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Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters on Talent Talks. And catch up on previous episodes of The Talent Revolution—a podcast dedicated to talent acquisition specialists, people leaders, and CEOs who want to hire better humans, and build stronger teams.
Know someone who'd be great on Talent Talks? Email us at podcast@pinpointhq.com
Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, Founder and CEO here at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Sophie Brown, Talent Acquisition Manager at thyssenkrupp Materials UK. thyssenkrupp are one of our brilliant customers. They work in the manufacturing industry, and I think really interestingly, Sophie very frequently recruits for these super niche roles, like Slitter Operator, and Plate Saw Operator, which is a super interesting challenge.
Really excited to chat more about how she's doing that. Are you ready for some questions, Sophie?
Sophie Brown: Yeah, let's fire away.
Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. Thank you for joining me today. So I think, look, we always start with the same thing, right? If you weren't in recruitment, what would you be doing?
Sophie Brown: This is a really good question because I have lots of different interests that I'm interested in.
So that can honestly range from marine biology. So I'm a bit of a shark nerd. I really love sharks, but obviously I'm not going to be a marine biologist in the UK, because there's no fun ones or exciting ones here. So that one's out the window. My team laugh at me as well, because I'm really into true crime.
So if you need any Netflix documentary recommendations, I'm the girl to come to. I always think being an investigative journalist in true crime would have been really interesting. But if I had to pick, if I wasn't in recruitment, I would probably be doing something maybe within dermatology or skincare, because I'm quite interested in that as well.
So I'd probably go for that.
Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. There's a whole bunch of things.
Sophie Brown: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: No, it's great.
Sophie Brown: It's quite a mix.
Tom Hacquoil: No, it's brilliant. And look, we just spent like 20 minutes talking about our collection of the dogs. And really enjoying this.
Sophie Brown: Exactly. Yeah, I love dogs as well. So maybe a dog groomer.
Tom Hacquoil: You you left me hanging on to two things there, right? So you said, You love sharks and my best friend's wife is obsessed with sharks. So I need to ask you what your favorite type of shark is.
Sophie Brown: That's probably very cliche, but it's got to be a Great White. That is top of my bucket list.
I would love to go Great White shark cage diving. That would just be, yeah. I know it's so random, isn't it? I don't even know where the interest came from, but I've just always been really fascinated by sharks or, marine life. That's why I say marine biology would have been really interesting, but not here in the UK, because I'm not that interested in basking sharks in Cornwall, so.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, no, I get that. I live in Jersey and we have those off the coast of Jersey every now and again as well. And then the second thing is you whet the appetite with the true crime Netflix reccos, but then didn't actually give us any. So please give us a Netflix recommendation.
Sophie Brown: Oh gosh now I've got to think of one, haven't I? Oh my goodness. Why can't I think of one off the top of my head? I'll tell you what, I can give you a good podcast. Actually, this is a good follow on because they did recently do a Netflix documentary about it as well.
It's called Sweet Bobby. And it's about this woman who was basically catfished in the most horrendous way. I won't say any more, but if any of your listeners, or if you're interested in that, then please go and listen to it because it is a really good one.
Tom Hacquoil: Brilliant. Thank you, Sophie. So we talked about driving to sites and stuff like that. I think let's talk about what you're actually doing at thyssenkrupp. So give me the 60 second summary of what your role is and what that looks like day to day.
Sophie Brown: Okay, sure. So my role really does encompass everything from recruitment and talent acquisition.
So I'm responsible for all of the hires across all of our sites in the UK. So we have just under 500 employees across our sites. We have three sites in the Birmingham area, one in Preston, one in Darton, one in Milton Keynes, and then we have two in Belfast as well. So I'm responsible for doing all of the recruitment for all of those roles.
So that's everything from doing the vacancy briefings with the hiring managers, advertising the roles screening the candidates. doing the telephone interviews, booking in the interviews doing obviously all the feedback with the candidates as well. And then there's the more strategic side of my role too.
So obviously last year we implemented Pinpoint, which was a really fun project to work on. And this year I'm looking a lot at our EVP and looking at how we can build our employer brand and reach those candidates too that, aren't necessarily as tech savvy. Some of our candidates within operations, they're not on LinkedIn, they might be on Indeed, but it's like, how do we reach those candidates as well?
