Dimitri Boylan
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation Podcast. Today, we are joined by Mark Wilson. Mark has 20 years of experience in talent acquisition. And, he was recently the global people director, talent acquisition at Babcock International Group, a international defense, aerospace and security company. And prior to that, Mark headed up talent acquisition and development at McLaren Group.
Mark, thanks for joining us.
Mark Wilson
Great to meet up with you again. So thanks very much and thanks for the intro.
Dimitri Boylan
Well, you know, it was the best I could do. We’ve known each other for a long time, right? And, the last time we were together, well, I think we were in Spain, but before that, we were in the McLaren headquarters. Yeah. You gave me a tour of the factory, and…
Mark Wilson
Trying to sell your car.
Dimitri Boylan
You’re trying it. You were. You were trying to sell me a car as well. They’re a bit pricey…
Mark Wilson
They are… They look nice, you know, they fill a purpose.
Dimitri Boylan
Well, I controlled myself and did not buy one. But I am following formula one a lot more. Okay. And as is everybody.
Mark Wilson
Yeah.
Dimitri Boylan
I want to talk about two things. I mean, I want to talk about the defense industry, obviously, and talent acquisition in the defense industry. But I think we start with formula one. So, McLaren has been doing very well in Formula One.
Let’s talk about that because talent acquisition is an evolving area. But it’s always been very dependent on brand and brand identity. When you were at McLaren, were you playing off the brand? Were you benefiting a lot from the brand? And if so, you know, in what ways?
Mark Wilson
Well, it was definitely advantageous to have two adverts on television for two hours every second Sunday with your company name on them. Whether that’s advantageous or not is, another matter because, quite often, you know, particularly within the automotive business, we were looking for niche skills, and skills that were very much in demand across the global market.
You know, those candidates aren’t necessarily… They’re not responding to adverts, basically. If you’ve got an in-demand skill set you can contact it. But we got an awful lot of responses… For quite a small company, we were getting 100,000 applications a year.
But it brings its own challenges when you’ve got a lot of brand recognition and not an awful lot of positions that you’re hiring into. And, you know, the there’s, there’s a whole host of things that you have to be doing to make sure that people have a good experience because they’re still buying the baseball caps and they’re still supporting the team, and they’re still engaging with what ultimately is the product?
Dimitri Boylan
So you really had a cost to gracefully disposition all of those people.
Mark Wilson
And and doing in a nice way and, and making sure that you still bringing about engagement with the organization because it’s not it’s not just the case that people have applied and they’re not suitable for a role. They might have applied to the wrong thing and have applied to something that they saw advertised because they want to be part of that success.
But, they have skills that you do want in another part of the business. So it’s the constant problem of talent acquisition, you know?
These are big organizations with lots of… You know, I needed accountants, I needed marketers, I need finance people. I needed all sorts of skills. And sometimes they’re easier to get. I mean, you came to MTC, you saw where the business was based in Surrey, which is a great place to have headquarters. It’s not such a good place to have a car factory in stockbroker belt in England. Sometimes it was quite challenging to get automotive skills in a part of the world that didn’t have an awful lot of automotive businesses.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. geographically challenged.
Mark Wilson
And I found this in most organizations that you, you’re trying to do something in a changing environment and typically in a growth environment where businesses want more of something that sometimes the local market can’t provide. Or you’re looking for skills that the organization needs and you’re having to manage expectation around the availability of those skills at the price point in the market at that moment in time. It’s a massive train set that you’re pulling lots of levers on.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. What do you think you learned from watching the McLaren business and McLaren as a competitive entity because businesses obviously are always in a competitive mode, but you actually had a team that was competing every two weeks, all over the world. Did that affect the way you thought about how you took on your job, how you talk to your team? And how you acted inside the company?
Mark Wilson
Yeah, it was very prestigious. It was a great place to be, you know, it’s very cool. That’s why I went there in the first place. You know, it’s a great building. It’s doing great stuff. You know, the second largest collection of motorsport trophies in the world outside northern Italy. You know, all that stuff. But it’s, you know, you’re trying to do things without an awful lot of resources. You know, the money gets spent on the primary purpose, the race team or the automotive manufacturer or whatever, you know. So core competence sitting there.
So, you know, we were constantly trying to produce fantastic experiences. And fantastic, external imagery and branding and messaging for tiny price points.
Dimitri Boylan
That might be the story of talent acquisition in general. But, I think when you do get somebody to come into that facility, you have great closing capability, right? I mean, I walked down the aisle of them in the entrance there to the McLaren factory and it’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, right? I mean, it could be a movie set.
