Two audiences, two objections

In 2015 I took over recruitment for the London office of an international firm. At that time, almost everything ran through agencies. Real direct sourcing — someone going out and finding candidates rather than posting an advert and waiting — was running at perhaps twenty per cent. The rest was expensive, and most expensive in the least defensible place, on the relatively junior roles where an agency fee is hardest to justify.

There was no shortage of good intent. The HR team did what they could, but advertising roles and reviewing CVs properly were a fraction of an HR manager's job rather than anyone's actual job, and it showed. Several agencies held relationships across the office, none of them managed particularly closely. From the agencies' side it was a comfortable arrangement.

I wasn't an employee. I'd been placed there through an RPO provider as part of a model the firm was trialling, and the decision to trial it had been taken by the Global HR Director and others in the US. London was a big office and one of three or four where the model was being tested.

Where I actually stood

The textbook version of change management says you secure sponsorship, then you implement. That is not what I had.

The decision had been made three thousand miles away by people the London office rarely saw. I was not on the payroll, which meant that to some people I was an outsider brought in to change something, which is a difficult way to arrive anywhere. And the cost of me landed on a local P&L, in front of a finance director who scrutinised every penny and was not yet persuaded that this one was worth it.

What I had was a mandate from the centre, scepticism where the money sat, and an HR team with goodwill but no particular authority to make anyone do anything. That is not an unusual position. I'd say it's the normal one, and the honest version of most change work is that the person in the middle has to make real a decision somebody else took.

What I built, and what actually moved

The process part was unglamorous: how we went to market, where candidates would actually come from and which sources were worth the time, someone whose job was to read CVs properly rather than fit it around three other things, a screening stage, two rounds of interview, and onboarding that was managed rather than assumed. I sat in the interviews myself, partly because I'd sourced the candidates and wanted to see how they came across, and partly because an outside view is worth having when the other interviewers all know each other.

None of that is difficult to design. Any competent recruiter would have written down roughly the same thing.

The half that mattered was the other one. I spent that first period building relationships with the partners and hiring managers, and the currency in those relationships was not enthusiasm or a good deck. It was candidates. We found lawyers and paralegals they would ordinarily have gone to an agency for, and we found them reasonably quickly. That is what turned it, and it turned faster than I expected.

The second objection

What's worth noticing is that it only turned one audience. The people using the service came round on delivery, because delivery was the thing they cared about. The person paying for it did not, because delivery wasn't their objection. Their objection was the line in their budget, and no amount of good hires makes a cost line disappear.

They came round slowly, and never enthusiastically. They were always going to scrutinise the pennies, and I don't think that's a flaw in a finance director. What changed was that they could see what the money was buying. That took months rather than weeks, and it took a different kind of evidence than the hiring managers needed.

That was two audiences with two different objections, moving at two different speeds. I'd assumed there was one conversation to have.

The office launch

The moment the model stopped being about cost was a new office opening.

We had a new office to staff and a date it had to open by. Some sourcing beforehand, then two weeks of back-to-back interviews, and every single person we hired for it came directly. Not one agency placement.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overclaim. Agencies could have done it. They fill offices for a living and they would have found people. The point isn't that we did something impossible. It's that when I arrived the firm could not have done it this way at all, and by then it could — at speed, at volume, with its own team and its own pipeline. Direct sourcing had gone from perhaps twenty per cent to around eighty-five.

That's the difference between a saving and a capability. Savings get reported once and forgotten. What the firm had by then was something it could actually use when a date was fixed and there was no time to negotiate terms with three agencies.

What I think this says about sponsorship

The order was the wrong way round, on paper. I didn't have local sponsorship and then deliver. I delivered, and sponsorship followed — first from the people using the service, later and more grudgingly from the person funding it.

I've since seen enough change work to know why that worked, and where it wouldn't. It worked because the unit was small enough to prove something in. Nine offices, a function I could see all of, hires that showed up in front of the people who doubted me within weeks. Evidence was available at a speed that made argument unnecessary.

That doesn't hold everywhere. Run a programme across thirty-plus offices and five thousand people and you have almost no direct contact with the work itself. It reaches people through champions, HR teams and local leaders, and whether it lands at all depends on whether those people carry it. You cannot demonstrate your way to credibility when you aren't the one doing the demonstrating. At that scale sponsorship has to come first, and getting it is most of the work.

So I'd put it like this. Sponsorship isn't a box you tick before starting, but something you either secure in advance because you have no way of proving anything quickly, or earn afterwards because you do. Knowing which situation you're in is the judgement, and getting it wrong is how these things stall.

I left to pursue a business project of my own. My replacement has since moved on as well, and the firm still has a talent acquisition team. I couldn't tell you the process runs as I left it, and I'd be surprised if it did. But a function that didn't exist when I arrived is still there a decade later and at least two people removed from me, which is what tells you whether it was a change or a project.

If you're looking at a hiring process you think needs rebuilding: do you actually have the sponsorship, or are you assuming it because someone senior said yes once in a meeting?