Reshaping Talent Strategy | with Keiran Dodd

Good afternoon, everybody, and you're very welcome to episode 120 of Social Talents, the Shortlist. Today we're talking about reshaping talent strategy. Sure. As you're aware, considering you're listening or watching to this podcast about talent, that talent is the lifeblood of every organization. Very, very few people impact the success or very few things, excuse me, impact the success of a business more than people that they employ. But organizations don't become great companies out of sheer luck. There needs to be intentional actions made regarding the recruitment, the retention, and the development of employees to meet the company's goals. And the two departments who typically run these activities, Talent Acquisition and hr. More broadly, they're often regarded as a service function that merely fills vacancies. So with this in mind, joining me on the shortlist today is Kiran Dodd, the global VP of talent at Preply, who claims that this definition needs reframing. HR and TA should be seen as a shaping function. Instead, Kiran will chat with us about how this perception can be changed. He'll go through some key pillars, examining operational excellence, data, employer, brand and customer experience. And we'll also hopefully have discussions about how organizations can move from being reactive to proactive, something I personally am very interested in, and giving TA that space at the table to improve and impact workforce planning and contribute to the company's overall success. So, Kevin, you are very, very welcome to the Shortlist.

Hi, Holly. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate you having me. It's really, really great to be here. As I was saying earlier on, from a very, very sunny Barcelona and a very sunny Dublin.

That back at you as well. We're both in unseasonably warm weather in Europe at the moment, which is kind of lovely for this time of year.

Yeah, yeah. Probably more unseasonable for you than for me.

Fair. Yes. Barcelona does tend to get nice weather, Dublin, when the odd day when it starts sunning, as you can see in the background here, for those of you who are watching, it's very, very sunny and beautiful. So, Kevin, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background, maybe? And tell us also a little bit about Preply as well. I'm sure there'll be some folks who are listening or watching who haven't yet heard of Preply.

Yeah, absolutely. So super happy to be here and happy to introduce myself. So I've probably spent over 12 years now predominantly in talent acquisition, ranging from agencies to corporate organizations. I don't think I'll take you through it all, but I'll take you through some of my most recent experience, I joined booking.com in 2015, which we were just talking about there. And I actually joined as one of the team leads for one of the functions. We were very small at that time, around 14 to 15 people in the product and tech TA. By the end of it I was actually managing the full product and tech recruitment team which was around 50 to 60 recruiters, sourcers, managers from that side. And I think we were doing roughly around 1,000 hires per year into our three main hubs. So our three main hubs were Amsterdam, which was around 80% of the hires, and Tel Aviv and Shanghai. My next experience, I actually worked for a company called Zalando which is a fashion marketplace within Europe. Not as big in the UK but the biggest in Europe, operating in around 17 countries. And my role there was actually to be the global head of executive recruitment. And I was brought and to build out the very first executive recruitment function for the company from scratch. Very, very great experience and some synergies from Zalando and Booking in terms of the companies that they are tech driven European organizations. And then most recently where I am today, I am the VP of Talent and people at Preply. Preply is a marketplace that actually connects students and shooters from all over the world. We probably operate in almost 175 countries and we do around about 1 million lessons per month. And what we're actually doing is we're trying to build the digital classroom for the world and we truly believe that everyone has the right to an education and we want to give that opportunity not only to our learners but also to our tutors. And my role at the moment is predominantly looking after the talent side. But most recently I've stepped into looking after the the full people function. When I joined two years ago, we were 130 people. I was probably around the 20th person in the Barcelona office. As of today, we're just short of 500 people. So in two years we've done 400x growth in people. And it's been an insane journey, but a very, very good one. And quite the journey from going from enterprise into an early stage startup.

Absolutely. So first of all, forgive me for mispronouncing Preply. How often do people mispronounce Preply? Am I the first one?

Honestly, very often you are not the first one.

Okay, that makes me feel a little better.

Yeah, no, no, don't worry, it's Preply. But yeah, it happens. It happens quite often. But once we educate the world with our brand, they know we're preply 100%.

That's it. Absolutely. I'm sure the same always happens for every new brand, I suppose, especially when it's a word that one makes up for or establishes as their own. And so speaking of this marketplace, I suppose that you're bringing tutors and students from all over the world. You're saying earlier that you're in over 170 countries now at this stage. And is it like every type of education, like every single type of lesson from math on upwards, or is it specialized? Like what kind of. Is it university education or pre K?

