Digital Innovation
“We want to help both our fans and
critics understand what is going on
in our company”
around the world, keeps us on our toes.
The war for engineering and product talent is
fierce in our sector but as the leader in our field,
our brand helps us to remain competitive and
attract people who want to be at the cutting edge
of payment technology and services.
There are certain skill sets in our arena that
are unique to the payments industry and the
talent pools are extremely small. For example, in
the area of ‘chip and pin’ security, the talent pool
for experienced engineers can be measured in
hundreds, globally, not hundreds of thousands.
In these hard-to-recruit areas, we pipeline
constantly and build long-term relationships
with candidates, passively if appropriate.
Being a technology company we try to stay
ahead of the curve in our use of recruiting
technology. We use cutting-edge applicant-
tracking and candidate-management tools.
Beyond those core essentials that any company of
our size needs to recruit effectively, we constantly
evaluate additional tools to support us in evolving
to the next level.
We recently formed a partnership with Textio,
a machine-learning platform for writing better
job descriptions. This has given us a noticeable lift
in terms of making our job descriptions appealing
to the talent communities to whom we need to
stand out, including women in technology, who
are important to our evolving diversity strategy.
Hiring manager effectiveness
Having made good progress in building our core
platform, we will soon be addressing our interview
and selection process. We are also working on
alexandermannsolutions.com
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a hiring manager effectiveness programme to
raise the capability bar across all segments of the
hiring process. The programme is made up of four
modules and will be delivered globally to all hiring
managers over the next few months.
To help attract candidates, we are building
our presence on the Glassdoor company ratings
website with support from Alexander Mann
Solutions’ consulting arm, Talent Collective. We
believe Glassdoor has become the ‘go to’ resource
for job seekers to undertake their research on
prospective employers. It is the ‘Yelpification’
of the job market and we want to be proactive in
using Glassdoor to promote our brand. We
also want to help both our fans and critics
understand what is going on in our company to
create a positive employee experience and drive
up engagement.
Employee referrals
Although our retention rates are what I believe
to be normal for a technology company, we
constantly strive to find ways to improve
performance. In the past 18 months, we have
implemented a new performance management
framework and a people operations capability
and, of course, the recruiting model in
partnership with Alexander Mann Solutions.
Specific to recruiting, we have launched an
employee referral programme and a careers
website dedicated to existing staff. These are
just a few examples of many things we are doing
to create a positive employee experience and to
attract and retain our most important assets in a
competitive global marketplace: our people.