Driving more innovation within TA | with Yasar Ahmad

Hello and you're very welcome to this week's special episode of the Shortlist. I'm coming to you live from Cork in southern Ireland this week and instead of a live broadcast, we're going to be playing an excerpt from our September edition of Social Talent Live, our quarterly talent leadership webinar. I sat down with Yasser Ahmad, the VP of Talent at HelloFresh, to talk all things innovation in talent acquisition. Hope you'll agree with me that Yasser has a refreshing perspective and the audience at Social Talent Live use the word it inspiring for this talk. Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed as well.

I'm really, really excited to have our next guest join me for a one on one. We call it a Fireside Chat, but we've no fire. Maybe we can bring a fake fire in one of these days for these fireside chats. But I'm excited to introduce to you Yasser Ahmad. And Yassir is the Global VP of Talent at HelloFresh. You may know HelloFresh because you use the services all around the world. You probably don't know much about the organization, probably don't know anything about how they hire, what they hire, and you probably haven't heard from this fantastic man who has previously joined me on our Shortlist podcast to share some of his insights. But welcoming back to the mic, Yasser, pleasure to have you here. Yass, wonder if you wouldn't mind for our audience, just in case there's one person out there who doesn't know who HelloFresh is, would you tell them about the organization, how you came to join the company, what's been going on the last year, and then we'll jump into the questions.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Johnny. What an introduction. So my name is Yasser Ahmed. I'm the global VP of talent at HelloFresh for people don't know HelloFresh. We're a meal kit solutions company me and Jonny have been talking about. Our growth over the last 12 months has been insane. We've grown from 11,000 employees to roughly around about 25,000 employees in a very short space of 10 months. And we've done that through like strategically thinking about how we approach recruitment. So yeah, that's kind of the story. Right. Hopefully we can dive a bit deeper into it.

What about your background?

Yeah.

So how long have you been with the business? Where were you before this? What's your kind of take take on on ta?

So I've been previously head of Tech TA for Zalando. Prior to that I was director and head of strategic hiring at Wipro. I'm not sure how I got into recruitment. You know, I was a certified Scrum master, ended up in a consultancy and then somehow got swindled into doing some recruitment for them. And then next thing you know, I was setting up my own TA company. So I tried my best not to think about it because I feel like I was slightly exploited and kind of got convinced to join the recruitment. But I've loved it since and, you know, it's been a really interesting journey.

So is it fair to say that your role in HelloFresh involves actually much more than TA?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'm the VP of Talent, so it's just not just talent acquisition, it's how we look at talent holistically from beginning to end, beyond just the talent acquisition side. What's nice about my role is because I manage talent acquisition and other teams like focusing on the other areas of the analytics or learning, etcetera, I get to look at talent a bit, the journey a bit more inclusively. And that's really been a big driver for a lot of the change we've been pushing forward. We're able to talk about it a lot more. Our recruiters are not really recruiters anymore. They're doing a bit more than that. Our sources, our coordinators, they do significantly more. And, you know, we've kind of adopted this new philosophy around how do we innovate, how do we take traditional TA and turn it into TA 4.0, where.

We pause here, slow you down from jumping too far ahead. Right, Because I was going to say.

I'm going to start with the huge.