Yeah, it's a fantastic question. So at the moment we predominantly focus on language learning. So and the reason for that, there's around about 1.9 billion people currently trying to learn a language and around 80% of them won't even get to basic fluency. So right now that's a problem that we're trying to solve. Now, if you were to land on preply today, you could find a math class, you could find a singing class, you could find public speaking class, but it's not something that we actively market yet. But we have a very strong platform where people like tutors want to go on and be there and be able to use that product. Will we start moving into that area? Very, very potentially. But I think right now we're very, very focused and our focus right now is being the biggest and largest language learning platform in the world.

I think languages is a fantastic place to start and certainly dominate. Right. Because, I mean, so much of the Internet, let alone everywhere else, but so much of the Internet is just written in one language. Software coding is written in English as well. It's very homogenous.

Exactly. And I mean, people can do coding classes actually on preply as well. There was actually one of our TA members yesterday was telling me that she'd done a data class on Python because she's recruiting a role there. So. Yeah, no, I fully agree. And I think for. For us is like, by breaking down the boundaries of language in a world that in my opinion, needs more united than ever, then we've just got this huge potential as a product to bring the world together and allow people to do that. So we're very, very focused on that at the moment.

That sounds awesome. So thank you for taking me through the brand and I hope everybody watching and listening suddenly is Googling preply like mad and going, oh, I want to learn this language, or I want to teach this language as well. This should be even more awesome as well. Can you talk to me about your experience then and maybe a little bit more about maybe that transition from moving from these big global organizations, working in Zalando now to a series C organization where you're suddenly going through forex growth in terms of your people. And Forex is really, is really meaningful. But in terms of, in comparison to Zalando and Booking, you know, there are much different stages in this organization. What were your learnings that you were able to apply from those kind of companies to what you're doing now?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think where I'd probably start because everyone asked me this question, why leave big brands like Zalando and booking and go join? When I joined we were a series E, Series A, excuse me. And I think for me there was like three main reasons. Number one, I'd experienced the well oiled machine, seen the scale, gone into new markets and I really wanted the opportunity to build something from the ground up. And I think you truly, truly get that. At series A organization you have opportunity to kind of really shape it. It's much more difficult on an enterprise company to change processes because it has massive impacts on the Sydney team, to the San Francisco team, to the Amsterdam team. So that was number one. And then number two was actually what we just discussed preply for me is like one of the one products that I truly believe has a positive impact on the world and you would struggle to find a negative for it. Like I think we give an opportunity to people to earn, we give opportunity to people to learn. So that's why in terms of like the experience of going into it, the growth is similar. So when we were at booking, I think we went, when I joined, we're probably 5,000 people, we went to 19,000 people. So it's almost 4x as well. Yeah, it's just a different scale of the number. I think the first thing that you notice is you become a lot more creative and a lot more innovative because you do not have huge budgets, you do not have huge employer brand teams, you do not have huge sourcing functions, you do not have a people analytics function. So you really need to roll your sleeves up and actually be willing to get in and get your, get your hands dirty. And I think what I took away from Zalando and booking, that straight away I brought into preplay is without structure and without process, it's just complete chaos. So the first thing we'd done, we went, okay, what can we do to bring some structure and some organization to make sure that we can be more efficient? I Always use some analogy. Preply had everything. They are. Like, we had a great team. We had systems, like good systems. The data exists. It just wasn't being used properly. And I was like, do you remember when you used to fly on an airplane before COVID and you land and then everyone just shoots up and it's chaos. No one can get off the plane. And for some weird reason, it took Covid to happen for planes to realize, like, if we just disembark the first five rows, then the second five rows, then the third five rows, everything becomes a lot easier. And that was what was at Preply. How do we take all this information and how do we make it more efficient? So what we done straight away was like, let's invest in the right tooling. So when I joined, we were only five recruiters. And the first thing I'd done was brought in an operations specialist, which I think is very uncommon in a series A company so small, you probably don't invest in an individual to run TAOP so early, but by doing that, we see massive, massive roi. Like a very good example that I'll give you is we had an ATS when I joined and we had 8,000 applicants just sitting in application stage, hadn't been moved for well over GDPR compliance, which of course we fixed. But, but. So I had to convince the leadership team to give me budget to get a stronger ats. The very simple way of doing that was I said, okay, well, I can pull some data and I can see that on every average hundred applications, we get one hire. So if we had a way of repurposing these 8,000 applicants, we would hit the hiring numbers already for the next two years. So the first thing we'd done was we brought in a system and then we made global, consistent processes. So if we were hiring an engineer for a Ukraine team or for a Barcelona team or for our US team, they went through the same process. So it was a very, very centralized approach, and that really allowed us to scale a lot quicker. And then the other part as well is we invested in data super, super early. So we built Tableau to begin with, and then the business moved to Looker. But we built reports that the business can have access to, and that really, really help us. And maybe the last thing that I think was really, really impactful for me was hiring the right people into the TA team. And what I mean by that is in an organization where you don't have functions such as source and such as employer brand, then you need to find people who are willing to do both and you need to train them to be what I would call M shaped. So you have your kind of 360 recruiter, but you also have someone who actually is passionate, is skilled about employer, brand and then you have someone who's also passionate and skilled about candidate experience, talent acquisition ops and moving things in a different direction as well. So I think one of the very good things we've done at preply, we hired a really, really strong team that wanted to operate more than just someone who wanted to make hires.

