EP55: Absa Group - Broadening Talent Acquisition: Embracing Diverse Sectors (With Shaun Tooray)

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

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Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. My name is Lydia. Joining us today is Shaun Tooray, Head of Talent Attraction at Absa Group. Welcome, Shaun, thank you for joining us all the way from Johannesburg.

Shaun: Thank you for having me, Lydia. Great to be here.

Shaun’s Journey In The Talent Space

Lydia: So Shaun, walk us through your journey in the talent space. I understand you've had quite a number of years in the tech recruitment space, right?

Shaun: Initially, my career started roughly 13 years ago. Ideally, you start moving into different functions, especially in the recruitment agency space. So, you get very exposed to multiple factors across recruitment. Tech was something that really interested me upfront. At that stage, things like business analysts, project managers, developers, and architects, which are normally foreign words to a lot of people, really became the go-to aspect in the sense of you’re being a specialist in that area itself.

From then on, I really elevated and moved into a tech company. Discovery Holdings is one of the top 50 Fortune companies in the world as well. It’s a South African-based company with a global footprint, and I moved in to look after their tech recruitment as well, which is quite interesting because then you get to see it from an internal lens perspective around exposure to talent management principles in the tech space.

Lydia: And you've taken that experience and exposure to tech recruitment into corporate and investment banking now.

Shaun: So currently, where I am, or if I can say, my sort of specialism, I’ve worked for already top-tier investment banks. My first one is Standard Bank, which is the largest investment bank on the African continent in terms of footprint. I’ve worked for Citibank, which is one of the largest foreign-owned banks as well. And I’m currently with the Absa Group within the Investment Banking space as well, which is one of the large players within Africa, Pan Africa, and then with rep offices globally as well.

In terms of tech, it touches us everywhere. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digitization, the AI that’s coming through. It’s really amazing how tech has really spearheaded a lot of growth within companies. But we’ve also seen at the same time, that tech really affecting companies like Microsoft and Amazon in a very negative way, in terms of scaling up because obviously, as they scale up from a tech perspective, people costs become quite highlighted and companies go through various restructures as well.

Attracting Talents in Competitive Markets

Lydia: In Absa, you oversee talent attraction strategies in Africa, the US, the UK, and APAC. So, what are some observations you’ve made about the demand and even the availability of tech talent in these regions over the past year? Any interesting insights you want to share?

Shaun: Sure, so I’ll take it back a bit further into my life at Puma Energy, which has a much bigger global footprint across the markets you’ve mentioned. Within the USA space, mainly Latin America, where we had a strong cohort of individuals as well. The cultural nuances around how each region operates as effectively as they can are very different from one to another. If we’ve got Latin America with a strong culture around people ethos, getting together, celebrating together, and really pushing goals and values.

Then you’ve got Africa, which is the emerging market space. So, Puma was headquartered in Africa, to run their entire African portfolio, which was a very large cash generator for them as well. A bit about Puma is that they are really playing within the downstream oil and gas sector itself. Obviously, with that being an emerging market, you have constraints with things like foreign currency volatility and infrastructure volatility as well.

And then within the Asia Pacific, what we mainly looked after was Singapore. If you walk into those offices, individuals are extremely smart, really focused on the goal at the end of the day, and extremely gifted academically, and from a thought leadership perspective. Then you’ve got the primary South African banks as well.

In terms of our footprint, we’ve got rep offices out within the US, UK, and China that seem to be open in terms of learning new laws, learning new integration strategies, and designing the candidate experience, which at the end of the day, really becomes top and forefront if I have to say for a talent attraction strategy. Because, ideally, we are entering markets where we are seen as the minnows. You’ve got your large big banks there and how do you attract that skill to say, “Hey, you know what? Come through and see what we can do for you.”

With that obviously comes talent mobility. You want to obviously elevate and move your people into these geographies. Number one, you trust these individuals; they have proven they really love your culture brand.

Lydia: So, in highly regulated markets, or industries that you've worked with, how do you work that into the process? Does it lengthen the hiring process?

Shaun: In a very recruitment-driven environment, it doesn’t affect recruitment unless the position is a regulatory sort of defined role where we would need further approvals from various Reserve Banks and other institutions. So, I wouldn’t say that there is a large volume of those roles, to be honest.