Question to get it out of the way, and you're already jumping into the answer. Talk to me about the future of TA. So you just said TA 4.0. Can you explain to the audience what the heck was 1 0, 2.0, 3.0? Tell us what you think 4.0 is and what, what happens beyond that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let me, before I go there though, let me just tell you, like, I had this epiphany, right? And I was reading some work from Al ghazali, who's a 10th century philosopher, and he says, there's no way to reach the end without mastering the beginning. And I kind of thought about, shit, how many candidates have we ghosted, right? So all these kind of bad processes that we have in our existing team. So we have what most people would Refer to as TA 1.0, which is your 360 recruiters, right? And I was Thinking, how can I add more value to my recruiters? How can I give them more feathers in the cap? How could I ensure that they feel more valued? The business field makes them feel more valued and they can contribute more. Because everybody wants to learn something in their work, but not everybody wants to. I know everybody wants to join social talent and watch your videos, but not everybody wants to do a learning development course every weekend or something like that. Right? So how could they learn on the job as well? And so we looked at what, what's the next evolution of recruitment which was, you know, sources being added to the recruitment team and then the third evolution of recruitment which is coordinators being added to the recruitment team. I thought, well, what's going to be Next? What's the 4 evolution? And we know that there are elements where exact teams are being added, Talent intelligence teams are being added, kind of experience teams are being added, operations analysts are being added, etc. Engineers are even being added. I've got an engineer in my team. So what we did was we thought, well, how about merging the roles and adding multiple competencies? So moving away from this I method to T to PI, to combination. So if you think about the breadth of your knowledge and then each element of that comb being deep competency. So a coordinator could be a talent intelligence specialist, candidate experience specialist and the talent operations specialist all in one role. Why do we just need to have a coordinator? Why can't we split the difference? I know you're not supposed to split the difference, but I mean, like, why can't we do that? And same with sources. Why can't we incorporate talent marketing, employee branding into a sourcing role? Because that seems like to be the next evolution of sourcing. So that's what we introduced and we did that by looking at. So, you know, you have your known unknowns, you have your known knowns, you have your unknown known unknowns, and then you have your unknown knowns. Right. I know that's a bit of a tongue twister, but the last one is the one that most people should focus on, which is we know that there are unknown knowns. And so we have to be customer centric, we have to be willing to fail, we have to have. We know there are blind spots, we know there are values that we need to intrinsically incorporate into our team training, you know, leaving ego out the door, et cetera. So how do we incorporate a framework, a decision making methodology into a role? And this was it. Essentially I was like, well, consolidate. And it kind of worked perfectly because we went from what, like an average of 80% productivity to 250% productivity in space of a month. Didn't add any extra recruiters. Suddenly everybody got more responsibility and our productivity skyrocketed. Why? Because everybody felt more valued. There was this kind of safety net that was provided as well. Behind the scenes saying, hey, look, we know this is. We're not yet. I was 60% confident, right? I said to the team, hey, I'm 60% confident. Let's see what we can do here. And lo and behold, nine months later, we're at 25,000 employees. So clearly something was working. There's obviously more to it.

So talk to me about, you know, obviously it's a good experiment. It's pure innovation. Because you're looking at, okay, how can we take something and adapt it? Right? That's kind of. That adaptability is essentially what innovation is. Right? You mentioned the productivity went up and what were the other things that you were hoping would come about and what were the results apart from productivity, which I don't want to rush past it because that's so important to get that productivity, what else were you hoping to see? What did you see?

Well, so from my team perspective, I already knew that the team was embracing off innovation because all I had to do was look at. They listened to the market, look at the great resignation, look at Covid, look at how they have adapted. There is a willingness there, even if it's unknown willingness. So I thought, well, the team itself, we need to provide for them first, which is how can we make them the most expensive recruiters like we most make most expensive coordinators, sources, etc. That I achieved. The next side of it was the business. The business needed to understand what was the value that we were bringing. They were used to a small recruitment team. My team right now is like roughly about 200 recruiters. But I mean, previously when I first started, it was only like 40 or 50 people. And those individuals were in a team that every month we were hiring a thousand plus people. So hiring managers who joined the organization didn't know the value we were bringing either. So we needed to have a really strong elevator pitch. And that was that, hey, we are very human shaped, we automate, we continuously learn, we're fluid in our approach. And then the key metrics behind that were like, obviously time to hire, time to fill, time to start, which is also sometimes often ignored, and a bunch of other like pandering experience, internal mobility. We introduced headhunting internally, which a lot of people are quite. They frown upon. So a lot of embracing the unknown. I think that became almost like our slogan.

I have a couple of comments here I want to read out here. Ruth clicks Nice approach. Yasser on having an end to end view around talent. She just reviewed her talent acquisition partner jobs to incorporate other roles outside of just acquiring talent. I think that's a bonus around having a full talent portfolio so you get to see the end to end of talent management. Great question. You mentioned about having those expensive team. Saria is asking, did you increase salaries?

