Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of The Independent Minds, Sarah Bishop and I are going to explore the important role that building the right team plays in building a business.
Speaker: Sarah has written a book, Scale Up, the Founder's Guide to Accelerating Growth by Building Dream Teams. Sarah is based in Vienna in Austria. which is not somewhere that I have ever been.
Speaker: But if I ever get the chance to visit, I will make use of my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to make all my travel arrangements. That is because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I get access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays, and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
Speaker: I have added a link for the built-in discount to the description so that you can become a member of the Ultimate Travel Club as well. And just like me, travel at trade prices. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to, and probably good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues as well.
Speaker: As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. So, hello Sarah.
Speaker: Hello Michael, thanks for having me on today. I'm looking forward to it. It's a big, big subject recruitment and everyone I think thinks it is really easy and yet it is not easy and it is so important. So I'm going to be picking your brains about how to get it right. But before we do that, please could you give us a little bit of a history about how you ended up in recruitment and the how you came to write the book?
Speaker: Oh, okay. Potted history. So I'll try to keep this short because many of my friends call me short story long. So um like most people, I fell into recruitment. no No little girl kind of grows up dreaming of being a recruitment consultant. So I went to university in Wolverhampton, which is how I ended up largely in the Midlands for most of my career. Read environmental science, wanted to be the new David Attenborough. Very quickly realised I was way too loud and sweary for that job, but completed by my degree in it anyway. Thought I'd save the world or do something very worthy. I finished university with loads of student debt, so I thought I'll get a sales job so I can earn commission, pay it all off quickly, and then I'll save the elephants or something. And basically, I went and worked in a a local car dealership, actually. So I did two and a half, three years in motor retail. um I think largely because my dad had had car yards when I was a kid, so I kind of grew up around cars and and that sort of thing.
Speaker: In my early 20s, you know, I had a nice new car every three months, but I was working evenings nearly every weekend and just got a bit tired of it. A friend of mine went into recruitment and after a few months, she said to me, get into recruitment. It's a lot easier to sell secretaries than it is cars. And so that's exactly what I did.
Speaker: I joined a then um fairly small but very entrepreneurial recruitment agency in the West Midlands called Extra Personnel, which grew to be a pretty massive thing. I was with them for 13 and a half years and basically worked my way through the business, starting as a trainee recruitment temporary desk controller. And my final, I think it was about four or five years, I was head of corporate sales in the public sector division. so I was dealing with sort of, you know, multi-million pound contracts with the likes of Birmingham City Council, various and NHS, and public sector bodies, housing associations, and then also your big boys like DHL. Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's, L'Oreal, you know, all these kind of things.
Speaker: Then in 2009, right at the tail end of a recession, um i decided to go it alone. And that's when recruit Recruit was born. And I've just realised, makes me feel a little bit old, but in September of this year, that will mark my 30th year in ah in recruitment. So I'm a bit of a the old lady of recruitment nowadays. Cool.
Speaker: Lots of experience under your belt then as well. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of the eternal student. So I don't, you know, I think you can always learn new things. So I don't think, you know, I've by by any means know know it all. But I've seen, I think, pretty much everything that you that you can see most in in recruitment and building businesses, really. Yes. And that's sort of that led to the book as well, then.
Speaker: The book came largely from an experience that we had during COVID, where I think everybody could, you know, we can all probably agree, can't we, that things just went a bit weird, surreal and crazy. So um during my employed career, I'd worked with several companies that grew pretty quickly, from Phones For You to um the Holiday Hypermarket and even HomeServe. But I was part of a team and employed and they were largely, it was volume growth largely through growing call centers. So it was quite homogenous job roles. You know, they'd be like, right, we need 20 call handlers and one team leader.
Speaker: Then during COVID, I got the opportunity to work with a startup that obviously at the time we didn't know it was going to grow so massively and rapidly, but it was quite different in that as it did start to grow, we basically started helping them to build all of their departments for for the business. So in short, They went from zero to 30 million in 21 months. They were providing COVID testing to the film and media industry. We placed over 220 people with them, as I say, right across all disciplines, really. So we built the finance team, sales and marketing team, science team, it t
Speaker: client relations you name it basically operational everything we we put them in there even a new CEO so it was a bit of a ride and I also like to think that we did our bit to help keep everybody entertained because we were all consuming a lot of TV weren't we whilst we were in prison confined at home so the first contract that my clients had was up with Arcadian and they were producing Jurassic World Dominion which was one of the first major productions to go back into production and then be and then be released. But they also did things like Downton Abbey and The Crown, you know, all of our favourites, lots of stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime. And it was, um yeah, it was crazy, but I loved it.
