Talent is our world

I’ve now been in my new role within AMS for a month and I thought I would share some thoughts on our new mission, what it means to me and what I hope it will mean for our talented staff around the world.  This article is unapologetically targeted towards my colleagues in AMS but I hope it will resonate with all Talent Acquisition (TA) professionals regardless of role, location or whether they are working in an in-house environment or with an outsourced partner.

Within TA our mission is simple, we’re seeking to hire the very best talent to enable our businesses to be successful.  How we do it is important (speed, cost, experience), but our ultimate mission is a simple one.  One of my proudest moments in AMS came a few years ago when I was copied in to an email from a global HR leader within one of our large pharmaceutical clients, to a small team of AMS recruiters supporting manufacturing hiring for that client in Europe.  The email thanked our team for the contribution that they had made to ramping up the production of an incredibly important vaccine that was urgently needed to tackle a virus spreading quickly in Africa.  The contribution that our team had made had helped to save lives. 

Most of us will know the story about President John F Kennedy visiting the NASA space centre in 1962.  During the tour the President spoke to a janitor and asked him what he was doing.  “Well Mr President” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

We like to tell ourselves that TA isn’t rocket science yet we certainly have a lot of complexity in what we do.  We are continually focused on optimizing our services through process design, deployment of technology, through leveraging data to analyze and predict performance.  We focus on how quickly we can perform our tasks and the cost-effectiveness of our work.  Sometimes we may forget our ultimate mission – our own versions of putting a man on the moon.

Within AMS our vision is to harness a new universe of talent for the world’s leading employers.  Put simply, talent is our world.  We want every single colleague in AMS to understand the part that they play in that mission.  I’ve heard great stories from Recruiters who have gone out of their way to support candidates through the hiring process by spending time checking-in with candidates out of core working hours or by finding time to have a coffee with new starters to welcome them to the business.  I’ve heard stories of Sourcers making connections and discussing potential roles with people they meet whilst on holiday or in coffee shops.  And I’ve heard stories from Administrators who have simply made the effort to put a call in to a candidate to connect in advance of an interview to wish them good luck.    

I’ve asked my colleagues in Client Operations to share more stories with me so I can share them further to help motivate and inspire all of us to put talent at the centre of our worlds.  It’s a very small reminder that all of us are contributing to a far more important mission.  In our own ways we should each be helping to put a man on the moon.