Yes, I did. That was one of the first things I did. Because, look, let me be honest with you, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. It wasn't easy. I'm looking at a team who was slightly demotivated. They weren't sure, they didn't have a leader for six months. I come in, I'm trying to impress them. I'm trying to tell them, look, this is going to be the future of ta, right? So the first thing I'm thinking is how can I motivate them without paying for it? And you know, how can I make them learn something new? How can I help the business? So that was the first step. But obviously after three months they're saying, hey, well look, I'm bringing in the results. So, you know, where's, where's the money? So by being able to do the first part, which is critical and having a strategy around it, I was very easily able to walk to my CEO and say, hey, look, we're, we're smashing it, you know, and actually our bands are very old compared to what they were traditionally. We're measuring recruiters versus recruiters. But these are no longer recruiters, these are no longer coordinators. They're doing a significantly amount more. We need to raise up and look at the salary range. And that's exactly what we did. It's not amazing. It's still got a lot of work in progress. But obviously anybody who talks to finance knows you have to have multiple fights before you can get the perfect range. And even then, with inflation, it changes every two months, doesn't it?

You've opened a can of worms, by the way. And the questions. I've got loads to try and ask you and I'll try and summarize some of them here. I was interested to understand. You mentioned one bomb you dropped. There was headhunting internally and Rupin is asking, can you explain that? I wonder, can you please explain that? But for a lot of organizations, and I know when you explain it because I've heard you Explain it before folks will think, well, we can't possibly go there. But could you answer a second part of that question for me, Yass, which is, if you can't go all that way, how could somebody who's in a more conservative business begin to bring innovation? So first question is just explain head holding internally. But for those who think that's a bit too far and examples like that are too far for their organization, can you share some insight into how you could innovate in a more conservative way?

Yeah, sure. But I think the first thing is just being a bit more foundational with it. Think of it like this. If you're a recruiter and you find out that someone was going to approach you, but they no longer are going to approach you because of some policy around a HRBP role, and you're like, hey, how come they didn't approach me? And it's because of some policy somewhere saying, hey, we don't have, we have a nope role. You'd be mad, you'd be frustrated, you'd be like, why isn't that my call? I've been in the company for X amount of period or tenure. So we kind of took that concept and said, okay, well what can we do to protect the teams that do need their people and also allow teams to not become these cliques where they're there for multiple years and you know, just got people who were there at the beginning of hella fresh days. And so the concept is if you're in, in a role and you've been in there for a certain amount of tenure, whether it's 12 months, 18 months, depending on your seniority, you're, you're fair game. So we can approach you and say, hey, you know, we noticed that you've been in your current role, you're a finance account manager. We've got some mid level data science roles. We know that you, there's a transition sense of skill sets, but there's a tech academy if you want to have a look. We're more than happy to introduce you to the hiring manager. We could talk about your learning and development and take it from there. And that's something a lot of companies, I've been doing that since 2014. So it's nothing new. I've been doing that in Wipro. You know, we went from zero to nearly 40% internal mobility in the space of a year at Wipro when doing that. And that was that director, senior director, you know, senior manager level as well. It wasn't, it was all the way up to VP level. And this is not something I've just kind of made up. I've been talking about this for the last seven, eight years. So it does work. It's just, I guess, you know, McKinsey, we're talking. McKinsey did an article about fear factors of human barriers to innovation. And in the article, it talks about the number one fear factor to innovate. And it was 3.6 times more prevalent than any other factor. And it was career impact. Most people don't innovate, or there's a barrier to innovate is because they are afraid it will impact their career. And the second one is loss of control and uncertainty. So those two things alone were enough to put people off trying something new. And I think that's really important when you think about that and you think about how you can destabilize or change that. They also talk about, like, believe and value. So having a moral responsibility to innovate. Right. And really, interestingly, a friend of mine said he's a very religious individual, and he said it's ironic, but he said, it's my duty to make as much money as possible so I can give money back to charity. And I thought that was really nice because he's thinking about believing it and valuing it. And McKinsey also talks about, you know, the frame and champion. So build optimism and frame risk to say, like, hey, this is. We're going to try something new. It's going to be risky, but this is the risk we'll take. And if, you know, if we fall outside this risk framework, we'll recognize it, we'll deal with it together. And so I think innovation can succeed when you have leaders that show up and they ritualize, they shield and empower. So, you know, basically get behind an idea and empower it. And I'll give you a real life example that most recruiters can use today. Right. I recently got kind of this. This happened to me, and I thought it was genius. I had a magazine reach out to me and say, hey, yes, we would love to do a news article with you. We'd love to interview you. And I said, all right, great. I got suckered into it. So I did the article two minutes later, hey, yes, thank you so much for doing the interview. We're owned by a parent company that does technology recruitment. We'd love to have a conversation with you. Now. At this point, I couldn't say no, I'm already suckered in. Right. And I thought it was genius the way they approached it. Instead of just cold calling me, they provided me some value first. And that's something that we need to think about as well. When you provide innovation, we almost need to provide something first.