When you were there during that period, your strategic view of talent acquisition… How did it evolve?
Mark Wilson
Well, I think about it from a career point of view, that was my first time working within HR for the business. So up to that point, I’d been a supplier. So I was running outsourced operations for clients. Once you go into the team, the behaviors change.
I wasn’t trying to maximize the number of roles that were being fulfilled and I was getting paid for. It was, ‘do we actually need this stuff? Is there a better way of doing this? Is going out to market always the best way of fulfilling on that skillset requirement?’ And starting to have different conversations with the business around internal mobility and development, lateral moves within the organization, internal moves for individuals.
And that was something that you’d never be doing as an RPO or an MSP provider. It’s like, ‘I’ve got an order for something. Great. I’ll go get you somebody fulfilled to fulfill in that order.’ So strategically, it did change my thinking. Thinking about that cost piece, how do we do more with less? How can we get more output without having to necessarily to make additional investment?
And if I think of things, our candidate engagement… There was a whole team focused on selling cars. I tried to help and we were having our chat, but they had fantastic resources, they had databases. They had they were pushing out content on McLaren developments and product developments all the time. We started to….
Dimitri Boylan
Use a marketing machine. They had refined that marketing machine. They knew who their audience was, and they knew how to engage their audience. And they had the tools to.
Mark Wilson
Segmentation was on point. There was some absolute experts producing beautifully shot videos of the most recent thing and telling you about updates and how you could buy another one add to your collection or whatever. We were able to tap into that, get their content, build that into our CRM activities from a candidate perspective and send that out to candidates, which meant that we had really slick content. I had the best content to push out to people that we were keeping warm that I’ve ever had in my career.
We were just leveraging something that already existed within the business. It didn’t cost any more. And, I’ve got great videos showing California of cars, driving around tracks and all the rest of it, which, you know, was candidate-focused as much as anything else. So, those were the kinds of things you were forever looking at. How do I get a competitive edge? How do I use something that’s already here? How can I repurpose that and use it to my advantage, which was to the company advantage?
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, well, it’s interesting because you had access to a marketing department that was a very tight ship that had refined its process over years. When you came in from a technology perspective, what was your situation and what do you think… What was the biggest challenge for you in getting that to work in an HR environment?
Mark Wilson
Well, free stuff is never free. Okay. So the HRIS, the ATS that was in existence had been a present from a sponsor of the race team. It was okay, you know, nobody made any money on it. There wasn’t anything that had been paid for. It was a gift. And the implementation was pretty quick and it happened a long time ago. I gotta be careful what I’m saying because. Right. You know, it was there, but it was.
Dimitri Boylan
It was not ideal.
Mark Wilson
To get anything changed or to use the functionality well, or to use additional functionality or to get the updates. Yeah, you had to go through one poor guy who was a part time developer.
And that was the situation that meant that reporting was a nightmare. It meant that the workflows, there was an entire team of people running workarounds on an existing static workflow, rather than being able to build a workflow around the needs of the business.
So, when we had an opportunity to change how we were working, who we were working with. That’s where we started having conversations with, yourselves and others. We needed, product that we could change ourselves rather than having to go through, up to certain levels. We could drag and drop, we could get the system doing what we needed.
So if I’m hiring a blue collar production operative on the line, they have a different hiring process to go through to the director of engineering, for example, and building appropriate stages and details that were captured and process that the candidate goes through appropriate to the needs of the role that they’re going into. And we’re able to do that.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. So, you felt you successfully reproduced for your own organization the same type of marketing experience that McLaren was having selling cars.
Mark Wilson
Yeah. We could we could bring pace. I remember when we spoke at the time, you know, bring some physics and to bring some electronics into it. There was a very linear process. There was a series process for approvals and we changed that to moving approval. Approvals being in parallel. So you had a parallel circuit, rather than a series circuit.
And that then meant that our time to approval went from 24 days as we waited for finance and HR and all the individual steps coming in to switching that round. And as long as somebody ticks the box, the thing could progress through to hiring. And we took it down to two days, which meant that we could move into action quicker.
And it was just stuff like that. That came from an initiative over, ‘what happened if we did it this way’ and we changed things around, we’re able to do that so that’s all… You know, having the flexibility to be able to try stuff out and test it, see if it works.
Being able to get the data to show that something does work is what it’s all about. I mean, it’s if you think back to the formula One stuff, that’s what they do some prototypes there.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. Right. They’re collecting the data now on the rear foil deflects.
