you’re to retain talent and keep your core team.

Remember, the world has noticed you and those people who made the start-up such a success.

This is where your new HR leader can step in and build the all-important infrastructure that will take a hardworking, but nebulous workforce and transform it into one that’s better motivated and better engaged.

So who is this HR professional? An experienced all-rounder is crucial here: you’ll need someone who’s willing to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and delve deep into the detail. Someone who can happily implement and oversee routine processes and focus on the wider strategy.

This person will possess enough experience to command respect, and know how to bend the rules. After all, fast-growth companies thrive on being disruptive. HR should be no different.

Your new HR leader will have experience of working with younger workforces whose drivers are often different to their older colleagues. He or she will know how to harness these differences and find the best methods of nourishing them.

If there isn’t room for everyone to progress upwards in the company, how else can a person be motivated, for example? (The short answer is through things like training and development, work-life balance, flexibility, and opportunities for volunteering – but that’s for another blog.)

Making HR commercial

For most fast-growth tech and e-commerce companies, in the early stages at least, HR begins and ends with talent acquisition. All too often the setting up of effective and efficient HR processes and operations is left too late.

The company has missed an early opportunity for HR to have a strategic influence across all aspects of the business; for HR to be run like a commercial enterprise. But it’s still not too late, and again, this is where a senior generalist – with exposure to all specialisms within HR – is needed.

This HR professional will be responsible for the delivery of HR services to local teams: from employee relations to recruitment, reward and recognition, through to performance management, organisation design, training and development.

Your new HR professional will be commercially minded, of course. This is absolutely critical: strategic decisions around outsourcing functions and bringing in interims, or launching company-wide reward and recognition policies and incentive plans for sales people, will all result in considerable performance improvements.

Performance improvements, staff retention and streamlined processes – all of which are the hallmarks of high functioning HR services.

And all of which can overcome the most stubborn of young habits.

What Does A Truly Commercial HR Business Partner Do?

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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

What Does A Head of OD Do? And What Makes Them Truly Commercial?

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This is the fifth 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 OD.

The OD role is one of those few roles that are mysterious and misunderstood, mostly by those who have never had one in their organisation. In fact, your organisation is either one that is committed and passionate about OD or…… it doesn’t have such a role and probably never will. You tend to find these roles in European or very large and complex companies but if you are recruiting a Head of OD for the first time, it is most likely that you have used consultants to perform this role to date.

So what does a Head of OD do? What does OD actually stand for? Is it Organisation Development, Organisational Development or Organisation Design? And how does this differ from Organisation Effectiveness? One of the first challenges in appointing a commercial Head of OD is defining what you want the role to do. This may seem obvious but given the confusion about OD it is worth spending some time on being clear what they will deliver and how they will interact with other functions.

There are many definitions of organisational development and even the website www.ODportal.com admits there is no single definition. In my experience, the most common outcome of the OD function is a workforce that works more effectively and productively together in furtherance of the company strategy.

With this definition in mind, what makes a Head Of OD truly commercial?

Firstly, they must be able to articulate the company strategy in terms of the workforce design, culture, behaviors and working practices and processes that will drive the strategy. They should know how to analyse the gap between this desired state and the current state. They should be able to design, plan and cost the interventions that bring about the desired change and they should be able to place a financial value on the target state e.g. how it will affect sales, what costs it will save, what financial risks it will mitigate.

Finally, they must have actually implemented these interventions and produced the desired result, or something close to it, both in human terms and financial outcomes.

One of the key attributes that sets commercial Heads of OD apart is their ability to combine their belief in human potential with a focus on business outcomes. They understand how human endeavour and organisational purpose can be combined to create mutual benefit to the employee, the customer and investors. They won’t flinch about recommending tough actions that make the company more effective but neither will they lose sight of how the manner in which these actions are decided and implemented will impact on employee engagement.

Being a commercial Head of OD requires courage – the courage to challenge divisive and damaging decisions that pursue short-term or personal goals at the expense of the overall health of the organisation, the courage to recognise when an organisation has lost it’s way and to help steer it away from disaster, the courage to act in the company’s interest rather than any one person’s interest. Such courage is based on a desire to make the organisation great not just successful.

Every company fulfills a role in society, depending on the desirability and utility of its products and services. However, the one thing they all have in common is that they also provide a means of channeling the potential of its employees to produce meaningful and valuable work. The truly commercial OD leader knows how to bring these two purposes together to create mutual success resulting in specific and lasting performance outcomes for the company. This is what makes companies great – the ability to create a win-win for all involved and sustain it over time.

So, when you next interview an OD candidate, have the courage to ask them what difference they have really made to both the company and it’s employees; how they made that company greater than before. But don’t accept vague answers and assertions that they made a difference, ask them for evidence of this impact. As we all know, commercial success is not built on good intentions alone.

