Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Frog Live Radio for this Wednesday, the 22nd of September, 2010. Now, today we want to take you on an interesting journey. Interesting journey in what way, you're asking? An interesting journey because we have with us a talent manager, or a talent scout as I like to call her, and she's a thought leader. Now this person is pivotal to changing the thinking around the people side of the business for one of the most successful commercial organizations in New Zealand. And we are thrilled to have Jane Davis from The Warehouse with us today. Now why Jane Davis? Well Jane Davis has spoken around the world and in Australasia especially on all things recruitment. And for those of you who have listened to Frog Live Radio, you will know that this is where the rubber meets the road for the realities of recruitment and human resources discussed by those at the very front of their industries. And Jane Davis is no exception. She definitely knows what is and what is not talent management. And put simply, the core of today's conversation is how to attract and retain quality employees both now, and this is where it gets interesting, in the future. Jane Davis, welcome to Frog Live Radio and on behalf of Frog Recruitment, may I say we are thrilled to have you here today.

Speaker 2: Thank you very much Mike and thanks for that wonderful introduction. I must say many thanks to Frog and Jane and her team for making this happen. It's a fabulous initiative and I feel very honored to be asked to take part in it.

Speaker 1: Now Jane, welcome. Now first up Jane, we want to learn a little bit about you and on behalf of Frog Recruitment, I'm rapt that you're about to tell us about you. Now here's a leading question. Is it true that your career almost mirrors that of a female lead in that 1980s defining movie, Top Gun?

Speaker 2: No, I don't think so. Nice try. I certainly started my career in the Air Force, but that's about where the similarities lie.

Speaker 1: So tell us about the beginning of your career Jane, because I think you were, is it right to say you have a background in psychology?

Speaker 2: That's right. I'm an industrial and organizational psychologist. I have been for 20 years and that was how I started my career.

Speaker 1: So just take us through it. So you studied psychology and we're at what university and what was your first job and what did you do? Because let's get the nub of who you are.

Speaker 2: Okay. So back in the late 80s, I did my Master's in Industrial Psych at Canterbury University and from there I actually went straight into the Air Force and gained my registration as a psychologist, which was an absolutely brilliant way to start my career because it really set me up for everything that I do now. There was no fancy name like talent management to describe what we did, but looking back that is exactly what we did. Things that we looked after were recruitment and we looked after assessment and selection so all those pilots and air crew that were coming into the Air Force, we had to assess them pretty thoroughly. We did a lot of training, a lot of coaching and a lot of the things that would make up modern day talent management. The only difference was we didn't have the technology to support it in those days like we do now.

Speaker 1: And was it quite a male-dominated industry you were in in those days or not?

Speaker 2: To give you a feel for it, on my officer training course, because I was uniformed, there were three girls and 17 males and that was probably fairly typical in terms of the proportion of males or females.

Speaker 1: Right, right. Hey, interesting. Now, today with these young recruiters that you see coming through, because you've had a very interesting start, psychology degree, etc., what would your advice be when young people wanting to become recruiters, Gen X, Gen Y, what would you look for and what would your advice be to give someone advice to say, look Jane, I really want to make a profession in recruitment or in HR?

Speaker 2: Absolute number one has to be passionate about recruitment. You can learn all the skills. There's no problem in reading books and sitting in, you know, being coached and trained on interview skills. But the most important thing is you have to love it. You have to love people. You have to be really passionate about, you know, getting the right people for the right role and you need to have heaps of commitment and just that, you know, ability to kind of push through and make sure that you find the right people for whoever it is that you're working with.

Speaker 1: And today's young recruiters, what type of background or what type of degrees or what type of training do they have? Is there something that you've seen in the marketplace?

Speaker 2: You know, recruitment, no, no, not at all. Recruitment's quite interesting because it's one of those very few professions, if you like, where any background will do. I've seen heaps of teachers make the transition. I've seen people from all sorts of industries. So it really comes down to who that person is and their fit with that whole, yeah, that whole industry. It is that passion and that enthusiasm that is incredibly important, not so much your background because, as I say, you can be trained.

Speaker 1: Right. Now, I'm going to ask you quite a provocative question. Does New Zealand have a great track record, do you think, when it comes to HR, human resources and recruitment professionals? Because you've been a consultant, you've worked for the Air Force, you've got a degree in psychology, so you've actually got a well-rounded career. What is your opinion?

Speaker 2: I think there is some excellent work going on in HR in general and certainly, you know, I do keep up with what is happening around the world in HR, particularly in talent management. And there are aspects of what we do in this country that are just as good as overseas and, in fact, sometimes better. And you can find all sorts of examples of really great practice in New Zealand. In terms of recruitment, I think we're getting a lot better. I know that, actually, interestingly, the recession has probably helped sort out that industry, because it may have got rid of some of the recruiters who weren't so strong or so good. But, you know, there's a core of recruitment companies and recruiters out there who are fabulous, who are excellent.

Speaker 1: Oh, great. Now, for those of you who are listening in today, please go to the frogrecruitment.co.nz site if you'd like to get the information to call in and ask a question at any time. Jane does quite have to take all your questions, no matter how basic, silly as mine are, or intelligent, of course. We'd love to hear some of those. Now, Jane, give us your definition of talent management, please.

