Innovation and the next generation of TA | with Yasar Ahmad

Sam. Hello, you're very welcome to episode 90 of the Shortlist. Really excited about today's episode because it's kind of something that I really, really love talking about and it's kind of what's next. We're going to be talking today about innovation and the next generation generation of talent acquisition. Before we do though, for those of you listening live, you're very welcome on LinkedIn or YouTube. We welcome your questions and comments. Just join in the chat and we'll do our best to read them out and discuss or get into the discussions you want us to get into. If you're listening to the podcast, you're also very welcome. Anything we reference in terms of links, our articles etc, we'll add to the show notes. You can find them there on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't know what I'm talking about. Wondering why is this live? Is there a podcast? You can find out more about the show by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist, where you also find a list of the previous 89 episodes. What's coming up next, links to the podcast, links to the videos, find us on LinkedIn, find us on YouTube and all those wonderful, wonderful things. But let's get back to the topic at hand. It's March. It's the beginning of March we're looking into in this part of the world anyway. Longer nights are. Sorry, longer days, brighter days, shorter nights, beginning of spring and summer and optimism. And you often look to the future this time of the year. And we're going to look to the future. Today we're going to talk about innovation and next generation ta, because innovation is something that of course every organization says they strive for across the board. We're big into innovation and change, but finding new and inventive ways to operate that will optimize processes, bolster growth, of course is mission critical and from an organizational point of view, that's important. But it's no less true than in the talent acquisition sphere. Whether by embracing new philosophies or stepping outside the box. As we say, we need to look to the future of talent acquisition and try and envisage how this function can adapt and iterate to become better and faster whilst also delivering expected results. So joining us to cast our thinking if into the future is Yasser Ahmad, the Global Vice President of talent at HelloFresh. Together today we're going to be examining what the next generation of TA looks like, the importance of ideation and how TA can learn from and emulate Other disciplines critically, like the process and structure of software development, for example. Yasser, you're very welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us here today. Wonder if you could tell our guests a little bit about yourself. HelloFresh, if they've never heard of HelloFresh and what brought you here today.

Thank you, Johnny. I really appreciate being on the show today. Very excited to talk about this topic for the audience that doesn't know who I am. My name is Yasser Ahmed. As Johnny mentioned, I've been in the recruitment industry for over a decade. Currently the global vice president of HelloFresh. Previously at Zalando, an E commerce business where we scaled the organization, doubled it in terms of its tech, engineers, etc. And previously before that I was working for a consultancy called Wipro. For anybody who doesn't know what HelloFresh is or who HelloFresh is or what they do, we're a food solutions group. So we're typically seen as a meal kit provider, but we do a lot more than just meal kits. Our organization size is roughly around about 20,000 employees. When I joined in June, we were 11,000 employees. So in the space of the last seven, eight months, we've grown dramatically. Last year we doubled in revenue, went to $6 billion in revenue last year and we delivered 1 billion meals to customers across the world. We operate in 17 countries and typically, if you do know who we are, there's this kind of misconception that we're quite a small organization or, or we're a local organization. But what people don't know is we're actually a very large organization that's trying to change the world a bit. You know, from sustainability to the way we eat and being a bit more healthier and.

Yeah. So your personal background whilst coming from talent acquisition, you mentioned your remit's a bit broader. You're the vice president of talent. Can you explain to our listeners what does that encompass?

Yeah, so talent is the. Is the all encompassing view of pre boarding and post boarding. So pre boarding, the talent acquisition process, post boarding, once they've joined, their experience as an employee, the employee experience, the learning, the analytics behind that. So as my role grows in HelloFresh, my remit grows as well. And my main focus has been mainly talent acquisition now. But for the next year I'm going to be focusing more on internal ability, learning and development, the analytics side of things and a lot more. So it's an exciting time definitely for me and the team because we're really kind of focusing on driving our delivery process excellence and innovation right now. So hopefully I can talk a bit more about our TA 4.0 and what it means and how people can replicate it to some degree.

