2. c l i c k s &
M O R T A R
Take a walk through certain London suburbs, Shoreditch is a hotspot, Southwark another, and there they
are, the rarest and most highlydesired resources. The guys have big beards and whippy hair, the girls are less
conspicuous, but they are all deeply coveted by madly dynamic and ambitious tech companies and they can write
their own cheques. So what sort of bait does property portal Zoopla have on the hook to attract tech talent?
3. OCTOBER 2016 thehrdirector 9
www.thehrdirector.com interview LORRAINE METCALF
Lorraine, tell us about your early life and why
you decided on a career in HR. I started my
career as a PA for an entrepreneur, Roger Dunn,
at Valetmatic, and whilst I was happy to gain
experience doing anything and everything, he
luckily saw I had some potential, and one day he
asked me what I really want to do for a career.
We talked about it and the conversation kept
going along the lines of HR - I had carried out
quite a bit of personnel work for him - but there
was no proper infrastructure. So he sponsored
me to study for my HR qualifications and, whilst
studying part-time, I worked all hours to make
up the time, qualified and he graciously
accepted my resignation when I decided to set
out on my HR career, armed with my new
qualifications. I had to move on to gain some
practical experience and was accepted at Lease
Plan as HR Coordinator. This turned out to be a
great opportunity as I joined and worked in their
HR team and, after about a year, I transferred
over to a company they had acquired, Keddy
Services. I was the only HR person there and had
to immediately roll my sleeves up and, in a very
short space of time, experienced a full-on
schedule of HR. I then met someone at a
resourcing event and, long story short, became
her successor when I moved to Electronic Arts
which - then and now - is the biggest and most
high profile player in the video games market.
This was not only a hugely exciting prospect, it
also exposed me to a truly creative environment,
I was hooked and I still am.
In those days, video gaming was not the
mainstream entertainment platform it is now,
but in the ten years I was there, EA, arguably,
did more than any other to propel gaming out
of the kids' bedroom and into the living room.
When I first joined EA was growing in Europe,
and was acquiring creative game developers
and setting up their publishing businesses. One
of the acquisitions we made was Bullfrog and,
after working with them as one of the group
I supported for over two years, I then moved
to focus exclusively on the highly-creative
development area. They definitely did not need
bureaucratic HR, so I really aligned my style of
management and delivery along these lines.
I was working with incredibly talented and
creative people, where you don’t want to put
bureaucratic guidelines and policies in place
and hamper their culture of creativity, but they
want and need some sort of structures, so
that’s a very fine line to walk. One thing I
learned, creative people are very honest with
you, which can be disarming, but refreshing.
These were really exciting days as EA won
massive licenses like; Harry Potter, Formula One
and FIFA. EA was American owned, but what
we achieved in Europe really shifted the focus
of the business in terms of prominence and
market share.
You are extremely passionate about the creative
side, it sounds to me like you’re saying there’s
a very specific way HR should manage that
environment. I’m not sure if it’s about creatives
it’s about starting out with the end in mind,
really thinking about what your interventions
are and what you need to achieve from them.
Certainly people in a creative environment are
far more vocal if they feel they're not getting
a good deal, and especially in smaller
environments, discontentment can spread
rapidly. So it's about being nimble and agile
enough to really engage people, not repel
them and come up with solutions they need.
So why did you leave and where did you go?
The ten years at EA rang some alarm bells and
reluctantly, I realised I had to see how strong my
skills were in the big wide world, outside the
video gaming bubble. So I left and immersed
myself in a couple of corporate roles and gained
some experience, but I realised that my heart was
definitely in creative technology. I stumbled into
Cable and Wireless which, on the face of it,
probably wouldn’t have attracted me, but they
were going through massive transformation and
that’s where the connection came. When I joined
my divisional head turned around to me and
said "we don’t have much time for HR, but if
you want to come to meetings you can". That
wasn't the most encouraging thing to hear,
nevertheless, there was much to do, so I carried
on with it. We had a matrix infrastructure, so
I had two bosses an operational, day-to-day boss
and a functional HR leader. After a few months
my operational boss moved to a different division
to handle a business and people transformation
project which had a big people remit, not least of
all a union challenge. By that stage I must have
achieved enough for him that he requested
I relocate too. It was a really exciting and
challenging time, and I achieved what I always
said I wanted to, a challenge and a job where
I wasn’t just minding the function - my wish
certainly came true.
