Coworking with James Lafferty

On Wednesdays, we schedule our weekly 1:1 with HR Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

James Lafferty has been working in tech recruitment for nearly 15 years, but only recently made the jump from agency to in-house. Since joining Epicor Software as its talent acquisition lead a little more than a year ago, he said he’s been introducing agency best practices, recruiting not just for open positions, but also for internal mobility and employee longevity.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR?

I work with managers and leaders to help them find people for their teams. Not that they lost them, but more, attract people to come and work for Epicor and help us grow…I oversee general talent acquisition teams, executive recruiting, talent operations, employer branding, and university recruiting teams…The company’s like 4,500 people…across over 40 countries. So we cover a lot of different countries and lots of different functions.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

Introduced a university recruiting program that focuses on interns and our early-career accelerator (ECA), which is a graduate rotational program…We built this and we introduced it to the company this year, and we want to continue to build on it.

Why did you feel like the ECA was such an important program to nurture and develop?

We want to make sure that…someone joins the workforce and they can skip through kind of like two or three years of job hopping, and then get more focused on where they want their career to go within nine months…Because nothing can beat experience, right? For positive or negative, I think there’s as much value in realizing what you don’t want to do, as thinking you do.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

That candidates are lining up to work here, and we just process the applications.

How are you working to address that misconception around recruiting?

We’re more the salespeople of the HR function, so I would often ask the question to a hiring manager. If they say, ‘I’m looking for this, this, and this,’ and I would then say, ‘Okay, I will speak to these people, would they join you?’...I think by asking these questions, it sharpens up the hiring managers as well. So they understand their unique selling points for their teams, and where maybe they’re not as competitive as other companies and the things they need to work on as well.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Seeing people who join make a big impact on the business and really enjoy what they do. It is a perfect match all around and very rewarding to have facilitated it.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?

Employee experience. Over the last few years, the world has changed. Employees have more choice in who they work for and companies are having to put people first. This means different things to different people. The beauty of this means there is no “one-size-fits-all,” and we now look at flexibility, shared purpose, overall well-being, career progression, skill development, and many more.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?

In 2022, the market went from boom to gloom. Recruiters were the hottest property during the first half of the year. The second half, there were mass layoffs. This has happened with each recession, and businesses need to learn from this to avoid overspending or over hiring, and also they will damage their brand reputation if you treat people like commodities.

Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why:

Calendly. I used to hate going back and forth on dates, times, different time zones, emails, Slack messages, and then getting a time. This makes life much easier!

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Coworking? Click here to introduce yourself.