Written by: Lee Narraway, Managing Director, Antal International.
When working in a technical market the
chances are it will be candidate driven, there are a number of reasons for
this. Firstly skills in the technical
space tend to be high demand and short supply, the second is that many sectors
experience a recessive period and during this period the candidates still need
to work so they migrate out of the sector.
During an upturn, the sector looks back to
the market and suddenly finds that all the candidates have gone and they
struggle to fill the roles that they may have.
But don’t worry there is something you can do in order to counter this.
The first thing that you must do is change
your mindset, the market has changed and so has the availability of the
candidates, the skills the candidates posses have developed and in changed allowing
them to adapt diverse markets and new challenges, this is a good thing for you
so don’t discount them at first screen stage if they are not currently working
in your sector.
I have placed a number of candidates back
into a sector that once left behind and they have all gone on to do great
things, one candidate had been out of the automotive sector for over 10 years
and the client was a little unsure whether to look them at the first screening
stage. At the initial brief with the
client I spoke about this particular person who I felt matched the role
perfectly. The client wasn’t keen
initially but I managed to convince the client that this candidate was very
much worth looking at. He now heads up
the business and has turned them around from a loss-making situation into a
profitable situation. The candidate had
learned some very valuable lessons in other sectors which really allowed him to
bring those lessons into the automotive sector and developed a new way of
looking at things whilst maintain the values of the new business.
I was also in a meeting with a client
recently who was a senior manager in a very large automotive company, this
particular individual had taken some time out of the sector into FMCG. He said
to me that he felt the FMCG sector was way behind automotive in terms of
process and systems. For the FMCG sector
this would tell me that they need to look at automotive candidates who may be
able to help them with the process and systems needs they have, I know from my
experience in FMCG that there is a huge need for good systems people, finding
processes which take care of Health and safety, quality and efficiency are so
vital to any manufacturing company that they simply cannot ignore this.
Another example would that aerospace
candidates tend to get nowhere in automotive as they are considered to be less
urgent than the automotive sector. I personally
have found that aerospace people tend to be very detailed and methodical and
this translates into automotive as perfection paralysis although it really
isn’t always the norm as we placed a program manager from aerospace in to
automotive and this candidate has been amazing for the client, he has taken on
a massive workload on is managing the load very well and developing the team
accordingly, he has also brought in other project engineers for the team, some
from the sector and some outside the sector.
He has a calm approach, which is considered and detailed whilst still
maintaining an urgent sense of attitude. He has been a real breath of fresh air
for the client who ordinarily would not have taken him.
Other
examples of how we have helped clients build teams in a sector.
One of our clients won a contract to
maintain a large capital asset, they needed to build a team that were familiar
with the asset but also up to speed with the latest more efficient methods of
machine management.
Once we had established what the
organization chart would look like we then focused on the positions which were
likely to be more demanding in terms of sector experience and knowledge. Once we had completed this assignment we
could then blend non sector candidates alongside and look for other
complimentary sector skills sets around the maintenance piece. We also looked
at some of the more routine roles and recruited ex forces people into these
roles, as they tend to find routine more confortable and take a rigorous
approach. The result was a really well
balanced team, which has contributed to the asset being the world’s most
productive machine in the sector.
Another of our clients wanted to build a
middle management team, which had a different culture to the current team. The client was going to redeploy the current
team and we were assigned to search and bring in skills to help drive culture
change and improve productivity. During
the search we identified complimentary skills from a broad range of sectors and
built a string team, which has taken the client forward to a level they have
not seen before, this is something we are particularly proud of.
In both of these examples, the single most
important factor to making the assignment work was to get the clients to open
their minds to taking non-sector people on board.
It’s not always the answer but it certainly
goes a long way to opening the market up further. I confidently predict that the future of
recruitment in technical skills will demand clients take from other sectors,
those clients that stick to their own sector will fall behind their competition
and lose out on the best skills, which can add real value to their own
business.
Lee Narraway
Managing Director
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