I want to speak to maybe a question that's coming on the Q and A. What were the change management challenges? And perhaps you've addressed that already and combined with that, Ruth Klitz is asking, how did you build the required capabilities around this new innovative approach for your team? And how do you continue upskilling? So maybe we'll just combine them in terms of change management and upskilling those challenges. How did you address them or how do you continue to address them?

Right, so change management, firstly, people need to know their roles, right? So you have to provide them a role description. You need to provide them a competency framework. What I mean by competency framework is literally, so if you divide it into two areas, what you have to do, typically that's like your KPIs, your metrics. So you need to hire X amount, you need to do this, you need to do that, the core measurables, and then how you do it. So how you do it is often disregarded in a lot of teams, right? So they don't tell you necessarily how you do it. So you could achieve 10 hires, but you could end up pissing everybody off in between. So how you do it is what we call role expectations. So role expectations could deep dive into, okay, this is what we expect of you. These are, you have to be a role model. You have to be this. So it's beyond just a job description. It's like really spelling out the key DNAs that are expected of a person in your team. When I did that initially, that was really welcomed by the team because they said, hey, we knew what we had to do, but sometimes we always felt the how you do it was ambiguous. So really spelling it out is super important for people. And then combining that together, we actually got rid of the words KPI and we changed it to health metrics. And I didn't actually measure any of my team. Interestingly, I didn't say, hey, you have to achieve three hires per month or two hires per month. All of that went out the window. What we said was, health metrics are there to guide you as a North Star because we don't want you to get into analysis paralysis. We don't want you to get into a situation where you're disregarding a process because you're so focused on trying to achieve a goal and, you know, you kind of other things suffer because of it. And that really helped us because we were still learning, we were growing. So I couldn't afford to say to everybody, hey, everybody, you need to hire three people a month. Because what would happen is everybody would hire three people a month and then stop. Whereas we had people hiring 10 people, 11 people, 16 people a month. Crazy numbers that I've never seen before. Even had a tech recruiter 10 hires recently thinking, how did you do that? And it came down to innovating. What, like, I'll pause because there's so much more I can say, but I'll come back to it and to Ruth's.

Question about enablement and upskilling. Was it relatively easy or how did you go about doing that and you continue that kind of mantra?

So we have a DNA in our team called Learning Never Stops, which means that we create learning opportunities every single day. So as we see it more like, I think I was reading the comments earlier about when is the best time to upskill. There's no best time to upskill. It's like being a parent. There's no time to stop and say, okay, I'm going to study to be a better parent. You're a parent, you have to upskill every day, every single second. And you have to be tolerant of it and understand it. And I think that's how we see recruitment as well, is that we look inwards. So when you look, when you know your outer appearance, you know that how you are perceived to some degree because, you know, people can tell you that when you look inwards, what you typically do is look at past experiences. You're looking, you're taking the old and making it into the new. And I think that's how we look at training and all of our, like, how people adapt. I didn't have no friction. Like, honestly, maybe I was one of the lucky ones where 200 people just decided they'd buy into my vision and say, do you know what? We're just going to do this. But I think it was the way we positioned it, which is like, hey, you know, we might make some mistakes. We're going to try this and let's all get behind it. And we did create okrs as well, which were very clear around, like, internal mobility, having a target of 20% diversity. Right now we're at 47% diversity hiring and at senior level, above all the way up to director level. And, you know, our target's 30%. How are we overachieving? In fact, today I had a call with our C level and they were saying to me, we need to slow down our hiring because we are hiring too fast. So we've already achieved our tech hiring for the year. And that's something I've never come across before. And I think the reason it's happening now is because we just empowered people from the get go out of the.