I'm dying to get to the conversation on TA 4.0 and I should share with our audience that a few months ago when I contacted you, Yasser, about your ideas around how do we get TA leaders together to discuss issues when we couldn't perhaps meet physically in person, you'd suggested let's use Oculus, let's use VR. And it sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to look at all the business apps on VR and you know, almost bought 40 VR sets and loved the potential. But you know, innovation is definitely the word that comes to mind when I think of you and your attitude to the work you do. Which kind of brings me to one of the first of two articles I want us to kick off the show with today, Yasser, and this comes from Fast Company. I'm keen to get your thoughts on it because the article is titled Customer Centric Innovation and Digital Transformation and really it's kind of a discussion on the importance of that particular piece that customer centric innovation in this world today, where everyone is trying to go after this innovation route and they're trying to find the formula for it. I'm interested to get your thoughts particularly around customer centric innovation and then its applicability in the broader sense to the TA world and how you see innovation throughout. A TA perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I feel like there is a bit of a myth around innovation. This idea, it's quite daunting. A lot of people don't feel like they have the time to invest in innovation, but they do it every day. Innovation is actually in its in the simplest form, it's very, very basic. It's the idea of iterating and taking something and doing a new version of it to some degree. Now if you do enough new versions, you get to a stage where you've got a totally different product. You think about social talent, for example, or any product, what it was at the beginning, the MVP to today. You could easily look at it and say we innovated a lot throughout the entire process. So I think to some degree the article really pins down the key parts to innovation in terms of making innovation fun. Well, that's really simple, like what are we trying to achieve? Because then you feel like you've got a goal to achieve, making innovation part of your everyday life. And I told a story recently to colleagues of mine where my son seven years ago he, we were visiting my mom and he was trying to switch on the Xbox with a laser pen. And I was like, what are you doing? You can't do that. And then eventually he said to me, dad, you're wrong. I can do it. And then my mom's cat came running along and hit the Xbox and switched it on. Innovation comes in all sorts of ways and it could be bad and good, right? But the key is to do it in a way that allows you to iterate. And I think when you, when you think of innovation from a customer centric perspective, the rule that I have is, is it human shaped? Does it even make sense? Are we trying to do something that doesn't make sense for the customer, doesn't make sense for me? For example, my son, as soon as he did that, I said, try again. And as you try again, I picked up the cat. Does it make sense now? Can you do it without the cat? And so to some degree, I believe that we need to foster a more human shaped approach that will allow us to be more customer centric. Because once we put ourselves and realize that is this ergonomic for us, Is this ergonomic for the customer? Is this ergonomic, whether it's a hiring manager or the business or product we're developing in the future. And so having recently we've implemented this in, in hellofresh. So in hellofresh, obviously I told you, we started off with 11,000, we're now 21,000. Our TA team grew by nearly 60, 70 people over the last six months. Our productivity has increased by 250%. A lot of people ask me, how did you do that? How did it happen? And it was very simple. We didn't do drastic innovations. We just understood and took back the definitions of what does innovation mean, what does process excellence mean and what does delivery mean? Divided those three things up and now you have a structure in your day where as a TA partner or a team lead or a coordinator, we've got clear structure, okay? And focus sometime on this innovation project, sometime on this process excellence project, and sometime on delivery. And so making transformation part of your company's culture for me is not doing massive leaps, it's about making, allowing people to see the small wins. So version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, like software updates, how the software engineering world innovates, right? They, they get a product out, they do a focus group, they test it, the AB test it, and then they go on and on and on. And so these parts of the article were really relevant. The only thing that was missing, which I felt was a bit odd, which I always feel is always missing in all these articles about everything. They don't tell you about prioritization, being relentless in your prioritization, making sure you are focusing on the most important thing first. It's that kind of Alan Watts quote, eat the frog in the morning. You know, do the things that matter the most, even if they're the most painful. So yeah, that's my view on it.

It's funny when you say the eat the frog in the morning. Just as a side note, when I, when I was speaking with American audiences, they always say you Europeans use use food references and eating animals for everything. And I'm like, like, okay, eating the elephant, eat the frog. We do do this. I think a lot. When you think about it, it's funny you mentioned the definition of innovation at the start of the assurance. It reminded me 20 odd years back. I spoke to a friend of mine who was working marketing for Procter and Gamble at the time and I didn't understand innovation at the time. And he said to me, this is, this is what innovation is. Johnny. He said, we sell washing powder, 750 grams. Then we decide we're going to have a 1.5 kilogram version. That's innovation. They said Apple did it, they had a phone. They said, let's make a bigger one. It's called an iPad. It's innovation. He said, people don't think that's innovation, but it's absolutely what it is. And the point being around customer centricity, do people want a bigger phone to write on and play with and watch TV or do whatever they did? Obviously, right? It was a big thing. They wanted larger laundry boxes and these things as well. But it is that point around understanding the customer. And there's a good line in that article, only when you can truly understand the unmet customers needs can you truly create meaningful innovation. So when you think about that lens, how do you get that understanding of the unmet customers needs in a talent acquisition world? Yasser.

