Suzie Custerson
Head of Talent Acquisition, Asia, Regional Human Resources, Manulife
Topic: leveraging new strategies to source talent in talent scarce markets & building stronger capabilities as part of Manulife’s HR transformation journey
“We’re on a HR transformation journey,” began Suzie Custerson. Her company has been taking a hard look at how HR has changed over the last few years, and how to make the most of different markets.
The first priority for Manulife was to culturally change the organisation, in order to give leaders more focus and to get them engaged with the people they’re leading.
She shared, “The engine is working hard, and we need to make sure that the engine is robust, well-oiled, and that the strategies we’re deploying make sense in the markets that we’re operating in.”
According to Custerson, a business that wants to grow needs to look at how and where it sources its talent. She warned that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach—every market needs its own strategies and careful consideration.
“We want to attract extraordinary people,” she explained. Attracting the talent that is good for the organisation can be challenging and, without a solid strategy as foundation, that job can be almost impossible.
Custerson identified the need to make bold ‘statement hires’, especially outside of the organisation, creating a digital footprint and investigating how to improve customer satisfaction. When it comes to sourcing talent, her company has identified four main categories—social media, mass market appeal sourcing (job boards etc.), research capability and relationship channels.
She said, “Here in Asia, relationship based referrals are the core for most organisations. About three quarters of our hires are through referrals. And you have to invest in all of those areas, but you have to be realistic about markets that you’re sourcing from, because not all of those channels need to be heavily invested in in each and every single market.”
Additionally, it is important to realise that not every role can be upgraded, so HR has to be careful and selective in upgrading talent only where it makes sense to do so. That’s not to say that remaining in the status quo is necessarily the answer—there definitely exists a need to mobilise people internally.
“You have to move your people around internally at least every two years, if not more. There is no other way to retain your people if you don’t offer those career opportunities. Also, it will help develop and well-round people in order to fill some of the gaps that your organisation may see.”
She ended her talk with a look to the future, and warned the crowd not to leave too much of it in the dark. “It’s hard to plan for the future if you don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline,” she concluded.
To see Suzie Custerson’s Power Point presentation, and those of many others, go to our HR Download Zone here: https://plainsailinghr.com/hr-download-zone/
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