Recruitment processes are quite lengthy on their own, so we are always looking at optimizing as much as possible. From a technology-driven perspective, virtual interviews or gamification from a psychometrics aspect, or even live engagement. From a process perspective, how do we push the agenda quite quickly?

Some of the things that we have really looked at are how can we optimize, and the bank is going through a very strong talent optimization project that’s looking at our system in Workday and how efficiently and effectively can we utilize a system to really take away that administrative aspect from the recruitment space itself?

Streamlining and Virtualizing Onboarding with AI

Lydia: So, what areas have you prioritized for talent attraction across all these different markets for corporate investment banking?

Shaun: There are a few aspects, one being the candidate experience. We are in a market that’s extremely driven with critical skills, right? And what we’ve seen over the past few months is that candidates are now interviewing you as a potential employer. Why? Because they have options at the end of the day to walk into three or four different employers at this stage. Because at the end of the day, the power has shifted.

So, the candidate experience is absolutely key in the sense of hand-holding, prioritizing, engaging, and really leveraging that client experience. The second thing is, and if I walk back a bit, it’s more about retention. We want to keep our people happy; we want to ensure that at the end of the day, they are rewarded, recognized, and supported in the way to reach their particular goals.

And there are various initiatives that we drive both co-creating and co-leading with our learning and development teams with our reward and benefit partners as well. And really defining what the employee value proposition should look like in today because it’s shifting so quickly.

Lydia: And the candidate experience being an area of priority will then also lead you to an onboarding experience, right? Across these different cultures as well. So, how do you manage that in terms of the different roles and also the different markets they use?

Shaun: So, we are currently running an onboarding project to streamline, virtualize, and really ensure that we integrate AI into this. The importance of the hiring manager, the mentee in that space, as well as the buddy, gets quite elevated because these are various people that are going to be assigned to the candidate to ensure that they land and they land correctly within the organization.

The last thing you would never want to hear is that somebody joins your organization, having filled out a form, and at the end of the month, they don’t get paid because of a certain glitch in the system. And bad news makes its rounds and really gets escalated.

At the end of the day, if we put ourselves in these positions, what is it that we would want to experience as a candidate? What are the measures and the SLAs that need to be refined to ensure that we’re talking about things like the benefit structures, the medical aid, the pension/provident funds?

Then the infrastructure is there. They come in and they obviously get the welcome pack. And then we’ve obviously tried to layer that because there’s a need for one single access point to various other systems. You don’t want people to log on to multiple and different systems because that just kicks out your experience.

Then obviously ensuring that they land correctly, that they are supported in that first 60 days of starting, getting used to the culture, the people, the engagement, the professionalism, and setting them up for being high-performance workers as well.

Recruitment Strategy in a Changing Market

Lydia: So Shaun, what are some key skills and qualities that you look out for when you recruit talent for this particular industry, banking and finance?

Shaun: If I lay across all industries, I always say that aptitude and attitude are extremely important. Because skills can always be learned and trained. So, as your basis, you have to ensure that the individual actually has the aptitude to come and move into your team and really start performing.

They have to have the right attitude to ensure that they integrate from a culture perspective because, obviously, you’re trying to drive high-performance teams. If you look at it within the banking space, banking knowledge is definitely important. But we’re moving into a day and age where there are a lot of transferable skills that you can really elevate from people to people.

Industries were changing right before our competitors, which were banks. Now they are major telcos, they are FinTechs out there. Now it’s retail clients as well that are offering loans and microloans and things like that. So, the landscape has changed significantly. Therefore, our recruitment strategy had to change with it. And obviously, you have to look at people coming in from various sectors itself. I mean, if I looked at our past data, about 50% of people have moved out of banking that had left the organization to join various firms. So, that’s extremely interesting at the same time.

Lydia: And how do you facilitate that change from one industry to the next, say they’re coming into Absa?

Shaun: So, obviously, there’s a change management aspect built into that. But if we look back at our recruitment process itself, it has to be a very competency-based behavioral aspect interview setup because, at the end of the day, you’re not asking specific banking questions, right?

So, the mindset obviously changes and it’s about the principle of how you apply some of these lenses or strategies to really look at it. If we’re talking about technical skill sets that individuals have to have with regard to our products themselves, we then become kind of tied.

