Executive Search is often considered so specialized that it should always remain the preserve of Exec Search agencies. However, an ever-increasing number of large employers are now choosing to build in-house executive search functions. So what are the advantages of doing this, how do you do this, and what is the ongoing impact from tighter talent markets and innovations in technology

My guest this week is Katie Howard, Global Talent Acquisition Luxury and Lifestyle Lead at IHG. Katie made the switch from Search Agency to in-house just over a year ago and has been helping set IHG up for success in a highly competitive market for senior talent.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The difference between agency and in-house

• The current challenges in the senior talent market within luxury hospitality

• How IHG differentiates itself

• Approaching and engaging with global talent pools

• Non-linear careers and talent mobility

• Managing stakeholders in large matrix organizations

• Making the candidate experience match the luxury guest experience

• DE&I

• Rethinking onboarding

• Advice for anyone setting up an in-house function

• The role of AI in executive hiring

• What does the future look like?

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Transcript:

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Matt: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 598 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Executive search is often considered so specialized that it should always remain the preserve of exec search agencies. However, an ever-increasing number of large employers are now choosing to build in-house executive search functions. So, what are the advantages of doing this? How do you do this? And what is the ongoing impact from tighter talent markets and innovations in technology? My guest this week is Katie Howard, Global Talent Acquisition Luxury and Lifestyle Lead at IHG. Katie made the switch from search agency to in-house just over a year ago and has been helping set IHG up for success in a highly competitive market for senior talent.

Hi Katie, and welcome to the podcast.

Katie: Hi Matt, thanks for having me.

Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

Katie: Yeah, of course, thank you. So, my name is Katie Howard. Well, my background is, I pretty much spent the whole of my career in recruitment, which began after graduating and traveling for a little while. So, I fell into recruitment like most people tend to do. And over the past 22 years, I’ve worked in the industry apart from a three-year break when I had my own business when my kids were quite small, which was around supporting women in their careers, community building, and career coaching. And then I went back into recruitment, mainly specialized in executive search within the global energy sector. And I spent 12 years living and working in Amsterdam and then we moved back to the UK just under three years ago now. And then until nine months ago, my experience was exclusively in agency exec search recruitment and I made the decision to transition to an in-house exec search role really to broaden my skillset. And now I’m the Global Luxury and Lifestyle Talent Acquisition Lead for IHG Hotels & Resorts. So, I head up general manager hiring within our luxury and lifestyle portfolio. And I was primarily brought in to develop an executive search offering in-house for this specialized function.

Matt: Fantastic stuff. And I suppose that’s a great sort of question to start with really, in terms of what are you finding the main differences between doing executive search as part of an agency, doing it in-house or building a function in-house?

Katie: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, there’s quite a lot of difference to be honest. But the main principles are very much the same in terms of the fact that exec search is very much a high touch, relationship driven function. There’s a lot of stakeholder management involved, but the main differences are from an agency perspective, you’ve got multiple clients who are different in size and scope with different needs. Previously, I worked across the global energy sector, so my clients could range anything from a startup to a very large blue chip matrix management organization. And companies tend to use you when you’re working in agency, when they’ve exhausted their traditional methods of recruiting and they’re really at a point where they need a specialist with expertise to come in and conduct targeted search for the position that you’ve been selected to work on, so ultimately, it’s very much a sales role. You have to have very highly developed business development and commercial sales skills. You have to identify the clients that need your help initially, you’ve got to win the business in quite a highly competitive market as well. So, you’re involved in lots of commercial negotiations in the first instance, you agree in ways of working, you negotiate in terms of business. And then after that it’s very much conducting the search assignment and direct sourcing and interviewing and market mapping and then managing that relationship with the client. It’s also quite a highly targeted environment in a lot of agency environments, very fast paced, very long hours, very, very competitive.