So we are doing open days this year. We're going out to careers fairs as well. So it encompasses everything. Being part of the people team too, I get involved with a lot of projects that maybe a talent acquisition and professional might not always have had the opportunity to get involved with being in a smaller company.
I say we're a smaller company. We're not. We're a global organization, but in the UK we are just under 500. So I'm part of the people team. And we have been accredited for top employer for the last two years as well. We're always looking at what we can do to not just maintain that accreditation, but what can we do to actually be the top employer and continue to be that top employer as well.
So yeah, it's a really versatile role to be honest, but I really love it.
Tom Hacquoil: That makes a lot of sense.
Sophie Brown: Longer than 60 seconds, sorry..
Tom Hacquoil: It's perfect, don't worry about it. I think you talked a lot there about, these recurring themes, you talk about candidate experience, you talk about EVP, you talk about top employers, like there's clearly a kind of a passion and a commercial desire within the business to really look after the team.
Talk to me about what you're doing in the candidate experience side, right? So, how do you attract those candidates, especially in the context of you were saying before, obviously these people aren't necessarily sat on LinkedIn all day. They may be on Indeed, but what are you doing to get in front of these folks and give them a great experience?
Sophie Brown: So I really don't think there is one thing in particular that attracts candidates because candidates come to roles through various channels and their interests are different as well. So it's a multitude of things. So it's looking at obviously your adverts and being transparent, there's a lot of trends and you see it a lot about candidates just wanting transparency when it comes to the salary and also the role as well.
And, for some of our roles maybe new candidates coming into the workforce, unless they're in this industry, might not have even heard, you mentioned earlier about a slitter operator, they might not have even heard of that before. So we don't just want to make an advert that is all singing and dancing, and then the candidates get to interview and actually don't really know what it is.
So the fact that we can add in videos into our adverts now, through Pinpoint, it has been so much easier. Such an amazing help for us because yes, we might have seen a reduction in the amount of applications, but the quality has been better. So yeah, so getting your adverts right is really important.
Looking at how you can reach candidates, who maybe aren't online so much. Like I said, we are actually gonna be doing some open days this year at our site. We're going to be attending more careers fairs and some of these careers fairs are in shopping centers as well, so we're reaching people that might not have even known who thyssenkrupp are, but then come and stumble across us at these careers fairs so that's another way.
I think as well, we're quite good at promoting our culture and our one team ethos here at thyssenkrupp, so I do think that really helps us attracting candidates. Because when we look at the data from our our employee surveys as well, one of the biggest reasons why people do stay with us for so long is because of our culture and our one team ethos.
So we like to market that as part of our EVP.
Tom Hacquoil: You talk there about videos are great and you're educating the market sometimes as to roles, maybe that they didn't know even existed or that they could do. I love that. I guess it opens up a broader question around, how do you think about that balance between hiring experienced folks?
Who've been there, done that, got the t shirt, have loads of experience versus folks that you're going to invest in upskilling and bringing new talent into the business. How do you think about managing that balance?
Sophie Brown: Yeah, so I think we're always very realistic. We know we're not always going to get super experienced candidates, but we don't want that either.
Again, one of the reasons why we have people stay with us for so long is because we offer really good career opportunities and we develop from within. If we are ever hiring, we'll always look to promote people internally first. Our people team as well do lots of really great work on workforce planning and succession planning.
So we're always looking ahead at what skills will we need for the future. Is that something that we can maybe bring an apprentice in for and train them up for those future skills needs or, can we offer somebody else internally that opportunity? Like you say, it is really finding a balance because sometimes you do need to bring in that expertise because then they can also be a mentor for the more junior employees and offer that expertise and that mentorship and then help to progress them as well.
We've got a really strong people team here and so they're always working with the managers to, bridge those gaps, especially when there's skills shortages as well.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes loads of sense. When we speak and have this conversation with lots of people, often the, maybe not the pushback, but the resistance or the challenge is being often that organizations struggle to create the infrastructure that you keep referencing. You've got this mature and established people team, you've got the wider business support, you're a well known brand, you've got the ability to provide that training internally, and so it makes a lot more sense.
I think lots of organizations want to build versus buy, and they try that, but they not put the right ingredients in the pot to make sure that's successful and they find them they don't get the results right.
