EP92: Informa - How to Tailor Job Descriptions to Attract Specialists

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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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. I’m your host, Lydia, and joining us today is Zoe Watling from Informa. Welcome, Zoe. And thank you for joining us.

Zoe: Thank you so much for having me, Lydia.

Navigating the Talent Terrain

Lydia: So, Zoe, what's your journey been like in the talent space? What is your growth story?

Zoe: So, I started off about 13 years ago, working for a cleaning and security company where I did everything from their recruitment to a bit of HR and Payroll.

From there, I spent quite a few years on the agency side. I spent five or six years on the agency side and got a great opportunity to recruit across quite a few different areas. I started off in technology for a good few years, which gave me some solid foundations. It teaches me how to headhunt quite effectively because I have to generate a bit of a network there.

Then, I moved over to some other areas, communications, and marketing, and then four years ago, I moved in-house with Informa. We’re a publicly listed business in the UK, but we’re a global business, and a very complex one.

Since I’ve been there, my career has accelerated somewhat, which is a great opportunity at somewhere like Informa because there is so much to learn and so much complexity. As soon as you get stuck in, you find that there are loads of opportunities to go.

I started off there as a talent partner and moved up to run the team out of EMEA. And then more recently, in the last couple of years, I’ve been the Head of Talent Acquisition for one of our divisions, Informa Tech. So, it’s really been a bit of an acceleration since I moved into Informa.

But I think one of the key things is the Talent Acquisition space has been evolving as well. So, it’s been a really great time to be part of the sector and it’s led to a lot of opportunities where I am, which is always good.

Lydia: Absolutely. Your experience in the agency side and also the early days of starting up and starting in a role that requires you to probably wear many hats. How much of that have you taken into a role like this kind of acceleration in your career?

Zoe: A lot of it, actually, I think there’s a lot to say for having a bit of a broader role starting out. I think it’s a great way to figure out what you want to do, or which part of the roles you actually enjoy. But also, I think that role in particular taught a lot of persistence and resilience.

Then, going into the agency side, I think you really have to start to navigate how to grow quite autonomously, how to find opportunities, and really master communication skills, which I think are really important. It also teaches you a lot about the pace of working, and how much you can achieve in a day, which I think has really set me up.

So, we always tend to look for Talent Acquisition partners who have done a bit of a stint in an agency, because we do believe there are some really great foundational skills you learn there and great techniques, and it gives us a really good foundation to build on for in-house. So, we’re quite an advocate for that. I know that some talent teams are slightly more skeptical, but I think, we’re all about the attitudes and behaviors, and the skills you can teach.

I think a lot of it has shaped me quite well in how I can manage my workload and if I had just come directly in-house, I wouldn’t have necessarily had those different opportunities or those different challenges, to be honest.

Lydia: And over the past four years, you clearly accelerated from one role to the next - leading teams, and now partnering with the tech side of things. So, what are some areas you've had the opportunity to look into, prioritizing any areas this year for talent acquisition, especially with tech?

Zoe: So, we’ve done a couple of things this year, one of which has been really around metrics and KPIs for our team. There’s one thing about being able to communicate to the business that they’re happy with the team and often in TA, happiness is silence. If you’re not hearing any noise, the team must be doing okay. But we really believed we had a high-performing team and we wanted to be able to talk to the business about it in quantifiable terms.

We’ve done a lot more measuring and metrics and we’re very fortunate that we’ve got the setup and live Power BI dashboards so that the business could also look into see what we’re doing at any time.

The other aspect of it has been really about building that partnership between all of our talent partners and the business. By partnership, I mean the balance in that relationship. I think, historically, TA teams have always had a bit of a master-servant dynamic with the business and the fact that we’re a service provider. So, we need to do as we’re told, and what we’ve really been trying to shape is how we can really effectively partner the business so that we’re advising, we’re consulting, and we’re adding value back.

In return for that work, we’re asking for things to shift and change in the business to make recruitment more effective, to make it more inclusive, and to put a bit of effort back from the business side as well, which has been quite transformative. It’s been tough and hasn’t been easy.

