Talent Centric
company acquire the best talent available
across the globe. But over the past two
years, the business has been on a journey of
transformation, following its 2015 acquisition
of Covidien plc, the largest acquisition in the
industry’s history.
“Covidien and Medtronic were roughly
the same size, with 40,000 and 45,000
employees respectively,” explains Pflanz.
“So the acquisition really required Medtronic
to transform. It gave us the opportunity to
consider how we need to be organised to
deliver at a much broader scale going forward.”
Rethinking the talent
acquisition proposition
While the acquisition signalled the start
of a massive company-wide transformation,
Pflanz points out that the appetite for
change was supportive.
“We had a ‘lucky situation’ where we
couldn’t just continue with two organisations
and two structures. I had done transformations
in the past which had often come up against
resistance, but in this case it was obvious why
we needed to change – people understood why.”
From a talent acquisition perspective,
this meant rethinking and redesigning the
function across the globe. Key for Pflanz and
the Medtronic talent acquisition team was
identifying what could be standardised and
delivered at scale, and whether there was an
opportunity to create efficiencies and models
that would make sense globally, but have
regional differences.
He explains: “We started by looking at the
entire assessment piece, to understand how
many people we hire and where across the two
organisations; most importantly, how much we
were spending to calculate the overall cost and
ROI of talent acquisition.”
At that time, Pflanz acknowledges there was
“a lack of consistency in collecting global talent
acquisition-specific data – not uncommon for
“Our task as talent acquisition
leaders is to have an informed
discussion with the business
around value rather than price”
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“The times of having 5-10 year
plans are long gone”
businesses that operate on such a large scale –
or the systems in place to capture and aggregate
it. This meant it could take weeks to collect and
identify meaningful metrics about the current
status of the recruitment function.
“Our first big realisation was the importance
of consistency and data availability to indicate
performance,” he says. “We found differences
around the approach to recruitment across
different continents – but broadly speaking,
the process from hire need to offer was similar.
Instead of inventing five solutions for the same
problem, we needed one solution that would
work for us globally.”
Focus on efficiency
Pflanz is clear that at the heart of the
investigation process was a desire for
effectiveness and efficiency – and above all,
value. “We are fortunate that the requirement
from the business wasn’t simply to make
decisions based solely on the cheapest
solution,” he says. “Our task as talent
acquisition leaders is to have an informed
discussion with the business around value
rather than price.”
As a result of data and insights gathered