“Our commodity is humans. We’re not dealing with making a product, so we have to be flexible in our approach to work in a way that technology can’t be.” – Ian Stilgoe, Talent Acquisition Manager for the North Europe region at 3M, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Ian Stilgoe at 3M, who began his career in High Street Recruitment before embarking on a role as 3M European Program Manager under Volt Consulting Group and later 3M UK itself, later moving on to become Talent Acquisition and Human Resource Manager for 3M UK. In early 2019, Ian transitioned to his current role as Talent Acquisition Manager for the North Europe Region of 3M’s global operations.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I started my career in Recruitment, as many of my colleagues and my peers did. I worked my way through the management chain with some large recruitment companies, but ultimately I felt that my key attributes and strengths lay within the customer delivery side rather than new business development, which tended to be a key theme of Recruitment at the time.
That led me to look into a role with Volt Consulting Group at 3M UK to manage permanent Sales and Marketing recruitment and a portion of contingent worker recruitment. I was successful in that, and was leading a team of seven Volt employees to manage the account across Europe when I was approached by 3M to head up Talent Acquisition after the decision was made to bring recruitment into in-house operations.
Initially, I embarked on a career in the Recruitment industry because I could see that it was a lucrative industry that meshed well with my personality traits and strengths. I stuck with it because even though it was hard work across long hours, it was exciting, rewarding, diverse, and I loved working with a young group of people who were all driven by their desire to be successful.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the sector?
The first one within Talent Acquisition specifically at the moment is the war for talent. It’s extremely competitive, and 3M only want to hire the best, so on top of that, our recruitment process is very stringent. Attracting and hiring the right people for the role can be very challenging.
Another key theme is keeping up with ever-changing technology in a fast-paced environment, and I think that’s both in terms of ensuring we have the right technology to attract the right people for us, and ensuring we as recruitment professionals in operational roles can use that technology as effectively as possible. Navigating things like candidate pooling and applicant tracking software can be a minefield as there’s so many options out there, and having the time, headspace, and experience to understand what the best tool for you to use at any given time isn’t always easy. It’s important to be able to focus on a select number of systems at a time to make sure our time is productive.
At 3M Diversity & Inclusion are essential to innovation, we seek and value differences in people and our recruitment processes are aligned to support this. As an equal opportunity employer is important that we tackle the challenge of ensuring our candidate attraction strategy supports our D&I targets. We are constantly looking at ways to improve the way we reach out to our target candidate audience.
The final challenge, for me, is that across the industry, we’re seeing team sizes reducing but workload expanding. We’re increasingly being expected to do more with less—to continue to work on significant projects and perform operationally as we did before, even though our teams might be half the size now. You can implement all the technology in the world to try and ease the strain of that reduction, but ultimately there is still a huge amount of human input needed in the recruitment process, even down to the basic elements like orchestrating interviews and dealing with people on a daily basis. Our commodity is humans. We’re not dealing with making a product, so we have to be flexible in our approach to work in a way that technology can’t be. 3M are definitely supporting that, but the world of recruitment isn’t easy.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their career?
I would strongly recommend considering where your strengths are to govern where you fall, both in HR more generally and Recruitment specifically.
Recruitment organisations have evolved a lot over the years, but more traditional agencies are still providing a service to organisations that use mass recruitment. Their work may not be the most skilled practice out there, but if you’re just starting out in Recruitment, they can provide a good introduction to the key elements of good recruitment practice. From there, you have professional recruiters who’s approach may be to focus on a certain industry or senior level hires, and experiencing that is incredibly useful when helping you facilitate a career in recruitment.
I think it’s important to be aware of the fact that Recruitment isn’t as simple as taking a vacancy and matching candidates to it; the reality is very different. If you can consider your strengths and your expectations for a role versus what you’ll actually be doing within that role, you’re more likely to see success rather than fall by the wayside.
The third element of a Recruitment role alongside understanding the role and the sales aspects is where your people skills come in through matching up your requirements and candidates with the role itself, but you will start to develop these skills naturally through your professional development.
Talent Acquisition has expanded massively over the years, with departments being created and nurtured to the point where they’re now key contributors to the success of organisations, so I think there’s a real opportunity for people to enter the world of Talent Acquisition and work directly within organisations, and there’s a strong link between that and wider HR.
Just as Talent Acquisition has evolved into an increasingly internal function, HR has evolved into a more strategic operation with leadership influence, and when we’re talking to HR Business Partners from a Talent Acquisition perspective, we’re hoping and seeing that they’ve got a good grasp of the business and have gone through that pre-requisition process of understanding the business needs when they’re looking at hiring someone. When that happens, we’re safe in the knowledge that the brief we’re given is a true reflection of what is actually needed. I think that understanding is really important for anyone working in HR.
3M’s success depends on the energy of our employees and the high quality of their leadership. Most of all it depends on their continuous improvement. From sales to manufacturing to marketing to engineering, if you’re committed to expanding your knowledge and gaining leading-edge skills, 3M is the place to do it. Professional development at 3M includes excellent training, continuing educational support, mentorship from smart, experienced people and more.
You’ll find a strong promote-from-within culture; it’s an important aspect of our emphasis on learning and professional growth. You may also move between business units or even, potentially, to different locations around the world. That’s one of the many advantages of our diverse business model and global reach.
You’ll be working with people that have worked at 3M for years, and have so much experience that you’ll almost develop naturally. That will drive your whole career forward, wherever it takes you.
Ian has been working as 3M Talent Acquisition Manager since 2012, and leads the Talent Acquisition function throughout the North Europe Region at all levels of 3M’s operation.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.