Then we have to look at individuals that have that particular product set because, ideally, that’s the focus at this stage. But if we’re looking at back-office type roles and if we look into accounting, finance, HR, compliance, risk, or even IT at some particular stage, we become very flexible in these aspects.

In my past role at Premier Energy, we had a division called aviation fuel. And we needed people who sell aviation fuel right far and few in between. Now, if you’re thinking about trying to hire somebody in Guatemala to go and sell aviation fuel, not many competitors out there.

So, what we did is we developed a gamification to assess and compare those individuals who are applying to some of our top salespeople. We are trying to look at particular attributes. And we’ve hired people who went out and sold printers, who sold IT equipment and we put them in this role. And we trained them up from a product perspective because the principle of it is that the characteristics of sales are universal if I have to put it that way.

Lydia: Fundamentally, they've got the right kind of aptitude, as you said, to perform the role. Correct. So, in terms of retention, or even attraction, and then retention, are there any initiatives or projects around attracting and retaining talent that you like to share?

Shaun: There are always projects ongoing, right? There are always shifting markets, and you have to be quite attentive. What’s been quite key in my career is that I really get close to the business from a priority level and objective level. I tend to really spend time with them to understand their business end-to-end because if we can’t influence them or if we can’t understand their business, we can’t influence their business. At the end of the day, it’s how do you customize that proposition for a range of people that might have other objectives? And how do we move to humanizing it? Because that’s going to be the key.

I’ll give you a typical example. Within South Africa, we have enormous issues when it comes to energy and electricity, there are dependency issues with our energy provider. So, what we’ve done is that we ensured that each individual gets an inverter so that if they are working from home, they can work from home. Sounds like a great concept, right? But if we put on the lens of the colleague or the employee, it’s like, “Oh, you want to ensure that I only work at the end of the day so that you benefit and you get your financial gain through whatever we do.”

Now, when Gartner comes in, they say, “You know what? You have to look at a holistic solution for that family, humanize it and take it out of the professional environment, and look at maybe solarizing their house so that, yes, while they’re working, little kids can watch TV as well. In the night, the lights can be on so that the family can benefit from sitting around a table.”

And that’s where the humanized approach comes in. This is very strong on our agenda to customize and build. We don’t have a structured EVP yet. And the key thing is when you look at it, how do you measure the success of an EVP? And here, there are no criteria because there’s no data or information that can give it to you. And what they say is that how you measure it is what your colleague is saying to the other colleague at the water cooler or what the colleague is saying to other people at a party. That’s how you measure the EVP itself.

Assessing Cultural Fit in Recruitment

Lydia: Let’s get into the candidate experience and assessing cultural fit. Are there any processes we put in place such as gamification which is something that you mentioned earlier? Are there any examples that you’d like to share?

Shaun: So basically, within Absa’s social construct, we don’t use gamification at this stage. We do use proper psychometrics via major vendors like SHL, etc. Obviously, fit and key to the role are a bit more important through that assessment phase because psychometrics is just another data point. It’s not a decision-making tool.

What we use to look at the culture fit is that we try to get more teams involved in the interview process to look at how we fit in together with the candidate coming in and the candidate can assess on their end. Can they easily integrate into the style of working from a cultural perspective?

Our values and purposes are extremely strong and our culture obviously intertwines with high performance as well because we are really pushing you to the stage of outperforming. We’ve done extremely well over the last few years. If you’ve achieved X, let’s raise the bar, let’s go higher, and that’s kind of the space we are in at this stage. We always want to better ourselves as well. And the process of referrals, employee referrals is extremely important because, at the end of the day, great people know great people. And as they start selling the culture into the external landscape, they start attracting and pushing people that they feel would be a good fit for the organization.

So, we are currently reviewing our entire employee referral program to ensure that it’s one of the most attractive and financially introverted mechanisms that employees can really look at integrating and selling for us.

Lydia: This might come in a little premature, but what are some steps you’ve taken to develop this EVP and in order to ensure that your talent strategies for both culture and scale are aligned?

Shaun: So, it was a large learning curve for me. But what we’ve done is that we set up a forum group. Ideally, this forum group is really pulling people from different businesses across the chain of the Bank of Corporate Investment Bank, and it was more of a working group.