So I'm going to, So I talk about something that kind of confuses people, but it's known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. And then everybody kind of stares at me, kind of like, what is he talking about? But what I'm saying is your blind spots. You know what you know, you know what you don't know. But do you know what you don't, what you don't know? The unknown. Unknown. So like, are we in an echo chamber, Is there something we're missing? And so from a customer centric perspective, you have to think about things in the most intrinsic detail. I'll give you an example that's not necessarily customer centric, but it is an example of how we can look at unknown unknowns. And it's about this idea of being inquisitive. So yesterday me and my team were talking and we were just kind of brainstorming and one of the thoughts that came up was, have you ever noticed on People's users LinkedIn profiles where they write X meta or X Facebook or X Amazon? And so I was thinking about our employer brand. Does someone's title X Facebook or X Amazon improve an individual's brand or does it improve the employer brand? So just for reference, HelloFresh gets searched 257,000 times a week in LinkedIn. And if you take a company like Amazon, Amazon has 8,100 users right now on LinkedIn that uses the title X Amazon. And so the way we were looking at it is how can this benefit us? Is there a way that this can benefit us? Is there a way we can look at illuminae and try, almost try to create a campaign which allows them to be an X hellofresh? Because if more people saw X hellofresh, would that mean that it's a validated company? Because ultimately what it is is to some degree it's virtue signaling to say, hey, I worked for Amazon and they're a great company, thus I must be great, right? And so not everybody does it. And the people that do do it, some people have problems with it. I'm not trying to solve that problem. I'm not trying to say whether it's the right thing or wrong to thing to do. I'm just trying to figure out whether I can take advantage of something that already happens. And so that's the way we think about TA is we think about the things that no one else is trying to think about. And if it's, if it's going to have a high roi. So what we try to do on a daily basis is we always have these conversations that blue sky thinking, because we're trying to figure out, okay, how can we constantly improve? Because if we improve the hiring, which we're doing, we know what we need to do there. We improved the process in terms of how we can interview and what type of questions. But how about the attraction piece, which is a massive minefield? You know, there's so much money in the attraction piece from sourcing to employer branding, EVP how you sell the roles. Companies are pummeling billions of dollars into this, and there could be little tricks that can make a big difference. In 2014, I was working for Wipro, and at the time I used if this, then that it's an app on your phone. And I had the British Gas Hive system in my house so the heating would come on through my mobile phone. I could select it and do the schedule and everything. My brother said to me, yes, you know, if you can create a geofence around your house, as soon as you enter the geofence, you can turn on your heating. I thought, this is amazing. So I started doing that. Then I found out that my hue lights could be controlled by this. So, okay, if I walk in my house, I could technically have my hue lights turn on my music player, play Darth Vader, and my heating come on. So my wife is like, what the hell's happening? And it happened. And then one fine evening, I was thinking about it and I thought, can I do anything else with this? And it turns out we could. And we. We put a geofence around multiple universities around the world, and every time someone tweeted with a geotag, we retweeted that we had graduate opportunities within the space of an hour. We got banned from Twitter. We sent out 3,000 tweets, and we had 500 applications. You know, so that was. It maybe wasn't the best, but it was an a B test for us. And we realized that, you know, we got 500 applications when we were struggling for applications. So there's things that definitely work when it comes to innovation, but it's about, like this inquisitive mindset, I think, is the part you have to kind of almost nurture it, because as we get older, we get told not to think too much about this and be as inquisitive. And it almost gets drummed out of us during school. And unique.

And so stop asking questions like, when you're a kid, you're telling your kids, stop, stop with the words. And I get. I get your point on this, right, but isn't there an element of. For some listeners, they may be thinking, I just don't have a clue about geofencing. I've never tried that. I've never been exposed to that. Is there an important. It's mentioned in the article. Is there an important part that talks about the diversity of the group, particularly the diversity of thought of the group, the different backgrounds and perspectives that if we all went to the same school, had the same upbringing, all did the same, you know, academic degree or background. We're unlikely to have been exposed to, you know, what might be a very abstract thing, I want to geofence my house. That gives you an idea on how to find 500 applications or whatever for roles. You know, what's your experience on the importance of that diversity of thought in teams to also support that innovation.

