Matthew Moxon, head of talent acquisition at Northern, joined the rail industry in September 2023. He talks to RailStaff about his experience of working in Rail, the unique challenges of recruiting into the industry, and how to make the process more accessible for everyone.
Thanks for joining us, Matthew. To start, would you mind giving us an idea of what your role as head of talent acquisition involves?
I’ve been head of talent acquisition since September 2023, so that’s 12 months now. My role at Northern covers everything we do to attract potential candidates, both externally and internally. That covers the process of assessing candidates, developing our Employer Value Proposition (EVP) candidate follow-ups, all the way through to the offer-management stage and onboarding.
There’s a lot to do in terms of attracting and retaining colleagues, including the advertising and recruitment marketing channels we use to get that message across, and also the many events we attend to attract graduates, apprentices, and year-in-industry cohorts. We’re currently looking at all the other areas from which we can draw candidates including, for example, ex-offender programs, as well as attracting ex-armed forces and ex-services personnel.
Going forward, we’ll be examining how we develop our employer value proposition, or rather what it’s like to work at Northern and what we can offer to people considering a career within our organisation.
Your career to date has spanned a number of industries. In your opinion, how does the recruitment environment in rail compare to others and what trends are you seeing?
I think that the appeal of jobs in rail, aside from the traditional roles such as train driver, is quite low. There aren’t many people who are necessarily considering rail as a career, and potential candidates tend to be attracted by some of the more obvious big brands without necessarily realising the breadth of opportunities available in our industry.
In terms of trends, there’s a move toward what we call ‘skills-based’ hiring, as opposed to just basing decisions on a CV. CVs are almost like window shopping – they only give you a snapshot of an individual and don’t tell you everything you need to know. We’ve got to come up with processes that demystify that pretty quickly, and having the right assessment tools for the right role is paramount to successful recruitment.
It’s important and we do not dismiss people’s prior achievements, but these don’t always relate to success in our business. We need to scrutinise and test candidates a little bit more. This is all moving forward holistically, and I think it will be the biggest evolution in recruitment over the next few years. We’re also looking at using AI and the technology to support that, making recruitment less subjective and actually a little bit more quantitative and evidence based.
It’s a really exciting time.
What challenges are recruiters working against at the moment and how are these being overcome?
We’re still working against the backdrop of a skills shortage, particularly within technical disciplines. Looking at engineering, for example, it’s so important to grow your own talent in this space. We have a very successful scheme where we take on 18 engineering apprentices every year and put them through quite a rigorous application vetting process, which includes an assessment centre where we get to test a number of different skill sets and behaviours. We had around 900 applications this year, triple the amount that we’ve had in previous years, and we’ve been able to select some very strong candidates.
One of our big challenges as a society is how to encourage more females to get into rail and engineering more broadly, and I think we need to start sowing the seeds for some of these roles as early as primary school level. We need to cut through some of those barriers and I think schools and parents/guardians can help to support that.
As with other roles, such as train drivers, some the blockers lie around shift patterns and a lack of flexibility on the part of companies. The new Government has recently announced that workplace flexibility will be made mandatory which is a positive step, but how will it operate when you’ve got to go to a manufacturing plant, to a construction site, or you need to get a train back on the tracks by a particular time? We need to find solutions to all of that if we’re going to encourage more female candidates.
We’re seeing a lot more counteroffers being made these days and that makes it more difficult for me as a recruiter to headhunt talent. As an industry, we really have to think about how we can draw talented people away from their current companies.
That said, businesses are becoming much more savvy when it comes to retaining staff, including offering better flexibility, greater benefits, and so on. Employers are becoming more clued up to the fact that it’s not as easy to replace talent and it’s very, very expensive to hire and reskill new staff.
Northern recently announced that it is reviewing its recruitment process with regard to neurodivergent candidates. Can you give us any further insight on this?
This initiative was fuelled primarily by people in the business coming forward with their own experience of how challenging the job seeking process can be for neurodivergent individuals. We’ve now set a working group alongside people with those lived experiences.
We’re working with our rail accessibility manager, who is himself neurodivergent, and is able to put himself in the shoes of candidates who face these types of difficulties. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every individual has their own needs and set of challenges. However, we’re trying to make the process as easy and transparent as we can for people.
It’s all about putting our cards on the table and taking the mystery out of the recruitment process, as well as tailoring the recruitment process to each individual candidate.
A few of the things were doing to make recruitment more accessible include providing a step-by-step breakdown of the process to make things really clear; providing candidates with images of the room in which interviews will take place so they’re comfortable with the surroundings when they arrive; allowing candidates to bring notes to interviews; and providing interview questions beforehand.
But it’s not just about recruitment. We also need to make sure that the environment is right for successful candidates when they arrive on their first day at work, and that we have the support and infrastructure in place to do that. We’ve been working with our Employee Experience Team and our fantastic EDI lead to ensure that we’re working hand-in-glove to get the best outcomes for candidates.
We’re at the beginning of this journey and it’s too early to give any data on it, but I think in a year or two we’ll really see the fruits of the work that we’re doing.
Finally, what makes rail a great choice for anyone at the start of their career or looking to switch industries?
Rail is an underrepresented opportunity for a lot of people but the diversity of careers on offer in this industry is unbelievable. There’s a particular interpretation of what a career in rail can be, whether that’s as a driver, as a conductor, as an engineer, but really there is a whole plethora of different roles and opportunities, and you can move in and out of different disciplines, if you have the right motivations and behaviours.
Since I joined the industry last year, I’ve been really encouraged by how collaborative it is. I’ve never worked in an industry where I’m involved in so many work groups, with so many different organisations, all trying to tackle similar challenges and make things better. That’s a unique and positive experience, and one which should attract candidates who want to work to improve something that’s bigger than themselves.
I’ve worked in many different industries, and what I’d like to make clear is that in rail, the opportunities are real, no matter what level you enter the industry at. Here at Northern, for instance, we have a regional director who has worked in pretty much every role you can imagine within rail. The fact that 38% of the roles that we fill are with internal applicants shows that once people are in the rail industry, they’re incredibly keen to stay and develop a career. As a recruiter, that is a really exciting thing to be a part of.
Image credit: Northern