So, we understood from a business perspective what the noise is, what they would like, and how to integrate that into one forum perspective. Then we interviewed new joiners that came into the organization to find out what really attracted them to this sort of brand on its own. We’ve asked things about how they landed and what they really see that we could do better.

So then we’ve identified if it’s going to be remuneration and benefits, then let’s focus on remuneration and benefits and look at the information we’ve gathered and what could be changed within the landscape. That’s obviously a strong pillar that we have to look at. We implemented that sort of strategy across it. And then we are elevating it to the group because we are just a business function of the entire Absa Group itself.

We feel that if it needs to be really rolled out, it needs to be rolled out from a group perspective, incorporating the other divisions’ thinking, thoughts, and processes. The great thing about it is that we are questioning a lot of the legacy aspects around some of the benefits. Why have these benefits not changed over the last 20 years? The world has changed but some of the benefits haven’t at all. Because if we want to be a game-changer and differentiate, we need to do things differently.

Empathetic Leadership in Remote Work

Lydia: Security is very critical to the banking industry, and also, working from home may pose a challenge. We’ve seen that in the past two years, with people and work being more decentralized. So, managing people from a remote perspective, what is the role of a people team to make sure that all these different processes or new processes set in place to accommodate remote work run smoothly and do not interrupt business operations?

Shaun: We call it empathetic leadership if you have to put it into words around this because, within the construct of South Africa, things are different for different people, right? What we’ve really got to consider at the end of the day is that probably people work from home, there is no nine-to-five, right? It’s 24 hours. It’s all about understanding your workforce as a hiring manager or as a line manager, understanding your workforce, and understanding that you need to shift from being task-oriented to being output-driven.

I’ll be honest, from a TA or talent attraction perspective, we have candidates asking, “What’s your hybrid strategy?” That’s so important for them because as individuals, we hire them for the reason that we trust them to deliver, right? All we need to do, as leaders, is provide the right tools, the stretches, and the challenges and leave them to deliver.

Absa has really embraced a distributed leadership model as well. What that means is that you no longer have to wait for your boss’s boss to approve something. You have the capacity at your level to make a decision to ensure that we can move ahead with whatever engagement strategy, project strategy, or even leadership strategy that you want to employ.

Obviously, it needs to fall into place around the values and ethos but at the end of the day, it’s enabling your team to work faster to deliver when they need to deliver and understand that they are responsible for time management. It might sound silly being time management but I think it’s having that mature approach to ensure that your hiring teams, and your leaders are equipped, are ready, and can manage the sort of workforce we want to.

Leveraging Technology in Recruitment

Lydia: You also talked about the different factors that have come into play in terms of talent attraction and the different industries that talent comes from. You will have to look quite far into the future. In terms of strategy, you would also need to develop some talent attraction strategies and not only fulfill the business needs today but also look at them in the foreseeable future. So, what might be some ways to think about future-proofing recruitment?

Shaun: There’s one simple answer to future-proofing recruitment: develop a very strong retention strategy. At the end of the day, unless it’s business growth, that’s the time you should be recruiting. Or you should be recruiting at very low levels in the organization and start uplifting everybody when there are vacancies across an organization structure. But looking at it from a future-proof perspective, workforce planning is extremely important.

In order to understand how effectively you can deliver a workforce plan, you really need to understand effectively where your business strategy is moving in the next two or three years. In line with that, you need to understand the market trends and some of the regulations or framework structures that are changing. And then boom, somebody throws a curveball like COVID. Something that nobody actually anticipated or planned for really starts disrupting.

So, I think from a strategic intent perspective, it’s ensuring that you’re looking at bringing in the best of the best individuals, to be honest, because these are individuals that are going to push your business to the next level. Number two, it’s about leveraging some of the IT or technology aspects.

Chat GPT comes to mind. Absa has this adoption around, “Yes, go ahead and explore with chat GPT.” But don’t load confidential communication. I mean, we’ve all seen chat GPT was hacked recently and things like that. So, it’s all about how we utilize these tools at our disposal to ensure that we can focus on the value-added aspects instead of looking at it from an administrative perspective. Can job descriptions be written by chat GPT? Yes, for sure. How much of that kick out in terms of our organizational strategy itself in terms of OD within design into the organization? Can they be linked to job categories and job families immediately? And then can you obviously condense that? Yes, 100%.