Yeah, I think it's a simple way to look at it from a diversity perspective is when you go on holiday and you experience a new country and you're like, oh wow, this is amazing. Like they do have this, we don't have this back home and then you see something they don't have. So if you go to Germany, they like to use cash and you're like, oh well I've got a card, they don't have that. And so you start to experience these differences and I think what we miss is we, we look at it from a half glass empty perspective when we start looking at it from a half glass full and start thinking about, okay, what lessons could I teach these individuals or what lessons could they teach me if they have something I don't have? And so for me diversity is just, it's not, you know, salt and pepper, it's not a side dish, it's the main dish, it's the whole purpose. Like I can't have innovation without the diversity element because I'm just going to get a bunch of same ideas. And so, you know, family members in my family travel a lot. Like there's family in Middle East, Far East, Canada and each one of them have the same sort of upbringing to some degree with myself. And then when I meet my wife's family who comes from a totally different background, my wife's Scottish, it's a totally different experience. So I feel like if we, if we embrace it on a day to day basis when we go to a different country, when we meet our partners and we, we, we actually yearn for that, that difference. Oh, you know, that chalk and cheese that, you know, I, I want something new. We're constantly asking for that. Yet when it comes to the workplace, surely it makes sense to have people that you wouldn't normally work with because they're the ones that are going to give you the best, like the best ideas, not necessarily the best ideas. I would say take that back actually because not everybody is going to give you that. But you'll get the most diverse thoughts, questions, critiques, you know, people will have. It goes back to that human shaped experience. You Know, if you think about Homo sapiens and us, we all come from. We're all human, we all have different experiences where we come from, what we do, etc. So I'd say diversity as I said is the main dish. It's not a seasoning or a side dish.

I love a frame that we only had a discussion this morning here in Social Talent. We're hiring for a whole bunch of rows roles at the moment. Check out our careers page. But the we thought the opportunity because we're now remote first businesses we can go beyond the diversity of the natural population in Ireland which is not as diverse as we'd like it to be because we can hire from anywhere and you can go find folks who come from those different markets because we we are untethered from our location in terms of the physical origins of where we were based in Ireland. With this new world and this new world I'm going to bring into our second article. This new world is changing loads of things we've identified on many other previous shows. The changes in the habits of potential employees and their outlook to work and life and the previous tensions that existed there. It looks at the great resignation or whatever people want to frame it as and that massive change in the way the the recruiting market's working. I want to point to a Gartner study that was published a week or two ago and this is interesting. It says, you know, their survey Data says only 19% but one in five HR leaders are prepared to address a shortage of critic critical talent. Although I think more than half them address recognize it as their number one issue.

Right.

