1. WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK
Profile
RECRUITER APRIL 201526
PHOTOGRAPHY:AKINFALOPE
Charlotte
Harris
COLIN COTTELL SPOKEWITH
THE GLOBAL HUMAN
RESOURCES DIRECTOR AT
FLEXIBLEWORKPLACE
PROVIDER REGUS ABOUTTHE
OVERHAUL OFTHE COMPANY’S
RECRUITMENTSTRUCTURE
27WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK RECRUITER APRIL 2015
Imagine an organisation that goes from having
50 or 60 recruiters to more than 2,000 within
the space of just over a year. It seems an unlikely
scenario. But for Charlotte Harris, global HR
director at flexible workplace provider Regus, it
is very real.
The exponential growth in the number of recruiters
at Regus was just one element in a two-year period
of change that saw a dramatic and fundamental
overhaul of the company’s ‘field recruitment’ —
meaning recruitment of customer service staff
working in Regus’s network of centres, rather than
senior executives. “I don’t think we anticipated the
level of change that this would cause, but that is
Regus’s way — we did it so quickly that a lot of people
didn’t get a chance to catch their breath,” says Harris,
speaking to Recruiter at the company’s modernistic
Bruton Street business centre in London’s Mayfair.
Regus is a company in a hurry. In the last couple
of years it has opened in roughly 450 new locations
around the world, bringing the number of employees
to more than 10,000 in 105 countries. The firm expects
to hire 3,000 new staff this year. And it is clearly a
company in which Harris believes she and her team
have a vital role to play. “The work that I do now is
really enabling that growth, and that is rewarding… you
can really influence and change what is happening. I
am hooked on Regus — simple as that,” she says.
Harris is clearly in her element at Regus as she
enthuses about the company and recruitment’s
PHILOSOPHY OF RECRUITMENT
“Alotofpeopleseerecruitmentas
afunctionalservice.It’snot;it’sfar
morethanthat”

2. 29WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK RECRUITER APRIL 2015
pivotal role in it. But the picture she paints of Regus’s
recruitment going back just a couple of years is a very
different one. “It was slow, it was impractical, and
disjointed between HR and the field. The field was
saying ‘I can’t grow my business because HR aren’t
recruiting people fast enough’,” she says.
The company’s separate recruitment teams in
each of Regus’s geographies — the Americas, the
UK, EMEA [Europe, Middle East & Africa] and Asia
Pacific — “were quite heavy in terms of manpower,
admin and spend”, she continues. “We were asking a
junior recruiter in Hong Kong to recruit local people
in Brisbane. It was just ridiculous, so quite clearly we
needed to do something drastic.
“It wasn’t HR or recruitment’s fault. It was just they
were under-resourced, and didn’t really have the skills
or the accountability to do what they needed to do.
So we tore it up.”
If that sounds overdramatic, Regus’s rapid
Profile
expansion and plans for further growth suggest that
this is not a company that shies away from change.
Indeed, the subsequent transformation of recruitment
within the company was conceived from the very
top of the organisation by Regus chief executive and
founder Mark Dixon.
The changes have been twofold, says Harris.
“We have created more regions, but put in more
accountability and responsibility at the country level.
At the same time, we looked to standardise and
streamline everything that we do centrally to so that
we can scale for growth.
“It was the way he [Dixon] wanted the business to
go,” Harris continues, “to localise and decentralise that
process, so instead of having core HR teams running
recruitment, he wanted everybody on the ground to
basically own it themselves.”
The result is that rather than HR being responsible
for recruitment as before, area directors now have the
responsibility to hire general managers, while general
managers, who manage Regus’s centres, in turn
recruit customer service representatives.
However dramatic these changes are, she says there
was always a realisation that they wouldn’t work on
their own. “We quite clearly couldn’t just say ‘it is
your job to do this now’… It needed to be a lot better
than that because we needed to embed it and make it
part of what we do.”
With recruitment only a part of hiring managers’
busy day jobs, “we needed to make it as quick and as
easy as possible. What was needed was a practical
solution they could follow”.
The introduction of what Regus calls ‘recruitment
champions’ has been pivotal. Chosen by Regus’s area
directors, recruitment champions do not actually
recruit themselves, but play a central part in the new
decentralised system. Following a two-day workshop
covering all the basics of recruitment at Regus, and
‘train the trainer’ sessions, their first responsibility is
to train Regus’s hiring managers, says Harris.
But that’s not all, she explains. “They also
act as a conduit for us into the business,
taking any issues and challenges that
recruiters are having locally and
feeding them through to their local
HR team.
