“When you’re competing in a global market for top talent, you need to invest in the skills of your recruiters,” said Michelle Rajkumar-Clifford, Head of Recruitment for Wholesale & Commercial at Lloyds Banking Group. “We wanted to equip our team with the knowledge and skills they need to deliver a best practice recruitment process and a positive candidate experience. We also wanted to establish ourselves internally as a team that understands both the requirements of the business as well as how to work with colleagues to achieve an effective outcome.”
Talent Q designed the nine-day programme around the learning needs of the 14 participants and incorporated its assessments as pre and post measures of behavioural change. The participants went through a bespoke 360 degree feedback process, to understand how their behaviour is perceived by others, and completed a personality questionnaire, to explore how their own personality traits impact on their work.
The resultant programme featured five modules and was delivered, for two cohorts, over nine months. It covered best practice in recruitment, innovative sourcing strategies, how to improve the candidate experience, influencing and negotiation, objective assessment approaches and the latest developments in employment law. It also examined the operations of the Wholesale & Commercial division, to help the recruitment team to better understand the needs of the business.
The participants undertook an assignment and presented the results to their peers. The 360 degree feedback process was then repeated to assess the behavioural change. The results showed across the board improvements, with significant increases in areas such as strategic thinking, entrepreneurial thinking, adaptability to change, innovation and achievement-orientation.
“The programme completely rejuvenated the recruitment team,” said Michelle Rajkumar-Clifford. “They’d been working together for over three years so they’d become established and perhaps set in their thinking. They’re now more excited about their work, more confident in dealing with hiring managers, and senior stakeholders, and better able to embrace change. In a recent employee engagement survey, they achieved one of the highest engagement scores of any team across the Group resourcing function.”
Lloyds Banking Group now plans to roll out the learning from the programme across its Group resourcing function.
“The outcomes from this programme have not gone unnoticed internally,” said Michelle Rajkumar-Clifford. “Extending the learning will not only benefit our recruiters and the organisation, it will also benefit all candidates who apply to the Group.”