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

What Differentiates The Truly Commercial Head of Reward

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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.

How To Spot A Truly Commercial Head of Resourcing

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This is the third 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 Resourcing. This article contains advice both for the candidate (on how to present their successes) and the recruiting manager (on what to look for in a CV and during the interview). Many of the tips below can also be applied to anyone looking to describe their achievements in more commercial terms.

Most of the candidates I now interview for Head of Resourcing roles are in fact very commercial. It is difficult to be in the recruitment business and not be commercial, given the focus in many companies on the cost effectiveness of the hiring process. It is such a visible expenditure category and yet is an activity that can’t be avoided, so the focus inevitably falls on doing it quicker, cheaper and right first time.

So why write an article on identifying commercial Heads of Resourcing if they are so common?

Well, the challenge is spotting the best ones in the crowd of candidates that come across your desk. The majority of CVs that I see from Heads of Resourcing do not do justice to their achievements; do not spell out what commercial impact they have made. And so it is difficult for the best to make themselves stand out from the rest.

The most common statements in CVs and interviews are quite general, for example:

“Introduced new recruitment service provider”; “Improved performance of recruitment team by 10%”; “Restructured PSL”.

The advice I give such candidates is to focus much more on the key metrics that define the cost-effectiveness of the resourcing process:

cost per hire
time to hire
volumes of internal vs external hires
quality and success of hires
volumes and costs of direct hires vs agency hires
fee structure of the PSL
processing capacity of the recruitment team
efficiency of starters process
relevance of shortlisted candidates
advertising spend

These are often referred to but rarely quoted as measurable achievements, which is key to demonstrating commercial impact.

One of the best tips I can give a candidate when referring to a measurable impact is not just to quote the percentage change in an activity or cost but to state what that actually saved the company in cash terms. This demonstrates the candidate’s financial awareness. But they should be careful only to quote savings that were realised by the company rather than hypothetical savings.

Let’s take a look at what these metrics might look like on paper as statements of commercial impact.

Performance Metric: Cost per hire How it should read: Reduced cost per hire by 50%, from £900 to £450, in 12 months, saving £3.1m. (You could also quote how this compares with the benchmark cost per hire for your sector, using benchmark data from sources such as PWC Saratoga.)

Performance Metric: Time to hire How it should read: Reduced time to hire in income-generating roles by 9 days, from 55 to 46, increasing revenue by 1.2%. (Some roles generate income and the longer the role is vacant, the less income the company generates.)

Performance Metric: Volumes of internal vs external hires How it should read: How it should read: Reduced external hires by 25%, reducing cost per hire by 35% (£1.8m) and increasing internal mobility by 110%. Attrition reduced by 2.5% as a result, saving £2.3m per year in recruitment spend. (If you increase internal recruitment you are probably reducing attrition as well, since more staff are developing their careers with the company.) Performance Metric: Quality and success of hires How it should read: Improved first year retention by 150%, from 30% to 45%, reducing cost of recruitment by £1.3m per year.

Performance Metric: Volumes and costs of direct hires vs agency hires How it should read: Reduced agency hire rates from 55% to 20%, reducing cost per hire from £900 to £350 in 2 years, saving £3.8m per year.

Performance Metric: Fee structure of the PSL How it should read: Reduced average agency fees from 25% to 18% in one year, saving £2.3m per year whilst maintaining shortlist success rates and time to hire. (It is relatively easy to cut costs with suppliers but you have to show that the business did not suffer as a result.) Performance Metric: Processing capacity of the recruitment team How it should read: Improved hires per recruiter from 90 to 120 per annum, reducing cost per hire from £400 to £360, saving £1.8m per year. (This is the number of hires that each internal recruiter handles per year. Benchmarks are also available for this figure from sources such as Hackett.)

Performance Metric: Efficiency of the starters process How it should read: Reduced data processing times of new starters by 50% from 70 minutes to 35 minutes, reducing cost per hire by 5%, saving £800k pa.

Performance Metric: Relevance of shortlisted candidates How it should read: Improved offer ratios of shortlisted candidates from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3, reducing cost per hire by £80, saving £1.8m.

Performance Metric: Advertising spend How it should read: Redesigned careers website, increasing direct application by 80% and reducing media costs by 60%, saving £850k pa.

As you can see, commercial achievements need to be quite specific. When comparing two candidates together, if one is vague and one has examples like those above, it is easy to see how the latter comes across as more commercial and credible. Being vague cannot only disadvantage a candidate compared to others, it can also paint a picture of poor business acumen.

If you need any advice on your search for your next truly commercial Head of Resourcing, please contact me at www.paskpartnership.com. Email: debbie@paskpartnership.com. Mobile: 07760 777 931

How Do You Identify A Truly Commercial Head of Learning & Development?

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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.

How Do You Identify HR People Who Are Truly Commercial?