And then from an in-house perspective, there’s obviously no more sales involved because you only have one client which is the internal client. When you’re working for a large corporate like IHG, you’re working across different regions with multiple stakeholders from the direct hiring team, heads of HR, heads of reward, recruitment marketing, employer branding, branding and strategy, DE&I, TA Ops, onboarding, L&D, so it’s a huge ecosystem really from an in-house perspective, but you’re also working with a lot of internal stakeholders. So, there’s lots of internal stakeholder management in a very complex matrix management structure as well, so you’ve got to be able to kind of really get your head around that.

And when I joined IHG, there was no internal exec search function per se. And due to the massive growth in our luxury and lifestyle portfolio of hotels, it was identified that the GM hiring for this segment needed a dedicated function. And my boss [unintelligible 00:08:08] really wanted somebody from an agency exec search background to fill this role, which is primarily when I stepped in. So, it was a great opportunity for me since working purely agency side for over 20 years. It was starting to get a little bit same, I wanted a new challenge, so it was 100% the right move for me. And I feel a lot more interesting as well because I’m working with many different functions now across TA and HR and the business. So, you really get immersed into the inner workings of a company which you don’t necessarily have that exposure to when working agency side, you’re only brought in at kind of the endpoint when they’re looking to fill a critical role and they’ve identified the need to use a partner.

Matt: And do you find the candidates respond differently to in-house executive search as opposed to agency? Is there a tradition of agencies kind of dominating this space in the market you work in?

Katie: I think it’s similar to be honest with you, because it’s all about the approach at the end of the day, it’s how you approach the candidates in the marketplace, how you get them to engage with you as a business, what you’re telling them about the opportunity. Working in-house, you’ve got more facts at hand because you can go to lots of different divisions to ask about the story behind a particular position or the culture of the organization, the value, so you can get a lot more rich information when you’re working in house.

But it’s competitive because there’s a number of agencies that also work within the hospitality space as well. And hospitality is quite a competitive marketplace. So, talent it’s not easy to come by, and it never will be I think when you’re working at certain levels within an organization. But I think a lot of it is around how you’re communicating with that talent in the marketplace and how you engage with them to get them interested, initiating or sparking a conversation initially, because a lot of these times, the candidates you’re speaking to are passive, they’re doing really well in their current companies, so it’s about how can we start to have these career conversations and get them engaged in wanting to work for a company like ours?

Matt: Tell us a little bit more about that talent market. How short supply is the talent? How long do people tend to stay in their roles? And how do you sort of go about developing that kind of persuasion strategy to get them to move?

Katie: Yeah, so the talent market in hospitality, there’s different portfolios and at different volumes of hotels. So, you’ve got within IHG there’s, for example, the premium and essential suites brands like your Holiday Inns or your Crowne Plazas, where there’s a lot more of these hotels, as opposed to say the luxury brands, which is the division that I work in, which makes the competitive set smaller, which means the talent market shrinks significantly. And then combined with the fact that hospitality as an industry is booming since the pandemic, and particularly within the luxury sector, there’s more and more new innovations coming out around guest experience and new technology that we really need to keep ahead of in order to stay competitive in the market.

Similar to other talent markets where the hiring needs are in high demand at senior levels, many top general managers are being well looked after by their current companies by offering great career development opportunities, great comp & bens. So, we have to see what is our differentiator, what is our compelling offering to make people want to leave a secure job and come to join IHG. So, a lot of the time is looking at how can we get a good message out to these demographics, how can we draw on our reputation. Most people are aware of IHG, since we are one of the largest hotel groups globally, which does make a big difference when you’re representing a large and well-known reputable brand who are also seen as growing in the market. And that’s why one of the key factors why somebody would want to join us around the reputation, the different brands that we represent.

We also need to look at our commitments to DE&I, sustainability, which is a big draw for Gen-Z, and millennials. We need to look at our opportunities for progression to move from hotels to corporate and vice versa. And we promote squiggly careers as well, through our room to grow initiative. So, people tend to want to move to join a large corporate that has a great infrastructure behind them in terms of support from corporate head office functions, and then the messaging is all around the particular assignment. So, whether it’s a resort or a city hotel, and what are the key differentiators within that hotel versus some of the comp set.