I think it’s a bit of a shift that areas of the business are really keen for, and other areas of the business would rather not be challenged on anything and just, you know, just sort of being told what to do. But it’s been a really interesting time for us to level up what we’re doing in talent acquisition.

Specializing for Success

Lydia: So, what's the approach like for Talent Acquisition this year, or rather just across the business point at Informa? I understand there's a push toward hiring specialists over generalists.

Zoe: Yes. So, we’re fortunate enough to have a larger team across Informa, and we’re globally positioned as well. One of the things this has allowed us to do is to really specialize our team into specific areas as opposed to matching people with stakeholders to work with over and over again.

So, we’ve split our teams into sales specialists, marketing specialists, technology specialists, content specialists, and Corporate Services specialists. This allows the team to have a deep-dive knowledge of those areas that have niche skill sets that are a bit deeper and harder to fill roles and be able to generate a network and a pipeline so that we can be more effective for the business.

One of Informa’s taglines is ‘championing the specialist.’ That means that we have a lot of unique jobs within the business, we have a lot of unique skill sets within the business, and being able to allow our team to specialize and focus in on those areas so that we get that depth of understanding a bit quicker, we can reduce that time to offer and time to hire on those roles, has been really imperative for our continued success and growth, especially our credibility within the business.

And also, just making sure that our team is being upskilled, to be able to deal with that, they’re spending more time with key people in the business to learn from. They’re networking and talking with more specialists in the business to try to find what that secret sauce is or read between the lines a few job descriptions to get those hooks to attract the right talent.

Lydia: So, what strategies or techniques have you found to be effective when it comes to attracting or even identifying top specialist talents in competitive markets?

Zoe: I think the ability to attract is still a work in progress, really. Part of that is because we do so many different specialist areas, we don’t physically have the funding within our brand project to go after each of those individually. So, a lot of the energy into attracting specialists actually has to come from the team’s ability to proactively source and headhunt and make sure that we’re utilizing our hiring managers in the business to help us cultivate that message to go out to someone to be worth clicking on.

As I’m sure most of the world is at the moment, people are inundated with others tapping them on the shoulder and asking if they are interested in a job move. So, it’s really about utilizing our business to fill that gap that we’re not ever going to be able to really truly get to the bottom of, but really help cultivate that.

We’ve also found in some areas and some regions, it’s been really effective actually utilizing our managers to do that reach out and to connect with someone who’s industry-known and utilize the personalities and the identities we have in the business to be able to do that, which will ultimately feed into our external attraction and marketing programs.

But they’re never a quick fix. It’s never something that happens overnight. So, it’s really about how we’re balancing both the organic and inorganic marketing methods to try to get some success in those areas.

Lydia: So, in that regard, what are some of the key qualities or maybe skills that differentiate specialists from generalists?

Zoe: If I think in particular about our research business, it’s a great example of somewhere where actually that level of specificity and depth of knowledge within those roles is really quite niche.

In some of our more senior research roles, there might be 10 to 20 qualified people globally who are able to do that job and often it comes down to a mixture of deep-dive knowledge and sector-specific areas. But also, it comes down to the renown within the industry like, is that person a voice that people are going to want to buy research from?

So often, it comes down to really what sounds like quite simplistic things, but ultimately, it really narrows the pool for us. So there’s a big amount of that really specific niche knowledge.

Decoding Job Descriptions to Attract Specialists

Lydia: And when it comes to crafting job descriptions, if you go out and advertise this role or this vacancy in your company, how do you go about it? What might be some tips to create job descriptions that would attract specialists and those who are extremely knowledgeable in their field? What kind of language do you use? What is the tone? And what type of terminology, if any, do you use?

Zoe: This is a really great question. I think, ultimately, there’s a standardization to [crafting] job descriptions happening across businesses at the moment. To get a great career path in the business you want, you need competency frameworks, you need things in place that almost neutralize those job descriptions in some ways, especially when we’re talking about attracting specialists.