You know, let’s let’s talk about talent in general because you were looking for manufacturing talent. You were looking for skilled labor. You went onto defense. There’s been a lot of talk, obviously European Union now, talking about building up its defense industry.
These are industries that have not been invested in heavily over the past, 20, 30 years in Europe, in the UK. There’s going to be a very big recruiting challenge there to build up these industries. How dire is that situation?
Mark Wilson
How dire is the situation? Well, I mean, there’s the whole infrastructure piece. We’re talking about huge sums of money. The European Defense Fund, the last I heard, was 800 billion being put aside to invest on European defenses. And post the wall coming down. We can remember what that was. You know the peace dividend that came through that.
Dimitri Boylan
And now you have a situation where, in the United States, for example, it’s most highly, I guess, most obvious in the effort to build submarines. At some point, in the States we figured out that we don’t have people who know how to weld.
Mark Wilson
It’s a global challenge.
Dimitri Boylan
And apparently, you can’t build a submarine without a lot of welders. And you can go to a talent acquisition team and say, ‘recruit 500 welders’. But if they’re not there, they’re not going to recruit them. And I think you’re going to have a similar problem in the UK now.
What was your experience in Babcock? Was talent a really hard thing to find or were you inundated?
Mark Wilson
Yeah, it was challenging. So the welding piece, the two skills that are in hottest demand, electronics engineers and welders, were both in massive demand across the sectors. In the UK, there were a number of programs already in play that were swallowing up available talent. So there’s a submarine program. All the submarines in the UK are built in Barrow. There’s a program underway to build submarines. I don’t think this is any great secret. All the available talent is beating a path to Barrow to make submarines.
I was looking at what, the US are doing and they have exactly the same problems. And they’re looking at lateral hire, upskilling programs to introduce people to welding.
The the two key challenges are meeting the security constraints. So, you need to be able to get a clearance and you need to be able to join two bits of metal together with high integrity, so that it isn’t going to fall apart again. Normally, that would take four years training to get to the point that you can weld with high integrity. And the security clearance thing is five years in country normally for workforce.
And it’s a tough job. You know, this isn’t just standing at the side. This is upside down with mirrors welding pipe. So this is hard, hard work in difficult environments doing difficult stuff to the highest levels of standards. So, it’s a well-paid job, but quite right too because it’s an in demand thing.
So we were looking for the same skills to build ships and that was very difficult. We were competing against the submarine yards, which were incentivizing people to come and work for them because that’s strategic national importance. There were a couple of other those one other main yard building surface ships, which had a slightly lesser level of security clearance required, but we still had to meet a level of security.
But that was in the middle of a city, Glasgow. You may have heard of it, I’m from there. They have a 120-year tradition of making ships in the middle of the city and a 1.5 million population on their doorstep. We didn’t have that advantage either. So we were trying to get skills in an environment where we didn’t have a high population center within ready… within an easy-to-attract area.
We undertook an awful lot of, I mean, we were doing a lot of work in strategic workforce planning. So where are these people? You know, they work in oil and gas and Aberdeen offshore. Are they working down at the nuclear power station then there’s being built down in Somerset? The biggest construction site in Western Europe at the time still is, which is another client, by the way. So we had a requirement to deliver there.
And undertaking lots of analysis, we found that all the tiny pockets of availability of skills in various places, but none of them were going to tip it, you know, they weren’t going to make a material….
Dimitri Boylan
They weren’t going to add up.
Mark Wilson
Yeah. You could go to Romania and get ten guys from Konstantin shipyard that aren’t making ships at the moment because the Black Seas is not particularly active. Or is active because no actor from commercial shipping perspective. And you could find a couple of guys that had got settled status before the UK left the EU, but you then had to talk them into coming over and, you know, it’s but real, you were running on…
Dimitri Boylan
You find yourself in some very complex conversations.
Mark Wilson
We went to the Philippines, an Anglophone country, and we went to South Africa. And, along with colleagues at the other yard in Glasgow, we were looking at bringing in skills from these territories to undertake the necessary work, and we could gain a security clearance of an appropriate level to have them work on surface ships.
But, you know, getting into detail on it, I’m bringing welders 12,000 miles from the Pacific to come and work in Scotland to work on programs. That’s how scarce the skill is. I think the same thing is happening in North America, going to similar kinds of places to get skills. And, you know, the population that’s in Norfolk is many and varied and the challenges that exist…
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, yeah. You y can improve the vocational training. That’s a 5 to 8-year plan. But it’s not your 2 to 3-year plan, right? Your 2 to 3-year plan involves a very, very complex sourcing strategy, building pipelines with a lot of agility. But, having to really tell a pretty complex story.