Also, we draw a lot on international mobility as well, because a lot of the general managers, they live quite transient lives. They’re moving from hotel to hotel, from different region to region. Generally, as a rule of thumb, general managers tend to stay in one hotel for anything from two to three years, sometimes a lot, lot longer, but that’s generally the rule of thumb, and then they’ll move on to another hotel. So, we’ve got quite a large talent at global talent pool to work from as well when we’re not restricted to certain locations. But there are some restrictions because a hotel might need someone with a particular language or cultural background or cultural awareness, etc.

Matt: A few things I want to pick up on. Firstly, tell us more about squiggly careers?

Katie: Squiggly careers, so this is an initiative that was brought into IHG from these two ladies that own the squiggly careers company. I forget their names now, but they’ve done quite a bit of work for IHG in terms of the coaching and consulting around our room to grow initiatives. And it’s a really interesting concept in the fact that careers are not linear anymore, they call them squiggly, so people can move from function to function, and they can move from doing one job to a complete, diverse, different job. And people don’t spend as long in one function anymore, they tend to move about, so we’re really good within IHG around creating these opportunities for people to move from function to function.

There’s a lot of open communication between different departments around the opportunities, and people can have those chances to move into a different area that they may not necessarily have the skills or experience in, but they’ll be given that opportunity. So, it’s a really nice way for people to move and gain skills, whether they’re moving from a hotel organization into a corporate function and getting exposed to different styles and different ways of working and different management structures.

Matt: Fantastic stuff. You mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, all of the different functions that you have to communicate within IHG, what type of persuasion do you have to do and what would your advice be to people in terms of engaging stakeholders across such a sort of large and diverse organization?

Katie: Yeah, a major part of this role is the stakeholder management and educating them around the talent in the market and the need to move quickly in order to secure the right people into the role. So, a key part of my role is advising and consulting, which I think is a core focus of working in executive search anyway. It’s been seen as that strategic talent partner to the business and it’s something that’s been met with a lot of positivity within the teams and the regions I’ve been working across, because a lot of the time we’re helping take away the guesswork from recruitment and selection and we’re saving our hiring team a lot of time when it comes to making decisions since they’re based on fact and analysis of the market and if the talent available within the market. So, my role is very much about advising, right from taking the initial brief through to the final selection of the candidate.

But one of the biggest challenges for us in talent acquisition is we don’t have direct access to the final decision maker, which is the owner of the hotels, since we manage the hotels on behalf of the owner. So it’s the hiring team, it’s the operations teams that manage the relationship with the owner who present the shortlisted candidates to them, which can be a bit of a bottleneck and it’s something that was quite different for me once when working in agency exec search, because you’re always dealing with the end decision maker, so you have a lot of influence around the work that’s gone into the assignment and why these people are the right fit and why we’ve ultimately selected this final shortlist.

And a lot of the time the owner doesn’t know about the work that’s gone into sourcing the final shortlist. So, we have to constantly educate the hiring team by way of delivering market insights and progress reports to update on the search, which hadn’t been done before. They can then share that with the owners to make sure all of the expectations are managed from the outset, which is very much a work in progress because it hadn’t ever been done before. So, we’re slowly making some changes with the operations teams who are open to getting the owner involved earlier in the recruitment process, so we don’t have any major surprises towards the end of the process. And this very much all links into the candidate experience as well, because the key thing we wanted was to create this candidate experience that matched what a guest experience is within our luxury and lifestyle hotels, which really enables the candidate to experience that brand in action. So, we’ve gone about creating very high touch concierge candidate experience, not for just candidates, but also for the internal stakeholders, and that’s gone down really well. And alongside that, we’ve developed a whole new set of tools and recruitment assets and ultimately, we want the candidate to come over and advocate of IHG regardless of the outcome, so that we grow our reputation really as the employer of choice.