To us, there’s a part of our intake meeting with the manager when we’re in a role that’s particularly specialist. It’s about finding that hook. What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? Why do you work here? As the person who’s going to manage this role, what can we draw from that? What are the opportunities in there? Is there an ability to build a brand, build a personal brand within the business? What are those little pieces that we can offer that are unique in quite a lot of ways, but there will be other businesses doing it?

That’s going to change you from reading the first line and thinking, ‘Okay, it’s another senior analyst position,’ to, ‘Oh, that’s the one I really want to go for.’ So, it’s really about utilizing the brains of our hiring managers and knowing what gets them up in the morning and personalizing it.

I think we’ve definitely moved into a space in the last two years more so than I’ve seen before where it needs to be a bit more human going out. Everything that we’re doing in terms of candidate sentiment analysis, a lot of that is around how people are feeling about businesses, how people feel about a role they’re doing. It’s less so that almost all hygiene factors are evolving.

So, it’s really about finding out how we can identify that there’s an element of inclusion and diversity that comes into that as well. I think there’s a lot more importance for people feeling that they can bring themselves to work, feeling like different viewpoints are going to be considered, different thoughts are going to be allowed in the room.

It’s really hard to try to captivate that in a job description, to really bring company culture into a paragraph because that’s really all the time you have to convince someone. So, for that element of it, we’ve done a lot of work in our equal opportunity statements that go at the bottom of our job descriptions to try to humanize it a little bit.

So, I think there’s not one way to do it. But I think the big tip is that the biggest specialists in your business are the people you’re recruiting for. And if you’re not utilizing their specialism and their reasons for coming to work in the morning, then you’re missing a track.

Lydia: There are plenty of recruiters or people in the talent business themselves who have started to see the benefits of automating the writing of job descriptions.

You’ve got tools like ChatGPT and all the other tools that have arisen from it in the past six to ten months. We’re seeing all these things coming out. So, what might be the impact of tools such as ChatGPT, and other such AI generative technologies on creating job descriptions that would fit specialists?

Zoe: I think there’s a really important conversation to be had about generative AI and its role in the TA space. Fundamentally, we’re getting to a point where if you’re not using generative AI to drive efficiencies in your work, you will be outperformed by people who are. So, I definitely think we’re getting to that level and stage where we need to lean in and adopt it.

Historically, HR specialists and talent specialists have always been seen as late adopters of these things. I think we actually need to get on the train early this time, because of the efficiencies that it can drive for us in our outreach and helping us tailor language to specific audiences. The more it’s been used, the more it’s learning and the better it’s getting. So, there’s 100% a space for generative AI within TA.

My caution with it is that it shouldn’t be used to make decisions about people. It should be used to help attract, it should be used to help us curate better language. I don’t know many Talent Acquisition partners who are natural marketers, I don’t think it’s generally something that comes together. So, using those tools to really give yourself an edge and getting that language right is really important.

But we’ve got to be careful about the inherent bias in AI because a lot of what’s out there is inherently biased in decision-making. When it comes to writing job descriptions and writing hooks and writing approaches, it’s never something you’re going to be able to copy and paste. I think you need to bring your voice, tone, and personality to those messages.

But if you’re like me, and you’re completely paralyzed by a blank page, and you don’t know where to start, it’s a great tool to just get that kick-started and get that going. Also, when you’re working with a manager to try to come up with that hook, playing around with something like ChatGPT or whichever tool you use, and playing with the language a little bit to see what comes out can be helpful.

I definitely think it’s a tool that we should be using and adapting, but we should just be using it for writing, we shouldn’t be using it to help us simplify and decide between CVs or anything like that.

Hiring Specialists in Remote Work Environments

Lydia: Moving on to the different kinds of work arrangements that we’re seeing, especially the gig economy and remote work, which are obviously not new. They’ve just accelerated in the past two or three years, as we’ve seen. It’s a crucial period in which we’re seeing more and more companies starting to adopt fully remote and fully decentralized work if you want to call it that.

So, we’re seeing the gig economy, we’re seeing remote work, and these have all become so prevalent. So, how has this influenced your approach to hiring specialists? Does this have any impact at all?