Power of a culture, the culture of empowerment, the culture of innovation. I want to bring maybe to my last, last question. I'll squeeze in if you don't mind. You ask because we're a little bit over time, but we started with talking about the future and a lot of people, when they start talking about the future and we haven't mentioned it once, they talk about tech, they talk about AI, they talk about automation. What is your view on the role of tech, AI, automation in TA and talent delivery? How important will it be? What are you looking at? What are you not looking at?

Kind of think of it a bit like what are you trying to achieve by even thinking about it? Like think about what you're trying to achieve as an individual, as a team, as a company. Essentially your time is money. So what we try to achieve is automation. Right? So we want to get as much time back as possible. People, there's this business saying, pay yourself first. Well, time is the most expensive currency, so pay yourself with time. So how do you do that? You innovate, you think about everything you do manually and how do you automate it? How do you almost make yourself redundant? And that's essentially what we're trying to do. Even with our coordinators, we told them straight away, hey, by the way, the reason why we're making talent intelligence specialists is because eventually some robots going to take over your job and we need you to be prepared for that. And that was something that they got on board with. They thought, okay, well let's, let's make the most of this, right? If you think about all the jobs in the industry right now, there'll probably be bus drivers that are like machine automated bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers. You already have phone operators, telemarketers, receptionists, cashiers, bank tellers even. The other day I went to a pharmacist, you know, I had to put in the details and suddenly my prescription came through and no longer needed to see the pharmacist. And I thought she was lovely. I always used to say hello to her. So, you know, automation is definitely coming. The fact is that AI can compete with the left side of your brain, the analysis side of the brain. Can it really compete with the right side of the brain, the creativity, the intuition. That's where I feel like the unpredictable work we do, which is really hard to measure, which is really hard and it's unpredictable, that's where we're going to get stuck. And that's where humans can really deep dive into and focus on the unpredictable. Whereas the predictable, the deep quantifiable, that can be passed over to AI. And I think if you, if you look at it like that and you look at time as the most important currency, you will start to move in the right direction. That can be the North Star. It doesn't need to be. I need to be the most innovative. Why do you need to be the most innovative? How's that going to even benefit you?

I love that left brain, right brain analogy. It works. It ties in nicely what Michelle said in the first panel around building for anti fragility and making sure that's the core of the team, which is to build for that. Because I guess that's the bit that isn't going to be automated. Yes. We could keep going. We have in the past. I got to cut it short. It's been fantastic. You have tons more questions in the chat. If you have a couple of minutes, I'd love you could address one of those. It'd be fantastic for our audience. But I gotta take the time to thank you so much for sharing your insights. The audience really appreciate your candidness and your honesty as well. Yas, pleasure to have you. We'll have you back on again soon.

Cheers. Thank you.

That's it. Thanks for listening to this very special episode featuring an excerpt of our last social Talent Live Talent Leadership webinar. There's lots more where that came from and you can register for our next edition to be a part of the conversation live by visiting socialtalent.com live. Our next webinar is taking place on Thursday, January 26, 2023, and it's all about workplace priorities for CHROs and CPOs in 2023. So be sure to reserve your place. And do join us next week for the live episode of the shortlist. On November 30th, we'll be talking with Anna Stetsensko and Darja Gornicka from Indigo Tech Recruiters. They'll be talking to us about what it's been like balancing the war in Ukraine and recruiting in that kind of environment and how they've worked with thousands of recruiters across Ukraine to help them get back to work. Tune in live on LinkedIn and YouTube on November 30th at 4pm Irish time. That's 11am in the east coast, 8am in the west coast or on Wednesday evening, Thursday morning when we drop in your favorite podcast app. We hope to see you there. Thanks and take care.

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