Very often when we talk about innovation, we focus solely on advances in technology and what they can empower. However, it is important to remember that innovation is about much more than this. Different ways of thinking and different ways of working are vital for companies looking for a competitive edge in their talent acquisition.
One company embracing all of types of innovation is Vodafone, one of the largest telecoms companies in the world. I’m delighted to welcome Catalina Schveninger as this week’s guest. At the time of recording Catalina was Vodafone’s Global Head of Recruiting and Employer Brand and she gives us some great insights into the great work Vodafone are doing in these areas.
In the interview we discuss:
• The recruitment challenges a company of Vodafone’s scope and scale faces
• Segmentation and focus for a digital native audience
• The importance of local knowledge and global collaboration
• Using an Agile methodology for recruiting
• Balancing the gender split of the recruitment pipeline
• Message and marketing personalization
Catalina also share her thoughts on future innovation at Vodafone
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Hi everyone, it’s Matt. A quick message from me before we start this week’s show. Mine and Mervyn’s book Exceptional Talent was published a year ago this week and I just wanted to take the opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone from all over the world who helped to make it such a big success. Thanks to everyone who contributed, everyone who helped us promote it, and of course, all of you who bought a copy. If you haven’t read it yet, then it’s still available. You can buy it from Amazon or directly from the Kogan page website. Now, in very much related news, I’m delighted to say that we’ve just confirmed with the publisher that we’re going to be writing a second book which will be due for publication in September 2019. We’ll share more details over the coming weeks and months about the topic, but suffice to say, it’s going to be very much talent related. Okay, on with the show.
Matt Alder [00:01:16]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 126 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Very often when we talk about innovation, we focus solely on technology and technological revolutions. However, it’s important to remember that innovation is about much more than just this. Different ways of thinking and different ways of working are vital for companies looking for a competitive edge in their talent acquisition strategy. One company embracing all types of innovation is Vodafone. And I’m delighted to welcome Catalina Schveninger as my guest on the show this week. At the time of recording, Catalina was Vodafone’s global head of resourcing and employer brand. And in the interview she gives us some insights into the great work Vodafone are doing in these areas. Hi Catalina and welcome to the podcast.
Catalina Schveninger [00:02:12]:
Hi Matt, thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Catalina Schveninger [00:02:19]:
Of course. So I’m Catalina Schveninger. I’m the. Until last week I was the global head of resourcing and employer brand of the Vodafone Group. Most recently I moved into another exciting area and center of expertise taking care of learning and development. I’ve been with vodafone for over 4 years. My background is generalist HR, but done a lot of things in my career around recruitment, employer brand and and talent and development. So I’m let’s say a generalist who has a strong passion for for candidate advocacy for brand for communications.
Matt Alder [00:03:01]:
Now Vodafone are a well known brand in a number of countries around the world, but not necessarily in every country that people might be listening to us in. Also I think that Vodafone do a lot of things that people who are familiar with the brand won’t necessarily know about. Could you give us a bit of an intro to the company and some background and really talk about what you guys do?
Catalina Schveninger [00:03:23]:
Of course. And you are absolutely right. I think Vodafone brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world and we’ve been around for over 30 years. We are actually a British startup coming out of Berkshire when 30 years ago a couple of engineers started this mobile first company. Now we’ve come a long way since then and we are now one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world with mobile operations in 26 countries and also partnerships with mobile networks in 49 more. And most recently we also moved into fixed broadband and we are present with fixed operations in 19 markets. So a global footprint. If you look at number of subscribers in revenue, we are second largest after China Telecom. To give you a flavor of the scope, we touch more than half a billion customers on the mobile side of the world and we have a very strong purpose to use connectivity to help people live a better today and build a better tomorrow. And that’s obviously that’s a big word but what it means, it means that we do this investing in digital infrastructure, delivering a good network experience, allowing you. Allowing us, allowing businesses to connect confidently everywhere at any time in the world of today when everything is always on, obviously connectivity is key and we do that also through a wide range of products. Whilst we are well known and for our mobile proposition we also have a very strong Internet of things play and maybe one of our most famous global brands that also I think last year in Forbes most admired brands is M? Pesa Mobile Banking. This is a product that allows especially people in emerging market who don’t have access to banking solutions to do their daily banking on their mobile phones. And you know this product comes originally from Kenya where 70% of the Kenyan GDP is actually transacted on M? Pesa. So again to summarize a large telco total communications company with a very strong purpose and very very exciting technology across, you know, that we are implementing across the market wherein and touching them millions of lives on a daily basis.