So let me ask you this. Did you go to the executive management and say, ‘we’re going to the Philippines in South Africa. Here’s what we discovered about the Philippines. Here’s the way it’s going to work or, well, we don’t know how it’s going to work yet. We’ll give you an update in three months.’ I mean, what was that experience like?
Mark Wilson
Well, one of the drivers sitting within this was cost. So, because of the nature of the contract, everything had to be delivered by Babcock as cost-effectively as possible. We couldn’t go to a customer and say, ‘Hey, we’ve accrued additional costs, so you need to pay more.’ You know, we had a price that we had to operate within.
So, normally, you would outsource the pain of the bureaucracy to somebody else and they deal with it and charge you a margin and you just pay for the concierge fee. In order to get the business case over the line, we had to demonstrate that this was going to be more cost-effective than any ways of working at the moment, like paying for Romanians’ accommodation or paying a premium to somebody to come from Glasgow to Edinburgh, or whatever the thing was.
Those were the other ways of doing this, and they weren’t necessarily going to give you a massive volume of people, but they all were expensive. They ratchet up the price. So the conversation within the business, with finance and with production stakeholders and with HR and with lots of of different bits of the business was, ‘this is the way in which we’re going to be able to meet all the caveats in order to get that big lump of metal in the water, and it’s going to float.’ Which was the most important bit. The floating is really important in warships.
So, you know, it was a long process and it was consistent messaging. So irrespective of ‘what about this, what about this?’ You go through all the eventualities and the possibilities and you’re investigating, but it comes back down to data and ‘this is how you’re going to be able to do this thing at pace at a price point and the volumes that you need in order to get the program delivered within the budgetary constraints that exist.’
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, I think you have to sell it. Right? I mean, whatever idea you come up with, you have to make the case. It can be difficult to make the case before you have the data, of course.
I think talent acquisition without really good workforce planning is probably… has limited impact. Right? You’re going to need a highly agile workforce planning that’s really on point, and on point in the sense of not only understanding the emerging demand from the customer, but also the emerging skills of the communities. And where you can overlay those, your own community, your competitors community, in terms of their, regardless of what ontology you use for skills or however you define it?
I mean, ultimately, you’re going to be coming up with some very dynamic combinations of capabilities that fit some particular need. And it’s going to be much more fluid than it’s ever been before, right?
Mark Wilson
And that’s where the interface between TA and the function that needs those skills, you want to be interpreting, ‘this is where you can get on the market and this is what you need somebody to do and this is the closest you’re going to get from an adaptation perspective out there at a price level in the geographics so you can legally deploy into that role, based on what you’ve described.’
I do wonder if that’s the space where AI comes in to demystifying some of those requests.
Dimitri Boylan
It can certainly facilitate a lot of the analysis of the skills that people have. It can certainly improve the analytical capability of the people in talent acquisition and talent management that are trying to find the right fit. It’s also going to change the way the consumer expresses their skills too. We’re yet to see how how much AI is going to change the consumer.
But I think I think you’re right. AI is going to play a big role in it, not only as a capability, as a set of capabilities. Obviously, these systems we’re talking about are going to have to be intelligent to some degree as well.
But I think it’s going to challenge the tech stack that most companies are rolling with right now because a lot of the tech stacks are not really easily made… They’re not, they weren’t designed for AI to support artificial intelligence, they don’t have enough data. They’re not really collecting the right data. They’re not really configurable by the end user. So they might not even be fit for purpose anymore.
And then throwing artificial intelligence on top of that may have a limited impact because of all of those fundamental, problems in the tech stack. So I think there’s going to be a little bit of… There’s going to be a rush to do a better digital transformation, so that the AI can help more with this.
Mark Wilson
The pace of change or the pace at which the adoption is happening from a candidate perspective is even greater than organizations. And so can you show me a candidate that hasn’t washed the CV through ChatGPT or Perplexity against the job description? You know, if you’re not doing that, then you know you’re missing a trick.
Dimitri Boylan
So I think there are going to be quite a few challenges, in terms of identity. When we talk about talent acquisition, we already see an increase in the number of applicants who are really automated responses. And, our customers are beginning to ask for technology that can identify this automation and flag it for security reasons.
And I think that recruiting technology is going to have to evolve to address this issue. We’re thinking it’s maybe one of the three big topics over the next couple of years in recruiting technology. Have you had discussions with management about that? Have you had discussions with your own teams about the challenges now that you see because of artificial intelligence and the way candidates can use it to…
Mark Wilson
To apply for things.