“Quite clearly my team can’t
handle 2,500 people [hiring
managers] ringing them up saying
‘I can’t log in … I can’t post this job,
I haven’t got any candidates, what
do I ask at interview’… all those
questions that a hiring manager
would ask because recruitment
is not their day job. It is about
having a network of people
on the ground that live and
breathe recruitment as part
of their job, and an escalation
point to us.”
GlobalHR
director,Regus
2014-present
Globalheadof
recruitment,
Regus
2012-14
VariousHR/
resourcing
contract
assignments,JC
Consulting
(herownlimited
company)
2007-12
Executivesearch
consultant,
ImprintSearch&
Selection
March 2007-
December
2007
Various
recruitment
agencyroles
(includedperiods
atHays,Robert
HalfandAdecco)
1989-2007
CV:
CHARLOTTE
HARRIS
SECRETOF SUCCESS
“Luck,hardworkandhaving
fantasticpeoplearoundme”
PHOTOGRAPHY:MANUELVASQUEZ

3. 31WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK RECRUITER APRIL 2015
Harris says a good word to describe recruitment
champions is ‘facilitators’, giving an example of how
they get hiring managers working in offices that are
geographically close to interview together, rather
than operating in silos. “That is how it works now,”
she says.
The aim is to have as many recruitment champions
as possible, says Harris, with area directors, for
example in London, New York or Singapore, where
there are several Regus centres, encouraged “to have
as many as they want”.
Once appointed, Harris emphasises that
recruitment champions are not simply left alone to
sink or swim. Each of Regus’s countries and regions
have weekly conference calls, where they can discuss
issues and challenges.
The wholesale transformation of recruitment
at Regus doesn’t end there, however. With hiring
managers in busy day jobs now replacing recruitment
specialists, came the recognition that the recruitment
process needed to be made as simple and easy as
possible. “We clearly needed to automate,” says Harris.
To avoid local centres receiving as many as 500
to 600 applications for just one or two jobs, a new
assessment process, which identifies the top 50-60%
of applicants was introduced. In addition, working
with international employment solutions and
retention firm Kenexa, hiring managers now have
Profile
a recruitment tool that is “intuitive and really easy
to use… 13 clicks to hire somebody”, says Harris
proudly. This is combined with a job description and
advertisement that “is completely locked down”.
Harris, who joined Regus in 2012 after a
career which spanned interim, search and agency
recruitment, is clearly at home at Regus, and relishes
the pace of change. “I can come up with ideas,”
she says, and a decision is very quickly arrived at
“whether [those ideas are] approved or not approved”,
she adds.
However, she accepts that the dramatic changes
introduced to recruitment at Regus over such a short
period, including implementation in 13 languages,
has not been without its challenges. “Crikey, how
long have you got?!” she says, when asked about the
problems encountered.
Harris says the biggest challenge was getting the
HR community to adopt the changes. “It is a massive
change of behaviour for them,” she acknowledges.
“Instead of them physically doing the recruitment,
they were changing to become supporters and
enablers.” Further, while Regus’s HR team of around
100 retains a local or regional presence in each of
Regus’s territories, the changes have meant some HR
staff leaving the business.
A one-size-fits-all solution across the whole
company has also proved problematical, particularly
in parts of Asia Pacific. For example, the new
situational judgement test, which takes candidates
10 to 15 minutes to complete, has proved unsuitable
for China, and the process is being redesigned. “They
call it ‘the three-second principle’,” she laughs. “If you
can’t allow a candidate to apply for a job within three
seconds you can forget it. Things just work differently
over there… so we are working our way through
Asia-Pac at this moment.”
A further difficulty is that some country managers
have baulked at hiring being devolved locally, taking
the attitude ‘Why should I do that? That is HR’s job’.
“It is really easy to develop something and roll it
out; the difficulty is getting people to embed it and
embrace it as part of what they do,” she adds.
For Harris, the way to get buy-in is communication
or “over-communication” as she puts it. “You have
got to tell them, tell them what you told them and
tell them again — it is really as simple as that.” That
and having your leadership involved, and helping to
drive change.
Harris says there are signs that HR is growing
into its new role of supporting and enabling those
in the field, improving the recruitment toolkit and
Regus’s various recruitment channels. The improved
transparency of the new system allows HR to spend
more time on identifying recruitment hotspots
to where they can drive traffic. “It is more of a
partnership role — there isn’t this kind of tension
now between HR, global HR and the guys on the
ground. They literally work in tandem with each
other, and it is really nice to see,” she says.
Founded 1989
Providesa
rangeofflexible
workplace
solutions,
includingbusiness
lounges,video
communication
suitesand
individual
workpods
Morethan
10,000 staffin
220locations
across105
countries
Justunder2m
customers
Salesof£1.53bn
in2013
REGUS
PHOTOGRAPHY:AKINFALOPE