Matt Alder [00:06:04]:
That’s really interesting because I thought I knew Vodafone pretty well but I didn’t know you guys were behind mpesa. So with an organization of Your scale and ambition, I’m guessing it must throw up some really interesting recruitment challenges. What are the sort of challenges that you face?
Catalina Schveninger [00:06:24]:
I think you touched the nail on the head by saying, you know, you didn’t know that MPESA is in our portfolio. And that’s exactly one of the issues we have, I think is a perception issue. Whilst we are a very well admired and well established brand in the candidates mind, maybe we don’t always come top of mind in terms of the most innovative digital company. It’s interesting how that shift changed. When I started my career years ago, telco was one of the sexiest industries you wanted to be in, right? We were back then. The digital natives of today, obviously right now, especially in the mind of millennial candidates, that’s not necessarily a direct link, a direct correlation. So we have work to do in terms of communicating all the exciting innovation that we have From Cloud to M2M, but also a very strong purpose in terms of improving people’s lives to change that perception. And you know, I’ll give you one data point. You know, we’re looking every year at obviously of surveys and the voice of candidates and specifically we work with a consulting company called Universal who are think they are serving about 2 million students and school leavers around the world. And we never come up in rankings year over year. So last year we took it at heart, we did some deeper analysis and realized that again there is a lack of awareness around our brand. So we started working harder, especially segmenting and focusing more on this population, you know, the digital natives, and being much more consistent in terms of bringing to life that innovation, those opportunities that you have on a global scale in a company like Vodafone. Whereas normally, let’s say when you are a school leaver, you probably consider a Facebook, a Google or another digital native for the same kind of opportunities. So that’s one of the lessons learned we had that although brand awareness is really, really strong, the brand consideration for digital natives was quite limited. So that’s a big focus of, of our candidate communications and of our hiring, hiring efforts.
Matt Alder [00:08:49]:
That’s interesting and I think it would be good to come back and talk about the kind of personalization you’re talking about for recruitment marketing a bit later. In the meantime, tell us how your recruitment team’s structured. How does it work across an organization of your size?
Catalina Schveninger [00:09:06]:
Yeah, so as I said, we operate across 26 markets on all continents and we have a very decentralized model. I think I like to call it the most decentralized, centralized company. So I sit here in Paddington where our head office is, but really recruitment is done on the ground, close to customers, close to where the business is. But I lead a global community. We have regular calls, we share best practices, we have very strong collaboration ways of working. But ultimately everything, you know, attraction, recruitment, recruitment, marketing is happening in the local markets close to home. We have our UK operation based out of Newbury, so I would work very closely together with that team. But they really run their show, right? They go to their universities, they have their campaigns targeted at the UK candidate pool. I think that works very well. It’s part of our DNA, this culture of collaboration and giving. Really empowering local markets who know their targets. There’s no one better, right? I mean there would be no way that I would know a lot around how, for example our candidate base works in India as I’m miles away, right, so, so that’s how we’re structured. We have around 150 recruiters globally, some in house, some together with our partners in RPOs. We have a common infrastructure in terms of HR technology, from the core ATS to video interviewing to core assessment methodology that all our recruiters across are using as well as the common practices in terms of what grade looks like, what they should assess, what potential looks like, what are the traits that we are looking into candidates when they join Vodafone.
Matt Alder [00:11:05]:
You mentioned when we were talking earlier, before I started recording that you’re moving towards Agile recruitment, could you talk a bit about that?