Speaker 2: Okay. Well, if you read a textbook... What is it? Okay. Yeah. If you read a textbook or an HR book on talent management, it would say something like it's all the systems, the processes and tools that are designed to identify, to assess, to develop and retain talent. And all that helps to drive the achievement of your business objectives. Okay? That's a fairly classical definition of talent management. And some might also say that you can achieve strategically focused talent management if all these systems and processes are linked together, or integrated is the word for that, usually through some form of technology. So, you know, I do subscribe to that definition. But while I do subscribe to it in theory, I think the reality can be somewhat different. So what I believe talent management to be is it's actually about what our managers do every day in their jobs to attract, to recruit, to induct, to train, develop, to coach, to recognise and engage their people. And it's not just a select group of people either. It's really all their people. So, you know, that is the manager's job. And so our role in talent management is to really help educate them and support them, show them how to use these tools to help them understand what's in it for them if they use them well and how these tools can add real value. So for me, talent management is about our managers and it's what they do with their people every day.

Speaker 1: Okay. So just take us back to how long would you say that the warehouse has been practising talent management for?

Speaker 2: Well, I've been here just over five years and in that time, it's hard to put a number on it. Maybe in the past three years, I think we've got a lot better at talent management. We spent the last, you know, the first couple of years really putting in all the solid foundations that you need to build a really solid talent management platform.

Speaker 1: Okay. So what would be – because when we spoke the other day, you said to me talent managers – a fully integrated talent management system is what you have, which we'll talk about. But you also spoke to me about what most organisations do is really not that good. It's about isolation. Can you explain more about that? Yeah. And that's what talent management isn't.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. So what happens is – and we've been in this very position ourselves – is that organisations tend to put in very – well, individual systems. So, for example, they'll have a recruitment platform and then they might put in a learning management system. Then they might say, well, actually, now we need a talent identification tool, so they'll put that in, and performance management. And over time, what happens is you have these discrete platforms which don't talk to each other. So all the information you hold about your people is all held on completely different And it makes it extremely difficult to get very good data, to give useful data to managers to make great decisions with. And we've been there, and that's why the last couple of years we have moved towards having one system, one platform, which over time will hold all the talent management information.

Speaker 1: So, okay, we're going to start the journey now. Just give us a bit of a background. How big is the – how many people work for the warehouse? Okay, so there's 8 – yep. No, and your responsibility covers what? Just quickly. Just give us a background.

Speaker 2: Okay. So we've got 8,500 people work for us, and at Christmas time we take on an extra 2,000. They're our Christmas tents who will be coming on stream in the next few weeks. In our team, I've got 11 in the talent management team, and we look after the full spectrum of talent management. So right through from attraction, employer brand, recruitment, and then once people start we look after induction, learning and development, leadership development, talent reviews and succession, engagement, and retention. So that's kind of the full spectrum.

Speaker 1: Right. So, beginning the talent management task, what was the first part of the journey? Where did it start?

Speaker 2: So a number of years ago, the starting point was really to look at – I mentioned before putting those foundations in place. So for example, when I came in there were three or four different competency models in the business. And so what we did, the starting point was to pull those together to one model, one model that showed behaviours, skills, knowledge, behaviours that are important for success at the warehouse. And so we consolidated that, and that then kind of was used as a platform for our recruitment processes, for our talent development processes, etc. So that was really one of the starting points. The other one probably was to have a very, very good look at how we were doing recruitment because we're spending a lot of money on recruitment, and actually we weren't attracting the people, the volume or the quality of people that we really needed in order to meet our business objectives.

Speaker 1: So where was the money being wasted, do you think?

Speaker 2: In a couple of areas. We used to spend a lot of money on advertising, and that was often, you know, those great big almost, I don't know, ninth of a page ads in the Herald which would cost $5,000 or $6,000 a pop. We spent a huge amount of money also on recruitment agencies, some of whom were fantastic and some not so good. But money that we knew there had to be a better way, there had to be a much more cost-effective way of doing recruitment which led to a much better result.

Speaker 1: So just before we move on to that, being provocative again, what are some of the practices that are not so good that you as a major client on the New Zealand commercial playing field has come up against with recruiters that you've had to use? What are some lessons you think you could offer?

Speaker 2: My number one for recruiters that we do use is you must know our business. The ones that are most successful are the ones that are closest to us. So they've found a way to really get into our business to understand what we're looking for, you know, what type of people do we really need, what's our culture like, how do you find those people that really fit us and the skills that we need for the future. So the ones that partner with us for the long term are the ones that are the most successful. They understand us, they put the effort in, they build fabulous relationships and it works extremely well.

Speaker 1: Right. So just getting back to the point. So you've said you've moved from using the very traditional New Zealand herald massive advertising budgets to building your own career website. Would that be right?

Speaker 2: Yes. Well, about three years ago we decided that we really wanted applicants to go to a website to be able to screen people as they came through, you know, to really standardise, to streamline, make things more efficient and take a lot of cost out. So that's when we developed our careers website.

Speaker 1: And can I just interrupt there? I've just read the Engage website today. Paul Jacobs, I'd love you to comment on this, commented on your website and he said, of interest are the questions that centre around visitor impressions of the warehouse as an employer before and after visiting the careers site. So do you actually ask people what they think of the warehouse?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So what he's referring to is an employer brand survey that we do annually and the questions in there are around people's impressions of the warehouse before they visited the website and after they visited it.

Speaker 1: Right. So let's just get back to it. Why was the career website? Very simply, for someone out there wanting to copy a success story such as yourself, give us some key success points around the website, what you did well and even some things that you had to learn to do better.

Speaker 2: Okay. Yep. So what did we do well? And this is, I think, the most critical thing is know who you are. As in, what is your story? What does your organisation stand for? And then, so that's really, I guess, employer brand.