So they're unprepared. And the Gartner article in their esteemed research they kind of focus on four areas that they think are critical to the future success of talent acquisition. I'll quickly summarize them before I ask you for your thoughts if you don't mind the answer. They say to focus on business continuity threats, not just talent gaps. There's a lot in that adopt a new approach to mass turnover by looking at the work to be done as opposed to just replacing people to kind of third thing, counter compensation increases by differentiating the EVP and then fourth attracting retaining talent by tailoring the EVP around lives instead of careers. So four things kind of business continuity, not just talent gaps. A new approach to turnover, changing the work to be done the countering the compensation increases by differentiating your EVP and then attracting folks by focusing on the EVP of their life rather than just their career. I'm Going to ask you to maybe comment on that for a second but then maybe relate that back to something you mentioned at the start of the show, which is kind of recruiting 4.0 TA 4.0 and your personal philosophy.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll start with like what I've seen in the industry over the last couple of months, not last two years. Sorry. People are more grateful, they're more mindful, they're more appreciative of themselves. People are more respect for the work they do. So there's this questioning constantly like it's been long overdue, but this kind of self respect of am I enjoying my job? Well, let me just go get another job. And this idea of work life balance has increased and I've always said it, I've said it for a long time now, that there will be a point where permanent jobs are not 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. There'll be two permanent jobs. I could work for HelloFresh and Meta@ the same time. We see in the contract world already that recruiters are now doing multiple contracts simultaneously. I have friends that do it, but it can that be adapted into a software engineer? Could he do or she do 2.5 days meta, 2.5 days at Google, what difference would it make? And so I think this flexibility is, is really driving this around. This idea of hey, I can go work in Spain somewhere. And so what's happening is when that starts getting questioned, other things start getting questioned. So a lot of people like I, I, I believe that the whole skill shortages is, is partly true, but I also believe these skills are going to be filled at some point from someone from somewhere. And I almost feel there's a bit of naivety there. I believe that if you asked these employees, not the HR leaders, how much they think they can do more or if they can take on more, or if they could be given an opportunity on potential as opposed to direct fit, would they step up? And I think what happens here is this industry we're in at the moment, the entire workforce, no matter what industry actually this kind of idea of mobility, of I can, I can, I easily move into a new role. It's always seen as a brand new process is seen as a, in fact it's insane if you think about it. You, you have job boards, internal job boards. So you've applied for a job, you've got the job, you've joined the company, you do a good job and now you have to apply for another job internally. This is the part of it it doesn't make sense. It's, it's just replicating. It's a process that I feel is a bit broken and that's why you never hear about amazing mobility processes and it's always a work in progress. And that's why you hear about people feeling very frowning upon poaching internally. You know, you can't poach from my team, you can't poach from this team. So why, why does it matter? Like why can't I poach from your team? If you want to set some rules, let's that set some rules. So I believe, like if you think about the TA teams, I believe that they should be internal head hunting first and that's going to drive a different type of behavior. If you can in if let's say the rule was someone with 12 months and a good rating is fair game and you've got a decent sized organization, maybe 5,000 plus people, then it works. If it's smaller then it might not work. Then it needs to be about succession planning. Should someone have to apply for their position and interview internally? If you give them that one bad experience where they feel like they're not because you, you're at a disadvantage when you interview internally. Firstly, that's like fact because you're interviewing someone who's worked for the company. You don't know if they've been over performing, underperforming, you don't know if they've worked any weekends, you don't know the emotional side of it that's attached to that interview. Whereas someone who applies directly outside hasn't got that emotional attachment just yet. And so I think a lot of companies are making the mistake of thinking that they need to interview internally. Instead it needs to be more clear about like what are the requirements, is it, is it, are we developing people to take on that role? And this is where my TA 4.0 comes in. It's kind of perfectly slipped it in there. So ta, let me just basically explain the very fundamentals of this concept. The idea was that I had delivery focus in my teams that was super engaged. Everybody knew what they were doing there. We had processes that we knew what we were doing. However, the innovation side was constantly missing. We weren't early adopters in that adoption cup. In fact, we were focusing on delivery and process excellence so much that there was no innovation. And the more I thought about it, I thought, well, innovation should solve a problem. And so the first problem I wanted to solve is I want to give back to the team. I want to make sure that my coordinator is the most expensive coordinator in the world. My Sourcer is the most expensive source in the world. So how can I do that? I can train them to do different things more than what they do today. We always talk about AI and others, other ML and all these other areas that are taking over and eventually bots, etc. But if we think about TA 1.0, that's your 360 recruiter. TA 2.0 is your 360 recruiter plus your sourcer. Eventually that sourcer brings in so many candidates, you need a coordinator. So now you have TA 3.0 with the coordinator, sourcer and recruiter. So TA 4.0 is slightly different. You have the talent partner, you have the coordinator that now does talent intelligence as well as candidate experience as well as coordination. And you have the talent engagement partner which does sourcing, talent marketing, employer branding and evp. And these are individuals who've never done this before. So we're training them up. Engagement super high. But the fact is that we have purely focused on potential as opposed to fit, which means that no one's going to have these multiple competencies. It's like the idea of T shaped, pie shaped and then comb shaped. This idea of building multiple competencies and future proofing them. By July this will be fully launched. So we'll have a tier intelligence function within the coordination function. So coordinators will be upskilled. Talent marketers have already started. You'll notice the videos being launched, the LinkedIn campaigns. We're doing Google AdWords, we're doing social media campaigns and we're doing a lot of stuff that I can't really reveal at the moment, but a lot of really innovative stuff there as well. And then what happens next? What is, what's TA 5.0, 6.0, 7.0? So we thought about this and we thought, well, let's solve another problem. So what does TA 5.0 mean for us? For us it's turning candidates into customers because we want more respect in the business. We want to have a P and L. We want to be able to reinvest into the business by taking some of the revenue we generate and putting it back into ourselves. So turning candidates into customers generates, makes us a better cost center and it allows us to have more control of our future. Tier 6.0 is a big problem we're trying to solve. Probably July 2023, we'll work on it properly, but it will be how do we hire in 24 hours? Greta and my team who joined my team, I hired her in 24 hours, spoke to her on Friday morning, interviewed her for the first time, spoke to her Friday, interviewed her in the afternoon, offered her by the evening. Now, whether it's a good experience, bad experience, that's not what we're trying to focus on. We're trying to focus on how can we reverse engineer the interview process and then TA 7.0, which a lot of people don't think about, is what do we do with the 1 million cvs we don't process? How do we give back to the community? Do we do on the blockchain? Do we remove CVS? Do we create NFTs? Do we give advice to people on their CVS? How is it sustainable to. For everybody to apply and just constantly be rejected because we don't hire 1 million people. We hired 10,000 people last year. Great. But there was a lot of people that didn't get hired, a lot of people that were disappointed, a lot of people that we could have helped. And so it goes beyond just the tier 7.0, goes beyond just the need of the function, but it's about giving back. And so that's how we've done innovation. We've always thought, okay, we can have a roadmap. And the great thing about this is you can add TA 4.1, 4.2, 4.3. We can iterate along the way. There is no rule. We may start TA 4.0, finish 4.0 and then change TA5.0. The whole point is we have small milestones that we try to achieve as we go along the way. So for me, I believe if you give back to your. Your people in your organization goes back to that whole saying, you know, look after your people and they'll do well. You know, pay them well, give them the opportunity internally, almost feel like it reminds me of my mom telling me how she got her first job in 1987. Oh, no, 86. She rang a newspaper and she said, hey, are you hiring? They said, yeah, come in today. And then she started, you know, packing the shelves. And it was this kind of idea that you don't need to be vetted, you don't need. So how can we go back to the. With technology now on our side and with additional concerns around safety and qualifications, is there a way to replicate what used to happen of that? Hey, I want a job. Okay, cool. You come, you're a software engineer. Come, you're already validated, you're already interviewed. You already. What can we do from an interview of perspective? And what's happening right now is Everybody's so focused on delivery, it's kind of like missing the wood for the trees. They're so focused on delivery, then they're not stopping to think, okay, well what else can I do? And I have a very simple rule for my entire TA leadership and they probably hate this, but it's something I've kind of mandated from the day one. And it's taken six months for them to slowly adopt it. Most of them haven't fully adopted it, but it's very simple. You have to have four hours free every day. And I have four hours free every day, everything. In fact, you know, today I had four hour, five hours yesterday, tomorrow I'll have four hours, etc. Etc. And that's because I can't work in the evenings, I can't be in meetings all day. When am I going to do the work? When am I going to have a chance to think? And so with data, with strict habits around, kind of being mindful and focusing on innovation and all the ingredients we need for innovation, I think that's what's really helped us get to where we are today. What we need for the future is to prioritize. I think we need to prioritize really, like really heavily on what's going to really move us to the next direct, next milestone. And that's where we'll achieve TA 4.0. And I think any company can do this. The beauty is it's not something, you know, brand new. It's just a simple, simple way of looking at things. And selling it internally is probably the biggest part.