Catalina Schveninger [00:11:15]:
We’ve been on a journey now looking at Agile behind product development in the IT world and I think we are early adapters together with other companies we benchmark and I think one of the best examples we looked at in the market is ing. So far I think they’re the only other company that’s not an IT kind of native that’s using Agile beyond IT development. So specifically recruitment, we are testing Agile in both day to day recruitment operations. So if I give you an example, in our Turkey operating company, they are now in the market for IT developers to staff our tribes and they are applying Agile specifically I think Kanban in the end to end process. So whereas your traditional model for recruitment would be you raise a requisition, you place the role, then you start targeting, you do a bit of social sourcing and then in a couple of weeks you put a short list together, they said wait a minute, let’s use Agile as a methodology. Specifically Kanban, which is a visual board of moving your backlog and unlocking the issue. So that you can get your product, or in this case your candidates fast to market to get these candidates in the door in 10 days. And obviously what’s fantastic about Agile outside of your typical product development sprints is that you fail fast and you learn fast. Right? So you can reiterate and learn from the failures. And as we all know, you know, when you are an experienced recruiter, you know, it’s utopia to think that one size fits all right in some, you know, sometimes you have a fantastic candidate, you go through all the process and in the end they say no, right? So the typical things always happen. Therefore Agile gives you the flexibility and the learnings fast of solving the problem. In this case, you know, staffing a whole IT team. Another use case of Agile is we’ve completely revamped our careers website and we have a global careers website as well as local ones. So we have adopted Agile and we work with Agile external coders, with our internal UX designers, recruiters. So we had a cross function team and we were able to develop a whole new website experience down to the application flow. So end to end into 12 weeks which would normally take at least 24 weeks until UAT. Right. So again a couple of use cases on when, when we are adopting Agile methodology. And again it’s a learning process, right? We’re not experts, we’re not even, you know, Scrum Master certified, but we are now playing with, with Agile tools and seeing that it’s the right direction of travel. So we’re very excited on, on doing even more outside of the, the current pilots we’re running.
Matt Alder [00:14:27]:
One of the other things that you guys are well known for is the way that you’ve been pioneering diversity within the organization. Could you tell us a bit about that as well?
Catalina Schveninger [00:14:36]:
I think diversity for us, especially in the tech industries is a hot topic, right. And there’s not a single conference that we go or a single article, you know, a single HR magazine where there’s not an article around diversity as an issue. And obviously the reason we keep talking about it is because nobody solved it. And unfortunately, you know, all the, the investigations and research we’ve done led to believe that there is no silver bullet in tackling diversity. And when I say diversity, I’m focusing more on gender diversity. But obviously diversity is broader than that, goes into culture diversity, diversity of skills, of personalities, disability, LGBT and so forth. But just to keep it simple, you know, let’s take gender for example. I think we are, we’ve done a lot of work in the last couple of years that gave us some recognition in the industry as pioneering company in gender diversity. We started first by looking internally and analyzing the data, realized that for example, women after maternity break their data not to come back because they find the prospect of working in the multinational really daunting. So we launched a pioneering maternity policy where we allow women to work part time, be paid full time for a period to reintegrate themselves in the world of work. This year, very excitingly, we actually launched a global paternity policy as well because dads equally who are leaning in, they are getting a couple of weeks as well to enjoy the newborns and come back smoothly back into the work with new energy. But so that’s. And obviously once you communicate that what’s telling the market is telling other women in the market that this is a company where if you join, you know, you have an opportunity to stick for long and they appreciate and respect the differences and their work life balance. But in addition to that, we also looked at our funnel and I think globally we have about a million candidates and we looked at that the percentage of women applying for roles is quite limited. So how can you get to a 50, 50 balance, gender balance, if you don’t have strong enough pipeline? Well, what you can do, first of all, make sure that you attract more women. And we’re doing that by debiasing text, where we’re working with a company from us who is using AI and natural language to debias the text of the adverts so they attract more women. We’re doing that by analyzing the funnel at every stage of the way. So getting the data to understand, okay, what’s you know, let’s say in the context of a 50, 50 application rate, where do we lose the women? So by looking at the data, we realize that sometimes it’s a short list level, sometimes maybe a certain hiring manager not putting enough women through. So we’re doing that on a constant basis and we’ve built dashboard around that and also putting some really strict rules in place around what happens in the assessment stage. Right. So the research we looked at from the University of Harvard showed that our old belief that if you put one, one woman on every short list that would increase the likelihood of being hired was wrong. We found out from the research that actually one woman on a short list even decreases her chance to be hired because it’s in detriment as you are always comparing her to other blokes in this case. So now we are testing two women and we’ve seen that the chances of having A woman hired increased by 50%. So again, we’ve tested a lot of either technology or changes of the process, awareness of unconscious bias training and everything. We capture all of these ideas in the toolkit and we’ve asked all markets who struggled in getting women on board to test these things. And we’re very happy to see that the needle is moving not enough, but in the right direction. And I think we persevere and continue to pilot other tools and changes in the process to ensure that we have a robust gender balanced hiring.
