JOB SWAP – A HUGE IMPACT (FOR ALL)

Over the course of the next five minutes I’m probably going to become both a hero (twice!) and a villain.

There tends to be three things that keep me awake at night or spring me out of bed each morning: Candidates, Clients or Consultants (Recruitment Consultants). However, I do feel very privileged that these 3Cs have all helped shape an extremely rewarding and enjoyable career over the past 20+ years.

A day doesn’t pass without multiple conversations around: career progression, finding top talent or the challenges around delivering the best possible outcomes for our customer(s). However, it does still baffle me that the desires of so many Candidates and Clients are aligned – yet they turn to (Recruitment) Consultants to move A-B and C-D! Don’t get me wrong we are delighted to please A, B, C and D and it enables our business to succeed by making the best matches.

But surely there is a greater opportunity and value in discovering more around the objectives of said Candidates and Clients? As in many instances we discover that:

Candidates want:

• Greater scope of responsibility
• Fresh challenge and learning experience
• Opportunity to learn from a new leader
• Different perspectives from a new team / partner group

And

Clients want:

• Talented individual with enhanced skills and new competencies
• Fresh perspective to complement their team
• Both the IQ and the EQ to lead and grow people / business
• Talent from either a competitor or valued business

What if this could be done under the same roof? And one less C is involved?

For the record, I’m a massive fan of Job Swaps and Secondments. But sadly, even with all the advancements in technology, flexibility and more contemporary leadership styles we still witness many businesses not embracing Job Swaps.

Stop and ask yourself:

• In the past 3 years have you (individually or as a leader) completed or provided a Job Swap opportunity?
• In the past 2 years if you’ve moved companies, would you have liked the opportunity to explore a Job Swap internally first? (be that in a different department or division)
• In the next 12 months, what could you do (individually or as a leader) to create or provide a Job Swap opportunity? How can you commit to this?

In my daily interactions with HRDs, CEOs and CFOs; the discussion around “Talent” comes up often. How do we nurture it? How do we develop it? How do we identify & evaluate it? And, How do we acquire it? Since expanding our search & selection practices across Finance, Strategy and HR we have explored the opportunity to think more laterally around talent development and explore the knowledge and networks of individuals beyond their SME.

As businesses need to operate more dynamically (and often with less resources) to meet the external environment, there is tremendous value for leaders to have exposure to multiple functional areas and could take responsibility for multiple business units / departments.

If, for example, a Finance and HR leader swaps roles, they both gain not only greater commercial or people acumen, respectively. They most likely also gain greater respect for the challenges of each other’s roles and likelihood of working together better in the future (breaking down silos and stereotypes). From a career pathing perspective, they also provide themselves a potential future career path of being a future COO that they didn’t previously have.

Ultimately, leading a team of functional experts is more about the leading, coaching, stretching and development of the team than applying one’s own functional expertise. In fact, not having technical knowledge enables your direct reports to step up to resolve technical issues rather than relying on the most technically seasoned member of the team – win-win-win!

Expanding one’s learning from a different business unit or different function has a huge (positive) impacts for the individual, the team around them and the customers they support. Take a business unit within an FMCG business with a Commercial Manager supporting Operations & Supply or Sales & Marketing they probably also have a HR Business Partner in the peer leadership team. Think about those two team members “Swapping Jobs” for six months – sure there would be some technical gaps, however the impact and outputs of their respective roles are actually not that different if you think about the big picture!

(Reference: https://www.theacquiregroup.com.au/primary-role-executive-leader/)

Over the past six months I have posed this concept and attempted to stimulate the thinking of several executive leaders and HiPo talent keen to accelerate their careers faster than most. A few insights from such individuals has been:

Job Swaps/Secondments are a fantastic way of up skilling your staff.

It helps the wider Corporate Finance team to manage workloads where work fluctuates from time to time. Instead of hiring short term contractors, we promote secondments/ job swaps.

For this to work well, job security is paramount for employees. Hence, we hold their substantive position and do not back fill with a permanent replacement.

There is a clearly defined scope and deliverables for each secondment. We provide a lot of support to employees whilst they are on their secondment.

It is a great learning experience for employees to expand their horizon and try different parts of the business. It helps with employee engagement and retention.

These opportunities also opens up future promotions.

Noting we are fast approaching the period of the year where there maybe one or two (hundred) Recruitment Consultants at Ryan’s Bar – and I still like to raise a glass with my community; I thought it was only fair to close on the benefits of Job Swaps to our own:

Consultants want:

• Talent that has gained diverse and unique experience, seen progression – those individuals that have worn three hats in one firm.
• Clients that can be showcased as employers of choice – “Company A is the leading firm for Job Swaps / Secondments in this sector”. That’s an easy sell!
• Targets, knowing who does AND who doesn’t provide the opportunity for their talent to shine and accelerate their careers – you know what to do next!

If every business truly embraced Job Swaps or Secondments then naturally our market may appear to shrink (in the number of placements that Recruitment Consultants transact). However, we would all love to have a greater and deeper pool of ‘Top Talent to aid or headhunt, and more organisations that are an easier sell to the market (with the up most of respect).