Leveraging on social media

Recruiting firm Hays plc's decision to harness technology is paying off, says its chief executive, Alistair Cox.迷你倉 By Anna Teo'WHERE are the people I need? Cloud or Cluster?"In a recent blog post on the company's website, Hays plc's chief executive Alistair Cox pointed to the "emerging paradox between workforces clustering around small geographic areas while other roles are becoming totally dispersed with the advent of crowdsourcing and online talent exchanges" - two approaches to work that are polar opposites but both growing quickly.Hays is a leading specialist recruiting firm in the white collar professional middle rungs, with almost 8,000 staff across 245 offices in 33 countries. Last year, the London-listed firm placed some 53,000 people into permanent jobs and another 182,000 on temporary assignments, which makes it about the biggest recruiter in the world in the "middle space"."It struck me as an interesting paradox," Mr Cox tells BT about the "cloud or cluster" phenomenon during a visit to Singapore. Entire industries have sprung up around clustering, the idea of building a critical mass of skills in a community that goes all the way back to the industrial revolution in 18th-century England. Today, people around the world are still seeking to develop their own version of Silicon Valley, the classic example of latter-day digital clusters, he says, citing the infotech hotbed of Bangalore, the R&D and innovation communities built around Cambridge University and more lately, East London. The latter's Tech City, for instance, has drawn "a lot of usually young people, full of ideas, creativity, technology-driven, and it's bringing the capital markets in, so it's started to create some very interesting new businesses", he says.'Like attracts like'As he wrote in the blog: "These (digital clusters) are incredibly vibrant places, bringing together like-minded people from around the world to share ideas and create new businesses. There is a real sense of 'like attracts like' in these communities and an immense desire by many people to go there and get involved."Singapore, Mr Cox notes, is asking the same question of itself: How can we have a Silicon Valley hub? "Everybody is asking, what is the secret recipe, to have our own Silicon Valley, because they're seeing the massive value that is coming out of these organisations," he says."Google didn't quite exist 15 years ago; Facebook didn't exist 10 years ago; Apple was nearly bankrupt 10 years ago. These are organisations that either weren't worth very much or didn't exist (not so long ago), and now if you add them all together, they are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and they employ thousands and thousands of people, so these are valuable things to create if you can find a way of doing it. So that's a classic of how do I build a cluster."But at the same time, one can now put projects on the web for people from around the world to work on.With ever-faster Internet speeds and computing power, "the ability to work remotely or on your own somewhere is unprecedented", he says. "There are some interesting models now - interestingly, the models have been born out of Silicon Valley but there are interesting models where, if I have a business problem, say, I have a lot of data and I want somebody to analyse it for trends, traditionally what I'd have done is maybe recruit some statistical analysts, SAS programmers, who would then interrogate this data."Now he can put the job out on business models such as Craigslist, for example, "and say, here's my data, here's my issue, and people from all around the world, literally, will look at that problem and bid on working on it for me, sometimes collaborating together, sometimes it will be just a route to a person who will solve the problem for me", he says. "But you will get people from literally all corners of the world, who will work remotely on that particular issue. There are certain roles or problems that lend themselves quite nicely to that remote work; there are lots and lots of other roles where you can't remote work but it is interesting that at a time where people ask, how can I build critical mass and scale and get a community together, another business model is saying, you don't need a community, you can just push it out to the cloud and let the best person in the world find it and work on it."He adds, laughing: "And if somebody were to ask me, what will the world of work look like in 100 years' time, I just don't have the answer, because it could go either way!" What seems clear to him is - even as the crowdsourcing model looks set to grow as more and new types of work get done remotely, many other projects and enterprises still thrive or hinge on people coming together, and "humans are social animals above all else". What's common to both approaches is "the ever-present need to find the right talent when you need it, whether it's in the cloud or in a crowd", he says. "You just need to know where to look."Which is what Hays does - "we help people find the people they need, whether it's accountants, lawyers, engineers, IT specialists... it is the ultimate people business", Mr Cox says."What we do is actually quite straightforward, how you do it may get quite complex at times. The two things you need to get right for a successful hire are - firstly, has the individual got the right technical skills to do the job and secondly, are they the right cultural fit for the organisation? Hiring mistakes are costly, they are time-consuming to fix, it's a big waste of resources, for both the employer and employee, it's bad all around. So if we can derisk that for our clients then that's valuable. So finding the right people, finding them quickly, getting them to the client in a very efficient way - and doing all of that is a variable cost as well. You know, our biggest competitor in the world is actually a client's own internal HR team who are usually a large fixed cost within the client. But because we only charge our clients when they successfully take somebody that we've found for them, we become a variable cost. That's a nice model to sit alongside their own internal teams."Not to be confused with the Hay Group, the American management consulting firm that's also in the human resource business, Hays plc has a colourful heritage as the specialist recruitment arm of a large diversified British business that was founded in 1867 as an operator of wharves and warehouses on the banks of the River Thames."Hays, as a business, was for many years a conglomerate in a whole number of different industries," says Mr Cox, who has been at the helm of Hays since September 2007. Its diverse businesses included food distribution and logistics."And then around 10 years ago, the business was sort of broken up into its various elements and everything was