Sophie Brown: I think as well sometimes we've brought in apprentices and they've been absolutely fantastic they've had no experience and it just proves what we're always trying to say you know it's not always about the technical skills.
It's about the soft skills and having the right attitude and willingness to learn. And we have some amazing apprentices who are now flourishing and doing so well within our organization. And I think because we have that the rest of our managers then see that and see the benefit of it too. So we do get a lot of support for that.
Tom Hacquoil: We'll move on to talk about interviewing and some data and stuff in a second. Before we do that, I've got my two wildcard questions. I always have to throw in there just to mix it up a bit. So first one's, if someone was to write a book about your life, what would the title of that book be?
Sophie Brown: What would the title of that be? Maybe Sophie-isms. Something to do with that. My family have a whole book of Sophie-isms. Things that I've come out with which just has them howling. Yeah, that's a tough one to be honest. What would yours be?
Back on you now.
Tom Hacquoil: God I don't know. I read a book recently and the chap in the book basically said that being an entrepreneur was like thousands of days of eating glass randomly interspersed with a few days of extreme joy.
And I think something like that, like "Eating Glass and Finding it Enjoyable" or something like that would probably do.
Sophie Brown: But look where you are now. I'm not just saying this, obviously, we went through a lot of demos and we really had to be sure that the ATS system that we chose was going to be the right one.
And I can't say enough good things about Pinpoint. It has just been such a joy to work with since we started, like right from the first calls with Andy, then to working with Ryan and it is an amazing system. So you should be so proud of yourself.
Tom Hacquoil: Thank you. And I appreciate that. I think I just don't want to take too much credit for the work of the team, right?
You highlighted some great people there. I think I'm good at finding smart people and putting them together, but the Pinpoint experience is not the Tom Hacquoil experience. But I'm really, I'm very happy to take credit for that. So thank you very much.
Sophie Brown: It's a team effort, isn't it?
Tom Hacquoil: For sure. I really appreciate that.
And Sophie-isms is a great book title, much better than Eating Glass and Enjoying It. I don't often get asked my own questions. And then I'm going to go straight to the second wildcard question. So we can wrap up on the data stuff in a sec. I think if you could spend an entire day shadowing someone doing a completely different job in a completely different industry.
Who would it be and why?
Sophie Brown: Oh. Okay, I've got a good one here. It would have to be David Attenborough because the guy is an absolute legend, isn't he? He's a national treasure and I think the places that you would go with him would be so fascinating. You'd get to see so many different climates, so many different animals and work with, see lots of different people and lots of different roles from photographers, divers, you know I think that would be so fascinating, so yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: That's a great answer, good effort. I like that.
Sophie Brown: Who would yours be?
Tom Hacquoil: Much less interesting than yours because I am a very boring person but probably Bernard Arnault. Bernard Arnault is the CEO and the founder of LVMH, Louis Vuitton Loewe Hennessy. And LVMH is just a massive holding company for fashion and retail brands typically.
And it's very different to the world that I live in and he's very far ahead in his journey. But I love reading about leaders and founders and CEOs but actually there's very little written about Bernard Arnault and it's quite hard to fly behind the scenes of what he's doing and so that's probably how I'd spend my day. Way less exciting.
Sophie Brown: I'll try and have a look myself on him after our call.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah he's a cool guy he's a bit of a grumpy man but that's eventually what I'm becoming anyway so it's part of the journey I think. Cool look that was a great answer honestly that was really cool thank you. So back to the work stuff, you've talked about candidate experience, you've talked about different types of folks, building, buying, all these sort of things you talk about these amazing apprentices as well and I can believe that, and I see some of that stuff play out in real life. When you're interviewing people and assessing them what's your favourite question what's your go to thing that helps you work out if someone's great or not?
Sophie Brown: So one of my favorite questions is, why are you interested in working for thyssenkrupp? And that's because we're all genuinely really proud to be part of thyssenkrupp, and we want people who are those brand ambassadors even within our operations teams.
They know they're not just a plate saw operator. They really understand how they contribute to our organization. Right from when I'm speaking to them at that telephone interview, I tell them that they're contributing to making parts that might go into an airplane, or it might go into an MRI scanner, or, it might go into a kettle in somebody's kitchen, I think it's really important that they know how they fit into the company.