We get a lot of recruiters and TA leaders talking to us about the current market in particular Asser we talk about vision of where you see the recruiting world going. People would share similar visions. They would talk about the importance of process excellence and innovation. But in a lot of teams today, they're just under fire. They're just being hammered with wrecks, replacement wrecks, their colleagues quitting because they are so busy, which makes them busier, which makes more colleagues quit. Leaders perhaps weren't getting the budget. We had Alan Bailey ex Intel on the show a couple of weeks ago and she had made a recommendation to say, hey, before you, if you're going to hire 10 more recruiters to solve the volume issue, to hire nine and hire a TA Ops person to get projects done. That was her kind of piece of advice. What would you say to teams or TA leaders that are just struggling because they're underwater with the amount of work and they get the high level idea of where they need to go, but they just can't get past the volume of wrecks that are hitting them at the moment. How do you get out of that to get to where you're talking about?

I feel like this is something that isn't taught to the TA members and you kind of. The fact that I worked in a consultancy allowed me to have that exposure to workforce planning on, as a, on the opposite side. So for me the easiest way to do this is really have a clear set formulas and data to back you up. So I'll give you an example in hellofresh as the first week I joined we started creating a model. And this model would allow us to input how many roles we have, what is the attrition, and then it would in return tell us exactly how many recruiters we need coordinators and sources. It would also in return tell us to maintain 15 roles at any given time. This is how many roles can be opened in January, February, March, April, May. And as you increase the roles, it told you exactly how many people you needed. And so what I did was I said, okay, for every 50 people, I'll also need a TA Ops specialist, I'll need three marketing specialists, I'll need this, this. So the model was created, it took probably about seven iterations of that model space of like four weeks going back and forth, back and forth, trying to figure out all the different details. And now it's something we use on a daily basis, well, not daily basis, but we use it on a quarterly basis to figure out are we going to deliver. And that's how we over delivered because we were able to say, okay, you want me to deliver a thousand roles with 20 recruiters for tech and however many thousands of roles for commercial. But you need to double down. If you need to double down, I need the investment. And I think what happens is TA teams are not being able to get the investment because they're not able to justify their headcount. And so by being able to say, in fact this TA4.0 will help you massively if you're able to say.