Zoe: So, definitely more so in the technology space. I think what we’ve seen for the last two years is that Informa has always been quite a flexible working business. We’ve always had quite a population of remote workers globally. It’s not something that’s completely new to us. I think the scale of what’s changed and the shift is quite new, and how truly hybrid we are, even for our office hubs, is definitely new.

It does open doors, absolutely. Technology talent, in particular, people being able to work from more remote parts of countries, being closer to family, all those sorts of benefits that help with that work-life balance.

And my massive concern is for early careers. I think a lot of us who’ve grown up in office environments and had that opportunity got a lot through osmosis. We got a lot through being in the office, hearing conversations happening, sitting in on meetings, and all that sort of shadow piece. And that’s my one concern about it. Are we set up robustly enough within businesses with enough robust training to help early talent that will be more remote or won’t necessarily have their manager in the office everyday?

I think there is a balance to have. But we’re definitely leaning into the remote working a lot more, while balancing the fact that we do have people who like to be office-based. And we do have office hubs in every country we operate in and from so that there is that choice for our colleagues as well. So, there’s value in both.

Lydia: Are there any success stories at all or any particular challenges that you might remember off the top of your head that you’ve encountered as you’ve grown in your role at Informa? Are there any memorable success stories or challenges that you may have encountered while hiring or looking out for specialists?

Zoe: Yes, I think a lot of it has been about how the pandemic has really affected the Talent Acquisition space, particularly people’s willingness or lack thereof for those connections that we would have had before. So, I think we were very fortunate pre-pandemic in the fact that everything worked quite a certain way. Within each region, there was always a certain way of approaching things and doing things, and with the pandemic, that all shifted.

So, I think a big challenge for us as a team, and to help move and coach the business as well was how the dynamics shifted from employers having a little bit more power and control in the market to candidates actually having a lot more power and control in the market.

One of our big success stories with that is, that even though we’re quite a large business, we’ve always been quite good at staying agile and staying quite nimble. One of the great things we have through the level of interaction our team has with the business is that we can pull together that sort of qualitative information quite quickly to make sure that we pivot.

So, a great example of this is certain regions where we were really fixed on having an office hub because we’ve always had an office hub. And that’s always how it had worked. And then noticing the real drop-off in interest or being able to engage people to come into office spaces, sort of in 2021 - 2022, was really about being able to provide the data back to the business to show the size and scale of the talent pools in that area that were working remotely.

The success stories from the business really involve utilizing data a lot more in the day-to-day. I think it’s something that TA as a sector and as a profession is getting better at. But I think one of our successes over the last couple of years with our team, and we’ve been recognized within the business and got an Informa Award, which is a really great achievement for us, has been our utilization of data to really influence the business.

And when we’re talking about specialist talent, when we’re talking about sparse candidate pools, being able to communicate that in a way that the business can understand and that’s commercially driven, has been massively impactful for us.

Implementing Talent Metrics

Lydia: You talked earlier about bringing focus on metrics and KPIs. So what might be the target around that? Do you have specific targets for these different KPIs that you have?

Zoe: Yes and no. I think a lot of it will change by region and by specialism. We know that technology roles will take longer to hire. We know that some junior sales roles can be a really quick fill.

So, one of the really important things when implementing metrics into a talent team is that it’s not a case of putting one fixed set of metrics. I think there has to be nuance there. But if anything, what we really built our metrics based on was what the performance had been. We know that that met industry standards from obviously the articles and the pieces that we’re reading and looking at, and just making sure we’re flexible to the market conditions.

A lot of people will talk about how challenging the last few years have been, compared to previous years, in terms of talent attraction and being able to get people. So, it has to be achievable. But one thing it can show to the business is this is what we think good looks like. Here’s what we’re measuring.

Ultimately, when we’re talking about gaining investment, when we’re talking about the impact our team’s having on the business from cost saving, being able to quantify that and show that in really powerful dashboards has completely revolutionized how we work and our credibility levels within our business.

Lydia: In terms of these dashboards and real-time metrics, as real as they can get, they’re critical when it comes to pivoting your strategy. So, switching the tactics that you use out there, right? Understanding where the trends are moving, and where the inward trends are going to be pointing towards where it affects business.

