How to influence recruitment strategy

Thanks very much, Johnny. I just have to make one correction. I actually officially work for Process now because we successfully listed ourselves on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange back in September. We're still part of the Naspers group of companies, but just in case you're confused by the logo, it's Process. And I'm delighted to have some of my colleagues here in the room as well. So very briefly, I'm not here to talk about Process specifically, but just very high level. We're a global consumer Internet business and we're one of the largest technology investors in the world. Most of you, rightly, as Jonny said, would not have heard of us. But for folks who come from Romania, you may be familiar with emag. For people who come from Poland, you might be familiar with OLX and pay you in the uae, Dubizl in Brazil, Ifood and. And so forth, and so forth and so forth. The reason I'm here today is to tell you a little bit more about how we've been using data and insights to influence recruitment strategy across our portfolio companies. Perhaps I could quickly just have a show of hands of anyone in the room that's been asked to find one of these mythical creatures. Is that it? No. One more. Okay. There's quite a few of you. Correct. So we frequently get asked in recruitment to find one of these. My German colleagues would be familiar. Or my German friends. Our German friends. This is called Er Liechtender Volksau and apologies for my terrible pronunciation, but basically it's pretty apparent, right? Some of us call it a purple squirrel and we'll have various other acronyms that we might want to use. This makes our lives incredibly challenging, especially when we're operating in a hugely competitive environment where the amount of talent we need actually physically doesn't exist and where the demand for that talent exceeds supply. Coupled with that, the talent agenda is changing and the big players are eating all the talent. So to illustrate what I mean by that, did you know that five of the key players globally are acquiring 10% of director and above level of talent? Only five key players? Okay. When I joined Naspers five years ago, in our markets, because we predominantly operate in growth markets, none of those players were actually competing with us for talent. They are now in Africa, they are now in Latam. We see them frequently more and more in central Eastern Europe. They're expanding outside of their traditional markets. And not just those five key players, but all sorts of competitors are coming into those markets and seeking the same talent that we're after as well. And in addition to Expanding their markets. They're also accelerating their need for talent exponentially. So I don't know. Are there any folks here from Lisbon? No folks. Okay, great. So you can't tell me if I'm saying anything that's not quite accurate, but what we're seeing in Lisbon in the last two years is that the demand for talent has just absolutely soared. All right. It hasn't really been a city that has been known for its tech talent, but you've got a lot more startups going there and a lot more tech organizations and e commerce businesses. So as a result of that, what we're seeing is that some of our employees are actually being offered 40% more on base salary than we are currently paying them. We're also seeing companies who are reevaluating their compensation structures every three to six months in order to make sure that they can be competitive in the market. This is the reality of Lisbon. But this is not the only city where we are seeing this. And this just compounds the challenges that we have even more. It's not just the external market. This is the reality of our world right now. We know, for example, that best in practice, hiring for engineering is 24 to 1. It is not unfeasible for us to see 200 to 1 in our funnels. 200 to 1. Okay. So this creates enormous internal constraints. This puts pressure on our resources, both our recruiters, our interviewers, and then our candidates. And as we like to remind our business leaders frequently, is that if you're rejecting 199 people, what's the impact on your brand? So we needed to figure out how to harness this and how to solve for this. And the thing that we landed on at the end of the day was that we needed to figure out what we could do with the data. We know that data actually drives all, or data decision making drives all. We know that. Okay, so how could we take that and how could we utilize that to our advantage going forward? How could we better inform our business? How could we change minds? And if we could change minds, how could we change behavior? So this led us to create what we call a market intelligence tool. We refer to it as our MI tool. Not very original, but if anyone has a better name, I'd love to hear any suggestions you have. I'm not going to go through this in too much detail, but suffice to say, let's say we're looking for a senior product manager. In we're looking for a senior product manager, we go to LinkedIn. And thanks to LinkedIn, Talent Insights, we were able to very quickly establish that we have one and a half million people that have a title as Senior Product Manager. What we quickly discover is that our role criteria significantly impacts the number of people that are available to us in this particular talent pool. And once we've plugged it all in, we actually end up with 51 people that potentially could satisfy our hiring manager's requirements. Okay. What was really insightful here was that we're actually able to track where these particular criteria actually start to break things down quite significantly. And also what the impact is on having a diverse pool of talent. You can see it tells you a whole load of other things as well. I think the two key takeaways from this were we can significantly impact diversity here by actually having too many criteria. But more importantly, what we were able to establish over a two year period is that we never ever consider more than, sorry, less than 99.1% of the