Sorry.

My son's just coming, if you're able to say to leaders, you need me to hit these. And typically what would happen is you just have a basic source and a basic coordinate. What I can actually do is I can add extra service levels, TA intelligence, talent, marketing, employee branding by introducing this TA 4.0 model, which means that we may have to add an additional 0.1 or 0.2 headcount per total figure. But then in the Long run, you get a much wider service range and you get a much better experience for your candidates and hiring managers, etc. And I feel like every person I speak to is sinking right now because they're under Rex, but not thinking about it strategically. Strategically, you can't go just build a house without any blueprints. Doesn't make sense. If I said, go build a house, here's the ingredient, here's the ingredients, here's the materials. You need to do it really quickly, before summer. And realistically, you're sitting there saying, well, I'm one person. And then you create a plan, you create the model, you look at it and you say, okay, well, actually I need 10 people. How do you want me to do this? And so you're essentially able to prove to them and dumb it down to say, logically, from a mathematical perspective, it's impossible for me to achieve what you want me to achieve with the headcount that I have, because the man, the people power is not there. And I think that's where everybody's who is struggling doesn't have the time to do that or they don't have the expertise to do that. And it's quite, it's quite, it's quite an intense process, if I'm honest. It's not an easy thing. It's not for everybody. It's not for the faint hide, but it's definitely something that every tier leader needs to double down on and invest in. Because having a delivery plan or having a road map saying, these are all the extra initiatives we're doing in January, we're going to do hiring days. On February, we're going to do that. That's not going to help. You need to go with status quo, not with all these extra initiatives are going to allow us to hire more. And that's where every TA leader goes. Right now they're like, hey, okay, how are we going to do more with. With the same people? And. And if I want to do more, they don't think about the negative. There is a negative to too much productivity. I know it sounds insane, but if someone is doing 20 hires per month, something somewhere is suffering. And this is what I think a lot of TA leaders need to realize is there is no way of escaping this idea of trying to do more with the same. It's like that kind of Einstein quote, right? Doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results, doesn't make sense.

So that's my point about strategy is well made. We've had several people the last few Weeks all repeat that about the lack of proper strategic thinking, unfortunately, amongst a lot of TA teams hit me a few. A few years ago I was in Barcelona at Camp Nou with a on a course that I'm still on with 29 other CEOs. And they brought us out to Camp New for the day and we spoke to a bunch of people there and they put us on the training pitch, which is just like across the road, and they put bibs on half of us and then the other didn't have bibs. And they said, right, you're going to play a game, you got to get, you know, pass the ball over there and there and this is the points where go. And we played for about five minutes. It was mental. It was chaotic, right? And exhausting. And they stopped and said, oh, okay, we're stopping out. What's going on? And we were all just so out of it and uncoordinated. They said. The guy running the workshop said, I told you the rules of the game. I put you in two teams. The first thing you did was you start started playing immediately started playing. He said, did anyone stop to say, okay, let's line up positions. Who's going to defend? How are we going to win this game? What's our strategy? What's our plan of attack? Do we have attackers? How are we going to move forward on the pitch, get the most points? Did anyone do that? We're like 30 CEOs going, no. And take 60 seconds and let's start again. And we broke into our two teams, we took 60 seconds and we built in 60 seconds a basic strategy to win. And the game was just so fundamentally different. I was quite visceral to kind of go through that, to realize the importance of strategy to win versus just working really hard. Which I think is to your point is what a lot of TA teams are doing right now is they're just working really hard as opposed to going, hang on a second, we need to step back and have a game plan.

You know why that is? It's because of the tech industry, the way that if you're a software engineer, you can technically be 10 times more effective if you're a deep domain expertise versus someone who's not a deep expert. So a lot of the time when you speak to these hiring managers, in their mind they can do 10 times the job of someone in their team. Because for them, software engineering is more binary and recruitment's not like that. You can't just 10x. There's a process and so many factors that don't include that are not in your power to change. So, so that's also something that I think is very key to being making aware, just being able to say, hey, I need a week to come up with a strategy. I'm going to come back to you. This is going to be. I'm going to explain to you why I can't deliver with. I can deliver, but these are my prerequisites. And there's another part to this where some organizations, they kind of almost beat it out of your. They make it this fear of asking for more or asking for help or whatever it may be. And so it's a shame. I think the organizations that are going to really suffer are the ones that are not able to innovate in this way and not able to look at the. But goes back to that kind of human shape. Does this even make sense? Can I even ask for someone to be 100% even at work right now? Today I started my conversation with my team saying, I don't want to be 100. I want to be 60 today. And that's fine because half of, half of what I'm thinking about is about the world, thinking about my kids, got to go to the gym, my wife's birthday, you know, all these different things. So how can I be 100 at work? Who's gonna ever be able to do that? It's impossible.