So, when it comes to technology aiding these kinds of decisions that you make, what role does technology such as data analytics, specifically, play in hiring? The whole hiring process you have in Informa?

Zoe: So, it’s something that we use day in, day out. Now, we’re really fortunate that we’re a bit more mature in our utilization of it, and we have the dashboards to hand. These dashboards don’t just talk about what our team is doing. They’re telling us about the trend's impacts on the business. Are our approvals getting quicker or slower? Have processes changed and become less efficient? What’s actually the retention of the hires we’re making? Are we hiring the right people in the right ways? Are our processes robust enough? Are we identifying the right thing?

It’s actually completely changed the game. Often, it’s anecdotal. Every single head of TA or senior TA person I speak to can tell you a million anecdotal stories. Being able to back that up with data is crucial because often those anecdotal stories are pretty spot on. But being able to show the business through the data how that helps is also important.

It’s also helped us inform and identify where the barriers are, and where the blocks are within the process. Where’s the slowdown? Is that delay because our teams are lacking the right tools to be able to do their job? Is it actually managers taking a vacation in the middle of a hiring process and slowing things down? What are the trends there that we can use to help drive efficiencies to make our processes more robust, but the business process more robust as well?

Ultimately, we can look at the trends, we can look at our hiring trends within the business versus what the market is, especially when there’s so much data now tracking redundancies and things that are business-related. Are we actually planning our workforce, and having our workforce planning work really well with that? Should we be bringing forward more product roles, because there’d be product redundancies?

And it’s really helping us be a lot more strategic and a lot more effective in the business. It’s a core tool that we use on a daily basis. And I think if a couple of years ago, you’d asked me if I thought that was a possibility, or something we’d be doing on a property, I’d have said, “There’s no way we can get the data that we need to get.” But actually, we’re very fortunate. We’ve got an incredible head of reporting and recruitment ops who gets it all there for us. But it massively impacts the way we make decisions and the strength behind those decisions.

Having the Right Skills and Mindset for Today’s TAs

Lydia: So, you talked a lot about the impact of technology and the need for metrics and being analytical. Just looking at the numbers and making sure you’re making as informed decisions as you should be, right? Around the hiring process, etc.

In that sense, what does a Talent Acquisition specialist or professional need to be today? What skills or attitudes should they bring to be good in this industry?

Zoe: I think this is a really interesting question because I’m sure everyone’s got a slightly different answer to it. For me, and where I sit on this right now, there’s got to be a lot of value back to the business from a Talent Acquisition partner. When I say that, I don’t just mean filling the roles quickly and making sure that everyone’s really happy throughout that process.

I’m talking a lot more about that true element of partnership. They’ve been able to challenge the business when skill sets don’t coexist. So, instead of searching for the role for ages and getting to that conclusion, having the strength and the credibility to be able to negotiate on that at the start is important. Through those conversations, getting involved in workforce planning with those teams that you work really closely with can help shape the business through the talent that’s available.

I think there’s a lot more of a strategic and growth mindset that’s needed now within Talent Acquisition that potentially wasn’t before. Our profession is evolving and actually getting more recognized. But it does mean that it can become as big and broad a role as you want it to be.

I think data is really important. If you’re going to business these days and you’re trying to tell them, you know, black is blue, then you need the data to back that up. Whether that’s market data, there’s so much out there. Agencies all around the world publish market reports all the time about trends. There’s the Insights tool, the likes of LinkedIn insights, or Horsefly, or those sorts of things that can really help you get good demographic data, good talent size data.

But essentially, we need to become more data-driven as a profession to gain that business credibility. If we talk the business language more, the partnership is more effective. And I think that’s really where the evolution needs to be now.

Lydia: Thank you very much, Zoe, for your time and your insights. These have been very generous insights that I think the audience will find very valuable. So, in case someone wants to pick up the conversation with you later, please drop us your contact details so they can connect.

Zoe: Amazing, that's great. The best way to get ahold of me is on LinkedIn. So, please feel free to reach out and message me on LinkedIn and thank you very much for having me.

Lydia: And we have been in conversation with Zoey Watling from Informa. Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe and stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.