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APRIL 201526

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Charlotte HarrisCOLIN COTTELL SPOKE WITH THE GLOBAL HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR AT FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE PROVIDER REGUS ABOUT THE OVERHAUL OF THE COMPANY’S RECRUITMENT STRUCTURE

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Imagine an organisation that goes from having 50 or 60 recruiters to more than 2,000 within the space of just over a year. It seems an unlikely scenario. But for Charlotte Harris, global HR director at flexible workplace provider Regus, it is very real.

The exponential growth in the number of recruiters at Regus was just one element in a two-year period of change that saw a dramatic and fundamental overhaul of the company’s ‘field recruitment’ — meaning recruitment of customer service staff working in Regus’s network of centres, rather than senior executives. “I don’t think we anticipated the level of change that this would cause, but that is Regus’s way — we did it so quickly that a lot of people didn’t get a chance to catch their breath,” says Harris, speaking to Recruiter at the company’s modernistic Bruton Street business centre in London’s Mayfair.

Regus is a company in a hurry. In the last couple of years it has opened in roughly 450 new locations around the world, bringing the number of employees to more than 10,000 in 105 countries. The firm expects to hire 3,000 new staff this year. And it is clearly a company in which Harris believes she and her team have a vital role to play. “The work that I do now is really enabling that growth, and that is rewarding… you can really influence and change what is happening. I am hooked on Regus — simple as that,” she says.

Harris is clearly in her element at Regus as she enthuses about the company and recruitment’s

PHILOSOPHY OF RECRUITMENT“A lot of people see recruitment as a functional service. It’s not; it’s far more than that”

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pivotal role in it. But the picture she paints of Regus’s recruitment going back just a couple of years is a very different one. “It was slow, it was impractical, and disjointed between HR and the field. The field was saying ‘I can’t grow my business because HR aren’t recruiting people fast enough’,” she says.

The company’s separate recruitment teams in each of Regus’s geographies — the Americas, the UK, EMEA [Europe, Middle East & Africa] and Asia Pacific — “were quite heavy in terms of manpower, admin and spend”, she continues. “We were asking a junior recruiter in Hong Kong to recruit local people in Brisbane. It was just ridiculous, so quite clearly we needed to do something drastic.

“It wasn’t HR or recruitment’s fault. It was just they were under-resourced, and didn’t really have the skills or the accountability to do what they needed to do. So we tore it up.”

If that sounds overdramatic, Regus’s rapid

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expansion and plans for further growth suggest that this is not a company that shies away from change. Indeed, the subsequent transformation of recruitment within the company was conceived from the very top of the organisation by Regus chief executive and founder Mark Dixon.

The changes have been twofold, says Harris. “We have created more regions, but put in more accountability and responsibility at the country level. At the same time, we looked to standardise and streamline everything that we do centrally to so that we can scale for growth.

“It was the way he [Dixon] wanted the business to go,” Harris continues, “to localise and decentralise that process, so instead of having core HR teams running recruitment, he wanted everybody on the ground to basically own it themselves.”

The result is that rather than HR being responsible for recruitment as before, area directors now have the responsibility to hire general managers, while general managers, who manage Regus’s centres, in turn recruit customer service representatives.

However dramatic these changes are, she says there was always a realisation that they wouldn’t work on their own. “We quite clearly couldn’t just say ‘it is your job to do this now’… It needed to be a lot better than that because we needed to embed it and make it part of what we do.”

With recruitment only a part of hiring managers’ busy day jobs, “we needed to make it as quick and as easy as possible. What was needed was a practical solution they could follow”.

The introduction of what Regus calls ‘recruitment champions’ has been pivotal. Chosen by Regus’s area directors, recruitment champions do not actually recruit themselves, but play a central part in the new decentralised system. Following a two-day workshop covering all the basics of recruitment at Regus, and ‘train the trainer’ sessions, their first responsibility is

to train Regus’s hiring managers, says Harris. But that’s not all, she explains. “They also act as a conduit for us into the business,

taking any issues and challenges that recruiters are having locally and feeding them through to their local HR team.