Yeah, totally. I think that's a really important aspect. Certainly at those kind of early stage organizations it's finding people with range and I love that kind of M shaped kind of skill or what I probably call a cone shaped skill. Right. You're able to go, you have a broad level of understanding but you go deep in multiple areas and you have that breadth and range to be able to, to dig in where an organization needs you at those early stages, as you say, to shape and determine what the company is going to be ultimately.

Absolutely. And I think the last part is that you really need someone who's bought into the product and the mission. Like mission, mission led people. Because when we were at Zalando and booking, I mean we're getting 500,000 applicants per year. When you're at an organization that doesn't have a huge brand, you need someone that can really go out there, go to the market and sell that mission and sell that story that hey, yes, we're this small, but we have 175, we have customers 175 countries already. Can you imagine what we can do if we scale this and really sell that to the individual? So I think it's imperative that you hire the right people and key people for the organization.

100%. You were saying earlier as well about you're building reporting and tableau and visibility for the organization, able to see the things that they needed to. Can you go into a little bit more about that? First of all, what things do they need to see and what kinds of decisions that help them to make?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've now migrated over to lucar, but I think first and foremost is workforce planning. So all execs, in my opinion, but especially in a startup is the way that you do planning on hiring is like you get told a week before the quarter, here's the roles, go fill them. And the expectation is they start that quarter when I think all as TA experts know that, okay, we need to build pipelines, we need to do the attraction part, we need to take them through the process. We need to make them make offers. If they're based in Germany, they have a three month notice period. If they're based in Spain, they have a two weeks. So the first part is actually giving that signal to being like, hey, this is the exact time it takes from someone to fill a position to start. Which I think is a much more important metric. I think a lot of teams look at time to fill or time to hire. For me, it's slightly a vanity metric because ultimately the person's not adding value the day they start or the day you hire them. They add value once they're onboarded. So I think it's creating that holistic view of the life cycle of a new employee, which we do. The other part is just making sure that we're on track. So how are we trending against the rules? What's our conversion rates? How are interviewers being and doing is like one person doing more interviews than the other. One thing that we're really looking into now at the moment, which I'm not sure any company's quite cracked, is how do you measure quality of hire and how can we put that into the system? And it's a tricky one. I think a lot of people say, well, people who pass a probation, right. But for me that's not always the best way of doing it. I think you can have bad managers that onboard people and people choose to leave or whatnot. So we're really looking into like what is the definition of a quality of hire and how can we actually track that to make sure that we're growing the organization in the right way. Like the term I always say to the team is like, we want to be better, not bigger. So success isn't for us as hiring 300 people. If we hire 150amazing people and we're short of target, it's better than hiring 300 people that are not right for the organization. So always better versus bigger.

That's a really interesting take to have actually, because I'm sure for, well, maybe I'm not so sure, but certainly my impression of talent acquisition is that, look, we're measured on if we're meeting our talent acquisition goals and if we don't because we only got half of them, then we're being told we're doing a bad job. So I suppose you're inside an organization where you're still at a reasonably small size. Small is relative, right? You're still, you're larger than the company. That I work for, for example.

Yeah.

But you know, compare again compared to massive global organizations, big tech companies, whatever it is, you're still reasonably small so you're able to, to influence the, this behavior of quality versus quantity. How do you change the mind though of, of the person you report into that you're still doing your job even though you might have only hit in your example half of the recruiting number, but the quality is still great.

