Growing Pains

For all kinds of businesses, success can bring new challenges, particularly when organisations need to expand their workforce rapidly. While undeniably positive, growth spurts can catch a leadership team by surprise.

UK insurer LV= was created as a small mutual society in 1843, and grew relatively slowly until 2007. Since then, it has embarked on a hiring surge, taking its workforce from 1,200 to 6,000 as it seeks an increasing share of the UK insurance market. In 2013 alone, LV= received 26,000 applications and hired 1,593 people.

However, LV=’s recruitment team doesn’t want to compromise on quality when recruiting large numbers of staff. “After trawling for employees in a certain area, you need to let the skills build up again,” says Paul Smith, LV=’s HR Director. “We might turn the tap on in Huddersfield, but then turn it off after the first recruitment drive, and [recruit instead] in Bristol.”

In order to avoid exhausting the skill bases surrounding its offices around the UK, the team has created a pioneering recruitment mapping approach. By overlaying staff and applicant data on to a digital map, the recruitment team has been able to identify which grades of staff were likely to accept different length commutes, where recruitment advertising was generating the most hires and where a community of LV= colleagues was particularly large. The mapping also showed the team which regions and commuter communities had not yet been tapped for talent, even where there was already an LV= call centre nearby.

At SuperGroup, the UK-based international retailer that owns the trendy Superdry clothing label, the recruitment team has decided on a different, localised strategy common in retail, which devolves recruitment responsibilities to specially trained store managers.

SuperGroup’s workforce has grown from 400 to 3,500 in the past five years, expanding beyond SME status into more than 100 stores in the UK and overseas and 17 separate national websites. Last year, the business received 100,000 job applications for 3,000 jobs. “If you are a young person and looking for a job in retail, you can’t get more sexy than us in terms of brands,” says Andrea Cartwright, Director of HR.

Cartwright has what she describes as a “tiny” team of 20, including payroll staff. SuperGroup deals with its mountain of applications by passing them to managers of stores near to the applicant’s home address. This regionalised approach requires a development programme designed to teach managers a range of skills, including recruitment, but has allowed SuperGroup’s central HR department to avoid the operational mire of mass recruitment. As a result, the team has remained small and strategic despite the company’s rapid growth.

Author

Barney Ely

Director at Hays

Linkedin

Barney is Director at Hays Human Resources, the leading UK HR recruiting experts, leading a team of 80 HR recruitment consultants in 40 locations across the UK.

Barney also has operational responsibility for Hays offices across the South of England, with responsibility for teams placing professionals in over 20 industry sectors, from accountancy and finance to construction, IT, marketing and education. Across many of these sectors, Hays also has further teams dedicated to public services, not-for-profit, executive and international recruitment

Barney is an active partner to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), sitting on the CIPD People Management Awards panel.

Barney joined Hays in 1993 as a business graduate and has spent much of his career recruiting for blue-chip organisations and SMEs.