Speaker: There's nothing quite so much fun as being busy, I suppose. You create the book and you've got all of this experience, but the thing is that you're writing about how to build a dream team. So tell me what is your definition of a dream team?
Speaker: That's a really good question, actually, Michael. So a dream team, I don't think it's something that you can kind of quantify with specifics. For me, it's actually getting together quite often a group of weird misfits who somehow manage to come together and make things happen and work in a really cohesive way.
Speaker: I think that's largely, particularly when you've got a startup environment, got people so I'm super ADHD and quite autistic as well and and I think one of the reasons why I loved the sheer chaos and the kind of unknown quantities you know of of stuff was um because that really appeals to my kind of I don't know so whether it's a search for dopamine or that I just have this real intuitive feel I find very really complex big picture nebulous stuff I find it really easy to see a clear path through and just go oh no we just need to do this this and this and everybody like looks at me like I'm rain man but then something simple like go shopping for milk and remember to actually come back with milk and not seven other things I find a little bit more difficult so I've gone and I've gone off on a tangent as if to prove my point you have a little bit to prove your point but I think what you're saying about a dream team is almost that
Speaker: There isn't really a definition of what a dream team is. It's different for everyone in every organisation. Yeah, absolutely. But the thing the thing about it, the the operative word really is team. And it is that people, they can be very different and come at things from quite a different angle. But the dream team has to...
Speaker: First of all, I think all recognise and completely understand what the brief and the goal is and buy into that. And then they can go about in their own magical way kind of doing it and making it happen. And so there's got to be a cohesion between those people in some ways. But for it to work really well, i think you need diversity of thought. And that's not always easy or what people go for, because it's very easy. One of the things I found in my experience, particularly when people are taking on their first employees, is they quite often will go with something that feels comfortable and is quite like them.
Speaker: And then you just end up doubling up on two people being good at certain things. And then all the crap that you're not particularly good or interested in still gets left by the wayside. Yeah, I totally get what you mean. But it sounds like the dream team is people who have bought into a vision. So before before you can recruit your dream team,
Speaker: You need to have leaders who have worked out what the vision is, the values and the mission. And that's absolutely what you sell to the candidates. They're selling their skills, their knowledge and expertise.
Speaker: You sell your vision, mission, values, all those sorts of things. They buy into it. And then you pick out the person who's got the right set of skills and knowledge to complement what it is that you can do and can't do so you're constantly building people you know you remind me so much of the best job i ever had which was one where i was doing all the things that i felt really good at and really enjoyed i worked in that in that organization for probably four five years and there was another person in the same hr department as me
Speaker: And in those four five years, we never once sat down and had a cup of coffee or went for lunch or anything like that. We were completely different, 100% opposite characters, personalities. We had very little in common.
Speaker: But they did the things that they really enjoyed doing. i did the things that I really enjoyed doing. And it worked. Yeah. I've always been grateful to the manager who made the decision that he wasn't going to give himself an easy life by having everybody getting along all the time and was prepared to deal with the odds.
Speaker: So that moment, shall we say, what he was getting was yeah everything was being covered because we were focusing on what it was that we liked to do and what we were good at as a result of that.
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah. and i And I think it also extends to beyond kind of everyone's getting on as well because like so I i' just did a bit of work with a client that the sales weren't really where they needed to be and it was very clear to me quite early on that the sales people weren't kind of driven enough and pushing enough. I don't mean in a pushy sales way, but i mean in pushing to get certain things over the line. And the way that I could tell was everybody in operations loved the sales team.
Speaker: And I've never seen an effective sales team where everyone in ops loves them because they can get on as people. But they I should be hearing things like, why may the hell have you promised that for Wednesday? We're never going to get it done. Yes. Do you know what i mean? So that there's that kind of friendly balance, but that each then each department is kind of pushing each other just that little bit more. And you know and then together we all achieve achieve a bit more. yeah so An internal healthy competition is always very healthy.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. But sometimes... a salesperson who's going to promise a little bit to get the operations people to actually see what they are really capable of doing. yeah Not that it needs to happen every week. Exactly. It's all about balance. yeah If it's happening every week, something's broken somewhere, isn't it? Oh, definitely. but Definitely. You've got an element of harmony within and any organization and an element of conflict, although conflict may be too strong a word to use, but
Speaker: you have all sorts of different pressures and the skill of the manager is managing the people to make sure that the pressures don't become too much on anyone. And you can still have people focused on what it is they do.
Speaker: I've worked in all sorts of startups as an HR person, been involved in all sorts of different projects all over the world. One of the key things that I think I was told early on in my career was that your most important job is recruitment.
