The facts
Full name, job title, company: Louise Moore, senior manager talent acquisition, Philips.
Career summary: I started my career as a recruitment consultant before making the move in-house in 2007. I have experience in retail, FMCG and now work in the health and technology space.
Philips was founded in 1891, in Eindhoven, Netherlands, to manufacture incandescent lamps and other electrical products. For 125 years, we have been improving people’s lives with a steady flow of ground-breaking innovations. We are now a health and wellbeing organisation operating across the entire continuum of healthcare.
We have more than 100,000 employees in the organisation across over 100 locations.
1. What are the main challenges you face currently?
One of the challenges any TA professional is facing just now is the talent shortage. It's estimated that by 2020, 60% of new jobs will require skills that only 20% of the population have. On top of skills shortages, we are contending with an ageing population, political uncertainty and a new generation of employees: 83% of 16-21 year olds want freelance over permanent employment.
Philips is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health. We look beyond technology to the experiences of consumers, patients, providers and caregivers across the health continuum – from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment and home care. We unlock insights to develop leading solutions that enable improved care at lower cost. With leading research, design and innovation capabilities, we partner with customers to transform the delivery of healthcare.
Unfortunately what we do is still not clear and many people still think of us as a TV/electronics business which is challenging when engaging passive talent.
2. What steps are you taking to address these?
Philips' transformation into a global health tech leader resulted in the attraction and retention of digital talent being identified as one of the “top-five barriers” to Philips' success at the 2015 Philips leadership summit.
In response to that critical business need, we developed a new employee value proposition to truly define what is unique about Philips. It credibly and pro-actively answers the question, ‘why should I work for Philips instead of another company?’ This gives us the opportunity to clearly and accurately describe who Philips is and, perhaps even more importantly, what we want to be in the future.
Philips' view is that diversity initiatives are not just about hiring underrepresented groups, but about broadly hiring people who think differently. We are on the start of this journey and are linking with a number of external organisations to create meaningful progress. This is more than just a CSR initiative, this approach is about our employees being as diverse as our customers. At Philips, we believe that the best place to work is an inclusive place to work. This means celebrating and fostering a work environment in which all of our people’s ideas, knowledge, perspectives, experiences and styles are valued.
3. How does your recruitment strategy ensure your organisation is positioned as an attractive place to work/employer of choice?
Within our recruitment strategy we go to market with clear messages to accurately describe what it is like to work at Philips. We have a number of attractive and unique benefits tailored to the real needs of our people such as agile/flexible working, casual dress code, strong portfolio of health and wellbeing initiatives, and a reward for performance culture.
What strengthens the authenticity of our message is that we use an employer advocacy tool, SMARP. Within SMARP any employee can write their own blog or post which they are encouraged to share across a range of social media platforms and by other employees.
Finally we run recruitment days rather than traditional interviews (where appropriate) which means candidates get a real insight into our organisation and culture and a chance to assess us as much we do them, a two way and much more transparent and efficient process.
4. Do you have any talent management programmes in place to ensure that once recruited, employees stay the course? What results have you seen from these?
We have a wide range of programmes developed to cater for our employees at every stage in their career journey. We operate the best practise 70:20:10 model. 70% on the job learning, 20% from a mentor and buddy and 10% classroom based learning. We also have Philips University, a future leaders' programme, and wesponsor professional training courses.
We run internal development days which helps guide and inspire our early professionals toward a broad range of opportunities, on this we have huge internal sponsorship from our leadership team. We have a great number of stories of employees who have climbed the ladder through a number of traditional and unexpected routes and regularly share these as part of our ‘always on’ employer brand communications.
5. How do you see the talent acquisition landscape evolving in the coming years?
I think in the coming years the war for talent will continue to challenge talent acquisition consultants. We must continually improve our ways of working in these spaces, become true strategic business partners for our stakeholders and candidates. I see the use of ‘LEAN’ philosophies to drive out processes that do not add value as essential. Digital technologies (e.g. screening automation, chatbots) may shape our future and I think that diversity and analytics will continue to be a focus point. In an increasingly candidate driven market – candidate experience will also remain high on the agenda.
6. What is your advice to other heads of recruitment/talent in attracting, retaining & developing a productive workforce?
Be authentic in everything you do, enable your team to do their best work and always remember your candidates are your customers!
