Kamaljeet (Ruby) Marwaha

Said the following about Commercial Recruitment Team:

“I would like to nominate Victoria Hill-Stanford who is the Head of Profession – Commercial and Erika Diaz our former Resourcing Business Partner for IP Signalling as the most effective and best recruitment team. Victoria (Vicky) and Erika have worked tirelessly together to understand the requirements of the commercial profession nationally and worked with the teams to help them recruit.

Historically commercial roles have proven hard to recruit for reasons including salary, location, and Network Rail job titles not correlating to external markets. Current resource planning initiatives, were siloed, re-active ad-hoc processes, leading to application fatigue from poor candidate experience, duplication of effort, and an inability to share CVs across the business.

Erika and Vicky worked together to redesign the recruitment process for commercial professionals. Historically the Head of Profession (HoP) has not been involved in recruitment campaigns so they looked at the lessons of past recruitment and identified a number of key areas including consolidating recruitment into campaign by office location creating one application interface, re-focus on transferable skill sets, communication of open vacancies to practitioners and re-setting external adverts into Quantity Surveyors job titles that the market recognised and understood.

This also involved gaining approval to advertise externally when internal recruitment was not successful. Securing this approval was challenging especially during current Network Rail re-structuring programme but essential in order to gear up to deliver the current control period.

To support the transferable skill, they designed a ‘try before you apply’ system and with my support we held events to discuss how transferable skills can be adapted to the commercial profession roles thus opening up opportunities to a more diverse workforce and those employees that are at risk. This new ‘try before you apply’ recruitment campaign was run at several Network Rail offices with the aim of attracting staff, some who were going to be displaced, with transferable skills into the profession. The campaign events included speakers from within the profession who could talk about their roles ranging from Assistant Commercial Managers to Senior Programme Commercial Managers. Quotes from individuals in the profession were posted on several recruitment websites. This campaign attracted 60 new people who were interesting in joining the profession.

In addition, the team utilised our internal Network Rail communications channels to share content including; Yammer, MyConnect, internal newsletters and emails.

They also used Textio to write our job adverts which provide gender neutral language, and blogs of ‘a day in the life’ of a commercial manager were posted on different social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Vercida to demystify the profession.

The resourcing team bought together stakeholders including IP Resourcing, HR, Heads of Profession, Communications, Commercial hiring managers and transition & redeployment teams through constant dialogue, re-statement of vision and enthusiasm for the final goal. The contribution of everyone was equally important and it bought together teams who had, until recently, acted in silos. Importantly people wanted to take part in the initiative and this was thanks to their work in creating a positive team environment for everyone who was involved.

The team worked with the hiring managers to help advertise and promote the vacancies to tap into the right resource pools to fill the vacancies. They went out of the traditional recruitment process and pre-sifted CVs for the hiring managers and made a direct challenge to a manager who rejected 14 internal candidates.

They worked on a weekly communication plan to keep all stakeholders and the teams updated on the developments. Their highly effective communication and leadership style meant that the project’s vision and value was successfully delivered. When the projected looked at risk of deviating from its path, specifics actions were recognised and followed up.

In addition, this year the team implemented two new recruitment strategies:

• Advertising on the job board ‘Women in Rail’, which provides another platform to attract candidates and supports our objective of creating an inclusive environment by increasing the female employee population to 20 per cent by 2020.

• Using promotion in the train stations to the general public that Network Rail is an organisation that supports career development, diversity, inclusion and flexible working. They created parallax videos for digital posters but also versions for us to use across social media (12 assets in total).

o Station advertisement – 4,600 views – 14 likes and 11 shares – Birmingham, Victoria, Waterloo, Manchester, Euston.

o Commercial Head of Profession LinkedIn Video – 4,560 views – 33 likes and 11 shares.

They discovered that the candidate experience for applying for NR jobs was poor. At times candidates would have to perform around 149 clicks from the career sites before actually reaching the ‘apply’ button. As part of the commercial campaign they created a URL which directed candidates to the commercial vacancies with one click only, this improved candidate experience and also helped create an external pipeline of candidates.

As a result, since the successful launch of the IP Commercial recruitment campaign in November last year we filled 86 per cent and we launched a second recruitment campaign in February 2019, some highlights of the campaign include:

• Successful appointments in hard to recruit locations (including Swindon, Newport, London)

• 40 per cent of hires were external

• High volume of applications received (370)

• Collaboration across regions and sharing candidate pools

• Filled 96 per cent of requirement

• Raised internal/external commercial branding awareness

• Appointments included two Team Organisers who had transferrable skills, one Transitionee, two graduates and one Try Before you Apply applicant.

The URL was included in the video with the Diversity and Inclusion, flexible working and career development scripts that has been published in some of our stations.

We also designed the job application to capture candidate’s job preference and asked them to confirm if they wanted part-time, full time or were interested in flexible working. This approached really helped our managers sifting the right candidates for the right opportunities. As a result, in just two weeks we received a total of 76 applications and 44 were distributed across the business. Now we are at the interviewing and offer stage of these applications.

This strategy completely underpins the company ethos of valuing its employees and with the use of upskilling apprenticeships to support applicants with transferrable roles we achieve the social value targets.

Suzanne Pangbourne – Head of HR (IP Projects, Policy & Performance) said ‘Both Vicky and Erika took a step back to consider how to tackle recruitment issues in a systematic manner, planning carefully and thinking creatively to produce some good results. They also shared their approach with other Heads of Profession so that others could learn from what went well and what they would do differently.’“