This is a YouTube video titled "How to Recruit Good Treasury Candidates with Shailesh Bettadapur" containing an English interview recorded in January 2019. The conversation features Mike Richards interviewing Shailesh Bettadapur about recruitment strategies, focusing on qualities like energy, intelligence, and integrity in candidates, and discussing interview techniques and candidate pools.
But when you are recruiting, what is it you look for in the people that work with you?
I always look for really two things, right? If you have the energy and if you have the gray matter and integrity. Obviously, my view is I can teach you anything. So it's not per se that we're looking for specific. You know, you have to have done this or you have to have done that. It's much more of a, you know, can you learn? And because my view is that, you know, this stuff is so dynamic and it's not that hard, you know, none of this is rocket science. So can people learn from this? And if the answer is no, then, you know, I don't care what kind of experience you have. I'm not interested.
And when you say energy, how are you assessing or measuring that when you're interviewing someone, Are you. Come on, do some squat thrusts, you know, come on and show us your, you know.
You know, you can tell in the interview how engaged people are. Right? And so. And you can tell. So, you know, what I do is I put a problem up on the board. I'll just make it up. I'll just put a problem on the board. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but I can kind of. All right, let me see how you solve this problem. Yeah, right. How would you approach this problem? Yeah, and, you know, might even be a problem we're working on. So, you know, how would you approach this?
Good way to get your money's worth as well.
Well, you know, and it's all, you know, it's a whiteboard. And so you get up and there with the, with the marker and kind of walk me through how you would think through this, and let's, let's debate it. And that, to me, that's the best kind of interview. I prefer that.
Have you seen the candidate pool change or have you seen differences internationally or what have been your thoughts?
No, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, you know, recruiting, you people have trouble recruiting for all kinds of reasons. Could be location of the position, it could be all kinds of things. Right. So it's hard to know necessarily what those are. You know, when I used to recruit, I had really good success recruiting at Wholesome, in part because it was a bit of a circular thing. You know, we recruited good candidates, and because we recruited good candidates, we were able to recruit more good candidates. So generally recruiting them right out of business school, where they were sort of a clean sheet of paper and we could teach them and that's. That's how we did it. And so. And I remember telling one of the candidates who ultimately came to work for us was, because I think he was. He was entertaining another position at gm, actually. And I said, yeah, I used to work at gm. It's a good company. You'll learn a lot. But I said, if you like what they do, you won't like what we do, and vice versa. I said, the thing that I can promise you, I can't tell you what your next job will be. What I can tell you is that whatever it is, you will learn a lot that you can take somewhere else if you need to. And so that's the way I think about it.