I, I don't want to work with that person personally. I don't want that person working in my organization. I don't work alongside that person. Because that's not a, it's not a healthy person.

No, exactly. And, and that's why we removed KPIs in the TA team and we introduce health metrics. So instead of beating people down by saying you need to achieve this every month, what we said is, here's like, what we see is the benchmark, the healthy metrics. But don't kill yourself if you don't achieve it. What you need to be focusing on is effort, commitment, and contribution. And then that will lead you to good results. But as long as you feel like you're showing up, you, you're learning, you're constantly. We, we have this very important saying in hellofresh. Learning never stops. So as long as your LNS is high, everything will be fine. It will fall into place. It's inevitable.

Yeah. So on that point, I can't believe we're at time already. We've rattled through a whole bunch of learning on innovation on TA 4 point, 0, 5.0, 6.0. 7.0 as well. You know, how to scale and grow a team, how to deal with the current market. I feel like we've touched on so many learning points, but I'm going to be selfish. If you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to push another couple of percentage out to perhaps leave our audience with one last piece of advice as we ask all of our guests on the show your last piece of advice to. To leave our audience here today with what would that be?

I think the most important thing and it works in all aspects of your life, all levels, is have a decision making methodology. And what that translates into is three or four questions you ask yourself before you make a decision without the subconscious mind making that decision decision. For me, it's very simple. Is what I'm doing human shaped? Does it make sense? Is it ergonomic? Is this going to be a long term thing? Can I iterate? Can I keep changing it? Is what I'm going to do stop me from changing my mind? Can I learn from it? Can I continuously improve it and then automate? I only have 40 hours work a work week or I only have 24 hours in a day. Is this going to save time for me or is it going to add time for me? And in the world of innovation for me, it's always about saving time as opposed to adding time. So that's my methodology. Every person should come up with their own methodology to some degree. Not like just you can obviously copy and paste. But I mean having those decision making principles is what's going to really help you grow in your career. Just streamline your thinking, remove any doubt and allow you to innovate.

Agree. Having that framework, that methodology, it gives you a sense of calm as well. Back to the kind of personal well being. Because when faced with any decision, you just go back to your framework and go, this is how I make the decision and apply it to that. And don't get panicked, don't get overwhelmed. It's not too big. My framework should hold and my framework begins not to hold. I'll innovate on that and iterate and build a slightly different framework. Yeah. So I can, you know, I've learned so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. We could go for another, not just 45 minutes, probably two hours. I'm eating into your four hours free time of thinking. I love that other piece of advice. I'm really, really kind of interested in that piece of requiring leaders to have the space to get the work done is so important. Because there is work to be done is brilliant. Yes. Thanks so much for joining me here today to have this discussion. We'll continue it again. I'm interested to see come July how 4.0 plays out in your own team and what you learn from it and how that iterative process drives us to 4.234 and then really to see what 5.0 looks like when you get there.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

A pleasure. And thank you all for listening and joining us live today. And apologies to Daniel Baxter and others whose questions we didn't quite get to do. Appreciate that there was so much to kind of consume there. Hopefully you'll go back and re listen to some of those pearls of wisdom for Master here today. But do join us next week. We have another great guest joining us next week on 9th of March live. If you can join us on LinkedIn or YouTube at 4pm UK Irish time, which is 11am on the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast of the US or you can find our podcast which drops typically on a Wednesday evening European time. We're going to be talking with Kingsley Akins. Kingsley was on the show just towards the end of 2021, one of the best global experts on networking I've ever met and he's going to be talking about the business case for Chief Networking officers, which I'm really excited to hear about. So do join us to hear Kingsley. I tell you, he's just listening to his voice. I can listen to him read anything or talk about anything, but I know this is his passion and he really is emphasizing the point of networking and did so before Christmas just at the end of 21. But I think he know he wants to take that one step further and talk about cheap networking officers in your organizations. Join us next week and you can find out more on that. You can find out where to subscribe, where to watch the live show by going to socialtown.com the shortlist. But do think about if you're particularly in TA, I want you to give a TA 4.0 what it means for you and what is your team doing to innovate to get past the business that we're in today. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week.