Matt Alder [00:19:07]:
That’s absolutely brilliant stuff. And I suppose leading on from that, going back to the issues of awareness and personalization of your message and your marketing, what kind of things are you doing in that area?
Catalina Schveninger [00:19:21]:
Yeah, I think personalization is big and I think in HR we are learning the trade right now, right. We are learning from the marketing for marketing function. We’re more advanced in micro targeting segmentation. We started from understanding that again basic understanding, one size doesn’t fit all. So whereas in the past we would manage a calendar of content on LinkedIn, for example, on themes that were more from a company perspective, let’s say it’s an international women’s week, so let’s talk about women. We moved away from that to more segmented targeting. So we have a proposition for youth audience and for digital natives. So we would have content around that we know from research that talks to this audience. Of course the women agenda is very important but we also saw that there’s a certain age group that reacts positively to this content. So we, for example from the universal research we saw that our diversity agenda is not very well known to that audience. Therefore now we are doing more around understanding what is really important for let’s say 25 year old school level women to know around Vorafone. So that will attract them to apply or to click. So those are a couple of things we’re doing I think in the digital natives hiring and as I said earlier, we are now looking to recruit or upskill people to work in tribes, in agile tribes for product development across all markets. So combination between IT skills and marketing skills and these people typically are either when we can’t grow our own, we have to go externally and they’re typically looking to either work in an agency or work in other digital natives companies. So our strategy there is more going where they are joining them in meetups. The tone of the voice of the campaign is completely different, is much more personal, it’s a lot more offline, which was one of my surprises, thinking this is A digital generation always on. I think they love when, when they get to meet you, when they meet the people who work at Vorafone. So again, this is another example of how we segmented this audience and deploy different techniques to be on their heart and mind. And again, I think it’s continuous learning. I think in some areas we struggle more than others. It’s also a matter of local brand perception. We have an amazing, we do an amazing work, for example, in Portugal or in Spain where we are one of the top brands for youth, where we see that it’s easier for us to get to reach these candidates and in other markets, maybe less so. And what we’re trying to do is when we have success stories in some markets, we share those and we look at opportunities of deploying the same kind of targeted approach in other markets where maybe we struggle for the same segment.
Matt Alder [00:22:30]:
So, final question. We’ve covered a huge amount of topics in quite a short space of time and obviously a lot of the things that we’ve spoken about are ongoing and developing and I’m sure will be, will be your focus for the coming months and years. But what’s on your radar in terms of what’s next? What are we looking at in terms of future innovations? If we were having this conversation in 18 months time, what kind of things would we be talking about? What’s your view of the future?
Catalina Schveninger [00:22:58]:
As I said, you know, I think, I think the future is very exciting as our brand goes. I have moved out of resourcing, but we’re very closely with a new head of resourcing and the themes we’re looking at together around innovation is how we leverage AI. And we have great use cases within the company with, with chatbots and AI. We’re now experimenting on the HireVue platform. We’re also experimenting AI in sifting and recruitment as well. And we’ve had a couple of successful pilots for that. So that’s definitely the future. There is a lot of question marks around AI and again, it’s one of the, it’s one of the buzzwords right now. I think it’s all about, you know, validity is all about making sure we don’t build bias into the algorithm. So we’re cautiously looking at AI and scaling it as we learn. But that’s definitely a topic that’s very hot and it will get only hotter in the next, in the next year or so, I think. Depersonalization and UX applied in ex. Right. So UX methodology in employee experience is another big theme. So we start now in terms of looking at, you know, what is your recruitment process, looking at what is the, what is the journey that candidates and employees go through and aligning everything we’re doing in terms of innovation process training around these journeys. And we only the start of that, but already seeing that it’s very exciting and people like to work when you always think with the user in mind versus, you know, what our professional processes and tools can do to the user. So those are, I think themes that would be carrying on working in both in recruitment, but also in learning and development, which is my new area right now. So definitely watch this space for some great innovation from AI to chatbots to Ex ux.
Matt Alder [00:24:59]:
Catalina, thank you very much for talking to me.
Catalina Schveninger [00:25:01]:
Thank you and hope to see you soon.
Matt Alder [00:25:05]:
My thanks to Catalina. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
