Member Showcase - Stephen Morgan

Stephen Morgan, Talent Sourcing Manager, ASB

Thanks heaps Stephen for being the second community member to be put under the spotlight! Stephen shares some very useful tips and insights.

Stephen responds to 4 questions:

1. What's the essence of your role?

Talent Sourcing Manager, reporting to the Recruitment Manager.

Responsible for: Proactive Sourcing Strategies and Channels, Acquisition Reporting, Employee Referral Programme, Candidate CRM Database, and Executive Recruitment. Also involvement in Employer Brand activity and ad-hoc HR projects.

I’ve been with ASB group for 5 years, the role is in its second year now and is still evolving. Some typical activities this year will include all planning and running of external and internal sourcing events, such as uni visits and career fairs, career evenings, internal team career events, general careers fairs both here and offshore (eg Wellington, London and Leeds expos). Other activities include running research and search assignments, promoting and running the employee referral programme, trialling new web sites and media, niche networking events, and recruitment team communications - both internally and externally.

2. ASB attends career expos within NZ and overseas. Has this been an important part of your hiring strategy?

Career Expos are often run in conjunction with our banking teams (eg migrant banking), promoting ASB group as both an employer and as a provider of financial services. It’s an important part of our branding as one of NZ’s leading employers to partner with our other divisions and give a flavour of our culture and our services to potential employees and customers.

Tips for newbies thinking of attending events, like the offshore expos include:

Look at the smaller centres as well as London. London tends to attract lots of similar candidates profile groups; IT, Engineers, Programme and Project Managers.
Look outside London for more variety and perhaps more realistic salary expectations. Leeds was a pleasant surprise this year offering superb venue, greater breadth of candidates and a bit more 'talk -time'. In fact there was probably only about a difference in 500 in the attendee numbers between Leeds and London.
Do some research in advance, partner up with offshore offices and others to do more than just the one of 2 events and profile yourself before you arrive. Don’t just rely on the Expo companies to promote you.

3. With the economy looking a bit glum at the moment, what sort of challenges do you see in 2009 for yourselves and other NZ employers?

Cost management is on most agendas at present, so of course labour costs and project/running costs need to be a focus; However, its business as usual for us as far as reaching and talking to candidates interested in
ASB. We still need to build our talent pools and pipelines, understand where the niche talents are and what they are doing; keeping them interested engaged and informed.

4. What does Recruitment 2.0 mean to you?

We have learnt a lot and are still learning a lot about what 2.0 can, and is, doing for us to support our initiatives. Our new ASB Bank website went live late last year with new functionalities / capabilities in blogging and other features. We hope to tap these for our new careers website coming soon. Last year we launched new Alumni sites for Maternity and OE employees, which have gone really well. We are looking at social media and trialling some projects in this space at present. I did direct marketing and social media PR courses last year to grow my skill in B2C comms and enhance more and more interaction with our candidate database. We also have been developing online assessment tools for identifying and developing internal talent. New tools such as Trackmeback.com are great online initiatives that provide a forum for 2-way interaction. The advent of new job boards, which are featuring "mash-up technology" are looking like the way forward in this competitive online space.