“Quite clearly my team can’t handle 2,500 people [hiring managers] ringing them up saying ‘I can’t log in … I can’t post this job, I haven’t got any candidates, what do I ask at interview’… all those questions that a hiring manager would ask because recruitment is not their day job. It is about having a network of people on the ground that live and breathe recruitment as part of their job, and an escalation point to us.”

Global HR director, Regus2014-present

Global head of recruitment, Regus2012-14

Various HR/resourcing contract assignments, JC Consulting(her own limited company) 2007-12

Executive search consultant, Imprint Search & Selection March 2007- December 2007

Various recruitment agency roles (included periods at Hays, Robert Half and Adecco)1989-2007

CV: CHARLOTTE HARRIS

SECRET OF SUCCESS “Luck, hard work and having fantastic people around me”

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Harris says a good word to describe recruitment champions is ‘facilitators’, giving an example of how they get hiring managers working in offices that are geographically close to interview together, rather than operating in silos. “That is how it works now,” she says.

The aim is to have as many recruitment champions as possible, says Harris, with area directors, for example in London, New York or Singapore, where there are several Regus centres, encouraged “to have as many as they want”.

Once appointed, Harris emphasises that recruitment champions are not simply left alone to sink or swim. Each of Regus’s countries and regions have weekly conference calls, where they can discuss issues and challenges.

The wholesale transformation of recruitment at Regus doesn’t end there, however. With hiring managers in busy day jobs now replacing recruitment specialists, came the recognition that the recruitment process needed to be made as simple and easy as possible. “We clearly needed to automate,” says Harris.

To avoid local centres receiving as many as 500 to 600 applications for just one or two jobs, a new assessment process, which identifies the top 50-60% of applicants was introduced. In addition, working with international employment solutions and retention firm Kenexa, hiring managers now have

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a recruitment tool that is “intuitive and really easy to use… 13 clicks to hire somebody”, says Harris proudly. This is combined with a job description and advertisement that “is completely locked down”.

Harris, who joined Regus in 2012 after a career which spanned interim, search and agency recruitment, is clearly at home at Regus, and relishes the pace of change. “I can come up with ideas,” she says, and a decision is very quickly arrived at “whether [those ideas are] approved or not approved”, she adds.

However, she accepts that the dramatic changes introduced to recruitment at Regus over such a short period, including implementation in 13 languages, has not been without its challenges. “Crikey, how long have you got?!” she says, when asked about the problems encountered.

Harris says the biggest challenge was getting the HR community to adopt the changes. “It is a massive change of behaviour for them,” she acknowledges. “Instead of them physically doing the recruitment, they were changing to become supporters and enablers.” Further, while Regus’s HR team of around 100 retains a local or regional presence in each of Regus’s territories, the changes have meant some HR staff leaving the business.

A one-size-fits-all solution across the whole company has also proved problematical, particularly in parts of Asia Pacific. For example, the new situational judgement test, which takes candidates 10 to 15 minutes to complete, has proved unsuitable for China, and the process is being redesigned. “They call it ‘the three-second principle’,” she laughs. “If you can’t allow a candidate to apply for a job within three seconds you can forget it. Things just work differently over there… so we are working our way through Asia-Pac at this moment.”

A further difficulty is that some country managers have baulked at hiring being devolved locally, taking the attitude ‘Why should I do that? That is HR’s job’.

“It is really easy to develop something and roll it out; the difficulty is getting people to embed it and embrace it as part of what they do,” she adds.

For Harris, the way to get buy-in is communication or “over-communication” as she puts it. “You have got to tell them, tell them what you told them and tell them again — it is really as simple as that.” That and having your leadership involved, and helping to drive change.

Harris says there are signs that HR is growing into its new role of supporting and enabling those in the field, improving the recruitment toolkit and Regus’s various recruitment channels. The improved transparency of the new system allows HR to spend more time on identifying recruitment hotspots to where they can drive traffic. “It is more of a partnership role — there isn’t this kind of tension now between HR, global HR and the guys on the ground. They literally work in tandem with each other, and it is really nice to see,” she says.

Founded 1989

Provides a range of flexible workplace solutions, including business lounges, video communication suites and individual workpods

More than 10,000 staff in 220 locations across 105 countries

Just under 2m customers

Sales of £1.53bn in 2013

REGUS

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