talent pool. Never, not once. And that point 1% is important because we never get to 1%. Okay. So with all these references that I've made to challenges that we already have, coupled with the data, we are now going to hiring managers with this tool and we are able to present to them to tell them what the reality of the market actually is. All right, we don't just do this one iteration, we actually do one iteration and then we do a second one where we take some liberty in some instances to look at how we can open the funnel more and what trade offs we can actually make. So in this particular example, for example, they've needed a master's degree. So we take that out, we're looking for 7 to 10 years of experience, we look for 4 to 12 years of experience. And then what does that tell us if we can do something like that? How does it impact diversity? How do these companies, where the talent exists, start to change out? How do the actual locations begin to change as well? And then what's the impact that we have in the different geography where we actually need to hire that particular person? Now this example here is what we would use for a mid level role. Okay. If we were looking for a chief financial officer or an executive, we can actually do a lot more data. We can go to Talent Neuron, we can look at competitive landscapes, we can see how much competition there is, we can see talent movement, we can see hotspots and a whole variety of other things. But just for the basics, this is what we are using here. So what have we learned? We've learned that data influences decisions. We've also learned that through this tool, we are actually able to change minds, and ultimately we are changing behavior. It's not a quick fix, but we are starting to make progress, most definitely. And you're probably thinking, well, Candice, that's terribly profound. We know all of this. Tell us something we don't know, and that's great. But I think what has been most interesting for me is that over the last year, I have probably interviewed about 100 recruiters as our portfolio companies ramp up their recruitment teams and expand. And I think I'm being generous when I say that 10% of those recruiters have been able to tell me that their businesses are leveraging data and insights to impact recruitment decisions and recruitment strategies. It's just not being done at all. The second thing that we've learned has been that harnessing this data has actually significantly increased talent acquisitions credibility. All right, so one thing that's happened for us quite significantly is that our MA team actually come to us now when they are looking under the hood at prospective companies they want to invest in. They come to us to give them that talent data and insights. Our strategy teams are coming to us at the moment to give them the talent insights for our annual leadership conference. That's significant. Okay. We're not just the order takers anymore. We're actually the people that folks are coming to for this information. Not only that, but really it's been quite phenomenal how this has helped to really increase confidence and courage in our recruiters. I don't know how many of you lead recruitment teams, but so often I've heard recruiters come to me and say, but I can't argue with them, Candace. I don't have the technical knowledge. And I'm like, no, but you're the subject matter expert. And now they really are the subject matter experts because they can go in there and they can say, this is what the market is telling us. This is what it looks like. So that's been quite fundamental in terms of changing how people are viewing the recruiters within our organization. I have to caveat that, of course, because not everybody's a believer. Okay. And I personally have a situation where I've been working with a hiring manager for 12 months, and all I do is I keep sending that see senior product manager report back to him every two months. All right, we can't do it, Candice. No, that's why you can't do it. We're still having this conversation. We're still having this conversation with some people. We've been able to persuade them to actually build the talent internally much quicker than 12 months. All right. With other people, we've managed to get them around to our thinking very, very quickly. And then as I say, you do have that 12 month thing. But what we've been able to do here is build something that is reusable. All right. What we've also been able to do here is look at ways that we drive adoption. So two things that we've done, we've worked with social talent and we've actually created our own mission. And as part of that mission, we've built it into our interview training. All right. And I'm delighted to say that this particular mission scored as highly as behavioral interview questions in the recent survey that we did. So, so people valued this as one of the two top most missions that they actually learned. And this was from the business, not from recruitment. Okay. And the second thing that we've done in order to drive adoption is that we've built this into recruiters objectives. Because the truth of the matter is this is a manual process and it actually is quite time consuming. So at the moment we're also looking at how do we actually build this out and automate it so that it's much quicker and easier for recruiters to be able to produce so that they actually go into their meetings and they use it all the time. Because the phenomenal thing here is that 12 months later of me working within OLX, but three years later working within the NASPERS group of companies, the leadership in the business is coming to us and saying we want to see the data. Where are those MI tools please? Can you share with them with us? And I think that's actually quite a phenomenal journey that we've gone on and it shows the value and the impact that we can make. So if anyone has any great ideas in the room on how we can automate, I'd be absolutely delighted to hear from you either later today or you can ping me an email at any point now. I'll open for any questions that anyone might have.