Speaker: You've got to find the right people into the right organization, in the right team, in the right way. And then your job as an HR professional or your job as a line manager, your job as a ah business manager, CEO, becomes so much easier because you've got the right people doing the right thing in the right way and they're going to tell you when something isn't right. You don't want someone who's going to be a problem.
Speaker: So what sort of things you business founders and managers do that mean that they end up with the wrong person in the wrong job in the wrong organisation and it's just wrong, wrong, wrong. What is it that they do that leads to that sort of situation?
Speaker: This is a big soapbox of mine, so I will try not to get excited and go off on a tangent about this, but i I think it largely actually starts from the interview process. I think most people interview to a job spec. So they're like, right, we've got this job to fill. Let's get these people in. Their CV looks like it matches. And then they're all of all of the questions are largely about the competence of the person to deliver this list of tasks and responsibility. They're closed questions, I think, very often, aren't they? They're closed questions. I've seen people saying, you can do this, rather than how did you do it, why did you do it, when did you do it, who did you do it for?
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah. And even when people ask more, more open questions to get a bit more information, they don't really focus on. the person behind the decisions, that how they make those decisions, you know what sort of thought process, what their behavioral styles are. And ah for me, I've always found that one of the biggest keys to longevity in a placement and everybody being you know pretty happy and rubbing along nicely is really when the values and the culture fits there.
Speaker: When I interview candidates or when my team interview candidates, it will be very much, we we'll open with, right we're not going to talk about the role at all at first. We want to know you know what your motivators are. We use quite a lot of and NLP and VAC about, you know, looking to the language that's used. And we talk to people about what their motivations are, what their values are.
Speaker: because you get all this unconscious bias and sometimes conscious bias when everybody's talking around the job spec. So you've got candidates wanting, you know, they want to get the job. So quite often they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. And then when you get them in post, it's it's not that they can't do the job. It's just that they're not a very good fit for for the team or the culture. or the values. I mean, if you, I'm sure in your experience, and I certainly know in mine, when I do interview training for hiring managers for my clients, we start with, you know, good old fashioned whiteboard. And it's like, right, just think back wherever you've worked, the people that have left or been got, you know, let go of, why haven't they worked out? And I get a big list. And it's very rarely to people say they couldn't do the job.
Speaker: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Hired for your hard skills and fired for your lack of soft skills. Soft skills, yeah. yeah And it's it can be very much very difficult for people to recognize, yeah, you may be very good at your job, but you're not actually working with people or even for people. You're operating in completely the wrong way. yeah The mistakes that I see people make in small businesses is the classic one of so-and-so, I know him from the rugby club.
Speaker: he'd be really good but he's already very happy where he is but he's introduced me to this person so he comes recommended so yeah i'll sit down and interview him but i'm going to offer him the job anyway because he's my mate from the rugby club has recommended him yeah even then you've still got to go through i think the right type of recruitment process right and then the selection process so you can split the two of them off really in some ways recruitment is finding the candidates and selection is selecting from the candidates that you've got the right person to be doing the job that you actually have in your organization hello too many managers employers don't take the processes seriously enough and haven't thought about how am i going to make sure that this person is going to be successful in my department in my business and as a small business owner my
Speaker: always thought is like you before I feed myself I'm going to be giving that person money my food budget at the end of the month might be quite small because I've got the commitment to pay that person that amount of money right especially in the early days but I need to make sure therefore but because I'm handing that money over I have the right person in the job and What think saying is that people don't go through enough of the selection techniques that are available to them and it probably haven't worked out before they actually start selecting candidates what it is that they're really looking for.
Speaker: Absolutely. we We see this a lot. So, I mean, first of all, I actively encourage most people to not take on family, friends and friends of friends if they can avoid it, because whilst they may may miss out on a great on a great fit person, unfortunately,
Speaker: ah I've just seen so many incidents of when it goes sideways and then you not only do you lose an employee, but you lose a friendship or it creates problems within the family. So I always say they, you know, they need to be,
Speaker: really you you know you really think oh my god we have to have this person there isn't anybody out there who's even even equally as good as them um and if you do this is where you know people like you come in doesn't it michael i always say make sure absolutely everything is documented and you have got contracts and don't do it on good faith and a handshake um you know treat treat that part of the process as if you don't know them from adam really um And the other thing I think when you were saying about with hiring managers, i think part of the reason why they sometimes make poor hiring decisions is, again, in my experience, hiring managers are generally always under pressure when they're hiring. It's always reactive. Somebody's left. We're at absolute capacity. This has happened. That that has happened. um And it's one of the reasons we're just introducing a subscription-based model for recruitment. So that's
Speaker: we can start doing talent pooling and talent mapping and do a lot of the legwork behind the scenes so that we know, you know, what hiring managers want and need so that every time they have got a need, it's not starting from scratch every time. yeah And also obviously it spreads it spreads the cost as well. But that's something that we're looking to introduce because I think a big part of their brain is focused on, I just need to get somebody in quick because either they're having to do stuff that they don't like or haven't really got capacity for, or their team is is really feeling it, ah um you know, or if it's a much smaller business, they're under so much pressure that they kind of get getting into a, you know, almost anybody on board is better than nobody on board. And then.