Yeah, I think, I think it's really good question. I think I'm fortunate that our CEO is very, very focused on quality of people. And I think he has the same philosophy philosophy as me and the TA and the HR team. But I do agree. I mean there's always a case where you have your director product or your director of engineering. We need to hit the numbers. We need these people to build the products. We need to do this. And I think it's an education piece almost. It's about kind of showing what a bad hire can do. And I think a bad hire can do a lot worse in a smaller company than a larger company. So I think if you don't bring in quality into most roles, you can see a significant impact earlier in a smaller company. I think like in booking you have 3,000 engineers almost. So I think it's number one is it's an education piece on how do you do that. And then also it's a buy in like I use this term with the team very, very often is if the business thinks you're responsible for ta, there's a problem there because we're co responsible and the sooner you can convince organization to realize that the much, much more successful you're going to be. And that is simple as that. So I think one thing we always try and do is encourage the leadership team and the key members of the hiring team is like you should have OKRs for hiring. It shouldn't just be on the TA team to have OKRs for hiring. That's part of your role. And it's almost a privilege to be able to scale the organization that you work for to interview for the organization that you work for because you're having such a big impact. And most organizations, I don't think we're unique now but every single person to the customer service representative is a stock owner. In preply you have stock options. And so it's your responsibility to make sure that you scale this organization in a healthy way. Yeah. And I think like you look at the last six months and tech and even in other organizations, organizations were just too Fat, they were too big. And you start to see all these layoffs that are happening. And I think that's an ill discipline of maybe not taking like a more focused approach.

I can't agree, I can't agree more. It's much more long term sustainable approach I suppose to talent acquisition and to talent in general. Right. We're being conservative with what it is that we use. Maybe to use more environmental kind of language, but certainly there's zero waste here and to hide in small organizations.

No, I think I'll be honest, we've made mistakes and preplay, I've made mistakes. I think there's even times like you probably experienced that you need to hire someone for your team. You're so desperate for that role to be filled. It's open for a long time and you want to make trade offs but then it's kind of a risk against reward or short term gain versus long term game trade off that you need to make. And I think a lot of organizations, if they can, then they can make some trade offs and you invest in your people and you invest in the L and D and you grow people as well. So I'm not saying go and find a, the best candidate every single time. That's, that's not a sustainable strategy. But I think if, if you're going to go find candidates and you need to make sure you have the right environment where they can prosper or not.

Well, that's it. Maybe it's the best candidate who is adaptable or moldable that they can become the best employee perhaps.

Exactly, exactly. I think that's a very good way of putting it.

So in terms of the, these fundamental kind of pillars of TA that I described in the opening about data about employer brand, can you bring me through what some of the, maybe the operational excellence pieces that you were driving, what customer experience, how customer experience comes into recruiting? Because that's an interesting one. How you're describing as a CX there, what are those kind of core pillars for your understanding of TA in your organization look like?

Yeah, absolutely. I think if we tackle customer experience straight away is. Yeah, that's correct. Actually my whole experience within TA when working internally for an organization is we're a consumer faced business. So every single candidate is a customer and the sooner the team realizes that the better. Because I think the one thing we want is that everyone leaves the process wanting to be a customer of preply or even like Zaland or booking, whether they got the job or not. So I think a massive part is one making People realize that and in particular making the interviewers on the business side realize that. And then it's about investing in tooling. So very, very quickly we invested in candidate experience tooling which straight away was a game changer for us because we very, very quickly could see like, okay, what are we doing well? What are we not doing well? And then how do we co course correct at. And the last part about customer experience, that what I try and try and teach the team to think about is as well as TA does actually have the opportunity to influence, for example the profit and loss of a company. One idea that we haven't quite tested yet preply but I would love to is imagine that you can do this for any consumer Facebooking. Every single candidate that goes for your interview, whether they get the job or not, you give them a discount to use a product. And that essentially. And if you look at on scale, let's take booking.com for example, that's when I was there, half a million people as a marketing channel in itself. And then if you can track that and correlate that, okay, well, wow, 10% of that, 50,000 people have no booked on booking.com what's the revenue? And then it's a lot easier to go to your chief financial officer or whoever you're working with at the time being like, hey, we need more budget with within ta. So candid experience I think is one really, really putting the customer at the center of everything. But I also think if you do it in the right way, then you can turn into strategic strength for the organization. Process excellence, operational excellence is about having the right systems, the right tools, the right data. I wouldn't put like there's five metrics that you should always track. I think each company's in. It depends on what they're trying to do. Like if you're trying to look at cost per hire or you're trying to bring down the time, there are different things. But I think what is important is that you know what you're trending against. And that was something we sat with the execs, we said, hey, what's important? What's important to us? And then we very quickly said, okay, here's our five main metrics. And we constantly do monthly business reviews as a TA leadership team on how are we trending against them? Where are we with them? What can we do to have an impact on them? What would be free, free, quick wins and then really invest and then different tools that drive efficiency. And that's, that's a big, big Thing for me, I see a lot of, even in the enterprise companies I work for, we had tools that we were paying for that we didn't even know that we had a contract with. So it's, it's about making sure that like you're getting value from run them and you're investing them in the right tools. On the employer brand part it's so important, isn't it? I think in particular for an early stage organization where you don't have the whole world looking at you, I think you need to really amplify your employee engagement, your employee ambassadors and really drive that. And the sooner you invest in that the, the better. Like I've seen some very, very good Series A, Series B, Series C's companies that have gone very, very aggressive early on and straight away they're known on the market and that can really, really change the game. I think like we've had a couple of competitors even when we're at Zalandor, even when we're at Preply where they specifically targeted us. And that really, really changed the game. So I think we quite early invested employer brand, worked on our evp, made sure our EVP was aligned. And then maybe the last part that I would say as well is really just make sure that you follow the business. So for me, TA and people, all our objectives should come from what the business objectives are. So we always break down. So I think a big, big thing for operational excellence and success within TA is that your okrs, or however you, however you want to call them are driven by what business goals are like. You don't want to spend time on stuff that's not driving the direction that the business is going in. And you can go really granular where it probably doesn't seem like it's driving that specific business goal that your company has for six months, 12 months, a quarter, but it should be changing it like 1% every single day. 1%. 1%. 1% makes you a lot stronger as a TA function.

