It feels a cruel irony that the most indulgent season of the year, surrounded as it is by the various temptations of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges, pigs in blankets and vats of alcohol, is followed immediately by a season of squeezing into our glad rags. For January tends to be the start of awards events – be they for talent acquisition technology, employer branding creativity or resourcing effectiveness. And whilst they offer much in terms of merriment, catching up with old friends and ill-advised dancefloor moves, are they too an example of our profession and industry looking inwardly, when there has perhaps never been a more important time for an outward focus?
I was struck with two or three hugely telling recent encounters between the good and the great and the world of talent acquisition. Assuming that he does indeed fit into the categories of good, great or both, Philip Hammond touched on the labour market twice in the run up to Christmas. And, if we’re being brutally honest, neither he, nor indeed talent acquisition, emerged covered wholly in glory.
In early December, Hammond spoke enthusiastically about wider participation in the workforce, including the involvement of what he termed marginal groups in general and of the disabled in particular. This broader engagement, he felt, was a factor in the UK’s long depressed productivity figures. There was an understandable and immediate outcry from the likes of Scope.
A week or so earlier, he again demonstrated his firm grasp of both numeracy and public sentiment by suggesting to Andrew Marr, ‘Where are all these unemployed people? There are no unemployed people’. Which must have come as something of a surprise to at least 1.42m people across the country.
However, it is far too easy to portray Hammond as a typical out of touch, under-briefed and entitled politician with little or no grasp of reality. To what extent does our industry have to carry some of Hammond’s can? We have clearly failed to position talent acquisition and the employment market as being sufficiently high profile and of sufficiently high importance at such high levels.
There was another, even more recent example of this. General Sir Nick Carter announced that the Army would be dropping its iconic and longstanding value proposition, Be the Best. This decision followed a research initiative during 2017 which suggested that the line was now seen as outdated, elitist and non-inclusive by some of the Army’s key stakeholder and hiring pools.
Given the recent challenges the Army has had in terms of recruitment, this appears no major surprise. A Government report this year, Filling the Ranks, suggested that the current approach to recruitment was simply not working. Whereas the Army needs to recruit 10,000 per year merely to maintain numbers, it had hired only 7,000 in the current year. Whilst the RAF and Navy were experiencing 10% hiring shortfalls, the comparable figure for the Army was 30%. Some of this shortfall, the report suggested, was down to BaME hiring figures of just 7% for the Army.
Despite this logic and the clear feeling that something needed to be done to improve recruitment, the Government, in the form of Gavin Williamson, the newly appointed Defence Secretary, promptly kicked the decision to retire Be the Best into some very long grass, with the unambiguous statement, “And at a time when the defence budget is being squeezed, it is lunacy to squander money on a futile branding project”.
Perhaps Mr Williamson has a point. Perhaps given the armed forces cutbacks, a re-branding can feel indulgent. Perhaps too, as his team went on to explain, people shouldn’t see Be the Best as being anything other than aspirational.
Or perhaps not.
What feels particularly disappointing is that some of the realities of talent acquisition feel ignored, under-articulated and apparently unimportant in this case. Despite the fact that the forces always struggle to hire when the economy is performing – and 4.2% unemployment would suggest the labour market element of the economy is not without strength – and the fact current army hiring is going backwards, we, again, as an industry have failed to make the case in the face of an opposition making political points.
It points to an incapacity to articulate that some increasingly key external talent pools sense more and more distance from themes such as Be the Best and that, with nearly a quarter of a century of use, the line ceases to reach out, to engage and to inspire. Whilst it has absolutely been aspirational in the past, it no longer feels fit for purpose. It has become white noise, wallpaper.
But the case remains apparently unmade by our profession to those making some key decisions.
It feels as though a branding project to replace Be the Best is anything but futile.
Politics and Brexit are usually intrinsically interwoven. However, we tend to perceive Brexit largely in terms of what will happen to the economy, the strength of sterling and the location of some major employers. Whilst the talent acquisition story appears depressingly low on the agenda. The colour of our new passports appears more worthy of debate than the likely impact of Brexit on employers, the labour market and productivity figures.
Again, it feels as though our collective industry could be doing more, could be more external facing, more outward looking, more influential. The case to be made has failed to be made.
And in returning to Philip Hammond, there is no challenge more significant to UK industry and the UK economy than productivity. We continue to lag significantly behind other comparable economies and the solution continues to escape us – largely because no one appears confident as to what the cause of such woeful productivity is.
Some call out poor standards of UK management or of weak investment in training or technology. Or that we are too distracted by our smartphone addiction. Or that it is down to our high employment figures comparable to other western economies. Or a housing market which creates lengthening commuting times. Or, indeed, of transport infrastructure challenges which too create lengthening commuting times.
These are a series of debates which have such a fundamental bearing on the economy and on depressed salary increases. And yet, is talent acquisition and the human resources industry doing as much as it might to influence such a debate and to come up with workable solutions? To externalise the function and what it does and how important it is to the economy?
If Philip Hammond has comically little notion of the labour market, it speaks volumes not only of himself, but also of our inability to communicate how vital it is. We get the politicians we deserve and we get the knowledge of such figures that we deserve too.
One of the major organisational challenges of our age – productivity – touches few other functions to the same degree as the broad talent acquisition and human resources space. Rather than remain on the sidelines and in our comfort zones, repeating the same arguments at the same conferences with the same delegates, don’t we all the unique opportunity of influencing, enabling and empowering the productivity challenge?
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 