Tell us about your next move. I moved on to
CPA Global an intellectual property company,
headquartered in Jersey. I worked as their Global
Head of HR Operations for a few years, and in
that time, we set up a big operation in India, so
this was my first real international role. Because
of the expansion, I was seconded to a senior
resourcing role, which wasn’t what I really
wanted, but I certainly did it, and it was very
much about getting the right cultural fit, but
it wasn’t where my passion was. Then an
ex-colleague from Cable and Wireless, who was
working at Iron Mountain, said there was a real
need for a shake up of HR there, so I moved
there for a year on the operational side as their
UK HR Director, working on changing the model
for how the business partners worked, and again
there was lots of change and a real opportunity
to work with the business and demonstrate the
value HR can add. Due to restructuring I decided
to leave and moved to become the HR Director
at notonthehighstreet.com, a relatively small
operation in those days, but it was an
opportunity to get back into an entrepreneurial
technology business. It was really a blank sheet
of paper, no HR department to speak of, so that
was a full-blown set up, and what was really
exciting and compelling about NOTHS, was that
you were dealing with all these individual artisans
of a mind boggling array of products, really
unusual, unique businesses, all highly creative,
and the platform was enabling them to promote
their products to a wider audience. It enabled
these creative entrepreneurs to get their products
INTERVIEWED BY JASON SPILLER & PHOTOGRAPHED BY STUART THOMAS
LORRAINE METCALF
GROUPHRDIRECTOR-ZOOPLAPROPERTYGROUP(ZPG)
4. 10 thehrdirector OCTOBER 2016
interview LORRAINE METCALF
out to their market. Historically they had only
been able to sell by going through craft
markets and the like. The volume they
managed to build was phenomenal.
Give us an idea of how that business developed
and, from an HR side, how you managed to put
the puzzle together? It was all about building
the technology. Trying to find talent...
attracting talent quickly enough to develop
and maintain the technical platform and
bringing in the talent in other areas too, that
could support this very diverse ecommerce
platform but also fit the unique culture. That
was quite a challenge. It has a very strong
brand, look and feel, although trying to find
people to fit that culture and meet those high
standards wasn’t easy, but a great
opportunity to be really at the beginning of
a very dynamic entity. Some of the partners
were doing what they loved in their spare
time whilst also having a full time job.
I remember meeting one partner who, a year
on, had managed to give up his full time job
to focus exclusively on his own business.
Notonthehighstreet.com created a whole
industry of passionate creatives fulfilling their
dreams. There were people who had gone off
and started families, often they were women
who didn’t want to go back full time to work
and this was their opportunity to do
something they loved, earn money and realise
their talent. Also, unlike EA which was male
dominated, notonthehighstreet.com attracted
lots of really talented women, in a way it was
the dawning of what we now call the gig
economy and I genuinely believe the founders
created something for local UK creatives that
nobody else had managed to achieve.
Tell us about Zoopla and how it came calling
for you. I wanted to scale a little bit more
and I met with Zoopla's CEO and then CFO,
Alex Chesterman and Stephen Morana, they
painted such an exciting vision for the future,
the potential for getting involved really
bowled me over. Alex and Simon Kain were
the co-founders and originally, of course,
Zoopla was about providing a web platform,
to help people search and find property,
essentially, an online property portal. Zoopla
was becoming well known too, of course,
because you could check what your property
is worth but, even more intriguingly, what
your neighbour, friends and colleagues,
bought their properties for and the current
value. When I joined the HR Manager was
going on maternity leave, so my experience
set was ideally suited, not least of all that
HR was at an early stage, which was familiar
territory for me. In terms of business needs
and rapid ambitions; there was resourcing
talent - again familiarity kicked in - and
formulating a cohesive recruiting resource
that could effectively continue to build the
technology resource. This, of course, was
at the very same time that hundreds of
tech-based companies were doing the same,
but resourcing and also putting in some
infrastructure and getting an HR system in
place to enable people to self-serve and
provide people data at the press of a button,
were my first objectives.
Also it was about implementing policies that
were balanced between being robust enough
to withstand some hectic growth and activity,
but at the same time didn't stifle, and you
can't do that in isolation, you have to make
everyone a stakeholder in the journey. It’s
very much about the balance of not putting
loads of policies in place, but creating
guidelines and not putting red tape in for the
sake of it. It’s about making sure you do the
right thing and work with the business to
solve their problems with them. It’s very
much about meeting the standard for
talented people. Plus it's creating enough
structure to avoid anarchy, but not so much
that you inadvertently create bureaucracy.
Increasingly, I think pragmatism will be
a pre-requisite of HR, to manage the fluid
and changing workplace. I really felt that
I had come to Zoopla at just the right time in
my career, in terms of what I was looking for
from a career at that point, but also my
experience set was a good match for what
needed to be achieved. The other big
objective was to compensate for the fact that
we were a small HR team with a lot to cover,
it was about driving as much HR in an
automated way and freeing up time to add
value where it was needed, whether that be
working on talent plans or creating toolkits
to help our talent reach their full potential.
The IPO, early in my tenure here, also made
me look at the right reward strategy for
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5. a FTSE250 business. Hot on the heels of that
were the acquisitions and my focus then was
ensuring the synergy, from an HR perspective.
In terms of business growth and finding the
resources to meet that, what was the plan from
a commercial point of view? And the HR
commercial initiative, what does the next five
years hold? Bringing the Group together was
about changing how we operate the HR team
and another big commercial consideration was
to meet the demands of a pretty ambitious
merger and acquisition projection. Having joined
in January 2014 and IPO’d six months later, we
acquired uSwitch in June 2015. Now our
commercial proposition is you’re then looking
at not just finding your property, but also
managing it. uSwitch are a price comparison
website covering energy, banking, comms and
finances helping the consumer manage their
property during and once they have moved.
