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Positive Changes for Talent Acquisition in Asia

Hosted by: Google

The Chapman Consulting Group co-hosted a vocal and thought provoking gathering of Talent Acquisition Heads at the offices of Google in Singapore this week. Regional recruitment leaders came together from a broad mix of industries and organisations including Barclays, BOAML, Cisco, Covidien, EMC, HP, Invensys, Life Technologies, Linde, Novartis, Quintiles, SAP, UBS, Visa and many more. The common thread throughout the discussion was that many positive changes are occurring with regard to the approach as well as the priorities for the Asia talent acquisition function.

1. Innovate: think like the business and hire the very best in HR

Our host, Kerry O’Shea, shared some of the changes that the staffing function at Google has gone through over the past few years. He explained, “Google People Services (GPS) combines everything related to staffing and programs rather than all HR. We don’t include HR business partners, Compensation, Benefits, Learning & Development for example.”

He shared, “The combined function has driven some new initiatives, such as the international six week ‘Explorer’ rotational assignments within GPS. In Asia Pacific we are also piloting a program that encourages people to give 5% of their time, or 2 hours a week, to projects with other GPS teams. This builds exposure to other teams, strengthens internal networks, and generates new ideas about future career paths, etc. We call it ‘Gimme Five.’”

Talent acquisition leaders must also strive to improve the function while echoing the passion that business leaders have for new practices and ideas. Kerry highlighted in closing that, ”It’s not just incremental things, it’s about putting the Google end user first and hiring the best people for the business. We have to do that for HR as well – we need to hire the best people for HR, put our ‘users’ first – meaning candidates, employees and hiring managers – and look for big innovations.”

2. Developing raw talent

Many organisations limit themselves by only looking to hire those with experience in the region, but there was plenty of discussion when a thoughtful and successful change in approach was shared. According to Adele Png who leads Asia Pacific Talent & Recruitment with Visa, ”Making the internship and graduate talent within Visa attractive to the business was critical, and now there is more demand than capacity for the programme. We have also focused on San Francisco and Singapore as global hubs for internal mobility and entry level talent.” Developing skill shortage areas in-house is a long-term strategy but it can be the best choice.

3. Changing the process, changing the thinking

The group was very interested in the specifics of a change EMC has made in their internal talent acquisition approach. The company now employs a ‘charge to’ business model whereby the businesses compensate talent acquisition upon a successful hire. Goh Hattori, Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) Head of Talent Acquisition at EMC shared that sponsorship can often be the key to change. Goh commented that, “The deployment of a new internal recruitment model had its challenges initially, but we are now a fully integrated part of the EMC HR & Business framework. One significant contributing factor in our success was the strong executive sponsorship we had in both APJ and Corporate.”

At Life Technologies a more mature version of this approach is being executed. Sandy Ng the Regional Head of Talent Acquisition at the company commented, “The use of a funding model, which charges the hiring managers on hiring, has improved accountability, productivity and cost savings. The additional revenue allows us to fund branding, pipelining and other proactive search activities.” It is compelling that the funding overflow can be utilised for social media or pipeline work, as justifying the cost of these areas can be difficult in a more traditional model.

A special thanks goes to our host Kerry and his team at Google. We will hold the next Asia Pacific talent acquisition Leaders gathering in Singapore during February 2014.

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