So it’s all about these things where we can plug in very quickly to simplify our processes to really give us time back. Because time is a commodity, I think it’s going to be really important to ensure that we spend our time with value-driven activities for our business and for our recruitment industry itself.

Ensuring DE&I Effort Is In Line with Talent Attraction Strategy

Lydia: It’s also critical to think about feedback. It’s not really in the company’s control to see what people are saying, but if you look at Glassdoor, for instance, you’re going to see lots of feedback about a company. So, to what extent do you address these pieces of feedback? And how much do you act on it?

Shaun: In this day and age, we always try to solicit feedback wherever we can. When I’m sitting with my executives and when I say, “Let’s talk about your recruitment and let’s focus on the things that have not gone right instead of telling me the things that have gone right,” because that’s very clear and it articulates and drives into my strategy for the next year or next two years around conditions we should look at. If you take it to the broader scale around candidate management.

Lydia: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are obviously top on everyone’s mind at the moment. And how to attract a diverse workforce, we’ve seen facts have shown and studies have shown that it has a direct positive business impact. So, how do you ensure that DE&I is prioritized in your talent attraction strategies?

Shaun: Our leadership, our learning, and development tools or engagements are positioned around this. I think we’ve just won a Diamond Award last year for our female empowerment program. We have a Woman in Banking program that we run quite successfully. We’ve ensured that our maternity benefits are really at the high end as well.

So, over and above just trying to employ people, you have to look at the conundrum around you that says, “What’s the value for a woman working in this organization?” Then you start addressing things like the gender pay gap as well, where we are almost about 90% of that. So, we’ve moved significantly to ensure that within South Africa, you’ve got various other targets above just gender.

You’ve got things like transformation targets because you have to obviously elevate different ethnic groups as well. We have to ensure that our facilities can accommodate them at the same time. So, it’s all about moving towards a unified culture that’s accepting, and we run extremely strong campaigns within the organization. We call it “Come as You Are,” which means you don’t have to change yourself for anyone. What it does is it actually ensures that people are appreciated in every form and in every way and that there is or that there should be no bias towards them.

Overcoming Resistance

Lydia: So, dealing with all kinds of cultures, different types of needs, and many kinds of circumstances against the backdrop of disruption. Right. So what does a TA professional need to be or what do they need to have?

Shaun: We are measured on various factors, such as time to hire, cost of hire, different SLAs, etc. But I think it’s all about being passionate about what you do, and a part of that really touches on people. It touches on serving people, to be honest. And it’s about soft skills. You can learn recruitment, anybody can be a strong employer brand ambassador, and you can learn how to run processes and interpret policies.

But if you don’t really care about the person on the other end, then you’re in the wrong job completely. Because at the end of the day, you are being judged and looked at. You have to have a personal connection with them. It’s about chemistry.

Lydia: Also, how do you deal with resistance if you’re trying to be critical about a policy or a benefit, as you said earlier in an example? Something that’s been there for 20 years or so, and you want to contest that?

Shaun: I’m a person who really likes to lead with data. Why? Because you can’t fabricate anything out of data, data speaks to one truth. Also, I think what’s important is not to take things too personally. So, look at the business value chain. And when there’s resistance, it’s normally due to past experience where individuals obviously have a wall up. It’s about creating a psychologically safe environment and ensuring that trust does exist between two parties because the one common objective that you guys will have is probably going to be the same. And all you’re doing is working towards it together.

I think if that is highlighted very upfront within the organization or within the project that you’re trying to achieve through your different stakeholders, it’s always a bit about that. What I’ve found really works quite well is that instead of talking about a lot of things, it’s good to sometimes be visual about it as well so that people can connect the dots.

Lydia: Thank you very much, Shaun, for your time and your wonderful, generous insights today. So, for anyone out there listening in who wants to connect with you, where can they find you?

Shaun: I’m definitely on LinkedIn, Shaun Tooray. I think I’m the only one in the world with that name. I’m happy to connect and engage. Thank you, Lydia, for your time. I really appreciate it.

Lydia: We’ve been in conversation with Shaun Tooray, Head of Talent Attraction at Absa Group, based in Johannesburg. Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.