On Friday 24th of June, TALiNT Partners and Cornerstone hosted a Talent Solutions Leaders Lunch at Sea Containers in London. The views were magnificent, the weather played along, and the company was lively.
The interactive panel discussion format before lunch was highly stimulating and the guests engaged in insightful and interesting conversation around key trends being seen in the market. The panellists were: Lindsay Harrison, Chief Customer Office at Rullion; Katrina Hutchinson O’Neill, CEO and joint founder of Join Talent; Simon Bradberry VP of Operations and BD, EMEA at Allegis Global Solutions and Andrew Brown, Director, RPO and Recruiting at Cornerstone. It is also worth noting that the companies represented in the room are responsible for hundreds of thousands of hires in the UK each year so when they talk about trends, it probably makes sense to pay attention.
One of the key trends highlighted was the acceleration of organisations increasingly hiring for skills rather than experience. Guests agreed that this now has more momentum than ever before and will have profound implications for how talent is acquired and not least for the traditional staffing/agency sector.
Hiring volumes are still strong with no signs yet of slowing, with our panellists Lindsay and Katrina in total agreement. Lindsay also noted that clients increasingly expecting far more agile approach to recruitment.
Simon’s view is that moves to a more holistic hiring process (i.e. versions of the Universal Workforce Model) are clearly happening and the key will be how quickly momentum towards this builds, not least given the complexities of the relationship between procurement and HR/hiring and outdated attitudes to internal mobility and the most important factor in making this happen is support at C-Suite level
Another important point raised by our panel was the evolution of the key differentiators to help with retention of their own staff. Whilst salaries have clearly taken a big step upwards recently, the most important factors now are around training and development and operational and tech support – essentially ways to make your employees better and ways to support them in doing a great job.
Having said that, there is also a realisation that ‘employment without borders’ is, more often than not, not a realistic option for most organisations. There needs to be some degree of proximity to either an office or other colleagues.
This is also supported by the surge in interest in wellbeing more generally with industry analyst Mervyn Dinner, referring to a 147% rise in this being mentioned in job adverts.
As ever with our panel discussion, we like to put our experts on the spot and ask them for a prediction. Here’s what they said:
- “As the market slows, it will be interesting to see how much power will shift back to the employer.” – Katrina Hutchinson O’Neill, CEO and joint founder of Join Talent”
- Changes in candidate attitudes – the great resignation could become the sustained resignation due to demand for remote working.” – Lindsay Harrison, Chief Customer Office at Rullion
- “[Solutions provider] relationships will move up the hierarchy as SWP priorities increase.” – Simon Bradberry VP of Operations and BD EMEA at Allegis Global Solutions
Guests at the Talent Solutions Leaders Lunch included people from Reed Talent Solutions, Lorien, Guidant Global, Armstrong Craven, PeopleScout, Two Heads Consulting, Resource Solutions, Matrix, Horsefly, AMS, Geometric Results, Harvey Nash, Hudson RPO, Talent Point, The Big Search, Hays Talent Solutions, Sanderson PLC and Talent Solutions.
