Organisational Restructure, Recruitment and Development

A Major energy Retailer

Project Brief

Our client, a leading UK energy retailer and subsidiary of a global energy retailing parent company, had a resource issue in recruiting permanent staff within one of its functions. The function had been up and running for 2.5 years and comprised a core permanent team of 11 staff and a flexible resource of 35 contractors. Recruitment of contract staff had been relatively easy, whilst permanent staff had proven to be difficult. Competition for permanent staff was particularly competitive in their location. The manager had restructured and now urgently needed to redefine roles, kick-start the recruitment process and create a compelling development framework for permanent staff in the roles identified.

Barnsnape were asked to:

• Challenge the rationale for the new organisational restructure
• Agree the permanent roles
• Define the new role profiles
• Create a turnkey recruitment / selection campaign to be administered by HR
• Define development framework.

The complication with this assignment became clear early on – the Manager and Human Resources were significantly over-stretched in terms of time.

New organisational structure

The organisational design was tested by establishing design principles which were non-negotiable. This enabled the creation of a revised model and a new organisational structure. In this particular design it was critical that the staff retention issue was explicitly addressed.

New Role Profiles

The company had undertaken significant work on creating new competencies and company values, and these were incorporated into the new role profiles in a way to ensure that new behaviours could be reinforced.

Turnkey Recruitment Campaign

It was critical to look at leading practice within recruitment. Desk research and interviews were undertaken to establish the possible options. The critical design factors in designing a sustainable recruitment campaign were to:

• Minimise the time investment for HR and the Client
• Outsource activity where possible
• Improve significantly the short-listed candidates
• Make the proposition attractive to recruitment agencies to engage high performance.

The proposed approach was to engage one lead agency to manage the process, undertaking a significant amount of the recruitment activity. They would manage the advertising; manage the CVs accessed through different media, including their own contact base; set up a specific recruitment site for the campaign; use sub-recruitment agencies if necessary; shortlist candidates; undertake initial telephone scripted interviews; and undertake short listed first interviews.

We researched all possible lead agency candidates and sub-recruitment agency candidates and also created a tender document. The scale of the recruitment activity expanded as other departments with similar roles wished to include themselves in the campaign. We enrolled the client’s corporate procurement department and ran the tender process over very tight timescales.

The evaluation process was led by procurement and the successful organisation hit the ground running – creating an innovative campaign and one which could be repeated in the future.

Development Framework

The critical design factor was to create something which would be usable by all stakeholders – new recruits, training, HR and managers. We delivered a learning needs analysis for each role which distinguished between developing, competent and highly competent performance. We designed a learning specification which: identified 5 levels for each learning element and the training method which would be appropriate for each. The learning elements were categorised into a number of areas including: skills and accountabilities; technical specialism; supporting skills; management; organisational practices; interpersonal skills; and other behaviours, attitudes. We also created a career path for each role, clearly showing the development and progression of skills required through each.

Outcome and Benefits

To recruit and retain the appropriate calibre of staff meant addressing the real issues: lack of manager time; lack of human resource time and local competition for recruiting these roles.

The specific outcomes achieved included:

• Creating a robust organisational structure which met all non-negotiable design criteria
• Establishing new role profiles which incorporated previous investment by HR on competency development
• Creating a sustainable recruitment campaign vehicle which could be repeated through-out the organisation, at any time
• Creating a tendering process which identified the best organisation in the market to deliver the campaign process
• Providing advice/coaching to the Client to ensure they could fulfil their role in the process
• Creating a comprehensive development framework which would enable a meaningful dialogue with role holders to identify areas for development
• Creating comprehensive information for training to develop or outsource the development of the appropriate training modules.

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