Senior Team Member Exit – Carter's Journey

Some twelve months into my inheritance experience with things going pretty well the bombshell hit.

I remember the day – George, my Engineering Manager, entered my office looking very sheepish and told me he’d been offered another job which he intended to take. My initial reaction was to persuade him to stay but this would cause imbalance in the team and anyway, in my experience, the persuasion route rarely worked once a member of staff had decided to move on. I graciously thanked George for his contribution and said I would immediately put the wheels in motion to replace him.
When George had gone I breathed a sigh of relief that one of the first things I’d done when taking over the Company was to put all my Senior Team on three months notice as part of their contracts of employment. I’d got three months to get someone as good as or better than George.

I hadn’t recruited for a long time and was slightly daunted by the prospect. In view of this I decided to do some market research – I seem to recollect someone telling me in the age we live in all information is accessible thanks to the internet. Soon I realised that the “online age” had totally altered the way businesses recruit. Gone were the days of advertising in the local newspaper, National press or a trade journal and there was now a whole “online recruitment” world on our doorstep.

My research showed even Recruitment Agencies had suffered from this change with one of the steepest rates of closure in the high street, coming 2nd only to Building Societies. Agency outlets had declined by 13.4% in the period October 2008 to December 2010. When I dug deeper I found some further statistics on the web, Recruitment Genius conducted a survey in 2010. In it, they identified that for 61% of the respondents, the internet was the preferred method for looking for work. Only 20% preferred to use a recruitment agency and 6% visited the Job Centre. Industry statistics estimated that over 90% of candidates look online before considering using any other application method.
With this “stat” it was clear that part of my recruitment strategy had to be to advertise online. I spent hours looking at recruitment job-sites and job-boards – there were generic sites and industry specific sites. Most industry magazines, such as Management Today had their own Job-board (MT Jobs) hosting vacancies – so I would be able to choose the traditional method of advertising in print, but also advertise on-line. Hopefully this approach would give the best of both worlds to find the right person for the job (capturing both the passive and active applicants). In the UK the predominant generic job-sites are Totaljobs, Job-site and Reed, with others such as Monster and CV-Library within the top 10 sites. Some of the stats are mind-blowing

“Totaljobs reported that in January 2011, 3.75M jobseekers visited Totaljobs.com – a rise of 33%. The jobseekers made 2M applications in the 1st month of 2011; with 141,000 uploading/updating their CV, adding to the 2.8 M searchable profiles already housed.” A staggering total of 181,158 CV’s were submitted in January 2011 to CV-Library making it the fastest growing database in the UK, which now holds over 3.2M CV’s.

One of my business friends suggested I “widen the net” by using Social Media. It appeared that LinkedIn and Facebook have become huge mechanisms for people looking for employment. The added advantage was that I could look up any applicants using these social media networks to “check them out”.
I went for a pint one evening, with my old business mentor “Frank” and told him about my findings. Frank, listened intently then commented “well before you embark on producing a flashy online or printed advertisement, decide what job you want this “new person” to do. Use this opportunity to reflect on George’s role with the Company. Review the Job Description and KPI’s. Analyse the Personnel Specification and decide what type of person you want to do this role? Don’t just go out and recruit another George – this may not be what the business requires.”

This was sound advice. In my hurry to replace George, I had not thought about reflecting on his Job role and its integration in the business strategy. My tasks started to formulate and included:

• Review the business needs, reflect on the suitability of the Engineering
• Manager’s Job Description – amend where necessary
• Check the accountabilities are clear and what key performance indicators (KPI’s) the replacement would be responsible for
• Update the Personnel Specification for the Engineering Manager’s role
• Check that the role’s remuneration package is competitive in the marketplace, so good quality candidates are attracted
• Then conduct market research on the suitable routes to market (where should I advertise?)

There was clearly a lot of work to be done so I targeted to have it all complete within the next three weeks - three months the clock was ticking! As part of my work I decided to consult individually with each of my team to get a clear picture of how George had performed and their expectations of his replacement. Doing this could only enhance the feeling of involvement I continually talked to them about.
Three weeks down the line I was satisfied I had a clear picture of what I wanted from the replacement (new job description) including KPI’s. I had also got a job specification and a typical remuneration package which I felt was competitive having checked on line. So the next thing to decide was whether to do a DIY job or work with someone to find the best recruit. Irrespective of the recruitment media I didn’t fancy having to review lots of CV’s especially as there would be plenty that were over qualified and a similar number from the under qualified – I’d got a business to run. So I needed to work with someone who new how to access the market that might have potential applicants, could produce an advertisement and review CV’s presenting me with a short list of candidates who could all do the required job leaving me to decide which one would fit best into my team and Company.
I rang a HR/recruitment lady (Simone) I’d once known and we arranged to meet. I handed over all the documentation pertinent to the recruitment and explained what I was looking for. We agreed a target of three weeks hence for presenting the short list with interviews the week after – I was very conscious that this would be week 7 out 12 of George’s notice period. Yes I would have to part with money for the resource to help with the recruitment but the new person was key to the future of the business and it was all about having the right expertise to do the recruitment – I hadn’t.
Having approved the advertising copy after three weeks Simone and I met to review the shortlist. She had 10 possible candidates (all of whom she’d met or conducted telephone interviews with) which we quickly whittled down to 3. I agreed Simone would be part of the interview panel and I set aside a day the week after to conduct interviews. My plan for the interview was that each candidate would given a psychometric test (conducted by Simone), shown round the factory (by one of my team) and an interview (with a panel of me, Simone and another one of my team). We now had a plan; hopefully it would achieve the aim of identifying the best candidate to become my new Engineering Manager.

If you want to read more chapters of Carters experiences we’ll include them in future website up dates. We generally plan to do an update once a quarter. If you are too impatient to wait for the next chapters you can obtain the full novel as an e-book by supplying us your details and giving us some feedback.
Send your request to enquiries@emseff.co.uk

Written by EMS