Ros Smith, HR director

Citation

Smith, R. (2009), "Ros Smith, HR director", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2009.37208cab.004

Ros Smith, HR director

Article Type: Practitioner profile From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 3

HR executives share their experience in human resources

In early 2005 when Ros Smith joined IRI, a provider of consumer, shopper and market insights, she brought with her over 20 years’ of HR experience. Prior to joining IRI, she worked for Quintiles Transnational Corporation, Dun and Bradstreet and Abbey, in addition to several smaller IT organizations. Although she has a background of working across many market sectors, Smith believes her most valuable experience has come from working within organizations where change has been constant and fast paced.

While at IRI, Smith has overseen a series of transformations, which have resulted in substantial restructuring of the business, offshoring of certain functions and an increased focus on the provision of new and innovative solutions to customers. Like many in her role she is increasingly asked to do more with less. These demands have led to an increase in third party partnerships and precise outsourcing. Regarding these issues, she is pragmatic and to get the needed results she has relied on her penchant to be bold and innovative.

Resourcing excellence

In July 2007, Smith partnered with Aon Consulting in order to change IRI’s recruitment model. Previously the company relied heavily on the use of employment agencies to source candidates, which put it in a reactive mode in terms of hiring new employees. Another drawback of this approach was that it did not allow IRI to build its own talent pool and significantly reduce the cost and time to hire.

Aon provided IRI with an in-house team of resourcing specialists and introduced a candidate tracking and management information system. This allowed a new recruitment model to emerge within the company. Today, this new structure utilizes multiple channels to source candidates, such as CV mining, web and direct advertising, employee referrals, networking and graduate campaigns, all of which are helping to lower the company’s sourcing costs.

Although IRI has retained some recruitment agencies through a preferred supplier list, the use of agencies has reduced from 90 to 30 percent of the sourcing channel. Smith says: “This has reduced cost to hire by more than 36 percent and saved the organization over £200,000 in fees in the first 12 months of operation. Other benefits to emerge from having a homegrown talent pool include improved hiring manager satisfaction, greater brand awareness and overall a better candidate experience. Through proper sourcing and screening processes prior to an interview, both HR and management time is best utilized by ensuring only quality candidates are being presented for consideration.”

Attracting and retaining

Like many organizations, IRI offers a competitive benefits package to attract and retain employees, however, the company realized that unless these were effectively communicated employees would have difficulty valuing them. The results of a benchmark study confirmed this view. Smith explains: “The results showed us that 59 percent of employees were unaware of their total benefits package, and that due to the low level of employee contributions only 10 percent were on track to meet their retirement ambitions. Although employees had access to online pension information and with it the ability to make quick and easy changes to their pension funding, less than 5 percent made use of the facility. It was clear that our benefits package was not providing the organization with the expected return-on-investment.”

With the full backing of the UK board, IRI undertook a partnership with Secondsight, a specialist employee benefits company. Smith comments: “Not only was there a good cultural fit between the two organizations but Secondsight had an ability to transform very dry and tedious subject matter into material that was simple to understand, relevant and interesting. We pulled the plug on the online system and chose a back-to-basics approach to communicating with employees – face-to-face.” As an incentive, IRI agreed to increase the employer contribution by a half percent if employees would save a minimum of three percent of their salary into their own fund. Secondsight ran a series of group presentations to raise awareness, which were followed by one-to-one benefit focus meetings where each individual’s situation was reviewed with a financial advisor. During these meetings it was possible to increase the awareness and understanding of the company benefits package and encourage employees to make appropriate financial provisions for their future.

As a result, today 65 percent of IRI employees are on track to meet their retirement ambitions; 71 percent have increased their contributions and over 70 percent say their understanding and knowledge of their pension has increased by a significant amount. Smith says: “Perhaps most importantly, over 50 percent of IRI employees now communicate that, if offered another job, their IRI benefits package would have an impact on their decision to stay with the company. This program is ongoing with all new employees going through the same process and with further one-to-one reviews available to all employees upon request.”

Ros Smith

About the author

Ros Smith is HR director at Information Resources Inc. She has over 20 years’ industry experience from across the finance, IT, pharmaceutical and market research sectors. Ros Smith can be contacted at: ros.smith@infores.com