And so we want people in within our organization who are going to be those ambassadors for us and are proud to work for us because then they'll want to keep growing in their career here. We'll see them stay a lot longer. So I always find that question really interesting because you hear lots of different answers.
I hear a lot now from candidates about they've had a look on our website and they're seeing all the great things we're doing when it comes to sustainability and our green ability strategy. Or they've seen about our events and our wellbeing events that we put on or our career opportunities.
I like that question 'cause I like to know they've done a bit of research and they actually want to work for us because I do think we differ from our competitors in that sense. For example, everyone who works for us is entitled to a company bonus. So right from apprentice level all the way upwards, and it's a fair bonus. Everyone gets, similar percentages as well, so we do really practice that one team ethos. And we want people who are going to come into our organization who also want to be part of that.
Tom Hacquoil: I love that, it's not actually about assessing the individual skill of the candidate.
It's about are they going to form part of a team that we want, right? And are they going to buy into the vision?
Sophie Brown: Yeah, the soft skills for us are, of course, like I said before, there are sometimes roles where we do need that technical expertise. But more often than not, we can train people up because we've got other people who have that and they can train people.
And so it's all about the soft skills for us and having people who can, be a culture fit or a culture add to our teams as well. We're not just looking for that technical expertise.
Tom Hacquoil: That makes perfect sense. Let's talk about data, right? I'm a geeky nerdy dude. Love data. Love to understand, what are you looking at as a TA manager to track and measure the success of the work that you're doing in the team?
Sophie Brown: So of course we look at our time to hire and our time to fill. That obviously falls a lot on me, how quickly I'm moving candidates through the process, but then we'll look at how long they're staying at each stage as well to see, are they sat at a particular stage with a hiring manager.
So we can then look to improve those processes. Obviously we want to make the processes streamlined as we can for our candidates. We want to provide them an amazing experience. I myself was made redundant last Christmas and felt firsthand what it's like to be ghosted by companies, or just to go through a process which just takes months, and it just doesn't feel good, and it makes you lose faith in that company.
And so for me, the candidate experience really is so important. I want them to feel like it's seamless and easy to go through. Of course, we look at things like where are our candidates coming from to track our return on investment. Our candidate surveys as well. So our candidate net promoter score, obviously that's saying whether the process that we have in place is efficient or not, but for me it really is less about tracking the success, but actually looking more about, okay, what can we do to make that this even better? What can we do to improve it? We're always trying to drive down that time to hire, drive down the amount of time they're spending at stages. Look at our equality and diversity as well.
How can we improve on that too?
Tom Hacquoil: Makes perfect sense. I love the sort of anecdote about your own experience as a candidate and being laid off. I think oftentimes the people who care deeply about these things that aren't necessarily immediately tied to commercial value, i.e. like candidate wait time are people who've had that kind of born out of their own negative experiences.
And so great that you can see that, make a difference.
Sophie Brown: Yeah, it sounds really cliche, but I genuinely, that is honestly why I'm in recruitment. I think a lot of people you speak to who are in talent acquisition have probably fallen into it. A lot of people I speak to have, and I certainly did too, but that is why I'm still in this and I'm not in dermatology, because I do really love talent acquisition. And I like having a role which is both hands on and proactive doing the recruitment but also the strategic side. Because I still like to speak to candidates and I still like to offer them that job because I know what it feels like when you really want a job and then you do get offered It's honestly it's such an amazing feeling and it makes my day giving that call to candidates.
Tom Hacquoil: I'm sure, I love that. Cool last few questions. I think AI, we can't have a conversation these days without talking about AI, right? What's your take on it? How's it impacting the industry in general and how are you thinking about it at thyssenkrupp?
Sophie Brown: Oh gosh, yeah, it's a big question, isn't it?
I think you have to have a balanced approach when it comes to AI. It's doing some great things, but there are certain things that definitely still need to have a human centered approach. So I look at screening of, CVs, for example. Obviously, AI can screen candidates out for you.
But for me, that still needs to have that human approach to it. Because like I said, we're not just looking at technical skills. We're looking at those soft skills and the cultural fit, the culture add. And AI can't assess that. And sometimes, I'll be looking at a CV, I might just have a question mark on something, but I don't want to rule that candidate out just because of that, I want to have a conversation with them.
