Catalyst | Digital
D
Developing talent
from within at Sanofi
Karl Vansteenkiste
W
ith the arrival of a new CEO, healthcare giant Sanofi
is keen to accelerate the development of internal talent
with the help of digital tools, writes Karl Vansteenkiste,
head of talent acquisition, Europe.
The past few months have turned the hiring market on its head. We
have offered contracts to people we’ve never met in person which
would previously have been unthinkable. Luckily, we had all the digital
infrastructure in place to support virtual hiring – we now have around
12 different tools and technologies within the business to support
talent acquisition.
As we emerge from the pandemic, I want to take the acceleration that it
has prompted around talent and use this as an opportunity to streamline
other areas. I see lots of opportunities to improve the candidate experience,
for example. Digital tools allow you to mass-customise the candidate
experience, which will enable us to do volume recruitment but in a
personalised way, which is exciting.
Our newly-appointed chief digital officer (CDO), Arnaud Robert, will also
bring a new drive in terms of the digital enterprise we need to become.
The pandemic was
the best chief
technology officer
we’ve ever had
Widening access to talent
The pandemic has accelerated a shift in mindset around remote
working and access to talent. Managers understand that if we are
not expecting people to sit in the same physical office, we are not
restricted to hiring from one geography; this opens up the talent pool
significantly, providing access to different levels of talent.
However, it’s quite different managing a team remotely versus one which
is physically present, so we do need to consider the skills we require from
our leaders. What kind of training do we need to put in place to enable
them to become effective remote leaders? Clearly, people have embraced
virtual ways of working because they have had to, but there’s a difference
between working remotely for three months and doing it sustainably for
the long term.
Play to win: develop from within
Our CEO, Paul Hudson, joined us in 2019 and announced a new
strategy called “play to win”. In our space, this means that talent
acquisition and talent management will be brought together into one
function – and we are at the start of this journey.
One of Hudson’s key messages is that we need to be able to ‘bet’ more on
internal talent and create a culture of developing from within. One of our
challenges around this is having the technology to support our internal
talent market and reach talent in a more automated way. Currently,
around 30% of the jobs we post internally across Europe do not attract
any internal applicants, so we need to do some work around mobilising
our passive candidate population in-house.
HR can help facilitate this. While we tend to put people in the driving
seat of their own careers, it’s important to ensure that available roles are
made visible to everyone, and that staff have a chance to gain exposure.
We must anticipate
what skills we will
need two or three
years from now,
and develop our
own people towards
those skills
Through an ‘insight-first approach’, we want to enable our internal
recruiters to identify people with suitable skills to match with new
roles. We are about to deploy ARYA – artificial intelligence software that
integrates with [human capital-management software] Workday – which
gives recruiters sight of internal talent profiles so that they can proactively
target those with the right skills and capabilities.
We can also educate managers around the value of hiring internally. For
example, where a manager is looking externally for a 100% ‘plug and
play’ solution, but we have an internal candidate who is an 80% match,
we would encourage them to select the existing employee; over time, we
can develop the remaining 20%.
In addition, we need to look at how our management infrastructure is
supporting mobility, a lot of which comes down to the way we develop
talent internally; historically this has probably been a reactive process,
rather than a proactive one. We still have plenty of work to do around
workforce planning – anticipating the skills we will need two or three
years from now, and developing our own people to acquire these.
One thing I’ve heard among businesspeople is that the pandemic was the
best chief technology officer we’ve ever had; this has certainly been the
case within Sanofi. The pandemic has massively accelerated some of the
evolutions it would otherwise have taken a couple of years to implement.
Karl Vansteenkiste is head of talent acquisition, Europe,
at Sanofi.