Applying Design Thinking to HR and Talent Management

Design thinking is a popular business model that has built a considerable following over the years, through its usefulness in a wide range of industries and use cases. More recently, HR professionals have been taking notice of the benefits it can bring to their organisations, in areas such as recruiting and developing talent. But why exactly has it become so popular?

As a HR Solutions Designer at the John Lewis Partnership – a new role in our organisation – I’m one of a small group who have begun to weave Design Thinking into our work. Our intention? To develop more useful and more relevant HR content, improve ways of working and to make sure our colleagues get the most out of their work. In this article, I want to explore what Design Thinking is and how we can use it to our advantage. I also want to consider if it can provide real, long-term opportunity for the growth and development of many other organisations, or if it may be just another concept in a long-line of trendsetting, but interchangeable, business models. Read more…

Talking Employer Brand

We talked briefly to Ben Gledhill, former Talent Acquisition Manager at Sofology and now responsible for Employer Branding and the Candidate Experience at The Metropolitan University, about his thoughts and views on Employer Brand touch-points and the candidate experience.

Where does your Employer Brand start and end? When someone joins a business? Wrong. Read more…

Employer Brand – How strong is yours?

Ali Harker, formerly Head of Recruitment at Homeserve and BSI, generously shares her advice on the importance and impact on nurturing a strong employer brand.

Your reputation as an employer is everything and if you have a good Employer Brand it makes it easier to recruit top talent. You may be missing out on attracting professionals because of a lack of brand awareness.

The No.1 thing candidates want to know before applying for a job is the company’s culture and values. So how do you get this across to your audience? There are various channels you can use and a number of things to consider:

Your employees are your unofficial recruiters and marketers. Expand your reach with this under-utilised secret weapon.  Independent research has shown that 1 in 4 candidates look at employee profiles after hearing about a new job. To make this work to your advantage, encourage your employees to use LinkedIn, Glassdoor and other social networks to share content and spread the word about your company, your employer brand and what it’s like to work there.

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The real deal with Talent is actually making full use of it!

Benjamin Franklin, in his summary of talent, once said “…What is a sundial in the shade?..” and in that prose he managed to eject the one big obvious point to finding talent. Once you’ve got it, what should you do with it?

Well, for many businesses, the true value of talent sits somewhere within the organisations innate business value and the trick is being able to measure it so that it has the right level of focus from the people tasked with running the organisation successfully. Accountants can’t measure talent, but we can all measure human capital – that’s the easy part. Headcount is just a number, right? Wrong. Headcount is a fictional story about payroll.

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Presenteeism, the opposite of absenteeism.

Back in my 20s and 30s I worked in the Health Club industry, an industry where your work and social life become one of the same things and the line can sometimes become a little blurred. The unsociable hours force your hand somewhat, in that there was always time to work but the work was never ending. The health clubs opened at 6.30am and closed at midnight, giving you plenty of time before or after a shift to amble around the club chatting to members, staff or even catching up on paperwork.

I thought it was just the industry in which I worked that made for the long hours culture. However, having moved from health clubs to night clubs and then into retail I realised it was probably an excuse and a symptom of presenteeism. A behaviour that is cultivated by wanting to be ‘seen’ to be truly engaged, wanting to be popular with both members and my boss and possibly making up for not wanting to miss out on something.

How times have changed and how my priorities and motivations are now very different.

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