Our latest acquisition, Property Software Group
provides the software to enable estate agents to
manage their CRM and workflows, so we now
help our consumers find, move and manage
their homes, essentially, the entire property
journey. In terms of meeting objectives and the
HR plan, my priority is not to go adrift. We are
definitely on schedule. In no small part the pace
is down to our CEO. We have very high
standards and aspirations, and my experience
is you can’t afford not to be on your plan
otherwise you’ll quickly slip behind. It is very
much about what are we trying to achieve and
to keep that ambition, energy and focus. That’s
what makes it exciting and why we have to be
agile to adapt to that. It’s a really exciting place
to be. Having those opportunities to continue
pushing the boundaries is a privilege as well as
working with incredibly passionate,
collaborative, talented and agile people.
The type of people you are keen to attract is
ruthlessly competitive and salaries are going up
and up, unsustainably. And that is a real
challenge! We build the talent pools, and they
are constantly being poached, attracting and
retaining them is our number one priority. So we
have brought our talent and resourcing function
in house, because we want to total control over
our early conversations. And there is also the
need to meet expectations, being competitive
and retaining our talent is a constant concern
that I have. People’s expectations are far higher,
there’s a lot of discussion about that, and
different people have different requirements.
A job for life is no longer the case, but as you
bring new talent in, it sets new standards. We
try to retain as much as we can, but you have
to be pragmatic about this sector and we feel
proud of developing people who eventually
move on - then we have to accept this as part of
the cycle. So long as they have enjoyed it here,
they become great advocates out in the market
and that's a real positive. It’s not ideal, and in the
early days, we found it difficult to accept that
people wanted to leave, but you cannot ignore
it and you have to adapt.
Do you wonder why there's not enough tech talent
to go around, when the younger generation is the
complete digital native? I think digital talent is
a really young industry, the developers we
started with at EA, which we talked about
earlier, were often “garage developers”. Times
have changed, the technology has evolved and
then some, and there are no boundaries now.
It's ultra-competitive for all concerned - like
everyone else, we would rather not hire the
wrong quality of talent, and for tech people,
their knowledge could be out of date in a matter
of months, if they stepped away for whatever
reason. But in terms of the talent drought, the
fact that there is such a lack of women in the
tech environment is an issue that occupies my
thoughts a great deal, I think employers should
change their game on how to improve on that.
There are just some roles that appeal more to
one gender than another, but we shouldn’t give
up. It is about starting early with your audience,
it can be difficult to get to grips with, but invest
in the future we must, and now. We are looking
at creating the right infrastructure for an
apprenticeship programme, dovetailed with
a graduate programme within the next few
years, and I think both of those programmes will
help to ensure we will be successful. In terms of
attracting talent, being in London obviously has
its benefits, but you are also competing with
some pretty heavy hitting neighbours. Wherever
you choose, you only have that finite pool of
talent who are able to work there.
In a business that is a technology driver if you
offer paternity leave, people fear they will be out
of date in six weeks. That’s the challenge,
business is so fast paced, you step back and it
will have moved on, you have to make conscious
decisions about what you are prepared to pause.
I think that is the world over. Shared parental
leave hasn’t really been taken up and it is
difficult to step away, but it is a choice.
The impact is, women are pursuing careers and
having families much later now. And possibly
when they have built their career to a point
where they can pause, then it’s time for them
to start a family - we all have to make choices
and choices have consequences. But families
are very important and it’s about creating the
right platform that doesn’t deter people and
helping create an environment where people
can be honest about what they want to do and
what that will mean for them and what
support they will need.
You are about to move to a new London HQ,
that you have been able to design to fit your
needs, that must have been fun to do. Yes, it is
being totally purpose built, with a fantastic
gym, spaces to meet and have coffee, pods to
work in, as much as you can make an office for
the future, this is it. And this is a big part of
cherishing the employer brand we have, but
also recognising where we can get synergies.
I have no hesitation to say that our ambitions
will continue. It is getting the right talent and
that continues to be a challenge. It's about
making sure we have a good three-year plan
that we can articulate. My HR team can really
see where they add the value and enjoy
themselves along the way, and I think that’s
important for all of our teams. And of course,
the new offices will be about supporting
dynamic working. For a business like this, as we
transition, the opportunities to meet people's
needs and also business objectives is here. For
us it’s about creating the right environment.
We feel lucky from an HR perspective because
we will be coming together into one group.
I think there will always be challenges to
overcome as the business and environment
changes - but that’s what makes it exciting.
We are actively hiring a brand new role as an
Employee Engagement Manager. We want to
give our employees a single point of focus for
engagement. If you have a strong culture and
values, it should be embedded in how people
work every day. Great people want to work
with great people and they self-manage that
themselves, they become so aligned to it and
are so passionate about doing the right thing
that they don’t want to work with people
that don’t think like that. That for us is the
standards we want to attain, but it means firing
on all cylinders and staying competitive and
that is a challenge worth aiming for.
OCTOBER 2016 thehrdirector 11
www.thehrdirector.com
HRD
FOR FURTHER INFO
www.zoopla.co.uk
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