But ultimately from a persuasion standpoint, it’s very much about having open communication, really advising on the talent market, backing that up with the progress reports and just highlighting the individuals that we’re selecting and why we’ve selected them and managing expectations, because sometimes expectations can be unrealistic. So, we’ve got to manage the expectations to say, “You might not get this right from the start.” And advise them in terms of where we’re going to source these candidates from and the competitor set within the market as well. So, it’s not a one single thing, I think it’s a host of different tools and methods that we use in order to get the right outcome at the end of the process.

Matt: Tell us a little bit more about that candidate experience. What is it you do to ensure that the high quality of it that you offer people.

Katie: A lot of it is around communicating again from the start. So, we have a candidate engagement pack which highlights the opportunities that we’re discussing with them in the market. This gives them a really nice overview of, it’s kind of like a brochure that we designed or we had a design agency design this for us. And this goes into detail around IHG as an organization. So, it’s not just a job description, it’s not just a job advert that they’ll see on our career’s website, but it’s something that we send out to the individuals and it highlights the organization, the growth plans. It highlights all of our different brands with hyperlinks into the five different key luxury brands that we have, so they can then individually look at each brand on our luxury and lifestyle landing page. And then it gives specifics of the role that we’re talking about, details in terms of who the hiring teams are and the biographies of the hiring team and it goes into some detail around our strategic initiatives, around our Journey to Tomorrow and DEI, sustainability, etc. So, this is one of the first points that the candidate will receive once we’ve started to engage with them on a specific key position. And the feedback we got from the candidates was, “This is amazing. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Normally it’s just a job description that they’ll send out with a huge wish list of criteria that somebody needs to fit.”

And then alongside that, it’s recruitment 101, really. It’s just about keeping in touch with the individuals at all times, and WhatsApp is a great way to just quickly send them a message, update them. We book in prep calls and debrief calls with the hiring team plus the candidates, which are always on Teams, so you get another touch point with them. And we pretty much handhold them right the way through, right to the end of the process where we’re then doing the negotiations around the contract through to onboarding, and then we’re creating this whole new onboarding experience for the candidates once they’re selected and they start with us. And it’s quite unique because the feedback has been really, really positive in the industry. Often, they say that “They’re lucky to get a phone call back a lot of the time.” So for us, it’s just about creating this high touch concierge experience, giving it this we’re all about the luxury and lifestyle portfolio, so it’s got to be aligned to luxury and lifestyle. It’s got to represent the brand that we’re working in and that’s ultimately it, there’s also some new initiatives that we’re looking at which will be further down the line, but I’ve only been enrolled for nine months, so a lot of this has been kind of unpacked and developed over that period. And then later on this year, there’ll be different things that we’ll be looking at in terms of once the candidate accepts, what can we send out to them and that gives them a nice kind of luxury and lifestyle look and feel to it as well.

Matt: You mentioned DE&I sort of several times in the conversation. Tell us, how do you ensure sort of diverse hiring at this level, and what’s the overall DE&I strategy?

Katie: Yeah, so we have firm what’s called our Journey to Tomorrow initiatives, which is our 10-year business plan to make a positive difference in a changing world. And one of the goals is around champion a diverse culture where everybody can thrive, called room to belong. And each of our regions are very different in terms of our DEI strategies. So, we work very closely with the talent management and HR teams around our DEI strategies to provide advice around local talent in each of the key regions from a diversity perspective. So, what’s right for one region might not necessarily be right for another region. So, we have to make sure that we are working in the right way with the different regions around the different elements of DE&I and what we can and what we can’t achieve.

And the requirements is sort of are very different, so as well as providing diverse shortlists where possible, we’re undertaking a number of awareness raising efforts around our diversity initiatives. So, we have our RISE program, which is aimed at female representation in our GM and hotels community. And then we have a number of ERGs across the whole business from leaning groups, which is focused on gender equity, to embrace, which is our network for employees of ethnic minority background. We’ve got Open and Out, which is our platform for conversations around LGBTQ. We’ve got DAWN, which is our Disability and Wellbeing Network. And all of these do amazing events and initiatives which contributes huge value to our culture and where DEI is really then kept at the forefront of everything that we do.