I have to say there's a. We had a recent social talent Live event which is a like a large live webinar that we run every probably two months. And the previous one that we've just ran most recently was about talent acquisition strategy and different aspects of strategy. Right. One of the polls that we ran in that webinar was you know, how aligned do you feel? Or something on those lines, how aligned do you feel that your talent acquisition strategy is to your organization strategy? And a reasonably large chunk, like large enough for people to go, hold on what about a third of people who are at the event? Well over a thousand people on the live event were saying not aligned or only sort of aligned. Which just blew my mind. How on earth now whether in fact the recruiting strategy is aligned or not, but at least people had the perception that they weren't clear how exactly what they were doing was working against the company's goal or working towards achieving the company's own goals. There was no like direct correlation or continued kind of communication that we're trying to achieve this so that the business can do this, you know, and it was, it was just, it was such an eye opening statistic to be like, oh my gosh, I have to read it at the real one. I think it's well over a third anyway of people who just were like, no, not completely aligned or just not aligned at all. They were just off doing their own thing, which is terrifying. How do you align those two things for your company? Like was it, was it through okrs, was it something else? Like how did you bring those two?

Yes, I see that a lot and I think we've had it in some of my previous companies before where there is this kind of mismatch. It's interesting because I think it's quite easy to pick up where you see like, hey, the business is like, right, we're going to massively grow into the US and then use the TA function. There's no hiring in the us so where's the disconnect here? I think how do we do it at preply is and I don't think I sit within the lt. And so every decision that's made, I can steer it and I can influence it. And that's maybe a little bit how we also train our TA partners is like they're talent advisors. So when roles come to them, their job's not just to go and execute, it's to kind of challenge and push back. We have business partners, but I honestly feel like talent acquisition plays a massive role of partnering with the business as well in conjunction with your hr, your HR business partner. So there's one part is like making sure that the team feels enabled to do that and comfortable with challenging VPs and challenging directors on that, saying that this doesn't match. The other part is the okrs and then the last part is actually the celebrating success together. So I think a very good example is imagine your highness, you're hiring for a sales organization. The sales team hits target. The celebration is around the sales team hitting target, rightfully so because they've scaled the business. But it's also about like, can you educate that department to recognize the hard work that went in from the TA team, from the interviewers as well to get those people and to allow you to hit that target. And then once that kind of recognition comes, then I think you see there's much, much more alignment across. Hey, I know exactly how my job influences the work that I do. Sorry. I know exactly how my job influences the success of this organization and that's a really difficult part to do. But I think if you can get an organization to do that, it can be quite game changing.

Yeah, I remember there was a presentation from the vice president of Talent Acquisition for Europe for Microsoft, who fairly boldly, may I add, but also completely correct, described the talent acquisitions role and fairly significant role in a like a 15% rise in Microsoft's share price. You know, we are responsible for this.

Why?

Well, none of those people who actually built the share price who managed to achieve our goals within, you know, the different parts of Microsoft, we would never would have got there if we didn't have the people. So that's our job, that's us. And it was like everyone's like, yeah, absolutely, well done, go for it. But like who, how often do people describe that? That was, that was me, that was, that was my achievement.

Honestly, it's so true. And I think in the last six years there's been a shift within, I think within hr, but maybe even more in Talent Acquisition. That this, what we're talking about today is like 10 years ago talent Acquisition wasn't even called Talent Acquisition, it was called recruitment and it was about, here's a job. Yeah, there you go. Exactly.