So I think from that side, it still needs to be quite human centred. But then I think it's doing some amazing things too. I think, the work I'm seeing on chatbots, for example, on career sites. I really love that because that could answer a lot of frequently asked questions to candidates and answer them quickly, as opposed to them having to maybe call in or email.
They can get an answer a lot quicker, which again is better for their candidate experience. Also means that I have more time to dedicate to the things that I want to do as well and are important to the candidate. Good from anonymised screening perspective. I think that could be really useful for companies.
You might have some unconscious bias that they need to address. So yeah, I want to learn more about it, but I'm not all AI. I think there's got to be a balance.
Tom Hacquoil: I'm the nerdy guy and I'm not all AI either. I think that makes perfect sense. And I love the balance. I think not ignoring it and pretending it's going to not happen and go away as a sensible strategy, but equally throwing everything under the AI banner is not a particularly sensible strategy.
And I'd say two things. I think one if your recruitment team is phoning it in, they don't really care, they're not looking, they're not passionate about it like you, they don't get satisfaction from giving that great candidate the offer on the phone. Like then maybe actually AI can do a similar job.
I think AI isn't replicating the experience you're offering candidates anytime soon.
Sophie Brown: And that to me would just say that company in the long run will suffer because they will end up recruiting people maybe who weren't quite right for the business or weren't properly interviewed. And so they maybe haven't got a full overview of what the role is that they're coming to, and then they might leave further down the line.
So they're just constantly going to have issues if they look at it like that.
Tom Hacquoil: I agree, but I think the thing that you said a second ago, which was really interesting, though, was you talked about, hey actually, you want to spend the time looking at things. And maybe you've got a question mark on something that you've seen in the CV, but you want to take the time to probe deeper because you don't want to rule the candidate out preemptively.
I think the problem a lot of people have, and you alluded to it sort of 10 minutes or so ago, was, you've got too many applicants, there's too much volume, but so what people are then doing is they're knee jerk reacting, let's just use AI to screen them. But actually, what you did, and you talked about it, was, actually we did some videos and we educated our candidates more up front about what it is they were signing up for, and your volume dropped.
Sophie Brown: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: That volume drop is a good thing, because you're seeing more qualified folks and then you can take the time you need to spend them.
Sophie Brown: Yeah, it's quality, not quantity, that's what we're aiming for, we want candidates to apply with a good idea of what the role is that they're actually applying for, because of course people use AI to write job adverts as well, and it can sound like, you hear the classic example, don't you, of sandwich artists?
What the hell? That's not a role, is it? I think you just have to be cautious, don't you?
Tom Hacquoil: I think that makes perfect sense. And I think, look, final questions. We're recording this basically most people's first day back in 2025, right? And so I think as we look ahead to the year, what do you see as the biggest challenge on the TA industry's radar for 2025?
Sophie Brown: I think there's a couple especially for our industry, there's still a skills shortage and lack of candidates out there, especially for our industry within manufacturing. I think companies are also still competing when it comes to hybrid working and remote working as well.
Obviously a lot of companies can offer that. And so it's about how do companies ensure fairness across their organization, for example, we've got a team that are in operations, so they're on site all of the time, but then the rest of our organization are very much flexible hybrid.
And so how do companies ensure that they are managing to keep a cohesive culture and keep that team building going? So I think that's going to continue to be a challenge because candidates, they do want that remote working or flexible working still, but you still need people in the office as well to, it is easier to bounce off ideas.
And so it's about finding that balance. So I think there's still going to be challenges for this year.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes perfect sense. Sophie, thank you so much for your time today. It's been great having you.
Sophie Brown: It's been lovely speaking to you too. It was really interesting. Thank you for answering the questions on the wildcards as well.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, it's good.
Sophie Brown: Put you on the spot.
Tom Hacquoil: I appreciate it. Yeah. For everybody else, you can follow Sophie on LinkedIn if you want to keep up with what she's doing. And you've heard loads of great things that Sophie and the people team at thyssenkrupp are up to. Go follow them on LinkedIn as well. We'll put links to do that in the show notes.
But thank you very much for listening. If you know anybody else who'd be a great Talent Talks guest please reach out and let me know, and have a great day.
Sophie Brown: Thank you, thank you so much Tom.