Three Big Myths About Internal Recruitment

Recruiter Daily, 24 January 2011

Internal recruitment is far from a "cushy" job with no clients to please and no targets to meet, says Bupa Australia recruitment consultant, Samantha Pearce.

Pearce spent over five years at Chandler Macleod before moving to her internal role with Bupa (the healthcare company whose brands include HBA, MBF and Mutual Community) nearly two years ago. As one of the four state-based consultants on the company's recruitment team, she says that perhaps the biggest myth that agency recruiters hold about internal recruitment is that, "you have no clients to please".

"I've sort of got to admit that I thought this [while working as an agency recruiter]," she says. "There are those days on the agency side where your clients are being particularly difficult or interesting, and you think, 'If I was in an in-house role I wouldn't have to deal with this'. That's the biggest myth."

The reality, she says, is that now, "the clients can drop by my desk, any time. We've got about 400 hiring managers across Bupa Australia, who can need recruitment support from us at the drop of a hat, normally all at once, of course, and they don't necessarily order themselves into a nice queue".

Internal recruiters can't be selective about who they deal with, either, she points out. "As an established agency recruiter, I found that you could select the vacancies that were best in line with your capabilities, or what you enjoyed recruiting, and you could walk away from work if it didn't sit with your expertise or even just your workload.

"But one way or another, we have to fill every single one of those [internal] vacancies without exception. How we do it is obviously up to us, but we've got to fill them. You can't just leave a few and walk away from them.

"Then, after we fill it and we're proud of ourselves, it's not over, because the candidate's performance still reflects on us through the whole of their career. The hiring manager doesn't forget that you were the person that recommended them and brought them in."

No targets
Another common misconception about internal recruitment is that consultants don't have to meet targets, Pearce says.

"Volumes are no less because we're internal. While it's not commission driven, we've got targets."

Over the past two years the Bupa team has directly recruited roughly 90 per cent of the company's hires, meaning each member of the team averaged nearly 180 hires in 2010, with agencies filling the remainder of the vacancies. (The significant achievement helped win the team the Rob Goffee Award for Talent Management at the 2010 AHRI National Awards.)

"We've got to hit those direct hire targets. Obviously if you do well in one year you need to continue that into the next year, if not better, and alongside the direct hire objectives, and all of our cost measures, we've got KPIs around time-to-fill (the actual speed of filling roles); first-year turnover (whether the candidates that we bring in actually stay more than 12 months, and perform); and then a massive tranche of how we're measured is candidate and client feedback.

"That includes candidates that we actually bring in, also candidates that we don't opt to hire; all of the clients [hiring managers] that we deal with; and also, when we do outsource to an agency, how the agency performs then reflects on us in the eyes of the hiring managers here."

The recruiting team has further targets around attrition, Pearce says, and managed to reduce attrition by seven per cent in its first year of operating, a figure it has sustained since.

It was tasked with saving the business $200,000 in recruiting costs, but managed to deliver a net bottom-line saving of more than $1 million, she adds.

"Perhaps I don't have a spreadsheet that shows me what my commission's going to be at the end of the month, but I don't feel that I perform in any less a results-driven or target-driven way. And that was quite a surprise to me, because I did naïvely think that that would be something that I would worry less about."

It's a cushy gig
Far from being "cushy", as some agency recruiters assume, internal recruitment requires more pro-activity and additional responsibilities, Pearce says.

"There's no question of me being able to wait for a vacancy to exist. I need to go and be consultative within the business to work out what vacancies will exist... I'm a lot more involved beforehand, as opposed to, 'Oh look, there's a vacancy, now I'm going to take a brief'.

"Good agency recruiters engage with their clients when there's no vacancy there, but the expectation of me is that I must, because if I don't, I'm genuinely not doing my job."

"Typically I'm involved in consulting with the hiring manager long before they've got a signed-off vacancy. Then I stay involved long after the candidate is on-boarded. Even when I was agency side and had loyal, longstanding clients who came to me again and again, that's still beyond the scope of involvement I would have had with them."

In addition, she says, she has greater involvement and influence in areas such as recruiting technology, the employee value proposition (EVP) and employer brand, and newer recruiting channels such as social media.

"There is a bit of added pressure because you are the face of the company you are representing and you know exactly what it is to work here. If I deal with a candidate here, their impressions of me and their interactions with us as a recruitment team are the basis on which they begin to build their impression of us as an employer, and they then tell their friends."

Despite the differences between the day-to-day roles, Pearce says the skill sets required in each are very much the same.

"A good recruiter in each case, on either side of fence, has the exact same qualities. If you love dealing with people, and get a real sense of satisfaction from matching people to career steps, and if you go out of your way for your clients, and if you're unbelievably positive even when things go wrong, you've got the right qualities to recruit," she says.