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Take a look through the current list of HR roles on Askgrapevine, Changeboard or Totaljobs and at least 99% of them will have job titles that reflect the process, the function or the relationship they are responsible for. So, a Head of Recruitment is responsible for the recruitment process; a Head of L&D for the learning and development process; an HR Director is responsible for the HR function; an HR Business Partner is responsible for developing a partnership relationship with the business. But is that how the success of the role is measured? By the efficiency of the process, the running of a department, the quality of the relationship? Well, of course these are important KPIs but what about all the valuable commercial outcomes we hear so much angst about – the successful resourcing of the business, the development of key skills, the growth of an effective workforce?

Very few roles are named for their commercial outcomes. A Director of Organisation Effectiveness is a well-known one and I’ve recently come across a Director of Productivity. What if all HR roles were given titles that described their commercial outcomes? We might have a Head of Ensuring Great Leaders Grow With The Company or a Director of Hiring Great Performers or an Employees Who Reflect The Brand And Win New Customers Manager.

So, given that job titles do not describe the commercial objectives of a role, how can you tell if a candidate has identified and delivered the right commercial outcomes in their previous roles rather than just delivering an off-the-shelf solution that made no real difference? How can you tell whether a candidate thinks and acts commercially?

A candidate may have the skills, knowledge and behaviours to perform the tasks of their role but this is not the same as their proven ability to identify and deliver relevant commercial outcomes. I have interviewed many perfectly competent candidates who deliver great processes but can’t explain what value they added to the organisation’s performance. Being commercial requires an HR person to understand the business strategy in people terms and then to determine how they can help deliver that strategy through targeted interventions, processes, policies, services and tools.

For example, if the company is trying to drive growth and margin improvement simultaneously, you would expect the Head of Recruitment to focus on hiring high quality employees who reflect the brand whilst reducing reliance on agencies; as opposed to slashing costs in recruitment that increase time to hire and drive down the quality of the hire. The latter intervention would increase margin but damage growth.

Key to choosing the right interventions is an ability to think outside the bounds of so-called best practice, benchmarks and fads. The commercial HR person is not constrained by their job description and chooses interventions or invents new ones that precisely deliver the current business strategy. Those who are less commercial will not be clear on why they chose a particular intervention or what difference they made to the company.

Many candidates will tell you of their achievements in the following terms: “Implemented RPO across the business in 9 months”; or “Introduced a blended learning strategy and increased e-learning uptake by 90%”. But what impact did these interventions have on the business? One would hope, in the above examples, that the introduction of Recruitment Process Outsourcing reduced the cost per hire and the new learning strategy had an impact on sales volumes or manufacturing quality. Adding such measures to the above statements would at least tell you that the candidate can talk the right commercial language. But were these the right interventions for the business at this time or just the hobbyhorse of a candidate wanting to make a name for themselves? Choosing the right interventions at the right time is what separates a truly commercial candidate from one who is just technically competent and strong on delivery.

Over the next five editions of Recruitment Insight, I will draw on my 24 years experience of recruiting HR people to explore how to spot a truly commercial candidate for five different HR roles. The first will be a Head of Learning & Development, a role that we have seen much activity on recently but few great candidates.

How do HR professionals improve their employability in an extended downturn?

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It is nearly three years since the beginning of the UK downturn and our economy is still hovering on the verge of a double-dip recession. A great deal has been asked of the HR function in this period, from negotiating pay freezes to maintaining staff engagement to making large-scale redundancies. These measures have been necessary for survival, to enable companies to ride the storm whilst they await the return of growth. And these measures have no doubt in turn ensured the survival of those HR people who are good in a crisis, who can do what is necessary to reduce costs and retain talent.

But will your survival skills be enough to carry you through to the next phase of the economy? Has the downturn resulted in you being stereotyped by the business as purely reactive, because that is all that has been required for the last three years? To what extent has your short-term survival been won at the cost of your long-term personal brand as a creator of value?

As businesses tire of purely defensive strategies and look for opportunities for growth and for rebuilding confidence in the market place, it is vital that HR people who wish to improve their employability should ask themselves what they have done recently to add value rather than just preserve it. If the answer is, “Not much” then now is the time to do something about it.

Employers will be looking for evidence of adaptability and creativity combined with a positive outlook, with one eye on growth. If your training budgets have been slashed, how can you still ensure that your skill base remains cutting edge through more informal, low cost routes? If salaries have been frozen, how can you tap into other motivators to improve innovation in the company? If you have made large numbers redundant, how are you re-energising the R&D function to ensure you have new products to sell?

In an economy that has had little good news recently, you can truly differentiate yourself by moving beyond cut-backs to demonstrating how you can prioritise your limited resources on the growth-generating aspects of the business, whilst innovating with your tools and interventions.