Dimitri Boylan
To things or to get past screening, all that type of stuff.
Mark Wilson
Yeah. It was most prevalent in early careers. So the graduate hiring and early careers, but particularly graduate hiring where you were educating hiring managers what was available to the candidate these days. So, you know, a cover letter, won’t say a cover letter from a candidate to see if they’re interested in the jobs.
You can knock one of those up in seconds. Write me a cover letter from the view of a graduate, in electrical engineering from Bristol University, who’s applying for this job. There we go. What’s that giving you? That’s showing you that somebody knows how to write a very basic prompt in a basic LLM, and then copy and paste it and put it into your thing and you’re going to have to read it. So, that exists.
Real-time interview responses. Having a screen open that’s going to listen to what you’ve just asked them in a competency-based interview, prompt them with a response. And that candidate completes that. These exist. This is free-to-use stuff that’s already out there. So your selection process has to be able to either overcome that or reflect it or be able to encompass that into your hiring.
In some places it’s fine to use AI to write your CV because you kind of write it anyway, but to use it as part of a skills test for a particular role or a coding test for a role. Is that you doing it? Is that the LLM doing it? You know, there’s a line that you really have to think about in terms of, ‘What it is you’re trying to do here? Are you trying to assess someone’s ability to use a thing, or are you trying to assess someone’s ability to do a thing?’
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. The academic community is struggling with this to a very high degree right now. And we’ve been looking at their development of their policies around what constitutes the work of the student. And the model is being built around the fact that the AI is here, it’s free, and it’s ubiquitous. It’s going to be used. Now, how do we accomplish everything that we want to accomplish with that present?
And there’s still a fair amount of debate in there within the community. So it’ll be interesting to see how they parse out the use of the technology from the capabilities of the human. And, it’ll be interesting to see how they develop those policies.
I think that the talent acquisition policies are going to have to be pretty clear on this at some point in time. I think right now they’re not so clear. But I think that you want to get clarity… Well, particularly because you need to give that clarity to the hiring managers. You have to make sure that the hiring managers are not saying things like, well, I’ve assessed their writing ability because I read their cover letter and it’s really great. It’s like that is no longer an assessment of their writing ability, that’s the assessment of ChatGPT use.
So hiring managers will need to understand those things. Your TA team will need to understand those things, and they’ll have to know exactly what the policy is of the company with regards to how AI is used to help candidates get jobs.
Mark Wilson
And it’s back to what’s the purpose of the exercise? You want to have somebody in your business who can do a thing, not if you need to assess some of these writing abilities. Are they going to be able to use LLMs in the workplace to produce documentation, verify, check, make sure it’s not hallucinating, and do all the things to be able to share that effectively? They probably are going to use Copilot in Microsoft products and all the rest of it.
So, you know, what is the thing that you need people to be able to do? And what is that competence you need to build. Working with some of the AIs I’ve been playing with recently. Yeah. You still need to cast an eye over and see if it’s talking sense and if it’s logical, and if it encompasses all the eventualities that you might not put in your prompt. That’s the kind of stuff that you want to be determining if the person you’re hiring can do.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. Can they effectively use artificial intelligence and do their job, preferably better and faster than they did before? And can you then get your organization to be able to do that at scale so that the whole organization is enabled by artificial intelligence? That is something that’s going to take some work. There’s no doubt about it.
I think the challenges are pretty clear. The rewards are pretty high. But right now, you know, there’s really two challenges. How do you set your policies for your talent acquisition? And how do you assess the people that you have inside your organization right now and figure out where they stand in the spectrum? Because when you get to workforce planning and distilling down roles to what you really need people to be able to do, you still have to figure out whether that’s new people or the people you have. And whether the gap between the people you have and what they can do and what you want them to do in the future is of the you can close or whether you need to be setting up an international sourcing strategy because there is no way to close that gap. Right. And these things are all going to play into each other in a, you know, pretty dynamic way over the next couple of years.
Mark Wilson
Massively, massively. The possibilities are phenomenal. But it’s also, you know, we’re still all scratching the surface in terms of what the capabilities of these things are.
Dimitri Boylan
So, you know, it’d be interesting to see what you do next, and, to, to see what you’ve borrowed from your prior experiences to, to make that a success. I’d love to have you back, Mark. Thank you so much for coming in.
Mark Wilson
Love to come back. Thanks very much, Dimitri.
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