sold off or demmini storagerged and the last business remaining was the recruitment business, which is what we are today." Now a "pure play specialist recruiter", Hays' turnover in its 2013 financial year that ended on June 30 was a flattish ¢G3.7 billion (S$7.4 billion). Under Mr Cox's watch, Hays spent some ¢G60 million five years ago on a complete upgrade of its front office database systems."I passionately believe that if we can find the right technology tools to make my already good people even better, they'll beat the competition, we'll serve more clients, more happy candidates, provide better customer service, etc, so that's why we invested in our technology platforms.Social media cues"We've got around the world literally millions and millions of people, professional people, on our databases. We built a relationship with those people over many years, we know what they're looking for, we know what they would be good at so we can be looking out for the right opportunities for them. Technology allows you to do a lot of that, so we built all our systems."Completely by serendipity, if you like, having finished the systems, the world of social media started to take off, and we looked at that and we said - can we somehow integrate the info coming out of social media into our own modern systems?" He was surprised to find, a while ago, that his two teenage sons didn't use email. "They do everything through social media, whether it's Facebook or they do it on SMS or WhatsApp or BBM. So they've adapted to communicate with their friends and family and future colleagues in ways that, five years ago, didn't exist."And I think, as an organisation that lives at the centre of the working world, if you like, we have to adapt our model to be able to deal with people the way they want to deal with their lives. So if everybody is dealing with their lives through, say, social media, we have to be in the middle of social media, because that's where the people are."Hays' pick of partner for its foray into social media is none other than LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals that boasts some 250 million members worldwide."We sat down with LinkedIn just over a year ago and we said - look, what we would like is more information coming off LinkedIn that allows us to do a faster, better job of putting the right people in front of our clients' opportunities at the right time. So we worked with Linkedln and their technical teams to get a real-time info flow from their database into our database. So if an individual is on LinkedIn and our database, we get two snapshots of that person - our database will have a lot more info over a period of time but it may be a few weeks or a few months out of date because they haven't sent us new info. LinkedIn has got less info but it's up to date, because individuals will tend to keep their profile up to date - if they've got a new job they'll change their job title, if they're looking for something new they may say they're looking for new opportunities. So you get this very nice combination of something that's very current and up to date, with something that is very deep and detailed, and you can blend those two and you get a fantastic snapshot of what that person is looking for and how we can help them. Having built our system, therefore, we can integrate that into LinkedIn. And that gives us a real advantage because nobody else in the industry can do that right now."The collaboration with LinkedIn "allows us to ramp up our business faster than if it didn't exist", he adds. "If you look at who uses us now on LinkedIn, we have nearly 400,000 professionals come regularly to see what we've got to say around the world of work. We get around 2 million hits every month on interesting things we put on LinkedIn. It could be a job ad, it could be a salary survey, it could be reading what I've got to say, I write a little blog there."Hays also uses Google technology to search and review profiles from LinkedIn. "There's no point having millions of people on your database if you can't find the two or three perfect candidates for an opportunity, so you need very powerful search capabilities to drill into this database and find exactly what you need," he says.Ramping up businessTrained as an aeronautical engineer, Mr Cox, 52, started out building military aircraft at British Aerospace. "But I moved quite early on in my career; I wanted to get more international experience and I wanted to work in an industry that maybe had greater opportunities for moving into management, so I joined the oil and gas industry."He was a field engineer with Schlumberger for six years before moving to the US in 1988 as a research scientist with the company. There, he obtained an MBA at Stanford, and then moved back to the UK as a consultant with McKinsey before returning to industry."So I moved to Blue Circle Industries, and that's what brought me out to Asia in 1998, just after the Asian financial crisis," he says. "I lived in Malaysia for nearly five years - in Kuala Lumpur - and it added a huge amount to my way of looking at the world, my experience; I won't have missed it for the world." Before moving to Hays in 2007, he had been CEO of Xansa, a UK-based IT services and back-office processing organisation.What career advice would he give his 17 and 16-year old sons?"Do something you really enjoy, study something you really enjoy, work in an industry and in a company where you really enjoy what you're doing, because we spend so many hours a day and so many years of our lives at work, you'd better do something that you really get a kick out of."And take charge of your own career, go and create the opportunities for yourself because very rarely in life do people sit there presenting opportunities to you; you have to go and make those things happen. For me personally, it was 'get on an aeroplane, go abroad and get some international experience'. When you feel as though you have hit a bit of a brick wall or you're stuck in a place, then change it - change employer, change your role within the company, do something about it. Don't just stay stuck in that rut because life's too short to let pass you by."anna@sph.com.sgALISTAIR COXChief Executive, Hays plc1982 Graduated in aeronautical engineering from Salford University, UK1982 Started career in British Aerospace's military aircraft division1983 Joined Schlumberger as field engineer1988 Became research scientist at Schlumberger's research lab in US1991 Obtained MBA from Stanford University1991 Returned to UK as a consultant with McKinsey & Co1994 Joined Blue Circle Industries as group strategy director1998 Became regional director at Blue Circle, based in Kuala Lumpur2001 Also became Lafarge's regional president for Asia (Lafarge acquired Blue Circle)2002 Returned to UK as CEO of Xansa2007 Joined Hays plc as chief executive迷你倉