Devising and leading a multistakeholder experience strategy

With CX gaining recognition as a driver of business outcomes, many organizations are restructuring to put customers first.

For global recruitment firm Robert Walters, this saw Sinead Hourigan FRCSA move out of her customer-facing operational leadership role and into the newly-created role of global head of CX in 2021.

The new role built on 20 years of experience as a business leader in the recruitment sector and now, with a remit to drive experience improvements across the business’s three pillars, Hourigan tells CX Network how she devised and led a multistakeholder strategy that breaks free of CX’s established silos and involves tech, marketing and HR.

CX Network: You head CX for a recruitment firm, but do not specialize in recruiting CX professionals. Tell us more about the new CX role that Robert Walters created and appointed you to.

Sinead Hourigan: My role was developed at the end of 2020, and into the beginning of 2021 with the intent of giving a greater degree of focus to our customer pillars: our clients, candidates and colleagues. There is an internal as well as external CX flavour to this role and the whole reason behind it was that when a client needs to hire they do so to a deadline, so we are constantly working against tight deadlines and trying to support people.

This means we do not always have time to take stock of what is working well and what potentially could do with some enhancements. We have been provided with some incredible technological advancements over the last number of years, but there are challenges that come along with that.

Within Robert Walters, we wanted to take a moment to identify what we are doing as far as our technological advancements are concerned – what works well and what brings us closer to our customers, and what was potentially creating barriers that we could not yet see. It is about using technology as an enabler to enhance CX, rather than something that might potentially be getting in the way of the need for a very human engagement. That is crucial in recruitment and we did not want to lose sight of it.

I had been in a client, public and colleague-facing operational leadership role for a number of years and this was a great opportunity for me to learn. When those things are combined, hopefully, it gives everyone the best outcomes.

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This role also gave me the opportunity to transition across into a business partner function role, whereas before I was always external-facing and sitting in the sales function. It was a different world, but it gave me empathy for the people who were in similar roles and helped with the foundation of our CX initiatives.

It meant our stakeholders felt a level of trust and comfort when I asked them very detailed questions about their candidates or clients, or if colleagues were happy or unhappy with our service delivery and what we could do better. They really saw that as somebody who had walked a mile in their shoes and was trying to find ways to help them enhance their performance.

So far it has been incredibly fun, incredibly challenging and I have learned new things every single day. CX is so young in the context of the function in and of itself, but hopefully we have demonstrated our capabilities to the business. People are already feeling valued, and they are reaching out to us to ask to be involved, for example in off-site leadership training. They want us to talk to their business about the challenges they are facing, and how they can improve and enhance their performance. That is a really positive sign.

CX Network: What targets are you working toward and what is your strategy to achieve them?

Sinead Hourigan: Initially, we agreed as part of this function that we would not set a single target. For CX the focus was to listen and to create a listening platform both internally and externally. This allowed us to hear where the challenges lie and identify where the enhancement opportunities were, after which we had to execute some of those and implement change. Then we would be able to establish targets.

Our business is full of structures and incentives, and we did not want this to get lost.
As part of that, we also wanted to ensure that people understood that the first thing we were going to do was listen and then work together to identify where the improvement opportunities were. Sometimes simple is the best approach to take!

We are working in three-year cycles to cover our three pillars and we started with colleagues.
We spent the first four months of our existence on an internal listening campaign. We asked everybody the same questions and recorded about 250 hours of calls with our people globally.
When we brought it all together, we were able to devise more than 800 initiatives for our global teams, all based on that feedback. It gave us such confidence we were doing the right thing and that we were focusing our interventions on the right areas.

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Interestingly enough, the internal colleagues pillar had the most initiatives, followed by candidate and client.

Thankfully, we have a very well-ordered internal HR function, which was already running an internal employee engagement program. We worked closely with them as they rolled this out to wrap it into the CX environment. It is a “you said, we listened” approach.

Under our three-year approach, we will return to the colleague pillar in 2024 and continue to work alongside the HR function to develop a program of work. In 2022 we focused on candidates and 2023 is our client focus and we are driving some improvement opportunities as well as some global listening programs across the client pillar at the moment. We listen, analyse, execute and review in a continuous improvement loop.

What we wanted to do was be able to deliver small, meaningful pieces of work initially for the business, then overlay beyond that as the program evolved.

CX Network: Candidates are the lifeblood of any recruitment firm. What was your initial strategy for the candidate pillar?

