Episode 6 | The Future of Recruitment

On Episode 6 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we sat down with Jayde Tipper, the CPO at Temenos, to talk about all things HR. Jayde’s career has people at the heart of it, so her insights into the industry are based on a close relationship with the people on the front lines. We asked her where the industry is headed and how we can help it get there.  

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the HR and recruitment space? 

Don’t always hang around with the HR people. Spend time with the business people, go for coffee, seek them out and be curious about the business. Ask them ‘What does this mean? Why do we measure this? Why is this important? Why do we care so much about software?  Can you invite me to that meeting?’ You’ll pick stuff up from your HR colleagues anyway, but you need to understand the business in order to be relevant. I’ve never had a business leader say, ‘Why are you asking me this stuff?’ because people love talking about what they know and what’s important to them. People will be excited about those relationships, because they don’t get them often.  

Having that level of curiosity and learning agility is a real differentiator in our industry. It’s good to be interested in whatever you’re working on. Whether you’re in financial technology, software or selling tins of beans, you’ve got to find some interest in it or you’ll be inauthentic. Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations where you know nothing and learning from them will get you a long way. 

How do you think recruitment is evolving? 

There’s a couple of fundamental principles that will change based on supply and demand. We keep hearing about the war for talent, but that’s just the norm now. When you have such a disconnect between supply and demand, organisations cannot hire their way out of the problem. You cannot hire what doesn’t exist. Because of this ongoing supply and demand component, employees have all the power.  

Organisations will have to be much more open to different types of hiring moving forwards. Permanent hiring will be massively reduced because people will be much more contract led, and there’ll be much more of this gig economy. Different generations of candidates are also asking for different things. Young people coming into the workplace are asking about social impact, they aren’t asking ‘What’s my sick leave? Am I gonna get access to Virgin Active?’ Organisations need to rethink what it means to hire. You’re not filling jobs, you’re solving business problems. We don’t write job descriptions any more, we write problem statements. Our job is to identify the problem that we need someone to solve and the skills that will enable them to solve that problem and advertising that. 

An example from FinTech is bringing in customer experience professionals. We were looking for people from banks who understood customer experience within the industry, but banks give the worst customer experience ever, so why were we doing that? Why didn’t we look at McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Hilton Hotels? We needed people who provided an excellent user experience to come into our sector to disrupt it. That’s why we exist as a company; to revolutionise the industry. Companies need to be much bolder in bringing people in from other industries, because that’s the future. 

What do you see the future of recruitment looking like? 

Recruitment hasn’t changed in 20 years. We’re not doing any of the same things we were doing 10 years ago in most parts of the business, but we’re still calling candidates and asking them, ‘Why do you want this job?’ Why don’t we have AI and systems and tools to change the way we work? We’re not using little black books anymore, but with the candidates, has it really changed? The future will come by us figuring out how it could be and then working back from there. How is this gonna look when my kids are in HR? We need to embrace all of the new technology and find a better way of engaging candidates.  

To hear more about the future of recruitment, tune into the full episode of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcast here.