If you need any advice on your search for commercial HR professionals or if you need advice as a candidate, please contact me on 07760 777 931 or via email debbie@paskpartnership.com

Learning On The Job – Alice Young

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Paskpartnership Ltd welcomes interesting and relevant articles on issues facing today’s business leaders. Alice Young has had a career that has spanned commercial, social enterprise and non-profit organisations where she has shared and developed best-practice talent acquisition and HR models to enable businesses to perform optimally. Currently at Apple, she provides governance, HR and talent acquisition support on a pro bono basis to a number of charities based in Sydney.

How to keep learning “on the job”

During economic down-turns and hard times lots of companies put the brakes on the Learning and Development department and before you know it, that Project Management course that your boss told you was essential for you to be considered for that next level role is no more than a pipe dream.

So in these constantly changing times how can you take ownership of your own personal development whilst at work?

1) Formal courses

Of course the stereotypical way that we think of “developing” ourselves is by attending a course. And as long as these are the “right” courses, and delivered in a way that plays to your personal “learning style” (we’re all different on this – some like lectures, others prefer a team focussed approach, others learn visually, others through activity based learning), then this will be a productive use of your time, and you might even get a professional accreditation from it that you can add to your CV. But do your homework before you sign up. Ask the course organizer why this course is being run (i.e. how and why this course was selected), how they’d describe the facilitator style, what are the intended learning outcomes, how many other people are on the course, and of those, how many are from your company. Then make a call as to whether you feel this is the right course for you, and if not, research one that you feel is more appropriate and ask your manager if you can attend that instead.

2) Stretch or inter-department projects

A lot of people view projects as “additional” work. I view them a) as great learning opportunities, b) as great networking opportunities, and c) as an opportunity to raise your profile in the business, particularly if you’re on a cross-cutting or inter-departmental project. In order to formally gain the most from the experience (and make sure you’re not just doing extra work), make sure the project and it’s outcomes are entered into your performance appraisal, with success measures and learning outcomes (if your organization has a performance appraisal process).

Worried about signing up for a stretch project? Don’t be. Just agree with the project “owner” at the outset that whilst you bring a,b and c to the table, ultimately this is a developmental experience for you (and way cheaper than going on a course). Then breathe. And enjoy. You know what they say – you learn more from your mistakes, and sometimes not having all the answers is good for you, even if it feels uncomfortable.

3) Innovate and problem solve

You know that issue that everyone works around? (eg the HR database doesn’t talk to the Finance database and 7 people spend 2 days at month-end inputting and verifying data in order to get staff paid). Well instead of working around it, work it out!

This is a key example of 2, except that the organization might not be acknowledging that it’s an issue (because to do that means that resources should be allocated into resolving the problem). So don’t just complain about it, put together a business case to resolve it, gain buy-in from your manager and key stakeholders and go for it. Never managed a project team before? Well now is the time to learn 🙂 And anything’s got to be better than 7 people spending 2 days verifying data – yawn. Your team and those around you will love you once it’s all resolved.

4) Find a mentor

Does your company have a formal mentoring program? If not, that’s ok, you can still find a mentor yourself, internally, or externally. Have a think about what you feel you would gain from a mentoring relationship and what sort of mentor would suit you, and set some goals accordingly. Then speak with your manager and your HR team about whether they can help source a mentor for you. If not, look through Linkedin at your own connections, and the connections of your connections. If approached appropriately, many people are delighted to be mentors. If you’re not comfortable with this approach you could try one of the many mentoring services that are now in place i.e. Propellher (indeed there’s some good tips on their site about mentoring relationships, how to set goals etc) www.propellher.com

5) Shadow someone in a different department

A great way to get to know your organization in a deeper way is to shadow someone who does a completely different job from you. You can have been working at a company for years and still get a new perspective on the organization, what it does and how, by spending a few days walking in another team member’s shoes. Make sure you share your experience by talking about what you’ve learnt at a team meeting afterwards.

6) Sign up for a volunteering opportunity

Does your organization have a community or CSR program? Have you ever signed up on it? If not – you should! A recent study by the UK based HR body, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development has found that volunteering programs deliver many benefits for participants, not least: enhancing professional knowledge, workload management, internal networking, community understanding, team work, creativity, self awareness, personal confidence, communication, coaching and mentoring. That’s a lot of courses you’d have to attend to gain all those skills, and they’re all rolled into one experience!

So quite simply the message is, if you want to be at the forefront of your career, you need to keep learning, no matter how much of a technical expert you are. And the best way to do this? Don’t sit back and wait for permission to attend a course. Instead, create your own learning plan based on what you want to be doing in your career in 5 or 10 year’s time and strategically start placing the building blocks of increasing your skill-set so that you can get there. Of course, you still have to perform in your day job, but if you’re prepared to go the extra mile you’ll find that constantly learning will leapfrog you ahead of the crowd over your next few career moves.