And we’ve also focused on upskilling local talents in our markets with the aim of doubling underrepresented groups within our teams as well. So, there’s a whole kind of the global corporate strategy, and then that gets filtered down into the different regions and the regional initiatives. And then from a talent acquisition perspective, we look at supply and diverse shortlists where we can, and then we provide the insights into the different markets and the availability of talent in that markets, and how diverse that talent is in the marketplace as well, to make sure that we’re also being realistic about what can and what can’t be achieved.

Matt: Obviously, the big talk in the industry at the moment is around the impact of AI and what it’s going to do to talent acquisition. What does the future look like for executive hiring? I mean, how do you think technology and AI might have an impact in terms of how you do what you do?

Katie: Yeah, sure. I think the premise of exec hiring will broadly stay the same in terms of the fact that it’s a high touch, it’s strategic hiring function that’s very much aligned with the business in the sense that you’re hiring the top leadership positions that make a significant impact on an organization’s success. Therefore, positioning yourself as a partner will always be key and critical. I think there’ll be more of a focus on diversity and inclusion. And executive hiring, there’ll be greater priority in building diverse candidate pipelines and employing unbiased assessment methods and inclusive hiring practices. I think also there’ll be some changes in terms of the skill sets required around DE&I and sustainability and social responsibility, since a lot of companies now are placing a lot of emphasis on ethical leadership. And there’ll be more of an expansion, I think of gig and interim executive roles as well to fill critical leadership gaps or spearhead specific initiatives.

And then from a tech point of view, I think technology and AI can really greatly enhance various aspects of exec hiring. The human element still will remain critical, because ultimately it’s about building and maintaining relationships with hiring managers and candidates, and understanding their unique needs and preferences, and providing that very personalized guidance and support, which I think are very much essential components of successful executive search assignments. But we will increasingly leverage technology and AI-powered tools to just streamline our processes and improve our candidate assessment methods. We’ve just signed up to a new CRM platform, which is a generative AI platform, which I think will really become an integral part of our toolkit, particularly around building talent pipelines for executive roles and identifying high potential employees to make sure that they’re ready for future leadership positions.

And alongside of that will be around the data driven decision making as well. So, utilizing data analytics and insights to inform hiring decisions, building robust progress reports and tracking those key metrics around time to fill and candidate quality, and then ultimately identifying areas for improvement within the hiring process, really just to optimize the exec search efforts and to achieve overall better outcomes.

Matt: And a final question for you. What advice would you give to someone who was moving in-house to set up an internal exec search function?

Katie: I would say it’s a really, really interesting move, particularly being in agency for over 20 years. It’s a long time to be on the agency side, which I loved, and it was quite a hard decision to move in house. But ultimately, if you’re looking to broaden your skill set and you’re looking to really get involved in the inner workings of a company where you’re not just involved in working with the hiring team to fill one position, you’re working with the whole organization, around the whole HR and talent ecosystem, as well as getting involved in business strategy. It’s a real opportunity for you to expand your skill set around talent acquisition and HR in general. If you’re working for a larger company with a bigger infrastructure, there’s so much exposure in terms of the regions and the regional diverse perspectives across those as well.

So, I think it’s just a very, very interesting landscape to move into when you’ve been working on very much a commercial function for a long time, to move into that embrace the whole HR and talent acquisition piece, which for me was 100% the right move. And it’s just been a really challenging and interesting journey so far and one that’s really pushed me as well because I guess you get stuck in a bit of a rut when you’re working in one function for such a long time and then moving in-house has just exposed me to so much more than I would have got by staying on the agency side.

Matt: Katie, thank you very much for talking to me.

Katie: Thanks so much, Matt.

Matt: My thanks to Katie. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show.

Thanks very much for listening I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.

The post Ep 598: Building Exec Search In House appeared first on The Recruiting Future Podcast.