Trevor Vas

Trevor Vas, CEO, Human Capital Management Solutions (HCMS), & Director, Australasian Talent Conference

Thanks heaps Trevor for being the seventh community member to be put under the spotlight!

** Please feel free to connect with Trevor or make any comments on Trevor's profile page **

Trevor responds to 4 questions:

1. What's the essence of your role?

I have a great job that involves learning and assisting organisations improve their Talent Management Functions. At HCMS we have a team of approximately 8 staff who work in a with clients in strategic, tactical and even transactional ways. It is always interesting.
For example, at the moment I'm working to consolidate and design a new Staffing Function for two organisations. This requires us to understand business drivers, current and expected service levels and develop a Staffing Function that is both practical and innovative. It must enable the clients to reduce costs improve quality and importantly create a competitive advantage in the market. Everyone appreciates the cost savings but they forget about them as the new service or functions become the norm. Everyone remembers competitive advantage for quite a while.
HCMS has a range of services and products that enable clients to optimise and improve their permanent and contingent staffing functions, create talent pools of critical/scarce staff, train internal recruiters and help organisations identify their EVP and develop innovative attraction and candidate relationship management solutions. At present we have a lot of business helping organisations with Their contingent workforce and redeployment solutions, our goal is to always have services and products that are in front of the market demand but relevant.
HCMS values and enjoys learning and so we have created the Australasian Talent Conference (ATC)in association with our business partner Kevin Wheeler.

2. Tell us more about the history behind the Australasian Talent Conference and the inside story around the upcoming Sydney event, 5-7 May 2009

The ATC started as a dream to create a similar conference to the ERE Electronic Recruiting Exchange in the US. It was conceived on the putting green at my golf club one Saturday when Kevin called my mobile and was keen to partner with us to bring the concept to Australia.
The vision of the ATC is to revolutionise Talent Management in this region. We want it to be the “go to event” each year on Talent Management”. We try and provide a mix of inspirational and practical solutions, to learn new ideas, mix with the world best in our field and most importantly network. Each year has been bigger than the last.
This year we have the best line up of speakers and our theme is “Talent Strategies for Tough Times”. In terms of speakers we have Dr John Sullivan speaking on Strategic Recruiting in an Economic Downturn, other speakers include Kevin Wheeler, Gerry Crispin, Master Burnet, Dr Charles Handler, Sue Polo from Google in the US, Christine Deputy from Starbucks and many others. We want delegates to have a significant ROI from attending the event. We realise that spending on conferences need to be justified with a positive return to the organisation.
Despite the down turn our numbers are quite good and we expect to have 200+ delegates attend and a good compliment of Sponsors and Exhibitors.

3. What does Recruitment 2.0 mean to you?

Recruitment 2.0 means interactive communications between all stakeholders (recruiters, hiring managers employees and candidates). It is scary and interesting! The end user becomes both the consumer and creator of content (i.e. the prosumer), with the 'social web' providing the platform linking communities.
In the case of recruitment, the prosumer's content can be variety of things typically a digital profile or a CV, the social web connects the communities of prospective employers and employees (blogs, mash-ups, podcasts, RSS etc.), and the long tail (as you rightly argue) is the development of niche job boards.
It is interesting I think once one organisation in an industry has adopted these practices others will follow. We are seeing the emergence and intergration of a range of technologies and tools, such as the use of social media sites and career microsites engaging employer and recruiters with and prospective employees and job candidates.
With the Australasian Talent Conference, for example, we’ve created an online space where recruitment and HR thought-leaders, presenters and attendees can come together to discuss issues relating to the industry, challenges, or to simply bounce ideas off each other given the common interest. Many organisations in the recruitment space are adopting a similar approach, however, are using Web2.0 technology to create a talent pool of interested, and like-minded individuals which they can call on to fill vacancies when the opportunities arise.
We’re in an era of greater visibility and accountability, and candidates, like consumers, will come to expect Australian organisations to invest as much time and resources online, at a level comparable to international competitors. Organisations will need to harness online communities to stay in business.

4. With the economy entering hard times, what does this mean for you? Will you and your team be doing anything differently?

Great question! Yes it means we operate on the basis of areas that enable organisations to save costs and improve efficiency as a number one priority. Our new consulting and training services on Redeployment have been very well accepted. We are also offering to audit Contingent Workforces and have created a best practice framework to enable an organisation first gain control of their contractor numbers and supplier margins and then create significant cost improvements by getting control of pay rates and utilisation of the workforce.
We commence most services on a low cost entry point as a basis of establishing and evaluating the ROI of a potential project and then understanding the payback on a larger project. This works, we sell off project plans.
We love this approach it keeps everyone focussed and it is transparent.

Last updated by Paul Jacobs Apr 29.

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