Speaker: not true, please. It's not true. find out quite quickly that that really isn't true yeah and the damage it can do yeah apart from apart from the damage it can do to your business and to the morale of other people in there just like the stress the sleepless nights and and i mean let's face it even if you find somebody incredibly irritating once they get in your business it's still not an easy thing to let people go because you've got that massive responsibility haven't you
Speaker: You've reminded me about working in Hong Kong, which is a full employment economy. If you decide to leave one organization, it will generally not take you very long to find another job in somewhere else.
Speaker: And so as an HR professional in Hong Kong, one of the things that I did was make sure that, well, for everyone that we employed or every type of job that we had, if someone in that job left, then I knew roughly where I would get the replacement from.
Speaker: So I wasn't starting my searching from scratch all the time, every time. And also, when you've got people moving up in the hierarchy of the organisation, think it's important to have some sort of connection with educators, colleges, universities and schools so that you can actually work on, okay, in 12 months time, I am likely to promote this person who came to me as a school leaver or a graduate.
Speaker: And then that means I'm going to need another one of those types of people as well. so talk to schools, talk to colleges, talk to universities about where you're likely to find those types of people. but You are quite right.
Speaker: Recruitment is a reactive thing. Someone appears with a a little letter saying, I am formally resigning. i want to go as soon as possible. And it's panic stations. It's like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?
Speaker: And it highlights all sorts of other HR issues about succession planning and job sharing and skills transfer, all those sorts of things. but Absolutely. the book is packed, full of all sorts of information. But what is the one thing that you would like to tell people who are listening now about the book that would sort say, this is a book that we definitely need to buy?
Speaker: Oh, one thing. You're right. It's packed with so much information, Michael, that I've squeezed in there. What's the what's the one thing? I suppose the thing that I would say is that...
Speaker: It really is a step by step guide to to what you need to do to build your business through people and through teams. we you know We see so many people that are trying to juggle everything. And we're usually the biggest bottlenecks in our own businesses. So for me, the one thing is, right, I'm a big fan of reverse engineering. So whatever, if it's a problem or whatever. So start with, we spoke about vision and mission and that earlier, didn't we? So start with, what are you looking to achieve? So that could be a bigger picture thing, which then if you work back from that, that that will then inform what your future organisation chart should look like. um Or it could be more specific to a role. So if you think, right, I'm at capacity, something's got to give that you sit down and that you you go, right, let's reverse engineer this. What do I need to achieve um And then you ask yourself questions like, you know, what bits am I good at that I still need to keep hold of? What am I not so good at? What do I love? What brings me joy? What doesn't so much? And then you start to to get a list, really, of the things that you want or need to offload. And then you can look at how that fits into, um you know, a job role for your next hire, for example.
Speaker: yes Yeah. I suppose... like you say it is a step-by-step guide it does take you through in a very gentle and supportive way all the things that you need to do but it comes down to it I think you're quite right founders business managers need to you the secret to successful recruitment is almost the things you do before you meet any client any candidate at yeah absolutely yeah couldn't agree more actually i've got to say i have been called supportive before but i don't think gentle has ever been in ah in a sentence that's described me before so thanks for that one
Speaker: let's quit whilst we're ahead then i'm on to a winner there you know sarah it has been really it's just so fascinating and interesting and uh you've made me remember so many things certainly made me think and uh I really do appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. I've really enjoyed our chat.
Speaker: Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Sarah Bishop, the author of Scale Up, the Founder's Guide to Accelerating Growth by Building Dream Teams.
Speaker: You can find out more about both of us and Sarah's book by using the links in the description. When you are recruiting people, you need to make sure that they are healthy. one of the best ways to maintain the health of your employees is for them to know the risks early.
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Speaker: The annual health test is conducted by an experienced phlebotomist who will complete a full blood draw at your home or workplace. Hospital standard tests are carried out in a UKAS accredited and CQC compliant laboratory.
Speaker: You can access easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes anytime by your secure personal wellness hub account. There is, as you would expect, a link and a discount code in the description.
Speaker: I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Sarah and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe.
Speaker: You'll probably also want to share the link with your friends, family and work colleagues as well. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abucida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
Speaker: Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.