Sinead Hourigan: For candidates, it was all about understanding how to say ‘no’ nicely. Unfortunately, in our world we have to say ‘no’ a lot more often than we get to say ‘yes’ so how you do it is so important. It is the biggest area of complaint in our industry – not returning calls, not letting candidates know what is happening or not sharing feedback when they haven’t been successful. Again, we felt that technology and automation, while valuable in this space, had de-humanized the process a little too much, so we wanted to review it and make some positive changes.

We looked at the whole candidate journey, from the minute they apply all the way through to when we do or do not place them in that magical position that they really wanted. At all the stages along the way we looked at how we say no with respect and how to close the loop on an ongoing basis.

It was a big piece of work and involved some changes to some of our tech infrastructure to ensure our automated messaging systems were working effectively and there were some changes to the way we onboard our own people and train them.

There were also changes to some of the reporting triggers that we built in our systems to make sure we were highlighting candidates at the right point and not losing sight of them.

I love these pieces of work where you can combine a technology, marketing and HR solution together and see how all the pieces of our business are effectively operating together in order to deliver great outcomes.

We have done round one for the candidate pillar, but in two years’ time we will be coming back to this very piece of work and identifying what is next.

There is always another five percent that you can get out of everything you do.

Our second programme of work was all about candidate activation. We wanted to think differently about the moment that a candidate enters our ecosystem, the expectations they have of us and if we are meeting them. If we are, how do we make sure we can optimise that and really systemize it so that everyone does the same thing? If we are not what is preventing us?

We want our people to understand the value of the relationships they are building. We talk a lot about rehumanizing the process and technology has helped a lot with this, but in other ways it can take the human element away from a lot of things.

The final project we looked at on the candidate side was contractor experience. These are the workers who are contracted via us to host employers, globally. They are supremely important part of our community and we had to make sure that we were giving them the right type of engagement and support and that they felt part of our family.

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We looked at how easy we make it for them to come and work with us, documentation, paperwork, then making the engagement phase as simple as possible. Then we looked at what we are doing to recognise them and know we are listening to them.

Building those voice of the contractor programs has allowed us to hear how often they want us to communicate with them, what their preferred platform is and how that differs in various markets.

The final piece of that programme is the off-boarding. As our temp and contractor workers are coming to the end of their assignments, making sure that we're closing the loop again, working effectively with them, finding a way to rehouse them somewhere else or if they are going into a permanent position with that employer, transitioning our relationship accordingly.

It is those little extra touches that you can make that make all the difference to people at that stage.

Once we had embedded all that we were able to start looking at targets and identifying where we can do better.

Now that we understand the landscape, there are metrics we have been able to build, for example around the timeframes for placing candidates and making sure that we set service levels for ourselves internally.

Once we understood it, we were able to build it. That is our mantra for everything.

CX Network: CX very much depends on collaboration and securing buy in. Many find this a challenge because of how their organization is structured or how CX is perceived, but as you have explained, you have overcome this to deliver a comprehensive, company-wide experience program. What is your advice for those who are struggling to unite disparate teams to achieve CX goals?

Sinead Hourigan: Explain everything.

People respond so much better when you tell them the story, when you explain what it is you're trying to do, when you bring them on the journey with you. I found so many people were so grateful and amazed that someone had taken the time to give them an in-depth understanding of what the projects were, what we were trying to achieve, how their role would impact that and where they needed help, advice or support.

Usually people are told what they need to know, but not given the whole encompassing picture. There can be many reasons for that, but people want to know how their piece of the puzzle creates the whole. That is really important.

Another tip is to genuinely understand each other's deadlines, how we intersect with each other, how project pipelines meet at a point in time and how we try and avoid everything converging on one spot. Not only is that an impossible situation for all of the different business partner functions trying to achieve their outcomes, but it is impossible for our stakeholders and it is exhausting for the general workforce to have to deal with five or six different disparate projects coming, all of which are supremely relevant and important to the business.

But at any given point in time, the business can get very fatigued from trying to handle too much coming their way. Understanding how we converge and when is pretty important.

Finally, we have some excellent people in our business who are very good at the change and adoption piece. Pre-planning is the way forward, rather than just presuming that, because something is now better, we should just roll it out and people will automatically “get it”.

It takes time to embed new processes and it takes time for the business to adapt to new things. Working with a qualified and capable team that is skilled in this area is critical. Otherwise, even the best ideas can go missing if we do not share them effectively.

On September 19, Sinead speaks at All Access: VOC APAC 2023 in the fireside chat: Be sure that any VoC programme is clearly defined, measurable and actionable.